Priests, Women, and Families
by Jules Michelet · English · Gutenberg #32157 · 417,249 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Priests, Women, and Families
Author: Jules Michelet
Release date: April 28, 2010 [eBook #32157]
Most recently updated: January 6, 2021
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PRIESTS, WOMEN, AND FAMILIES ***
Produced by Al Haines
PRIESTS,
WOMEN, AND FAMILIES,
TRANSLATED FROM THE EIGHTH EDITION
OF
LE PRETRE, LA FEMME, ET LA FAMILLE.
BY
J. MICHELET.
LONDON:
PUBLISHED BY THE PROTESTANT EVANGELICAL MISSION,
5, RACQUET COURT, FLEET STREET, E.C.
1874.
EDITOR'S PREFACE.
When it was first proposed to publish an English Translation of this
admirable work, its gifted Author wrote to the Translator to the
following effect: "This work cannot be without interest to the people
of England, among whom, at this moment, the Jesuits are so madly
pursuing their work. Nothing is more strange than their chimerical
hopes of speedily converting England."
Indeed, their intrigues and manoeuvres were thought at that
time--1845--to be "chimerical," even by many who were _forced_ to join
in the Jesuit Crusade. One of the Bishops, directed by Dr. Wiseman to
use the "Litany for the Conversion of England," replied, "You may as
well pray that the blackamoor may be made white." He was ordered to
Rome, and six months' detention there quieted his opposition to the
Jesuit schemes intended to "bend or break" his country.
In presenting a New Issue of "PRIESTS, WOMEN, AND FAMILIES", we meet a
want--a necessity--of Society. The CONFESSIONAL UNMASKED, which so
_faithfully_ portrayed the Romish and Ritualistic Priest, and which was
so unjustly and _illegally_ suppressed by the violence and intrigues of
Priests and those whom they "directed," was too plain in its utterances
for general reading. Its _testimony_ as a WITNESS _was_ and _is_ of
the highest importance; but we fully concur with the Author of this
"work of art" that it should not be disfigured by the portraits of
Priests.
The following _Illustrations_ are a proof that something ought to be
done on behalf of the deluded creatures who, under the pretence of
becoming the "Brides of Christ," are subjected to "indignities" and
cruelty, not tolerated anywhere else.
"ARTICLES OF PIETY;"
OR, INSTRUMENTS OF TORTURE IN ENGLISH CONVENTS.
[Illustration: This engraving is copied from a _Photograph_, Published
by the Society. For a description of these and other "Articles of
Piety," see _Oxford and Roman Railway_. Price 1s.]
Instruments of Torture are _now_ practised upon Nuns in Romish Convents
in _London_ and in all parts of the country.
The Romish "Articles of Piety," named on the next page, were bought at
"Little's Ecclesiastical Warehouse", 20, Cranbourne Street, and at the
Convent of the "Sisters of the Assumption of the Perpetual Adoration of
the Blessed Sacrament," London.
Such Instruments of Torture are fitter for the worshippers of Baal,
than for the worshippers of God; and a person using them upon cattle
would lay himself open to a prosecution by the "Society for Prevention
of Cruelty to Animals." Both the parties who purchased these articles
are intimately known to Mr. Steele, the Secretary of the Protestant
Evangelical Mission and Electoral Union.
COPIES OF BILLS GIVEN TO PURCHASERS.
No. 1. Jan. 15, 1868.
Ecclesiastical Warehouse,
20, Cranbourne Street.
s. d.
To Hair Shirt .................. 12 6
To Discipline .................. 4 0
Two Do., had last week ......... 3 6
To Massive Waist Chain ......... 8 6
Two Armlets, 3s. 6d. & 1s. 6d. 5 0
One Hair Band .................. 5 0
£1 18 6
Rec. C. Cuddon. for F. A. LITTLE
No. 2. Convent of the Assumption,
24, Kensington Sq.
s. d.
One Iron Discipline ........... 7 0
One Nut ....................... 2 6
Total ............. 9 6
Rec. Sr. M. Bernardine, May 1, 1869.
No. 3. Convent of the Assumption,
24, Kensington Sq.
s. d.
Iron Discipline ............... 5 6
Two Bracelets ................. 1 6
One Nut ....................... 2 6
9 6
Paid S--: Sep. --, 1869.
No. 4. Little's Ecclesiastical
Warehouse, 20, Cranbourne Street.
s. d.
To Discipline (9 tails) ....... 6 6
" Ditto (7 tails) ............ 2 3
" Chain Band ................. 6 6
Ditto Smaller ................. 4 6
19 9
Received with thanks, Sep. --, 1869.
Christian Reader,--It is your duty to testify, on God's behalf, against
the _Blasphemy_ and _Cruelty_ of Romanism. The _Maker_ and _Preserver_
of man is the loving _Father_ who gave His only begotten Son to die for
us; and thus make atonement for our sin. "By Him all that believe are
justified from all things."--Acts xiii. 38, 39; Micah vi. 6-8; John
iii. 16; Rom. iii. 20-26; Heb. ix. 22.
IRON DISCIPLINES OF "THE CHURCH."
Saint Liguori, the Doctor of the Romish Church, commends the use of
_Disciplines_ to the "True Spouse of Christ" thus:--
"_Disciplines_, or _Flagellations_, are a species of mortification,
strongly recommended by St. Francis de Sales, and universally adopted
in Religious Communities of both sexes. All the modern Saints, without
a single exception, have continually practised this sort of penance.
It is related of St. Lewis Gonzaga, that he often scourged himself into
blood three times a-day. And at the point of death, not having
sufficient strength to use the lash, he besought the Provincial to have
him disciplined from head to foot."
[Illustration: Instruments of Discipline or Flagellation]
A. This is a band for going round the body to "mortify the flesh." It
is made of _Iron wire_, and the _ends_ of each link form Spikes which
range in length from the sixteenth of an inch to half an inch.
B. This is a _Flagellum_, made of strong iron wire. It has _five_
tails to represent the "Five wounds;" and at the end of each tail there
is a _Spike_, about an inch long, to _pierce_ the flesh. It will be
seen that the lowermost joints are the heaviest, so as to increase the
severity of the blows.
C. This is a _Cross_ resting upon an "I. H. S."--Jesus the Saviour of
Man. It is for wearing on the breast, and is made of _iron_, as,
indeed, all the other articles represented in the engraving are. It is
covered over with _spikes_ on the side next the body.
D. This is another _Flagellum_, commemorative of the "Five wounds."
At the end of each tail there is a kind of _Rowel_ with sharp points.
It is impossible to use this without cutting the flesh.
E. This _Belt_ is similar to A, but of stronger material. This _belt_
sometimes becomes _imbedded_ in the flesh of the devoted _victim_ of
"the Church."
F. This _Flagellum_ has _Nine_ tails, to represent the nine months
during which "The Word was made flesh." The "Cat-and-nine-tails" and
the "Incarnation"!!
G. This _Flagellum_ is a modification of B, D, and L.
H, J, P. These are _Bands_ for the _limbs_, and, like A and E, are
covered with _spikes_.
I. This is a _Cross_ similar to that resting upon the "I. H. S." above.
K. This is a _Cross_ and _Heart_ to be worn over the seat of the
affections, to show that all "natural affection" is to be crucified.
This was painfully illustrated in the case of a young lady who had left
her home and entered one of these Conventual Establishments to the
great grief of her parents. Her father called at the convent to see
her. She was brought to him, and on his expostulating with her, and
soliciting her return home, he observed that she pressed her hands
against her breast, and seemed to suffer excruciating pain. After a
little, blood oozed through her dress, and she was then withdrawn by
the "Sisters."
L. This _Flagellum_ may be called the Mother Superior's "_Wild Cat_."
M. This _Flagellum_ has Seven tails, to represent the "Seven Dolours"
of the Virgin; and a doleful tale they tell.
N. These two _Nets_ of Iron wire, covered over with _spikes_, are for
the most cruel and immodest purposes. We dare not describe them.
O. Each of these two hemispheres, together forming a _Nut_, has _five
brass spikes_, which are used for imprinting the _Stigmata_ or "Five
wounds" of Christ upon the _Religious_.
Were such cruelties perpetrated upon the _Heathen_, all our _Christian_
Churches would resound with appeals to the sympathy of the people to
come to the help of the sufferers, whether _Fanatics_ or _Victims_.
This would be commendable. Why, then, is the same course not adopted
on behalf of Nuns, who, as Rev. Pierce Connelly says, "are not only
slaves, but who are, _de facto_, by a Satanic consecration, secret
prisoners for life, and may any day be put an end to, or much worse,
with less risk of vengeance here in England than in Italy or
Spain!"--Extracted from the Annual Report of the Protestant Evangelical
Mission and Electoral Union, January, 1873.
PREFACE.
The following pages--intended to restore _Domestic Life_ to French
Society--formed the Preface to the Third Edition of _Priests, Women,
and Families_, by M. Michelet, of which celebrated work, "THE
PROTESTANT EVANGELICAL MISSION" have published an Edition in English.
This book has produced upon our adversaries an effect we had not
anticipated. It has made them lose every sense of propriety and
self-respect:--nay, more, even that respect for the sanctuary which it
was their duty to teach us. From the pulpits of their crowded churches
they preach against a living man, calling him by his name, and invoking
upon the author and his book the hatred of those who know not how to
read, and who will never read this work. The heads of the clergy must,
indeed, have felt themselves touched to the quick, to let loose these
furious preachers upon us.
We have hit the mark too fairly, it should seem. Woman!--this was the
point on which they were sensitive. Direction, the spiritual guidance
of women, is the vital part of ecclesiastical authority; and they will
fight for it to the death. Strike, if you will, elsewhere, but not
here. Attack the dogma--all well and good; they may, perhaps, make a
show of violence, or perpetrate some empty declamation; but if you
should happen to meddle with this particular point, the thing becomes
serious, and they no longer contain themselves. It is a sad sight to
see pontiffs, elders of the people, gesticulating, stamping, foaming at
the mouth, and gnashing their teeth.[1] Young men, do not look;
epileptic convulsions have occasionally a contagious effect upon the
spectators. Let us leave them and depart; we must resume our studies
without loss of time: "Art is long, life is short."
I remember having read in the correspondence of Saint Charles Borromeo,
that one of his friends, a person of authority and importance, having
censured some Jesuit or other who was too fond of confessing nuns, the
latter came in a fury to insult him. The Jesuit knew his strength:
being a preacher then in vogue, well off at court, and still better at
the court of Rome, he thought he need not stand upon ceremony. He went
to the greatest extremes, was violent, insolent, as much as he pleased:
his grave censor remained cool. The Jesuit could no longer keep within
the bounds of decency, and made use of the vilest expressions. The
other, calm and firm, answered nothing; he let him continue his
declamation, threats, and violent gestures; he only looked at his feet.
"Why were you always looking at his feet?" inquired an eye-witness, as
soon as the Jesuit, was gone. "Because," replied the noble man calmly,
"I fancied I saw the cloven hoof peeping out every now and then; and
this man, who seemed possessed with a devil, might be the tempter
himself, disguised as a Jesuit."
One prelate predicts in sorrow that we are sending the priests to
martyrdom.
Alas, this martyrdom is what they themselves demand, either aloud or in
secret, namely--marriage.
We think, without enumerating the too well known inconveniences of
their present state, that if the priest is to advise the family, it is
good for him to know what a family is; that as a married man, of a
mature age and experience, one who has loved and suffered, and whom
domestic affections have enlightened upon the mysteries of moral life,
which are not to be learned by guessing, he would possess at the same
time more affection and more wisdom.
It is true the defenders of the clergy have lately drawn such a picture
of marriage, that many persons perhaps will henceforth dread the
engagement. They have far exceeded the very worst things that
novelists and modern socialists have ever said against the _legal
union_. Marriage, which lovers imprudently seek as a confirmation of
love, is, according to them, but a warfare: we marry in order to fight.
It is impossible to degrade lower the virtue of matrimony. The
sacrament of union, according to these doctors, is useless, and can do
nothing unless a third party be always present between the
partners--_i.e._, the combatants--to separate them.
It had been generally believed that two persons were sufficient for
matrimony: but this is all altered; and we have the new system, as set
forth by themselves, composed of three elements: 1st, _man_, the
strong, the violent; 2ndly, _woman_, a being naturally weak; 3rdly, the
_priest_, born a man, and strong, but who is kind enough to become weak
and resemble woman; and who, participating thus in both natures, may
interpose between them.
Interpose! interfere between two persons who were to be henceforth but
one! This changes wonderfully the idea which, from the beginning of
the world, has been entertained of marriage.
But this is not all; they avow that they do not pretend to make an
impartial interference that might favour each of the parties, according
to reason. No, they address themselves exclusively to the wife: she it
is whom they undertake to protect against her natural protector. They
offer to league with her in order to transform the husband. If it were
once firmly established that marriage, instead of being unity in two
persons, is a league of one of them with a stranger, it would become
exceedingly scarce. Two to one! the game would seem too desperate; few
people would be bold enough to face the peril. There would be no
marriages but for money; and these are already too numerous. People in
difficulties would doubtless not fail to marry; for instance, a
merchant placed by his pitiless creditor between marriage and a warrant.
To be transformed, re-made, remodelled, and changed in nature! A grand
and difficult change! But there would be no merit in it, if it was not
of one's free will, and only brought about by a sort of domestic
persecution, or household warfare.
First of all, we must know whether transformation means amelioration,
whether it be intended by transformation to ascend higher and higher in
moral life, and become more virtuous and wise. To ascend would be well
and good; but if it should be to fall lower?
And first of all, the wisdom they offer us does not imply knowledge.
"What is the use of knowledge and literature? They are mere toys of
luxury, vain and dangerous ornaments of the mind, both strangers to the
soul." Let us not contest the matter, but pass over this empty
distinction that opposes the mind to the soul, as if ignorance was
innocence, and as if they could have the gifts of the soul and heart
with a poor, insipid, idiotic literature!
But where is their heart? Let us catch a glimpse of it. How is it
that those who undertake to develope it in others dispense with giving
any proof of it in themselves? But this living fountain of the heart
is impossible to be hidden, if we really have it within us. It springs
out in spite of everything; if you were to stop it on one side, it
would run out by the other. It is more difficult to be confined than
the flowing of great rivers:--try to shut up the sources of the Rhone
or Rhine! These are vain metaphors, and very ill-placed, I allow: to
what deserts of Arabia must I not resort to find more suitable ones?
We are in a church: see the crowd, the dense mass of people who after
having wandered far, enter here weary and athirst, hoping to find some
refreshment; they wait with open mouths. Will there even be one small
drop of dew?
No; a decent, proper, blunt-looking man ascends the pulpit: he will not
affect them; he confines himself to proofs. He makes a grand display
of reasoning, with high logical pretensions and much solemnity in his
premises. Then come sudden, sharp conclusions; but for middle term
there is none: "These things require no proof." Why, then, miserable
reasoner, did you make so much noise about your proofs?
Well! do not prove! only love! and we will let you off everything else.
Say only one word from the heart to comfort this crowd. All that
variegated mass of living heads, that you see so closely assembled
around your pulpit are not blocks of stone, but so many living souls.
Those yonder are young men, the rising generation, our future society.
They are of happy dispositions, full of spirit, fresh and entire, such
as God made them, and untamed; they rush forward incautiously even to
the very brink of precipices. What! youth, danger, futurity, and hopes
clouded with fear--does not all this move you? Will nothing open your
fatherly heart?
Mark, too, that brilliant crowd of women and flowers: in all that
splendour so delightful to the eye there is much suffering. I pray you
to speak one word of comfort to them. You know they are your
daughters, who come every evening so forlorn to weep at your feet.
They confide in you, and tell you everything; you know their wounds.
Try to find some consoling word--surely that cannot be so difficult.
What man is there who, in seeing the heart of a woman bleeding before
him, would not feel his own heart inspired with words to heal it? A
dumb man, for want of words, would find what is worth more, a flood of
tears!
What shall we say of those who, in presence of so many desponding,
sickly, and confiding persons, give them, as their only remedy, the
spirit of an academy, glittering commonplaces, old paradoxes,
Bonaparteism, socialism, and what not? There is in all this, we must
confess, a sad dryness and a great want of feeling.
Ah! you _are_ dry and harsh! I felt this the other day (it was in
December last), when I read on the walls, as I was passing by, an order
from the archbishop. It was a case of suicide; a poor wretch had
killed himself in the church of Saint-Gervais. Was it misery, passion,
madness, spleen, or moral weakness in this melancholy season? No cause
was mentioned; the body alone was there with the blood on the marble
slabs; but no explanation. By what gradation of griefs,
disappointments, and anguish had he been induced to commit this
unnatural act? What steps of moral purgatory had he descended before
he reached the bottom of the abyss? Who could say? No one. But any
man with a gleam of imagination in his heart, sees in this solemn
mystery something to make him weep and pray. That man is not Mr.
Affre: read the mandate. There is compassion for the blood-stained
church, and pity for the polluted stones; but for the dead only a
malediction. But, whether a Christian or not, guilty or not, is he not
still a man, my lord bishop? Could you not, whilst you were condemning
suicide, let fall one word of pity by the way? No, no sentiment of
humanity, nothing for the poor soul, which, besides its misfortune
(which must have been terrible, indeed, since it could not support it),
departs all alone and accursed, to attempt that perilous flight of the
other life and judgment.
Another very different fact had given me some time before a similar
impression. I had gone on business to the house of the venerable
Sister * * *.
She was absent; and two persons, a lady and an aged priest, were
waiting, like myself, in the small parlour. The lady seemed actuated
by some motive of beneficence: the priest, as they are lords and
masters in every Religious house, seemed to be quite at home, and, to
beguile the time, was writing letters at the sister's bureau. At the
conclusion of every note, he listened to the lady for a moment. The
latter, whose gentle face bore traces of grief, impressed one at once
with the goodness of her disposition: perhaps she would not have
attracted my attention, but there was something in her that interested
me. Was it passion or grief? I overheard without listening--she had
lost her son.
An only son, full of affection, spirits, and courage; a young hero,
who, leaving the Polytechnic school, had abandoned everything, riches,
high life, pleasure, happiness, and such a mother! And regardless
alike of safety and danger, had rushed to Marseilles, thence to
Algiers, to the enemy, and to death.
The poor woman, wholly occupied with this idea, snatched, from time to
time, a little moment to put in a word; she wanted to speak to him, and
appeal to his compassion. The scene was infinitely touching and
natural, without any theatrical effect. Her moderate grief and sighs,
without tears, affected me the more.
She was evidently wasting her breath. The thoughts of the priest were
elsewhere. It was not possible for him not to listen; he was forced to
say something or other (the lady was rich, and her carriage was waiting
at the door); but he got off as cheap as he could: "Yes, Madam,
Providence tries us. It strikes us for our good. These are very
painful trials," &c., &c. Such vague and cold words did not discourage
the lady; she drew her chair nearer, thinking he would hear her better:
"Ah! Sir, how shall I tell you? Ah! how can you understand so heavy a
calamity?" She would have made a dead man weep.
Did you ever see the heart-rending sight of the poor pointer, that has
been wounded by a shot, writhing at his master's feet, and licking his
hands, as if praying to him to help him? The comparison will appear,
perhaps, strange to those who have not seen the reality. However, at
that moment, I felt it in my heart. That woman, mortally wounded, yet
so gentle in her grief, seemed to be writhing at the feet of the
priest, and to entreat his compassion.
I looked at that priest: he was vulgar and unfeeling, such as we see so
often, neither wicked nor good; there was nothing to indicate a heart
of iron, but he was as if made of wood. I saw plainly that no one word
of all which his ear had received had entered his soul. One sense was
wanting. But why torment a blind man by speaking to him of colours?
He answers vaguely; occasionally he may guess pretty nearly; but how
can it be helped? he cannot see.
And do not think that the feelings of the heart can be guessed at more
easily. A man without wife or child might study the mysterious working
of a family in books and the world for ten thousand years, without ever
knowing one word about them. Look at these men; it is neither time,
opportunity, nor facility that they lack to acquire knowledge; they
pass their lives with women who tell them more than they tell their
husbands; they know and yet they are ignorant: they know all a woman's
acts and thoughts, but they are ignorant precisely of what is the best
and most intimate part of her character, and the very essence of her
being. They hardly understand her as a lover (of God or man), still
less as a wife, and not at all as a mother. Nothing is more painful
than to see them sitting down awkwardly by the side of a woman to
caress her child: their manner towards it is that of flatterers or
courtiers--anything but that of a father.
What I pity most in the man condemned to celibacy is not only the
privation of the sweetest joys of the heart, but that a thousand
objects of the natural and moral world are, and ever will be, a dead
letter to him. Many have thought, by living apart, to dedicate their
lives to science; but the reverse is the case: in such a morose and
crippled life science is never fathomed; it may be varied and
superficially immense; but it escapes, for it will not reside there.
Celibacy gives a restless activity to researches, intrigues, and
business, a sort of huntsman's eagerness, a sharpness in the subtleties
of school-divinity and disputation; this is at least the effect it had
in its prime. If it makes the senses keen and liable to temptation,
certainly it does not soften the heart. Our terrorists in the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were monks.[2] Monastic prisons were
always the most cruel.[3] A life systematically negative, a life
without its functions, developes in man instincts that are hostile to
life; he who suffers, is willing to make others suffer. The harmonious
and fertile parts of our nature, which on the one hand incline to
goodness, and on the other to genius and high invention, can hardly
ever withstand this partial suicide.
Two classes of persons necessarily contract much
insensibility--surgeons and priests. By constantly witnessing
sufferings and death, we become by degrees dead in our sympathetic
faculties. Let us, however, remark this difference, that the
insensibility of the surgeon is not without its utility: if he was
affected by his operation he might tremble. The business of the
priest, on the contrary, requires that he should be affected; sympathy
would be generally the most efficacious remedy to cure the soul. But
independently of what we have just said about the natural harshness of
this profitless life, we must observe that the priest, in contradiction
with a society, the whole of whose progress he condemns, becomes less
and less benevolent for the sinner and the rebel. The physician who
does not like his patient is less likely than another to cure him.
It is a sad reflection to think that these men, who have so little
sympathy, and who are, moreover, soured by contention, should happen to
have in their hands the most gentle portion of mankind; that which has
preserved the most affection, and ever remained the most faithful to
nature, and which, in the very corruption of morals, is still the least
corrupted by interest and hateful passions.
That is to say, that the least loving govern those who love the most.
In order to know well what use they make of this empire over women,
which they claim as their own privilege, we must not confine ourselves
to their flattering and wheedling ways with fashionable ladies, but
inquire of the poor women whom they are able to treat unceremoniously,
those especially, who, being in convents, are at the mercy of the
ecclesiastical superiors, and whom they keep under lock and key, and
undertake to protect alone.
We are not quite satisfied with this protection. For a long time we
thought all was right; we were even simple enough to say to ourselves
that the law could see nothing amiss in this kingdom of grace. But
hark! from those gentle asylums, those images of paradise, we hear sobs
and sighs.
I shall not speak here of the convents that have become real houses of
correction, nor of the events at Sens, Avignon, and Poictiers, nor of
the suicides that have taken place, alas! much nearer home.
No, I shall speak only of the most honourable houses and the most holy
nuns. How are they protected by ecclesiastical authority?
First, _as to the Soul_, or conscience, that dearest possession, on
account of which they sacrifice all the pleasures of this world; is it
true that the sisters of the hospitals who passed for Jansenists have
been latterly persecuted, to make them denounce their supposed secret
directors; and that they have obtained a truce only through the
threatening mediation of a magistrate, who is a celebrated orator and a
firm Gallican?
Again, _as to the Body_, or personal liberty, which the slave gains as
soon as ever he does but touch the sacred soil of France--does
ecclesiastical authority secure this to the nuns? Is it true that a
Carmelite nun, within sixty leagues of Paris, was kept _chained_ for
several months in her convent, and afterwards shut up for _nine years
in a madhouse_?
Is it true that a Benedictine nun was put into a sort of _in pace_, and
afterwards into a room full of mad women, where nothing was heard but
the horrible cries, howlings, and impure language of ruined women, who,
from one excess to another, have become raving mad?[4]
This woman, whose only crime was good sense and a taste for writing and
drawing flowers, served her establishment a long time as housekeeper
and governess: she had taught most of the sisters to read. What does
she ask for? The punishment of her enemies? No: only the consolation
of confessing, and taking the sacrament; spiritual food for her old age.
People may say, "Perhaps the bishop did not know?" The bishop knew
all: "he was much moved"--but he did nothing. The chaplain of the
house knew they were going to put a nun _in pace_. "He sighed "--but
did nothing. The _Vicaire-Général_ did not sigh, but sided with the
party against the nun: his _ultimatum_ was that she should die of
hunger, or return to her dungeon.
Who showed himself the real bishop in this business?--The Magistrate.
Who was the real priest? The Advocate, a studious young man, whom
science had withdrawn from the bar, but who, seeing this unfortunate
woman devoid of all succour, for whom no one durst either print or
plead (under the ridiculous system of terror), took up the affair,
spoke, wrote, and acted; taking every necessary step, making journeys
in the depth of winter, and sacrificing both his money and his
time--six months of his life. May God pay him back with interest!
Which is the good Samaritan in this case? Who proved himself the
neighbour of the wretched woman? Who picked up the bleeding victim
from the road, before whom the Pharisees had passed? Who is the real
priest, the true father?
A witty writer of the day uses the term _my fathers_, in speaking of
the magistrates who interpose in the affairs of the Church. He speaks
deridingly, but they deserve the name. Who bestows it upon them? The
afflicted who are the members of Christ, and who, as such, are also the
Church, I should think. Yes, they call them _fathers_ on account of
their paternal equity. Their helpful interposition had too long been
repelled from the threshold of the convents by these crafty words:
"_What are you going to do_? Should you enter here, you would disturb
the peace of these quiet asylums, and startle these timid virgins!"
Why! they themselves call for our assistance: we hear their shrieks
from the streets!
All of us laymen, of whatever denomination, whether magistrates,
politicians, authors, or solitary thinkers, ought to take up the cause
of women more seriously than we have hitherto done.
We cannot leave them where they now are, in hands so harsh and
unfeeling, and which are, moreover, unsafe in more than one respect.
Nothing can be more important or more worthy of uniting us together.
Let us, I pray you, come to an understanding about it; it is the most
holy of all causes: let there be then a cessation from religious
strife. We can recommence our disputes afterwards as much as we please.
And first let us frankly confess the truth to one another. The evil
when confessed and known has a better chance of being remedied. Whom
ought we to accuse in the present state of things?
Let us not accuse the Jesuits, who carry on their Jesuitical trade, nor
the priests, who are dangerous, restless, and violent, only because
they are unhappy. No; we ought rather to accuse ourselves.
If dead men return in broad daylight, if these Gothic phantoms haunt
our streets at noon-day, it is because the living have let the spirit
of life grow weak within them. How is it that these men re-appear
among us, after having been buried by history with all funeral rites,
and laid by the side of other ancient orders? The very sight of them
is a solemn token and a serious warning.
This has been allowed to take place, O ye men of the present day, to
bring you to your senses, and to remind you of what you ought to be.
If the future that is within you were revealed in its full light, who
would turn his eyes towards the departing shadows of darkness and
night? It is for you to find, and for you to make, the future. This
is not a thing that you must expect to find ready made. If the future
is already in you as a bud, transmitted from the most distant ages, let
it grow there as the desire for progress and amelioration, a paternal
wish for the happiness of those who are to follow you. Love in
anticipation your unknown son, for he will be born. Men call him "The
time to come." Then work for him.
The day when fellow-mortals will perceive in you the man of future and
a magnanimous mind, families will be rallied. Woman will follow you
everywhere, if she can say to herself, "I am the wife of a strong man."
Modern strength appears in the powerful liberty with which you go on
disengaging the reality from the forms, and the spirit from the dead
letter. But why do you not reveal yourself to the companion of your
life, in that which is for you your life itself? She passes away days
and years by your side, without seeing or knowing the grandeur that is
within you. If she saw you walk free, strong, and prosperous in action
and in science, she would not remain chained down to material idolatry,
and bound to the sterile letter; she would rise to a faith far more
free and pure, and you would be as one in faith. She would preserve
for you this common treasure of religious life, where you might seek
for comfort when your mind is languid; and when your various toils,
studies, and business have weakened the vital unity within you, she
would bring back your thoughts and life to God, the true, the only
unity.
I shall not attempt to crowd a large volume into a small Preface. I
shall only add one word, which at once expresses and completes my
thought.
Man ought to nourish woman. He ought to feed spiritually (and
materially if he can) her who nourishes him with her love, her milk,
and her very life. Our adversaries give women bad food; but we give
them none at all.
To the women of the richer class, those brilliant ones whom people
suppose so happy, to these we give no spiritual food.
And to the women of the poorer class, solitary, industrious, and
destitute, who try hard to gain their bread, we do not even give our
assistance to help them to find their material food.
These women, who are or will be mothers, are left by us to fast (either
in soul or in body), and we are punished especially by the generation
that issues from them, for our neglecting to give them the staff of
life.
I like to believe that good-will, generally, is not wanting--only time
and attention. People live in a hurry, and can hardly be said to live:
they follow with a huntsman's eagerness this or that petty object, and
neglect what is important.
You man of business or study, who are so energetic and indefatigable,
you have no time, say you, to associate your wife with your daily
progress; you leave her to her _ennui_, idle conversations, empty
sermons, and silly books; so that, falling below herself, less than
woman, even less than a child, she will have neither moral action,
influence, or maternal authority over her own offspring. Well! you
will have the time, as old age advances, to try in vain to do all over
again what is not done twice, to follow in the steps of a son, who,
from college to the schools, and from thence into the world, hardly
knows his family; and who, if he travels a little, and meets you on his
return, will ask you your name. The mother alone could have made you a
son; but to do so you ought to have made her what a woman ought to be,
strengthened her with your sentiments and ideas, and nourished her with
your life.
If I look beyond the family and domestic affections, I find our
negligence towards women resembles hard-heartedness; the cruel effects
which result from it recoil upon ourselves.
You think yourself good and kind-hearted; you are not insensible to the
fate of poor women; an old one reminds you of your mother, a young one
of your daughter. But you have not the time either to see or know that
the old one and the young one are both literally dying with hunger.
Two machines are constantly working to exterminate them:--the convent,
that immense _Workshop_, that works for little or nothing, not relying
on its labour for subsistence. Then the large shop, with sleeping
partners, that buys of the convent, and destroys by degrees the smaller
shops which employed the workwomen. The latter has but two chances
left--the Seine, or to find at night some heartless wretch who takes
advantage of her hunger--suicide or dishonour.
Men receive about as much as women from public charity: this is unjust.
They have infinitely more resources. They are stronger, have a greater
variety of work, more _initiative_, a more active impulse, more
locomotion, if I may so express myself, to go and hunt out work. They
travel, emigrate, and find engagements. Not to mention countries where
manual labour is very dear, I know of provinces in France, where it is
very difficult to find either journeymen or man-servants. Man can
wander to and fro. Woman remains at home and dies.
Let this workwoman, whom the opposition of the convent has crushed,
crawl to the gate of the convent--can she find an asylum there? She
would want, in default of dowry, the active protection of an
influential priest, a protection reserved for devout persons, such as
have had the time to follow the "_Mois de Marie_"--Devotions to the
Virgin--the _Catechisms of Perseverance_, &c., &c., and who have been,
for a long time past, under ecclesiastical authority. This protection
is often very dearly purchased; and for what? To get permission to
pass one's life shut up within walls, to be obliged to counterfeit a
devotion one has not! Death cannot be worse.
They die then, quietly, decently, and alone. They will never be seen
coming down from their garrets into the street to walk about with the
motto, "_To live working or die fighting_." They will make no
disturbances; we have nothing to fear from them. It is for this very
reason, that we are the more bound to assist them. Shall we then feel
our hearts affected only for those of whom we are afraid?
Men of money, if I must speak to you in your own money language, I will
tell you, that as soon as we shall have an economical government, it
will not hesitate to lay out its money for women, to help them to
maintain themselves by their industry.
Not only do these sickly women crowd our hospitals, and leave them only
to return, but the offspring of these poor exhausted creatures, if they
do not die in the Foundling, will be, like their mothers, the habitual
inmates of those hospitals. A miserably poor woman is a whole family
of sick persons in perspective.
Whether we be philosophers, physiologists, political economists, or
statesmen, we all know that the excellency of the race, the strength of
the people, come especially from the woman. Does not the nine months'
support of the mother establish this? Strong mothers have strong
children.
We all are, and ever shall be, the debtors of women. They are mothers;
this says everything. He who would bargain about the work of those who
are the joy of the present and the destiny of the future, must needs
have been born in misery and damnation. Their manual labour is a very
secondary consideration; that is especially our part. What do they
make?--Man: this is a superior work. To be loved, to bring forth both
physically and morally, to educate man (our barbarous age does not
quite understand this yet), this is the business of woman.
"_Fons omnium viventium_!" What can ever be added to this sublime
saying?
Whilst writing all this, I have had in my mind a woman, whose strong
and serious mind would not have failed to support me in these
contentions: I lost her thirty years ago (I was a child then);
nevertheless, ever living in my memory, she follows me from age to age.
She suffered with me in my poverty, and was not allowed to share my
better fortune. When young I made her sad, and now I cannot console
her. I know not even where her bones are: I was too poor then to buy
earth to bury her!
And yet I owe her much. I feel deeply that I am the son of woman.
Every instant in my ideas and words (not to mention my features and
gestures), I find again my mother in myself. It is my mother's blood
which gives me the sympathy I feel for by-gone ages, and the tender
remembrance of all those who are now no more.
What return then could I, who am myself advancing towards old age, make
her for the many things I owe her? One, for which she would have
thanked me--this protest in favour of women and mothers: and I place it
at the head of a book believed by some to be a work of controversy.
They are wrong.
The longer it lives, if it should live, the plainer will it be seen,
that, in spite of polemical emotion, it was a work of history, a work
of faith, of truth, and of sincerity:--on what, then, could I have set
my heart more?
[1] This will not appear exaggerated to those who have read the furious
libel of the Bishop of Chartres. A newspaper asks me why I did not
prosecute him for defamation. This mad violence is much less guilty
than the treacherous insinuations they make in their books and
newspapers, in the saloons, &c. Now they attribute to me whatever has
been done by other Michelets, to whom I am not even related (for
instance, Michelet of Languedoc, a poet and soldier under the
Restoration); now they pretend to believe, though I had told them the
contrary at the end of my preface, that this book is my lecture of
1844. Then, again, they get up a little petition from Marseilles, to
pray for the dismissal of the professor. So far from wishing to stifle
the voice of my adversaries, I have claimed for their writings the same
liberty I asked for my own. _Lesson of the 27th of February_,
1845:--"I see among you the greater part of those who had aided me to
maintain in this chair the liberty of discussion. We will respect this
liberty in our adversaries. This is not chivalry, it is simply our
duty. It is, moreover, essential to the cause of truth, that no
objection be suppressed; but that each party may be at liberty to state
their reasons. You may be sure that truth will prevail and conquer.
We pass away; but truth lasts and triumphs. Yet, as long as her
adversaries may have any thing to say, her triumph is mingled with
doubt."
[2] For the fifteenth century, see my History of France, A.D. 1413.
[3] Mabillon on _Monastic Imprisonment_, posthumous works, vol. ii. p.
327.
[4] We should, perhaps, have reserved these facts for some future
occasion, if they had not been already divulged by the newspapers and
reviews. Besides, several magistrates have expressed their opinions on
many analogous facts in the same locality. A solicitor-general writes
to the underprefect:--"I have reason to be as convinced _as you_, that
Madame * * * was in full possession of her senses. A longer
imprisonment would most certainly have made her really mad," &c. A
letter from the Solicitor-General Sorbier, quoted by Mr. Tilliard, in
favour of Marie Lemonnier, p. 65.
MEMOIR.
The following brief Memoir of the Author of "Priests, Women, and
Families" was written for, and embodied in, the "Dictionary of
Universal Biography," published by Mackenzie about 1862.
Another Memoir of this celebrated Historian of France was given in _The
Times_, Feb. 12, 1874, two days after his decease. _The Times_ states
that he "died of heart disease":--
"Michelet, Jules, one of the greatest of contemporary French writers,
was born at Paris on the 21st of August, 1798. In the introduction to
his little book, 'Le Peuple,' Michelet has told the story of his early
life. He was the son of a small master printer, of Paris, who was
ruined by one of the Emperor Napoleon's arbitrary measures against the
Press, by which the number of printers in Paris was suddenly reduced.
For the benefit of his creditors, the elder Michelet, with no aid but
that of his family, printed, folded, bound, and sold some trivial
little works, of which he owned the copyright; and the Historian of
France began his career by 'composing' in the typographical, not the
literary, sense of the word. At twelve he had picked up a little Latin
from a friendly old bookseller who had been a village schoolmaster; and
his brave parents, in spite of their penury, decided that he should go
to college. He entered the Lycée Charlemagne, where he distinguished
himself, and his exercises attracted the notice of Villemain. He
supported himself by private teaching until, in 1821, he obtained, by
competition, a professorship in his college. His first publications
were two chronological summaries of modern history, 1825-26. In 1827
he essayed a higher flight by the publication, not only of his 'Précis
de l'Histoire Moderne,' but by that of his volume on the Scienza Nuova
of Vico ('Principes de la Philosophie d'Histoire'), the then
little-known father of the so-called philosophy of history, whose work
was thus first introduced to the French public, and, indeed, to that of
England. These two works procured him a professorship at the école
normale. After the Revolution of the Three Days, the now distinguished
professor was placed at the head of the historical section of the
French archives, a welcome position, which gave him the command of new
and unexplored material for the History of France. The first work in
which he displayed his peculiar historical genius, was his 'Histoire
Romaine,' 1831, embracing only the History of the Roman Republic. From
1833, dates the appearance of his great 'History of France,' of which
still uncompleted work, twelve volumes had appeared in 1860. In 1834,
Gruizot made the dawning Historian of France his _suppléant_, or
substitute, in the Chair of History connected with the Faculty of
Letters; and in 1838 he was appointed Professor of History in the
College de France. Meanwhile, besides instalments of his 'History of
France,' he had published several works, among them (1835) his
excellent and interesting 'Memoires de Luther,' in which, by extracts
from Luther's Table-talk and Letters, the great reformer was made to
tell himself the history of his life; the 'OEuvres Choises de Vico;'
and the philosophical and poetical 'Origines du Droit Francais.' In
the education controversy of the later years of Louis Philippe's reign,
Michelet and his friend Edgar Quinet vehemently opposed the pretensions
of the clerical party, and carried the war into the enemies' camp by
the publication of their joint work, 'Les Jesuites,' 1843, followed, in
1844, by Michelet's 'Du Pretre, de la Femme, et la Famille,' translated
into English as 'Priests, Women, and Families.' Guizot bowed to the
ecclesiastical storm which these works invoked, and suspended the
lectures of the two anti-clerical professors. To 1846 belongs
Michelet's eloquent and touching little book, 'Le Peuple.' The
Revolution of February, 1848, restored Michelet to his functions. He
waived, however, the political career which was now opened to him, and
laboured at his grandiose 'History of the French Revolution,' of which
the first volume had appeared in 1847. In 1851 he was again
suspended--this time by the ministry of the Prince President--from his
professional functions, and on account of his democratic teachings.
After the _coup d'etat_ he refused to take the oaths, and lost all his
public employments. Since then he has been occupied with his 'History
of France,' and of the French Revolution, and with the production of
other and some minor works. It is not among the last that must be
classed his two striking volumes, 'L'Oiseau,' 1856, and 'L'Insecte,'
1857, the result of a retreat from a pressure of a new political system
into the realm of nature. In 'L'Amour,' 1858, and 'La Femme,' 1859,
the intrusion of physiology into the domain of thought and feeling was
too much for English tastes. In 'La Mer,' 1861, Michelet addresses
himself to the natural history and the poetry of the sea."
CONTENTS.
PREFACES.
Editor's Preface
Author's Preface
Memoir
PART I.
ON DIRECTION IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.
CHAPTER I.
Religious Re-action in 1600--Influence of the Jesuits over Women and
Children--Savoy; the Vaudois; Violence and Gentleness--St. François de
Sales
CHAPTER II.
St. François de Sales and Madame de
Chantal--Visitation--Quietism--Results of Religious Direction
CHAPTER III.
Loneliness of Woman--Easy Devotion--Worldly Theology of the
Jesuits--Women and Children advantageously made use of--Thirty Years'
War, 1618-1648--Gallant Devotion--Religious Novels--Casuists
CHAPTER IV.
Convents--Convents in Paris--Convents contrasted; the Director--Dispute
about the Direction of the Nuns--The Jesuits Triumph through Calumny
CHAPTER V.
Re-action of Morality--Arnaud, 1643; Pascal, 1657--The Jesuits lose
Ground--They gain over the King and the Pope--Discouragement of the
Jesuits; their Corruption--They Protect the Quietists--Desmarets--Morin
burnt, 1663--Immorality of Quietism
CHAPTER VI.
Continuation of Moral Re-action--_Tartuffe_, 1664--Real Tartuffes--Why
Tartuffe is not a Quietist
CHAPTER VII.
Apparition of Molinos, 1675--His Success at Rome--French
Quietists--Madame Guyon and her Director--"The Torrents"--Mystic
Death--Do we return from it?
CHAPTER VIII.
Fenelon as Director--His Quietism--"Maxims of Saints," 1697--Fenelon
and Madame de la Maisonfort
CHAPTER IX.
Bossuet as Director--Bossuet and Sister Cornuau--Bossuet's
Imprudence--He is a Quietist in Practice--Devout Direction inclines to
Quietism--Moral Paralysis
CHAPTER X.
Molinos' "Guide"--Part Played in it by the Director; Hypocritical
Austerity--Immoral Doctrine; Approved by Rome, 1675--Molinos Condemned
at Rome, 1687--His Morals--His Morals Conformable to his
Doctrine--Spanish Molinosists--Mother Agueda
CHAPTER XI.
No more Systems: an Emblem--The Heart--Sex--The Immaculate--The Sacred
Heart--Mario Alacoque--The Seventeenth Century is the Age of
Equivocation--Chimerical Politics of the Jesuits--Father
Colombière--England--Papist Conspiracy--First Altar of the Sacred
Heart--The Ruin of the Galileans, Quietists, and Port-Royal--Theology
annihilated in the Eighteenth Century--Materiality of the Sacred
Heart--Jesuitical Art
PART II.
ON DIRECTION IN GENERAL, AND ESPECIALLY IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
CHAPTER I.
Resemblances and Differences between the seventeenth and nineteenth
Centuries--Christian Art--It is we who have restored the Church--What
the Church adds to the Power of the Priest--The Confessional
CHAPTER II.
Confession--Present Education of the Young Confessor--The Priest in the
Middle Ages--1st, believed--2ndly, was mortified--3rdly, knew--4thly,
interrogated less--The Dangers of the Young Confessor--How he
Strengthens his Tottering Position
CHAPTER III.
Confession--The Confessor and the Husband--How they Detach the
Wife--The Director--Directors in Concert--Ecclesiastical Policy
CHAPTER IV.
Habit--Power of Habit--Its Insensible Beginning; its Progress--Second
Nature; often fatal--A Man taking Advantage of his Power--Can we get
clear of it?
CHAPTER V.
On Convents--Omnipotence of the Director--Condition of the Nuns,
Forlorn and Wretched--Convents made Bridewells and
Bedlams--Captation--Barbarous Discipline; Struggle between the Superior
Nun and the Director; Change of Directors--The Magistrate
CHAPTER VI.
Absorption of the Will--Government of Acts, Thoughts, and
Wills--_Assimilation_ of the Soul--_Transhumanation_--To become the God
of another--Pride and Desire
CHAPTER VII.
Desire. Terrors of the other World--The Physician and his
Patient--Alternatives; Postponements--Effects of Fear in Love--To be
All-powerful and Abstain--Struggles between the Spirit and the
Flesh--Moral Death more Potent than Physical Life--It will not revive
PART III.
CHAPTER I.
Schism in Families--The Daughter; by whom Educated--Importance of
Education--The Advantage of the First Instructor--Influence of Priests
upon Marriage--Which they Retain after that Ceremony
CHAPTER II.
Woman--The Husband does not Associate with the Wife--He seldom knows
how to Initiate her into his Thoughts--What Mutual Initiation would
be--The Wife Consoles Herself with her Son--He is taken from her; her
Loneliness and _Ennui_--A pious young Man--The _Spiritual_ and the
_Worldly_ Man--Who is now the Mortified Man
CHAPTER III.
The Mother--Alone for a Long Time, she can bring up her
Child--Intellectual Nourishment--Gestation, Incubation, Education--The
Child Guarantees the Mother, and she the Child--She protects his
Originality, which Public Education must Limit--The Father even Limits
it, the Mother Defends it--Her Weakness; she wishes her Son to be a
Hero--Her Heroic Disinterestedness
CHAPTER IV.
Love--Love wishes to _raise_ and not absorb--False Theory of our
Adversaries; Dangerous Practice--Love wishes to form an Equal who may
love freely--Love in the World, in the Civil World--And in Families,
not understood by the Middle Ages--Family Religion
ONE WORD TO THE PRIESTS:--We do not Attack Priests, but their Unhappy
and Dangerous Position--Not Rome but France is the Pope--Our Sympathy
for Priests, Victims of the Laws--Priests and Soldiers--_Priest_ means
_Old Man_
PRIESTS, WOMEN, AND FAMILIES.
PART I.
ON DIRECTION IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.
CHAPTER I.
RELIGIOUS REACTION IN 1600.--INFLUENCE OF THE JESUITS OVER WOMEN AND
CHILDREN.--SAVOY; THE VAUDOIS; VIOLENCE AND MILDNESS.--ST. FRANCOIS DE
SALES.
Everybody has seen in the Louvre Guide's graceful picture representing
the Annunciation. The drawing is incorrect, the colouring false, and
yet the effect is seducing. Do not expect to find in it the
conscientiousness and austerity of the old schools; you would look also
in vain for the vigorous and bold touch of the masters of the
_Renaissance_. The sixteenth century has passed away, and everything
assumes a softer character. The figure with which the painter has
evidently taken the most pleasure is the angel, who, according to the
refinement of that surfeited period, is a pretty-looking singing boy--a
cherub of the Sacristy. He appears to be sixteen, and the Virgin from
eighteen to twenty years of age. This Virgin--by no means ideal, but
real, and the reality slightly adulterated--is no other than a young
Italian maiden whom Guido copied at her own house, in her snug oratory,
and at her convenient praying-desk (prie-Dieu), such as were then used
by ladies.
If the painter was inspired by anything else, it was not by the Gospel,
but rather by the devout novels of that period, or the fashionable
sermons uttered by the Jesuits in their coquettish-looking churches.
The Angelic Salutation, the Visitation, the Annunciation, were the
darling subjects upon which they had, for a long time past, exhausted
every imagination of seraphic gallantry. On beholding this picture by
Guide, we fancy we are reading the Bernardino. The angel speaks Latin
like a young learned clerk; the Virgin, like a boarding-school young
lady, responds in soft Italian, "O alto signore," &c.
This pretty picture is important as a work characteristic of an already
corrupt age; being an agreeable and delicate work, we are the more
easily led to perceive its suspicious graces and equivocal charms.
Let us call to mind the softened forms which the devout reaction of
this age--that of Henry IV.--then assumed. We are lost in astonishment
when we hear, as it were on the morrow of the sixteenth century, after
wars and massacres, the lisping of this still small voice. The
terrible preachers of the Sixteen,--the monks who went armed with
muskets in the processions of the League--are suddenly humanised, and
become gentle. The reason is, they must lull to sleep those whom they
have not been able to kill. The task, however, was not very difficult.
Everybody was worn out by the excessive fatigue of religious warfare,
and exhausted by a struggle that afforded no result, and from which no
one came off victorious. Every one knew too well his party and his
friends. In the evening of so long a march there was nobody, however
good a walker he might be, who did not desire to rest: the
indefatigable Henry of Beam, seeking repose like the rest, or wishing
to lull them into tranquillity, afforded them the example, and gave
himself up with a good grace into the hands of Father Cotton and
Gabrielle.
Henry IV. was the grandfather of Louis XIV., and Cotton the great uncle
of Father La Chaise--two royalties, two dynasties; one of kings, the
other of Jesuit confessors. The history of the latter would be very
interesting. These amiable fathers ruled throughout the whole of the
century, by dint of absolving, pardoning, shutting their eyes, and
remaining ignorant. They effected great results by the most trifling
means, such as little capitulations, secret transactions, back-doors,
and hidden staircases.
The Jesuits could plead that, being the constrained restorers of Papal
authority, that is to say, physicians to a dead body, the means were
not left to their choice. Dead beat in the world of ideas, where could
they hope to resume their warfare, save in the field of intrigue,
passion, and human weaknesses?
There, nobody could serve them more actively than Women. Even when
they did not act with the Jesuits and for them, they were not less
useful in an indirect manner, as instruments and means,--as objects of
business and daily compromise between the penitent and the confessor.
The tactics of the confessor did not differ much from those of the
mistress. His address, like hers, was to refuse sometimes, to put off,
to cause to languish, to be severe, but with moderation, then at length
to be overcome by pure goodness of heart. These little manoeuvres,
infallible in their effects upon a gallant and devout king, who was
moreover obliged to receive the sacrament on appointed days, often put
the whole State into the Confessional. The king being caught and held
fast, was obliged to give satisfaction in some way or other. He paid
for his human weaknesses with political ones; such an amour cost him a
state-secret, such a bastard a royal ordinance. Occasionally, they did
not let him off without bail. In order to preserve a certain mistress,
for instance, he was forced to give up his son. How much did Father
Cotton forgive Henry IV. to obtain from him the education of the
dauphin.[1]
In this great enterprise of kidnapping man everywhere, by using woman
as a decoy, and by woman getting possession of the child, the Jesuits
met with more than one obstacle, but one particularly serious--their
reputation of Jesuits. They were already by far too well known. We
may read in the letters of St. Charles Borromeo, who had established
them at Milan and {36} singularly favoured them, what sort of character
he gives them--intriguing, quarrelsome, and insolent under a cringing
exterior. Even their penitents, who found them very convenient, were
nevertheless at times disgusted with them. The most simple saw plainly
enough that these people, who found every opinion probable, had none
themselves. These famous champions of the faith were sceptics in
morals: even less than sceptics, for speculative scepticism might leave
some sentiment of honour; but a doubter in practice, who says Yes on
such and such an act, and Yes on the contrary one, must sink lower and
lower in morality, and lose not only every principle, but in time every
affection of the heart!
Their very appearance was a satire against them. These people, so
cunning in disguising themselves, were made up of lying; it was
everywhere around them, palpable and visible. Like brass badly gilt,
like the holy toys in their gaudy churches, they appeared false at the
distance of a hundred paces: false in expression, accent, gesture, and
attitude; affected, exaggerated, and often excessively fickle. This
inconstancy was amusing, but it also put people on their guard. They
could well learn an attitude or a deportment; but studied graces, and a
bending, undulating, and serpentine gait are anything but satisfactory.
They worked hard to appear a simple, humble, insignificant, good sort
of people. Their grimace betrayed them.
These equivocal-looking individuals had, however, in the eyes of the
women a redeeming quality: they were passionately fond of children. No
mother, grandmother, or nurse could caress them more, or could find
better some endearing word to make them smile. In the churches of the
Jesuits the good saints of the order, St. Xavier or St. Ignatius, are
often painted as grotesque nurses, holding the divine darling (poupon)
in their arms, fondling and kissing it. They began also to make on
their altars and in their fantastically-ornamented chapels those little
paradises in glass cases, where women are delighted to see the wax
child among flowers. The Jesuits loved children so much, that they
would have liked to educate them all.
Not one of them, however learned he might be, disdained to be a tutor,
to give the principles of grammar, and teach the declensions.
There were, however, many people among their own friends and penitents,
even those who trusted their souls to their keeping, who, nevertheless,
hesitated to confide their sons to them. They would have succeeded far
less with women and children, if their good fortune had not given them
for ally a tall lad, shrewd and discreet, who possessed precisely what
they had lacked to inspire confidence,--a charming simplicity.
This friend of the Jesuits, who served them so much the better as he
did not become one of them, invented, in an artless manner, for the
profit of these intriguers, the manner, tone, and true style of easy
devotion, which they would have ever sought for in vain. Falsehood
would never assume the shadow of reality as it can do, if it was always
and entirely unconnected with truth.
Before speaking of François de Sales, I must say one word about the
stage on which he performs his part.
The great effort of the Ultramontane reaction about the year 1600 was
at the Alps, in Switzerland and Savoy. The work was going on bravely
on each side of the mountains, only the means were far from being the
same: they showed on either side a totally different countenance--here
the face of an angel, there the look of a wild beast; the latter
physiognomy was against the poor Vaudois in Piedmont.
In Savoy, and towards Geneva, they put on the angelic expression, not
being able to employ any other than gentle means against populations
sheltered by treaties, and who would have been protected against
violence by the lances of Switzerland.
The agent of Rome in this quarter was the celebrated Jesuit, Antonio
Possevino[2], a professor, scholar, and diplomatist, as {38} well as
the confessor of the kings of the North. He himself organised the
persecutions against the Vaudois of Piedmont; and he formed and
directed his pupil, François de Sales, to gain by his address the
Protestants of Savoy.
Ought I to speak of this terrible history of the Vaudois, or pass it
over in silence? Speak of it! It is far too cruel--no one will relate
it without his pen hesitating, and his words being blotted by his
tears.[3] If, however, I did not speak of it, we should never behold
the most odious part of the system, that artful policy which employed
the very opposite means in precisely the same cases; here ferocity,
there an unnatural mildness. One word, and I leave the sad story. The
most implacable butchers were women, the penitents of the Jesuits of
Turin. The victims were children! They destroyed them in the
sixteenth century: there were four hundred children burnt at one time
in a cavern. In the seventeenth century they kidnapped them. The
edict of pacification, granted to the Vaudois in 1655, promises, as a
singular favour, that their children under twelve years of age shall no
longer be stolen from them; above that age it is still lawful to seize
them.
This new sort of persecution, more cruel than massacres, characterises
the period when the Jesuits undertook to make themselves universally
masters of the education of children. These pitiless plagiarists[4],
who dragged them away from their mothers, wanted only to bring them up
in their fashion, make them abjure their faith, hate their family, and
arm them against their brethren.
It was, as I have said, a Jesuit professor, Possevino, who renewed the
persecution about the time at which we are now arrived. The same,
while teaching at Padua, had for his pupil young François de Sales, who
had already passed a year in Paris, at the college of Clermont. He
belonged to one of those families of Savoy, as much distinguished by
their devotion as by their valour, who carried on wars long against
Geneva. He was endowed with all the qualities requisite for the war of
seduction, which they then desired to commence--a gentle and sincere
devotion, a lively and earnest speech, and a singular charm of
goodness, beauty, and gentleness. Who has not remarked this charm in
the smile of the children of Savoy, who are so natural, yet so
circumspect?
Every favour of Heaven must, we certainly believe, have been showered
upon him, since in this bad age, bad taste, and bad party, among the
cunning and false people who made him their tool, he remained, however,
St. François de Sales. Everything he has said or written, without
being free from blemishes, is charming, full of affection, of an
original gentleness and genius, which, though it may excite a smile, is
nevertheless very affecting. Everywhere we find, as it were, living
fountains springing up, flowers after flowers, and rivulets meandering
as in a lovely spring morning after a shower. It might be said,
perhaps, that he amuses himself so much with flowerets, that his
nosegay is no longer such as shepherdesses gather, but such as would
suit a flower-girl, as his Philothea would say: he takes them all, and
takes too many; there are some colours among them badly matched, and
have a strange effect. It is the taste of that age, we must confess;
the Savoyard taste in particular does not fear ugliness; and a Jesuit
education does not lead to the detestation of falsehood.
But even if he had not been so charming a writer, his bewitching
personal qualities would still have had the same effect. His fair mild
countenance, with rather a childish expression, pleased at first sight.
Little children, in their nurses' arms, as soon as they saw him, could
not take their eyes off him. He was equally delighted with them, and
would exclaim, as he fondly caressed them, "Here is my little family."
The children ran after him, and the mothers followed their children.
Little family? or little intrigue? The words (_ménage manège_) are
somewhat similar; and though a child in appearance, the good man was at
bottom very deep. If he permitted the nuns a few trifling
falsehoods[5], ought we to believe he never granted the same indulgence
to himself? However it may be, actual falsehood appeared less in his
words than in his position; he was made a bishop in order to give the
example of sacrificing the rights of the bishops to the Pope. For the
love of peace, and to hide the division of the Catholics by an
appearance of union, he did the Jesuits the important service of saving
their Molina accused at Rome; and he managed to induce the Pope to
impose silence on the friends, as well as the enemies, of Grace.
This sweet-tempered man did not, however, confine himself to the means
of mildness and persuasion. In his zeal as a converter, he invoked the
assistance of less honourable means--interest, money, places; lastly,
authority and terror. He made the Duke of Savoy travel from village to
village, and advised him at last to drive away the remaining few who
still refused to abjure their faith.[6] Money, very powerful in this
poor country, seemed to him a means at once so natural and
irresistible, that he went even into Geneva, to buy up old Theodore de
Bèze, and offered him, on the part of the Pope, a pension of four
thousand crowns.
It was an odd sight to behold this man, the bishop and titular prince
of Geneva, beating about the bush to circumvent his native city, and
organising a war of seduction against it by France and Savoy. Money
and intrigue did not suffice; it was necessary to employ a softer charm
to thaw and liquify the inattackable iceberg of logic and criticism.
Convents for females were founded, to attract and receive the
newly-converted, and to offer them a powerful bait composed of love and
mysticism. These convents have been made famous by the names of Madame
de Chantal and Madame Guyon. The former established in them the mild
devotion of the Visitation; and it was there that the latter wrote her
little book of _Torrents_, which seems inspired, like Rousseau's
_Julie_ (by the bye, a far less dangerous composition), by the
Charmettes, Meillerie, and Clarens.
[1] The masterpiece of the Jesuit was to get the shepherd-poet Des
Yveteaux, the most empty-headed man in France, named tutor, reserving
to himself the moral and religious part of education.
[2] See his Life, by Dorigny, p. 505.; Bonneville, Life of St.
François, p. 19, &c.
[3] Read the three great Vaudois historians, Gilles, Léger, and Arnaud.
[4] Plagiarius, in its proper sense, means, as is well known, a
man-stealer.
[5] Little lies, little deceits, little prevarications. See, for
instance, OEuvres, vol. viii. pp. 196, 223, 342.
[6] Nouvelles Lettres Inédites, published by Mr. Datta, 1835, vol. i.
p. 247. See also, for the intolerance of St. François, pp. 130, 131,
136, 141, and vol. ix. of the OEuvres, p. 335, the bounden duty of
kings to put to the sword all the enemies of the Pope.
CHAPTER II.
ST. FRANCOIS DE SALES AND MADAME DE
CHANTAL.--VISITATION.--QUIETISM.--RESULTS OF RELIGIOUS DIRECTION.
Saint François de Sales was very popular in France, and especially in
the provinces of Burgundy, where a fermentation of religious passions
had continued in full force ever since the days of the League. The
parliament of Dijon entreated him to come and preach there. He was
received by his friend André Frémiot, who from being a counsellor in
Parliament had become Archbishop of Bourges. He was the son of a
president much esteemed at Dijon, and the brother of Madame de Chantal,
consequently the great-uncle of Madame de Sévigné, who was the
grand-daughter of the latter.
The biographers of St. François and Madame de Chantal, in order to give
their first meeting an air of the romantic and marvellous, suppose, but
with little probability on their side, that they were unacquainted;
that one had scarcely heard the other spoken of; that they had seen
each other only in their dreams or visions. In Lent, when the Saint
preached at Dijon, he distinguished her among the crowd of ladies, and,
on descending from the pulpit, exclaimed, "Who is then this young
widow, who listened so attentively to the Word of God?" "My sister,"
replied the Archbishop, "the Baroness de Chantal."
She was then (1604) thirty-two years of age, and St. Francis
thirty-seven; consequently, she was born in 1572, the year of St.
Bartholomew. From her very infancy she was somewhat austere,
passionate, and violent. When only six years old, a Protestant
gentleman happening to give her some sugar-plums, she threw them into
the fire, saying, "Sir, see how the heretics will burn in hell, for not
believing what our Lord has said. If you gave the lie to the king, my
papa would have you hung; what must the punishment be then for having
so often contradicted our Lord!"
With all her devotion and passion, she had an eye to real advantages.
She had very ably conducted the household and fortune of her husband,
and those of her father and father-in-law were managed by her with the
same prudence. She took up her abode with the latter, who, otherwise,
had not left his wealth to her young children.
We read with a sort of enchantment the lively and charming letters by
which the correspondence begins between St. François de Sales, and her
whom he calls "his dear sister and daughter." Nothing can be more pure
and chaste, but at the same time, why should we not say so, nothing
more ardent. It is curious to observe the innocent art, the caresses,
the tender and ingenious flattery with which he envelopes these two
families, the Frémiots and the Chantals. First, the father, the good
old president Frémiot, who in his library begins to study religious
books and dreams of salvation; next, the brother, the ex-chancellor,
the Archbishop of Bourges; he writes expressly for him a little
treatise on the manner of preaching. He by no means neglects the
father-in-law, the rough old Baron de Chantal, an ancient relic of the
wars of the League, the object of the daughter-in-law's particular
adoration. But he succeeds especially in captivating the young
children; he shows his tenderness in a thousand ways, by a thousand
pious caresses, such as the heart of a woman, and that woman a mother,
had scarcely been able to suggest. He prays for them, and desires
these infants to remember him in their prayers.
Only one person in this household was difficult to be tamed, and this
was Madame de Chantal's confessor. It is here, in this struggle
between the Director and the Confessor, that we learn what address,
what skilful manoeuvres and stratagems, are to be found in the
resources of an ardent will. This confessor was a devout personage,
but of confined and shallow intellect, and small means. The Saint
desires to become his friend,--he submits to his superior wisdom the
advice he is about to give. He skilfully comforts Madame de Chantal,
who entertained some misgiving about her spiritual infidelity, and who,
finding herself moving on an agreeable sloping path, was fearful she
had left the rough road to salvation. He carefully entertains this
scruple in order the better to do away with it; to her inquiry whether
she ought to impart it to her confessor, he adroitly gives her to
understand that it may be dispensed with.
He declares then as a conqueror, who has nothing to fear, that far from
being, like the other, uneasy, jealous, and peevish, who required
implicit obedience, he on the contrary imposes no obligations, but
leaves her entirely free--no obligation, save that of Christian
friendship, whose tie is called by St. Paul "the bond of perfectness:"
all other ties are temporal, even that of obedience; but that of
charity increases with time: it is free from the scythe of
death,--"Love is strong as death," saith the Song of Solomon. He says
to her, on another occasion, with much ingenuousness and dignity: "I do
not add one grain to the truth; I speak before God, who knows my heart
and yours; every affection has a character that distinguishes it from
the others; that which I feel for you has a peculiar character, that
gives me infinite consolation, and to tell you all, is extremely
profitable to me. I did not wish to say so much, but one word produces
another, and then I know you will be careful." (Oct. 14, 1604.)
From this moment, having her constantly before his eyes, he associates
her not only with his religious thoughts, but, what astonishes us more,
with his very acts as a priest. It is generally before or after mass
that he writes to her; it is of her, of her children, that he is
thinking, says he, "_at the moment of the communion_." They do penance
the same days, take the communion at the same moment, though separate.
"_He offers her to God, when he offers Him His Son!_" (Nov. 1, 1605.)
This singular man, whose serenity was never for a moment affected by
such a union, was able very soon to perceive that the mind of Madame de
Chantal was far from being as tranquil as his own. Her character was
strong, and she felt deeply. The middle class of people, the citizens
and lawyers, from whom she was descended, were endowed from their birth
with a keener mind, and a greater spirit of sincerity and truth, than
the elegant, noble, but enfeebled families of the sixteenth century.
The last comers were fresh; you find them everywhere ardent and serious
in literature, warfare, and religion; they impart to the seventeenth
century the gravity and holiness of its character. Thus this woman,
though a saint, had nevertheless depths of unknown passion.
They had hardly been separated two months when she wrote to him that
she wanted to see him again. And indeed they met half-way in
Franche-Comte, in the celebrated pilgrimage of St. Claude. There she
was happy; there she poured out all her heart, and confessed to him for
the first time; making him the sweet engagement of entrusting to his
beloved hand the vow of obedience.
Six weeks had not passed away before she wrote to him that she wanted
to see him again. Now she is bewildered by passions and temptations;
all around her is darkness and doubts; she doubts even of her faith;
she has no longer the strength of exercising her will; she would wish
to fly--alas! she has no wings; and in the midst of these great but sad
feelings, this serious person seems rather childish; she would like him
to call her no longer "madam," but his sister, his daughter, as he did
before.
She uses in another place this sad expression,--"There is something
within me that has never been satisfied."--(Nov. 21, 1604.)
The conduct of St. François deserves our attention. This man, so
shrewd at other times, will now understand but half. Far from inducing
Madame de Chantal to adopt a religious life, which would have put her
into his power, he tries to strengthen her in her duties of mother and
daughter towards her children and the two old men who required also her
maternal care. He discourses with her of her duties, business, and
obligations. As to her doubts, she must neither reflect nor reason
about them. She must occasionally read good books; and he points out
to her, as such, some paltry mystic treatises. If the _she-ass_ should
kick (it is thus he designates the flesh and sensuality), he must quiet
her by some blows of discipline.
He appears at this time to have been very sensible that an intimacy
between two persons so united by affection was not without
inconvenience. He answers with prudence to the entreaties of Madame de
Chantal: "I am bound here hand and foot; and as for you, my dear
sister, does not the inconvenience of the last journey alarm you?"
This was written in October on the eve of a season rude enough among
the Alps and at Jura: "We shall see between this and Easter."
She went at this period to see him at the house of his mother; then,
finding herself all alone at Dijon, she fell very ill. Occupied with
the controversy of this time, he seemed to be neglecting her. He wrote
to her less and less; feeling, doubtless, the necessity of making all
haste in this rapid journey. All this year (1605) was passed, on her
part, in a violent struggle between temptations and doubts; at last she
scarcely knew how to make up her mind, whether to bury herself with the
Carmelites, or marry again.
A great religious movement was then taking place in France: this
movement, far from being spontaneous, was well devised, very
artificial, but, nevertheless, immense in its results. The rich and
powerful families of the Bar had, by their zeal and vanity, impelled it
forward. At the side of the oratory founded by Cardinal de Bérulle,
Madame Acarie, a woman singularly active and zealous, a saint engaged
in all the devout intrigues (known also as the blessed Mary of the
incarnation), established the Carmelites in France, and the Ursulines
in Paris. The impassioned austerity of Madame de Chantal urged her
towards the Carmelites; she consulted occasionally one of their
superiors, a doctor of the Sorbonne.[1] St. François de Sales
perceived the danger, and he no longer endeavoured to contend against
her. He accepted Madame de Chantal from that very moment. In a
charming letter he gives her, in the name of his mother, his young
sister to educate.
It seems that as long as she had this tender pledge she was in some
degree calmer; but it was soon taken from her. This child, so
cherished and so well taken care of, died in her arms at her own house.
She cannot disguise from the Saint, in the excess of her grief, that
she had asked God to let her rather die herself; she went so far as to
pray that she might rather lose one of her own children!
This took place in November (1607). It is three months after that we
find in the letters of the Saint the first idea of getting nearer to
him a person so well tried, and who seemed to him, moreover, to be an
instrument of the designs of God.
The extreme vivacity, I was almost saying the violence, with which
Madame de Chantal broke every tie in order to follow an impulse given
with so much reserve, proves too plainly all the passion of her ardent
nature. It was not an easy thing to leave there those two old men, her
father, her father-in-law, and her own son, who, they say, stretched
himself out on the threshold to prevent her passing. Good old Frémiot
was gained over less by his daughter than by the letters of the Saint,
which she used as auxiliaries. We have still the letter of
resignation, all blotted over with his tears, in which he gives his
consent: this resignation, moreover, seems not to have lasted long. He
died the following year.
She has now passed over the body of her son and that of her father; she
arrives at Annecy. What would have happened if the Saint had not found
fuel for this powerful flame that he had raised too high--higher than
he desired himself?
The day after the Pentecost, he calls her to him after mass: "Well, my
daughter," says he, "I have determined what I shall do with you." "And
I am resolved to obey," cried she, falling on her knees before him.
"You must enter St. Clair's." "I am quite ready," replied she. "No,
you are not strong enough; you must be a sister in the Hospital of
Beaune." "Whatever you please." "This is not quite what I
want--become a Carmelite." He tried her thus in several ways, and
found her ever obedient. "Well," said he, "nothing of the sort--God
calls you to the Visitation."
The Visitation had nothing of the austerity of the ancient orders. The
founder himself said it was "almost no religion at all." No
troublesome customs, no watchings, no fastings, but little duty, short
prayers, no seclusions (in the beginning); the sisters, while they
waited for the coming of the divine Bridegroom, went to visit Him in
the person of His poor and His sick, who are His living members.
Nothing was better calculated to calm the stormy passions within, than
this variety of active charity. Madame de Chantal, who had formerly
been a good mother, a prudent housekeeper, was happy in finding even in
mystic life employment for her economical and positive faculties in
devoting herself to the laborious detail of the establishment of a
great order, in travelling, according to the orders of her beloved
director, from one establishment to another. It was a twofold proof of
wisdom in the Saint: he made her useful, and kept her away.
With all this prudence, we must say that the happiness of working
together for the same end, of founding, and creating together,
strengthened still more the tie that was already so strong. It is
curious to see how they tighten the band in wishing to untie it. This
contradiction is affecting. At the very time he is prescribing to her
to detach herself from him who had been her nurse, he protests that
this nurse shall never fail her. The very day he lost his mother he
writes in these strong terms: "To you I speak, to you, I say, to whom I
have allotted my mother's place in my memorial of the mass, without
depriving you of the one you had, for I have not been able to do it, so
fast do you retain what you have in my heart; and so it is, _you
possess it first and last_."
I do not think a stronger expression ever escaped the heart on a more
solemn day. How burning must it have entered her heart, already
lacerated with passion! How can he be surprised after that, that she
should write to him, "Pray to God, that I survive you not!" Does he
not see, that at every instant he wounds, and heals only to renew the
pain?
The nuns of the Visitation, who published some of the letters of their
foundress, have prudently suppressed several, which, as they say
themselves, "are only fit to be kept under the lock and key of
charity." Those which are extant are, however, quite sufficient to
show the deep wound she bore with her to the grave.
The Visitation being supported neither by active charity, which was
soon prohibited, nor by the cultivation of the intellect, which had
given life to the Paraclet and other convents of the middle ages, had
no other choice, it would seem, than to adopt mystic asceticism. But
the moderation of the founder, in conformity with the lukewarmness of
the times, had excluded from his new institution the austerity of the
ancient orders--those cruel practices that annihilated the senses in
destroying the body itself; consequently, there was no activity, nor
study, nor austerity. In this vacuum two things were evident from the
very outset: on one side, narrow-mindedness, a taste for trivial
observances, and a fantastical system of devotion (Madame de Chantal
tatooed her bosom with the name of Jesus); on the other side, an
unreasonable and boundless attachment to the _Director_.
In everything relating to St. François de Sales the saint shows herself
very weak. After his death she raves, and allows herself to be guided
by dreams and visions. She fancies that she perceives his dear
presence, in the churches, amid celestial perfumes, perceptible to her
alone. She lays upon his tomb a little book composed of all he had
written or said upon the Visitation, praying "that if there was
anything in it contrary to his intentions, he would have the goodness
to efface it."
In 1631, ten years after the death of St. François de Sales, his tomb
was solemnly opened, and his body was found entire. "It was placed in
the sacristy of the monastery, where, about nine o'clock at night,
after the crowd had withdrawn, she led her community, and began praying
by the side of the body, 'in an ecstasy of love and humility.' As they
were forbidden to touch it, she did a signal act of obedience in
abstaining from kissing his hand. The following morning, having
obtained permission, she stooped down in order to place the saint's
hand upon her head; when, as if he had been alive, he drew her towards
him, and held her in a paternal and tender caress: she felt very
plainly this supernatural movement.... They still keep, as a double
relic, the veil she then wore."
Let others be at a loss to find out the real name of this worthy
sentiment, or let a false reserve prevent them; let them term it filial
piety, or fraternal affection; we, for our part, call it simply by a
name that we believe holy--we shall call it love. We are bound to
believe the saint himself, when he assures us that this sentiment
contributed powerfully to his spiritual progress. However, this is not
sufficient; we must see what effect it had upon Madame de Chantal.
All the doctrine to be found in the writings of St. François, among
much excellent practical advice, might be summed up in these words--to
_love_ and to _wait_.
_To wait_ for the visitation of the divine Bridegroom. Far from
advising action, or the desire of acting, he is so afraid of motion,
that he proscribes the word _union_ with God, which might imply a
tendency to unite; and desires that the word _unity_ may be used
instead, for it is necessary to remain in a loving indifference. "I
wish for very little," said he, "and that little I desire very little;
I have almost no desires; but if I were to be born again, I would have
none at all. If God came to me, I would go to Him also; but _if He
would not come to me, I would remain there, and not go to Him_."
This absence of every desire excluded even that of virtue. It is the
highest point which the saint seems to have reached a short time before
his death. He writes on the 10th of August, 1619, "Say you renounce
every virtue, desiring them only as you receive them gradually from
God, nor wishing to take any care for acquiring them, excepting in
proportion as His bounty shall employ you to do so, for His own good
pleasure." If self-will disappear at this point, what will take its
place? The will of God apparently.... Only, let us not forget that if
this miracle take place, it will have for its result a state of
unalterable peace and immutable strength. By this token, and by no
other, are we bound to recognise it.
Madame de Chantal herself tells us that it had just the contrary
effect. Though they have skilfully arranged her life, and mutilated
her letters, there are still enough of them to show in what a tempest
of passion she passed her days. Her whole life, which was long, and
taken up with real cares, in founding and managing religious
establishments, contributes in no way to calm her; time wears her out
and destroys her, without effecting any change in her inward martyrdom.
She finishes by this confession in her latter days: "All that I have
suffered during the whole course of my life are not to be compared to
the torments I now feel; I am reduced to such a degree that nothing can
satisfy me, nor give me any relief, except one word--Death!"
I did not need this sad testimony; I could have found it out without
her assistance. This exclusive cultivation of sensibility, whatever be
the virtues that ennoble it, ends infallibly in tormenting the soul,
and reducing it to a state of excruciating suffering. We cannot, with
impunity, allow our will, the very essence of our strength and reason,
the guardian of our tranquillity, to be absorbed by an all-devouring
love.
I have spoken elsewhere of the few but splendid examples exhibited
throughout the middle ages in the persons of learned nuns, who combined
science with piety. Their instructors seem to have entertained no
apprehension in developing both their reason and their will. But
science, it is said, fills the soul with uneasiness and curiosity, and
removes us from God. As if there were any science without Him; as if
the divine effulgence, reflected in science, had not a serene virtue, a
power diffusing tranquillity in the human heart, and imparting that
peace of eternal truths and imperishable laws, which will exist in all
their purity when worlds will be no more.
Whom do I blame in all this? Man? God forbid! I only censure the
method.
This method, which was termed Quietism when once it was reduced to a
system, and which, as we shall see presently, is, generally speaking,
that of the _devout direction_, is nothing else than the development of
our passiveness, our instinct of indolence; the result of which, in
course of time, is the paralysis of our will, the annihilation of the
essence of man's constitution.
St. François de Sales, was, it would seem, one of the most likely
persons to impart animation to this lifeless system. Nevertheless it
was he, the loyal and the pure, who introduced the system at this
period; it was he who in the seventeenth century pointed out the road
to _passiveness_.
We are, as yet, in the earliest dawn of the century, in all its morning
freshness, and invigorated by the breeze from the Alps. Yet see,
Madame de Chantal sickens and breathes with difficulty.... How will it
be towards evening?
The worthy saint, in a delightful letter, describes himself as being
one day on the lake of Geneva, "on a small raft," guided by Providence,
and perfectly obedient "to the pilot, who forbids him to stir, and very
glad at having only a board three fingers thick to support him." The
century is embarked with him, and, with this amiable guide, he sails
among breakers. These deep waters, as you will find out afterwards,
are the depths of Quietism; and if your sight is keen enough, you may
already perceive Molinos through this transparent abyss.
[1] See St. François, OEuvres, viii. 336, April, 1606; and Tabaraud,
Life of Bérulle, pp., 57, 58, 95, 141.
CHAPTER III.
LONELINESS OF WOMAN.--EASY DEVOTION.--WORLDLY THEOLOGY OF THE JESUITS
AND HOME.--WOMEN AND CHILDREN ADVANTAGEOUSLY MADE USE OF.--WAR OF
THIRTY YEARS, 1618-1648.--GALLANT DEVOTION.--DEVOUT NOVELS.--CASUISTS.
Hitherto we have spoken of a rare exception--the life of a woman full
of action, and doubly employed; as a saint and foundress, but
especially as a wife, the mother of a family, and prudent housewife.
The biographers of Madame de Chantal remark, as a singular thing, that
in both conditions, as wife and as widow, she conducted her own
household herself, directed her dependents, and administered the
property of her husband, her father, and her children.
This indeed was becoming rare. The taste for household and domestic
cares which we find everywhere in the sixteenth century, but especially
among citizens and the families of the Bar, grows much weaker in the
seventeenth, when every one desires to live in great style.
The absence of occupation is a taste of the period, proceeding also
from the state of things. All society is ever idle on the morrow of
religious wars, each local action has ceased, and central life, that is
to say, court life, has hardly begun. The nobility have finished their
adventures, and hung up their swords; the citizens have nothing further
to do, being no longer engaged in plots, seditions, or armed
processions. The _ennui_ of this want of occupation falls particularly
heavy upon woman; she is about to become at once unoccupied and lonely.
In the sixteenth century she was kept in communication with man by the
vital questions that were debated, even in her family, by common
dangers, fears, and hopes. But there was nothing of the sort in the
seventeenth century.
Add to this a more serious circumstance which is likely to increase in
the following ages; namely, that in every profession the spirit of
speciality and detail, which gradually absorbs man, has the effect of
insulating him in his family, and of making him, as it were, a mute
being for his wife and kindred. He no longer communicates to them his
daily thoughts; and they can understand nothing of the minute
intricacies and petty technical problems which occupy his mind.
But, at least, woman has still her children to console her? No; at the
time we are now speaking of, the mansion, silent and empty, is no
longer kept alive by the noise of children; instruction at home is now
an exception, and gives way daily to the fashion of collective
education. The son is brought up among the Jesuits, the daughter by
the Ursulines, or other nuns; the mother is left alone.
The mother and the son are henceforth separated! An immense evil, the
bud of a thousand misfortunes for families and society! I shall return
to this subject later.
Not only separated, but, by the effect of a totally opposite life, they
will be more and more opposed in mind, and less and less able to
understand each other. The son a little pedant in _us_, _i.e._ Latin,
the mother ignorant and worldly, have no longer a common language
between them.
A family thus disunited will be much more open to influence from
without. The mother and the child, once separated, are more easily
caught; though different means are employed. The child is tamed, and
broken in by an overwhelming mass of studies; he must write and write,
copy and copy again, at best translate and imitate. But the mother is
entrapped by means of her excessive loneliness and _ennui_. The lady
of the mansion is alone in her residence; her husband is hunting, or at
the court. The president's lady is alone in her hotel; the gentleman
starts every morning for the palace, and returns in the evening: a sad
abode is this hotel in the Marais or City, some overgrown grey house in
a dismal little street.
The lady in the sixteenth century beguiled her leisure hours by
singing, and often by poetry. In the seventeenth they forbad her all
worldly songs; as to religious songs, she abstains from them much more
easily. Sing a psalm! It would be to declare herself a Protestant!
What then remains for her? Gallant devotion--the conversation of the
director or the lover.
The sixteenth century, with its strong morality and fluctuation of
ideas, took, as it were, by fits and starts, flying leaps from
gallantry to devotion, then from God to the devil: it made sudden and
alternate changes from pleasure to penitence. But in the seventeenth
century people were more ingenious. Thanks to the progress of
equivocation, they are enabled to do both at once, and, by mingling the
language of love with that of devotion, speak of both at the same time.
If, without being seen, you could listen to the conversation in a
coquettish neighbourhood, you would not always be able to say whether
it is the lover or the director who is speaking.
To explain to one's self the singular success of the latter, we must
not forget the moral situation of the time, the uneasy and bewildered
state of every one's conscience on the morrow of a period of religious
wars, harassed by passions. In the dull tranquillity that succeeded,
in the nullity of the present, the past would rise up in glowing
colours, and the remembrance of it become the more importunate. Then
was awakened in many minds, especially among weak and impassioned
women, the terrible question of eternal bliss or woe.
The whole fortune of the Jesuits, and the confidence placed in them by
the nobles and fine ladies, arose from the clever answer they gave to
this question. It is, therefore, indispensable to say a few words
about it.
Who can save us? The theologian on the one hand, and the jurist or
philosopher on the other, give diametrically opposite answers.
The theologian, if he be really such, attributes the greatest share to
Christianity, and answers, "It is the grace of Christ, which serves us
as a substitute for justice[1], and saves whomsoever it will. A few
are predestined to be saved, the greater number to be damned."
The jurist answers, on the contrary, that we are punished or rewarded
according to the good or bad use that we freely make of our will; that
we are paid according to our works, according to justice. This is the
eternal debate between the jurist and the theologian, between justice
and predestination.[1]
In order to have a clearer idea of the opposition of these two
principles, let us imagine a mountain with two declivities, its summit
terminating in a very narrow ridge, with the edge as sharp as a razor.
On one side is predestination that damns, on the other, justice that
strikes--two terrible monsters. Man is on the top, with one foot on
one slope and one on the other, ever on the point of slipping.
And when was the fear of sliding stronger than after those great crimes
of the sixteenth century, when Man was top-heavy, and lost his balance?
We know the religious horror of Charles IX. after the massacre of Saint
Bartholomew: he died for want of a Jesuit confessor. John III., King
of Sweden, who killed his brother, did not die of remorse: his wife
took care to send for the good Father Possevino, who purified him and
made him a Catholic.
The means employed by the Jesuits to calm consciences fill us, at first
sight, with surprise. They adopted both skilfully and carefully; still
they did adopt the principle of the jurists, namely, that man is saved
or lost by his works, by the use he makes of his free will.
A liberal doctrine, yet severe, it would seem: you are free,
consequently responsible, and punishable. You sin, and you expiate.
The jurisconsult, who is in earnest, requires here a serious
expiation--the personal chastisement of the guilty party. "He must
forfeit his head," says he: "the law will cure him of his malady of
iniquity by the sword."
We should fare better by going to the Jesuit, and get off much cheaper.
The expiation he requires is not so terrible. He will often prove that
there is no necessity for any expiation. The fault, properly
interpreted, will turn out, perhaps, to be a merit. At the worst, if
found to be a fault, it may be washed out by good works; now, the very
best work of all is to devote one's self to the Jesuits, and espouse
the Ultramontane interest.
Do you perceive all the skill of the Jesuits in this manoeuvre of
theirs? On the one hand, the doctrine of liberty and justice, with
which the middle ages had reproached the jurisconsults as pagan and
irreconcilable with Christianity, is now adopted by the Jesuits, who
show themselves to the world as the friends and champions of free will.
On the other hand, as this free will brings on the sinner
responsibility and justice according to his works, he finds himself
very much embarrassed with it. The Jesuit comes very seasonably to his
relief; he takes upon himself the task of _directing_ this inconvenient
liberty, and reduces works to the capital one of serving Rome. So that
moral liberty, professed in theory, will turn practically to the profit
of authority.
A double lie. These people who give themselves the title of Jesuits,
or men of Jesus, teach that man is saved less by Jesus than by himself,
by his free will. Are, then, these men philosophers, and friends of
liberty? Quite the contrary; they are at once the most cruel enemies
of philosophy and liberty.
That is to say, with the word free will they juggle away Jesus; and
only retain the word Jesus to cheat us of the liberty which they set
before us.
The thing being thus simplified on both sides, a sort of tacit bargain
was made between Rome, the Jesuits, and the world.
Rome gave up _Christianity_, the principle which forms its basis
(salvation by Christ). Having been called upon to choose between this
doctrine and the contrary one, she durst not decide.
The Jesuits gave up _morality_ after religion; reducing the moral
merits by which man may earn his salvation to only one, the _Political_
merit of which we have spoken, that of serving Rome.
What must the world give up in its turn?
The world (by far the most worldly part of the world, woman) will have
to give up her best possessions, her family and her domestic hearth.
Eve once more betrays Adam. Woman deceives man in her husband and son.
Thus every one sold his God. Rome bartered away religion, and woman
domestic piety.
The weak minds of women after the great corruption of the sixteenth
century, spoiled beyond all remedy, full of passion, fear, and wicked
desires mingled with remorse, seized greedily the means of sinning
conscientiously, of expiating without either amendment, amelioration,
or return towards God. They thought themselves happy to receive at the
Confessional, by way of penance, some little political commission, or
the management of some intrigue. They transferred to this singular
manner of expiating their faults the very violence of the guilty
passions, for which the atonement was to be made; and in order to
remain sinful, they were often obliged to commit crimes.[2]
The passion of woman, inconstant in everything else, was in this case
sustained by the vigorous obstinacy of the mysterious and invisible
hand that urged her forward. Under this impulse, at once gentle and
strong, ardent and persevering, firm as iron and as dissolving as fire,
characters and even interests at length gave way.
Some examples will help us to understand it the better. In France, old
Lesdiguières was politically, much interested in remaining a
Protestant; as such, he was the head man of the party. The king rather
than the governor of Dauphiné, he assisted the Swiss, and protected the
populations of Vaud and Romand against the house of Savoy. But the old
man's daughter was gained over by Father Cotton. She set to work upon
her father with patience and address, and succeeded in inducing him to
quit his high position for an empty title, and change his religion for
the title of Constable.
In Germany the character of Ferdinand I., his interest, and the part he
had to play, would have induced him to remain moderate, and not become
the vassal of his nephew, Philip II. With violence and fanaticism he
had no choice but to accept a secondary place. The emperor's
daughters, however, intrigued so well that the house of Austria became
united by marriage to the houses of Lorraine and Bavaria. The children
of these families being educated by the Jesuits, the latter repaired in
Germany the broken thread of the destinies of the Guises, and had even
better fortune than the Guises themselves; for they made for their own
use certain blind instruments, agents in diplomacy and tactics--skilful
workmen certainly, but still mere workmen. I speak of that hardy and
devout generation, of Ferdinand II. of Austria, of Tilly, and
Maximilian of Bavaria, those conscientious executors of the great works
of Rome, who, under the direction of their teachers, carried on for so
long a time, throughout Europe, a warfare which was at once barbarous
and skilful, merciless and methodical. The Jesuits launched them into
it, and then carefully watched over them; and whenever Tilly on his
charger was seen dashing over the smoking ruins of cities, or the
battle-field covered with the slain, the Jesuit, trotting on his mule,
was not far off.
This vile war, the most loathsome in history, appears the more
horrible, by the almost total absence of free inspiration and
spontaneous impulse. It was, from its very beginning, both artificial
and mechanical[3]--like a war of machines or phantoms. These strange
beings, created only to fight, march with a look as void of martial
ardour, as their heart is of affection. How could they be reasoned
with? What language could be used towards them? What pity could be
expected from them? In our wars of religion, in those of the
Revolution they were men who fought; each died for the sake of his
idea, and, when he fell on the battle-field, he shrouded himself in his
faith. Whereas the partisans of the Thirty Years' War have no
individual life--no idea of their own; their very breath is but the
inspiration of the evil genius who urges them on. These automatons,
who grow blinder every day, are not the less obstinate and bloody. No
history would lead us to understand this abominable phenomenon, if
there did not remain some delineation of them in the hellish pictures
of that diabolical, _damned_ Salvator Rosa.[4]
Behold, then, this fruit of mildness, benignity, and paternity; see
how, after having by indulgence and connivance exterminated morality,
seized on the family by surprise, fascinated the mother and conquered
the child, and by the devil's own art raised the _man-machine_, they
are found to have created a monster, whose whole idea, life, and action
was _murder_, nothing more.
Wise politicians, amiable men, good fathers, who with so much mildness
have skilfully arranged from afar the Thirty Years' War, seducing
Aquaviva, you learned Canisius, and you good Possevino, the friend of
St. François de Sales, who will not admire the flexibility of your
genius? At the very time you were organising the terrible intrigue of
this second and prolonged St. Bartholomew, you were mildly discussing
with the good saint the difference that ought to be observed between
"those who died in love, and those who died for love."
What by-path led from these mild theories to such atrocious results?
How did it happen that souls enervated by gallant devotion and devout
gallantry, and spoiled by the daily facilities of an obliging and
accommodating casuistry, allowed themselves to be taken asleep in the
meshes of political intrigue? It would be a long story. In order to
set about it one must wade through their nauseous literature; but one
sickens at the sight of their filthy trash.
One word, however, for it is important. Prepared as the world was,
both by bad morals and bad taste, for the miserable productions with
which the Jesuits inundated it, all this insipid flood would have
subsided without leaving any traces behind, had they not mingled with
it a part of the pure original stream, which had already delighted the
human heart. The charm of St. François de Sales, his sublime spiritual
union with Madame de Chantal, the holy and mild seducing influence
which he had exercised over women and children, served indirectly, but
very efficaciously, the purpose of this great religious intrigue.
With small morality and cheap absolution, the Jesuits could very easily
corrupt consciences, but not tranquillise them. They could play, with
more or less skill, upon that rich instrument Falsehood, which their
institution gave them, airs of science, art, literature, and theology.
But could they, with all this false fingering, produce one true
note?--Not one!
But this true and gentle note was precisely that which was sounded for
them by St. François. They had only to play after his method to make
the false appear a little less discordant. The amiable qualities of
his writings, nay, their pleasing errors, were skilfully made the most
of. His taste for the minute and humble, which made him bestow a
partial regard upon the lesser beings of the creation, such as little
children, lambs, birds, and bees, became a precedent among the Jesuits
for whatever is finical and narrow-minded, for a meanness of style and
littleness of heart. The bold but innocent language of an angel, pure
as light itself, who incessantly points out God in his sweetest
revelation, woman suckling, and the divine mysteries of love,
emboldened his imitators to make the most perilous equivocations, and
was the occasion of their carrying their ambiguous terms to such a
pitch, that the line of demarcation between gallantry and devotion, the
lover and the spiritual father, became at length invisible.
The friend of St. François de Sales, good bishop Camus, with all his
little romances, contributed much to this. There was nothing now but
pious sheep-folds, devout Astreas, and ecclesiastical Amyntases.
Conversion sanctifies everything in these novels; I am aware of it.
The lovers at the end of the story enter a convent or seminary, but
they arrive there by a long roundabout road, which enables them to
dream by the way.
A taste for the romantic and insipid, the benignant and paternal style,
thus gained ground rapidly. The event showed that the innocent had
worked for the benefit of the cunning. A St. François and a Camus
prepared the way for Father Douillet.
The essential point for the Jesuits was to reduce and to lessen, to
make minds weak and false, to make the little very little, and turn the
simple into idiots: a mind nourished with trifles and amused with toys
must be easy to govern. Emblems, rebuses, and puns, the delight of the
Jesuits, were very fit for that purpose. Among the class of silly
emblems, few books can vie with the _Imago primi Soeculi Societatis
Jesu_.
All this paltry nonsense succeeded admirably with women who had no sort
of occupation, and whose minds had been for a long time corrupted by an
unintellectual gallantry. It has been proved by experience, in every
age, that to please the sex only two things are requisite; first, to
amuse them, to participate in their taste for everything that is
trifling, romantic, and false; secondly, to flatter them, and spoil
them in their weaknesses, by making one's self weaker, more effeminate,
and womanish than they.
This was the line of conduct laid down for all.--How is it that the
lover gets an advantage over the husband? Generally speaking, it is
less by his passion, than by his assiduity and complaisance, and by
flattering woman's fancy. The director will make use of the very same
means; he will flatter, and so much the more successfully, as some
degree of austerity at least was expected from his character and
profession. But what is to prevent another from flattering still more?
We have just now seen an instance (a respectable one, it is true) of
these spiritual infidelities.
In changing continually one confessor for another, merely on account of
his being more gentle and indulgent than the former, we run the risk of
falling very low in morality. To get the upper hand over so many
accommodating directors, an entirely new standard of effeminacy and
baseness is required. The new comer must entirely change the
characters; and instead of being the judge, as formerly, at the bar of
penitence, he must be a suppliant; justice will be obliged to plead
before the sinner, and the divine man becomes the penitent!
The Jesuits, who by these means supplanted so many directors, bear
witness, that in this sort of opposition they had no one to fear. They
knew well enough, that no other would be found better qualified than a
Jesuit for easy indulgence, disguised connivance, and subtilty to
overreach the Deity. Father Cotton was so little afraid of his
penitents leaving him, that, on the contrary, he used occasionally to
advise them to go to the other confessors: "Go," said he, "go and try
them; you will return to me!"
Only imagine this general emulation among confessors, directors, and
consulting casuists, to justify everything, to find every day some
adroit means of carrying indulgence still further, of declaring
innocent some new case, that had hitherto been supposed guilty. The
result of this manner of waging war against sin, emulously carried by
so many learned men, was its gradual and universal disappearance from
the common life of man; sin could no longer find a haven of refuge, and
one might reasonably suppose that in a few years it would cease to
exist in the world.
The great book of "Provinciales," with all the artifice of method,
omits one thing, which we regret. In showing us the unanimity of the
casuists, the author presents them, as it were, on the same line, and
as contemporaries. It would have been more instructive to have dated
them, and given to each his appointed period; and thus, according to
his merits in the progressive development of casuistry, to show how
they severally advanced towards perfection, outbidding, surpassing, and
eclipsing one another.
In so great a rivalry, it was necessary to make every effort, and set
all their wits to work. The penitent having the option, might become
difficult. He wanted his absolution at a cheaper rate every day; and
they who would not lower their price lost their customers. It was
business that required a clever man to find out, in so great a
relaxation, by what means further indulgence might be given. A fine,
elastic, and indulgent science, that, instead of imposing rules,
adapted itself to proportions, narrowing or widening, and taking
measurement, as the case might be. Every progress of this kind, being
carefully noted down served as a starting-post to go further. In
countries that have once become aguish, fever produces fever; the sick
inhabitant neglecting the precaution for preserving health, filth
accumulates on filth, the waters form marshes, and the miasma grows
stronger; a close, heavy, and noxious atmosphere oppresses the country.
The people crawl or lie down. Do not speak to them of attempting any
remedy; they are accustomed to the fever; they have had it on and off
ever since their birth, and their forefathers had it. Why try
remedies? The country has been in the same state from time immemorial;
it would be almost a pity, according to these authorities, to make a
change.
[1] The Apostle puts the matter thus:--Therefore by the deeds of the
law there shall no flesh be justified in His sight: for by the law is
the knowledge of sin. But now the righteousness of God without the law
is manifested, being witnessed by the law and the prophets; even the
righteousness of God which is by faith of Jesus Christ unto all and
upon all them that believe: for there is no difference: for all have
sinned, and come short of the glory of God: being justified freely by
His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus: whom God hath
set forth to be a propitiation through faith in His blood, to declare
His righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the
forbearance of God; to declare, I say, at this time His righteousness:
that He might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in
Jesus.--Rom. iii. 20-26.
[2] See in Léger, the vast system of espionage, intrigue, and secret
persecution, that the first ladies of Piedmont and France had
organised, under the direction of the Jesuits.
[3] Excepting the electrical moment of Gustavus-Adolphus.
[4] The term is a harsh one, and I am sorry for it. If this great
artist paints war so cruelly, it is doubtless because he had more
feeling than any of his contemporaries, and appreciates more keenly the
horror of this terrible epoch.
CHAPTER IV.
CONVENTS.--NEIGHBOURHOOD OF CONVENTS.--CONVENTS IN THE SEVENTEENTH
CENTURY.--CONTRAST WITH THE MIDDLE AGE.--THE DIRECTOR.--DISPUTE ABOUT
THE DIRECTION OF THE NUNS.--THE JESUITS TRIUMPH THROUGH CALUMNY.
An ingenuous and intellectual German lady told me one day that, when
she came with her husband to Paris for the first time, they had
wandered about in a grand but very dull quarter of the town, where they
made an infinite number of turns and windings without being able to
find their way. They had entered by a public garden, and found at last
another public garden that brought them out again at the quay. I saw
that she meant the learned and pious neighbourhood which contains so
many convents and colleges, and reaches from the Luxembourg to the
"Jardin des Plantes."
"I saw," said this lady, "whole streets with gardens, surrounded with
high walls, that reminded me of the deserted districts of Rome, where
the _malaria_ prevails, with this difference, that these were not
deserted, but, as it were, mysteriously inhabited, shut up,
mistrustful, and inhospitable. Other streets, exceedingly dark, were
in a manner buried between two rows of lofty grey houses with no front
aspect, and which showed, as it were in derision, their walled-up
windows, or their rivetted lattices, turned upside down, by which one
may see--nothing. We asked our way several times, and it was often
pointed out to us; but somehow or other, after having gone up and down
and up again, we ever found ourselves at the same point. Our _ennui_
and fatigue increased. We invincibly and fatally met with the same
dull streets, and the same dismal houses sullenly shut, which seemed to
look at us with an evil eye. Exhausted at last, and seeing no end to
the puzzle, oppressed more and more by a certain dispiriting influence
that seemed to ooze from these walls, I sat down upon a stone and began
to weep."
A dispiriting lassitude does indeed seize and oppress our hearts at the
very sight of these disagreeable-looking houses; the most cheerful are
the hospitals. Having been for the most part built or rebuilt in those
times of solemn dulness, the reigns of Louis XIII. and Louis XIV.,
there is nothing about them to remind us of the lovely art of the
_renaissance_. The latest memento of that art is the Florentine front
of the Luxembourg Palace. All those houses that were built at a later
period, even those which affect a certain severe luxury (the Sorbonne,
for example), are occasionally great, but never grand. With their
lofty pointed roofs, and stiff straight lines, they have always a dry,
dull, and monotonous appearance, a _priestly_ or _old-maidenish_ look.
In this they scarcely belie themselves, the greater part of them having
been built to accommodate the numberless females belonging to the
nobility and upper class of citizens, who, in order to enrich a son,
condemned their unfortunate daughters to a sad, but decent death.
The monuments of the middle ages have a melancholy, but not a
dispiriting look; we feel, on looking at them, the vigour and sincerity
of the sentiment that inspired their builders. They are not, generally
speaking, official monuments, but living works of the people, the
offspring of their faith. But these, on the contrary, are nothing else
than the creation of a class,--that class of newly-created nobles that
swarmed into life in the seventeenth century by subserviency, the
ante-chamber, and ministerial offices. They are hospitals opened for
the daughters of these families. Their great number might almost
deceive us as to the strength and extent of the religious re-action of
that time. Look at them well, and tell me, I pray you, whether you can
discern the least trace about them of the ascetic character--are they
religious houses, hospitals, barracks, or colleges? There is nothing
to prove what they are. They would be perfectly fit for any civil
purpose. They have but one character, but it is a very decided one:
serious uniformity, decent mediocrity, and _ennui_.--It is _ennui_
itself, personified in an architectural form--a palpable, tangible, and
visible _ennui_.
The reason of these houses being indefinitely multiplied is, that the
austerity of the ancient rules having been then much modified, parents
had less hesitation in making their daughters take the veil; for it was
no longer burying them alive. The parlours were saloons frequented by
crowds, under the pretext of being edified. Fine ladies came there to
confide their secrets, filling the minds of the nuns with intrigues and
vexations, and troubling them with useless regrets.
These worldly cares caused the interior of the convents to appear to
them still more dismal; for there they had nothing but trifling insipid
ceremonies, a sort of modified austerity, and an idle and empty routine
of monotonous life.
Monastic life was quite a different thing in the middle ages; it was
much more serious. There were then in the convents both more training
for death, and a more active life. The system was, generally speaking,
based upon two principles, which were sincerely and strictly adhered
to: the destruction of the body, and the vivification of the soul. To
war against the body they employed an exterminating fasting, excessive
vigils, and frequent bleeding. For the development of the soul, the
monks and nuns were made to read, transcribe, and sing. Up to the
eleventh century they understood what they sang, as there was but
little difference between Latin and the vulgar tongues of that period.
The service had then a dramatic character, which sustained and
constantly captivated the attention. Many things that have been
reduced to simple words, were then expressed in gestures and
pantomimes; what is now spoken was then _acted_. When they inflicted
upon worship that serious, sober, and wearisome character that it still
wears, the nuns were still allowed, as an indemnification, pious
reading, legends, the lives of saints, and other books that had been
translated. All these consolations were taken from them in the
sixteenth century; the discovery was made, that it was dangerous to
give them too great a taste for reading. In the seventeenth, even
singing appeared to be an object of suspicion to many confessors; they
were afraid the nuns might grow tender in singing the praises of God.[1]
But what did they give them as a substitute? What did they get in
return for all those services which they no longer understood, for
their reading and singing that were now denied them, and for so many
other comforts, of which they were successively deprived?
Was it an inanimate object? No, it was a man; let us speak out
plainly, the _director_. The director was a novelty, hardly known to
the middle ages, contented with the confessor.
Yes, a man is to inherit all this vast vacant place: his conversation
and teaching are to fill up the void. Prayers, reading, if it be
permitted, everything, will be done according to his direction and by
him. God, whom they imbibed in their books, or in their sight, even
God is henceforward dispensed to them by this man--measured out to them
day by day according to the standard of his heart.
Ideas come crowding here--but they must wait; we will examine them
afterwards. Now they would only interrupt the thread of our historical
deduction.
At the first outbreak of religious re-action, the nuns were generally
governed by the friars of their order. The Bernardin nuns were
directed by the Bernardin friars, the Carmelite nuns by the Carmelite
friars, and the nuns of St. Elizabeth by the Picpus friars. The
Capuchin nuns were not only confessed by their friars, but were fed at
their expense, and by the produce of their begging.[2]
The monks did not long preserve this exclusive possession. For more
than a quarter of a century, priests, monks, and friars of every order,
carried on a furious war against one another on this question. This
mysterious empire of shut-up and dependent women, over whom unlimited
sway may be held, was, not without reason, the common aim of the
ambition of all. Such houses, apparently quiet and strangers to the
world, nevertheless are always _grand centres of action_. Here was an
immense power for the orders that should get possession of it; and for
individuals, whether priests or friars, it was (let them confess it, or
not) an affair of passion.
What I say here, I say of the purest and most austere, who are often
the most tender. The honourable attachment of Cardinal Bérulle for the
Carmelite nuns, whom he had brought here, was know to everybody. He
had lodged them near his house; he visited them every hour of the day,
and even in the evening. The Jesuits said _at night_. It was to them
he went when he was ill, in order to get better. When Paris was
infested by a plague, he said he would not leave it, "on account of his
nuns."
The Oratorians and the Jesuits, naturally enemies and adversaries,
joined together at first in a common cause to remove the Carmelite
friars from the direction of these nuns; but no sooner had they
succeeded, than they began to dispute with each other.
The austere order of the Carmelites, which spread but little in France,
obtained its importance as the _beau idéal_ of penitence, a sort of
religious poetry. The enthusiastic spirit of Saint Theresa still
animated them. There it was that the most violent converts came to
seek refuge; and there it was, also, that those whose wounds were too
deep, and who, like Madame de la Vallière, sought death as their last
resource, came to die.
But the two great institutions of this age, those which expressed its
spirit and had an immense development, were the Visitandines and the
Ursulines. The former had, in the reign of Louis XIV., about a hundred
and fifty monasteries, and the latter from three to four hundred.
The Visitandines were, as is well known, the most gentle of these
orders: they awaited the coming of their divine Bridegroom in a state
of inaction; and their sluggish life was well calculated to make them
visionaries. We know the astonishing success of Marie Alocoque, and
how it was turned to account by the Jesuits.
The Ursulines, a more useful body, devoted themselves to education. In
the three hundred and fifty convents which belonged to them in this
century, they educated, at the smallest computation, thirty-five
thousand young girls. This vast establishment for education, directed
by skilful hands, might, indeed, become a political engine of enormous
power.
The Ursulines and the Visitandines were governed by bishops, who
appointed their confessors. St. François de Sales, so excellent a
friend to the Jesuits and friars in general, had showed himself
distrustful of them in the subject that was dearest to his heart, that
of the Visitation:--"My opinion is (says he) that these good girls do
not know what they want, if they wish to submit themselves to the
superiority of the friars, who, indeed, are excellent servants of God;
but it always goes hard for girls to be governed by the orders, _who
are accustomed to take from them the holy liberty of the mind_."[3]
It is but too easy to perceive how the orders of women servilely
reproduced the minds of the men who directed them. Thus, the devotion
of those who were governed by monks was characterised by every species
of caprice, eccentricity, and violence; whilst they who were under the
direction of secular priests, such as the Oratorians and the
Doctrinaires, show some faint traces of reason, together with a sort of
narrow-minded, common-place, and unproductive wisdom.
The nuns, who received from the bishops their ordinary confessors,
chose for themselves an extraordinary one besides, who, as being
extraordinary, did not fail to supplant and annul the former: the
latter was, in most cases, a Jesuit. Thus the new orders of the
Ursulines and Visitandines, created by priests, who had endeavoured to
keep friars out of them, fell, nevertheless, under the influence of the
latter: the priests sowed, but the Jesuits reaped the harvest.
Nothing did greater service to the cause of the Jesuits than their
constantly repeating that their austere founder had expressly forbidden
them ever to govern the convents of women. This was true, as applied
to convents generally, but false as regarded nuns in particular, and
their special direction. They did not, indeed, govern them
_collectively_, but they directed them _individually_.
The Jesuit was not pestered with the daily detail of spiritual
management, or the small fry of trifling faults. He did not fatigue;
he only interfered at the right time; he was particularly useful in
dispensing the nuns from telling the confessor what they wished to
conceal. The latter became, by degrees, a sort of husband, whom they
might disregard.
If he happened, indeed, to have any firmness in his composition, or to
be able to exercise any influence, the others worked hard to get rid of
him by force of calumny. We may form an opinion of the audacity of the
Jesuits in this particular, since they did not fear to attack the
Cardinal de Bérulle himself, notwithstanding his power.[4] One of his
relatives, living with the Carmelites, having become pregnant, they
boldly accused him of the crime, though he had never set his foot
within the convent. Finding no one to believe them, and seeing they
would gain nothing by attacking him on the score of morality, they
joined in a general outcry against his books. "They contained the
hidden poison of a dangerous mysticism: the cardinal was too tender,
too indulgent, and too weak, both as a theologian and _a director_."
Astounding impudence! when everybody knew and saw what sort of
directors they were themselves!
This, however, had, in time, the desired effect, if not against
Bérulle, at least against the Oratory, who became disgusted with, and
afraid of, the direction of the nuns, and at last abandoned it.
This is a remarkable example of the all-powerful effects of _Calumny_,
when organised on a grand scale by a numerous body, vented by them, and
continually sung in chorus. A band of thirty thousand men repeating
the same thing every day throughout the Christian world! Who could
resist that? This is the very essence of Jesuitical art, in which they
are unrivalled. At the very creation of their order, a sentence was
applied to them, similar to those well-known verses in which Virgil
speaks of the Romans:--
"Excudent alii spirantia mollius æra," &c., &c.
Others shall animate brass, or give life to marble; the Romans shall
excel in other arts. "Remember, Jesuit, thy art is calumny."
[1] Châteaubriand, Vie de Rancé, pp. 227-229.
[2] See Héliot; and, for Paris especially, Félibien.
[3] OEuvres, vol. xi. p. 120 (ed. 3318.)
[4] Tabaraud, Life of Bérulle, vol. i. passim.
CHAPTER V.
REACTION OF MORALITY.--ARNAUD, 1643.--PASCAL, 1657.--BASENESS OF THE
JESUITS.--HOW THEY GET HOLD OF THE KING AND THE POPE, AND IMPOSE
SILENCE UPON THEIR ENEMIES.--DISCOURAGEMENT OF THE JESUITS.--THEIR
CORRUPTION.--THEY PROTECT THE FIRST QUIETISTS.--IMMORALITY OF
QUIETISM.--DESMARETS DE SAINT SORLIN.--MORIN BURNT, 1663.
Morality was weakened, but not quite extinct. Though undermined by the
casuists, Jesuitism, and by the intrigues of the clergy, it was saved
by the laity. The age presents us this contrast. The priests, even
the best of them, the Cardinal de Bérulle for instance, rush into the
world, and into politics; while illustrious persons among the laity,
such as Descartes and Poussin, retire to seek solitude. The
philosophers turn monks, and the saints become men of business.
Each set of people will acquire what it desires in this century. One
party will have power; they will succeed in obtaining the banishment of
the Protestants, the proscription of the Jansenists, and the submission
of the Galileans to the pope. Others will have science; Descartes and
Galileo give the movements; Leibnitz and Newton furnish the harmony.
That is to say, the Church will triumph in temporal affairs, and the
laity will obtain the spiritual power.
From the desert where our great lay-monks then took refuge a purer
breeze begins to blow. We feel that a new age now commences, modern
age, the age of work, following that of disputes. No more dreams, no
more school-divinity. We must now begin to work in earnest, early and
before daylight. It is rather cold, but no matter; it is the
refreshing coolness of the dawn, as after those beautiful nights in the
North, where a young queen of twenty goes to visit Descartes, at four
in the morning, to learn the application of algebra to geometry.
This serious and exalted spirit, which revived philosophy and modified
literature, had necessarily some influence on theology. It found a
resting point, though a very minute and still imperceptible one, in the
assembly of the friends of Port-Royal; it added grandeur to their
austerity, morality asserted its own claims, and religion awoke to a
sense of her danger.
Everything was going on prosperously for the Jesuits; as confessors of
kings, grandees, and fine ladies, they saw their morality everywhere in
full bloom; when in this serene atmosphere, the lightning flashes and
the thunderbolt falls. I speak of Arnaud's book, entitled "Frequent
Communion" (1643), so unexpected and so overwhelming.
Not only the Jesuits and Jesuitism were struck by the blow, but, in
general, all that portion of Christendom, which was enervated by an
easy indulgence. Christianity appeared again austere and grave; the
world again saw with awe the pale face of its crucified Saviour. He
came to say again, in the name of grace, what natural reason equally
asserts, "There is no real expiation without repentance." What became
of all their petty arts of evasion in presence of this severe truth?
What became of their worldly devotions and romantic piety, together
with all the Philotheas, Erotheas, and their imitations? The contrast
appeared odious.
Other writers have said, and will say, all this much better. I am not
writing here the history of Jansenism. The theological question is now
become obsolete. The moral question still survives, and history owes
it one word, for it cannot remain indifferent between the honest and
the dishonest. Whether the Jansenist did or did not exaggerate the
doctrine of grace, we must still call this party, as it deserves to be,
in this grand struggle, the party of virtue.
Arnaud and Pascal are so far from having gone too far against their
adversaries, that one might easily show they stopped short of the mark,
of their own accord, that they did not wish to make use of all their
arms, and were afraid (in attacking, on certain delicate points, the
Jesuitical direction) of doing harm to direction in general, and to
confession.
Ferrier, the Jesuit, avows that, after the terrible blow inflicted by
the _Lettres Provinciales_, the Jesuits were crushed, and that they
fell into derision and contempt. A multitude of bishops condemned
them, and not one stood up in their defence.
One of the means they employed to mend their case was, to say boldly
that the opinions with which they were reproached were not those of the
Society, but of a few individuals. They were answered that, as all
their books were examined by the chief, they belonged thus to the whole
body. No matter: to amuse the simple, they got a few of their order to
write against their own doctrine. A Spanish Jesuit wrote against
Ultramontanism. Another, the Father Gonzales, wrote a book against the
casuists: he was very useful to them. When, in course of time, Rome
was at last ashamed of their doctrine, and disavowed them, they put
Gonzales forward, printed his book, and made him their general. Even
in our own time, it is this book and this name that they oppose to us.
Thus they have an answer for everything. Should you like _indulgence_,
take Escobar; should you prefer _severity_, take Gonzales.
Let us now see what was the result of this general contempt into which
they fell after the _Provinciales_. Public conscience having received
such good warning, every one apparently will hasten to shun them.
Their confession will be avoided and their colleges deserted. You
think so? Then you are much mistaken.
They are too necessary to the corruption of the age. How could the
king, with his two-fold adultery posted up in the face of all Europe,
make his devotions without them? Fathers Ferrier, Canard, and La
Chaise, will remain with him till the end, like pieces of furniture
that are too convenient to be dispensed with.
But does not Rome perceive how much she is compromised by such allies?
It is not incumbent on her to separate from them?
Feeble attempts were not wanting. A pope condemned the apology of the
casuists that the Jesuits had risked. The energy of Rome went no
further: if any remained, it was employed against the enemies of the
Jesuits. The latter got the upper hand; they had succeeded, in the
beginning of the century, in getting the head of the Church to impose
silence on the doctrine of grace, as defended by the Dominicans; and
they silenced it again, in the middle of the century, when it
recommenced speaking by the mouth of the Jansenists.
The Jesuits showed their gratitude to Rome, for imposing this silence a
second time, by stretching still farther the infallibility of the pope.
They did not fear to build up still higher this falling Tower of Babel;
they increased it by two stories: first, they asserted the
infallibility of the pope _in matters of faith_. Secondly, when the
danger had become imminent, they took a bold and foolish step; but it
secured to them the friendship of Rome; they made the pope do in his
decrepitude what he had never dared to do in his power--declare himself
infallible _in matters of fact_.
And this at the very moment that Rome was obliged to confess that she
was wrong about the greatest facts of nature and history. Not to speak
of the New World, which she was obliged to admit, after having denied
it, she condemns Galileo, and then she submits to his system, adopts
and teaches it: the penance that she imposed on him for one day has,
since Galileo, been inflicted upon herself for two hundred years.
Here is another fact, still graver in one sense:--
The fundamental right of popes, the title of their power, those famous
Decrees which they quoted and defended, as long as criticism, unaided
by the art of printing, failed to enlighten mankind;--well! the pope is
obliged to confess that these very Decrees are a tissue of lies and
imposture.[1]
What? when popery has disclaimed its own word, and given itself the lie
on the fundamental fact, upon which its own right depends, is it then
that the Jesuits claim for her infallibility in matters of fact?
The Jesuits have been the tempters and corrupters of popes as well as
of kings. They caught kings by their _concupiscence_, and popes by
their _pride_.
It is a laughable, but touching sight to see this poor little Jansenist
party, then so great in genius and heart, resolute in making an appeal
to the justice of Rome, and remaining on their knees before this
mercenary judge!
The Jesuits were not so blind but that they saw that popery, foolishly
propped up by them in theology, was miserably losing ground in the
political world. In the beginning of the 17th century the pope was
still powerful; he whipped Henry IV. in the person of the Cardinal
d'Ossat. But in the middle of that century, after all the great
efforts of the Thirty Years' War, the pope was not even consulted in
the Treaty of Westphalia; and in that of the Pyrenees, between Catholic
Spain and very-Christian France, they forgot that he existed.
The Jesuits had undertaken what was perfectly impossible; and the
principal engine they employed for it--the monopoly of the rising
generation--was not less impossible. Their greatest effort had been
directed to this point; they had succeeded in getting into their hands
the greater part of the children of the nobility and of people of
fortune; they had contrived, by means of education, a machine to narrow
the mind and crush the intellect. But such was the vigour of modern
invention, that in spite of the most ingenious machinery to annihilate
invention, the first generation produced Descartes, the second the
author of Tartuffe, and the third Voltaire.
The worst of it is, by the light of this great modern flambeau which
they had been unable to extinguish, they saw their own deformity. They
knew what they were, and began to despise themselves. No one is so
hardened in lying as to deceive himself entirely. They were obliged
tacitly to confess that their _probabilism_, or doctrine of
probability, was at bottom but doubt, and the absence of all principle.
They could not help discovering that they, the most Christian of all
societies, and the champions of the faith, were only sceptics.
Of faith?--what faith? It was not, at any rate, Christian faith: all
their theology had no other tendency than to ruin the base on which
Christianity is founded--grace and salvation by the blood of Jesus
Christ.
Champions of a principle? No; but agents of a plot, occupied with one
project, and this an impossible one--the restoration of popery.
Some few Jesuits resolved to seek a remedy in themselves for their
fallen condition. They avowed frankly the urgent need that the Society
had of reform. Their chief, a German, dared to attempt this reform;
but it went hard with him: the great majority of the Jesuits wished to
maintain the abuses, and they deprived him of all power.
These good workmen, who had been so successful in justifying the
enjoyments of others, wanted to enjoy themselves in their turn. They
chose for their general a man after their own heart, amiable, gentle,
and kind, the epicure Oliva. Rome, recently governed by Madame
Olympia, was in a season of indulgence; Oliva, retiring to his
delightful villa, said, "Business to-morrow," and left the Society to
govern itself after its own fashion.
Some became merchants, bankers, and cloth-makers for the profit of
their establishments. Others following more closely the example of the
pope, worked for their nephews, and transacted the business of their
families. The idle wits frequented the public walks, coquetted, and
made madrigals. Others again found amusement in chatting to the nuns,
in the little secrets of women, and in sensual inquisitiveness. Their
rulers, lastly, who found themselves excluded from the society of
women, became too often the Thyrsis and Corydons of the Colleges; the
consequence was in Germany a formidable investigation; when a great
number of the proud and austere German houses were found to be criminal.
The Jesuits, who had fallen so low both in theory and practice,
increased their party at the risk of the strangest auxiliaries.
Whoever declared himself an enemy of the Jansenists became their
friend. Hence arose the immoral inconsistency of the Society--its
perfect indifference to systems. These people, who for more than half
a century had been fighting for free will, formed a sudden alliance,
without any intervening period of transition, with the mystics who
confounded all their liberty in God. Just before they had been
reproached with following the principles of pagan philosophers and
jurisconsults, who attribute everything to justice and nothing to grace
or love; now they receive quietism at its birth with open arms, and the
preacher of love, the visionary Desmarets de St. Sorlin.
Desmarets had, it is true, done them some essential service. He had
succeeded in dismembering Port-Royal, by gaining over some of the nuns.
He assisted them powerfully in destroying poor Morin, another visionary
more original and more innocent, who fancied himself to be the Holy
Ghost. He tells us himself how, being encouraged by Father Canard
(Annat) the king's confessor, he gained the confidence of this
unfortunate man, made him believe he was his disciple, and drew from
him written documents, by means of which he caused him to be burnt
(1663).
The protection of this all-powerful confessor gained for the most
extravagant books of Desmarets the approbation of the Archbishop of
Paris. He declared in them that he was a prophet, and undertook to
raise for the king and the pope an army of a hundred and forty-four
thousand _devots_, as knights of papal infallibility, to exterminate,
in concert with Spain, the Turks and the Jansenists.
These _devots_, or victims of love, were self-sacrificed people, who
affected a sort of inward annihilation, and who lived henceforth only
in God. Hence they could do no harm. The soul, said this prophet,
having become a nonentity, cannot consent; so that whatever it may do,
inasmuch as it has not consented, it has not sinned. It no longer
thinks at all, either of what it has done, or of what it has not done;
for it has done nothing at all. God being all in us, does all, and
suffers all; the devil can no longer find the creature, either in
itself or in its acts, for it acts no longer. By an entire dissolution
of ourselves, the virtue of the Holy Ghost flows into us, and we become
wholly God, by a miraculous _deiformity_. If there be still anything
jarring in the grosser part, the purer part knows nothing of it; but
both these parts, being subtilised and rarefied, change at last into
God; "_God then abides with the emotions of sensuality, all of which
are sanctified_."[2]
Desmarets did not confine himself to printing this doctrine with the
privilege of the king and the approbation of the archbishop. Strongly
supported by the Jesuits, he ran from convent to convent preaching to
the nuns. Layman as he was, he had made himself a director of female
youth. He related to them his dreams of devout gallantry, and inquired
about their carnal temptations. It seemed that a man so perfectly
self-annihilated might write fearlessly the strangest things--the
following letter for instance:--"I embrace you, my very dear love, in
your nonentity, being a perfect nullity myself, each of us being all in
our All, by our amiable Jesus," &c.
What progress is here made in a few years, since the "Provincial
Letters!" What has become of the casuists? Those simple people who
took and effaced transgressions one by one, giving themselves immense
trouble. They are all scattered to the winds.
Casuistry was an art that had its masters, doctors, and cunning men.
But now, what need of doctors? Every _spiritual_ man, every devout
person, every Jesuit in a short robe can speak as well as he in the
long one the soft language of pious tenderness. The Jesuits have
fallen, but _Jesuitism_ has gained ground. It is no longer requisite
to direct the _attention_ every day, for every distinct case, by
special equivocations. Love that mingles and confounds everything is
the sovereign, most gentle, and powerful equivocation. Lull the _will_
to sleep and there is no longer any intention, "The soul, losing its
nonentity in its infinity," will be gently annihilated in the bosom of
love.
[1] By two cardinals and librarians of the Vatican, Bellarmin and
Baronius, one of whom was the confessor of the pope.
[2] Desmarets de St. Sorlin's Delight of the Spirit, 29th _journée_, p.
170.
CHAPTER VI.
CONTINUATION OF MORAL REACTION.--TARTUFFE, 1664-1669.--REAL
TARTUFFES.--WHY TARTUFFE IS NOT YET A QUIETIST.
The devotee caught in the fact by the man of the world, the churchman
excommunicated by the comedian--this is the meaning and aim of the
_Tartuffe_.
Plato, in his Athenian Tartuffe (the Euthyphron), put this grand moral
question, "Can there be _sanctity_ without _justice_?" This question,
so clear in itself but so skilfully obscured by casuists, was again put
forward in open daylight. The _Theatre_ re-established religious
morality which had been so endangered in the _Churches_.
The author of the _Tartuffe_ chose his subject, not in society in
general, but in a more limited space, in the family circle, the
fireside, the holy of holies of modern life. This dramatist, this
impious being was, of all men in the world, the one who had most at
heart the religion of the family, though he had no family himself. He
was both tender and melancholy, and sometimes, in speaking of himself
and his domestic griefs, he would utter this grave but characteristic
sentence: "I ought to have foreseen that one thing made me unfit for
family society; which is my austerity."
The _Tartuffe_, that grand and sublime picture, is very simple in its
outline. Had it been more complicated it had been less popular.
_Mental restriction_ and the _direction of intention_, which everybody
had laughed at since the "Provincial Letters," were sufficient matter
for Molière. He did not venture to bring the new doctrine of mysticism
on the stage, being as yet too little known or too dangerous.
Had he employed the jargon of Desmarets and the earlier quietists, and
put into the mouth of Tartuffe their mystic tendernesses, the result
would have been the same as that of his ridiculous sonnet in the
_Misanthrope_--the pit would have wondered what it meant.
The evening before the first representation of Tartuffe, Molière read
the piece to Ninon; "and to pay him back in his own coin, she related
to him a similar adventure she had had with a wretch of that species,
whose portrait she drew in such lively and natural colours, that if the
piece had not been composed, he said he never would have undertaken it."
What, then, could be wanting to this master-piece, this drama of such
profound conception and powerful execution? Nothing, certainly, but
what was excluded by the state of religion at that time, and by the
customs of our theatre.
Still one thing was wanting, which was impossible to be shown in so
short a drama (though, in fact, it constitutes the real essence of the
characters), I mean the preparatory management, the long windings by
which he makes his approaches, his patience in stratagems, and his
gradual fascination.
Everything is strongly told, but rather abruptly. This man, received
into the house out of charity--this low rogue, this glutton who eats as
much as six, this red-eared villain--how did he grow bold so suddenly
and aspire so high? A declaration of love from such a man to such a
lady, from an intended son-in-law to his future mother-in-law, still
astonishes when we read it. On the stage, perhaps, we countenance it
more easily.
Elmira, when the holy man makes this surprising avowal to her face is
by no means prepared to listen to him. A real Tartuffe would have
acted in a very different manner: he would have quietly sat down,
humble and patient, and waited for the favourable moment. If, for
instance, Elmira had experienced the indiscretions and fickleness of
those worldly lovers whom Tartuffe mentions, then, indeed, when she was
worn out by these trials, and become weak, weary, and dispirited, he
might have accosted her; then perhaps she would have allowed him to
say, in the smooth quietist jargon, many things that she cannot listen
to at the moment when Molière presents her before us.
Mademoiselle Bourignon, in her curious _Life_, which well deserves
another edition, relates what danger she was in through a saint of this
species. I shall let her speak for herself. But first you must know
that the pious damsel, who had just become an heiress, was thinking
about laying out her wealth in endowing convents, and in other similar
acts of piety.
"Being, one day, in the streets of Lille, I met a man whom I did not
know, who said to me as he passed, 'You will not do what you wish; you
will do what you do not wish.' Two days after, the same man came to my
house and said, 'What did you think of me?' 'That you were either a
fool or a prophet,' replied I. 'Neither,' said he; 'I am a poor fellow
from a village near Douai, and my name is Jean de St. Saulieu; I have
no other thought but that of charity. I lived first of all with a
hermit, but now I have my curé, Mr. Roussel, for a director. I teach
poor children to read. The sweetest--the most charitable act you could
do would be to collect all the little female orphans; they have become
so numerous since the wars! The convents are rich enough.' He spoke
for three hours together with much unction.
"I inquired about him of the curé, his director, who assured me that he
was a person of a truly apostolical zeal. (We should observe that the
curé had tried at first to catch this rich heiress for his own nephew;
the nephew not succeeding, he employed one of his own creatures.)
Saint Saulieu frequently repeated his visits, speaking divinely of
spiritual things. I could not understand how a man without any
preparatory study could speak in so sublime a manner of the divine
mysteries. I believed him to be really inspired by the Holy Ghost. He
said himself that he was dead to nature. He had been a soldier, and
had returned from the wars as chaste as a child. By dint of abstinence
he had lost the taste of food, and could no longer distinguish wine
from beer! He passed the greater part of his time on his knees in the
churches. He was seen to walk in the street with a modest air and
downcast eyes, never looking at anything, as if he had been alone in
the world. He visited the poor and sick, giving away all he possessed.
In winter time, if he saw a poor man without a garment, he would draw
him aside, take off his own coat, and give it him. My heart overflowed
with joy to see that there were still such men in the world. I thanked
God, and thought I had found the counterpart of myself. Priests and
other pious persons put the same confidence in him, went to consult
him, and receive his good advice.
"It was quite foreign to my feelings to quit my peaceful retreat, and
establish the asylum for children that Saint Saulieu had recommended to
me. But he brought me a tradesman who had begun the same thing, and
who offered me a house where he had already located a few poor girls.
I took possession in November, 1653. I cleaned these children. They
were shockingly dirty, but after a great deal of trouble, I cleaned
them myself, having nobody with me who liked the occupation. But at
last I made a rule, and followed it myself, putting every thing in
common, and making every one eat at the same table. I kept myself as
retired as I could; but I was obliged to speak to all sorts of persons.
Friars came, as well as devotees whose conversations did not much
please me... I was frequently sick to death.
"The house in which Saint Saulieu taught having been destroyed, and
himself sent away, he went to live with the tradesman of whom I have
already spoken. They solicited me to make an asylum, like mine, for
boys. In order to raise a necessary fund, Saint Saulieu was to take an
office in the town on lease, that brought in two thousand francs
a-year, and the revenue was to be applied to this foundation, myself
being security for him. He received the produce of one year, and then
said it was necessary, before anything was done, to receive for another
year, to furnish the house. This made four thousand franks; and when
he had got six thousand, he kept the whole, saying it was the fruit of
his labour, and that he had well earned it.
"I had not waited for this to make me distrustful of the man; I had had
some strange inward misgivings on his account. One day methought I saw
a black wolf sporting with a white lamb. Another day it was the heart
of Saint Saulieu, and a little Moorish child with a crown and sceptre
of gold sitting upon it, as if the devil had been the king of his
heart. I did not conceal these visions from him; but he grew angry,
and said I ought to confess myself, for thinking so badly of my
neighbour; that he could not be a black wolf; for, on the contrary, the
more he approached me, the more pure and chaste he became.
"One day, however, he told me that we ought to be married, only for
spiritual love; and that such a union would enable us to do still more
good. To this I answered, that marriage was not requisite for such a
union. He made me, however, little demonstrations of friendship, to
which, at first, I paid no attention. At last, he suddenly threw off
the mask, told me he loved me desperately; that for many years he had
studied spiritual books, the better to win me; and that now having so
much access to me, I must be his wife, either by love or force and he
approached to caress me. I was very angry, and commanded him to go.
Then he burst into tears, fell on his knees, and said, 'The devil
tempted me.' I was simple enough to believe and to pardon him.
"This was not the end of the affair: he was always recommencing his
attack, following me everywhere, and entering my house in spite of my
girls. He went so far as to hold a knife to my throat to force me to
yield... At the same time he said everywhere that he had gained his
suit, and that I was his promised wife. I complained in vain to his
confessor; I then appealed to justice, who allowed me two men to guard
my house, and began an enquiry. Saint Saulieu soon absconded from
Lille, and went to Ghent, where he found one of my girls, who was a
great devotee and passed for a mirror of perfection: he lived with her,
and she became _enceinte_. The way he arranged the Lille affair was
this: he had a brother among the Jesuits, and they employed their
friends so well, that he got off by paying the costs of justice,
retracting his calumny, and acknowledging that I was an honest
women."[1]
This took place between 1653 and 1658, consequently only a few years
before the representation of Molière's _Tartuffe_, who wrote the three
first acts in 1664. Everything leads us to believe that such
adventures were not rare at that period. Tartuffe, Orgon, and all the
other personages of this truly historical piece, are not abstract
beings, pure creations of art, like the heroes of Corneille or Racine;
they are real men, caught in the act, and taken from nature.
What strikes us in Mademoiselle de Bourignon's Flemish Tartuffe is his
patience to study and learn mysticism in order to speak its language;
and, again, his perseverance in associating himself for whole years
with the thoughts of the pious maiden.
If Molière had not been confined in so narrow a frame, if his
_Tartuffe_ had had the time to prepare better his advances, if he had
been able (the thing was then, no doubt, too dangerous) to take the
cloak of Desmarets and Quietism in its birth, he might have advanced
still further in his designs without being discovered. Then he would
not in the very beginning have made to the person he wants to seduce
the very illogical confession, that he is a cheat. He would not have
ventured the expression, "If it be only heaven" (Act iv. scene 5).
Instead of unmasking abruptly this ugly corruption, he would have
varnished it over, and unveiled it by degrees. From one ambiguous
phrase to another, and by a cunning transition, he would have contrived
to make corruption take the appearance of perfection. Who knows? He
might perhaps at last have succeeded, like many others, in finding it
unnecessary to be a hypocrite any longer, and have finished by imposing
on himself, cheating and seducing himself into the belief that he was a
saint. It is then he would have been Tartuffe in the superlative
degree, being so not only for the world, but for himself, having
perfectly confounded within himself every ray of good, and reposing in
evil with a tranquillity secured by his ignorance, counterfeit at
first, but afterwards become natural.
[1] The two accounts given by Mademoiselle de Bourignon are abridged
and united. See at the end of Vol. I. of her OEuvres (Amsterdam,
1686), pp. 68-80, and pp. 188-197.
CHAPTER VII.
APPARITION OF MOLINOS, 1675.--HIS SUCCESS AT HOME.--FRENCH
QUIETISTS.--MADAME GUYON.--HER DIRECTOR.--THE TORRENTS.--MYSTIC
DEATH.--DO WE RETURN FROM IT?
_The Spiritual Guide_ of Molinos appeared at Rome in 1675. The way
having been prepared for twenty years by different publications of the
same tendency, highly approved of by the inquisitors of Rome and Spain,
this book had a success unparalleled in the age; in twelve years it was
translated and reprinted twenty times.
We must not be surprised that this guide to annihilation, this method
to die, was received so greedily. There was then throughout Europe a
general feeling of wearisomeness. That century, still far from its
close, already panted for repose. This appears to be the case by its
own doctrines. Cartesianism, which gave it an impulse, became inactive
and contemplative in Mallebranche (1674). Spinosa, as early as 1670,
had declared the immobility of God, man, and the world, in the unity of
substance. And in 1676, Hobbes gave his theory of political fatalism.
Spinosa, Hobbes, and Molinos--death, everywhere, in metaphysics,
politics, and morality! What a dismal chorus! They are of one mind
without knowing each other or forming any compact; they seem, however,
to shout to each other from one extremity of Europe to the other!
Poor human liberty has nothing left but the choice of its suicide;
either to be hurled by logic in the North into the bottomless pit of
Spinosa, or to be lulled in the South by the sweet voice of Molinos,
into a death-like and eternal slumber.
The age is, however, as yet in all its brilliancy and triumph. Some
time must pass away before these discouraging and deadly thoughts pass
from theory to practice, and politics become infected with this moral
languor.
It is a delicate and interesting moment in every existence, that middle
term between the period of increasing vigour and that of old age, when,
retaining its brilliancy, it loses its strength, and decay
imperceptibly begins. In the month of August the trees have all their
leaves, but soon they change colour, many a one grows pale, and in
their splendid summer robe you have a presentiment of their autumnal
decline.
For some time an impure and feverish wind had blown from the South,
both from Italy and Spain: Italy was already too lifeless, too deeply
entombed to be able to produce even a doctrine of death. It was a
Spaniard, established at Rome and imbued with Italian languor, who
invented this theory and drew it forth into practice. Still it was
necessary for his disciples to oblige him to write and publish.
Molinos had, for twenty years, been satisfied with sowing his doctrine
noiselessly in Rome, and propagating it gently from palace to palace.
The theology of Quietism was wonderfully adapted to the city of
catacombs, the silent city, where, from that time, scarcely anything
was heard but the faint rustling of worms crawling in the sepulchre.
When the Spaniard arrived in Rome, it had hardly recovered from the
effeminate pontificate of Madame Olympia. The _crucified Jesus_
reposed in the delicate hands of her general Oliva, among sumptuous
_vines_, exotic flowers, lilies, and roses. These torpid Romans, this
idle nobility, and these lazy fair ones, who pass their time on
couches, with half-closed eyes, are the persons to whom Molinos comes
at a late hour to speak--ought I to say _speak_? His low whispering
voice, sinking into their lethargy, is confounded with their inward
dream.
Quietism had quite a different character in France. In a living
country, the theory of death showed some symptoms of life. An infinite
measure of activity was employed to prove that action was no longer
necessary. This injured their doctrine, for noise and light were
hurtful to it. This delicate plant loved darkness and sought to grow
in the shade. Not to speak of the chimerical Desmarets, who could but
render an opinion ridiculous, Malaval seemed to have an idea that this
new doctrine outstepped Christianity. Concerning the words of Jesus,
"_I am the way_," he uses an expression surprising for this century:
"Since He is the way, let us pass by Him; _but he who is always passing
never arrives_."
Our French Quietists by their lucid analysis, their rich and fertile
developments, made known, for the first time, what had scarcely been
dreamed of in the obscure form which Quietism had prudently preserved
in other countries. Many things, that seemed in the bud hardly
developed, appeared in Madame Guyon in full bloom, as clear as
daylight, with the sun in the meridian. The singular purity of this
woman rendered her intrepid in advancing the most dangerous ideas. She
was as pure in her imagination as she was disinterested in her motives.
She had no need to figure to herself the object of her pious love,
under a material form. This is what gives her mysticism a sublime
superiority over the coarse and sensual devotion of the _Sacré-Coeur_,
established by the _Visitandine_, Marie Alacoque, about the same
period. Madame Guyon was far too intellectual to give a form to her
God; she truly loved a spirit; hence sprang her confidence and
unlimited courage. She attempts bravely, but without suspecting
herself to be brave, the most perilous paths, now ascending, now
descending into regions that others had most avoided; she presses
boldly forward past the point where every one had stopped through fear,
like the luminary which brightens everything and remains unsullied
itself. These courageous efforts, though innocent in so pure a woman,
had nevertheless a dangerous effect upon the weak-minded. Her
confessor, Father Lacombe, was wrecked in this dangerous gulf, where he
was swallowed up and drowned. The person and the doctrine had equally
deranged his faculties. All we know of his intercourse with her
betrays a strange weakness, which she, in her sublime aspirations,
seems hardly to have condescended to notice. The very first time he
saw her, then young, and tending her aged husband, he was so affected
by the sight that he fainted. Afterwards, having become her humble
disciple, under the name of her director, he followed her everywhere in
her adventurous life, both in France and Savoy. He never left her
side, "and could not dine without her." He had succeeded in getting
her portrait taken. Being arrested at the same time as herself, in
1687, he was for ten years a prisoner in the fortresses of the
Pyrenees. In 1698, they took advantage of the weakness of his mind to
make him write to Madame Guyon a compromising letter: "The poor man,"
said she, laughing, "is become mad." He certainly was so, and, a few
days after, he died at Charenton.
This madness little surprises me, when I read Madame Guyon's
_Torrents_, that fantastic, charming, but fearful book. It must not be
passed over in silence.
When she composed the book, she was at Annecy, in the convent of the
_newly converted_. She had bestowed her wealth upon her family, and
the small income she reserved for herself was also given away by her to
this religious establishment, where she was very ill used. This
delicate woman, who had passed her life in luxury, was forced to work
with her hands beyond her strength; her employment was washing and
sweeping. Father Lacombe, then in Rome, had recommended her to write
whatever came into her mind. "It is to obey you," says she, "that I am
beginning to write what I do not know myself." She takes a ream of
paper, and writes down the title of her subject:--_Torrents_.
As the torrents of the Alps, the rivers, rivulets, and mountain
streams, which tumble from their heights, rush with all their force
towards the sea, even so our souls, by the effect of their spiritual
inclination, hasten to return towards God to be blended with Him. This
comparison of living waters is not a simple text that serves her for a
starting-point; she follows it up almost throughout the volume with
renewed graces. One would suppose that this pleasing light style would
tire us at last; but it does not: we feel that it is not mere words and
language, but that it springs and flows like life-blood from the heart.
She is evidently an uninformed woman, who has read only the Imitation,
the Philothea of Saint François, some few stories, and Don Quixote;
knows nothing at all, and has not seen much. Even these _Torrents_,
which she describes, are not seen by her in the Alps, where she then
is; she sees them within herself; she sees nature in the mirror of her
heart.
In reading this book we seem absolutely as if we were on the brink of a
cascade, pensively listening to the murmuring of the waters. They fall
for ever and ever gently and charmingly, varying their uniformity by a
thousand changes of sound and colour. Thence you see the approach of
waters of every sort (images of human souls), rivers that flow only to
reach other broad majestic streams, all loaded with boats, goods, and
passengers, and that are admired and blessed for the services they
render. These streams are the souls of the saints and great doctors.
There are also more rapid and eager waters which are good for nothing,
on which no one dares to float, that rush forward, in headlong
impatience, to reach the ocean. Such waters have terrible falls, and
occasionally grow impure. Sometimes they disappear.--Alas! poor
torrent, what has become of thee? It is not lost; it returns to the
surface, but only to be lost again; it is yet far from its goal; it
will have first to be dashed against rocks, scattered abroad, and, as
it were, annihilated!
When the writer has brought her torrent to this supreme fall, she is at
fault about the simile of the living waters; she then leaves it, and
the torrent becomes a soul again. No image taken from nature could
express what this soul is about to suffer. Here begins a strange
drama, where it seems no one before had dared to venture--that of
mystic death. We certainly find in earlier books a word here and there
upon this dark subject; but no one yet had reached the same depth in
the tomb, that deep pit where the soul is about to be buried. Madame
Guyon indulges in a sort of pleasure, or perseverance, I had almost
said eagerness, to grope still lower, to find, beyond all funereal
ideas, a more definite death, a death more decidedly dead.
There are many things in it, that we should never have expected from a
woman's hand: passion in its transports forgets reserve. This soul,
that is destined to perish, must first be divested, by her divine
lover, of her trappings, the gifts that had ornamented her: he snatches
off her garments, that is to say, the virtues in which she had been
enveloped.--O shame! She sees herself naked, and knows not where to
hide! This is not yet enough; her beauty is taken away. O horror!
She sees she is ugly. Frightened and wandering, she runs and becomes
loathsome. The faster she runs towards God, "the more she is soiled by
the dirty paths she must travel in." Poor, naked, ugly, and deformed,
she loses a taste for everything, understanding, memory, and will;
lastly, she loses together with her will a something or other "that is
her favourite," and would be a substitute for all--the idea that she is
a child of God. This is properly the death at which she must arrive at
last. Let nobody, neither the director nor any other, attempt to
relieve her. She must die, and be put in the ground; be trodden under
foot and walked upon, become foul and rotten, and suffer the stench of
corruption, until rottenness becoming dust and ashes, hardly anything
may remain to testify that the soul ever existed.
What was the soul must, if it still thinks, apparently think that all
it can now do is, to remain motionless in the bosom of the earth. Now,
however, it begins to feel something surprising! Has the sun darted a
ray through a crack in the tomb? perhaps only for one moment? No: the
effect is durable, the dead soul revives, recovers some strength, a
sort of life. But this is no longer her own life, it is _life in God_.
She has no longer anything of her own, neither will nor desire. What
has she to do to possess what she loves? Nothing, nothing, eternally
nothing. But can she have any defects in this state? Doubtless she
has; she knows them, but does nothing to get rid of them: to be able to
do so, she would have to become as before, "thoughtful about herself."
These are little mists which she must allow to disappear gradually.
The soul has now God for soul; He is now become her principle of life,
_He is one and identical_ with her.
"In this state nothing extraordinary happens, no visions, revelations,
ecstasies, nor transports. All such things do not belong to this
system, which is simple, pure, and naked, seeing nothing but in God,
_as God sees Himself_, and by His eyes."
Thus, after many immoral and dangerous things, the book ends in a
singular purity, which few mystics have even approached. A gentle new
birth, without either visions or ecstasies, and a sight divinely pure
and serene, is the lot of that soul, which has passed through all the
various shadows of death.
If we listen to Madame Guyon, our life, after having been crushed,
soiled, and destroyed, will revive in God. He who has passed through
all the horror of the sepulchre, whose living body has become a corpse,
which has held communion with worms, and from rottenness has become
ashes and clay--even he will resume his life, and again bloom in the
sun.
What can be less credible, or less conformable to nature? She deceives
herself and us by equivocal terms. The life she promises us after this
death is not our own; our personality extinguished, effaced, and
annihilated, will be succeeded by another, infinite and perfect, I
allow; but still not ours.
I had not yet read the _Torrents_ when all this was, for the first
time, represented to my mind. I was ascending St. Gothard, and had
advanced to meet the violent Reuss that rushes madly down the mountain
in its headlong course. My imagination conjured up, in spite of
myself, the terrible strugglings with which it labours to force its way
through rocks that would hem it in and bar its progress. I was
frightened at its falls and the efforts it seemed to make, like a poor
soul on the rack, to fly from itself, and hide where it might be seen
no more. It writhes at the Devil's Bridge, and, in the midst of its
agony, hurled from an immense height to the bottom of the abyss, it
ceases for a moment to be a river: it becomes a tempest between heaven
and earth, an icy vapour, a horrible frosty blast, that fills the dark
valley with an infernal mist. Mount higher and higher still. You
traverse a cavern, and pass a hollow rock. Lo! the uproar ceases; this
grand battle of the elements is over. Peace and silence reign. And
life?--is it renewed? Do you find a new-birth after this
death-struggle? The meadow is blighted, the flowers are gone, and the
very grass is scarce and poor. Nothing in nature stirs, not a bird in
the air, not an insect on the earth. You see the sun again, it is
true, but void of rays and heat.
CHAPTER VIII.
FENELON AS DIRECTOR.--HIS QUIETISM.--MAXIMS OF SAINTS, 1697.--FENELON
AND MADAME DE LA MAISONPORT.
Madame Guyon was not apparently the extravagant and chimerical person
that her enemies pretend, since, on her arrival at Paris from Savoy,
she managed to captivate and secure, at her first onset, the man, of
all others, the most capable of giving a relish to her doctrines--a man
of genius, who, moreover, had an infinite fund of sagacity and address,
and who, independently of all these merits, possessed what had
dispensed, if necessary, with every other qualification, being, at that
time, the director the most in vogue.
This new Chantal required a St. François de Sales; she found one in
Fenelon, who was less serene and innocent, it is true, and less
refulgent with boyhood and seraphic grace, but eminently noble and
shrewd, subtle, eloquent, close, very devout, and very intriguing.
She laid her hands upon him, seized and carried him by an easy assault.
This great genius, whose mind was stored with every variety and every
contradiction, would probably have continued to waver, had it not been
for this powerful impulse that forced him all on one side. Till then
he had wandered between different opinions, and opposite parties and
communities, so that every one claimed him as his own, and thought to
possess him. Though assiduous in courting Bossuet, whose disciple he
said he was, never leaving his side in his retirement at Meaux, he was
not less friendly to the Jesuits, and, between the two, he still held
fast to Saint-Sulpice. In his theology, at one time inclining towards
Grace, at another towards Free-will, imbued with the oldest mystics,
and full of the presentiments of the eighteenth century, he seems to
have had, beneath his faith, some obscure corners of scepticism which
he was unwilling to fathom. All these divers elements, without being
able to combine, were harmonised in his outward actions, under the
graceful influence of the most elegant genius that was ever met with.
Being both a Grecian and a Christian, he reminds us at the same time of
the fathers, philosophers, and romancers of the Alexandrian period; and
sometimes our sophist turns prophet, and, in his sermon, soars on the
wings of Isaiah.
Everything inclines us to believe, for all that, that the astonishing
writer was the least part of Fenelon--he was superlatively the
_Director_. Who can say by what enchantment he bewitched souls, and
filled them with transport? We perceive traces of it in the infinite
charms of his correspondence, disfigured and adulterated as it is;[1]
no other has been more cruelly pruned, purged, and designedly obscured.
Yet in these fragments and scattered remains, seduction is still
omnipotent: besides a nobleness of manner, and an animated and refined
turn of thought, in which the man of power is very perceptible under
the robe of the apostle, there is also what is particularly his own, a
feminine delicacy that by no means excludes strength, and even in his
subtilty an indescribable tenderness that touches the heart. When a
youth, and before he was tutor to the Duke of Burgundy, he had, for a
long time, directed the _newly converted_. There he had the
opportunity of well studying woman's character, and of acquiring that
perfect knowledge of the female heart, in which he was unrivalled.
The impassioned interest they took in his fortune, the tears of his
little flock, the Duchesses of Chevreuse, Beauvilliers, and others,
when he missed the archbishopric of Paris, their constant fidelity to
this well-beloved guide during his exile at Cambrai, which ended only
with his death--all this fills up the void of the lost letters, and
conveys a strange idea of this all-powerful magician, whose invincible
magic defied every attack.
To introduce spirituality so refined and so exalted, and such a
pretension to supreme perfection into that world of outward propriety
and ceremonial at Versailles, and this, at the end of a reign in which
everything seemed rigidly frozen--was, indeed, a rash undertaking.
There was no question here of abandoning one's self, like Madame Guyon
in her retreat among the Alps, to the torrents of divine love. It was
necessary to have the appearance of common sense, and the forms of
reason even in the madness of love; it was expedient, as the ancient
comic writer says "_to run mad with rule and measure_." This is what
Fenelon attempted to do in the _Maxims of Saints_. The condemnation of
Molinos, and the imprisonment of Madame Guyon at Vincennes, were a
sufficient lesson: he declared himself, but with prudence, and though
perfectly decided, maintained an outward show of weak indecision.
Nevertheless, with all his skill, cunning, and prevarication, if he
differs from the absolute Quietists whom he affects to condemn, it is
less in any fundamental part of doctrine, than the degree in which he
admits that doctrine. He thinks he goes far enough in saying, that the
state of quiet in which the soul loses its activity is not a
_perpetually_, but an _habitually_ passive state. But in acknowledging
inaction to be both superior to action and a state of perfection, does
he not make us wish that the inaction might be perpetual?
The soul _habitually_ passive, according to him, is concentrated above,
leaving beneath her the inferior part, whose acts are those of an
entirely _blind_ and involuntary commotion. _These acts being always
supposed to be voluntary_, he avows that the superior part still
remains responsible for them. Will they then be governed by it? By no
means; it is absorbed in its sublime quietude. What, then, is to
interfere in its place? What is to keep order in this lower sphere,
where the soul no longer descends? He tells us plainly--_it is the
director_.
His modification of Molinos in theory is less important than it seems
to be. The speculative part, with which Bossuet is so much occupied,
is not the most essential in a point where practice is so directly
interested. What is really serious is, that Fenelon, as well as
Molinos, after having traced out a great plan of regulations, has not
enough of these rules; he has to call in, at every moment, the
assistance of the director. He establishes a system; but this system
cannot work alone; it wants the hand of man. This inert theory
continually requires the supplement of an especial consultation, and an
empirical expedient. The director is a sort of supplementary soul for
the soul, who, whilst this last is sleeping in its sublime sphere, is
leading and regulating every thing for it in this miserable world
below, which is, after all, that of reality.
Man, eternally man! this is what you find at the bottom of their
doctrines in sifting and compressing them. This is the _ultima ratio_
of their systems. Such is their theory, and such their life also.
I leave these two illustrious adversaries, Fenelon and Bossuet, to
dispute about ideas. I prefer to observe their practice. There, I see
that the doctrine has but a little, and man a very great part. Whether
Quietists or Anti-quietists, they do not differ much in their method of
enveloping the soul, and lulling the will to sleep.
During this contention of theories, or rather before it began, there
was a personal one, very curious to witness. The stake in this game,
if I may use the expression, the spiritual prize that both sides
disputed, was a woman, a charming soul, full of transport and youth, of
an imprudent vivacity, and ingenuous loyalty. She was a niece of
Madame Guyon, a young lady whom they called Madame de la Maisonfort,
for she was a canoness. This noble, but poor young lady, ill-treated
by her father and stepmother, had fallen into the cold political hands
of Madame de Maintenon. Either for the vanity of founding, or in order
to amuse an old king rather difficult to entertain, she was then
establishing Saint-Cyr, for the daughters of noble families. She knew
the king was ever _sensible_ to women, and consequently let him see
only old ones or children. The boarders of Saint-Cyr, who in the
innocency of their sports gladdened the eyes of the old man, brought to
his mind a former age, and offered him a mild and innocent opportunity
for paternal gallantry.
Madame de Maintenon, who, as is well known, owed her singular fortune
to a certain decent harmony of middling qualities, looked out for an
eminently middling person, if one may use the expression, to
superintend this establishment. She could not do better than to seek
him among the Sulpicians and Lazarists. Godet, the Sulpician, whom she
took as director both of Saint-Cyr and herself; was a man of merit,
though a downright pedant; at least Saint Simon, his admirer, gives us
this sort of definition of him. Madame de Maintenon saw in him the
blunt matter-of-fact priest, who might insure her against every sort of
eccentricity. With such a man as that, one would have nothing to fear:
having to choose between the two men of genius who influenced
Saint-Cyr, Racine the Jansenist, and Fenelon the Quietist, she
preferred Godet.
Those who are ignorant of its history would have only to look at the
mansion of Saint-Cyr, to discern in it at once the real abode of
_ennui_. The soul of the foundress, the domineering spirit of the
governess, is everywhere perceptible. The very look of the place makes
one yawn. It would be something, if this building had but a sorrowful
character; even sadness may entertain the soul. No, it is not sad, yet
it is not the more cheerful on that account; there is nothing to be
said against it, the character and the style being equally null; there
is nothing one can even blame. Of what age is the chapel? Neither
Gothic nor the _renaissance_, nor is it even the Jesuit style.
Perhaps, then, there is something of the Jansenist austerity? It is by
no means austere. What is it then? Nothing. But this nothing causes
an overwhelming _ennui_, such as one would never find elsewhere.
After this first short half-devout and half-worldly period, that of the
representations of Athalie and Esther, which the young ladies had
played too well, the school being reformed, became a sort of convent.
Instead of Racine, it was the Abbé Pellegrin and Madame de Maintenon
who wrote pieces for Saint-Cyr; and the governesses were required to be
nuns. This was a great change; it displeased Louis XIV. himself, and
ran the risk of compromising the new establishment. Madame de
Maintenon seems to have been aware of this, and she looked out for a
_foundation-stone to her edifice_, a living one--alas! a woman full of
grace and life!--It was poor Maisonfort, whom they decided to veil,
immure, and seal up for ever in the foundations of Saint-Cyr.
But she whose will was law in everything, was unable to do this.
Lively and independent as was La Maisonfort, all the kings and queens
in the world would have been unsuccessful. The heart alone, skilfully
touched, was able to induce her to take the desired step. Madame de
Maintenon, who desired it extremely, made such vigorous efforts, that
they surprise us when we read her letters. That very reserved person
throws her character aside in this business: she becomes confiding, in
order to be confided in, and does not fear to avow to the young girl,
whom she wishes to make disgusted with this life, that she herself, in
the highest station in the world, "is dying of sadness and _ennui_."
What proved to be much more efficacious, was their employing against
her a new director, the seducing, charming, irresistible Abbé de
Fenelon. He was then on very good terms with Madame de Maintenon;
dining every Sunday with her in the apartments of the Duchesses de
Beauvilliers and de Chevreuse, where, all alone, without servants, they
served themselves, that they might not be overheard. The inclination
La Maisonfort felt for this singular man was great, and authority
ordered her to follow this inclination: "See the Abbé de Fenelon,"
Madame de Maintenon would write to her, "and accustom yourself to live
with him."
Kind order! she followed it but too well:--sweet custom!--With such a
man, who animated everything by his personal charm, who simplified and
facilitated the most arduous things, she did not walk, but fly, between
heaven and earth, into the tepid regions of divine love. So much
seduction, sanctity, and liberty at once--it was too much for her poor
heart!
St. Simon tells us by what method of espionage and treason Godet proved
the presence of Quietism in Saint-Cyr. There was no need of so much
cunning. La Maisonfort was so pure as to be imprudent. In the
happiness of this new spirituality, into which she entered with her
whole soul, she said much more than was required of her.
Fenelon, suspected as he had then become, was still left with her, till
she had made the important step. They waited till, under his
influence, and in spite of her own protestations and tears, she had
taken the veil, and heard the fatal grate shut behind her.
Two meetings were held at Saint-Cyr, to decide on the destiny of the
victim. Godet, supported by the Lazarists, Thiberge, and Brisacier,
decided she should be a nun, and Fenelon, who was a member of this fine
council, made no opposition. She herself has informed us, that, during
the deliberation, "she retired before the holy sacrament in a strange
agony; that she thought she should have died of grief, and that she
passed the whole of the night in a flood of tears."
The deliberation was merely a matter of form; Madame de Maintenon was
resolved; and obey they must. Nobody at that time was more at her
command than Fenelon. It was then the decisive crisis of Quietism.
The question was no less than to know whether its doctor, writer, and
prophet, unpalatable as he was to the king, who, however, did not yet
thoroughly know him, would be able to acquire, before his doctrine
burst forth, that position of a great prelate in the church, to which
all his supporters were hurrying him. Hence sprung his unlimited
devotedness to Madame de Maintenon, and the sacrifice of poor
Maisonfort to her omnipotent will. Fenelon, who knew perfectly well
how little she was inclined to this vocation, sacrificed her, certainly
not to his personal interests, but for the advancement of his doctrines
and the aggrandizement of his own party.
As soon as she had taken the veil, and was immured for ever, he became
more and more distant; for she was frankness itself, and by her
imprudence did harm to his doctrine, which was already sharply
attacked. He did not need so compromising an alliance, but what he
wanted was political support. In his last extremity he addressed
himself to the Jesuits, and took one of them for his confessor; for
they had taken the precaution to have some on both sides.
To fall back from Fenelon to Godet, and undergo his blunt and harsh
direction, was more than the new nun could support. One day, when he
came to her with the little decrees and petty regulations which he had
composed with Madame de Maintenon, La Maisonfort could contain herself
no longer, but spoke out, before him and the all-powerful foundress,
all the contempt she felt for them. A short time after, a letter with
the king's seal expelled her unfeelingly from Saint-Cyr.
She had defended herself too successfully against such persons as
Godet, Brisacier, and others of the hostile party. Though abandoned by
Fenelon, she endeavoured to remain faithful to his doctrines, and was
determined to keep his books. They were obliged to invoke the most
powerful man of the time, Bossuet, in order to bring the rebel to
reason. But she would not receive even his advice, till after she had
asked Fenelon whether she might do so. He replies to this last mark of
confidence, I regret to say, by a dull, disagreeable letter, in which
are shown but too plainly his jealousy, and the regret he feels in
seeing one, whom he had abandoned, pass under the control of another.
[1] A bishop, at that time an inspector of the University, boasted
before me (and several other persons, who will be witnesses if
necessary) that he had burned some of Fenelon's letters.
CHAPTER IX.
BOSSUET AS DIRECTOR.--BOSSUET AND SISTER CORNUAU.--HIS LOYALTY AND
IMPRUDENCE.--HE IS PRACTICALLY A QUIETEST.--DEVOUT DIRECTION INCLINES
TO QUIETISM.--A MORAL PARALYSIS.
Nothing throws more light upon the real character of _direction_ than
the correspondence of the worthiest and most loyal of directors--I mean
Bossuet. Experience is decisive; if here, too, the results are bad, we
must blame the method and the system, but by no means the man.
The greatness of his genius, and the nobleness of his character would
naturally remove Bossuet far from the petty passions of the vulgar herd
of directors, their meanness, jealousy, and vexatious tyranny. We may
believe what one of his own penitents says of him:--"Without
disapproving," says she, "of the directors who interfere even in the
slightest thoughts and affections, _he did not relish this practice_
towards those souls which loved God and had made some progress in
spiritual life."
His correspondence is praiseworthy, noble, and serious. You will not
find in it the too loving tenderness of Saint François de Sales, and
still less the refinement and impassioned subtilties of Fenelon.
Bossuet's letters, though less austere, resemble those of Saint-Cyran
by their seriousness. They often contain a grandeur of style little
suited to the humble and ordinary person to whom they are generally
addressed, but very advantageous in keeping her at a distance, and
preventing too close an intimacy even in the most unreserved private
conversation.
If this correspondence has reached us in a more complete form than that
of Fenelon, we are indebted for it (at least for the most curious part
of it) to the veneration which one of Bossuet's penitents, the good
Widow Cornuau, entertained for his memory. That worthy person, in
transmitting these letters to us, has religiously left in them a number
of details, humiliating enough for herself. She has forgotten her own
vanity, and thought only of the glory of her spiritual father. In
this, she has been very happily guided by her attachment for him;
perhaps, indeed, she has done more for him than any panegyrist. These
noble letters written in such profound secrecy, and never intended to
see daylight, are worthy of being exhibited to the public.
This good widow tells us, that when she had the happiness of going to
see him in his retirement at Meaux, he received her occasionally "in a
small, very cold, and smoky room." This is, according to all
appearances, the small summer-house, which is shown even in our time,
at the end of the garden, on the old rampart of the city, which forms
the terrace of the episcopal palace. The cabinet is on the
ground-floor, and above it, in a small loft, slept the valet, who awoke
Bossuet early every morning. A dark narrow alley of yews and holly
leads to this dull apartment: these are old dwarf stunted trees, which
have entwined their knotty branches and their dark prickly leaves.
Dreams of the past dwell for ever here; here you may still find all the
difficulties of those grand polemical questions, now so remote from us,
the disputes of Jurien and Claude, with the stately history of the
Variations, and the deadly battle of Quietism, envenomed by betrayed
friendship. The tower of the cathedral, with its mild majestic mien,
hovers above the French-fashioned, grave-looking garden; but it is
neither seen from the dark little alley, nor from the dull cabinet; a
place confined, cold, and of a disagreeable aspect, which in spite of
noble reminiscences, disheartens us by its vulgarity, and reminds us
that this fine genius, the best priest of his age, was still a _Priest_.
There was scarcely any other point by which this domineering spirit
could be touched, than docility and obedience. The good Cornuau
exercised these qualities in a degree he could hardly have expected.
She gives much, and we see that she hides still more, for fear of
displeasing him. She set all her wits to work, to follow, as far as
her natural mediocrity permitted her, the tastes and ideas of this
great man. He had a genius for government; and she had it also in
miniature. She took upon herself the business of the community with
which she lived, and at the same time transacted that of her own
family. She waited in this manner fifteen years before she was allowed
to become a nun. She at last obtained this favour, and had herself
called the Sister of Saint-_Benigné_, thus assuming, rather boldly
perhaps, Bossuet's own name. These real cares, in which the prudent
director kept her a long time, had an excellent effect upon her, in
diverting and pruning her imagination. She was of an impassioned,
honest, but rather ordinary disposition; and, unfortunately for her,
she had enough good sense to confess to herself what she was. She
knows, and she tells herself, that she is only a commoner of the lower
order; that she has neither birth, wit, grace, nor connection; that she
has not even seen Versailles! What chance would she have of gaining
his favour in a struggle against the other spiritual daughters, those
fine ladies, ever brilliant even in their penitence and voluntary
abasement?
It seems that she had hoped at first to have her revenge in some other
way, and to rise above these worldly ladies by the path of mysticism.
She took it into her head one day to have visions: she wrote one, of a
very paltry imagination, which Bossuet did not encourage. What could
she do? Nature had denied her wings; she saw plainly that most
certainly she would not be able to fly. At any rate, she had no pride;
she did not try to conceal the sad condition of her heart; and this
humiliating confession escapes her; "I am bursting with jealousy."
What affects us the most is, that after having made the confession,
this poor creature, so very gentle, and so very good, sacrificed her
own feelings, and became nurse to her who was the object of her
jealousy, and then attacked by a dreadful malady. She accompanied her
to Paris, shut herself up with her, took care of her, and at last loved
her; for the very reason, perhaps, which just before had produced quite
the contrary effect--because she was loved by Bossuet.
Sister Cornuau is evidently mistaken in her jealousy; she herself is
the person preferred; we see it now by comparing the different
correspondence. For her is reserved all his paternal indulgence; for
her alone he seems at times to be affected, as much as his ordinary
gravity permits. This man, so occupied, finds time to write her nearly
two hundred letters; and he is certainly much more firm and austere
with the fine
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