Anne-Élisabeth of Lorraine

Born on August 6, 1649, to Henri de Lorraine-Elbeuf, Count of Harcourt, endowed with rare beauty, great wit, and a tender and solid piety, Anne-Él isabeth was re Anne-Élisabeth Princess of the House of Lorraine, known for her piety and humility. quested from her father by Duke Charles IV for his son, Charles -Henri, Prince of Vaudémont, legit Charles-Henri, prince de Vaudémont Husband of Anne-Élisabeth and legitimized son of Charles IV. imized of Lorraine. The marriage was celebrated with great splendor in Bar, on April 27, 1669.

It is known how stormy and tormented the reign of Cha rles IV wa Charles IV Duke of Lorraine and father-in-law of the saint. s, and it is understandable that the members of his family could not help but share in the consequences of his operations. The Duke soon sent the newlywed to Vienna for affairs of state; the young princess had remained in Nancy and was there on August 23, four months after her wedding, when two commissioners of Louis XIV came to propose derisory arrangements to her father-in-law. Three days later, one of these envoys, the Marquis de Fournille, returned to Nancy to seize the city and capture Charles, who had retreated toward Épinal. Fournille entered the ducal palace, where the princesses of Lillebonne and Vaudémont had taken refuge. It was only with great difficulty, and after their carriage had been brutally searched, that they obtained permission to withdraw to the Convent of the Visitation.

Prince Henri de Vaudémont was, in 1671, again sent to Vienna to inform the Emperor of the violence being exercised against the Duke, his father. Meanwhile, Charles IV had retreated to Cologne and then to Frankfurt, where the princesses and the nobility of Lorraine had gone to meet him. His son also went there upon returning from Vienna, but he had him withdraw to Brussels with the princess, his wife, whose married life had been and would remain little more than an anticipated widowhood. Henri de Vaudémont, entrusted with a command in the armies of Louis XIV, was often on campaign. He is encountered in 1674 at the Bat tle of Seneffe, wh bataille de Seneff 1674 battle in which the Prince of Vaudémont was wounded. ere he was severely mistreated; in 1686, at the Siege of Buda, where the Turks were forced to retreat, and in other encounters as well.

During all this time, the pious princess, described as sovereign of Commercy in the last acts concerning her, occupied herself, in retirement, with the meditation of eternal truths and her advancement in perfection. She accepted, with perfect submission to the divine will, bodily infirmities, the troubles of isolation, the temporary separation from an only son whom she had to send to court, and whom she saw again only to close his eyes ten years before death struck her herself, and the loss of her fortune; all these afflictions became, for her, as so many steps to draw ever closer to God. There remain, as proof, various writings that escaped destruction and are preserved in the treasury of the charters of Lorraine.

These documents consist of: 1st, ninety-eight pages of reflections made and resolutions taken by this worthy princess in the course of nine spiritual retreats that she made between the years 1683 and 1713, in Carmelite monasteries in Antwerp, Innsbruck, Vilvoorde, Milan, and Pont-à-Mousson; 2nd, twenty-four sheets of reflections on the months; 3rd, twenty letters addressed to t Pont-à-Mousson Burial place chosen by the princess and seat of a Carmelite convent. he Carmelites of Pont-à-Mousson. We will offer here some extracts which, better than anything we could say, will reveal, at least in part, the tribulations that overwhelmed her and the truly heroic resignation with which she was seen to endure them.

Here is what Anne-Élisabeth wrote at Pont-à-Mousson in 1713: "Never permit, my Savior, that I lose the memory of your mercies, for fear that my heart might be unfaithful enough to let the memory of them be erased. I mark them here as much to confound myself as to obey my confessor, who has so strongly recommended this practice that I constantly neglect.

"May I therefore recall, my Lord, with gratitude and admiration the adorable conduct of your Providence over our family; finding ourselves in 1690, after a long series of evils through which life can be traversed; overwhelmed by illness, at the end of all our resources to subsist, seeing no remedy for the life of my husband and my own except in a change of air. How many labors did it not take to execute it? The unworthy treatment my son received makes our journey more necessary and more difficult, and yet in such a short time you helped us find, through resources I could hardly hope for, the means to pay or erase more than forty thousand crowns of debt, and the means to make our journey, after so many evils that had left me no respite for two years, during which I was at my wit's end. You gave me the strength, Lord, to sustain fatigue and extraordinary work without all my weaknesses and impatience being able to repel your kindnesses...

"It is at your feet, Lord, that I mark here your mercies and my feelings to aid my weakness and to confound me if I do not preserve the memory of them and if I do not execute the resolutions founded on this same mercy, which I experience as so infinite that there is nothing I cannot promise myself from it. I came here with the intention of finding strength and consolation in the renewal of the sacrifice of my dear son, uniting myself to all those that our holy Mother made of you, my divine Master; but I found myself invested with newer and in a sense more stinging pains, since nothing should wound a Christian soul as much as sin. Instead of consolation, I found only trouble, agitation, and new pain, and it is thus, Lord, that you console.

"Yes, my God, I have recognized in this conduct your divine character and that if I had profited from your trials, I could not be better rewarded than by new exercises of patience, since nothing is so good in this world as that which purifies us and helps us to make a solid penance. I would like to occupy all my gratitude in thanking you for my past, present, and future evils, for the grace you have given me to sustain me in this last trial. Continue it for me here and, having begun for you, may I not end by myself, that is to say, according to the course of my sadness. I have often said to you: *Fo da pa mi fusté da par voy*."

In her reflections of January 1685, after the departure of her son either for the court or to follow his father, the princess poured out her heart thus: "I cannot admire your Providence enough, O my God, when I consider its conduct over me and how many mercies I am anticipated with at the time of the great feasts. After having languished all through Advent in illness and in a distraction that rendered me incapable of everything, you restored to me, nine days before this great feast, fervor, solitude, and all the help that could prepare me for it. You filled me with many graces in the celebration of the mysteries of your birth and your circumcision. I sacrificed my son to you with all my heart, according to the movements I felt in my soul; even if I were to find loss in the dispositions for which your Providence and reason press me to act, I would not want to back down if you want it to be through myself that it is disposed; finally, my Savior, I experience more than ever the help of your grace. It is you who act in me; when it comes to great things, to sacrificing husband, child, I feel animated by a Christian generosity that makes me unrecognizable to myself; neither weaknesses nor the tenderness of this heart that has made me suffer so much and made me so rebellious to your graces are to be found anymore..."

In the following month of June, returning to the departure of her son which had been so sensitive for her, she wrote: "I truly experience, my Savior, that the weight of our own weakness, increased by all the sins with which my life is filled, makes the practice of virtue so difficult for me that the slightest setbacks make me relax in my good resolutions, since the continuation of the fever I had for three months and the preparations for my son's journey prevented me, for two months in a row, from making the remarks on the state of my soul where I find so much utility; but despite all my relaxations, nothing interrupts, my God, the course of your graces; I have been filled with them to sustain my evils with courage and tranquility and to make to you, in the same spirit, the sacrifice of my son's departure; you suspended this pain for me until the moment of this hard separation. If I was penetrated by it, I tried to offer you unceasingly what I suffered from it; I could not doubt that it was an order of your Providence by the surprising way in which it contributed to this design and its execution... I renew to you with all my heart the sacrifice of our persons and of everything that depends on them; I accept the deprivation of joy and the increase of pains that I experience every day since the departure of my son; since he was in the world, he was one of my first and most pleasant occupations. Take, my God, all the place he held in my heart and in my occupations, weaken the ties that attach me to the earth..."

The princess wrote from Commercy, on October 15, 1708, to the superior of the Carmelites of Pont-à-Mousson: "I only thank you for the vows you have made for my preservation on the condition that you continue them for my conversion and to make better use of the little life that the Lord wishes to prolong in me; for I have felt, in this illness, all the weight of my miseries and my weakness in serving Him..." Anne-Élisabeth, having reached the point of perfection that is easy to determine by what has just been cited from her writings, rendered her beautiful soul to God on August 5, 1714. She had chosen her burial place at the Carmelite monastery of the same Pont-à-Mousso n. The cartula Pont-à-Mousson Burial place chosen by the princess and seat of a Carmelite convent. ry of this convent has preserved the details of her interment; here they are: "On February 2, 1713, the Reverend Mother Anne of the Passion was elected prioress, who had been a lady-in-waiting to the most serene Princess of Vaudémont and was highly esteemed by her. If this august princess, who had given her to this house in preference to many others, had the consolation of seeing her as superior of this house before dying; this good Mother had the sorrow, during her priorship, of seeing her brought dead into her house. As she came every year to the monastery to perform her exercises, she had taken care to mark the place of her burial. It is in the cloister, right next to the door that enters the choir, so that the nuns, upon entering and leaving, might remember her. She died in Commercy, the usual place of her r Commercy The princess's usual place of residence. esidence, on the 5th of the month of August 1714, and was brought the next day with all the funeral pomp due to her rank and received as such. She was exposed in our church for three days on a state bed, and every day solemn services were held with a great number of masses. On the 9th, she was interred. And as we were preparing for the forty-day period, an order came from His Lordship the Prince of Vaudémont to cease all funeral pomp, to conform to her last wishes, by which she requested that no more be done for her than for a simple commoner. What humility for a princess from the family of Lorraine... This would be the place to deliver her eulogy; but since she forbade it by her testament, who would dare to contravene her last wishes?... She gave us for her burial and to have a share in our prayers SIX THOUSAND LIVRES".

What a contrast between the Christian and truly bourgeois simplicity of persons of the birth and rank of Philippe de Gheidres, Marguerite of Bavaria, Marguerite of Alençon, and Anne-Élisabeth of Lorraine-Elbeuf, and the ridiculously luxurious pretensions of many bourgeois of mediocre fortune and even more mediocre principles, even upon the graves at the bottom of which their bodies will soon be nothing but rot! May it lead at least a few of the latter to serious reflection and remind them that while it is good to honor the burial of the deceased, it is cruel to abandon their souls without concerning oneself with procuring them a place in the abode of eternal and heavenly rest.

Notice due to the extreme kindness of Father Guillaume, chaplain of the ducal chapel in Nancy, who wrote it based on autographs of the deceased.