La Grande Mademoiselle

I said to the Queen [said the worthy Motteville] that Mademoiselle was justified in refusing to avow it. I said that, whether it were true or untrue, Monsieur had not the right to forsake her. A girl is not to blame for thinking of her establishment, but it is not right to let it be known that she is thinking of it, nor is it proper to confess that she is working to accomplish it.

All Monsieur's motives were known and they increased the contempt of the people. When Mademoiselle attained her majority she expressed a wish to take possession of her inheritance. She asked her father for an accounting and her father accused her of indelicacy and undutiful conduct. He continued to administer her fortune and to give her such sums as he considered suitable for the maintenance of her home. In justification of his conduct he alleged that he had no money of his own, and that it was impossible to turn her property into funds. "Several times," said Mme. de Motteville, "I have heard him say that he had not a sou that his daughter did not give him. 'My daughter possesses great wealth,' he used to ejaculate; 'were it not for that I should not know where to go for bread.'" People remembered that he had received a million of revenue when he married⁹³ and they judged his conduct severely, but they were not astonished. "No one can hope much from the conduct of Monsieur," wrote Olivier d'Ormesson.

After the quarrel the first meeting between father and daughter took place in the gallery of the Luxembourg. Monsieur hung his head.

He changed colour [wrote Mademoiselle]; he appeared abashed; he tried to reprimand me; he began as people begin such things, but he knew that he ought to apologise to me rather than to blame me; and in truth that was what he did; he apologised, – though he did not seem to know that he was doing it.

As they talked Monsieur's eyes filled with tears and Mademoiselle wept freely. To all appearances they were on the best of terms when they parted.

Having appeased her father, Mademoiselle went to the Palais Royal hoping to pacify the Queen. Anne of Austria greeted her with icy reserve and Mademoiselle never could forget it. She had looked upon Anne of Austria as children look upon an elder sister. Thenceforth, feeling that she had no hope of support from her own family, she bent every effort to the difficult task of finding a suitable husband and of establishing her life on a firm and independent basis. Mazarin's unswerving determination to prevent Mademoiselle's marriage was classed among the most important of the causes which contributed to the Fronde. The dangers attendant upon his conduct were real and serious; practically he was Mademoiselle's only guardian, and Mademoiselle was not only the favorite of the people but the Princess of the reigning house. As the director of a powerful nation Mazarin had duties which no State's minister is justified in ignoring. There were times when many of his other errors were so represented as to appear pardonable, but there never was a time when he was not blamed for the humiliation of the haughty Princess who, by no fault of her own, had been left upon the shores of life, isolated, hopeless of establishment, an object of ridicule to the unobservant who failed to see the pathetic loneliness of her position. The Parisians, high and low, thought that the Queen's Minister had done Mademoiselle an irreparable wrong, and it was thought that she knew that he had done her a wrong. It was believed that she would be a dangerous adversary in the day when the French people called him to account.

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 years⁹⁴ 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 Bérulle⁹⁵ 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. Richelieu¹⁰⁰ 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 depravity¹⁰³ 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 despised¹⁰⁵– 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.