The great Port-Royal was dead with M. de Saci and Mother Angelica de St. Jean, faithful and modest imitators of their illustrious 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 passed 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 title 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.

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 assemblage, 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 God 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 anticipation, 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; “God 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 passed 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 noblest 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 passion, 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 associates. 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 Port-Royal, 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 analogous 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 God. “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 God: all vice would be banished in a little while, and the kingdom of God 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 Duchess 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 God, 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 God 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 God, as God 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 God 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; God 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 God, had strongly maintained the fact of human individuality and responsibility. The theory of mere (pure) love absorbing the soul in God 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 God, “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 God’s, nothing whatever, unless it be, in a word, God.” 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 God. 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 noble type of the finest period of the Catholic church in France, made the mistake of pushing 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 anticipation, 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 friendship? 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 God 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 God’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 God, 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. “God 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 God 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 God, 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 nobler 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 God’s name, speak not of me but to God 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 passionately 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 passed 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, nobility. 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 nobody 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 succumbed 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 God with sweet and simple confidence. “O, how great is God! 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!” [OEuvres de Fenelon, Lettres Spirituelles, xxv. 128.]

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 mass 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 assembly 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 assembly of the clergy of France, “that St. Peter and his successors, vicars of Jesus Christ, and the whole church itself, received from God 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 God, 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 principal 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 incumbent 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 mass, 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 noble 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 Marcieau, 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. God 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 God 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 God. 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 God’s sovereign mercy. History has left weighing upon Louis XIV. the crushing 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 lustre; 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.

Pascal, had he been born later, would have remained independent and proud, from the nature of his mind and of his character as well as from the connection he had full early with Port-Royal, where they did not rear courtiers; he died, however, at thirty-nine, in 1661, the very year in which Louis XIV. began to govern. Born at Clermont, in Auvergne, educated at his father’s and by his father, though it was not thought desirable to let him study mathematics, he had already discovered by himself the first thirty-two propositions of Euclid, when Cardinal Richelieu, holding on his knee little Jacqueline Pascal, and looking at her brother, said to M. Pascal, the two children’s father, who had come to thank him for a favor, “Take care of them; I mean to make something great of them.” This was the native and powerful instinct of genius divining genius; Richelieu, however, died three years later, without having done anything for the children who had impressed him beyond giving their father a share in the superintendence of Rouen; he thus put them in the way of the great Corneille, who was affectionately kind to Jacqueline, but took no particular notice of Blaise Pascal. The latter was seventeen; he had already written his Traite des Coniques (Treatise on Conics) and begun to occupy himself with “his arithmetical machine,” as his sister, Madame Perier calls it. At twenty-three he had ceased to apply his mind to human sciences; “when he afterwards discovered the roulette (cycloid), it was without thinking,” says Madame Perier, “and to distract his attention from a severe tooth-ache he had.” He was not twenty-four when anxiety for his salvation and for the glory of God had taken complete possession of his soul. It was to the same end that he composed the Lettres Provinciales, the first of which was written in six days, and the style of which, clear, lively, precise, far removed from the somewhat solemn gravity of Port-Royal, formed French prose as Malherbe and Boileau formed the poetry. This was the impression of his contemporaries, the most hard of them to please in the art of writing. “That is excellent; that will be relished,” said the recluses of Port-Royal, in spite of the misgivings of M. Singlin. More than thirty years after Pascal’s death, Madame de Sevigne, in 1689, wrote to Madame de Grignan, “Sometimes, to divert ourselves, we read the little Letters (to a provincial). Good heavens, how charming! And how my son reads them! I always think of my daughter, and how that excess of correctness of reasoning would suit her; but your brother says that you consider that it is always the same thing over again. Ah! My goodness, so much the better! Could any one have a more perfect style, a raillery more refined, more natural, more delicate, worthier offspring of those dialogues of Plato, which are so fine? And when, after the first ten letters, he addresses himself to the reverend Jesuit fathers, what earnestness, what solidity, what force! What eloquence! What love for God and for the truth! What a way of maintaining it and making it understood! I am sure that you have never read them but in a hurry, pitching on the pleasant places; but it is not so when they are read at leisure.” Lord Macaulay once said to M. Guizot, “Amongst modern works I know only two perfect ones, to which there is no exception to be taken, and they are Pascal’s Provincials and the Letters of Madame de Sevigne.”

Boileau was of Lord Macaulay’s opinion; at least as regarded Pascal. “Corbinelli wrote to me the other day,” says Madame de Sevigne, on the 15th of January, 1690: “he gave me an account of a conversation and a dinner at M. de Lamoignon’s: the persons were the master and mistress of the house, M. de Troyes, M. de Toulon, Father Bourdaloue, a comrade of his, Despredaux, and Corbinelli. The talk was of ancient and modern works. Despreaux supported the ancient, with the exception of one single modern, which surpassed, in his opinion, both old and new. Bourdaloue’s comrade, who assumed the well-read air, and who had fastened on to Despreaux and Corbinelli, asked him what in the world this book could be that was so remarkably clever. Despreaux would not give the name. Corbinelli said to him, ‘Sir, I conjure you to tell me, that I may read it all night.’ Despreaux answered, laughing, ‘Ah! sir, you have read it more than once, I am sure.’ The Jesuit joins in, with a disdainful air, and presses Despreaux to name this marvellous writer. ‘Do not press me, father,’ says Despreaux. The father persists. At last Despreaux takes hold of his arm, and squeezing it very hard, says, ‘You will have it, father; well, then, egad! it is Pascal.’ ‘Pascal,’ says the father, all blushes and astonishment; ‘Pascal is as beautiful as the false can be.’ ‘False,’ replied Despreaux: ‘false! Let me tell you that he is as true as he is inimitable; he has just been translated into three languages.’ The father rejoined, ‘He is none the more true for that.’ Despreaux grew warm, and shouted like a madman: ‘Well, father, will you say that one of yours did not have it printed in one of his books that a Christian was not obliged to love God? Dare you say that that is false?’ ‘Sir,’ said the father, in a fury, ‘we must distinguish.’ ‘Distinguish!’ cried Despreaux; ‘distinguish, egad! distinguish! Distinguish whether we are obliged to love God!’ And, taking Corbinelli by the arm, he flew off to the other end of the room, coming back again, and rushing about like a lunatic; but he would not go near the father any more, and went off to join the rest of the company. Here endeth the story; the curtain falls.” Literary taste and religious sympathies combined, in the case of Boileau, to exalt Pascal.

The provincials could not satisfy for long the pious ardor of Pascal’s soul; he took in hand his great work on the Verite de la Religion. He had taken a vigorous part in the discussions of Port-Royal as to subscription of the formulary: his opinion was decidedly in favor of resistance. It was the moment when MM. Arnauld and Nicole had discovered a restriction, as it was then called, which allowed of subscribing with a safe conscience. “M. Pascal, who loved truth above all things,” writes his niece, Marguerite Perier; “who, moreover, was pulled down by a pain in the head, which never left him; who had exerted himself to make them feel as he himself felt; and who had expressed himself very vigorously in spite of his weakness, was so grief-stricken that he had a fit, and lost speech and consciousness. Everybody was alarmed. Exertions were made to bring him round, and then those gentlemen withdrew. When he was quite recovered, Madame Perier asked him what had caused this incident. He answered, ‘When I saw all those persons that I looked upon as being those whom God had made to know the truth, and who ought to be its defenders, wavering and falling. I declare to you that I was so overcome with grief that I was unable to support it, and could not help breaking down.’” Blaise Pascal was the worthy brother of Jacqueline; in the former, as well as the latter, the soul was too ardent and too strong for its covering of body. Nearly all his relatives died young. “I alone am left,” wrote Mdlle. Perier, when she had become, exceptionally, very aged. “I might say, like Simon Maccabeus, the last of all his brethren, All my relatives and all my brethren are dead in the service of God and in the love of truth. I alone am left; please God I may never have a thought of backsliding!”

Pascal was unable to finish his work. “God, who had inspired my brother with this design and with all his thoughts,” writes his sister, “did not permit him to bring it to its completion, for reasons to us unknown.” The last years of Pascal’s life, invalid as he had been from the age of eighteen, were one long and continual torture, accepted and supported with an austere disdain of suffering. Incapable of any application, he gave his attention solely to his salvation and the care of the poor. “I have taken it into my head,” says he, “to have in the house a sick pauper, to whom the same service shall be rendered as to myself; particular attention to be paid to him, and, in fact, no difference to be made between him and me, in order that I may have the consolation of knowing that there is one pauper as well treated as myself, in the perplexity I suffer from finding myself in the great affluence of every sort in which I do find myself.” The spirit of M. de St. Cyran is there, and also the spirit of the gospel, which caused Pascal, when he was dying, to say, “I love poverty, because Jesus Christ loved it. I love wealth, because it gives the means of assisting the needy.” A genius unique in the extent and variety of his faculties, which were applied with the same splendid results to mathematics and physics, to philosophy and polemics, disdaining all preconceived ideas, going unerringly and straightforwardly to the bottom of things with admirable force and profundity, independent and free even in his voluntary submission to the Christian faith, which he accepts with his eyes open, after having weighed it, measured it, and sounded it to its uttermost depths, too steadfast and too simple not to bow his head before mysteries, all the while acknowledging his ignorance. “If there were no darkness,” says he, “man would not feel his corruption; if there were no light, man would have no hope of remedy. Thus it is not only quite right, but useful, for us that God should be concealed in part, and revealed in part, since it is equally dangerous for man to know God without knowing his own misery, and to know his own misery without knowing God.” The lights of this great intellect had led him to acquiesce in his own fogs. “One can be quite sure that there is a God, without knowing what He is,” says he.

In 1627, four years after Pascal, and, like him, in a family of the long robe, was born, at Dijon, his only rival in that great art of writing prose which established the superiority of the French language. At sixteen, Bossuet preached his first sermon in the drawing-room of Madame de Rambouillet, and the great Conde was pleased to attend his theological examinations. He was already famous at court as a preacher and a polemist when the king gave him the title of Bishop of Condom, almost immediately inviting him to become preceptor to the dauphin. A difficult and an irksome task for him who had already written for Turenne an exposition of the Catholic faith, and had delivered the funeral orations over Madame Henriette and the Queen of England. “The king has greatly at heart the dauphin’s education,” wrote Father Lacoue to Colbert; “he regards it as one of his grand state-strokes in respect of the future.” The dauphin was not devoid of intelligence. “Monseigneur has plenty of wits,” said Councillor Le Gout de Saint-Seine in his private journal, “but his wits are under a bushel.” The boy was indolent, with little inclination for work, roughly treated by his governor, the Duke of Montausier, who was endowed with more virtue than ability in the superintendence of a prince’s education. “O,” cried Monseigneur, when official announcement was made to him of the project of marriage which the king was conducting for him with the Princess Christine of Bavaria, “we shall see whether M. Huet (afterwards bishop of Avranches) will want to make me learn ancient geography any more!” Bossuet had better understood what ought to be the aim of a king’s education. “Remember, Monseigneur,” he constantly repeated to him, “that destined as you are to reign some day over this great kingdom, you are bound to make it happy.” He was in despair at his pupil’s inattention. “There is a great deal to endure with a mind so destitute of application,” he wrote to Marshal Bellefonds; “there is no perceptible relief, and we go on, as St. Paul says, hoping against hope.” He had written a little treatise on inattention, De Incogitantia,—in the vain hope of thus rousing his pupil to work. “I dread nothing in the world so much,” Louis XIV would say, “as to have a sluggard (faineant) dauphin; I would much prefer to have no son at all!” Bossuet foresaw the innumerable obstacles in the way of his labors. “I perceive, as I think,” he wrote to his friends, “in the dauphin the beginnings of great graces, a simplicity, a straightforwardness, a principle of goodness, an attention, amidst all his flightiness, to the mysteries, a something or other which comes with a flash, in the middle of his distractions, to call him back to God. You would be charmed if I were to tell you the questions he puts to me, and the desire he shows to be a good servant of God. But the world! the world! the world! pleasures, evil counsels, evil examples! Save us, Lord! save us! Thou didst verily preserve the children from the furnace, but Thou didst send Thine angel; and, as for me, alas! what am I? Humility, trepidation, absorption into one’s own nothingness!”

It was not for Bossuet that the honor was reserved of succeeding in the difficult task of a royal education. Fenelon encountered in the Duke of Burgundy a more undisciplined nature, a more violent character, and more dangerous tendencies than Bossuet had to fight against in the grand-dauphin; but there was a richer mind and a warmer heart; the preceptor, too, was more proper for the work. Bossuet, nevertheless, labored conscientiously to instruct his little prince, studying for him and with him the classical authors, preparing grammatical expositions, and, lastly, writing for his edification the Traite de la Connaissance de Dieu et de soi-mime (Treatise on the Knowledge of God and of Self), the Discours sur l’Histoire Universelle (Discourse on Universal History), and the Politique tiree de l’Ecriture Sainte (Polity derived from Holy Writ). The labor was in vain; the very loftiness of his genius, the extent and profundity of his views, rendered Bossuet unfit to get at the heart and mind of a boy who was timid, idle, and kept in fear by the king as well as by his governor. The dauphin was nineteen when his marriage restored Bossuet to the church and to the world; the king appointed him almoner to the dauphiness, and, before long, Bishop of Meaux.

Neither the assembly of the clergy and the part he played therein, nor his frequent preachings at court, diverted Bossuet from his duties as bishop; he habitually resided at Meaux, in the midst of his priests. The greater number of his sermons, written at first in fragments, collected from memory in their aggregate, and repeated frequently with divergences in wording and development, were preached in the cathedral of Meaux. The dauphin sometimes went thither to see him. “Pray, sir,” he had said to him, in his childhood, “take great care of me whilst I am little; I will of you when I am big.” Assured of his righteousness as a priest and his fine tact as a man, the king appealed to Bossuet in the delicate conjunctures of his life. It is related that it was the Bishop of Meaux who dissuaded him from making public his marriage with Madame de Maintenon. She, more anxious for power than splendor, did not bear him any ill-will for it; amidst the various leanings of the court, divided as it was between Jansenism and Quietism, it was to the simple teaching of the Catholic church, represented by Bossuet, that she remained practically attached. Right-minded and strong-minded, but a little cold-hearted, Madame de Maintenon could not suffer herself to be led away by the sublime excesses of the Jansenists or the pious reveries of Madame Guyon; the Jesuits had influence over her, without her being a slave to them; and that influence increased after the death of Bossuet. The guidance of the Bishop of Meaux, in fact, answered the requirements of spirits that were pious and earnest without enthusiasm: less ardent in faith and less absolute in religious practice than M. de St. Cyran and Port-Royal, less exacting in his demands than Father Bourdaloue, susceptible now and then of mystic ideas, as is proved by his letters to Sister Cornuau, he did not let himself be won by the vague ecstasies of absolute (pure) love; he had a mind large enough to say, like Mother Angelica Arnauld, “I am of all saints’ order, and all saints are of my order;” but his preferences always inclined towards those saints and learned doctors who had not carried any religious tendency to excess, and who had known how to rest content with the spirit of a rule and a faith that were practical. A wonderful genius, discovering by flashes, and as if by instinct, the most profound truths of human nature, and giving them expression in an incomparable style, forcing, straining the language to make it render his idea, darting at one bound to the sublimest height by use of the simplest terms, which he, so to speak, bore away with him, wresting them from their natural and proper signification. “There, in spite of that great heart of hers, is that princess so admired and so beloved; there, such as Death has made her for us!” Bossuet alone could speak like that.

He was writing incessantly, all the while that he was preaching at Meaux and at Paris, making funeral orations over the queen, Maria Theresa, over the Princess Palatine, Michael Le Tellier, and the Prince of Conde. The Edict of Nantes had just been revoked; controversy with the Protestant ministers, headed by Claude and Jurieu, occupied a great space in the life of the Bishop of Meaux. He at that time wrote his Histoire des Variations, often unjust and violent, always able in its attacks upon the Reformation; he did not import any zeal into persecution, though all the while admitting unreservedly the doctrines universally propagated amongst Catholics. “I declare,” he wrote to M. de Baville, “that I am and have always been of opinion, first, that princes may by penal laws constrain all heretics to conform to the profession and practices of the Catholic church; secondly, that this doctrine ought to be held invariable in the church, which has not only conformed to, but has even demanded, similar ordinances from princes.” He at the same time opposed the constraint put upon the new converts to oblige them to go to mass, without requiring from them any other act of religion.

“When the emperors imposed a like obligation on the Donatists,” he wrote to the Bishop of Mirepoix, “it was on the supposition that they were converted, or would be; but the heretics at the present time, who declare themselves by not fulfilling their Easter (communicating), ought to be rather hindered from assisting at the mysteries than constrained thereto, and the more so in that it appears to be a consequence thereof to constrain them likewise to fulfil their Easter, which is expressly to give occasion for frightful sacrilege. They might be constrained to undergo instruction; but, so far as I can learn, that would hardly advance matters, and I think that we must be reduced to three things; one is, to oblige them to send their children to the schools, or, in default, to find means of taking them out of their hands; another is, to be firm as regards marriages; and the last is, to take great pains to become privately acquainted with those of whom there are good hopes, and to procure for them solid instruction and veritable enlightenment; the rest must be left to time and to the grace of God. I know of nothing else.” About the same time Fenelon, engaged upon the missions in Poitou, being as much convinced as the Bishop of Meaux of a sovereign’s rights over the conscience of the faithful, as well as of the terrible danger of hypocrisy, wrote to Bossuet, telling him that he had demanded the withdrawal of the troops in all the districts he was visiting: “It is no light matter to change the sentiments of a whole people. What difficulty must the apostles have found in changing the face of the universe, overcoming all passions, and establishing a doctrine till then unheard of, seeing that we cannot persuade the ignorant by clear and express passages which they read every day in favor of the religion of their ancestors, and that the king’s own authority stirs up every passion to render persuasion more easy for us! The remnants of this sect go on sinking little by little, as regards all exterior observance, into a religious indifference which cannot but cause fear and trembling. If one wanted to make them abjure Christianity and follow the Koran, there would be nothing required but to show them the dragoons; provided that they assemble by night, and withstand all instruction, they consider that they have done enough.” Cardinal Noailles was of the same mind as Bossuet and Fenelon. “The king will be pained to decide against your opinion as regards the new converts,” says a letter to him from Madame de Maintenon; “meanwhile the most general is to force them to attend at mass. Your opinion seems to be a condemnation of all that has been hitherto done against these poor creatures. It is not pleasant to hark back so far, and it has always been supposed that, in any case, they must have a religion.” In vain were liberty of conscience and its inviolable rights still misunderstood by the noblest spirits, the sincerity and high-mindedness of the great bishops instinctively revolted against the hypocrisy engendered of persecution. The tacit assuagement of the severities against the Reformers, between 1688 and 1700, was the fruit of the representations of Bossuet, Fenelon, and Cardinal Noailles. Madame de Maintenon wrote at that date to one of her relatives, “You are converted; do not meddle in the conversion of others. I confess to you that I do not like the idea of answering before God and the king for all those conversions.”

At the same time with the controversial treatises, the Elevations sur les Mysteres and the Meditations sur l’Evangile were written at Meaux, drawing the bishop away to the serener regions of supreme faith. There might he have chanced to meet those Reformers, as determined as he in the strife, as attached, at bottom, as he, for life and death, to the mysteries and to the lights of a common hope. “When God shall give us grace to enter Paradise,” St. Bernard used to say, “we shall be above all astonished at not finding some of those whom we had thought to meet there, and at finding others whom we did not expect.” Bossuet had a moments glimpse of this higher truth; in concert with Leibnitz, a great intellect of more range in knowledge and less steadfastness than he in religious faith, he tried to reconcile the Catholic and Protestant communions in one and the same creed. There were insurmountable difficulties on both sides; the attempt remained unsuccessful.

The Bishop of Meaux had lately triumphed in the matter of Quietism, breaking the ties of old friendship with Fenelon, and more concerned about defending sound doctrine in the church than fearful of hurting his friend, who was sincere and modest in his relations with him, and humbly submissive to the decrees of the court of Rome. The Archbishop of Cambrai was in exile at his own diocese; Bossuet was ill at Meaux, still, however, at work, going deeper every day into that profound study of Holy Writ and of the fathers of the church which shines forth in all his writings. He had stone, and suffered agonies, but would not permit an operation. On his death-bed, surrounded by his nephews and his vicars, he rejected with disdain all eulogies on his episcopal life. “Speak to me of necessary truths,” said he, preserving to the last the simplicity of a great and strong mind, accustomed to turn from appearances and secondary doctrines to embrace the mighty realities of time and of eternity. He died at Paris on the 12th of April, 1704, just when the troubles of the church were springing up again. Great was the consternation amongst the bishops of France, wont as they were to shape themselves by his counsels. “Men were astounded at this mortal’s mortality.” Bossuet was seventy-three.

A month later, on the 13th of May, Father Bourdaloue in his turn died. A model of close logic and moral austerity, with a stiff and manly eloquence, so impressed with the miserable insufficiency of human efforts, that he said as he was dying, “My God, I have wasted life; it is just that Thou recall it.” There remained only Fenelon in the first rank, which Massillon did not as yet dispute with him. Malebranche was living retired in his cell at the Oratory, seldom speaking, writing his Recherches sur la Verite (Researches into Truth), and his Entretiens sur la Metaphysique (Discourses on Metaphysics), bolder in thought than he was aware of or wished, sincere and natural in his meditations as well as in his style. In spite of Flechier’s eloquence in certain funeral orations, posterity has decided against the modesty of the Archbishop of Cambrai, who said at the death of the Bishop of Nimes, in 1710, “We have lost our master.” In his retirement or his exile, after Bossuet’s death, it was around Fenelon that was concentrated all the lustre of the French episcopate, long since restored to the respect and admiration it deserved.

Fenelon was born in Perigord, at the castle of Fenelon, on the 6th of August, 1651. Like Cardinal Retz he belonged to an ancient and noble house, and was destined from his youth for the church. Brought up at the seminary of St. Sulpice, lately founded by M. Olier, he for a short time conceived the idea of devoting himself to foreign missions; his weak health and his family’s opposition turned him ere long from his purpose, but the preaching of the gospel amongst the heathen continued to have for him an attraction which is perfectly depicted in one of the rare sermons of his which have been preserved. He had held himself modestly aloof, occupied with confirming new Catholics in their conversion or with preaching to the Protestants of Poitou; he had written nothing but his Traite de l’Education des Filles, intended for the family of the Duke of Beauvilliers, and a book on the ministere du pasteur. He was in bad odor with Harlay, Archbishop of Paris, who had said to him curtly one day, “You want to escape notice, M. Abbe, and you will;” nevertheless, when Louis XIV. chose the Duke of Beauvilliers as governor to his grandson, the Duke of Burgundy, the duke at once called Fenelon, then thirty-eight years of age, to the important post of preceptor.

Whereas the grand-dauphin, endowed with ordinary intelligence, was indolent and feeble, his son was, in the same proportion, violent, fiery, indomitable. “The Duke of Burgundy,” says St. Simon, “was a born demon (naquit terrible), and in his early youth caused fear and trembling. Harsh, passionate, even to the last degree of rage against inanimate things, madly impetuous, unable to bear the least opposition, even from the hours and the elements, without flying into furies enough to make you fear that everything inside him would burst; obstinate to excess, passionately fond of all pleasures, of good living, of the chase madly, of music with a sort of transport, and of play too, in which he could not bear to lose; often ferocious, naturally inclined to cruelty, savage in raillery, taking off absurdities with a patness which was killing; from the height of the clouds he regarded men as but atoms to whom he bore no resemblance, whoever they might be. Barely did the princes his brothers appear to him intermediary between himself and the human race, although there had always been an affectation of bringing them all three up in perfect equality; wits, penetration, flashed from every part of him, even in his transports; his repartees were astounding, his replies always went to the point and deep down, even in his mad fits; he made child’s play of the most abstract sciences; the extent and vivacity of his wits were prodigious, and hindered him from applying himself to one thing at a time, so far as to render him incapable of it.”

As a sincere Christian and a priest, Fenelon saw from the first that religion alone could triumph over this terrible nature; the Duke of Beauvilliers, as sincere and as christianly as he, without much wits, modestly allowed himself to be led; all the motives that act most powerfully on a generous spirit, honor, confidence, fear and love of God, were employed one after the other to bring the prince into self-subjection. He was but eight years old, and Fenelon had been only a few months with him, when the child put into his hands one day the following engagement:—

“I promise M. l’Abbe de Fenelon, on the honor of a prince, to do at once whatever he bids me, and to obey him the instant he orders me anything, and, if I fail to, I will submit to any kind of punishment and disgrace.”

“Done at Versailles the 29th of November, 1689.

“Signed: Louis.”