One midnight, while she lay awake in Amsterdam, she heard a clear inner voice saying to her, "Go to Brussels; go in sackcloth and ashes; go and tell of sin; let everything in your person speak of sin and awaken conscience; then proclaim, Behold the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sin of the world." Without waiting to take counsel with flesh and blood, she went with her nurse-secretary Swaan and her babe Frida, the child of peace, to Brussels, and hired for three weeks the most beautiful hall in the city, the Salle de la Grande Harmonic—the same in which fair women and brave men danced on the eve of Waterloo. When she at length divulged to one of her comrades the fact that she was to appear in sackcloth and ashes, he answered— "You cannot! never!" "I must, it is so commanded." So a _robe de bure_ was made for her—a single-seamed garment of the coarse brown stuff worn by monks, with a hole cut out for the neck and two for the arms, and a hempen rope for the waist. Before the opening meeting she had intimate dealings with her officers. "It is necessary," she said, "that one die for the people. I want to bring that thoughtless, frivolous city into touch with God. I wish your faces to speak of another world. It is your minds and hearts that I seek. If you are going to think of your own people and your own concerns, if you are going to be preoccupied with a hundred and one things, go back at once. I am going to live these three weeks as if they were the last on earth. I have left home and little ones and am going to exist for this town. If Christ laid down His life for us, we have got to lay down our lives for the salvation of Brussels." There were heart-searchings and confessions and tears among the officers; fresh alliances were made with God; and the Maréchale believed that this was one of the secrets of the wonderful success of that campaign. On the evening of the first meeting, she clothed herself in the _robe de bure_, and put real ashes on her head. But if ever the devil in person attacked any poor soul, the Maréchale felt herself so assailed in those moments when the great hall was filling and she was waiting. What shafts of ridicule were hurled at her as by a spiritual foe! Could any dress he more ridiculous, any realism more contemptible? How comical was that assumption of the rôle of prophet! What a miserable fiasco the whole performance would prove! She was seized with a paralysing fear, and when Antomarchi—her "St. Francis"—came to announce that the audience was ready, he found her white as a sheet and shaking from head to foot. "Have I made a mistake?" she asked. "No! Maréchale, go on! go on! it is all right!" "Tell them to sing and pray, and then I will come." Her soul gathered strength from the strains of her own hymn, "_O toi! bien-aimé fils de l’homme_," with the chorus— Viens, Jésus t’appelle; Ne sois plus rebelle. Viens au bien-aimé Fils de Dieu, Crois en sa tendresse éternelle—