A Popular History of France from the Earliest Times Volume V Part 25

Mother Angelica Arnauld, to whom these lines were addressed, was the most perfect image and the most accomplished disciple of M. de St. Cyran.

More gentle and more human than he, she was quite as strong and quite as zealous. "It is necessary to be dead to everything, and after that to await everything; such was the motto of her inward life and of the constant effort made by this impa.s.sioned soul, susceptible of all tender affections, to detach herself violently and irrevocably from earth. The instinct of command, loftiness and breadth of views, find their place with the holy priest and with the nun; the mind of M. de St. Cyran was less practical and his judgment less simple than that of the abbess, habituated as she had been from childhood to govern the lives of her nuns as their conscience. A reformer of more than one convent since the day when she had closed the gates of Port-Royal against her father, M. Arnauld, in order to restore the strictness of the cloister, Mother Angelica carried rule along with her, for she carried within herself the government, rigid, no doubt, for it was life in a convent, but characterized by generous largeness of heart, which caused the yoke to be easily borne.

"To be perfect, there is no need to do singular things," she would often repeat, after St. Francis de Sales; "what is needed is to do common things singularly well!" She carried the same zeal from convent to convent, from Port-Royal des Champs to Port-Royal de Paris; from Maubuisson, whither her superiors sent her to establish a reformation, to St. Sacrement, to establish union between the two orders; ever devoted to religion, without having chosen her vocation; attracting around her all that were hers; her mother, a wife at twelve years of age, and astonished to find herself obeying after having commanded her twenty children for fifty years; five of her sisters; nieces and cousins; and in "the Desert," beside Port-Royal des Champs, her brothers, her nephews, her friends, steeped like herself in penitence. Before her, St. Bernard had "dispeopled the world " of those whom he loved, by an error common to zealous souls and exclusive spirits, solely occupied with thoughts of salvation. Even in solitude Mother Angelica had not found rest. "I am not fit to live on earth," she would say; "I know not why I am still there; I can no longer bear either myself or others; there is none that seeketh after G.o.d." She was piously unjust towards her age, and still more towards her friends; it was the honorable distinction of M. de St.

Cyran and his disciples that they did seek after G.o.d and holiness, at every cost and every risk.

Mother Angelica was nearing the repose of eternity, the only repose admitted by her brother M. Arnauld, when the storm of persecution burst upon the monastery. The Augustinus of Jansenius, Bishop of Ypres, a friend of M. de St. Cyran's, had just been condemned at Rome. Five propositions concerning grace were p.r.o.nounced heretical. "The pope has a right to condemn them," said the Jansenists, "if they are to be found in the Augustinus, but, in fact, they are not to be found there." The dispute waxed hot; M. Arnauld threw himself into it pa.s.sionately. He, in his turn, was condemned by the Sorbonne. "This is the very day," he wrote to his sister, Mother Angelica, "when I am to be wiped out from the number of the doctors; I hope of G.o.d's goodness that He will not on that account wipe me out from the number of His servants. That is the only t.i.tle I desire to preserve." M. Arnauld's friends pressed him to protest against his condemnation. "Would you let yourself be crushed like a child?" they said. He wrote in the theologian's vein, lengthily and bitterly; his friends listened in silence. Arnauld understood them.

"I see quite well that you do not consider this doc.u.ment a good one for its purpose," said he, "and I think you are right; but you who are young," and he turned towards Pascal, who had a short time since retired to Port-Royal, "you ought to do something." This was the origin of the _Lettres Provinciales_. For the first time Pascal wrote, something other than a treatise on physics. He revealed himself all at once and entirely. The recluses of Port-Royal were obliged to close their schools; they had to disperse. Arnauld concealed himself with his friend Nicole. "I am having search made everywhere for M. Arnauld," said Louis XIV. to Boileau, who was supposed to be much attached to the Jansenists.

"Your Majesty always was lucky," replied Boileau; "you will not find him."

The nuns' turn had come; orders were given to send away the pensioners (pupils); Mother Angelica set out for the house at Paris, "where was the battle-ground." [_Memoires pour servir a l'Histoire de Port-Royal,_ t. ii. p. 127.] As she was leaving the house in the fields, which was so dear to her, she met in the court-yard M. d'Andilly, her brother, who was waiting to say good by to her. When he came up to her, she said to him, "Good by, my dear brother; be of good courage, whatever happens." "Fear nothing, my dear sister; I am perfectly so." But she replied, "Brother, brother, let us be humble. Let us remember that humility without fort.i.tude is cowardice, but that fort.i.tude without humility is presumption." "When she arrived at the convent in Paris, she found us for the most part very sad," writes her niece, Mother Angelica de St.

Jean, "and some were in tears. She, looking at us with an open and confident countenance, said, 'Why, I believe there is weeping here!

Come, my children, what is all this? Have you no faith? And at what are you dismayed? What if men do rage? Eh? Are you afraid of that? They are but flies! You hope in G.o.d, and yet fear anything! Fear but Him, and, trust me, all will be well;' and to Madame de Chevreuse, who came to fetch her daughters, 'Madame, when there is no G.o.d I shall lose courage; but, so long as G.o.d is G.o.d, I shall hope in Him.'" She succ.u.mbed, however, beneath the burden; and the terror she had always felt of death aggravated her sufferings. "Believe me, my children," she would say to the nuns, "believe what I tell you. People do not know what death is, and do not think about it. As for me, I have apprehended it all my life, and have always been thinking about it. But all I have imagined is less than nothing in comparison with what it is, with what I feel, and with what I comprehend at this moment. It would need but such thoughts to detach us from everything." M. Singlin, being obliged to conceal himself, came secretly to see her; she would not have her nephew, M. de Sacy, run the same risk. "I shall never see him more," she said; "it is G.o.d's will; I do not vex myself about it. My nephew without G.o.d could be of no use to me, and G.o.d without my nephew will be all in all to me."

The grand-vicar of the Archbishop of Paris went to Port-Royal to make sure that the pensioners had gone. He sat down beside Mother Angelica's bed. "So you are ill, mother," said he; "pray, what is your complaint?"

"I am dropsical, sir," she replied. "Jesus! my dear mother, you say that as if it were nothing at all.--Does not such a complaint dismay you?"

"No, sir," she replied; "I am incomparably more dismayed at what I see happening in our house. For, indeed, I came hither to die here, but I did not come to see all that I now see, and I had no reason to expect the kind of treatment we are having. Sir, sir, this is man's day; G.o.d's day will come, who will reveal many things and avenge everything." She died on the 6th of August, 1661, murmuring over and over again, "Good by; good by!" And, when she was asked why she said that, she replied simply, "Because I am going away, my children." She had given instructions to bury her in the preau (court-yard), and not to have any nonsense (_badineries_) after her death. "I am your Jonas," she said to the nuns; "when I am thrown into the whale's belly the tempest will cease." She was mistaken; the tempest was scarcely beginning.

Cardinal de Retz was still t.i.tular Archbishop of Paris, and rather favorable to Jansenism. It was, therefore, the grandvicars who prepared the exhortation to the faithful, calling upon them to accept the papal decision touching Jansen's book. There was drawn up a formula or formulary of adhesion, "turned with some skill," says Madame Perier her biography of Jacqueline Pascal, and in such a way that subscription did not bind the conscience, as theologians most scrupulous about the truth affirmed; the nuns of Port-Royal, however, refused to subscribe. "What hinders us," said a letter to Mother Angelica de St. Jean from Jacqueline Pascal, Sister St. Euphemia in religion, "what hinders all the ecclesiastics who recognize the truth, to reply, when the formulary is presented to them to subscribe, 'I know the respect I owe the bishops, but my conscience does not permit me to subscribe that a thing is in a book in which I have not seen it,' and after that wait for what will happen? What have we to fear? Banishment and dispersion for the nuns, seizure of temporalities, imprisonment and death, if you will; but is not that our glory, and should it not be our joy? Let us renounce the gospel or follow the maxims of the gospel, and deem ourselves happy to suffer somewhat for righteousness' sake. I know that it is not for daughters to defend the truth, though one might say, unfortunately, that since the bishops have the courage of daughters, the daughters must have the courage of bishops; but, if it is not for us to defend the truth, it is for us to die for the truth, and suffer everything rather than abandon it."

Jacqueline subscribed, divided between her instinctive repugnance and her desire to show herself a "humble daughter of the Catholic church." "It is all we can concede," she said; "for the rest, come what may, poverty, dispersion, imprisonment, death, all this seems to me nothing in comparison with the anguish in which I should pa.s.s the remainder of my life if I had been wretch enough to make a covenant with death on so excellent an occasion of paying to G.o.d the vows of fidelity which our lips have p.r.o.nounced." "Her health was so shaken by the shock which all this business caused her," writes Madame Prier, "that she fell dangerously ill, and died soon after." "Think not, I beg of you, my father," she wrote to M. Arnauld, "firm as I may appear, that nature does not greatly apprehend all the consequences of this; but I hope that grace will sustain me, and it seems to me as if I feel it." "The king does all he wills," Madame de Guemenee had said to M. Le Tellier, whom she was trying to soften towards Port-Royal; "he makes princes of the blood, he makes archbishops and bishops, and he will make martyrs likewise."

Jacqueline Pascal was "the first victim" of the formulary.

She was not the only one. "It will not stop there," said the king, to whom it was announced that the daughters of Port-Royal consented to sign the formulary on condition only of giving an explanation of their conduct. Cardinal de Retz had at last sent in his resignation. M. du Marca, archbishop designate in succession to him, died three days after receiving the bulls from Rome; Hardouin de Porefix had just been nominated in his place. He repaired to Port-Royal. The days of grace were over, the nuns remained indomitable.

"What is the use of all your prayers?" said he to Sister Christine Brisquet; "what ground for G.o.d to listen to you? You go to Him and say, 'My G.o.d, give me Thy spirit and Thy grace; but, my G.o.d, I do not mean to subscribe; I will take good care not to do that for all that may be said.' After that, what ground for G.o.d to hearken to you?" He forbade the nuns the sacraments. "They are pure as angels and proud as demons,"

repeated the archbishop angrily, as he left the convent. On the 25th of August he returned to Port-Royal, accompanied by a numerous escort of ecclesiastics and exons. "When I say a thing, so it must be," he said as he entered; "I will not eat my words." He picked out twelve nuns, who were immediately taken away and dispersed in different monasteries. M.

d'Andilly was at the gate, receiving in his carriage his sister, Mother Agnes, aged and infirm, and his three daughters doomed to exile. "I had borne up all day without weeping and without inclination thereto," writes Mother Angelica de St. Jean on arrival at the _Annonciades bleues;_ "but when night came, and, after finis.h.i.+ng all my prayers, I thought to lay me down and take some rest, I felt myself all in a moment bruised and lacerated in every part by the separations I had just gone through; I then found sensibly that, to escape weakness in the hour of deep affliction, there must be no dropping of the eyes that have been lifted to the mountains." Ten months later the exiled nuns returned, without having subscribed, to Port-Royal des Champs, a little before the moment when M. de Saci, who had become their secret director since the death of M. Singlin, was arrested, together with his secretary, Fontaine, at six in the morning, in front of the Bastille. "As he had for two years past been expecting imprisonment, he had got the epistles of St. Paul bound up together so as to always carry them about with him. 'Let them do with me what they please,' he was wont to say; 'wherever they put me, provided that I have my St. Paul with me, I fear nothing.'" On the 13th of May, 1666, the day of his arrest, M. de Saci had for once happened to forget his book. He was put into the Bastille, after an examination "which revealed a man of much wit and worth," said the king himself. Fontaine remained separated from him for three months. "Liberty, for me, is to be with M. de Saci," said the faithful secretary; "open the door of his room and that of the Bastille, and you will see to which of the two I shall run. Without him everything will be prison to me; I shall be free wherever I see him." At last he had the joy of recovering his well-beloved master, strictly watched and still deprived of the sacraments. Like Luther at Wartburg, he was finis.h.i.+ng the revisal of his translation of the Bible, when his cousins, MM. de Pomponne and Arnauld, entered his room on the 31st of October, 1668. They chatted a while without any appearance of impatience on the part of M. de Saci. "You are free," said his friends at last, who had wanted to prove him; "and they showed him the king's order, which he read," says Abbe Arnauld, "without any change of countenance, and as little affected by joy as he had been a moment before by the longinquity of his release."

He lived fifteen years longer, occupied, during the interval of rest which the Peace of the Church restored to Port-Royal, in directing and fortifying souls. He published, one after another, the volumes of his translation of the Bible, with expositions (_eclairciss.e.m.e.nts_) which had been required by the examiners. In 1679 the renewal of the king's severities compelled him to retire completely to Pomponne. On the 3d of January, 1684, at seventy-one years of age, he felt ill and went to bed; he died next day, without being taken by surprise, as regarded either his affairs or his soul, by so speedy an end. "O blessed flames of purgatory!" he said, as he breathed his last. He had requested to be buried at Port-Royal des Champs; he was borne thither at night; the cold was intense, and the roads were covered with snow; the carriages were escorted by men carrying torches. The nuns looked a moment upon the face of the saintly director, whom they had not seen for so many years; and then he was lowered into his grave. "Needs hide in earth what is but earth," said Mother Angelica de St. Jean, in deep accents and a lowly voice, "and return to nothingness what in itself is but nothing." She was, nevertheless, heart-broken, and tarried only for this pious duty to pa.s.s away in her turn. "It is time to give up my veil to him from whom I received it," said she. A fortnight after the death of M. de Saci, she expired at Port-Royal, just preceding to the tomb her brother M. de Luzancy, who breathed his last at Pomponne, where he had lived with M. de Saci. "I confess," said the inconsolable Fontaine, "that when I saw this brother and sister stricken with death by that of M. de Saci, I blushed-- I who thought I had always loved him--not to follow him like them; and I became, consequently, exasperated with myself for loving so little in comparison with those persons, whose love had been strong as death." The human heart avenges itself for the tortures men pretentiously inflict upon it: the disciples of St. Cyran thought to stifle in their souls all earthly affections, and they died of grief on losing those they loved.

"Their life ebbed away in those depths of tears," as M. Vinet has said.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Abbey of Port-Royal----580]

The great Port-Royal was dead with M. de Saci and Mother Angelica de St.

Jean, faithful and modest imitators of their ill.u.s.trious predecessors.

The austere virtue and the pious severance from the world existed still in the house in the Fields, under the direction of Duguet; the persecution too continued, persistent and noiseless; the king had given the direction of his conscience to the Jesuits; from Father La Chaise, moderate and prudent, he had pa.s.sed to Father Letellier, violent and perfidious; furthermore, the long persistence of the Jansenists in their obstinacy, their freedom of thought which infringed the unity so dear to Louis XIV., displeased the monarch, absolute even in his hour of humiliation and defeat. The property of Port-Royal was seized, and Cardinal de Noailles, well disposed at bottom towards the Jansenists, but so feeble in character that determination, disgusted him as if it were a personal insult, ended by once more forbidding the nuns the sacraments; the house in the Fields was surpressed, and its t.i.tle merged in that of Port-Royal in Paris, for some time past replenished with submissive nuns.

Madame de Chateau-Renaud, "the new abbess, went to take possession; the daughters of Mother Angelica protested, but without violence, as she would have done in their place." On the 29th of October, 1709, after prime, Father Letellier having told the king that Madame de Chateau- Renaud dared not to go to Port-Royal des Champs, being convinced that those headstrong, disobedient, and rebellious daughters would laugh at the king's decree, and that, unless his Majesty would be pleased to give precise orders to disperse them, it would never be possible to carry it out, the king, being pressed in this way, sent his orders to M. d'Argenson, lieutenant of police."

[Ill.u.s.tration: Reading the Decree 581]

He appeared at Port-Royal with a commissary and two exons. He asked for the prioress; she was at church: when service was over, he summoned all the nuns; one, old and very paralytic, was missing. "Let her be brought," said M. d'Argenson. "His Majesty's orders are," he continued, "that you break up this a.s.semblage, never to meet again. It is your general dispersal that I announce to you; you are allowed but three hours to break up." "We are ready to obey, sir," said the mother-prioress; "half an hour is more than sufficient for us to say our last good by, and take with us a breviary, a Bible, and our regulations." And when he asked her whither she meant to go, "Sir, the moment our community is broken up and dispersed, it is indifferent to me in what place I may be personally, since I hope to find G.o.d wherever I shall be." They got into carriages, receiving one after another the farewell and blessing of the mother-prioress, who was the last to depart, remaining firm to the end there were two and twenty, the youngest fifty years old; they all died in the convents to which they were taken. A seizure was at once made of all papers and books left in the cells; Cardinal Noailles did not interfere.

M. de St. Cyran had depicted him by antic.i.p.ation, when he said that the weak were more to be feared than the wicked. He was complaining one day of his differences with his bishops. "What can you expect, Monsignor?"

laughingly said a lady well disposed to the Jansenists; "G.o.d is just; it is the stones of Port-Royal tumbling upon your head." The tombs were destroyed; some coffins were carried to a distance, others left and profaned; the plough pa.s.sed over the ruins; the hatred of the enemies of Port-Royal was satiated. A few of the faithful, preserving in their hearts the ardent faith of M. de St. Cyran, narrowed, however, and absorbed by obstinate resistance, a few theologians dying in exile, and leaving in Holland a succession of bishops detached from the Roman church,--this was all that remained of one of the n.o.blest attempts ever made by the human soul to rise, here below, above that which is permitted by human nature. Virtues of the utmost force, Christianity zealously pushed to its extremest limits, and the most invincible courage, sustained the Jansenists in a conscientious struggle against spiritual oppression; its life died out, little by little, amongst the dispersed members. The Catholic church suffered therefrom in its innermost sanctuary. "The Catholic religion would only be more neglected if there were no more religionists," said Vauban, in his Memoire in favor of the Protestants. It was the same as regarded the Jansenists. The Jesuits and Louis XIV., in their ignorant pa.s.sion, for unity and uniformity, had not comprehended that great principle of healthy freedom and sound justice of which the scientific soldier had a glimmering.

The insurrection of the Camisards, in the Cevennes, had been entirely of a popular character; the Jansenists had penitents amongst the great of this world, though none properly belonged to them or retired to their convents or their solitudes; it was the great French burgessdom, issue for the most part of the magistracy, which supplied their most fervent a.s.sociates. Fenelon and Madame Guyon founded their little church at court and amongst the great lords; and many remained faithful to them till death. The spiritual letters of Fenelon, models of wisdom, pious tact, moderation, and knowledge of the human heart, are nearly all addressed to persons engaged in the life and the offices of the court, exposed to all the temptations of the world. It is no longer the desert of the penitents of PortRoyal, or the strict cloister of Mother Angelica; Fenelon is for only inward restrictions and an abstention purely spiritual; from afar and in his retreat at Cambrai, he watches over his faithful flock with a tender pre-occupation which does not make him overlook the duties of their position. "Take as penance for your sins,"

he wrote, "the disagreeable liabilities of the position you are in: the very hinderances which seem injurious to our advancement in piety turn to our profit, provided that we do what depends on ourselves. Fail not in any of your duties towards the court, as regards your office and the proprieties, but be not anxious for posts which awaken ambition." Such are, with their discreet tolerance, the teachings of Fenelon, adapted for the guidance of the Dukes of Beauvilliers and Chevreuse, and of the Duke of Burgundy himself. He went much further, and on less safe a road, when he was living at court, under the influence of Madame Guyon. A widow and still young, gifted with an ardent spirit and a lofty and subtile mind, Madame Guyon had imagined, in her mystical enthusiasm, a theory of pure love, very a.n.a.logous fundamentally, if not in its practical consequences, to the doctrines taught shortly before by a Spanish priest named Molinos, condemned by the court of Rome in 1687. It was about the same time that Madame Guyon went to Paris, with her book on the _Moyen court et facile de faire l'Oraison du Coeur_ (Short and easy Method of making Orison with the Heart). Prayer, according to this wholly mystical teaching, loses the character of supplication or intercession, to become the simple silence of a soul absorbed in G.o.d. "Why are not simple folks so taught?"

she said. "Shepherds keeping their flocks would have the spirit of the old anchorites; and laborers, whilst driving the plough, would talk happily with G.o.d: all vice would be banished in a little while, and the kingdom of G.o.d would be realized on earth."

It was a far cry from the sanguinary struggle against sin and the armed Christianity of the Jansenists; the sublime and specious visions of Madame Guy on fascinated lofty and gentle souls: the d.u.c.h.ess of Charost, daughter of Fouquet, Mesdames de Beauvilliers, de Chevreuse, de Mortemart, daughters of Colbert, and their pious husbands, were the first to be chained to her feet. Fenelon, at that time, preceptor to the children of France (royal family), saw her, admired her, and became imbued with her doctrines. She was for a while admitted to the intimacy of Madame de Maintenon. It was for this little nucleus of faithful friends that she wrote her book of _Torrents_. The human soul is a torrent which returns to its source, in G.o.d, who lives in perfect repose, and who would fain give it to those who are His. The Christian soul has nothing more that is its, neither will nor desire. It has G.o.d for soul; He is its principle of life." In this way there is nothing extraordinary. No visions, no ecstasies, no entrancements. The way is simple, pure, and plain; there the soul sees nothing but in G.o.d, as G.o.d sees Himself and with His eyes." With less vagueness, and quite as mystically, Fenelon defined the sublime love taught by Madame Guyon in the following maxim, afterwards condemned at Rome: "There is an habitual state of love of G.o.d which is pure charity, without any taint of the motive of self-interest. Neither fear of punishment nor desire of reward have any longer part in this love; G.o.d is loved not for the merit, or the perfection, or the happiness to be found in loving Him." What singular seductiveness in those theories of pure love which were taught at the court of Louis XIV., by his grandchildren's preceptor, at a woman's instigation, and zealously preached fifty years afterwards by President (of New Jersey College) Jonathan Edwards, in the cold and austere atmosphere of New England!

Led away by the generous enthusiasm of his soul, Fenelon had not probed the dangers of his new doctrine. The gospel and church of Christ, whilst preaching the love of G.o.d, had strongly maintained the fact of human individuality and responsibility. The theory of mere (pure) love absorbing the soul in G.o.d put an end to repentance, effort to withstand evil, and the need of a Redeemer. Bossuet was not deceived. The elevation of his mind, combined with strong common sense, caused him to see through all the veils of the mysticism. Madame Guyon had submitted her books to him; he disapproved of them, at first quietly, then formally, after a thorough examination in conjunction with two other doctors. Madame Guyon retired to a monastery of Meaux; she soon returned to Paris, and her believers rallied round her. Bossuet, in his anger, no longer held his hand. Madame Guyon was shut up first at Vincennes, and then in the Bastille; she remained seven years in prison, and ended by retiring to near Blois, where she died in 1717, still absorbed in her holy and vague reveries, praying no more inasmuch as she possessed G.o.d, "a submissive daughter, however, of the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman Church, having and desiring to admit no other opinion but its," as she says in her will. Bourdaloue calls mere (pure) love "a bare faith, which has for its object no verity of the gospel's, no mystery of Jesus Christ's, no attribute of G.o.d's, nothing whatever, unless it be, in a word, G.o.d." In the presence of death, on the approach of the awful realities of eternity, Madame Guyon no doubt felt the want of a more simple faith in the mighty and living G.o.d. Fenelon had not waited so long to surrender.

The instinct of the pious and vigorous souls of the seventeenth century had not allowed them to go astray: there was little talk of pantheism, which had spread considerably in the sixteenth century; but there had been a presentiment of the dangers lurking behind the doctrines of Madame Guyon. Bossuet, that great and n.o.ble type of the finest period of the Catholic church in France, made the mistake of pus.h.i.+ng his victory too far. Fenelon, a young priest when the great Bishop of Meaux was already in his zenith, had preserved towards him a profound affection and a deep respect. "We are, by antic.i.p.ation, agreed, however you may decide," he wrote to him on the 28th of July, 1694: "it will be no specious submission, but a sincere conviction. Though that which I suppose myself to have read should appear to me clearer than that two and two make four, I should consider it still less clear than my obligation to mistrust all my lights, and to prefer before them those of a bishop such as you. You have only to give me my lesson in writing; provided that you wrote me precisely what is the doctrine of the church, and what are the articles in which I have slipped, I would tie myself down inviolably to that rule." Bossuet required more; he wanted Fenelon, recently promoted to the Archbishopric of Cambrai, to approve of the book he was preparing on _Etats d'Oraison_ (States of Orison), and explicitly to condemn the works of Madame Guyon. Fenelon refused with generous indignation. "So it is to secure my own reputation," he writes to Madame de Maintenon, in 1696, "that I am wanted to subscribe that a lady, my friend, would plainly deserve to be burned with all her writings, for an execrable form of spirituality, which is the only bond of our friends.h.i.+p? I tell you, madame, I would burn my friend with my own hands, and I would burn myself joyfully, rather than let the church be imperilled. But here is a poor captive woman, overwhelmed with sorrows; there is none to defend her, none to excuse her; they are always afraid to do so. I maintain that this stroke of the pen, given by me against my conscience, from a cowardly policy, would render me forever infamous, and unworthy of my ministry and my position." Fenelon no longer submitted his reason and his conduct, then, to the judgment of Bossuet; he recognized in him an adversary, but he still spoke of him with profound veneration. "Fear not," he writes to Madame de Maintenon, "that I should gainsay M. de Meaux; I shall never speak of him but as of my master, and of his propositions but as the rule of faith." Fenelon was at Cambrai, being regular in the residence which removed him for nine months in the year from the court and the children of France, when there appeared his _Explication des Maximes des Saints sur la Vie Interieure_ (Exposition of the Maxims of the Saints touching the Inner Life), almost at the same moment as Bossuet's _Instruction sur les Etats d' Oraison_ (Lessons on States of Orison). Fenelon's book appeared as dangerous as those of Madame Guyon; he himself submitted it to the pope, and was getting ready to repair to Rome to defend his cause, when the king wrote to him, "I do not think proper to allow you to go to Rome; you must, on the contrary, repair to your diocese, whence I forbid you to go away; you can send to Rome your pleas in justification of your book."

Fenelon departed to an exile which was to last as long as his life; on his departure, he wrote to Madame de Maintenon, "I shall depart hence, madame, to-morrow, Friday, in obedience to the king. My greatest sorrow is to have wearied him and to displease him. I shall not cease, all the days of my life, to pray G.o.d to pour His graces upon him. I consent to be crushed more and more. The only thing I ask of his Majesty is, that the diocese of Cambrai, which is guiltless, may not suffer for the errors imputed to me. I ask protection only for the sake of the church, and even that protection I limit to not being disturbed in those few good works which my present position permits me to do, in order to fulfil a pastor's duties. It remains for me, madame, only to ask your pardon for all the trouble I have caused you. I shall all my life be as deeply sensible of your former kindnesses as if I had not forfeited them, and my respectful attachment to yourself, madame, will never diminish."

Fenelon made no mistake in addressing to Madame de Maintenon his farewell and his regrets; she had acted against him with the uneasiness of a person led away for a moment by an irresistible attraction, and returning, quite affrighted, to rule and the beaten paths. The mere love theory had no power to fascinate her for long. The Archbishop of Cambrai did not drop out of that pleasant dignity. The pious councillors of the king were working against him at Rome, bringing all the influence of France to weigh upon Innocent XII. Fenelon had taken no part in the declarations of the Gallican church, in 1682, which had been drawn up by Bossuet; the court of Rome was inclined towards him; the strife became bitter and personal; pamphlets succeeded pamphlets, letters. Bossuet published a _Relation du Quietisme_ (An Account of Quietism), and remarks upon the reply of M. de Cambrai. "I write this for the people," he said, "in order that, the character of M. de Cambrai being known, his eloquence may, with G.o.d's permission, no more impose upon anybody." Fenelon replied with a vigor, a fullness, and a moderation which brought men's minds over to him. "You do more for me by the excess of your accusations," said he to Bossuet, "than I could do myself. But what a melancholy consolation when we look at the scandal which troubles the house of G.o.d, and which causes so many heretics and libertines (free- thinkers) to triumph! Whatever end may be put by a holy pontiff to this matter, I await it with impatience, having no wish but to obey, no fear but to be in the wrong, no object but peace. I hope that it will be seen from my silence, my unreserved submission, my constant horror of illusion, my isolation from any book and any person of a suspicious sort, that the evil you would fain have caused to be apprehended is as chimerical as the scandal has been real, and that violent measures taken against imaginary evils turn to poison."

Fenelon was condemned on the 12th of March, 1699; the sentence of Rome was mild, and hinted no suspicion of heresy; it had been wrested from the pope by the urgency of Louis XIV. "It would be painful to his Majesty,"

wrote the Bishop of Meaux in the king's name, "to see a new schism growing up amongst his subjects at the very time that he is applying himself with all his might to the task of extirpating that of Calvin, and if he saw the prolongation, by manoeuvres which are incomprehensible, of a matter which appeared to be at an end. He will know what he has to do, and will take suitable resolutions, still hoping, nevertheless, that his Holiness will not be pleased to reduce him to such disagreeable extremities." When the threat reached Rome, Innocent XII. had already yielded.

Fenelon submitted to the pope's decision completely and unreservedly.

"G.o.d gives me grace to be at peace amidst bitterness and sorrow," he wrote to the Duke of Beauvilliers on the 29th of March, 1699. "Amongst so many troubles I have one consolation little fitted to be known in the world, but solid enough for those who seek G.o.d in good faith, and that is, that my conduct is quite decided upon, and that I have no longer to deliberate. It only remains for me to submit and hold my peace; that is what I have always desired. I have now but to choose the terms of my submission; the shortest, the simplest, the most absolute, the most devoid of any restriction, are those that I rather prefer. My conscience is disburdened in that of my superior. In all this, far from having an eye to my advantage, I have no eye to any man; I see but G.o.d, and I am content with what He does."

Bossuet had triumphed: his vaster mind, his more sagacious insight, his stronger judgment had unravelled the dangerous errors in which Fenelon had allowed himself to be entangled. The Archbishop of Cambrai, however, had grown in the estimation of good men on account of his moderation, his gentle and high-spirited independence during the struggle, his submission, full of dignity, after the papal decision. The mind of Bossuet was the greater; the spirit of Fenelon was the n.o.bler and more deeply pious. "I cannot consent to have my book defended even indirectly," he wrote to one of his friends on the 21st of July, 1699.

"In G.o.d's name, speak not of me but to G.o.d only, and leave men to think as they please; as for me, I have no object but silence and peace after my unreserved submission."

Fenelon was not detached from the world and his hopes to quite such an extent as he would have had it appear. He had educated the Duke of Burgundy, who remained pa.s.sionately attached to him, and might hope for a return of prosperity. He remained in the silence and retirement of his diocese, with the character of an able and saintly bishop, keeping open house, grandly and simply, careful of the welfare of the soldiery who pa.s.sed through Cambrai, adored by his clergy and the people. "Never a word about the court, or about public affairs of any sort that could be found fault with, or any that smacked the least in the world of baseness, regret, or flattery," writes St. Simon; "never anything that could give a bare hint of what he had been or might be again. He was a tall, thin man, well made, pale, with a large nose, eyes from which fire and intellect streamed like a torrent, and a physiognomy such that I have never seen any like it, and there was no forgetting it when it had been seen but once. It combined everything, and there was no conflict of opposites in it. There were gravity and gallantry, the serious and the gay; it savored equally of the learned doctor, the bishop, and the great lord; that which appeared on its surface, as well as in his whole person, was refinement, intellect, grace, propriety, and, above all, n.o.bility.

It required an effort to cease looking at him. His manners corresponded therewith in the same proportion, with an ease which communicated it to others; with all this, a man who never desired to show more wits than they with whom he conversed, who put himself within everybody's range without ever letting it be perceived, in such wise that n.o.body could drop him, or fight shy of him, or not want to see him again. It was this rare talent, which he possessed to the highest degree, that kept his friends so completely attached to him all his life, in spite of his downfall, and that, in their dispersion, brought them together to speak of him, to sorrow after him, to yearn for him, to bind themselves more and more to him, as the Jews to Jerusalem, and to sigh after his return and hope continually for it, just as that unfortunate people still expects and sighs after the Messiah."

Those faithful friends were dropping one after another. The death of the Duke of Burgundy and of the Duke of Chevreuse in 1712, and that of the Duke of Beauvilliers in 1714, were a fatal blow to the affections as well as to the ambitious hopes of Fenelon. Of delicate health, worn out by the manifold duties of the episcopate, inwardly wearied by long and vain expectation, he succ.u.mbed on the 7th of January, 1715, at the moment when the attraction shown by the Duke of Orleans towards him and "the king's declining state" were once more renewing his chances of power. "He was already consulted in private and courted again in public," says St.

Simon, "because the inclination of the rising sun had already shown through." He died, however, without letting any sign of yearning for life appear, "regardless of all that he was leaving, and occupied solely with that which he was going to meet, with a tranquillity, a peace, which excluded nothing but disquietude, and which included penitence, despoilment, and a unique care for the spiritual affairs of his diocese."

The Christian soul was detaching itself from the world to go before G.o.d with sweet and simple confidence. "O, how great is G.o.d! how all in all!

How as nothing are we when we are so near Him, and when the veil which conceals Him from us is about to lift!" [_Euvres de Fenelon, Lettres Spirituelles,_ xxv. 128.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Bossuet----591]

So many fires smouldering in the hearts, so many different struggles going on in the souls, that sought to manifest their personal and independent life have often caused forgetfulness of the great ma.s.s of the faithful who were neither Jansenists nor Quietists. Bossuet was the real head and the pride of the great Catholic church of France in the seventeenth century; what he approved of was approved of by the immense majority of the French clergy, what he condemned was condemned by them.

Moderate and prudent in conduct as well as in his opinions, pious without being fervent, holding discreetly aloof from all excesses, he was a Gallican without fear and without estrangement as regarded the papal power, to which he steadfastly paid homage. It was with pain, and not without having sought to escape therefrom, that he found himself obliged, at the a.s.sembly of the clergy in 1682, to draw up the solemn declarations of the Gallican church. The meeting of the clergy had been called forth by the eternal discussions of the civil power with the court of Rome on the question of the rights of regale, that is to say, the rights of the sovereign to receive the revenues of vacant bishoprics, and to appoint to benefices belonging to them. The French bishops were of independent spirit; the Archbishop of Paris, Francis de Harlay, was on bad terms with Pope Innocent XI.; Bossuet managed to moderate the discussions, and kept within suitable bounds the declaration which he could not avoid. He had always taught and maintained what was proclaimed by the a.s.sembly of the clergy of France, "that St. Peter and his successors, vicars of Jesus Christ, and the whole church itself, received from G.o.d authority over only spiritual matters and such as appertain to salvation, and not over temporal and civil matters, in such sort that kings and sovereigns are not subject to tiny ecclesiastical power, by order of G.o.d, in temporal matters, and cannot be deposed directly or indirectly by authority of the keys of the church; finally, that, though the pope has the princ.i.p.al part in questions of faith, and though his decrees concern all the churches and each church severally, his judgment is, nevertheless, not irrefragable, unless the consent of the church intervene." Old doctrines in the church of France, but never before so solemnly declared and made inc.u.mbent upon the teaching of all the faculties of theology in the kingdom.

Constantly occupied in the dogmatic struggle against Protestantism, Bossuet had imported into it a moderation in form which, however, did not keep out injustice. Without any inclination towards persecution, he, with almost unanimity on the part of the bishops of France, approved of the king's piety in the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. "Take up your sacred pens," says he in his funeral oration over Michael Le Tellier,

"ye who compose the annals of the church; haste ye to place Louis amongst the peers of Constantine and Theodosius. Our fathers saw not as we have seen an inveterate heresy falling at a single blow, scattered flocks returning in a ma.s.s, and our churches too narrow to receive them, their false shepherds leaving them without even awaiting the order, and happy to have their banishment to allege as excuse; all tranquillity amidst so great a movement; the universe astounded to see in so novel an event the most certain sign as well as the most n.o.ble use of authority, and the prince's merit more recognized and more revered than even his authority.

Moved by so many marvels, say ye to this new Constantine, this new Theodosius, this new Marciaau, this new Charlemagne, what the six hundred and thirty Fathers said aforetime in the council of Chaloedon, You have confirmed the faith; you have exterminated the heretics; that is the worthy achievement of your reign, that is its own characteristic.

Through you heresy is no more. G.o.d alone could have wrought this marvel.

King of heaven, preserve the king of earth; that is the prayer of the churches, that is the prayer of the bishops." Bossuet, like Louis XIV., believed Protestantism to be destroyed. "Heresy is no more," he said.

It was the same feeling that prompted Louis XIV., when dying, to the edict of March 8, 1715. "We learn," said he, "that, abjurations being frequently made in provinces distant from those in which our newly converted subjects die, our judges to whom those who die relapsed are denounced find a difficulty in condemning them, for want of proof of their abjuration. The stay which those who were of the religion styled Reformed have made in our kingdom since we abolished therein all exercise of the said religion is a more than sufficient proof that they have embraced the Catholic religion, without which they would have been neither suffered nor tolerated." There did not exist, there could not exist, any more Protestants in France; all who died without sacraments were relapsed, and as such dragged on the hurdle. Those who were not married at a Catholic church were not married. M. Guizot was born at Nimes on the 4th of October, 1787, before Protestants possessed any civil rights in France.

Bossuet had died on the 12th of April, 1704. When troubles began again in the church, the enemies of the Jansenists obtained from the king a decree interdicting the _Reflexions morales cur le Nouveau Testament,_ an old and highly esteemed work by Father Quesnel, some time an Oratorian, who had become head of the Jansenists on the death of the great Arnauld.

Its condemnation at Rome was demanded. Cardinal de Noailles, Archbishop of Paris, had but lately, as Bishop of Chalons, approved of the book; he refused to retract his approbation; the Jesuits made urgent representations to the pope; Clement XI. launched the bull _Unigenitus,_ condemning a hundred and one propositions extracted from the _Reflexions morales_. Eight prelates, with Cardinal de Noailles at their head, protested against the bull; it was, nevertheless, enregistered at the Parliament, but not without difficulty. The archbishop still held out, supported by the greater part of the religious orders and the majority of the doctors of Sorbonne. The king's confessor, Letellier, pressed him to prosecute the cardinal and get him deposed by a national council; the affair dragged its slow length along at Rome; the archbishop had suspended from the sacred functions all the Jesuits of his diocese; the struggle had commenced under the name of Jansenism against the whole Gallican church. The king was about to bring the matter before his bed of justice, when he fell ill. He saw no more of Cardinal de Noailles, and this rupture vexed him. "I am sorry to leave the affairs of the church in the state in which they are," he said to his councillors. "I am perfectly ignorant in the matter; you know, and I call you to witness, that I have done nothing therein but what you wanted, and that I have done all you wanted. It is you who will answer before G.o.d for all that has been done, whether too much or too little. I charge you with it before Him, and I have a clear conscience. I am but a know-nothing who have left myself to your guidance." An awful appeal from a dying king to the guides of his conscience. He had dispeopled his kingdom, reduced to exile, despair, or falsehood fifteen hundred thousand of his subjects, but the memory of the persecutions inflicted upon the Protestants did not trouble him; they were for him rather a pledge of his salvation and of his acceptance before G.o.d. He was thinking of the Catholic church, the holy priests exiled or imprisoned, the nuns driven from their convent, the division among the bishops, the scandal amongst the faithful. The great burden of absolute power was evident to his eyes; he sought to let it fall back upon the shoulders of those who had enticed him or urged him upon that fatal path. A vain attempt in the eyes of men, whatever may be the judgment of G.o.d's sovereign mercy. History has left weighing upon Louis XIV. the crus.h.i.+ng weight of the religious persecutions ordered under his reign.

CHAPTER XLVIII.----LOUIS XIV., LITERATURE AND ART.

It has been said in this History that Louis XIV. had the fortune to find himself at the culminating point of absolute monarchy, and to profit by the labors of his predecessors, reaping a portion of their glory; he had likewise the honor of enriching himself with the labors of his contemporaries, and attracting to himself a share of their l.u.s.tre; the honor, be it said, not the fortune, for he managed to remain the centre of intellectual movement as well as of the court, of literature and art as well as affairs of state. Only the abrupt and solitary genius of Pascal or the prankish and ingenuous geniality of La Fontaine held aloof from king and court; Racine and Moliere, Bossuet and Fenelon, La Bruyere and Boileau lived frequently in the circle of Louis XIV., and enjoyed in different degrees his favor; M. de la Rochefoucauld and Madame de Sevigne were of the court; Lebrun, Rigaud, Mignard, painted for the king; Perrault and Mansard constructed the Louvre and Versailles; the learned of all countries considered it an honor to correspond with the new academies founded in France. Louis XIV. was even less a man of letters or an artist than an administrator or a soldier; but literature and art, as well as the superintendents and the generals, found in him the King.

The puissant unity of the reign is everywhere the same. The king and the nation are in harmony.