Priests, Women, and Families Part 9

Then he burst into tears, fell on his knees, and said, 'The devil tempted me.' I was simple enough to believe and to pardon him.

"This was not the end of the affair: he was always recommencing his attack, following me everywhere, and entering my house in spite of my girls. He went so far as to hold a knife to my throat to force me to yield... At the same time he said everywhere that he had gained his suit, and that I was his promised wife. I complained in vain to his confessor; I then appealed to justice, who allowed me two men to guard my house, and began an enquiry. Saint Saulieu soon absconded from Lille, and went to Ghent, where he found one of my girls, who was a great devotee and pa.s.sed for a mirror of perfection: he lived with her, and she became _enceinte_. The way he arranged the Lille affair was this: he had a brother among the Jesuits, and they employed their friends so well, that he got off by paying the costs of justice, retracting his calumny, and acknowledging that I was an honest women."[1]

This took place between 1653 and 1658, consequently only a few years before the representation of Moliere's _Tartuffe_, who wrote the three first acts in 1664. Everything leads us to believe that such adventures were not rare at that period. Tartuffe, Orgon, and all the other personages of this truly historical piece, are not abstract beings, pure creations of art, like the heroes of Corneille or Racine; they are real men, caught in the act, and taken from nature.

What strikes us in Mademoiselle de Bourignon's Flemish Tartuffe is his patience to study and learn mysticism in order to speak its language; and, again, his perseverance in a.s.sociating himself for whole years with the thoughts of the pious maiden.

If Moliere had not been confined in so narrow a frame, if his _Tartuffe_ had had the time to prepare better his advances, if he had been able (the thing was then, no doubt, too dangerous) to take the cloak of Desmarets and Quietism in its birth, he might have advanced still further in his designs without being discovered. Then he would not in the very beginning have made to the person he wants to seduce the very illogical confession, that he is a cheat. He would not have ventured the expression, "If it be only heaven" (Act iv. scene 5).

Instead of unmasking abruptly this ugly corruption, he would have varnished it over, and unveiled it by degrees. From one ambiguous phrase to another, and by a cunning transition, he would have contrived to make corruption take the appearance of perfection. Who knows? He might perhaps at last have succeeded, like many others, in finding it unnecessary to be a hypocrite any longer, and have finished by imposing on himself, cheating and seducing himself into the belief that he was a saint. It is then he would have been Tartuffe in the superlative degree, being so not only for the world, but for himself, having perfectly confounded within himself every ray of good, and reposing in evil with a tranquillity secured by his ignorance, counterfeit at first, but afterwards become natural.

[1] The two accounts given by Mademoiselle de Bourignon are abridged and united. See at the end of Vol. I. of her OEuvres (Amsterdam, 1686), pp. 68-80, and pp. 188-197.

CHAPTER VII.

APPARITION OF MOLINOS, 1675.--HIS SUCCESS AT HOME.--FRENCH QUIETISTS.--MADAME GUYON.--HER DIRECTOR.--THE TORRENTS.--MYSTIC DEATH.--DO WE RETURN FROM IT?

_The Spiritual Guide_ of Molinos appeared at Rome in 1675. The way having been prepared for twenty years by different publications of the same tendency, highly approved of by the inquisitors of Rome and Spain, this book had a success unparalleled in the age; in twelve years it was translated and reprinted twenty times.

We must not be surprised that this guide to annihilation, this method to die, was received so greedily. There was then throughout Europe a general feeling of wearisomeness. That century, still far from its close, already panted for repose. This appears to be the case by its own doctrines. Cartesianism, which gave it an impulse, became inactive and contemplative in Mallebranche (1674). Spinosa, as early as 1670, had declared the immobility of G.o.d, man, and the world, in the unity of substance. And in 1676, Hobbes gave his theory of political fatalism.

Spinosa, Hobbes, and Molinos--death, everywhere, in metaphysics, politics, and morality! What a dismal chorus! They are of one mind without knowing each other or forming any compact; they seem, however, to shout to each other from one extremity of Europe to the other!

Poor human liberty has nothing left but the choice of its suicide; either to be hurled by logic in the North into the bottomless pit of Spinosa, or to be lulled in the South by the sweet voice of Molinos, into a death-like and eternal slumber.

The age is, however, as yet in all its brilliancy and triumph. Some time must pa.s.s away before these discouraging and deadly thoughts pa.s.s from theory to practice, and politics become infected with this moral languor.

It is a delicate and interesting moment in every existence, that middle term between the period of increasing vigour and that of old age, when, retaining its brilliancy, it loses its strength, and decay imperceptibly begins. In the month of August the trees have all their leaves, but soon they change colour, many a one grows pale, and in their splendid summer robe you have a presentiment of their autumnal decline.

For some time an impure and feverish wind had blown from the South, both from Italy and Spain: Italy was already too lifeless, too deeply entombed to be able to produce even a doctrine of death. It was a Spaniard, established at Rome and imbued with Italian languor, who invented this theory and drew it forth into practice. Still it was necessary for his disciples to oblige him to write and publish.

Molinos had, for twenty years, been satisfied with sowing his doctrine noiselessly in Rome, and propagating it gently from palace to palace.

The theology of Quietism was wonderfully adapted to the city of catacombs, the silent city, where, from that time, scarcely anything was heard but the faint rustling of worms crawling in the sepulchre.

When the Spaniard arrived in Rome, it had hardly recovered from the effeminate pontificate of Madame Olympia. The _crucified Jesus_ reposed in the delicate hands of her general Oliva, among sumptuous _vines_, exotic flowers, lilies, and roses. These torpid Romans, this idle n.o.bility, and these lazy fair ones, who pa.s.s their time on couches, with half-closed eyes, are the persons to whom Molinos comes at a late hour to speak--ought I to say _speak_? His low whispering voice, sinking into their lethargy, is confounded with their inward dream.

Quietism had quite a different character in France. In a living country, the theory of death showed some symptoms of life. An infinite measure of activity was employed to prove that action was no longer necessary. This injured their doctrine, for noise and light were hurtful to it. This delicate plant loved darkness and sought to grow in the shade. Not to speak of the chimerical Desmarets, who could but render an opinion ridiculous, Malaval seemed to have an idea that this new doctrine outstepped Christianity. Concerning the words of Jesus, "_I am the way_," he uses an expression surprising for this century: "Since He is the way, let us pa.s.s by Him; _but he who is always pa.s.sing never arrives_."

Our French Quietists by their lucid a.n.a.lysis, their rich and fertile developments, made known, for the first time, what had scarcely been dreamed of in the obscure form which Quietism had prudently preserved in other countries. Many things, that seemed in the bud hardly developed, appeared in Madame Guyon in full bloom, as clear as daylight, with the sun in the meridian. The singular purity of this woman rendered her intrepid in advancing the most dangerous ideas. She was as pure in her imagination as she was disinterested in her motives.

She had no need to figure to herself the object of her pious love, under a material form. This is what gives her mysticism a sublime superiority over the coa.r.s.e and sensual devotion of the _Sacre-Coeur_, established by the _Visitandine_, Marie Alacoque, about the same period. Madame Guyon was far too intellectual to give a form to her G.o.d; she truly loved a spirit; hence sprang her confidence and unlimited courage. She attempts bravely, but without suspecting herself to be brave, the most perilous paths, now ascending, now descending into regions that others had most avoided; she presses boldly forward past the point where every one had stopped through fear, like the luminary which brightens everything and remains unsullied itself. These courageous efforts, though innocent in so pure a woman, had nevertheless a dangerous effect upon the weak-minded. Her confessor, Father Lacombe, was wrecked in this dangerous gulf, where he was swallowed up and drowned. The person and the doctrine had equally deranged his faculties. All we know of his intercourse with her betrays a strange weakness, which she, in her sublime aspirations, seems hardly to have condescended to notice. The very first time he saw her, then young, and tending her aged husband, he was so affected by the sight that he fainted. Afterwards, having become her humble disciple, under the name of her director, he followed her everywhere in her adventurous life, both in France and Savoy. He never left her side, "and could not dine without her." He had succeeded in getting her portrait taken. Being arrested at the same time as herself, in 1687, he was for ten years a prisoner in the fortresses of the Pyrenees. In 1698, they took advantage of the weakness of his mind to make him write to Madame Guyon a compromising letter: "The poor man,"

said she, laughing, "is become mad." He certainly was so, and, a few days after, he died at Charenton.

This madness little surprises me, when I read Madame Guyon's _Torrents_, that fantastic, charming, but fearful book. It must not be pa.s.sed over in silence.

When she composed the book, she was at Annecy, in the convent of the _newly converted_. She had bestowed her wealth upon her family, and the small income she reserved for herself was also given away by her to this religious establishment, where she was very ill used. This delicate woman, who had pa.s.sed her life in luxury, was forced to work with her hands beyond her strength; her employment was washing and sweeping. Father Lacombe, then in Rome, had recommended her to write whatever came into her mind. "It is to obey you," says she, "that I am beginning to write what I do not know myself." She takes a ream of paper, and writes down the t.i.tle of her subject:--_Torrents_.

As the torrents of the Alps, the rivers, rivulets, and mountain streams, which tumble from their heights, rush with all their force towards the sea, even so our souls, by the effect of their spiritual inclination, hasten to return towards G.o.d to be blended with Him. This comparison of living waters is not a simple text that serves her for a starting-point; she follows it up almost throughout the volume with renewed graces. One would suppose that this pleasing light style would tire us at last; but it does not: we feel that it is not mere words and language, but that it springs and flows like life-blood from the heart.

She is evidently an uninformed woman, who has read only the Imitation, the Philothea of Saint Francois, some few stories, and Don Quixote; knows nothing at all, and has not seen much. Even these _Torrents_, which she describes, are not seen by her in the Alps, where she then is; she sees them within herself; she sees nature in the mirror of her heart.

In reading this book we seem absolutely as if we were on the brink of a cascade, pensively listening to the murmuring of the waters. They fall for ever and ever gently and charmingly, varying their uniformity by a thousand changes of sound and colour. Thence you see the approach of waters of every sort (images of human souls), rivers that flow only to reach other broad majestic streams, all loaded with boats, goods, and pa.s.sengers, and that are admired and blessed for the services they render. These streams are the souls of the saints and great doctors.

There are also more rapid and eager waters which are good for nothing, on which no one dares to float, that rush forward, in headlong impatience, to reach the ocean. Such waters have terrible falls, and occasionally grow impure. Sometimes they disappear.--Alas! poor torrent, what has become of thee? It is not lost; it returns to the surface, but only to be lost again; it is yet far from its goal; it will have first to be dashed against rocks, scattered abroad, and, as it were, annihilated!

When the writer has brought her torrent to this supreme fall, she is at fault about the simile of the living waters; she then leaves it, and the torrent becomes a soul again. No image taken from nature could express what this soul is about to suffer. Here begins a strange drama, where it seems no one before had dared to venture--that of mystic death. We certainly find in earlier books a word here and there upon this dark subject; but no one yet had reached the same depth in the tomb, that deep pit where the soul is about to be buried. Madame Guyon indulges in a sort of pleasure, or perseverance, I had almost said eagerness, to grope still lower, to find, beyond all funereal ideas, a more definite death, a death more decidedly dead.

There are many things in it, that we should never have expected from a woman's hand: pa.s.sion in its transports forgets reserve. This soul, that is destined to perish, must first be divested, by her divine lover, of her trappings, the gifts that had ornamented her: he s.n.a.t.c.hes off her garments, that is to say, the virtues in which she had been enveloped.--O shame! She sees herself naked, and knows not where to hide! This is not yet enough; her beauty is taken away. O horror!

She sees she is ugly. Frightened and wandering, she runs and becomes loathsome. The faster she runs towards G.o.d, "the more she is soiled by the dirty paths she must travel in." Poor, naked, ugly, and deformed, she loses a taste for everything, understanding, memory, and will; lastly, she loses together with her will a something or other "that is her favourite," and would be a subst.i.tute for all--the idea that she is a child of G.o.d. This is properly the death at which she must arrive at last. Let n.o.body, neither the director nor any other, attempt to relieve her. She must die, and be put in the ground; be trodden under foot and walked upon, become foul and rotten, and suffer the stench of corruption, until rottenness becoming dust and ashes, hardly anything may remain to testify that the soul ever existed.

What was the soul must, if it still thinks, apparently think that all it can now do is, to remain motionless in the bosom of the earth. Now, however, it begins to feel something surprising! Has the sun darted a ray through a crack in the tomb? perhaps only for one moment? No: the effect is durable, the dead soul revives, recovers some strength, a sort of life. But this is no longer her own life, it is _life in G.o.d_.

She has no longer anything of her own, neither will nor desire. What has she to do to possess what she loves? Nothing, nothing, eternally nothing. But can she have any defects in this state? Doubtless she has; she knows them, but does nothing to get rid of them: to be able to do so, she would have to become as before, "thoughtful about herself."

These are little mists which she must allow to disappear gradually.

The soul has now G.o.d for soul; He is now become her principle of life, _He is one and identical_ with her.

"In this state nothing extraordinary happens, no visions, revelations, ecstasies, nor transports. All such things do not belong to this system, which is simple, pure, and naked, seeing nothing but in G.o.d, _as G.o.d sees Himself_, and by His eyes."

Thus, after many immoral and dangerous things, the book ends in a singular purity, which few mystics have even approached. A gentle new birth, without either visions or ecstasies, and a sight divinely pure and serene, is the lot of that soul, which has pa.s.sed through all the various shadows of death.

If we listen to Madame Guyon, our life, after having been crushed, soiled, and destroyed, will revive in G.o.d. He who has pa.s.sed through all the horror of the sepulchre, whose living body has become a corpse, which has held communion with worms, and from rottenness has become ashes and clay--even he will resume his life, and again bloom in the sun.

What can be less credible, or less conformable to nature? She deceives herself and us by equivocal terms. The life she promises us after this death is not our own; our personality extinguished, effaced, and annihilated, will be succeeded by another, infinite and perfect, I allow; but still not ours.

I had not yet read the _Torrents_ when all this was, for the first time, represented to my mind. I was ascending St. Gothard, and had advanced to meet the violent Reuss that rushes madly down the mountain in its headlong course. My imagination conjured up, in spite of myself, the terrible strugglings with which it labours to force its way through rocks that would hem it in and bar its progress. I was frightened at its falls and the efforts it seemed to make, like a poor soul on the rack, to fly from itself, and hide where it might be seen no more. It writhes at the Devil's Bridge, and, in the midst of its agony, hurled from an immense height to the bottom of the abyss, it ceases for a moment to be a river: it becomes a tempest between heaven and earth, an icy vapour, a horrible frosty blast, that fills the dark valley with an infernal mist. Mount higher and higher still. You traverse a cavern, and pa.s.s a hollow rock. Lo! the uproar ceases; this grand battle of the elements is over. Peace and silence reign. And life?--is it renewed? Do you find a new-birth after this death-struggle? The meadow is blighted, the flowers are gone, and the very gra.s.s is scarce and poor. Nothing in nature stirs, not a bird in the air, not an insect on the earth. You see the sun again, it is true, but void of rays and heat.

CHAPTER VIII.

FENELON AS DIRECTOR.--HIS QUIETISM.--MAXIMS OF SAINTS, 1697.--FENELON AND MADAME DE LA MAISONPORT.

Madame Guyon was not apparently the extravagant and chimerical person that her enemies pretend, since, on her arrival at Paris from Savoy, she managed to captivate and secure, at her first onset, the man, of all others, the most capable of giving a relish to her doctrines--a man of genius, who, moreover, had an infinite fund of sagacity and address, and who, independently of all these merits, possessed what had dispensed, if necessary, with every other qualification, being, at that time, the director the most in vogue.

This new Chantal required a St. Francois de Sales; she found one in Fenelon, who was less serene and innocent, it is true, and less refulgent with boyhood and seraphic grace, but eminently n.o.ble and shrewd, subtle, eloquent, close, very devout, and very intriguing.

She laid her hands upon him, seized and carried him by an easy a.s.sault.

This great genius, whose mind was stored with every variety and every contradiction, would probably have continued to waver, had it not been for this powerful impulse that forced him all on one side. Till then he had wandered between different opinions, and opposite parties and communities, so that every one claimed him as his own, and thought to possess him. Though a.s.siduous in courting Bossuet, whose disciple he said he was, never leaving his side in his retirement at Meaux, he was not less friendly to the Jesuits, and, between the two, he still held fast to Saint-Sulpice. In his theology, at one time inclining towards Grace, at another towards Free-will, imbued with the oldest mystics, and full of the presentiments of the eighteenth century, he seems to have had, beneath his faith, some obscure corners of scepticism which he was unwilling to fathom. All these divers elements, without being able to combine, were harmonised in his outward actions, under the graceful influence of the most elegant genius that was ever met with.

Being both a Grecian and a Christian, he reminds us at the same time of the fathers, philosophers, and romancers of the Alexandrian period; and sometimes our sophist turns prophet, and, in his sermon, soars on the wings of Isaiah.

Everything inclines us to believe, for all that, that the astonishing writer was the least part of Fenelon--he was superlatively the _Director_. Who can say by what enchantment he bewitched souls, and filled them with transport? We perceive traces of it in the infinite charms of his correspondence, disfigured and adulterated as it is;[1]

no other has been more cruelly pruned, purged, and designedly obscured.

Yet in these fragments and scattered remains, seduction is still omnipotent: besides a n.o.bleness of manner, and an animated and refined turn of thought, in which the man of power is very perceptible under the robe of the apostle, there is also what is particularly his own, a feminine delicacy that by no means excludes strength, and even in his subtilty an indescribable tenderness that touches the heart. When a youth, and before he was tutor to the Duke of Burgundy, he had, for a long time, directed the _newly converted_. There he had the opportunity of well studying woman's character, and of acquiring that perfect knowledge of the female heart, in which he was unrivalled.

The impa.s.sioned interest they took in his fortune, the tears of his little flock, the d.u.c.h.esses of Chevreuse, Beauvilliers, and others, when he missed the archbishopric of Paris, their constant fidelity to this well-beloved guide during his exile at Cambrai, which ended only with his death--all this fills up the void of the lost letters, and conveys a strange idea of this all-powerful magician, whose invincible magic defied every attack.

To introduce spirituality so refined and so exalted, and such a pretension to supreme perfection into that world of outward propriety and ceremonial at Versailles, and this, at the end of a reign in which everything seemed rigidly frozen--was, indeed, a rash undertaking.