Hardly had this feverish craving for celebrity been satisfied, this refinement of hypocrisy been brought to perfection, when Madame de Krüdener's genuine conversion took place. It came about in this wise. Sitting at the window of her house in Riga one day in 1805, she was in the act of bowing to one of the most favoured of her numerous admirers when the unfortunate man was seized with a fit of apoplexy and fell down dead. This incident preyed on her mind. Her melancholy, however, did not render her independent of earthly requirements, and she sent one day for a shoemaker to measure her for a pair of shoes. The man came. At first she hardly noticed him, but while he was kneeling in front of her she was struck by his happy expression. "Are you happy?" she asked him. "I am the happiest man in the world," was the reply. This shoemaker was one of the "awakened," a member of the community of Moravian Brethren. He had an aversion to work, and lived at home with his mother, Frau Blau, one of the worst religious hypocrites in Riga, who gained her livelihood by imposing upon the rich members of her sect. The sight of the shoemaker's happiness made such an impression on Madame de Krüdener's susceptible soul that she again and again visited his mother and him. At their house she made acquaintance with many more of the Moravian Brethren, and was soon as enthusiastic a Christian believer as any one of them. A gradual, slow training in Christianity would not have been possible in her case, but the doctrine of sudden conversion and entire change of life was one well calculated to have a strong effect upon her, now that she was over forty. The same ardour which she had exhibited in the passions of her youth she now expended on the passion of her maturer years. Both her words and actions are henceforth inspired by religious enthusiasm. She divides her time between devotional exercises and charitable deeds. Her whole previous life seems to her to have been nothing but error and foolishness. Her whole life now is but one feeling, love to her Saviour. "I have not a thought except to please, to serve, to sacrifice everything to Him through whose grace I desire nothing except to be allowed to love all my fellow-men, and who shows me nothing in the future but glimpses of bliss. Oh, if men but knew the happiness of religion, how they would shun every care except care for their souls!"