Chapter IV (2)

Mademoiselle knew her power and talked openly of what she could do. "I am," she said, "a very bad enemy; hot-tempered, strong in anger; and that, added to my birth, may well make my enemies tremble." She could say it without boasting: she was a Free Lance and the great French People was her clan.

III

Two years[94] previous to the serio-comic scene in the Palais Royal, Emperor Ferdinand III. had barely escaped causing a catastrophe. Had the catastrophe been effected the victim would have been the Princess of a reigning house. This is a very roundabout way of saying that Mademoiselle's anxiety to marry the Emperor led her to prepare for the alliance by practising religion; and that once engaged in the practice, she was seized by the desire to become a nun.

The turbulent Princess who so ardently aspired to the throne of Ferdinand III. was as free in spirit as she was independent in action, and being hampered by no religion but the religion of culture, she followed her fancies and adopted a line of conduct in singular opposition to her natural behaviour and inclinations. Lured by ambitious policy to affect the attitude of religious devotion, she fell into her own net and was so deceived by her feelings that she supposed that she wished to take the veil. The fact that at heart her wishes tended in a diametrically opposite direction furnished the most striking proof of the power of hypnotic auto-suggestion. I am speaking now of a time previous to Saujon's mission to Germany. In her own words:

The desire to be an empress followed me wherever I journeyed, and
the effects of my wishes seemed to be so close at hand that I was
led to believe that it would be well for me to form habits best
suited to the habits and to the humour of the Emperor. I had heard
it said that he was very devout, and by following his example I
became so worshipful that after I had feigned the appearance of
devotion a while I longed to be a nun. I never breathed a word of
it to any one; but during the whole of eight days I was inspired by
a desire to become a Carmelite. I was so engrossed by this feeling
that I could neither eat nor sleep. And I was so beset by that
anxiety added to my natural anxiety, that they feared lest I should
fall ill. Every time that the Queen went into the convents--which
happened often--I remained in the church alone; and thinking of
all the persons who loved me and who would regret my retreat from
the world, I wept. So that which appeared to be a struggle with my
religious desire to break away from my worldly self was in reality
a struggle progressing in my heart between my wish to enter the
convent and my horror of leaving all whom I loved, and breaking
away from all my tenderness for them. I can say only this: during
these eight days the Empire was nothing to me. But I must avow that
I felt a certain amount of vanity because I was to leave the world
under such important circumstances.

Mademoiselle had hung out the sign-board of religion--if I may use such a term--and she multiplied all the symptoms of religious conversion. To quote her own words:

I did not appear at Court. I did not wear my patches, I did not
powder my hair,--in fact, I neglected my hair until it was so long
and so dusty that it completely disguised me. I used to wear three
kerchiefs around my neck,--one over the other,--and they muffled
me so that in warm weather I nearly smothered. As I wished to look
like a woman forty years old, I never wore any coloured riband.
As for pleasure, I took pleasure in nothing but in reading and
re-reading the life of Saint Theresa.

No one was astonished by religious demonstrations of that kind. Custom did not oppose the admission of the public to the spectacle of intimate mental or spiritual crises which it is now considered proper to conceal. The only thing astonishing was that Mademoiselle had harboured the idea of forsaking the world. Her friends ridiculed her, and, stung by their raillery, she recanted. Speaking of it later, she said: "I wondered at my ideas; I scoffed at my infatuation. I made excuses because I had ever dreamed of such a project."

Monsieur was more surprised than his neighbours, and his surprise assumed a more virulent form; when his daughter begged to be permitted to enter a convent, when she declared that she would "better love to serve God than to wear the royal crowns of all the world," he gave way to a violent outburst of fury. Mademoiselle did not repeat her petition; she begged him to let the subject drop; and thus ended the comedy.

In any other quarter curiosity regarding details would have been the only sentiment aroused by such a project. The daughters of many noble families and the daughters of families beyond the pale of the nobility entered convents. In the spiritual slough in which France floundered toward the close of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century, the nun's veil and the monk's habit were the only suitable coverings for mental distress, and in many cases the convent and the monastery were the sole places of refuge in a world so lamentable that Bérulle[95] and Vincent de Paul contemplated it with anguish. The convent was the only safe shelter for souls in which the germs of religious life had resisted the inroads of spiritual disease. In certain parts of the country, the annihilation of the Christian principle had resulted in the degradation of the Sacred Office and in the increase of the number of skeptics in the higher classes.

Saving a few exceptions, who were types of the Temple of the Holy Ghost, the Church set the example of every form and every degree of contempt for its corporate body, for its individual members, and for its consecrated accessories. I have already spoken of the elegant cavaliers, who, in their leisure moments, played the part of priests. In their eyes a bishopric was a sinecure like another sinecure. The office of the priesthood entailed no special conduct, nor any special duty. In general, priests were shepherds who passed their lives at a distance from their flocks, revelling in luxury and in pleasure. "Turning abruptly," said an ecclesiastical writer, "from the pleasures of the Court to the austere duties of the priesthood, without any preparation save the royal ordinance,--an ordinance, peradventure, due to secret and unavowable solicitations,--men assumed the office and became bishops before they had received Holy Orders. Naturally, such haphazard bishops brought to the Episcopate minds far from ecclesiastical." In that day cardinals and bishops were seen distributing the benefits of their dioceses among their lower domestic tributaries. Thus valets, cooks, barbers, and lackeys were covered with the sacred vestments, and called to serve the altar.[96] Being abandoned to their own devices, the lesser clergy--heirs to all the failings and all the weaknesses of the lower classes of the people--grovelled in ignorance and in disorder. The continually augmenting evil was aggravated by the way in which the Church recruited the rank and file of her legions. As a rule, the cure, or living of the curé, was in the gift of the abbot. No one but the abbot had a right to appoint a curé. The abbot's power descended to his successor. That would have been well enough, had the abbot's virtues and good judgment--if such there had been--descended to the man immediately following him in office, but the abbot thus empowered to appoint the curé was seldom capable of making a good choice or even a decent choice.

The Court bestowed the abbeys on infants in the cradle, and the titulars were generally the illegitimate children of the princes, younger sons of great seigniors, notably gallant soldiers, and notoriously "gallant" women. The abbots were laical protégés of every origin, of every profession, and of every character. Henry IV. bestowed abbeys indiscriminately. Among other notables who received the office of abbot at his hands were a certain number of Protestants and an equally certain number of women. Sully possessed four abbeys: "the fair Corisande" possessed an abbey (the Abbey of Chatillon-sur-Seine, where Saint Bernard had been raised). The fantastic abbots did not exert themselves to find suitable curés, and even had they been disposed to do so, where could they have gone to look for them? There were no clerical nursery-gardens in which to sow choice seed and to root cuttings for the parterres of the Church, and this was the chief cause of the prevailing evil. As there were no seminaries, and as the presbyterial schools were in decay, there were no places where men could make serious preparation for the Episcopate. As soon as the youth destined for Orders had learned so much Latin that he could explain the gospels used in the service of the Mass, and translate his breviary well enough to say his Office, he was considered fit for the priesthood. It is not difficult to imagine what became of the sacraments of the Church when they fell into such hands. There were priests who eliminated all pretence of unction from Baptism. Others, though they had received no sacerdotal authority, joined men and women in marriage, and sent them away rejoicing at their escape from a more binding formality. Some of the priests were ignorant of the formula of Absolution, and in their ignorance they changed, abridged, and transposed to suit their own taste the august words of the most redoubtable of mysteries. Dumb as cattle, the ignoble priests deserted the pulpit, so there were no more sermons; there was no catechism, and the people, deprived of all instruction, were more benighted than their pastors. In some parishes there were men and women who were ignorant of the existence of God.[97]

The people had no teachers, and their manners were as neglected as their spiritual education. With rare exceptions, the provincial priest went to the wine-shops with his parishioners; if he saw fit, he went without taking off his surplice,--nor was that the worst; in every respect, and everywhere, and always, he set lamentable examples for his people. "One may say with truth and with horror," cried the austere Bourdoise, the friend of Père Bérulle, "that of all the evil done in the world, the part done by the ecclesiastics is the worst." Père Amelotte expressed his opinion with still more energy: "The name of priest," he cried, "has become the synonym of ignorance and debauchery!"

After the religious wars there were neither churches nor presbyteries, and therefore there were thousands of villages where there were no priests, but it is to be doubted whether such villages were more pitiable than those in which by their daily conduct the priests constantly provoked the people to despise the earthly representative of God. The abandoned villages were not plunged in thicker moral and religious darkness, or in grosser or more abominable superstition, than that into which the ignoble pastors led their flocks. In one half of the total number of the provinces of France, the work that the first missionaries to the Gauls had accomplished had all to be begun again.

In the world of the aristocracy the condition of Catholicism was little better. When Vincent de Paul--by a mischance which was not to be the only one in his career--was appointed Almoner to Queen Marguerite, first wife of Henry IV., he was overwhelmed by what he saw and heard. The Court was two thirds pagan.[98] A loose and reckless line of thought, a moral libertinage, was considered a mark of elegance, and that opinion obtained until the seventeenth century. The _jeunesse dorée_, the "gilded youths" of the day, imitated the atheists and gloried in manifesting their contempt for the "superstitions of religion." They repeated after Vanini that "man ought to obey the natural law," that "vice and virtue should be classed as products of climate, of temperament, and of alimentation," that "children born with feeble intellects are best fitted to develop into good Christians." Among the higher classes, piety was not entirely extinct; that was proven in the days of the triumphant Renaissance, when the Catholicism of Bossuet and of Bourdaloue flamed with all the strength of a newly kindled fire from the dying embers of the old religion. But the belief in God and in the things of God was not to be avowed among people of intellect. In a certain elegant, frivolous, and corrupt world, impiety and wit marched hand in hand. A man was not absolutely perfect in tone and manners unless he seasoned his conversation with a grain of atheism.[99] Under Louis XIII. in the immediate neighbourhood of royalty the tone changed, because the King's bigotry kept close watch over the appearance of religion. Men knew that they could not air their smart affectation of skepticism with impunity when their chief not only openly professed and practised religion, but frowned upon those who did not. All felt that the only way to be popular at Court was to follow the example of the King, and all slipped their atheism up their sleeves and bowed the knee with grace and dexterity, pulling on long faces and praying as visibly as Louis himself. But many years passed before the practice of religion expressed the feelings of the heart. Richelieu[100] had several intimate friends who were openly confessed infidels, and proud of their infidelity. While they were intellectual and witty and devoted to the Cardinal's interests, they were permitted to think as they pleased.

Long after the day of Richelieu,--in the reign of Louis XIV.,--the great Condé and Princess Anne de Gonzague made vows to the "marvellous victories of grace,"[101] but while they were "waiting for the miracle," the more miscreant of the Court amused themselves by throwing a piece of the wood of the true cross into the fire "to see whether it would burn."

The current of moral libertinage, though it appeared sluggish after the Fronde, had not run dry, and it was seen in the last third of the seventeenth century and in the following century shallow, but flowing freely.[102]

Whatever the general condition, the city was always better fortified against spiritual libertinage than the Court, because it contained stronger elements, and because it lacked the frivolity of the social bodies devoted to pleasure. In the city mingled with the higher bourgeoisie and the middle bourgeoisie were nobles of excellent stock who did not visit the Louvre or the Palais Royal because, as they had no title or position at Court, they could not claim the rank to which their quality gave them right; to cite an instance: Mme. de Sévigné was not of the Court; she was always of the city.

Taken altogether, the Parliamentary world, which had one foot at Court and the other foot in the city, had preserved a great deal of religion and morality. Olivier d'Ormesson's journal shows us the homes of the serious and intellectual people of the great metropolitan centres to whom piety and gravity had descended from their fathers.

The Parliamentary world of the provinces was notable for its moral attitude and for its love of religion. Taken all in all the French bourgeoisie had not felt the inroads of free thought, although there had been a few cases of visible infiltration. In the country districts the people practised religion more or less fervently.

Despite the few exceptions serving as luminous points in the universal darkness, in the reign of Louis XIII. the situation was well fitted to inspire creatures of ardent faith and exalted mysticism with horror. There were many such people in Paris then, as there have been always. Discouraged, hopeless of finding anything better in a world abandoned to blasphemy and vice, the naturally pious fled to the cloisters and too often they found within the walls of their refuges the same scandals that had driven them from their homes. The larger number of the monasteries were given over to depravity[103] and the monks were like the people of the world. As we have seen, a few prelates of rare faith and devotion furnished the exceptions to the rule, but set, as they were, wide distances apart in the swarming mass of vociferous immorality, they excited a pity which swallowed up all appreciation of their importance.

Divers questions which were not connected either with belief as a whole or with the principle of belief combined to make the Protestant minority by far more moral than the Catholic majority. Perhaps the social disadvantage attached to Protestantism was the strongest reason for its superiority. When a practically powerless minority is surrounded and kept under surveillance by a powerful majority, unless pride and vanity have blinded its prudence the minority keeps careful watch of its actions. By a natural process minorities of agitators cast cowardly and selfish members out of their ranks; in other words, they weed out the useless, the feeble, the derogatory elements, and the elements which, being dependent upon the favour of the public, or susceptible to public criticism, flinch if subjected to unfavourable judgment. The Protestant minority eliminated all who, fearing the ridicule or the animosity of the Court, shrank from standing shoulder to shoulder with the men in the fighting ranks of Protestantism. Impelled by personal interest, the converts to the reform movement went back to the Catholic majority. There were so many advantages attendant upon the profession of Catholicism that with few exceptions the great lords declared their faith in the religion powerful to endow them with military commands and with governmental and other lucrative positions. The Protestant ranks were thinned, but the few who stood their ground were the picked men of the reform movement. The ranks of the Catholics were swelled by the hypocrites and the turncoats who had deserted from the army of the Protestants. The Protestants gained morally by the defection of their converts, and the Catholics lost; the few who sustained Protestantism were sincere; the fact of their profession proved it.

The Protestant pastor had no selfish reason for his profession; he had nothing to hope for; he was lured by no promise of an abbey, nor could he expect to be rewarded for his open revolt against the King's church. Looking at it in its most illusive light, his was a bad business; there was nothing in it to tempt the favourites of the great; not even a lackey could find advantage in appointment to the Protestant ministry, and no man entered upon the painful life of the Protestant pastor unless forced by an all-mastering vocation. The cause of the Reformation was safe because it was in the hands of men who boasted of "a judge that no king could corrupt," and who believed that they had armed themselves with "the panoply of God." The pastors laboured with unfailing zeal, first to kindle the spark of a faith separated from all earthly interests; next to nourish sincere belief in God as the vital principle of religious life. Under their influence the Protestants of the upper middle classes and the Protestants of the lower classes--there were still fewer of the latter than of the former--not only practised, but lived their religion, giving an example of good conduct and of intelligent appreciation of the name and the meaning of their profession. Their adversaries were forced to render them the homage due to their efforts and their sincerity. They, the Protestants, were charitable in the true sense of the term; they loved the brethren; they cared for the bodies as well as for the souls of the poor; they proved their love for their fellows by guarding the public welfare; they kept the laws and, whenever it was possible, enforced them. The pastors knew that they must practise what they preached, and, profiting by the examples of the ignoble priests, they set a guard upon their words and movements, lest their disciples should question their sincerity. They were austere, energetic, and devoted to their people and to their cause. They were convinced that they were warders of the inheritance of the saints, and they patrolled their circuit, and went about in the name of Christ proclaiming the mercy of God and warning men of Eternity and of The Judgment.

Let us be loyal to our convictions and give to those early pastors the credit due to their candour and to their efforts; they surpassed us in many ways. They were learned; they were versed in science, kind to strangers, strict in morality, brotherly to the poor.

François de Sales said of them: "The Protestants were Christians; Catholicism was not Christian."[104]

So matters stood--the churches ruined and abandoned, Religion mocked and the priests despised[105]--when a little phalanx of devoted men arose to rescue the wrecked body of the French Clergy. They organised systematically, but their plan of action was independent. François de Sales was among the first who broke ground for the difficult work. He was a calm, cool man, indifferent to abuse, firm in the conviction that his power was from God. There were many representatives of the Church, but few like him. One of his chroniclers dwelt upon his "exalted indifference to insult" another, speaking of his "supernatural patience," said:

"A Du Perron could not have stopped short in an argument with a heretic, but, on the other hand, a Du Perron would not have converted the heretic by the ardour of his forbearing kindness." Strowski said of de Sales that he "saw as the wise see, and lived among men not as a nominal Christian but as a man of God, gifted with omniscience." By living in the world de Sales had learned that a germ of religion was still alive in many of the abandoned souls; he knew that there were a few who were truly Catholic; he knew that those few were cherishing their faith, but he saw that they lived isolated lives, away from the world, and he believed that the limitations of their spiritual hermitage hindered their usefulness. De Sales believed in a community of religion and Christian love. The few who cherished their religion were a class by themselves. They knew and respected each other, they theorised abstractly upon the prevailing evils, but they had no thought of bettering man's condition. Their sorrows had turned their thoughts to woeful contemplation of their helplessness, and all their hopes were straining forward toward the peaceful cloister and the silent intimacy of monachism. For them the uses of life were as a tale that is told. They had no thought of public service, they were timid, they abhorred sin and shrank from sinners, their isolation had developed their tendency to mysticism, and the best efforts of their minds were concentrated upon hypotheses.

Père François believed that they and all who loved God could do good work in the world. He did not believe in controversy, he did not believe in silencing skeptics with overwhelming arguments. He used his own means in his own way; but his task was hard and his progress slow, and months passed before he was able to form a working plan. His idea was to revive religious feeling and spiritual zeal, to increase the piety of life in community, to exemplify the love which teaches man to live at peace with his brother, to fulfil his mission as the son of man made in the likeness of God, and to act his part as an intelligent member of an orderly solidarity. De Sales's first work was difficult, but not long after his mission-house was established he saw that his success was sure, and he then appointed deputies and began his individual labour for the revival of religious thought. He knew that the people loved to reason, and he had resolved to develop their intelligence and to open their minds to Truth: the strong principle of all reform. His doubt of the utility of controversy had been confirmed by the spectacle of the recluses of the Church. Study had convinced him that theologians had taken the wrong road and exaggerated the spiritual influence of the "power of piety." He believed in the practical piety of Charity, and he accepted as his appointed task the awakening of Christian love. His impelling force was not the bigotry which

proves religion orthodox
By apostolic blows and knocks,

nor was it the contemplative faith which, by living in convents, deprives the world of the example of its fervour; it was that practical manifestation of the grace of God "which fits the citizen for civil life and forms him for the world."

In the end Père François's religion became purely practical and he had but one aim: the awakening of the soul.

His critics talked of his "dreams," his "visions," and his "religio-sentimental revival." His piety was expressed in the saying: "Religious life is not an attitude, nor can the practice of religion save a man; the true life of the Christian springs from a change of heart, from the intimate and profound transformation of his personality." We know with what ardour Père François went forward to his goal, manifesting his ideals by his acts. By his words and by his writings he worked a revolution in men's souls. His success equalled the success of Honoré d'Urfé; few books have reached the number of the editions of the _Introduction à la vie dévote_.[106]

In Paris de Sales had often visited a young priest named Pierre de Bérulle, who also was deeply grieved by the condition of Catholicism, and who was ambitious to work a change in the clergy and in the Church. Père Bérulle had discussed the subject with Vincent de Paul, de Sales, Bourdoise, and other pious friends, and after serious reflection, he had determined to undertake the stupendous work of reforming the clergy. In 1611 he founded a mission-house called the Oratoire. "The chief object of the mission was to put an end to the uselessness of so many ecclesiastics." The missionaries began their work cautiously and humbly, but their progress was rapid. Less than fifteen months after the first Mass was offered upon the altar of the new house, the Oratoire was represented by fifty branch missions. The brothers of the company were seen among all classes; their aim, like the individual aim of Père François, was to make the love of God familiar to men by habituating man to the love of his brother. They turned aside from their path to help wherever they saw need; they nursed the sick, they worked among the common people, they lent their strength to the worn-out labourer.

They were as true, as simple, and as earnest as the men who walked with the Son of Mary by the Lake of Galilee. Bound by no tie but Christian Charity, free to act their will, they manifested their faith by their piety, and it was impossible to deny the beneficence of their example. From the mother-house they set out for all parts of France, exhorting, imploring the dissolute to forsake their sin, and proclaiming the love of Christ. Protestants were making a strong point of the wrath of God; the Oratorians talked of God's mercy. They passed from province to province, they searched the streets and the lanes of the cities, they laboured with the labourers, they feasted with the bourgeois. Dispensing brotherly sympathy, they entered the homes of the poor as familiar friends, confessing the adults, catechising the children, and restoring religion to those who had lost it or forgotten it. They demanded hospitality in the provincial presbyteries, aroused the slothful priests to repentant action, and, raising the standard of the Faith before all eyes, they pointed men to Eternal Life and lifted the fallen brethren from the mire.

Shoulder to shoulder with the three chevaliers of the Faith, de Sales, de Bérulle, and Père Vincent, was the stern Saint Cyran (Jean Duvergier de Hauranne) who lent to the assistance of the Oratorians the powerful influence of his magnetic fervour. The impassioned eloquence of the author of _Lettres Chrétiennes et Spirituelles_ was awe-inspiring. The members of the famous convent (Port Royal des Champs) were equally devoted; their fervour was gentler, but always grave and salutary. Saint Cyran's characteristics were well defined in Joubert's _Pensée_.

The Jansenists carried into their religious life more depth of
thought and more reflection; they were more firmly bound by
religion's sacred liens; there was an austerity in their ideas and
in their minds, and that austerity incessantly circumscribed their
will by the limitations of duty.

They were pervaded, even to their mental habit, by their uncompromising conception of divine justice; their inclinations were antipathetic to the lusts of the flesh. The companions of the community of Port Royal were as pure in heart as the Oratorians, but they were childlike in their simplicity; they delighted in the beauties of nature and in the society of their friends; they indulged their humanity whenever such indulgence accorded with their vocation; they permitted "the fêtes of Christian love," to which we of the present look back in fancy as to visions of the first days of the early Church. Jules Lemaître said in his address at Port Royal:[107]

Port Royal is one of the most august of all the awe-inspiring
refuges of the spiritual life of France. It is holy ground; for
in this vale was nourished the most ardent inner life of the
nation's Church. Here prayed and meditated the most profound of
thinkers, the souls most self-contained, most self-dependent, most
absorbed by the mystery of man's eternal destiny. None caught in
the whirlpool of earthly life ever seemed more convinced of the
powerlessness of human liberty to arrest the evolution of the
inexorable Plan, and yet none ever manifested firmer will to battle
and to endure than those first heralds of the resurrection of
Catholicism.

François de Sales loved the convent of Port Royal; he called it his "place of dear delight"! In its shaded cloisters de Bérulle, Père Vincent, and Saint Cyran laboured together to purify the Church, until the time came when the closest friends were separated by dogmatic differences; and even then the tempest that wrecked Port Royal could not sweep away the memory of the peaceful days when the four friends lent their united efforts to the work which gave the decisive impulsion to the Catholic Renaissance.

Whenever the Church established religious communities, men were called to direct them from all the branches of de Bérulle's Oratoire, because it was generally known that the Oratorians inspired the labourers of the Faith with religious ardour, and in time the theological knowledge gained in the Oratoire and in its branches was considered essential to the true spiritual establishment of the priest. Men about to enter the service of the Church went to the Oratoire to learn how to dispense the sacramental lessons with proper understanding of their meaning; new faces were continually appearing, then vanishing aglow with celestial fire. Once when an Oratorian complained that too many of their body were leaving Paris, de Bérulle answered: "I thank God for it! This congregation was established for nothing else; its mission is to furnish worthy ministers and workmen fitted for the service of the Church."

FROM A STEEL ENGRAVING]

De Bérulle knew that, were he to give all the members of his community, their number would be too feeble to regenerate the vast and vitiated body of the French clergy. He could not hope to reap the harvest, but he counted it as glory to be permitted to sow the seed.

Vincent de Paul was the third collaborator of the company. It was said of him that he was "created to fill men's minds with love of spiritual things and with love for the Creator." Père Vincent was a simple countryman. In appearance he resembled the disciples of Christ, as represented in ancient pictures. His rugged features rose above a faded and patched soutane, but his face expressed such kindness and such sympathy that, like his heavenly Ensample, he drew men after him. Bernard of Cluny deplored the evil days; but the time of Louis XIII. was worse than the time of Bernard. The mercy proclaimed by the Gospel had been effaced from the minds of men, and the Charity of God had been dishonoured even by the guides sent to make it manifest. Mercy and Charity incarnate entered France with Père Vincent, and childlike fondness and gentle patience crept back into human relations--not rapidly--the influences against them were too strong--but steadily and surely. Père Vincent was amusing; it was said of him that he was "like no one else"; the courtiers first watched and ridiculed, then imitated him. When they saw him lift the fallen and attach importance to the sufferings of the common people, and when they heard him insist that criminals were men and that they had a right to demand the treatment due to men, they shrugged their shoulders, but they knew that through the influence of the simple peasant-priest something unknown and very sweet had entered France.

Vincent de Paul was a worker. He founded the Order of the Sisters of Charity, the Convicts' Mission-Refuge, a refuge for the unfortunate, the Foundling Hospital, and a great general hospital and asylum where twenty thousand men and women were lodged and nourished. To the people of France Père Vincent was a man apart from all others, the impersonation of human love and the manifestation of God's mercy. By the force of his example pity penetrated and pervaded a society in which pity had been unknown, or if known, despised. The people whose past life had prepared them for anything but good works sprang with ardour upon the road opened by the gentle saint who had taught France the way of mercy. Even the great essayed to be like Père Vincent; every one, high and low, each in his own way and to the extent of his power, followed the unique example. Saint Vincent became the national standard; the nobles pressed forward in his footsteps, concerning themselves with the sick and the poor and trying to do the work of priests. They laboured earnestly lavishing their money and their time, and, fired by the strength of their purpose, they came to love their duty better than they had loved their pleasure. They imitated the Oratorians as closely as they had imitated the shepherds of _Astrée_, and "the monsters of the will," Indifference, Infidelity, and Licence, hid their heads for a time, and Charity became the fashion of the day.

Père Vincent's religious zeal equalled his brotherly tenderness; he was de Bérulle's best ally. A special community, under his direction, assisted in the labours of the Oratoire. The chief purpose of the mother-house and its branches was the purification of the priesthood and the increase of religion. When a young priest was ready to be ordained he was sent to Père Vincent's mission, where, by means of systematic retreats, he received the deep impression of the spiritual devotion and the charity peculiar to the Oratorians.

Bossuet remembered with profound gratitude the retreats that he made in Père Vincent's Oratoire. But there was one at Court to whom the piety of Père Vincent was a thorn in the flesh. We have seen that de Bérulle's work was the purification of the clergy, and that Père Vincent was de Bérulle's chief ally. Mazarin was the Queen's guardian, and the Queen held the list of ecclesiastical appointments. A Council called the _Conseil de Conscience_ had been instituted to guide the Regent in her "Collation of Benefices." The nominees were subject to the approbation of the Council. When their names were read the points in their favour and against them were discussed. In this _Conseil de Conscience_ Père Vincent confronted Mazarin ten years. Before Père Vincent appeared men were appointed abbots regardless of their characters. Chantelauze says in _Saint Vincent de Paul et les Gondis_ that "Mazarin raised Simony to honour." The Cardinal gave the benefices to people whom he was sure of: people who were willing to devote themselves, body and soul, to his purposes. Père Vincent had awakened the minds of many influential prelates, and a few men and women prominent at Court had been aroused to a sense of the condition of the Church. These few priests and laymen were called the "Saints' Party."

They sat in the Council convened for the avowed purpose of purifying the Church. When Mazarin made an ignoble appointment, Père Vincent objected, and the influential prelates and the others of their party echoed his objections. Through the energy of the "Saints," as they were flippantly called by the courtiers, many scandalous appointments were prevented, and gradually the church positions were filled by sincere and devoted men. The determined and earnest objections of so many undeniably disinterested, well-known, and unimpeachable people aroused the superstitious scruples of the Queen, and when her scruples were aroused, she was obstinate. Mazarin knew this. He knew that Anne of Austria was a peculiar woman, he knew that she had been a Queen before he had had any hold upon her, and he knew that he had not been her first favourite. He was quick, keen-sighted, flexible. He was cautious. He had no intention of changing the sustained coo of his turtle-dove for the shrill "_Tais-toi!_" of the Regent of France. But he was not comfortable. His little diaries contain many allusions to the distress caused by his inability to digest the interference of the "Saints." He looked forward to the time when he should be so strong that it would be safe for him to take steps to free himself from the obsessions of the _Conseil de Conscience_. He was amiable and indulgent in his intercourse with all the cabals and with all the conflicting agitations; he studied motives and forestalled results; he brought down his own larks with the mirrors of his enemies. He had a thousand different ways of working out the same aims. He did nothing to actively offend, but there was a persistence in his gentle tenacity which exasperated men like Condé and disheartened the frank soldiers of the Faith of the mission of Port Royal and the Oratoire. He foresaw a time when he could dispose of benefices and of all else. A few years later the _Conseil de Conscience_ was abolished, and Père Vincent was ignominiously vanquished. Père Vincent lacked the requisites of the courtier; he was artless, and straightforward, and intriguers found it easy to make him appear ridiculous in the eyes of the Queen.[108] Mazarin watched his moment, and when he was sure that Anne of Austria could not refuse him anything, he drew the table of benefices from her hand. From that time "pick and choose" was the order of the day. "Monsieur le Cardinal" visited the appointments secretly, and secured the lion's share for himself. When he had made his choice, the men who offered him the highest bids received what he had rejected. In later years Mazarin was, by his own appointment, Archbishop of Metz and the possessor of thirty fat benefices. His revenues were considerable.

Nowhere did the Oratorians meet as determined opposition as at Court. The courtiers had gone to Mass because they lost the King's favour if they did not go to Mass, but to be inclined to skepticism was generally regarded as a token of elegance. Men thought that they were evincing superior culture when they braved God, the Devil, and the King, at one and the same time, by committing a thousand blasphemies. Despite the pressure of the new ideas, the "Saints' Party" had been difficult to organise. It was a short-lived party because Mazarin was not a man to tolerate rivals who were liable to develop power enough to counteract his influence over Anne of Austria concerning subjects even more vital than the distribution of the benefices. The petty annoyances to which the Prime Minister subjected the "Saints' Party" convinced people that when a man was of the Court, if he felt the indubitable touch of the finger of Grace, the only way open to him was the road to the cloister. It was known that wasps sting, and that they are not meet adversaries for the sons of God, and the wasps were there in swarms. François de Sales called the constantly recurring annoyances, "that mass of wasps." As there was no hope of relief in sight, it was generally supposed that the most prudent and the wisest course for labourers in the vineyard of the Lord was to enter the hive and take their places in the cells, among the manufacturers of honey. So when La Grande Mademoiselle looked upon the convent as her natural destination, she was carrying out the prevalent idea that retreat from the world was the natural result of conversion to true religion. It was well for her and for the convent which she had decided to honour with her presence that just at the moment when she laid her plans her father had one of his rare attacks of common sense--yes, well for her and well for the convent!

IV

Mademoiselle's crisis covered a period of six months; when she reappeared patches adorned her face and powder glistened in her hair. She said of her awakening: "I recovered my taste for diversions, and I attended the play and other amusements with pleasure, but my worldly life did not obliterate the memory of my longings; the excessive austerity to which I had reduced myself was modified, but I could not forget the aspirations which I had supposed would lead me to the Carmelites!" Not long after she emerged from her religious retreat politics called her from her frivolity. Political life was the arena at that hour, and it is not probable that the most radical of the feministic codes of the future will restore the power which women then possessed by force of their determined gallantry, their courage, their vivacity, their beauty, and their coquetry. The women of the future will lack such power because their rights will be conferred by laws; legal rights are of small importance compared to rights conferred and confirmed by custom. The women of Mademoiselle's day ordered the march of war, led armies, dictated the terms of peace, curbed the will of statesmen, and signed treaties with kings, not because they had a right to do so, but because they possessed invincible force. Richelieu, who had a species of force of his own, and at times wielded it to their temporary detriment, planned his moves with deference to their tactics, and openly deplored their importance. Mazarin, who dreaded women, wrote to Don Luis del Haro: "We have three such amazons right here in France, and they are fully competent to rule three great kingdoms; they are the Duchesse de Longueville, the Princesse Palatine, and the Duchesse de Chevreuse." The Duchesse de Chevreuse, having been born in the early century, was the veteran of the trio. "She had a strong mind," said Richelieu,[109] "and powerful beauty, which, as she knew well how to use it, she never lowered by any disgraceful concessions. Her mind was always well balanced."

Retz completed the portrait: "She loved without any choice of objects for the simple reason that it was necessary for her to love some one; and when once the plan was laid it was not difficult to give her a lover. But from the moment when she began to love her lover, she loved him faithfully,--and she loved no one else." She was witty, spirited, and of a very vigorous mind. Some of her ideas were so brilliant that they were like flashes of lightning; and some of them were so wise and so profound that the wisest men known to history might have been proud to claim them. Rare genius and keen wits which she had trained to intrigue from early youth had made her one of the most dangerous politicians in France. She had been an intimate friend of Anne of Austria, and the chief architect of the Chalais conspiracy. After the exposure of the conspiracy, Richelieu sentenced her to banishment for a term of twenty-five years, and no old political war-horse could have taken revenge sterner than hers. She did not rest on her wrongs; her entrance upon foreign territory was marked by the awakening of all the foreign animosities. Alone and single-handed, the unique Duchess formed a league against France, and when events reached a crisis she had attained such importance in the minds of the allies that England, though vanquished and suing for peace, made it a condition of her surrender that the Duchesse de Chevreuse, "a woman for whom the King of England entertained a particular esteem," should be recalled to France. Richelieu yielded the point instantly; he was too wise to invest it with the importance of a parley; he recalled the woman who had convened a foreign league against her own people, and eliminated the banishment of powerful women from his list of penalties. He had learned an important political lesson; thereafter the presence of the Duchesse de Chevreuse was considered in high diplomatic circles the one thing needful for the even balance of the State of France. After the Spanish intrigue, which ended in Val de Grâce, the Cardinal, fearing another "league," made efforts to keep the versatile Duchess under his hand, but she slipped through his fingers and was seen all over France actively pursuing her own peculiar business. (1637.)

The Duchesse de Chevreuse once traversed France on horseback, disguised as a man, and she used to say that nothing had ever amused her as well as that journey. She must have been a judge of amusements, as she had tried them all. When she ran away disguised as a man, her husband and Richelieu both ran after her, to implore her to remain in France, and, in her efforts to escape her pursuers, she was forced to hide in many strange places, and to resort to stratagems of all kinds. In one place where she passed the night, her hostess, considering her a handsome boy, made her a declaration of love. Her guides, deceived by her appearance gave her a fair idea of the manners worn by a certain class of men when they think that they are among men and free from the constraint of woman's presence. On her journeys through Europe, she slept one night or more in a barn, on a pile of straw, the next night in a field, under a hedge, or in one of the vast beds in which our fathers bedded a dozen persons at once without regard to their circumstances. Alone, or in close quarters, the Duchesse de Chevreuse maintained her identity. Hers was a resolute spirit; she kept her own counsel, and she feared neither man nor devil. Thus, in boys' clothes, in company with cavaliers who lisped the language of the _Précieuses_, or with troopers from whose mouths rushed the fat oaths of the Cossacks, sleeping now on straw and now with a dozen strangers, drunk and sober, she crossed the Pyrenees and reached Madrid, where she turned the head of the King of Spain and passed on to London, where she was fêted as a powerful ally, and where, incidentally, she became the chief official agent of the enemies of Richelieu.

When Louis XIII. was dying he rallied long enough to enjoin the Duchesse de Chevreuse from entering France.[110] Standing upon the brink of Eternity, he remembered the traitress whom he had not seen in ten years. The Duchesse de Chevreuse was informed of his commands, and, knowing him to be in the agonies of death, she placed her political schemes in the hands of agents and hurried back to France to condole with the widow and to assume the control of the French nation as the deputy of Anne of Austria. She entered the Louvre June 14, 1643, thinking that the ten years which had passed since she had last seen her old confidante had made as little change in the Queen as in her own bright eyes. She found two children at play together,--young Louis XIV. and little Monsieur, a tall proud girl with ash-blonde hair: La Grande Mademoiselle, and a mature and matronly Regent who blushed when she saluted her. One month to a day had passed since Louis XIII. had yielded up the ghost.

The Duchesse de Chevreuse installed herself in Paris in her old quarters and bent her energies to the task of dethroning Mazarin.

* * * * *

The Palatine Princess, Anne de Gonzague, was a ravishingly beautiful woman endowed with great executive ability. "I do not think," said Retz, "that Elizabeth of England had more capacity for conducting a State." Anne de Gonzague did not begin her career by politics. When, as a young girl, she appeared in the world of the Court, she astonished France by the number and by the piquancy of her adventures. She was another of the exalted dames who ran upon the highways disguised as cavaliers or as monks. No one was surprised no matter when or where he saw Anne de Gonzague, though she was often met far beyond the limits of polite society. Fancy alone--and their own sweet will--ruled the fair ladies of those heroic days. During five whole years Anne de Gonzague[111] gave the world to understand that she was "Mme. de Guise, wife of Henri de Guise, Archbishop of Rheims" (the same Henri de Guise who afterward married Mme. de Bossut).

Having passed for "Mme. de Guise" sixty months, the Lady Anne appeared at Court under her own name "as if nothing had happened," reported Mademoiselle. Whatever may have here "happened," Anne de Gonzague reappeared at Court as alluring as in the flower of her first youth; and, as the _Chronicle_ expressed it: "had the talent to marry herself--between two affairs of womanly gallantry--to the Prince Palatine,[112] one of the most rabidly jealous of gentlemen," because, as the pious and truthful Bossuet justly remarked, "everything gave way before the secret charm of her conversation." When nearly thirty years of age she obeyed the instincts of her genius and engaged in politics, with other politically inclined ladies, including Mme. de Longueville, whose only talent lay in her blonde hair and charming eyes.

Despite the poverty of her mental resources, Mme. de Longueville was a natural director of men, and she was but one of a very brilliant coterie. The prominent and fiery amazons of the politics of that epoch are too historically known to require detailed mention. They were: the haughty, dazzlingly superb, but too vicious and too practical in vice, Montbazon; the Duchesse de Chatillon (the imperious beauty who had her hand painted upon a painted lion whose face was the face of the great Condé), and many others who to the measure of their ability played with the honour and the lives of men, with Universal Suffrage, and with the stability of France, and who, like La Grande Mademoiselle, were called from their revelries by the dangers which threatened them.

The daughter of Gaston d'Orléans had grown up firmly convinced that the younger branch of the House of Paris (her own branch) could do anything. That had been the lesson taught for more than a century of history. From Charles VIII. to Louis XIII. the throne had been transmitted from father to son but three times; in all other cases it had passed to brothers or to cousins. The collaterals of the royal family had become accustomed to think of themselves as very near the throne, and at times that habit of thought had been detrimental to the country. Before the birth of Louis XIV. Gaston d'Orléans had touched the crown with the tips of his fingers, and he had made use of his title as heir-presumptive to work out some very unsavoury ends. After the birth of his nephews he had lived in a dream of possible results; he had waited to see what "his star" would bring him, and his hopes had blazed among their ashes at the first hint of the possibility of a change. When Louis XIV. was nine years old he was very sick and his doctors expected him to die; he had the smallpox. Monsieur was jubilant: he exhibited his joy publicly, and the courtiers drank to the health of "Gaston I." Olivier d'Ormesson stated that the courtiers distributed all the offices in the King's gift and planned to dispose of the King's brother. Anne of Austria, agonising in prayer for the life of the King, was horrified to learn that a plot was on foot to abduct little Monsieur. She was warned that the child was to be stolen some time in the night between Saturday and Sunday. Maréchal de Schomberg passed that night on his horse, accompanied by armed men who watched all the windows and doors of the palace. When the King recovered Monsieur apologised for his conduct, and the sponge of the royal forgiveness was passed over that episode as it had been over many others. Under the Regency of Anne of Austria the Court was called upon to resist the second junior branch, whose inferiority of pretensions was more than balanced by its intelligence and audacity.