Number Thirteen. An Episode Of The Commune
Mlle. de Lemaque and her sister Mme. de Chanoir lived at No. 13 Rue Royale. They were the daughters of a military man whose fortune when he married consisted in his sword, nothing else; and of a noble Demoiselle de Cambatte, whose wedding portion, according to the good old French fashion, was precisely the same as her husband’s, minus the sword. But over and above this joint capital the young people had a good stock of hope and courage, and an inexhaustible fund of love; they had therefore as good a chance of getting on as other young folk who start in life under the same pecuniary disadvantages. M. de Lemaque, moreover, had friends in high place who looked kindly on him, and promised him countenance and protection, and there was no reason, as far as he and his wife could see, why he should not in due time clutch that legendary baton which Napoleon declared every French soldier carries in his knapsack. Nor, indeed, looking at things from a retrospective point of view, was there any reason, that we can see, why he should not have died a marshal of France, except that he died too soon. The young soldier was in a fair way of climbing to the topmost rung of the military ladder; but just as he had got his foot on the third rung, Death stepped down and met him, and he climbed no further. His wife followed him into the grave three years later. They left two daughters, Félicité and Aline, the only fruits of their short and happy union. The orphans were educated at the Legion of Honor, and then sent adrift on the wide, wide world, to battle with its winds and waves, to sink or swim as best they could. They swam. Perhaps I ought rather say they floated. The eldest, Félicité, was married from S. Denis to an old general, who, after a reasonably short time, had the delicacy to betake himself to a better world, leaving his gay wife a widow at the head of an income of £40 a year. Aline might have married under similar circumstances, but, after turning it over in her mind, she came to the conclusion that, all things considered, since it was a choice of evils, and that she must earn her bread in some way, she preferred earning it and eating it independently as a single woman. This gave rise to the only quarrel the sisters had had in their lives. Félicité resented the disgrace that Aline was going to put on the family name by degenerating into a giver of private lessons, when she might have secured forty pounds a year for ever by a few years’ dutiful attendance on a brave man who had fought his country’s battles.
“Well, if you can find me a warrior of ninety,” said the younger sister, a month before she left S. Denis, “I’m not sure that he might not persuade me; but I never will capitulate under ninety; I couldn’t trust a man under that; they live for ever when they marry between sixty and eighty, and there are no tyrants like them; now, I would do my duty as a kind wife for a year or so, but I’ve no notion of taking a situation as nurse for fifteen or twenty years, and that’s what one gets by marrying a young man of seventy or thereabouts.”
Félicité urged her own case as a proof to the contrary. Général de Chanoir was only sixty‐eight when she married him, and he retired at seventy. Aline maintained, however, that this was the one exception necessary to prove the rule to the present generation, and as no eligible parti of fourscore and ten presented itself before she left school, she held to her resolve, and started at once as a teacher.
The sisters took an apartment together, if two rooms, a cabinet de toilette, and a cooking‐range in a dark passage, dignified by the name of kitchen, can be called an apartment, and for six years they lived very happily.
Mme. de Chanoir was small and fair, and very distinguished‐looking. She had never known a day’s illness in her life, but she was a hypochondriac. She believed herself afflicted with a spine disease, which necessitated reclining all day long on the sofa in a Louis Quinze dressing‐gown and a Dubarry cap.
Aline was tall and dark, not exactly pretty, but indescribably piquant. Without being delicate, her health was far less robust than her sister’s; but she was blessed with indomitable spirits and a fund of energy that carried her through a variety of aches and pains, and often bore her successfully through her round of daily work when another would have given in.
The domestic establishment of the sisters consisted in a charwoman, who rejoiced in the name of Mme. Cléry. She was a type of a class almost extinct in Paris now; a dainty little cook, clean as a sixpence, honest as the sun, orderly as a clock, a capital servant in every way. She came twice a day to No. 13, two hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon, and the sisters paid her twenty francs a month. She might have struck for more wages, and rather than let her go they would have managed to raise them; but Mme. Cléry was born before strikes came into fashion, it was quite impossible to say how long before; her age was incalculable; her youth belonged to that class of facts spoken of as beyond the memory of the oldest man in the district. Aline used to look at her sometimes, and wonder if she really could have been born, and if she meant to die like other people; the crisp, wiry old woman looked the sort of person never to have either a beginning or an end; they had had her now for eight years—at least Mme. de Chanoir had—and there was not the shadow of a change in her. Her gowns were like herself, they never wore out, neither did her caps—high Normandy caps, with flaps extended like a wind‐mill in repose, stiff, white, and uncompromising. Everything about her was antiquated. She had a religious regard for antiquity in every shape, and a proportionate contempt for modernism; but, of all earthly things, what her soul loved most was an old name, and what it most despised a new one. She used to say that if she chose to cook the rotis of a parvenu she might make double the money, and it was true; but she could not bend her spirit to it; she liked her dry bread and herbs better from a good family than a stalled ox from upstarts. She was as faithful as a dog to her two mistresses, and consequently lorded over them like a step‐mother, perpetually bullying and scolding, and bewailing her own infatuation in staying with them while she might be turning a fatter pullet on her own spit at home than the miserable coquille at No. 13 ever held a fire to. Why had she not the sense to take the situation that M. X——, the agent de change, across the street, had offered her again and again? The femme de ménage was, in fact, as odious and exasperating as the most devoted old servant who ever nursed a family from the cradle to the grave. But let any one else dare so much as cast a disrespectful glance at either of her victims! She shook her fist at the concierge’s wife one day for venturing to call Mme. de Chanoir Mme. de Chanoir tout court, instead of Mme. la Générale de Chanoir, to a flunky who came with a note, and she boxed the concierge’s ears for speaking of Aline as “l’Institutrice.” As Mme. la Générale’s sofa was drawn across the window that looked into the court, she happened to be an eye‐witness to the two incidents, and heard every word that was said. This accidental disclosure of Mme. Cléry’s regard for the family dignity before outsiders covered a multitude of sins in the eyes of both the sisters. Indeed, Mme. de Chanoir came at last, by force of habit, almost to enjoy being bullied by the old soul. “Cela nous pose, ma chère,” she would remark complacently, when the wind from the kitchen blew due north, and Aline threatened to mutiny.
Aline never could have endured it if she had been as constantly tried as her easy‐going sister was; but, lucky for all parties, she went out immediately after breakfast, and seldom came in till late in the afternoon, when the old beldame was busy getting ready the dinner.
It was a momentous life they led, the two young women, but, on the whole, it was a happy one. Mme. de Chanoir, seeing how bravely her sister carried the burden she had taken up, grew reconciled to it in time. They had a pleasant little society, too; friends who had known them from their childhood, some rich and in good positions, others struggling like themselves in a narrow cage and under difficult circumstances; but one and all liked the sisters, and brought a little contingent of sunshine to their lives. As to Aline, she had sunshine enough in herself to light up the whole Rue Royale. Every lesson she gave, every incident of the day, no matter how trivial, fell across her path like a sunbeam; she had a knack of looking at things from a sunny focus that shot out rays on every object that came within its radius, and of extracting amusement or interest from the most commonplace things and people; even her own vexations she had turned into ridicule. Her position of governess was a fountain of fun to her. When another would have drawn gall from a snub, and smarted and been miserable under a slight, Aline de Lemaque saw a comic side to the circumstance, and would dress it up in a fashion that diverted herself and her friends for a week. Moreover, the young lady was something of a philosopher.
“You never find out human nature till you come to earn your own bread—I mean, women don’t,” she used to say to Mme. de Chanoir. “If I were the mother of a family of daughters, and wanted to teach them life, I’d make every one of them, no matter how big their dots were, begin by running after the cachet. Nobody who hasn’t tried it would believe what a castle of truth it is to one—a mirror that shows up character to the life, a sort of moral photography. It is often as good as a play to me to watch the change that comes over people when, after talking to them, and making myself pass for a very agreeable person, I suddenly announce the fact that I give lessons. Their whole countenance changes, not that they look on me straightway with contempt. Oh! dear no. Many good Christians, people of the ’help yourself and God will help you’ sect, conceive, on the contrary, a great respect for me; but I become metamorphosed on the spot. I am not what they took me for, they took me for a lady, and all the time I was a governess! They did not think the less of me, but they can’t help feeling that they have been taken in; that, in fact, I’m an altogether different variety from themselves, and it is very odd they did not recognize it at first sight. But these are the least exciting experiences. The great fun is when I get hold of an out‐and‐out worldly individual, man or woman, but a woman is best, and let them go on till they have thoroughly committed themselves, made themselves gushingly agreeable to me, perhaps gone the length of asking, in a significant manner, if I live in their neighborhood; then comes the crisis. I smile my gladdest, and say, ‘Monsieur, or Madame, I give lessons!’ Changement de décoration à vue d’œil, ma chère. It’s just as if I lancéd an obus into the middle of the company, only it rebounds on me and hits nobody else; the eyebrows of the company go up, the corners of its mouth go down, and it bows to me as I sit on the ruins of my respectability, shattered to pieces by my own obus.”
“I can’t understand how you can laugh at it. If I were in your place, I should have died of vexation and wounded pride long ago,” said Mme. de Chanoir, one day, as Aline related in high glee an obus episode that she had had that morning; “but I really believe you have no feeling.”
“Well, whatever I have, I keep out of the reach of vulgar impertinence. I should be very sorry to make my feelings a target for insolence and bad breeding,” replied Aline pertly. This was the simple truth. Her feelings were out of the reach of such petty shafts; they were cased in cheerfulness and common sense, and a nobler sort of pride than that in which Mme. de Chanoir considered her sister wanting. If, however, the obus was frequently fatal to Mlle. de Lemaque’s social standing, on the other hand it occasionally did her good service; but of this later. Its present character was that of an explosive bomb which she carried in her pocket, and lancéd with infinite gusto on every available opportunity.
On Saturday evening the sisters were “at home.” These little soirées were the great event of their quiet lives. All the episodes and anecdotes of the week were treasured up for that evening, when the intimes came to see them and converse and sip a glass of cold eau sucrée in summer, and a cup of hot ditto in winter (but then it was called tea) by the light of a small lamp with a green shade. There was no attempt at entertainment or finery of any kind, except that Mme. Cléry, instead of going home as soon as the dinner things were washed up, stayed to open the door. It was a remnant of the sort of society that used to exist in French families some thirty years ago, when conversation was cultivated as the primary accomplishment of men and women, and when they met regularly to exercise themselves in the difficult and delightful art. It was not reserved to the well‐born exclusively to talk well and brilliantly in those days, when the most coveted encomium that could be passed on any one was, “He talks well.” All classes vied for it; every circle had its centre of conversation. The fauteuil de l’aïeule and the salon of the femme d’esprit, each had its audience, attended as assiduously, and perhaps enjoyed quite as much, as the vaudevilles and ambigus that have since drawn away the bourgeois from the one and the man of fashion from the other. Besides its usual habitués for conversation, every circle had one habitué who was looked upon as the friend of the family, and tacitly took precedence of all the others. The friend of the family at No. 13 was a certain professor of the Sorbonne named M. Dalibouze. He was somewhere on the sunny side of fifty, a bald, pompous little man who wore spectacles, took snuff, and laid down the law; very prosy and very estimable, a model professor. He had never married, but it was the dream of his life to marry. He had meditated on marriage for the last thirty years, and of course knew more about it than any man who had been married double that time. He was never so eloquent or so emphatic as when dilating on the joys and duties of domestic life; no matter how tired he was with study and scientific researches, how disappointed in the result of some cherished literary scheme, he brightened up the moment marriage came on the tapis. This hobby of the professor’s was a great amusement to Mme. de Chanoir, who delighted to see him jump into the saddle and ride off at a canter while she lay languidly working at her tapestry, patting him on the back every now and then, by a word of encouragement, or signifying her assent merely by a smile or a nod. Sometimes she would take him to task seriously about putting his theories into practice and getting himself a wife, assuring him that it was quite wicked of him not to marry when he was so richly endowed with all the qualities necessary to make a model husband.
“Ah! madame, if I thought I were capable of making a young woman happy!” M. Dalibouze would exclaim with a sigh; “but at my age! No, I have let my chance go by.”
“How, sir, at your age!” the générale would protest. “Why, it is the very flower of manhood, the moment of all others for a man to marry. You have outlived the delusions of youth and none of its vigor; you have crossed the Rubicon that separates folly from wisdom, and you have left nothing on the other side of the bridge but the silly chimera of boyhood. Believe me, the woman whom you would select would never wish to see you a day younger.”
And M. Dalibouze would caress his chin, and observe thoughtfully: “Do you think so, madame?” Upon which Mme. de Chanoir would pour another vial of oil and honey on the learned head of the professor, till the wonder was that it did not turn on his shoulders.
Aline had no sympathy with his rhapsodies or his jeremiads; they bored her to extinction, and sometimes it was all she could do not to tell him so; but she disapproved of his being made a joke of, and testified against it very decidedly when Félicité, in a spirit of mischief, led him up to a more than usually ridiculous culmination. It was not fair, she said, to make a greater fool of the good little man than he made of himself, and instead of encouraging him to talk such nonsense one ought to laugh him out of it, and try and cure him of his silly conceit.
“I don’t see it at all in that light,” Mme. de Chanoir would answer. “In the first place, if I laughed at him, or rather if I let him see that I did, he would never forgive me, and, as I have a great regard for him, I should be sorry to lose his friendship; and in the next place, it’s a great amusement to me to see him swallow my little doses of flattery so complacently, and I have no scruple in dosing him, because nothing that I or any one else could say could possibly add one grain to his self‐ conceit, so one may as well turn it to account for a little entertainment.”
It was partly this system of flattery, which Aline resented on principle, that induced her occasionally to snub the professor, and partly the fact that she had reason to suspect his dreams of married bliss centred upon herself. In fact, she knew it. He had never told her so outright, for the simple reason that, whenever he drew near that crisis, Aline cut him short in such a peremptory manner that it cowed him for weeks, but nevertheless she knew in her heart of hearts that she reigned supreme over M. Dalibouze’s. She would not have married him, no, not if he could have crowned her queen of the Sorbonne and the Collége de France, but the fact of his being her slave and aspiring to be her master constituted a claim on her regard which a true‐hearted woman seldom disowns.
Félicité would have favored his suit if there had been the ghost of a chance for him, but she knew there was not.
Mme. Cléry looked coldly on it. Needless to say, neither M. Dalibouze nor his cruel‐hearted lady‐love had ever made a confidante of the femme de ménage; but she often remarked to her mistresses when they ventured an opinion on anything connected with her special department, “Je ne suis pas née d’hier,” an assertion which, strange to say, even the rebellious Aline had never attempted to gainsay. Mme. Cléry was not, indeed, born yesterday, moreover she was a Frenchwoman, and a particularly wide‐awake one, and from the first evening that she saw Aline sugaring M. Dalibouze’s tea, dropping in lump after lump in that reckless way, while the little man held his cup and beamed at her through his spectacles as if he meant to stand there for ever simpering, “Merci encore!”—it occurred to Mme. Cléry when she saw this that there was more in it than tea‐making. Of course it was natural and proper that a young woman, especially an orphan, should think of getting married, but it was right and proper that her friends should think of it too, and see that she married the proper person. Now, on the face of it, M. Dalibouze could not be the proper person. Nevertheless, Mme. Cléry waited till the suspicion that M. Dalibouze had settled it in his own mind that he was that man took the shape of a conviction before she considered it her duty to interfere.
By interfering Mme. Cléry meant going aux renseignements. Nobody ever got true renseignements, especially when there was a marriage in question, except people like her; ladies and gentlemen never get behind the scenes with each other, or, if they do, they never tell what they see there. They are very sweet and smiling when they meet in the salon, and nobody guesses that madame has rated her femme de chambre for not putting the flowers in her hair exactly to her fancy, or that monsieur has flung a boot at his valet for giving him his shaving‐water too hot or too cold. If you want the truth, you must get it by the back‐stairs. This was Mme. Cléry’s belief, and, acting upon it, she went to M. Dalibouze’s concierge in the Rue Jean Beauvais to consult him confidentially about his locataire.
The first thing to be ascertained before entering on such secondary details as character, conduct, etc., was whether or not the professor was of a good enough family to be entertained at all as a husband for Mlle. de Lemaque. On this sine qua non question the concierge could unfortunately throw no light. The professor had a multitude of friends, all respectable people, many of them décorés, who drove to the door in spruce coupés, but of his family Pipelet knew nothing; of his personal respectability there was no doubt whatever; he was the kindest of men, a very pearl of tenants, always in before midnight, and gave forty francs to Pipelet on New Year’s day, not to count sundry other little bonuses on minor fêtes during the year. But so long as her mind was in darkness on the main point, all this was no better than sounding brass in the ears of Mme. Cléry.
“Has he, or has he not, the particule?” she demanded, cutting Pipelet short in the middle of his panegyric.
“The particule?” repeated Pipelet. “What’s that?”
“The particule nobiliaire,” explained Mme. Cléry, with a touch of contempt. “There is some question of a marriage between him and one of my ladies; but, if M. Dalibouze hasn’t got the particule, it’s no use thinking of it.”
“Madame,” said Pipelet, assuming a meditative air—he was completely at sea as to what this essential piece of property might be, but did not like to own his ignorance—“I’m not a man to set up for knowing more of my tenant’s business than I do, and M. Dalibouze has never opened himself to me about how or where his money was placed; but I could give you the name of his agent, if I thought it would not compromise me.”
“I’m not a woman to compromise any one that showed me confidence,” said Mme. Cléry, tightening her lips, and bobbing her flaps at Pipelet; “but you need not give me the name of his agent. What sort of a figure should I make at his agent’s! Give me his own name. How does he spell it?”
“Spell it!” echoed Pipelet.
“A big D or a little d?” said Mme. Cléry.
“Why, a big D, of course! Who ever spelt their name with a little one?” retorted Pipelet.
“Ah!...” Mme. Cléry smiled a smile of serene pity on the benighted ignoramus, and then observed coolly: “I suspected it! I’m not easy to deceive in that sort of things. I was not born yesterday. Good‐morning, M. le Concierge.” She moved towards the door.
“Stop!” cried Pipelet, seizing his berette as if a ray of light had shot through his skull—“stop! Now that I think of it, it’s a little d. I have not a doubt but it’s a little d. I noticed it only yesterday on a letter that came for monsieur, and I said to myself: ‘Let us see!’ I said. ‘What a queer fancy for a man of distinction like M. le Professeur to spell his name with a little d!’ Là! if I didn’t say those words to myself no later than yesterday!”
Mme. Cléry was dubious. Unluckily there was no letter in M. Dalibouze’s box at that moment, which would have settled the point at issue, so she had nothing for it but to go home, and turn it in her mind what was to be done next. After all, it was a great responsibility on her. The old soul considered herself in the light of a protector to the two young women, one a cripple on the broad of her back, and the other a light‐hearted creature who believed everything and everybody. It was her place to look after them as far as she could. That afternoon, when Mme. Cléry went to No. 13, after her fruitless expedition to the Rue Jean Beauvais, she took a letter in to Mme. de Chanoir. She had never seen, or, at any rate, never noticed, the writing before, but as she handed the envelope to her mistress it flashed upon her that it was from M. Dalibouze, and that it bore on the subject of her morning’s peregrination.
She seized a feather‐broom that hung by the fireplace, and began vigorously threatening the clock and the candlesticks, as an excuse for staying in the room, and watching Mme. de Chanoir in the looking‐glass while she read the letter. The old woman was an irascible enemy to dust; they were used to see her at the most inopportune times pounce on the feather‐broom and begin whipping about her to the right and left, so Mme. de Chanoir took no notice of this sudden castigation of the chimney‐piece at four o’clock in the afternoon. She read her note, and then, tossing it into the basket beside her, resumed her tapestry as if nothing had occurred to divert her thoughts from roses and Berlin wool.
“Mme. la Générale, pardon and excuse,” said Mme. Cléry, deliberately hanging the feather‐broom on its nail, and going up to the foot of the générale’s sofa. “I have it on my mind to ask something of madame.”
“Ask it, my good Mme. Cléry.”
“Does Mme. la Générale think of marrying Mlle. Aline?”
Mme. de Chanoir opened her eyes, and stared for a moment in mild surprise at her charwoman, then a smile broke over her face, and she said:
“You are thinking that you would not like to come to me if I were alone?”
“I was not thinking of that, madame,” replied Mme. Cléry, in a tone of ceremony that was not habitual, and which would have boded no good (Mme. Cléry was never so respectful as when she was going to be particularly disagreeable), except that she looked very meek, and, Félicité thought, rather affectionately at her as their eyes met.
“Well,” said Mme. de Chanoir, “I suppose we must marry her some day; I ought, perhaps, to occupy myself about it more actively than I do; but there’s time enough to think about it yet; mademoiselle is in no hurry.”
“Dame!” said Mme. Cléry testily, “when a demoiselle has become an old maid, there is not so much time to lose! Pardon and excuse, Mme. la Générale, but I thought, I don’t know why, that that letter had something to do with it?”
“This letter! What could have put that into your head?”
Mme. de Chanoir took up the note to see if the envelope had anything about it which warranted this romantic suspicion, but it was an ordinary envelope, with no trace of anything more peculiar than the post‐mark.
“As I have told Mme. la Générale before,” said Mme. Cléry, shaking her head significantly, “I was not born yesterday”—she emphasized the not as if Mme. de Chanoir had denied that fact and challenged her to swear to it on the Bible—“and I don’t carry my eyes in my pocket; and when a demoiselle heaps lumps of sugar into a gentleman’s cup till it’s as thick as honey for a spoon to stand in, and a shame to see the substance of the family wasted in such a way, and she never grudging it a bit, but looking as if it would be fun to her to turn the sugar‐bowl upside down over it—I say, when I see that sort of thing, I’m not femme Cléry if there isn’t something in it.”
Félicité felt inclined to laugh, but she restrained herself, and observed interrogatively:
“Well, Mme. Cléry, suppose there is?”
This extravagance of sugar on M. Dalibouze was an old grievance of Mme. Cléry’s. In fact, it had been her only one against the professor, till she grew to look upon him as the possible husband of Mlle. Aline, and then the question of his having or not having the particule assumed such alarming importance in her mind that it magnified all minor defects, and she believed him capable of every misdemeanor under the sun.
“Mme. la Générale,” she replied, “one does not marry every day; one ought to think seriously about it; Mlle. Aline has not experience; she is vive and light‐hearted; she is a person to be taken in by outward appearances; such things as learning, good principles, and esprit would blind her to serious shortcomings; it is the duty of Mme. la Générale to prevent such a mistake in time.”
“What sort of shortcomings are you afraid of in M. Dalibouze, Mme. Cléry?” inquired Mme. de Chanoir, dropping her tapestry, and looking with awakened curiosity at the old woman.
“Let us begin with a first principle, Mme. la Générale,” observed Mme. Cléry, demurely slapping the palm of her left hand. “Mlle. Aline is née; the father and mother of mamzelle were both of an excellent family; it is consequently of the first necessity that her husband should be so, too; the first thing, therefore, to be considered in a suitor is his name. Now, has M. Dalibouze the particule, or has he not?”
It was a very great effort for Mme. de Chanoir to keep her countenance under this charge and deliver with which the old woman solemnly closed her speech, and then stood awaiting the effect on her listener; still, such is the weakness of human nature, the générale in her inmost heart was flattered by it; it was pleasant to be looked up to as belonging to a race above the common herd, to be recognized in spite of her poverty, even by a femme de ménage, as superior to the wealthy parvenus whose fathers and mothers were not of a good family.
“My good Mme. Cléry,” she said after a moment’s reflection, “you, like ourselves, were brought up with very different ideas from those that people hold nowadays. Nobody cares a straw to‐day who a man’s father was, or whether he had the particule or not; all that they care about is that he should be well educated, and well conducted, and well off; and, my dear, one must go with the times, one must give in to the force of public opinion around one. Customs change with the times. I would, of course, much rather have a brother‐in‐law of our own rank than one cleverer and richer who was not; but what would you have? One cannot have everything. It is not pleasant for me to see Mlle. de Lemaque earning her own bread, running about the streets like a milliner’s apprentice at all hours of the day. I would overlook something to see her married to a kind, honorable man who would keep her in comfort and independence.”
“Bonté divine!” exclaimed Mme. Cléry, with a look of deep distress and consternation, “madame would then actually marry mamzelle to a bourgeois sans particule? For madame admits that M. Dalibouze has not the particule, that he spells his name with a big D?”
“Alas! he does,” confessed the générale; “but he comes, nevertheless, of a good old Normandy stock, Mme. Cléry; his great‐grandfather was procureur du roi under—”
“Tut! tut!” interrupted Mme. Cléry; “his great‐grandfather may have been what he liked; if he wasn’t a gentleman, he has no business marrying his great grandson to a de Lemaque. No, madame; I am a poor woman, but I know better than that. Mamzelle’s father would turn in his grave if he saw her married to a man who spelt his name with a big D.”
The conversation was interrupted by a ring at the door. It was Aline. She came back earlier than usual, because one of her pupils was ill and had not been able to take her lesson. The young girl was flushed and excited, and flung herself into an arm‐chair the moment she entered, and burst into tears. Mme. de Chanoir sat up in alarm, fearing she was ill, and suggested a cup of tisane.
“Oh! ’tis nothing. I’m an idiot to mind it or let such impertinence vex me,” she said, when the first outburst had passed off and relieved her.
“Mon Dieu! but what vexes mamzelle?” inquired Mme. Cléry anxiously.
“A horrid man that followed me the length of the street, and made some impudent speech, and asked me where I lived,” sobbed Aline.
“Is it possible!” exclaimed the old woman, aghast, and clasping her hands. “Well, mamzelle does astonish me! I thought young men knew better nowadays than to go on with that sort of tricks; fifty years ago they used to. I remember how I was followed and spoken to every time I went to church or to market; it was a persecution; but now I come and go and nobody minds me. To think of their daring to speak to mamzelle!”
“That’s what one must expect when one walks about alone at your age, ma pauvre Aline,” said the générale, rather sharply, with a significant look at Mme. Cléry which that good lady understood, and resented by compressing her lips and bobbing her flaps, as much as to say, “One has a principle or one has not”—principle being in this instance synonymous with particule.
Things remained in statu quo after this for some years. Mme. de Chanoir did not enlighten her sister on the subject of the conference with Mme. Cléry, but she worked as far as she could in favor of the luckless suitor who spelt his name with a capital D. It was of no use, however. Aline continued to snub him so pertinaciously and persistently that Mme. de Chanoir at last gave up his cause as hopeless, and the professor himself, when he saw this, his solitary stronghold, surrender, thought it best to raise the siege with a good grace, and make a friendly truce with the victor. He frankly withdrew from the field of suitors, and took up his position as a friend of the family. This once done, he accepted its responsibilities and prerogatives, and held himself on the qui vive to render any service in his power to Mme. de Chanoir; he kept her concierge in order, and brought bonbons and flowers to No. 13 on every possible occasion. He knew Aline was passionately fond of the latter, and he was careful to keep the flower stand that stood in the pier of the little salon freshly supplied with her favorite plants, and the vases filled with her favorite flowers. He never dared to offer her a present, but under cover of offering them to the générale he kept her informed about every new book which was likely to interest her. Finally, Frenchman‐ like, having abandoned the hope of marrying her himself, he set to work to find some more fortunate suitor. This was par excellence the duty of a friend of the family, and M. Dalibouze was fully alive to its importance. The disinterested zeal he displayed in the discharge of it would have been comical if the spirit of genuine self‐sacrifice which animated him had not touched it with pathos. One by one every eligible parti in the range of his acquaintance was led up for inspection to No. 13. Mme. de Chanoir entered complacently into the presentations; they amused her, and she tried to persuade herself that, sooner or later, something would come of them; but she knew Aline too well ever to let her into the secret of the professor’s matrimonial manœuvres. The result would have been to furnish Mlle. de Lemaque with an obus opportunity and nothing more.
But do what she would, the générale could never cheat Mme. Cléry. The old woman detected a prétendant as a cat does a mouse. It was an instinct with her. There was no putting her off the scent. She never said a word to Mme. de Chanoir, but she had a most aggravating way of making her understand tacitly that she knew all about it—that, in fact, she was not born yesterday. This was her system, whenever M. Dalibouze brought a parti to tea in the evening. Mme. Cléry was seized next day with a furious dusting fit, and when the générale testified against the feathers that kept flying out of the broom, Mme. Cléry would observe, in a significant way:
“Mme. la Générale, that makes an impression when one sees a salon well dusted; that proves that the servant is capable—that she attends to her work. Madame does not think of those things, but strangers do.”
It became at length a sort of cabalistic ceremony with the old woman; intelligible only to Mme. de Chanoir. If Aline came in when the fit was on her, and ventured to expostulate, and ask what she was doing with the duster at that time of day, Mme. Cléry would remark stiffly: “Mamzelle Aline, I am dusting.” Aline came at last to believe that it was a modified phase of S. Vitus’ dance, and that for want of anything better the old beldame vented her nerves on imaginary dust which she pursued in holes and corners with her feathery weapon.
This went on till Mlle. de Lemaque was six‐and‐twenty. She was still a bright, brave creature, working hard, accepting the privations and toil of her life in a spirit of sunshiny courage. But the sun was no longer always shining. There were days now when he drew behind a cloud—when toil pressed like a burden, and she beat her wings against it, and hated the cage that cooped her in; and she longed not so much for rest or happiness as for freedom—for a larger scope and higher aims, and wider, fuller sympathies. When these cloudy days came around, Aline felt the void of her life with an intensity that amounted at times to anguish; she felt it all the more keenly because she could not speak of it. Mme. de Chanoir would not have understood it. The sisters were sincerely attached to each other, but there was little sympathy of character between them, and on many points they were as little acquainted with each other as the neighbors on the next street. They knew this, and agreed sensibly to keep clear of certain subjects on which they could never meet except to disagree. The younger sister, therefore, when the sky was overcast, and when her spirits flagged, never tried to lean upon the older, but worked against the enemy in silence, denying herself the luxury of complaint. If her looks betrayed her, as was sometimes the case, and prompted Mme. de Chanoir to inquire if there was anything the matter beyond the never‐ending annoyance of life in general, Aline’s assurance that there was not was invariably followed by the remark: “Ma sœur, I wish you were married.” To which Aline as invariably replied: “I am happier as I am, Félicité.” It was true, or at any rate Mlle. de Lemaque thought it was. Under all her surface indifference she carried a true woman’s heart. She had dreamt her dreams of happiness, of tender fireside joys, and the dream was so fair and beautiful that for years it filled her life like a reality, and when she discovered, or fancied she did, that it was all too beautiful to be anything but a dream, that the hero of her young imagination would never cross her path in the form of a mortal husband, Aline accepted the discovery with a sigh, but without repining, and laid aside all thought of marriage as a guest that was not for her. As to the marriages that she saw every day around her, she would no more have bound herself in one of them than she would have sold herself to an Eastern pasha. Marriage was a very different thing in her eyes from what it was in Mme. de Chanoir’s. There was no point on which the sisters were more asunder than on this, and Aline understood it so well that she avoided touching on it except in jest. Whenever the subject was introduced, she drew a mask of frivolity over her real feelings to avoid bringing down the générale’s ridicule on what she would stigmatize as preposterous sentimentality.
M. Dalibouze alone guessed something of this under‐current of deep feeling in the young girl’s character. With the subtle instinct of affection he penetrated the disguise in which she wrapped herself, but, with a delicacy that she scarcely gave him credit for, he never let her see that he did. Sometimes, indeed, when one of those fits of tristesse was upon her, and she was striving to dissemble it by increased cheerfulness towards everybody, and sauciness towards him, the professor would adapt the conversation to the tone of her thoughts with a skill and apropos that surprised her. Once in particular Aline was startled by the way in which he betrayed either a singularly close observation of her character, or a still more singular sympathy with its moods and sufferings. It was on a Saturday evening, the little circle was gathered round the fire, and the conversation fell upon poetry and the mission of poets amongst common men. Aline declared that it was the grandest of all missions; that, after the prophet and priest, the poet did more for the moral well‐being, the spiritual redemption of his fellows than any other missionary, whether philosopher, artist, or patriot; he combined them all, in fact, if he wished it. If he was a patriot, he could serve his country better than a soldier, by singing her wrongs and her glories, and firing the souls of her sons, and making all mankind vibrate to the touch of pain, or joy, or passionate revenge, while he sat quietly by his own hearth; she quoted Moore and Krazinski, and other patriot bards who living had ruled their people, and sent down their name a legacy of glory to unborn generations, till warmed by her subject she grew almost eloquent, and broke off in an impulsive cry of admiration and envy: “Oh! what a glorious privilege to be a poet, to be even a man with the power of doing something, of living a noble life, instead of being a weak, good‐for‐nothing woman!”
The little ring of listeners heard her with pleasure, and thought she must have a very keen appreciation of the beauties of the poets to speak of them so well and so fervently. But M. Dalibouze saw more in it than this. He saw an under‐tone of impatience, of disappointment, of longing to go and do likewise, to spread her wings and fly, to wield a wand that had power to make others spread their wings; there was a spirit’s war‐cry in it, a rebel’s impotent cry against the narrow, inexorable bondage of her life.
“Yes,” said the professor, “it is a grand mission, I grant you, but it is not such a rare one as you make it out, Mlle. Aline. There are more poets in the world than those who write poetry; few of us have the gift of being poets in language, but we may all be poets in action if we will; we may live out our lives in poems.”
“If we had the fashioning of our lives, no doubt we might,” asserted Aline ironically; “but they are most of them so shabby that I defy Homer himself to manufacture an epic or an idyl out of them.”
“You are mistaken. There is no life too shabby to be a poem,” said M. Dalibouze; “it is true, we can’t fashion our lives as you say, but we can color them, we can harmonize them; but we must begin by believing this, and by getting our elements under command; we must sort them and arrange them, just as Mme. la Générale is doing with the shreds and silks for the tapestry, and then go on patiently working out the pattern leaf by leaf; by‐and‐by when the web gets tangled as it is sure to do with the best workers, instead of pulling angrily at it, or cutting it with the sharp scissors of revolt, we must call up a soft breeze from the land of souls where the spirit of the true poet dwells, and bid it blow over it, and then let us listen, and we shall hear the spirit‐wind draw tones of music out of our tangled web, like the breeze sweeping the strings of an Æolian harp. It is our own fault, or perhaps oftener our own misfortune, if our lives look shabby to us; we consider them piecemeal instead of looking at them as a whole.”
“But how can we look at them as a whole?” said Aline. “We don’t even know that they ever will develop into a whole. How many of us remain on the easel a sort of washed‐in sketch to the end? It seems to me we are pretty much like apples in an orchard; some drop off in the flower, some when they are grown to little green balls, hard and sour and good for nothing; it is only a little of the tree that comes to maturity.”
“And is there not abundance of poetry in every phase of the apple’s life, no matter when it falls?” said M. Dalibouze. “How many poems has the blight of the starry blossom given birth to? And the little green ball, who will count the odes that the school‐boy has sung to it, not in good hexameters perhaps, but in sound, heart poetry, full of zest and the gusto of youth, when all bitters are sweet? O mon Dieu! when I think of the days when a bright‐green apple was like honey in my mouth, I could be a poet myself! No paté de foie gras ever tasted half so sweet as that forbidden fruit of my school‐days!”
“Good for the forbidden fruit!” said Aline, amused at the professor’s sentiment over the reminiscence; “but that is only one view of the question: if the apples could speak, they would give us another.”
“Would they?” said M. Dalibouze. “I’m not sure of that. If the apples discuss the point at all, believe me, they are agreed that whatever befalls them is the very best thing that could. We have no evidence of any created thing, vegetable, mineral, or animal, grumbling at its lot; that is reserved to man, discontent is man’s prerogative, he quarrels with himself, with his destiny, his neighbors, everything by turns. If we could but do like the apples, blossom, and grow, and fall, early or late, just as the wind and the gardener wished, we should be happy. Fancy an apple quarrelling with the sun in spring for not warming him as he does in August! It would be no more preposterous than it is for men to quarrel with their circumstances. The fruit of our lives have their seasons like the fruit of our gardens; the winter and snows and the sharp winds are just as necessary to both as the fire of the summer heat; all growth is gradual, and we must accept the process through which we are brought to maturity, just as the apples do. It is not the same for all of us; some are ripened under the warm vibrating sun, others resist it, and, like certain winter fruit, require the cold twilight days to mellow them. But it matters little what the process is, it is sure to be the right one if we wait for it and accept it.”
“I wonder what stage of it I am in at the present moment,” said Aline. “I can’t say the sun has had much to do with it; the winds and the rain have been the busiest agents in my garden so far.”
“Patience, mademoiselle!” said M. Dalibouze. “The sun will come in his own good time.”
“You answer for that?”
“I do.”
Aline looked him straight in the face as she put the question like a challenge, and M. Dalibouze met the saucy bright eyes with a grave glance that had more of tenderness in it than she had ever seen there before. It flashed upon her for a moment that the sun might come to her through a less worthy medium than this kind, faithful, honorable man, and that she had been mayhap a fool to her own happiness in shutting the gate on him so contemptuously.
Perhaps the professor read the thought on her face, for he said in a penetrated tone, and fixing his eyes upon her:
“The true sun of life is marriage.”
It was an unfortunate remark. Aline tossed back her head, and burst out laughing. The spell that had held her for an instant was broken.
“A day will come when some one will tell you so, and you will not laugh, Mlle. Aline,” said M. Dalibouze humbly, and hiding his discomfiture under a smile.
This was the only time within the last two years that he had betrayed himself into any expression of latent hope with regard to Mlle. de Lemaque, and it had no sooner escaped him than he regretted it. The following Saturday, by way of atonement, he brought up a most desirable parti for inspection, and next day Mme. Cléry was seized with the inevitable dusting fit. Nothing, however, came of it.
Things went on without any noticeable change at No. 13 till September, 1870, when Paris was declared in a state of siege. The sisters were not among those lucky ones who wavered for a time between going and staying, between the desire to put themselves in safe‐keeping, and the temptation of living through the blocus and boasting of it for the rest of their days. There was no choice for them but to stay. Aline, as usual, made the best of it; she must stay, so she settled it in her mind that she liked to stay; that it would be a wonderful experience to live through the most exciting episode that could have broken up the stagnant monotony of their lives, and that, in fact, it was rather an enjoyable prospect than the reverse.
Mme. Cléry was commissioned to lay in as ample a store of provisions as their purse would allow. The good woman did the best she could with her means, and the little group encouraged each other to face the coming events like patriotic citizens, cheerfully and bravely. Of the magnitude of those events, or their own probable share in their national calamities, they had a very vague notion.
“The situation,” M. Dalibouze assured them, “was critical, but by no means desperate. On the contrary, France, instead of being at the mercy of her enemies, was now on the eve of crushing them, of obtaining one of those astonishing victories which make ordinary history pale. It was the incommensurable superiority of the French arms that had brought her to this pass; that had driven Prussia mad with rage and envy, and roused her to defiance. Infatuated Prussia! she would mourn over her folly once and for ever. She would find that Paris was not alone the Greece of civilization and the arts and sciences, but that she was the most impregnable fortress that ever defied the batteries of a foe. Europe had deserted Paris, after betraying France to her enemies; now the day of reckoning was at hand; Europe would reap the fruits of her base jealousy, and witness the triumph of the capital of the world!”
This was M. Dalibouze’s firm opinion, and he gave it in public and private to any one who cared to hear it. When Mme. de Chanoir asked if he meant to remain in Paris through the siege, the professor was so shocked by the implied affront to his patriotism that he had to control himself before he could trust himself to answer her.
“Comment, Mme. la Générale! You think so meanly of me as to suppose I would abandon my country at such a crisis! Is it a time to fly when the enemy is at our gates, and when the nation expects every man to stand forth and defend her, and scatter those miserable eaters of sauerkraut to the winds!”
And straightway acting up to this noble patriotic credo, M. Dalibouze had himself measured for a National Guard uniform. No sooner had he endorsed it than he rushed off to Nadar’s and had himself photographed. He counted the hours till the proofs came home, and then, bursting with satisfaction, he set out to No. 13.
“It is unbecoming,” he said, shrugging his shoulders as he presented his carte de visite to the générale, “mais que voulez‐vous? A man must sacrifice everything to his country; what is personal appearance that it could weigh in the balance against duty! Bah! I could get myself up as a punchinello, and perch all day on the top of Mont Valérien, if it could scare away one of those despicable brigands from the walls of the capital!”
“You are wrong in saying it is unbecoming, M. Dalibouze,” protested the générale, attentively scanning the portrait, where the military costume was set off by a semi‐heroic military pose, “I think the dress suits you admirably.”
“You are too indulgent, madame,” said the professor. “You see your friends through the eyes of friendship; but, in truth, it was purely from an historical point of view that I made the little sacrifice of personal feeling; the portrait will be interesting as a souvenir some day when we, the actors in this great drama, have passed away.”
But time went on, and the prophetic triumphs of M. Dalibouze were not realized; the eaters of sauerkraut held their ground, and provisions began to grow scarce at No. 13. The purse of the sisters, never a large one, was now seriously diminished, Aline’s contribution to the common fund having ceased altogether with the beginning of the siege. Her old pupils had left, and there was no chance of finding any new ones at such a time as this. No one had money to spend on lessons, or leisure to learn; the study that absorbed everybody was how to realize food or fuel out of impossible elements. Every one was suffering, in a more or less degree, from the miseries imposed by the state of blocus; but one would have fancied the presence of death in so many shapes, by fire without, by cold and famine within, would have detached them generally from life, and made them forgetful of the wants of the body and absorbed them in sublimer cares. But it was not so. After the first shock of hearing the cannon at the gates close to them, they got used to it. Later, when the bombardment came, there was another momentary panic, but it calmed down, and they got used to that too. Shells could apparently fall all round without killing them. So they turned all their thoughts to the cherishing and comfort of their poor afflicted bodies. It must have been sad, and sometimes grimly comical, to watch the singular phases of human nature developed by the blocus. One of the oddest and most frequent was the change it wrought in people with regard to their food. People who had been ascetically indifferent to it before, and never thought of their meals till they sat down to table, grew monomaniac on the point, and could think and speak of nothing else. Meals were talked of, in fact, from what we can gather, more than politics, the Prussians, or the probable issue of the siege, or any of the gigantic problems that were being worked out both inside and outside the besieged city. Intelligent men and women discussed by the hour, with gravity and gusto, the best way of preparing cats and dogs, rats and mice, and all the abominations that necessity had substituted for food. Poor human nature was fermenting under the process like wine in the vat, and all its dregs came uppermost: selfishness, callousness to the sufferings of others, ingratitude, all the pitiable meanness of a man, boiled up to the surface and showed him a sorry figure to behold. But other nobler things came to the surface too. There were innumerable silent dramas, soul‐poems going on in unlikely places, making no noise beyond their quiet sphere, but travelling high and sounding loud behind the curtain of gray sky that shrouded the winter sun of Paris. The cannon shook her ramparts, and the shells flashed like lurid furies through the midnight darkness; but far above the din and the darkness and the death‐ cries rose the low sweet music of many a brave heart’s sacrifice; the stronger giving up his share to the weaker, the son hoarding his scanty rations against the day of still scantier supplies, when there would be scarcely food enough to support the weakened frame of an aged father or mother, talking big about the impossibility of surrender, and lightly about the price of resistance. There were mothers in Paris, too, and wherever mothers are there is sure to be found self‐sacrifice in its loveliest, divinest form. How many of them toiled and sweated, aye, and begged, subduing all pride to love for the little ones, who ate their fill and knew nothing of the cruel tooth that was gnawing the bread‐winner’s vitals!
We who heard the thunder of the artillery and the blasting shout of the mitrailleuse, we did not hear these things, but other ears did, and not a note of the sweet music was lost, angels were hearkening for them, and as they rose above the dark discord, like crystal bells tolling in the storm wind, the white‐winged messengers caught them on golden lyres and wafted them on to paradise.
To Be Continued.
On A Picture Of S. Mary Bearing Doves To Sacrifice
My eyes climb slowly up, as by a stair, To seek a picture on my chamber wall— A picture of the Mother of our Lord, Hung where the latest twilight shadows fall.
My lifted eyes behold a childlike face, Under a veil of woman’s holiest thought, O’ershadowed by the mystery of grace, And mystery of mercy—God hath wrought.
Down through the dim old temple, moving slow, Her drooping lids scarce lifted from the ground, As if she faintly heard the distant flow Of far‐off seas of grief she could not sound.
I think archangels would not count it sin If, underneath the veil that hides her eyes, They, seeing all things, saw the soul within Held more of mother‐love than sacrifice.
She walks erect, the virgin undefiled, Back from her throat the loose robe falls apart, And e’en as she would clasp her royal Child, She holds the dovelets to her tender heart.
No white wing trembles ’neath her pitying palm, No feather flutters in this last warm nest, And thus she bears them on—while solemn psalm Wakes dim, prophetic stirrings in her breast.
Sweet Hebrew mother! many a woman shares, Thy crucifixion of her hopes and loves, And in her arms to death unshrinking bears Her precious things—even her turtle‐doves.
But often, ere the temple’s marble floor Has ceased the echo of her parting feet, Her gifts prove worthless—thine is ever more The gift of gifts—transcendent and complete.
We mothers, too, have treasures all our own, And, one by one, oft see them sacrificed: Thou, Blessed among women—thou alone Hast held within thine arms the dear Child‐Christ.
Therefore, mine eyes mount up, as by a stair, To seek the picture on my chamber wall; Therefore my soul climbs oft the steeps of prayer, To rest where shadows of thy Son’s cross fall.
Centres Of Thought In The Past. First Article. The Monasteries
It seems very ambitious to try and present to the reader a sketch of anything so vast as the field of research pointed out by the above title, and, indeed, far from aiming at this, we will set forth by saying, once for all, that our attempts will be nothing more than passing views, isolated specimens of that immense whole which, under the names of education, progress, development, scholasticism, and renaissance, forms the intellectual “stock in trade” of every modern system of knowledge.
The “past” is divided into two distinct eras—the monastic and the scholastic. In the earlier era, the centres of thought were the Benedictine and the Columbanian monasteries; in the second era, intellectual life gathered its strength in the universities, under the guidance of the church, typified by the Mendicant Orders. The first era may be said to have lasted from the fifth century to the eleventh, and to have reached its apogee in the seventh and eighth. The second reached from the eleventh century to the sixteenth, and attained its highest glory in the prolific and gifted thirteenth century. Each had its representative centre par excellence, its representative men, philosophy, and religious development. Prior Vaughan, in his recent masterpiece, the Life of S. Thomas of Aquin, expresses this idea in many ways. “From the sixth to the thirteenth century,” he says, “the education of Europe was Benedictine. Monks in their cells ... were planting the mustard‐seed of future European intellectual growth.” Further on he says: “Plato represents rest; Aristotle, inquisitiveness. The former is synthetical; the latter, analytical. Quies is monastic, inquisitiveness is dialectical.” Thus, Plato is the representative master of the earlier era; S. Benedict and his incomparable rule, its representative religious outgrowth; the study of the Scriptures, the Fathers, and the liberal arts, its representative system of education. We do not hear of many “commentaries” in those days, nor of curious schedules of questions, such as, “Did the little hands of the Boy Jesus create the stars?”(26) On the other hand, elegant Latinity was taught, and the Scriptures were multiplied by thousands of costly and laborious transcriptions. The first era was eminently conservative. Its very schools were physically representative; “the solitary abbey, hidden away amongst the hills, with its psalmody, and manual work, and unexciting study.”(27) In the scholastic era, things were reversed. “Latinity grew barbarous, and many far graver disorders arose out of the daring and undue exercise of reason. Yet intellectual progress was being made in spite of the decay of letters.... In the extraordinary intellectual revolution which marked the opening of the thirteenth century, the study of thoughts was substituted for the study of words.”(28) Here the representative exponent was Aristotle; the religious developments, the Crusades and the Mendicant Orders; and the personal outgrowth of the clashes of the two systems—that of the old immovable dogmatic church, and that of irreverence and rationalism—S. Bernard, S. Dominic, S. Thomas of Aquin, on the one hand, and Peter Abelard and William de Saint Amour, on the other. Here, again, we find the locale analogous to the spirit of the age. Cities were now the centres of knowledge; noisy streets, with ominous names, such as the “Rue Coupegueule,”(29) in Paris, so named from the frequent murders committed there during university brawls, take the place of the silent cloister and long stone corridors of the abbey; physical disorder typifies the moral confusion of the day; and Paris the chaotic stands in the room of Monte Casino, S. Gall, or English Jarrow. Then followed the “Renaissance,” that “revival of practical paganism.”(30) “The saints and fathers of the church gradually disappeared from the schools, and society, instead of being permeated, as in former times, with an atmosphere of faith, was now redolent of heathenism.”(31) Petrarch and Boccaccio were the representatives of this refined (if we must use the word in its ordinary sensual meaning) infidelity; Plato was the god of the new Olympus, but unrecognizable from the Plato embodied in the Fathers and Benedictine littérateurs, for, practically speaking, polite life had now become Epicurean; while as for the religious development of the times, since it could no longer be representative, it became apostolic. Savonarola and S. Francis Xavier are names that stand out in the moral darkness of that era, and the latter suggests the only new creation in the church from that day to our own. Christian education had been Benedictine, then Dominican; it now became Jesuit. The world knew its old enemy in the new dress, and ever since has warred against it with diabolical foresight and unwearied venom. Of this last phase of the past, which is so like the present that we have classed it apart, we do not purpose to speak, but will confine ourselves to those older and grander, though hardly less troublous times known as the middle ages.
The first two centres of Christianity and patristic learning outside Rome were Alexandria and Constantinople. The latter soon fell away into schism, and thence into that barbarism which the vigorous Western races were at that very same time casting off through the influence of the church that Byzantium had rejected. From Alexandria we may date the beginnings of our own systems of learning. The end of the second century already found the Christian schools of that city famous, and the converted Stoic Pantænus spoken of as one of “transcendent powers.” Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Hippolytus, Bishop of Porto, were teachers in those schools, and the Acts of the Martyrs tell us that Catharine, the learned virgin‐martyr, was an Alexandrian. Hippolytus was a famous astronomer and arithmetician. Clement used poetry, philosophy, science, eloquence, and even satire, in the interests of religion. Origen became the master of S. Gregory Thaumaturgus and his brother Athenodorus. “It was now recognized that Christians were men who could think and reason with other men, ... and of whom a university city need not be ashamed. Christians were expected to teach and study the liberal arts, profane literature, philosophy, and the Biblical languages, ... and all the time the business of the school went on, persecution raged with small intermission.”(32) Prior Vaughan says that “Faith took her seat with her Greek profile and simple majesty in Alexandria, and withstood, as one gifted with a divine power, two subtle and dangerous enemies—heathen philosophy and heretical theology—and, by means of Clement and of Origen, proved to passion and misbelief that a new and strange intellectual influence had been brought into the world.”(33) Antioch and Constantinople claimed the world’s attention later on, and the Thebaid teemed with equal treasures of learning and of holiness. S. John Chrysostom exhorts Christian parents, in 376, “to entrust the education of their sons to the solitaries, to those men of the mountain whose lessons he himself had received.”(34)
When the glories of the patristic age were waning, and the East seemed to fail the church, through whose influence alone she had become famous, there arose in the West, among the half‐barbarous races of Goths, Franks, Celts, and Teutons, other champions of monasticism and pioneers of learning. The raw material of Christian Europe was being moulded into the heroic form it bore during mediæval times by poet, philosopher, and legislator‐monks.
Of these monastic centres, Lerins is perhaps the oldest. Founded in 410, on an island of the Mediterranean near the coast of France, it became “another Thebaid, a celebrated school of theology and Christian philosophy, a citadel inaccessible to the works of barbarism, and an asylum for literature and science which had fled from Italy on the invasion of the Goths.”(35) All France sought its bishops from this holy and learned isle. Among its great scholars was Vincent of Lerins, the first controversialist of his time, and the originator of the celebrated formula: Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus creditum est. We may be pardoned for extending our notice of him, since the words he uses on the progress of the church are so singularly appropriate to our own times and problems. Having established the unchangeableness of Catholic doctrine, he goes on to say: “Shall there, then, be no progress in the church of Christ? There shall be progress, and even great progress, ... but it will be progress and not change. With the growth of ages there must necessarily be a growth of intelligence, of wisdom, and of knowledge, for each man as for all the church. But the religion of souls must imitate the progress of the human form, which, in developing and growing in years, never ceases to be the same in the maturity of age as in the flower of youth.”(36) Had the monk of Lerins foreknown the aberrations of the doctor of Munich, he could not have better refuted the latest heresy of our own day. S. Lupus of Troyes, who arrested Attila at the gates of his episcopal city, and successfully combated the Pelagian heresy in England; S. Cesarius of Arles, who was successively persecuted and finally reinstated by two barbarian kings, and who gave his sister Cesaria a rule for her nuns which was adopted by Queen Radegundes for her immense monastery of Poictiers; Salvian, whose eloquence was likened to that of S. Augustine, were all monks of Lerins. S. Cesarius has well epitomized the training of this great and holy school when he says: “It is she who nourishes those illustrious monks who are sent into all provinces of Gaul as bishops. When they arrive, they are children; when they go out, they are fathers. She receives them as recruits, she sends them forth kings.”(37) As late as 1537, we find on the list of the commission appointed by Pope Paul III. to draw up the preliminaries of the Council of Trent, and especially to point out and correct the abuses of secular training and paganized art, the name of Gregory Cortese, Abbot of Lerins.(38) But we must hasten on to other foundations of a reputation and influence as world‐wide as that of the Mediterranean Abbey.
In 580, there was a famous school at Seville, where all the arts and sciences were taught by learned masters, presided over by S. Leander, the bishop of the diocese. Then S. Ildefonso, of Toledo, a scholar of Seville, founded a great school at Toledo itself (where the famous councils took place later on), which, together with Seville, made “Spain the intellectual light of the Christian world in the seventh century.”(39)
From the South let us turn to the fruitful land where monks supplied the place of martyrs, and where the faith, planted by Patrick, grew so marvellously into absolute power within the short space of a century. Armagh, Bangor, Clonard, are names that at once recall the palmy days of sacred learning. “Within a century after the death of S. Patrick,” says Bishop Nicholson, “the Irish seminaries had so increased that most parts of Europe sent their children to be educated there, and drew thence their bishops and teachers.”(40) “By the ninth century, Armagh could boast of 7,000 students.”(41) “Clonard,” says Usher, “issued forth a stream of saints and doctors like the Greek warriors from the wooden horse.”(42) The Irish communities, Montalembert tells us in his brilliant language, “entered into rivalry with the great monastic schools of Gaul. They explained Ovid there; they copied Virgil; they devoted themselves especially to Greek literature; they drew back from no inquiry, from no discussion; they gloried in placing boldness on a level with faith.” The young Luan answered the Abbot of Bangor, who warned him against the dangers of too engrossing a study of the liberal arts: “If I have the knowledge of God, I shall never offend God, for they who disobey him are they who know him not.”
The Irish were as adventurous as they were learned, and Montalembert bears witness to the national propensity in the following graceful language: “This monastic nation became the missionary nation par excellence. The Irish missionaries covered the land and seas of the West. Unwearied navigators, they landed on the most desert islands; they overflowed the continent with their successive immigrations. They saw in incessant visions a world known and unknown to be conquered for Christ.” And the author of Christian Schools and Scholars reminds us of the beautiful legend of S. Brendan, the founder of the great school of Clonfert in Connaught, the school‐fellow of Columba, and the pupil of Finian at Clonard, who is declared to have set sail in search of the Land of Promise, and during his seven years’ journey to have “discovered a vast tract of land, lying far to the west of Ireland, where he beheld wonderful birds and trees of unknown foliage, which gave forth perfumes of extraordinary sweetness.” Whatever fiction is mingled with this marvellous narrative, it is difficult not to admit that it must have had some foundation of truth, and the poetic legend which was perfectly familiar to Columbus is said to have furnished him with one motive for believing in the existence of a western continent. Later on we shall find Albertus Magnus foreshadowing the same belief in his writings. Two of the Irish missionaries deserve especial notice—Columba, the Apostle of Caledonia, and Columbanus, the founder of Luxeuil in Burgundy. The former, with his stronghold of Iona, which “came to be looked upon as the chief seat of learning, not only in Britain, but in the whole Western world,”(43) is familiar to all readers of Montalembert’s great monastic poem, and to that other public who have had access to the Duke of Argyll’s recent work on the rock‐bound metropolis of Christian Britain. We are told that the most scrupulous exactitude was required in the Scriptorium of Iona, and that Columba himself, a skilful penman, wrote out the famous Book of Kells with his own hand. It is now preserved in the library of Trinity College, Dublin. The monks of Iona studied and taught the classics, the mechanical arts, law, history, and physic. They transferred to their new home all the learning of Armagh and Clonard. Painful journeys in search of books or of the oral teaching of some renowned master were nothing in their eyes; they listened to lectures on the Greek and Latin fathers, hung entranced over Homer and Virgil, and were skilled in calculating eclipses and other natural phenomena. They astonished the world with their arithmetical knowledge and linguistic erudition, and their keen logic and love of syllogism are spoken of by S. Benedict of Anian in the ninth century.(44) Art was equally cultivated, but this, strictly speaking, is outside our present subject. As an example of Columba’s liberal spirit and devotion to the best interests of literature, we may remark his defence of the bards at the Assembly of Drumceitt. Poets, historians, law‐givers, and genealogists, the bards represented all the learning of a past age and system; and if their arrogance now and then overstepped the bounds of courtesy, and even sometimes the restraints of law, in the main their institute was heroic and praiseworthy. Columba argued against their opponent, a prince of the Nialls of the South, Aedh, that “care must be taken not to pull up the good corn with the tares, and that the general exile of the poets would be the death of a venerable antiquity, and that of a poetry which was dear to the country and useful to those who knew how to employ it.” His eloquence saved the bardic institute, and the poets in their gratitude composed a famous song in his praise, which became celebrated in Irish literature under the name of Ambhra, or Praise of S. Columbkill.(45)
Columbanus, a monk of Bangor, was destined to found an Irish colony of even greater fame and longer duration than Iona. Luxeuil, founded in 590, at the foot of the Vosges in Burgundy, soon counted among its sons many hundred votaries of learning. Montalembert says of it that “no monastery of the West had yet shone with so much lustre or attracted so many disciples”. It became another Lerins, a nursery of bishops for the Frankish and Burgundian cities, a notable seat of secular knowledge, and, above all, a school of saints. Indeed, among the meagre, skeleton‐like details that come down to us of these giant abodes of a supernatural race of men, we find ourselves perforce repeating over and over the same formula of commendation. What more could one say but that each of these monastic centres was a school of saints? And yet how much variety in that sameness! How much that even we can see, and distinguish, and mentally dissect! We see some soaring spirit, whose burning love is never content with renunciation, but ever seeks, with holy restlessness, some deeper solitude in which to pray and meditate, like the Bavarian monk Sturm, the pupil and companion of S. Boniface, and the founder of the world‐renowned Abbey of Fulda; or, again, some great thinker like Alcuin of York, whose touching love for his own land and city makes us feel with pardonable pride how near akin is our own weak human nature to that of even the giant men of old; or spirits like the gentle Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, the traditions of whose unwearied moderation and “inestimable gift of kindness and light‐heartedness,” as well as his “intense and active sympathy for those human sorrows which in all ages are the same,” are all the more precious to us that they are also mingled with tales of his wondrous horsemanship, athletic frame, and simple enjoyment of legitimate sports. The same author we have just quoted, Montalembert, says that the description of his childhood reads like that of a little Anglo‐Saxon of our own day, a scholar of Eton or Harrow. So that, when one after another we read of Gaulish, Celtic, and Teutonic abbeys that were intellectual capitals and centres of far‐reaching and all‐embracing knowledge, we must always remember that these words, grown trite at last from frequent use, have as varied a meaning as the collective name of Milky Way, which stands for countless worlds of unknown stars.
As Christianity spread in the early part of the middle ages, these monastic centres were multiplied like the posterity of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Lindisfarne, the Iona of the eastern coast of England, soon rivalled her Scottish predecessor, and retained much the same impress of Celtic learning, while Melrose served as a supplementary school and novitiate. The Teutonic element now began to make itself felt. Caedmon, the Saxon cowherd, transformed into a poet and a monk by a direct call from God, sang the creation in strains “which,” says Montalembert, “may still be admired even beside the immortal poem of the author of Paradise Lost.” Wilfrid, the S. Thomas à Becket of the seventh century, vigorously planted Roman traditions and customs in the Saxon monastery of Ripon, and perpetuated the name of S. Peter in his other magnificent foundation of Peterborough, the poetic “Home among the Meadows,” or Medehamstede.(46) Theodore, the Greek metropolitan of England, in 673 introduced into the Anglo‐Saxon schools “an intellectual and literary development as worthy of the admiration as of the gratitude of posterity; the study of the two classic tongues (Greek and Latin) chiefly flourished under his care.... Monasteries, thus transformed into homes of scientific study, could not but spread a taste and respect for intellectual life, not only among the clergy, but also among their lay‐protectors, the friends and neighbors of each community.”(47)
Benedict Biscop, the contemporary of the chivalrous Wilfrid of York, is eminently a representative of Anglo‐Saxon cultivation. Montalembert puts his name in the “monastic constellation of the seventh century” for intelligence, art, and science. He it was who undertook a journey to Rome (which place he had visited many times before on other errands) solely to procure books; and it must be borne in mind that this journey was then twice as long and a hundred times more dangerous than a journey from London to Australia is now. After having founded the Abbey of Wearmouth, at the mouth of the Wear, Benedict set forth again, bringing masons and glass‐makers from Gaul to teach the Anglo‐Saxons some notions of solid and ornamental architecture. He was a passionate book‐collector, and wished each of his monasteries to have a great library, which he considered indispensable to the discipline, instruction, and good organization of the community. Originally a monk at Lerins, whither he had gone after giving up a knightly and seignorial career in his own country, he naturally drank in that thirst for learning which, in the earlier middle ages, seems to have been almost inseparable from holiness. Jarrow, the sister monastery to Wearmouth, situated near it by the mouth of the Tyne, was even yet more famous as a school of hallowed knowledge, and has become endeared to the hearts of all Englishmen as the home of the Venerable Bede. His is a figure which, even in the foreign annals of the church, stands pre‐eminent among ecclesiastical writers, and one in whom the Anglo‐Saxon character is thoroughly and beautifully revealed. Calm and steadfast self‐possession, that beautiful attribute of the followers of the “Prince of Peace,” is the key‐note to the writings of the historian‐monk of Jarrow. The first glimpse we have of him is as the solitary companion of the new‐made abbot, Ceolfrid, chanting the divine office at the age of seven; his voice choked with sobs as he thought of the elder brethren, all of whom a grievous pestilence had carried off. But though the choir had gone to join in the hymns of the New Jerusalem, the canonical hours were nevertheless kept up by the sorrowing abbot and the child‐chorister until new brethren came to take the place of the old ones. Bede was never idle; he says himself that “he was always his own secretary, and dictated, composed, and copied all himself.” His great history was the means of bringing him into contact with the best men of his day. “The details he gives on this subject show that a constant communication was kept up between the principal centres of religious life, and that an amount of intellectual activity as surprising as it is admirable—when the difficulty of communication and the internal wars which ravaged England are taken into account—existed among their inhabitants.”(48) Bede’s political foresight seems to have been of no mean order, and the grave advice he administers to bishops on ecclesiastical abuses shows at once his practical common sense and fearlessness of character. He also condemns the too sweeping grants of land, exemptions from taxes, and privileges offered to monastic houses, and gives the wisest reasons for his strictures. “The nations of Catholic Europe envied England the possession of so great a doctor, the first among the offspring of barbarous races who had won a place among the doctors of the church, ... and his illustrious successor Alcuin, speaking to the community of Jarrow which Bede had made famous, bears witness to his celebrity in these words: ‘Stir up, then, the minds of your sleepers by his example; study his works, and you will be able to draw from them the secret of eternal beauty.’ ”(49)
Malmesbury was another Anglo‐Saxon centre of thought, and the memory of S. Aldhelm long gave it that “powerful and popular existence which lasted far into the middle ages.”(50) The cathedral school of York, “which rose into celebrity just as Bede was withdrawn from the scene of his useful labors,”(51) produced one of the greatest of English scholars, and one instrumental in carrying knowledge acquired among monks to the warrior court of a foreign prince. Charlemagne and his Palatine schools of Aix‐la‐ Chapelle would have been shorn of half their glory had it not been for the Englishman Alcuin. But it was not without a pang that the home‐loving master left the school he had almost formed, and which he cherished as the product of his first efforts, and undertook to foster the same institutions in a strange land. These schools, in which enthusiastic French writers love to trace the germ of the mighty University of Paris, seem to have possessed a system of equality very creditable both to their master and their imperial patron. Later on, when the wearied magister at last wrested from Charlemagne the permission to retire into some monastery, since he had failed in obtaining leave to return and die at York, it was only to found another school that he occupied his leisure. S. Martin’s at Tours now became as famous as the Palatine at Aix‐la‐Chapelle. “He applied himself to his new duties with unabated energy, and by his own teaching raised the school of Tours to a renown which was shared by none of its contemporaries. In the hall of studies, a distinct place was set apart for the copyists, who were exhorted by certain verses of their master, set up in a conspicuous place, to mind their stops and not to leave out letters.”(52) Here, then, is another of those pleasant little details which creates a fellow‐feeling between the human nature of to‐day and that of past ages. The description of his life from which we have drawn this sketch closes thus: “In short, his active mind, thoroughly Anglo‐Saxon in its temper, worked on to the end; laboring at a sublime end by homely practical details. One sees he is of the same race with Bede, who wrote and dictated to the last hour of his life, and, when his work was finished, calmly closed his book and died.”(53)
We have already named Fulda, the glorious monastic centre where the monk Sturm established the Benedictine rule in 744, and where, before his death, 400 monks sang daily the praises of God, and good scholars were trained to intellectual warfare in the name of faith. In 802, “mindful of its great origin, it was one of the first to enter heartily into the revival of letters instituted by Charlemagne,” and sent the monks Hatto and Rabanus to study under Alcuin. We find a most graphic description of the daily routine of this great school in Christian Schools and Scholars. It so well illustrates the common life of the middle ages that we do not hesitate to give it at some length: “The German nobles gladly entrusted their sons to Rabanus’ care, and he taught them with wonderful gentleness and patience. At his lectures every one was trained to write equally well in prose or verse on any subject placed before him, and was afterwards taken through a course of rhetoric, logic, and natural philosophy.... The school of Fulda had inherited the fullest share of the Anglo‐Saxon spirit, and exhibited the same spectacle of intellectual activity which we have already seen working in the foundations of S. Benedict Biscop. Every variety of useful occupation was embraced by the monks.... Within doors the visitor might have beheld a huge range of workshops, in which cunning hands were kept constantly busy on every description of useful and ornamental work in wood, stone, and metal.... Passing on to the interior of the building, the stranger would have been introduced to the scriptorium, over the door of which was an inscription warning the copyists to abstain from idle words, to be diligent in copying good books, and to take care not to alter the text by careless mistakes. Not far from the scriptorium was the interior school ... where our visitor, were he from the more civilized South, might well have stood in mute surprise in the midst of these fancied barbarians, whom he would have found engaged in pursuits not unworthy of the schools of Rome. The monk Probus is perhaps lecturing on Virgil or Cicero, and that with such hearty enthusiasm that his brother‐professors accuse him in good‐natured jesting of ranking them with the saints. Elsewhere disputations are being carried on over the Categories of Aristotle, and an attentive ear will discover that the controversy which made such a noise in the twelfth century, and divided the philosophers of Europe into the rival sects of Nominalists and Realists, is perfectly well understood at Fulda, though it does not seem to have disturbed the peace of the school. To your delight, if you be not altogether wedded to the study of the dead languages, you may find some engaged on the uncouth language of their fatherland, and, looking over their shoulders, you may smile to see the barbarous words which they are cataloguing in their glossaries, words, nevertheless, destined to reappear centuries hence in the most philosophic literature of Europe.... It may be added that the school of Fulda would have been found ordered with admirable discipline. Twelve of the best professors were chosen, and formed a council of elders or doctors, presided over by one who bore the title of principal, and who assigned to each one the lectures he was to deliver to the pupils. In the midst of this world of intellectual life and labor, Rabanus continued for some years to train the first minds of Germany, and reckoned among his pupils the most celebrated men of the age.... For the rest, he was an enemy to anything like narrowness of intellectual training. His own works in prose and verse embraced a large variety of subjects, ... and he is commonly reputed the author of the Veni Creator.”(54)
One of his pupils, the monk Otfried of Weissembourg, entered with singular ardor into the study of the Tudesque or native dialect. Inspired by Rabanus, who himself devoted much attention to this subject, and encouraged by a “certain noble lady named Judith,” Otfried undertook to translate into his native tongue the most remarkable Gospel passages relating to Our Lord’s life. His verses speedily became familiar to the people, and by degrees took the place of those pagan songs of their forefathers, by which much of the leaven of heathenism yet remained in the minds of the peasantry, associated as it was with all the touching prestige of nationalism and the honest pride they felt in their ancestors’ prowess.
Rabanus, while master of the Fulda school, had much to suffer from the eccentricities of his abbot, Ratgar, who, afflicted with the building mania, actually forced his monks to interrupt their studies, and even shorten their prayers, to take up the trowel and the hod and hasten on his new erections. Here we have the other side of the daily life of the middle ages, and a more ludicrous scene can hardly be imagined than the enforced labor of the scholar‐monks, their rueful countenances showing their despair at the unpleasant task, yet their unflinching principle of obedience towering above their disgust, and compelling them to work in silence till relieved by the Emperor Louis himself. The new abbot, installed in Ratgar’s place by a commission empowered to look into the latter’s unheard‐of abuse of his authority, was a saint as well as a scholar, and “healed the wounds which a long course of ill‐treatment had opened in the community.” Rabanus himself succeeded him, and resigned the mastership of the school to his favorite assistant, Candidus.
Passing over many abbeys whose merits it were too long a story to enumerate, we come to S. Gall, the great Helvetian centre of thought. Originally it was founded by Gall, the disciple of Columbanus, and in the reign of King Pepin changed the Columbanian for the Benedictine rule. Already, in its early beginnings, it was a home of art, and Tutilo’s works in gold, copper, and brass were famous throughout the Germanic world. The mills, the forge, the workshops of all sorts, the cloisters for the monks, the buildings for the students, the immense tracts of arable land, the reclaimed forests, the fleet of busy little boats on the great Lake of Constance, all told of a stirring centre of human life. And while art, science, philosophy, agriculture, and mechanical industry were all at work in the townlike abbey, “you will hear these fine classical scholars preaching plain truths, in barbarous idioms, to the rude race of the mountains, who, before the monks came among them, sacrificed to the evil one, and worshipped stocks and stones.”(55) “S. Gall was almost as much a place of resort as Rome or Athens, at least to the learned world of the ninth century. Her schools were a kind of university, frequented by men of all nations, who came hither to fit themselves for all professions. S. Gall was larger and freer, and made more of the arts and sciences; indeed, so far as regards its studies, it had a better claim to the title of university than any single institution which can be named as existing before the time of Philip Augustus.(56) You would have found here not monks alone, but courtiers, soldiers, and the sons of kings. All diligently applied themselves to the cultivation of the Tudesque dialect, and to its grammatical formation, so as to render it capable of producing a literature of its own.”(57) The monks were in correspondence with all the learned monastic houses of France and Italy, and the transfer of a codex, a Livy, or a Virgil from one to the other occasioned as much diplomacy, interest, and excitement as a commercial treaty or the discovery of new gold fields would in our day. S. Gall had its Greek scholars, too, and seems to have fostered among its copyists a love for “fine editions,” such as would do honor to an English or Russian bibliomaniac of to‐day. They made their own parchment from the hides of the wild animals of their mountains, and employed many hands on each precious manuscript. The costly binding was likewise all home‐made, and many a jewelled missal must have come from the hand of the artist‐monk Tutilo. Music was a specialty of S. Gall, if one may say so in an age when music was so much a part of education that alone of all the arts it was included in the quadrivium, or higher instruction of the mediæval schools. Romanus of S. Gall it was who first named the musical notes by the letters of the alphabet, a system which is universal in Germany, and very commonly followed in England to this day.
We should multiply names ad infinitum were we to allow ourselves to roam further over that field of history so falsely called the dark ages. Einsiedeln, Paderborn, Magdeburg, Utrecht, are but a few of the many equally deserving of notice, the latter being, we are told, “a fashionable place of education for the sons of German princes” in the tenth century. Before we go on to the second stage of the learning of the past—the era of the universities—we cannot help looking back to the little Saxon island where, in 882, Alfred devoted one‐fourth of his revenue to the restoration of the Oxford schools and obtained from Pope Martin II. a brief constituting them what may be fairly called a university. This was at a time when learning was at a low ebb, and the invasions of the Danes were endangering the cause of letters—a cause so intimately wrapped up in that of the great monasteries. Glastonbury, the ruined home of so much wisdom, science, and philosophy, was destined under S. Dunstan to retake her place among the schools. A great revival was initiated by him, a reform among the clergy vigorously enforced, episcopal seminaries reopened, and monastic schools once more brought to their ancient place in the vanguard of civilization. Ethelwold, Dunstan’s disciple, was zealous for the study of sacred learning, and “loved teaching for its own sake. A new race of scholars sprang up in the restored cloisters, some of whom were not unworthy to be ranked with the disciples of Bede and Alcuin.”(58) At Glastonbury, like as at Fulda, the native tongue was cultivated, harmonized, and rendered capable of being ranked no longer as a dialect, but as the characteristic language of an eminently masterful people. Croyland, also, a ruined centre of intellectual life, rose again from its ashes; new monks and scholars reared its walls and filled its schools, and the Danish horrors were soon forgotten in the thoughtful kindness of the new abbot, Turketul, the nephew of Alfred, who, as we read, from a warrior and a courtier, a minister of state, and a royal prince, became a gentle monk and the rewarder of his little pupils. “Turketul took the greatest interest in the success of the school, visiting it daily, inspecting the tasks of each child, and taking with him a servant who carried raisins, figs, and nuts, or more often apples and pears, and such like little gifts, that the boys might be encouraged to be diligent, not with words only or blows, but rather by the hope of reward.” Such is the sweet, homely picture given us by the historian Ingulph of one of the greatest of schools in its early monastic beginnings. We have left ourselves so little space that even the metropolis of the Benedictines, the glorious and world‐renowned Monte Casino, can find but a scant notice in these pages. If Subiaco was the spiritual birthplace of the order par excellence, Monte Casino was its intellectual cradle. There the rule was written which, by some mysterious fate, was destined to absorb and supersede that of the widespread Columbanians; there were the missionary principles first established which led to the conversion of the Anglo‐Saxon race; there the school of quies and reverence first planted which made this wonderful monastery “the most powerful and celebrated in the Catholic universe.”(59) It was likened to Sinai by Pope Victor III., the successor of Hildebrand, in bold and simple verses, full of divine exultation and Christian pride: it has been defended and protected by an English and Protestant scholar,(60) the minister of a nation whose civilization once flowed from its bosom, and whose learning was fostered in its early “scriptoria.” It has outlasted many of its own offspring, and still stands undecayed in its moral sublimity, fruitful yet in saints and scholars, the mother‐house of an order whose origin stretches beyond Benedict far into the desert of Paul and Anthony, Jerome and Hilarion.
And now that we are forced, reluctantly enough, to let fall the veil over that teeming life of the mediæval cloister, the fruitful nursery of every later intellectual development, shall we tell the reader what has most struck us throughout the short sketch we have been able to give of these centres of thought? Does not their history sound like some “monkish chronicle”? How is it that all the most “celebrated men of their time” (the phrase so often repeated in these annals) are monks, and so many not only monks, but saints? How is it that we come upon so many instances of these great scholars taking their turn at the mill, the forge, and the bake‐house, and that these details sound neither sordid nor vulgar, as they might of modern and secular littérateurs? It was the monastic principle, the Christ‐principle, as Prior Vaughan calls it in his Life of S. Thomas of Aquin—the principle of faith, obedience, purity, adoration, and reverence. “The monks had a world of their own.... Whilst the barbarians were laying all things in ruins, they, heedless alike of fame or profit, were patiently laying the foundations of European civilization. They were forming the languages of Schiller, of Bacon, and of Bossuet; they were creating arts which modern skill in vain endeavors to imitate; they were preserving the codices of ancient learning, and embalming the world ‘lying in wickedness’ with the sweet odor of their manifold virtues.”(61) Not only were they men who “wrote and spoke much, and, by their masculine genius and young and fresh inspiration, prevented the new Christian world from falling back from its first advances, either by literature or politics, under the yoke of exhausted paganism”;(62) not only were they men of progress even while essentially conservative, men of the future even while their studies were all of the past, but, “in opposing poverty, chastity, and obedience, the three great bases of monastic life, to the orgies of wealth, debauchery, and pride, they created at once a contrast and a remedy.”(63) Prior Vaughan, in his brilliant lifelike picture of mediævalism, S. Thomas of Aquin, perpetually refers to the ruling principle of monasticism: “To omit mention of the Benedictine principle would be to manifest great ignorance of the action of the highest form of truth upon mankind. The mastership of authority and reverence, springing out of the school of quies, did not cease to exert a considerable influence even after the dominant power of the monastic body had nearly disappeared.”(64) Elsewhere we read: “There was nothing of the sophist or logician in those sweet and venerable countenances, the unruffled beauty of which is so often dwelt upon by their biographers.... One of the marks of the age is the absence of the disputatious spirit, which, if it diminishes their rank (that of the monastic thinkers) in the world of letters, forms the charm of their characters as men. The real spirit of the age was one of reverence for tradition.”(65)
The foresight of the monk‐teachers of the earlier middle ages is no less remarkable than their holiness. Everywhere they fostered the native idiom, and labored to reduce it to an intelligible grammar. The national and patriotic feeling thus awakened in the centres of learning must needs have endeared them to, and more closely linked them with, the intellectual progress of the people they instructed. A modern author observes that “Bede’s words are evidence that the establishment of the Teutonic nations on the ruins of the Roman Empire did not barbarize knowledge. He collected and taught more natural truths than any Roman writer had yet accomplished, and his works display an advance, not a retrogression, in science.” Indeed, natural science seems to have been from the first a peculiarly monastic pursuit. The great names of Bede, Gerbert, Albertus Magnus, and Roger Bacon are as a mighty chain from century to century, leading up to the discoveries of Galileo, Newton, Arago, and Humboldt; while in S. Brendan we have a bold precursor of Columbus.
The monasteries were so entirely the sole centres of civilization that numberless towns owe their origin to them. Scholars came for instruction, and remained for edification; grateful patients settled near the heaven‐ taught physicians who had cured them; peasants clustered round the abbeys for protection, and thus grew towns and villages without number in Germany, Switzerland, France, England, and Italy. Even America bears to‐ day, in the name of one of her oldest English settlements, and a hereditary representative of intellect—Boston—a memento of the old intellectual supremacy of monasticism. S. Botolph, an Anglo‐Saxon hermit, left his monastery, and settled in a hut on one of the plains of Lincolnshire. Scholars gathered around him, and, despite his remonstrances, set up other huts around his, and the Benedictine monastery of Icanhoe was founded. As time went on, a village sprang up and became a town, and was called Botolphstown. The name was afterwards corrupted and cut down into Boston, and from Boston it was that the founders of New England set sail on their journey to Holland, their first stage on their way to the New World.
In old times, then, monasteries created towns; now, alas, it is towns that necessitate monasteries. We have now to plant the monastic school in the midst of the teeming emporiums of trade and vice, where thousands toil harder for a bare crust and a hard board than the monks of old toiled for the kingdom of heaven. It is not to listen to a learned or holy man that settlements are made nowadays, but to dig oil‐wells or work coal and iron mines. Modern towns are made by traders, eager to be beforehand with their competitors, and the journalist and the liquor‐seller are the first citizens of the new town. Quies is relegated to the region of romance; it is unpractical, it “does not pay”; learning itself, if it succeeds in getting a footing in the centres of commerce, partakes of the commercial spirit, and is rather to be called “cramming” than knowledge, and, as to the moral result of the contrast between the Benedictine principle of the early ages and the principle of hurry, of contention, of money‐worship current in our days, let the annals of modern crime be called upon to witness.
Versailles
What an apotheosis of royalty the name evokes! Versailles and Louis Quatorze. As if by the stroke of the enchanter’s wand, there starts up before us a long procession of heroes and poets and statesmen and wits and fair women, a galaxy of glory and beauty revolving around one central figure as satellites round their sun. We lose sight of all the dark spots upon the disc in contemplating the blaze of brightness that emanates from it. We forget the iniquitous follies of the Grand Monarque, and remember nothing but the splendors of his reign, its unparalleled monarchical triumph; we see him through a mist of proud achievements in war and peace, excellence in every branch of science and industry, fine arts and letters, all that dazzled his contemporaries still dazzles us, and even at this distance his faults and follies are, if not quite eclipsed, softened and modified in the daze of a fictitious light. The group of illustrious men who surround his throne magnify rather than diminish the individuality of the man, lending a false halo to him, as if their genius were a thing of his creation, an effect rather than a cause of his ascendency. How far, in truth, Louis may have tended to create by his personal influence, his kindly patronage and keen discrimination, that wonderful assemblage of talent in every grade which will remain for ever associated with his name, it would be difficult to determine, but, judging from the extraordinary influx of genius which signalized his reign, and the corresponding dearth of it in the succeeding ones, we are tempted to believe that he at least possessed in an almost supernatural degree the gift, so precious to a king, of divining genius wherever it did exist, and of calling it forth from its hiding‐places, however dismal or remote, to the light of success and fame. But for the discriminating admiration of Louis, which fanned the poetic fire of the timid and sensitive Racine and stimulated the wit of the obscure and humble Molière, we should assuredly have missed some of the noblest efforts of both those poets. Louis was prodigal of his smiles to rising talent, for he knew that to it the sunshine of encouragement is as beneficent as the sun’s warmth to the earth in spring‐time.
But we are beginning at the end. Versailles is identified to us chiefly if not solely with Louis Quatorze and his age; but it was not so from the beginning. Once upon a time it was a marshy swamp, unhealthy and uncultivated; and, if we deny Louis the faculty of creating men of genius, we cannot refuse him that of having evolved an Eden from a wilderness. There is little indeed in the history of this early period to compensate the reader for keeping him waiting while we review it, still it is better to cast our glance back a little, not very far, a century or so, to see what were the antecedents of the site of one of the grandest historic monuments of France.
In the year 1561, Martial de Loménie was seigneur of Versailles, and was frequently honored by the visits of Henri de Navarre, who went out to hunt the stag in his subject’s swampy wilderness. De Loménie sold it to Albert de Gondy, Maréchal de Retz, who in his turn was honored by the presence of his sovereign, Louis XIII., there. Louis was in the habit of indulging his favorite pastime at Versailles, but, beyond placing his land and his game at the disposal of the king, the maréchal seems to have shown scant hospitality to the royal hunter. Saint‐Simon tells us that during these excursions Louis usually slept in a windmill or in a dingy inn, whose only customers were the wagoners who journeyed across that out‐of‐the‐way place. Of the two lodgings he inclines to think the windmill was the most comfortable. Louis probably found neither quarters very luxurious, for in 1627 he purchased a piece of ground which had been in the Soisy family since the fourteenth century, and built himself a hunting‐lodge on the ruins of an old manor‐house there, to the great discomfiture of a large colony of owls who had made themselves at home in the moss‐grown ruin. Bassompierre deplores the vandalism which swept away the venerable shelter of the owls, and declares that after all the lodge was but a sorry improvement on the windmill, being “too shabby a dwelling for even a plain gentilhomme to take conceit in.” Such as it was, it satisfied the king, and remained untouched till it was swallowed up in the great palace which was to embody all the glories of the ensuing reign. When Louis Quatorze conceived the design of building Versailles, he confided the execution of his vast idea to Mansard, laying down, however, as a primary condition that the shabby little hunting‐lodge of the late king should be preserved, and comprised in the new structure. Mansard declared that this was impossible, to which Louis, with true kingly logic, replied coolly: Raison de plus.(66) No argument of artistic beauty or common sense could move him from his resolution, or induce him to sanction the demolition of the quaint little building that his father had raised. Rather than be guilty of such an unfilial act, he said he would give up the notion of his new palace altogether. Mansard had nothing for it but to give way, and pledge himself that the ugly red‐brick lodge should stand somehow and somewhere in the magnificent pile that was already reared in his imagination. The only concession he obtained was that it should be concealed, if this were possible. Mansard swore he would make it possible, and he kept his word. The lodge of Louis XIII. was swallowed up in the elaborate stone‐work of that part of the palace facing the Avenue de Paris, and remains to this day an enduring if not a very sensible proof of the filial respect of Louis XIV. This was the one solitary impediment that Louis threw in the architect’s way; in everything else he gave him carte blanche, power unlimited, and all but unlimited wealth to work out his fantastic and superb conception. Simultaneously with this mighty fabric another work of almost equal magnitude had to be undertaken; this was the planting of the park and the gardens. The country for miles around the site of the palace was a swamp abounding with reptiles, and reeking with vapors of so deadly a character that the men employed in draining it died like flies of a malaria that raged like a pestilence for months together. They refused after a time to continue the work, though enormous wages were offered, and it was found necessary at last, under pain of abandoning it, to press men into the service as for the army in time of war. No accurate statistics are extant as to the number of victims who perished in the execution of this royal freak; but the most authentic opinions of the time put it at the astounding figure of twenty thousand. So much for the good old times of the ancien régime, that we are apt to invest with a sort of pathetic prestige. What were the lives of so many vilains(67) and the tears and hunger of innumerable vilaines, widows and orphans of the dead men, in comparison to the supreme pleasure of the king and the accomplishment of his omnipotent will? The death‐sweat of these human cattle rained upon the swamp, and in due time it was’ made wholesome, purified as so many foul spots upon the earth are by the sweat of toil and sorrow, and fitted to grow flowers and green trees that would diffuse their fragrance and spread pleasant shade where corruption and barrenness had dwelt.
Le Notre, that prince of gardeners, may be truly said to have created the pleasure‐grounds of Versailles; nature had thrown many obstacles in his way, she thwarted him at every step, but her obstinate resistance only stimulated his genius to loftier flights and his indomitable energy to stronger efforts. He conquered in the end. Never was conquest more fully appreciated than Le Notre’s by his royal master. Louis not only rewarded him with more than princely liberality, but admitted him to his personal intimacy, treating the plebeian artist with an affectionate familiarity that he never extended to the high and mighty courtiers who looked on in envy and admiration. Le Notre was too little of a courtier himself to value adequately the honor of the king’s condescension, but he loved the man, and took no pains to conceal it; there was an expansive bonhomie, a native simplicity in his character, that, contrasting as it did with the artificial atmosphere of the court, charmed Louis, and he would listen with delight to the honest fellow’s garrulity while he related, with naïve satisfaction, the tale of his early struggles and the difficult and hardy triumphs of his talent and perseverance. Versailles was, of course, to be the crowning achievement of his life, and nothing could exceed the diligence and ardor that he brought to bear on it. He besought the king not to inspect the works while they were in the progressive stage, but to wait, once he had seen the disposition of the ground, till they were advanced to a certain point. Louis humored him by consenting, though greatly against his inclination. He kept his word faithfully in spite of all temptations of curiosity and impatience; contenting himself with questioning Le Notre, at stated times, as to how things were getting on, but never once, in his frequent and regular visits of inspection to the palace, did he set foot within the forbidden precincts. The day came at last when his forbearance was to be rewarded. Le Notre invited him to enter the closed doors. Louis came, and found that the reality far outstripped his most sanguine expectations; he was in raptures with all he beheld, and declared himself abundantly rewarded for his patience. Le Notre, no less enchanted than the king, walked on beside his chair, doing the honors of the gardens and the park, and listening with a swelling heart to the exclamations of delight that greeted every fresh view that opened in the landscape. It seemed, indeed, as if a whole army of fairies had been at work to bring such a paradise out of chaos; long rows of stately full‐grown trees, brought from a distance and transplanted into the arid soil, had taken root and were flourishing as in their native earth; winding paths intersected majestic avenues, and led the visitor, unexpectedly, to richly planted groves, where marble fauns hid coyly, as if frightened to be caught by the sunlight in their unveiled beauty; all the elves in fairyland, all the gods in Olympia, were here congregated, now astray in the green tangle of the wood, now standing in majestic groups, or peeping singly through an opening in the foliage as if they were playing hide‐and‐seek; water‐nymphs, dashing the soft spray round their naked limbs, started unexpectedly from nooks and corners, cooling the air that was heavy with the scent of flowers; the rush of the cascade answered the laughing ripple of the fountain; from bower to bower there came a concert of water‐music, such as no mortal ear had ever heard before; it was, indeed, a sight to set before a king, and the gardener might well rejoice who had worked these wonders in the desert.
Le Notre had been all this time trotting briskly by the king’s rolling‐ chair. When they had gone over the enchanted region, Louis said: “You are tired, my friend; get up here beside me, and let us go over it all once more.”
And Le Notre, without more ado, jumped up beside the king, and they began it all over again, as the children say of their favorite stories. He explained to Louis how he nearly despaired of ever getting that birch‐ grove right, owing to a bed of rock that would not be dislodged to make room for it; now and then he would catch the king by the sleeve, and bid him shut his eyes and not open them till they came to a certain point, when he would cry Voilà!—demeaning himself altogether like a true child of nature, and enjoying thoroughly the sympathy of the companion who, for the time being, a common delight made kindred with him. Suddenly, however, it seems to have dawned upon him that he was riding side by side with the king of France. He rubbed his hands, and exclaimed with childlike glee: “What a proud day this is in my life!” And then, as the tears came unchecked into his honest eyes, he added: “And if my good old father could but see me, what a happy one it would be!”
Louis, entering into the son’s emotion, made him talk on about his old father, and listened with profound interest to the story of their humble life in common. He wanted to give Le Notre letters‐patent of nobility, and so raise all his family to the rank of gentilshommes, but the offer was gratefully declined; it would have been a temptation to most men, but it was not to Le Notre; he had no ambitions of a worldly cast; his sole aspirations were those of a man of genius, and he preferred retaining the name of his father and ennobling it by a higher title than it was in the power of kings to bestow.
As soon as the palace and the grounds were finished, Louis came and took up his abode at Versailles. Then began that series of fêtes and pageants that makes the annals of that time read like the description of a long carnival. One of the most gorgeous of these fêtes was a sort of carrousel, given in 1664, when no less than five hundred guests were conveyed to Versailles in the king’s suite and at his expense—no small matter in the days when railways were unknown, and carriages drawn by six or eight horses were the only mode of travelling for persons of rank. The king played the part of “Roger” in the carrousel, and came riding on a white charger, magnificently caparisoned, all the court diamonds being given up to the adornment of rider and steed; he advanced at the head of a cavalcade of two hundred knights, after which came a golden chariot, called the “Chariot of the Sun,” and filled with shepherds and many mythological personages; the three queens, namely, the queen‐dowager Anne d’Autriche, the reigning queen, and the Queen of England, widow of Charles I., surrounded by three hundred ladies of the rank and beauty of France, assisted at the entrance of the tournament, while a vast concourse of enthusiastic spectators added by their presence to the enlivenment of the scene. At night “four thousand huge torches” illuminated the gardens; the supper was spread by nymphs and fauns, while Pan and Diana, “advancing on a moving mountain,” came down to preside over the festive board. Not the least noteworthy episode of the entertainment, which lasted seven days, was the representation of Molière’s Princesse d’Elide and the first three acts of Tartuffe, played now for the first time. The earlier fêtes at Versailles were marked by the presence of the greatest and fairest names that illustrated the reign of Louis Quatorze, so fertile throughout in celebrities.
Foremost in the gay and brilliant throng stands the figure of the one woman whom Louis ever really loved, the pale and pensive Louise de la Vallière, she who was in reality the goddess of this gorgeous temple, but who, in the words of Mme. de Sévigné, “hid herself in the grass like a violet,” and whose modesty and humility in the midst of her erring triumphs drew from all hearts the pardon she never wrung from her own uncompromising conscience.
All the glories of France flocked to Versailles as to a shrine where they did homage and were glorified in turn. At every step we meet the majestic figure of the Grand Monarque. See him at the top of the great stair, calling out to the Grand Condé, who toils painfully up the marble steps, bending under the weight of years and the fatigues of war: “Take your time, cousin; you are too heavily laden with laurels to walk fast; we can wait for you.” Not a room, or a terrace, or a gallery but has a witness to bring forth of the king’s courtesy or the king’s magnificence. There is the cabinet du roi, where he used to work at the affairs of state with his ministers, not one of whom worked as hard as the king himself. His ministers were not his tools nevertheless; despotic as he was, Louis let them hold their own against him, and when they had justice on their side he could yield gracefully to the opposition and respect the courage that prompted it. Witness the scene between him and his Chancellor Voisin, which took place in this same cabinet du roi. One of the most disreputable men of that not very reputable court, by dint of intrigue, obtained from Louis a promise of lettres de grâce. Next day, when the chancellor came in to his usual work, the king desired him to affix the great seals to the document, which was ready prepared. Voisin looked over it first conscientiously as was his custom, and then flatly refused to obey the king’s command, denouncing the grant of the lettres de grâce to such a man as an abuse of the royal privilege. Louis replied that his word was pledged, and it was too late now to discuss the unworthiness of the subject; he put forward his hand, and, seeing that Voisin did not move, he took the seals himself and affixed them to the deed. The chancellor looked on in silence, but, when Louis handed him back the badge of office, he drew away his hand, and said haughtily: “They are polluted; I will never take them back.”
“What a man!” exclaimed Louis, with a glance of frank admiration at his sturdy minister, and he flung the deed into the fire.
Voisin quietly took up the seals, and went on with his work as if nothing had occurred to interrupt it.
It was in the cabinet du roi that Louis took leave of the Duc d’Anjou, on the eve of his departure for Spain, with those memorable words: “Partez, mon fils, il n’y a plus de Pyrénées!”(68)
But it is in the Salle du Trône that the Grand Monarque appears to us in his most congenial attitude; here we see him in his true element, playing the king as the world never saw it played before, and assuredly never will again; here all the potentates of the earth came and greeted him spontaneously as le roi, as if he were the only real king, and they his vassals, or, at least, his humble imitators. One day we see the ambassador of the Dey of Algiers presenting in his name “a little present of twelve Arab steeds, and humbly praying that the mighty majesty of France would deign to accept them, seeing that King Solomon himself had accepted the leg of the grasshopper tendered to him by the ant.”
On another occasion, we see the stately Doge of Genoa advancing to pay his court; Louis questions him concerning the behavior of the courtiers to him, and the doge replies: “Truly, if the King of France steals away the liberty of our hearts, his courtiers take care to restore it.” The king suspects the reply to be provoked by some discourtesy on the part of his entourage, and, having investigated the matter and found that Louvois and De Croissy had demeaned themselves with unseemly hauteur to the sensitive stranger, he severely rebuked them in the presence of the whole court.
It was here, no doubt, seated on his golden throne, that Louis received the chief of Châteaubriand’s tale, and astonished him by the splendor of his state, and sent the noble savage back to his home in the far West to relate to the awe‐stricken children of the forest the wonders of the great French chief “whose superb wigwam he had beheld.”
The Salle du Sacre is less exclusive in its associations, the presence of the grand roi being thrown into the shade by the subsequent military glory of the grande armée. David has covered the walls with the chief events of Napoleon’s career, beginning with the first consulship, and continuing through the triumphal march of the Empire. When the first series of these immense pictures was shown to Napoleon, he, startled by their magnitude, of which he was probably a better judge than of their talent, turned to the painter, and exclaimed: “Now I must build a palace to lodge them!”
The Salle des Amiraux, which, as its name indicates, is consecrated to the memory of the naval heroes of France, was formerly the room of the Dauphin, son of Louis XIV. So little is known of this prince beyond the fact that he was the direct antithesis of his father in habits and character, that the following anecdote may be found interesting as connected with him:
The dauphin, like most princes of his time, was passionately fond of the chase. On one occasion he set out on a hunting expedition accompanied by a large party, and towards nightfall he and one of his equerries got separated from the rest, and found themselves astray in a dense wood, where they wandered for some hours without meeting any signs of human habitation. They came at last upon a small cottage, which, from its isolated position and shabby appearance, he set down as most likely a rendezvous of robbers, that part of the country being much frequented by these worthies. They were well armed, however, and determined to risk the barbarous hospitality of the thieves rather than pass the night amidst the snakes and other uncomfortable inmates of the woods. They knocked at the door, first meekly, then more peremptorily, and at last furiously; getting no answer, they resolved to break open the house, and began hammering away vigorously with the but‐end of their guns at the shaky old door. At this crisis a window opened somewhere, and a voice, that quavered with fright, besought the burglars to go away, as they would find nothing in so poor a lodging to repay their trouble. Summoned to say whom it belonged to, the voice replied that it was that of the curé of the neighboring hamlet, whereupon the huntsmen begged him to come down and spare them further trouble by opening the door himself. After much expostulation the host obeyed, and then his guests desired him to serve the best he had for their supper; there was no use protesting with visitors who had such formidable arguments on their shoulders and glistening in their belts, so the curé obeyed with the best grace he could. There was nothing substantial in the larder, he declared, but a leg of mutton, which the gentlemen were welcome to if they would undertake to cook it and let him go back to his bed. This they agreed to, with great good‐humor and many courteous thanks, and the old priest, after showing them where to find food and shelter for their horses, wished them a good appetite and betook himself to his couch, marvelling much at the sudden gentleness and courtesy of these singular burglars who had made their entry in so boisterous and uncivil a manner. The burglars, meantime, did full justice to his hospitality and their own cooking, and, having supped heartily, flung themselves at full length on the floor, and were soon sound asleep—sounder, no doubt, than their host, whose slumbers, if he slept at all, were most likely disturbed by visions of highwaymen arresting and murdering the king’s subjects or throttling honest folk in their beds, and such like unrefreshing dreams. The good man was up betimes, and while the hunters were still fast asleep he slipt out to seek some breakfast for them. Meantime the hunt, which had been in pursuit of the prince all night, perceived the little wreath of smoke that curled up from the curé’s chimney on the clear morning air, and at once made for the point whence it proceeded, sounding the horn as it approached. The prince and his companions started to their feet at the first note of the welcome signal, rushed to their horses, and were in the saddle and far out of sight before their host returned from his foraging expedition. Great was his surprise to find the birds had flown, but he was glad to be rid of them, and on such easy terms, for they had carried off nothing—the house was just as he had left it. It was not a thing to boast of, having harbored a couple of highwaymen for a night, though they had behaved so considerately to him—the curé, therefore, kept the adventure to himself. But he had not heard the last of it. The next day a messenger came in hot haste from Versailles with a summons for him to appear without further delay before the king. Terrified out of his five wits, and knowing full well what had brought this judgment upon him, the worthy old priest took up his stick and asked no questions, but forthwith made his way to the palace. He was conducted at once to the Salle du Trône, where Louis, surrounded by the rank and blood of France, was seated as for some solemn ceremonial on his chair of state. He bent a stern gaze on the curé, and in accents that made the culprit’s soul shake within him, demanded how it came to pass that a man of his holy calling made his house a rendezvous for midnight robbers who prowled about the country, disturbing honest subjects and breaking the king’s laws. The curé fell upon his knees, and humbly confessing cowardly concealment of a fact that he was in conscience bound to have denounced at once to the nearest magistrate, pleaded, nevertheless, that the bearing of those malefactors was so noble and their manners so courteous that he had doubts as to whether they were indeed such and not rather two knights of his majesty’s court; whereupon Louis bade the malefactors come forward, and, introducing them by name to the bewildered curé, enjoined him to be less cautious another time in opening his doors to benighted gentlemen.
“And in payment of the leg of mutton which my son was so unmannerly as to confiscate on you,” continued the king, “I name you Grand Prieur, with the revenues and privileges attached to the office.” This was assuredly the highest price that ever a leg of mutton fetched.
The chambre â coucher de la reine(69) plays a distinct part of its own in the annals of Versailles. We forget its first occupant, the gentle, long‐suffering Marie Thérèse, of whom, on hearing of her death, Louis Quatorze exclaimed: “This is the first sorrow she ever caused me!” we forget the longer‐suffering wife of Louis Quinze, the charitable Marie Leczinska, surnamed by the people “the good queen”; we lose sight of all the august figures who pass before us in the retrospect of this royal chamber, and see only Marie Antoinette, the haughty sovereign, the heroic mother and devoted wife, who has made it all her own. We see her, woke out of her sleep, and the cries of the mob menacing the palace in the dead of the night, and flying hardly dressed from the chambre de la reine to take refuge in the dauphin’s apartment, while the faithful guards dispute with their lives the entrance of her own to the mad multitude that have now broken in like a destroying torrent and are close upon the threshold. The walls seem still to echo the cry of those two brave guards as they fell: “Save the queen! Save the queen!” The great tragedy that was to change the whole destinies of France may be said to have begun on this terrible night of the 6th of October.
The chambre à coucher du roi(70) is, on the other hand, filled with Louis Quatorze to the exclusion of all other memories. Here was performed that solemn comedy in which the warriors and statesmen of the day took their part so gravely: the lever and coucher de roi. When we read the minute details given in the chronicles of the time of the ceremonial gone through by his courtiers every time the king got in and out of bed, it is a severe tax on our credulity to believe that the dramatis personæ who played the farce so seriously were not fools or grinning idiots, but sane and sober men whose lineage was second only in blue‐blooded antiquity to that of Cæsar himself, men of talent, men of genius, heroes who fought their country’s battles and deemed it no derogation to come from the field of glory and fight for the honor of handing the king his stockings or his pantaloons. This proud noblesse whom Richelieu could not conquer by the sword or subdue by tortures and imprisonment, lay down at the feet of Louis, and, it is hardly a figure of speech to say, licked them. They appear to have looked upon him, not as a mortal like themselves, however elevated above them in rank and power, but as a god, a being altogether apart from them in species. One is tempted to believe that both they and he must occasionally have been possessed with some vague notion that it was so; there is no other way of accounting for the servile worship which they tendered as a duty, and which he accepted as a due. Truly that famous “L’état c’est moi!”(71) sounds more of a god than a man; and that other utterance of Louis, Messieurs, j’ai failli attendre!(72) addressed to the proudest nobility in Europe, who were barely in their places when the flourish of trumpets announced the king’s entrance, is scarcely less grotesque in its superhuman pride.
This great and little coucher which was surrounded by so much prestige in the court of France was somewhat ridiculed by contemporary sovereigns, for the honor of humanity be it said; their admiration for Louis did not go the length of viewing the august ceremonial otherwise than in the light of a bore or a joke. When Frederick the Great heard from his ambassador an account of the first grand lever at which he assisted at Versailles, he burst into an uncontrollable fit of laughter, and exclaimed: “Well, if I were king of France, I would certainly hire some small king to go through all that for me!”
Considering how eagerly his courtiers contended for the honor of dressing the king’s person, one would have fancied the privilege of making his bed would have been proportionately coveted, and held second only to the honor of holding his majesty’s boots; but, such is the inconsistency of human beings, this was not the case. The courtiers probably felt that a line should be drawn somewhere, so they drew it here; they would not perform this menial office for the Grand Monarque, and the distinction of turning his mattresses and spreading his quilt devolved on valets of a lower grade. Among this inferior herd was one named Molière, a youth whom his comrades laughed at and treated as a sort of crazy creature who was always in the moon. One day when it happened to be his turn to spread the royal sheets, the poet Belloc overheard them chaffing him and refusing to help him in his work. He went up to Molière, and said: “Monsieur de Molière, will you do me the honor of allowing me to help you to make the king’s bed?” and Molière granted the request. The incident came to the king’s ear and led to his noticing the eccentric valet. A little later, and we see him standing behind the valet’s chair in this same room, where his majesty’s dinner was sometimes served, and waiting upon him, while the courtiers who had refused to sit at table with Molière stood round, looking on in “mute consternation at the strange spectacle,” Saint‐Simon tells us, who owns naïvely to sharing their consternation.
“Since none of my courtiers will admit Monsieur de Molière to their table,” said Louis, “I must needs set him down at mine, and show them that I count it an honor for the King of France to wait upon so great a man.”
Here, in this bed that Belloc and Molière had made together, Louis Quatorze died. From under the crimson and gold canopy which had witnessed the eternal levers and couchers, Louis rebuked the violent grief of two young pages who stood within the balustrade, that sanctum sanctorum which none under a prince of the blood or a high chancellor dare pass at any other time; they were weeping bitterly. “What!” exclaimed the king, “did ye, then, think I was immortal?” There was a time when he himself seemed to have thought so; but viewed by that vivid light that breaks through the mists of death, things wore a different aspect in his eyes; and the adulation which would fain have treated him as immortal, and which was during life as the breath of his nostrils to Louis, showed now as the empty bubble that it was.
No one ever again slept in the bed which had been honored by the last sigh of the Grand Monarque; the room remained henceforth unoccupied, and, with the exception of the pictures which have been removed, is still just as he left it. Louis carried his favorite pictures about with him wherever he went. “David,” by Domenichino, his best beloved of them all, is now to be seen at the Louvre; otherwise little has been altered in the chambre du roi; the bed and the ruelle are in their old place, also the table, on which a cold collation was laid every night in case of the king’s awaking and feeling hungry; this precautionary little meal was called the en cas; and the name with the habit, which had given rise to it, is still perpetuated in many old‐fashioned French families. Louis Quinze, from some superstitious feeling, could never bring himself to sleep in the death‐ chamber of his illustrious great‐grandfather; he took possession of what was then the salle de billiard, a noble room opening into the œil‐de‐ bœuf (bull’s eye), so called from its having an œil‐de‐bœuf over the large window at the north end. In an alcove in this billiard hall, Louis XV. died. The adjoining œil‐de‐bœuf was filled with the courtiers, who dare not venture within the polluted atmosphere of the royal chamber, but stood outside it, consulting together in “guilty whispers” as to what they ought to do; dreading on one hand the reward of their cowardice if the king should recover, and fearing on the other to fly too soon with their servile congratulations to his successor. In the great court below another crowd was assembled, watching in breathless silence for the signal which was to proclaim the king’s death. What a spectacle it was!—what a lesson for a king! The flatterers who yesterday had been his slaves, pandering to his vices, and helping to make him the abject creature that he was, abandoned him now that he was struggling with grim Death, and, all absorbed in selfish cares for their own interest, in speculations of the favor of the new king, they had no pity in their hearts for the master who could pay them no more. It came at last, the signal; the small flame of a candle was seen flickering through the darkness, and then held up at the window of the œil‐de‐bœuf. “Suddenly there was a noise,” says the historian of that ghastly scene, “like a roll of thunder, it was the courtiers rushing from the antechamber of the dead king to greet his successor.” Only his daughters had been brave enough to stand by the bedside of the dying man, and, now that he was gone, there was not one in all that multitude who could be induced to perform the last office of mercy towards his poor remains. It was imperative, nevertheless, that the body should be embalmed, and this appalling task devolved upon Andouillé, the late king’s surgeon. The Duc de Villequier went up to him and reminded him of it; he knew that the operation must insure certain death to the operator, but that was not his concern.
“It is your duty, monsieur,” said the duke; and he was coolly turning away when Andouillé stopped him. “Yes,” he replied, “it is my duty, and it is yours to hold the head.” De Villequier had forgotten this; he made no answer, but left the room, and nothing more was said about the embalmment. The body was hustled into a coffin, and smuggled rather than conveyed in the dead of the night to S. Denis, a few menials accompanying the King of France to his last resting‐place. The spirit of French loyalty may be said to have been buried with Louis Quinze; “the divinity that doth hedge a king” was that night laid low in France, wrapped in the shroud that covered the unutterable mass of corruption consigned like a dog to the ready‐made grave in S. Denis. Le roi could never again be to the nation what he had been heretofore. Le roi est mort, vive le roi!(73) ceased to be the watchword of its fealty; le roi, that being invested not merely with supreme authority, but with a sort of vague personal sacredness that has no parallel in modern loyalty, died with Louis Quinze, never to be resuscitated. The miserable death of the libertine prince, fit ending to an ignoble life, came upon his people in the light of a divine judgment, swift and awful, and dealt the last blow at that prestige which had for generations been the bulwark of king‐worship and shaded with its mysterious reverence the iniquities of the throne. No man suffers alone for his sins, but how much more truly may this be said of kings! Who could measure the depth of the gulf that Louis XV. had dug through his long reign for those who were to come after him, and realize the consequences of his evil deeds to future generations of Frenchmen? There is no greater fallacy than to attribute to an age the responsibility of its own destinies; none probably ever saw the beginning and end of its own history, for good or evil, but less than any other can the period of the Revolution be said to have witnessed this unity. We must look much further back to trace the rising of the red flood that inundated France in ’93. It was the insane extravagance of Louis XIV.’s reign and the official depravity of the succeeding one that sowed the harvest that was to be reaped in fire by the innocent victims of a corruption which for a whole century had been seething as in the caldron of the Prophet’s vision, till it boiled over in the mad frenzy of the Revolution, and swallowed up not only the monarch, but the soul and reason of France, in a deluge of exasperated hate and suicidal revenge. Louis Seize, the martyred king who was to expiate the follies and crimes of his predecessors, next passes before us along the galleries of Versailles. There is an interval of peace, a short halcyon time of pastorals and idyls, we see Marie Antoinette playing at shepherdess in Arcadia, we hear Trianon ringing with the music of her light‐hearted laughter, we see her choosing a friend,(74) and braving the jealous anger that makes a crime of her friendship though it be wise, and rebukes her mirth though it be innocent; but the queen turns a deaf ear to all warning sounds and shuts her eyes to the gathering clouds. Imprudent Marie Antoinette! Ill‐adapted wife of timid, hesitating, magnanimous Louis Seize, the Bourbon of whom it was written with truth:
“Louis ne sut qu’aimer et pardonner, S’il avait su punir, il aurait su regner.”(75)
He loved and forgave to the end, but he never learned to punish. Warnings were not wanting, but he would not heed them. See him standing in the embrasure of the window of that cabinet du roi whence Louis Quatorze ruled the kings and peoples of Europe; a new power has arisen; it is the people’s turn to rule the king, his brow is clouded, his lip trembles, not with fear—that base emotion never stirred the soul of Louis Seize—but with anguish, perplexity, doubts in himself that amounted to despair. He listens to the murmurs of the crowd down below; and to De Brézé, who repeats, in tremulous accents, Mirabeau’s message of tremendous import: “Go tell the king that the will of the people has brought us here, and nothing but the force of bayonets shall drive us hence!” That force he knew full well would never be appealed to; it was not the people who should be driven hence, it was they who would drive the king. Presently we see the ponderous state coach jolting slowly down the Avenue de Paris, the first stage of the royal martyrs towards the guillotine; the mob, in a frenzy of drunken triumph, jostled it from side to side, pressing rudely through the windows to stare at their victims, and insulting them by thrusting the red cap into their faces, and shouting as they go: “The baker and the bakeress! now we have caught them, and the people shall have bread!” This journey dates a new era in the annals of Versailles, it is the death‐knell of the pleasant days of royalty; there are to be no more fêtes pastorales at Trianon, no more merry children of France careering over the flowery terraces, making the sombre alleys bright and the gay flowers brighter with the sweet melody of child laughter; all this is gone, and passed like a dream. “The old order of things has vanished, making place for the new.” Soon we shall see the palace of Louis Quatorze stripped of its costly furniture, invaded by the rabble, and pillaged from garret to cellar. The Convention will deem it right to utilize the “foregoing abode of the tyrants” by turning it into a hospital; they will transport the invalids to Versailles, but the rheumatic old heroes will find the apartments of the Grand Monarque too grand to be comfortable, they will complain of their pains and aches being aggravated by the draughts, and beg to be taken back to their homely quarters, and the Convention, in its benevolence, will accede to the request.
Louis XVIII. was anxious to fix his residence at Versailles, and went the length of spending six millions of francs on repairing the façade, which had been sadly battered by the Revolution, but he found that the expense of refurnishing the palace would have been too much for the exhausted finances of France; so he gave up the idea.
Louis Philippe restored it to its ancient splendor, but not for his own use; he made it over to the nation as a museum, where they might go and enjoy themselves, and see all the glories of their country commemorated. Many of the victories of the grande armée were painted to his order to complete the series already decorating the walls. Versailles has retained ever since this national character. Under the Second Empire it was used occasionally for fêtes given to foreign princes; the most magnificent of these was the one prepared for the Queen of England when she visited Napoleon III. after his marriage.
France has undergone many strange vicissitudes, and her palaces have harbored many unlikely guests; but among the strangest on record none can assuredly compete with the recent experiences of Versailles. If the spirit of Louis XIV. be permitted sometimes to haunt the scene of his earthly pride, what must his feelings have been during the last two years! What did he feel on beholding the halls which had echoed to his conquering step held by the victorious soldiers of Germany, and vacated by them to make way for the President of the French Republic? But this crowning enormity stopped short at the threat. The chambre du roi was indeed placed at the disposal of the President, but whether it was that he shrank from the profanation, or feared the vast proportions of the great king’s palace, as likely to prove too large a frame for the representative of a republic, he declined taking up his abode there. Versailles continues still to be the resort of the people and of travellers from all parts of the world.
Father Isaac Jogues, S.J
Father Isaac Jogues, the first of the missionaries to bear the cross into the interior of our country, and the first to shed his blood on its soil for the faith of Christ, was a native of Orleans, France. He was born on the 10th of January, 1607, of a family distinguished alike for their virtues and their worth. In the bosom of this pious family the young Isaac was reared up, surrounded by all the profound and pleasing practices of Catholic devotion. Lessons of religion and letters were imparted together, and the scholar from his earliest youth proved himself remarkably apt at both. As soon as he was old enough, he was sent, to his own great joy, to the college at Orleans, then recently established by the Jesuit Fathers, under whose instruction he made rapid progress in his studies. The virtues of his character so ingratiated him with his companions at college, that no thought of jealousy ever entered their hearts at the eminence he enjoyed as a student.
As the close of his collegiate course drew near, he began, more seriously than ever, to meditate on the greatest act of one’s life—the selection of a vocation. It was his extraordinary devotion to the Passion of Our Lord that settled this question for him. The cathedral church of his native city was dedicated to the Holy Cross, and there from his tenderest years he gazed daily upon that sacred symbol of the Passion and Redemption glittering from the spires of the temple, and it became the object of his warmest affection.
“O lovely tree whose branches wore The royal purple of his gore! Oh! may aloft thy branches shoot, And fill all nations with thy fruit!”
Impelled by this devotion, he retired into himself in order to discover his vocation, and heard within his soul the voice of Heaven calling him to the Society of Jesus. Having applied for admission into the Society, and being received with alacrity by the superior, he entered upon his novitiate in October, 1624. To complete his studies he next went to the celebrated college of La Flèche, where he passed his examination in philosophy at the end of three years with great distinction. Then, in obedience to the discipline of his order, the young Jesuit went to teach in the college at Rouen, and for four years instructed the youth of that city in the elements of the Latin language, in the principles of religion and the practice of piety. So fruitful were his labors in this regard that his scholars were ever distinguished for the solidity and constancy of their virtues, and many of them became companions of their saintly preceptor in the Society of Jesus.
We now find him winning laurels in the flowery path of literature. It was, at the period of which we speak, the custom at the Jesuit colleges to test the qualifications of the teachers, by requiring them, at the opening of the year, to deliver an oration or poem, or read a lecture of their own production, in public. Simply in obedience to this rule, and without any desire of his own to gain distinction, the gifted Jogues participated in these exercises, and on one occasion produced a poem of rare excellence. But his heart was too thoroughly pre‐engaged to covet the laurels of literary fame. He was intent on winning another crown—the glorious crown of martyrdom. Yet so obedient was the young scholastic to the will of his superior and to the spirit of his institute, that he, who only desired for himself the wigwam and council fires of the roving tribes of the Western wilds, went out with as much labor and zeal to acquire all the accomplishments of learning as though a professor’s chair in Europe was to be the field of his ambition. He was next sent to Paris, where he began his course of divinity at the college of Clermont.
He applied himself to these studies with the greatest zeal, since they constituted the last probation and delay preceding his elevation to the sacred ministry, and the realization of his fondest hope—a foreign mission. He seems not to have discovered his future plans to his family, to whom he was, however, most tenderly attached. Writing to them in April, 1635, on receiving their complaint at his not having joined them in one of their family festivals, he says: “The prayers which I offer up, as well afar off as near you, are the most affectionate marks I can give of my interest in you all.”
When the time for the reception of holy orders drew near, he prepared himself by a spiritual retreat, and was ordained in February, 1636. His family, who were extremely devoted to him, were not present at his ordination; but his fond mother obtained from his superior a promise that he might say his first Mass in his native city. He accordingly went to Orleans, and offered up the holy sacrifice for the first time in the church of the Holy Cross. Then, tearing himself away from his mother and sisters, never to see them again, he went to Rouen, and entered upon what is called the second novitiate in the Society of Jesus. But a fleet was soon ready to sail from Dieppe for Canada, and the young missionary must hasten to his chosen field of labor and love.
He was accompanied on the voyage by the Jesuit Fathers Garnier and Chatelain, and by M. de Chanflour, afterwards governor at Three Rivers. The vessel in which they sailed being leaky, the pumps were kept in constant motion, and the labor thus imposed upon the crew gave rise to a mutiny, which Father Jogues alone was able to quell. M. de Chanflour ever afterwards, in speaking of the voyage, attributed his safety to the influence of Father Jogues’ prayers with God, and of his persuasion with the men.
After words of pious affection and encouragement which this exemplary son knew well how to address to that excellent mother, he proceeds in one of his letters addressed to her:
“I write this more than three thousand miles away from you, and I may perhaps this year be sent to a nation called the Huron, distant nearly a thousand miles more from here. It shows great dispositions for embracing the faith. It matters not where we are, provided we are ever in the arms of Providence and in his holy grace. This I beg for you and all our family daily at the altar.”
By his short stay at Miscou he missed the Indian flotilla, and Fathers Garnier and Chatelain embarked without him; but, some canoes having come in later, the Indians, when about to return, asked, as if reproachfully, why there was no black‐gown to be carried by them. Father Jogues, being then at Three Rivers, was summoned to embark, and at once joyfully entered the canoes.
We would gladly reproduce, did our space allow, a letter addressed to his mother, under date June 5, 1637, giving an account of this voyage. Suffice it to say that in nineteen days he accomplished what usually took twenty‐ five or thirty; joining Fathers Garnier and Chatelain, who had preceded him but a month, and three other missionaries who had been five or six years in the country.
Supported by his zeal, he accomplished his arduous and laborious passage, but no sooner arrived at Ihonitiria than his exhausted nature sank under a dreadful malady, which for more than a month threatened to terminate his existence. With four others he lay during all this time in a cabin, without medicines or food, except such food as was an aggravation to the disease. By the middle of October Father Jogues was so far recovered as to be able to take the ordinary food of the country, the sagamity.
In November he set out from Ihonitiria to join Father Brebeuf at the great town of Ossossané, where for a time they were companions on earth who were destined to be companions in heaven, in the enjoyment of the glorious crown of martyrdom. Sickness was raging over the land, and the missionaries hastened from town to town, and from cabin to cabin, baptizing the dying infants, and such of the adults as were willing to receive the words of eternal life. They even extended their visits to the neighboring Nipissings, who had been terribly afflicted with the prevailing maladies. The poor Indians, in most cases, would not listen to the voice of the fathers, because they could not promise, as their own sorcerers pretended, to cure their bodily afflictions. The horrid orgies of the medicine‐men were consequently in great requisition, and one of them, a little deformed creature, offered his services to one of the fathers in his sickness.
There was another medicine‐man, Tehoronhaegnon, who filled the land with dances and orgies of the most wicked and revolting character. The missionaries labored to banish these abominations from the country, and to introduce in their place the pure and holy rites of the Christian religion. Unacquainted with their language, Father Jogues labored under the greatest disadvantages, but by zealous and persevering application he was soon able to make himself well understood; and in a few years he was master of the Huron, the key‐tongue to so many others. Remaining at Ossossané as his place of residence, he was incessant in his visits and ministrations in the cabins of the people, preaching the faith to all, and at the same time rapidly acquiring their language. Late in 1637 he returned to labor in the same way at Ihonitiria. On the ruin of this town and its mission, he went again to join his superior, Father Brebeuf, at Teananstayae.
In 1639, Father Jogues accompanied Father Garnier in his expedition to plant the cross among the mountains of the Petuns, or Tobacco Indians. They twice visited the Petun village of Ehwae, which they dedicated to SS. Peter and Paul. But their noble efforts were in vain; every door was closed against them, and menaces assailed them on every side; even the women reproached their husbands for not killing them, and the children pursued them through the streets. The sachems gave a feast to the young warriors in order to induce them to destroy the missionaries; but the providence of God saved his servants from the impending blow.
In the next year, Father Jogues was stationed with Father Francis Duperon at the new residence at S. Mary’s. Four towns partook of their care, and these they piously dedicated to S. Ann, S. John, S. Denis, and S. Louis. Obliged to select the worst season of the year for their labor, because then only were the neophytes drawn together, their time was incessantly occupied in conveying to the untaught natives the faith and its consolations. Next year Father Jogues was stationed permanently at St. Mary’s. Here the fathers established a hospice, where the wayfarer was ever sure to find refreshment and relief for the body as well as the soul. To this sacred spot in the wilderness came Indians from distant villages to receive instruction in the faith, some to be baptized, some to prepare for the reception of Holy Communion, some to be trained in the duties of catechists, and others, like Joseph Chihatenhwa, to make a spiritual retreat.
But now a new enterprise for the Gospel drew Father Jogues away from St. Mary’s. This was to plant the cross in the region now comprising the state of Michigan. The missionaries knew that beyond the Huron Lake another vast expanse of water lay which never yet had been visited by them. The strait which connected the two lakes had formerly been known by the name of Gaston, and was supposed to have been once visited by Nicholet, but no intercourse ever subsisted between the French and the tribes of those regions. In the summer of 1641, numerous delegations from all the nations and tribes, scattered over a great expanse of country, were attracted to the “Feast of the Dead,” now to be given by the Algonquins.
Thus, on the present occasion, the numerous branches of the vast Algonquin family were brought in contact with the Jesuit missionaries and the Christian Hurons, and the latter spread far and near in this vast assembly the fame of the black‐gown chiefs. In the general interchange of presents, the missionaries presented to the strangers “the wampum of the faith.” The Panoitigoueieuhak, or Sauteux, as the French called them, a tribe inhabiting the small strip near the Falls of St. Mary, were particularly friendly and earnest, and invited the black‐gowns to come and bring the faith to their cabins as they had done for the Hurons. Father Raymbault and Father Jogues were named by the superior to visit this new and distant vineyard. Launching their canoes in the latter part of September at St. Mary’s, they glided over the little river Wye, and were soon on the broad, clear bosom of the great “Fresh‐Water Sea.” For seventeen days their frail canoes glided through the multitude of little islands that stud the water from the Huron promontory. They reached without accident the strait where Superior empties its waters into the lower lakes, and then they encountered Indians assembled to the number of two thousand. From these they learned of innumerable wild and warlike tribes stretching far to the west and south. Here, too, their eager ears were feasted with tidings of a mighty river rolling towards the south till it met the sea, whose shores were lined with numberless tribes and nations. Planting the cross at Sault St. Mary’s, the two fathers turned it hopefully and prophetically towards this great mysterious river, whose vast and teeming valley they thus took possession of in the name of the Prince of Peace. Having opened the way to this immense mission‐field by their visit, the two missionaries encouraged the Sauteux with the prospect of a future permanent mission, and, amidst the regrets of their new friends, again launched their canoes and returned to their mission‐house at St. Mary’s. “Thus,” says Bancroft, “did the religious zeal of the French bear the cross to the banks of the St. Mary and the confines of Lake Superior, and look wistfully towards the homes of the Sioux in the Valley of the Mississippi, five years before the New England Eliot had addressed the tribes of Indians that dwelt within six miles of Boston Harbor.”
At St. Mary’s, Father Jogues remained constantly employed at the hospice with Father Duperon in instructing and preparing the Indians for the reception of the faith. One hundred and twenty were baptized during the winter, and among these was the famous warrior, Ahasistari, a chief of the town of St. Joseph’s.
This brave and chivalrous chief had been for some time receiving instruction in the faith, and he now came forward to ask for baptism. The fathers at first put him off, in order that he might become still better instructed; but his entreaties were so earnest, and his appreciation of the Christian truths so intelligent, that it was deemed no longer necessary or proper to postpone the boon. He accordingly received the sacrament on Holy Saturday, 1642.
It has been seen how, at Orleans, the ardent novice of the Society of Jesus was passionately devoted to the cross, the memento of our Saviour’s Passion. Like S. Peter, his heart was still for ever enamored with the sacred humanity of his divine Master. Thus his devotion to the Blessed Sacrament was intense, and the Real Presence, the greatest of blessings, made the wilderness of America a paradise to Father Jogues. Father Buteux says of him that he was “a soul glued to the Blessed Sacrament.” His prayers, meditations, office, examens of conscience—in fine, all his devotions—were performed in the little chapel before the Holy Eucharist. Neither heat, nor cold, nor the swarms of mosquitoes, with which the chapel was infested, could induce him to forego the society of his Saviour. No wonder he was attracted thither; for it was in the little chapel that he was not unfrequently favored with heavenly visitations. It was there, too, that he breathed that heroic prayer, whose only petition was that he might be allowed to bear a portion of his Saviour’s cross. His prayer was heard—a warning voice fortified his soul for the approaching conflict.
The necessities of the Huron missionaries had now arrived at the point of extreme distress. They were reduced to procure the wine for the altar from the wild grape; at last, flour to make the sacred host was wanting for the holy sacrifice, and the missionaries themselves were in want of clothes and other necessaries of life. The perilous passage through various intervening hostile tribes to procure relief from Quebec for the pressing demands of the mission must now be undertaken by some one, and Father Jerome Lalemant, the superior, selected Father Jogues for the task, which, however, at the same time, he permitted him to accept or decline. His immediate preparation to depart showed that he did not hesitate about accepting. To his great joy, the faithful and noble chief, Eustace Ahasistari, came forward, and offered to become his escort and guide. A flotilla of four canoes, bearing the missionary, the Christian chief, four Frenchmen, and eighteen Hurons, started from St. Mary’s on the 13th of June. The voyagers had to endure the usual portages at the rapids, and other hardships of such trips; but, by the exercise of great care and vigilance, they reached Quebec without harm from the savages. The faithful messenger, besides procuring books, vestments, and sacred vessels, had all things in readiness by the last day in July, the feast of S. Ignatius. He stopped to celebrate the feast of the great founder of his order, in which his companions united by approaching the sacraments in solemn preparation for their perilous return. The flotilla, now increased to twelve canoes, started from Three Rivers on the 1st day of August, and at first made slow progress against the impetuous current of the St. Lawrence. They spent the night on a small island in Lake St. Peter, twelve leagues from Three Rivers, and on the second morning they had not proceeded far when they discovered suspicious footprints on the adjacent shore. Nerved by the dauntless courage of Ahasistari, they pushed on, and had not advanced a league when suddenly a volley from a Mohawk ambush riddled their bark canoes. Panic‐struck, the Hurons, whose canoes were near the shore, fled in all directions. Only fourteen rallied round the gallant Ahasistari, who had now to oppose a force of twice his numbers. The Mohawks, armed with fire‐arms, and reinforced from the other shore, overpowered the Hurons, who broke and fled. Father Jogues, ever mindful of his sacred calling, in the heat of the attack calmly stopped to take up water for the baptism of his pilot, who was the only unbaptized Indian in his canoe. Seeing himself almost alone, he made to the shore; but he did not attempt to escape, which he might easily have done. “Could I,” he says, “a minister of Christ, forsake the dying, the wounded, the captive?” Advancing to the guard of the prisoners, he asked to be made a captive with them, and their companion in danger and in death. Well might the Mohawk guard, at the sight of such heroism, have been scarcely able to believe his senses! Well might the historian exclaim, “When did a Jesuit missionary seek to save his own life, at what he believed to be the risk of a soul?”(76) Father Jogues at once began his offices of mercy among his fellow‐captives. He encouraged and confessed his faithful companion, the good René Goupil; he instructed and baptized the Hurons, and as, one after another, they were brought in prisoners, the priest of God rushed to meet and embrace them, and to unite them to the fold of Christ.
In the meantime, Ahasistari, having got beyond the reach of his pursuers, looked round for Ondessonk. Finding that the black‐gown was not there, the noble chief relinquished his freedom that he might share in the captivity of the father, whom he had promised never to abandon. While Father Jogues was engaged in ministering to the prisoners, the voice of Ahasistari struck upon his astonished ears. “I made a vow to thee that I would share thy fortunes, whether death or life. Brother, here I am to keep my vow.” Also a young Frenchman, one of those donnés who accompanied and aided the missionaries, returned to join the prisoners with the same exalted motive; and, as Father Jogues tenderly embraced him, all bleeding and mangled as he was, the savages could not restrain their fury. Rushing upon the father, they beat him with their fists and clubs till he fell senseless to the ground. Then, seizing his hands, they tore out most of his nails with their teeth, and inflicted upon him the exquisite torture of crunching his fingers, especially the two forefingers. But these tortures were only the first outbursts of savage rage and cruelty, the forerunners of more cruel ones in reserve.
The time consumed in collecting the prisoners, dividing the booty, and preparing for retreat enabled Father Jogues to complete the instruction and baptism of the remaining prisoners.
On Lake Champlain, another Mohawk war‐fleet met the flotilla, and, drawing up on an island, the newcomers prepared to receive their countrymen and the prisoners. They erected a scaffold on the highest point of land for the prisoners; then offering thanks to the sun as the genius of war, they lined the shore, and welcomed the conquering fleet with a salute of firearms. The number of savages on the new flotilla was about two hundred, and, as their native superstition taught them that their success in war would be proportioned to their cruelty to the prisoners, sad indeed was the fate of the latter. Father Jogues closed the line of prisoners as they marched up to the scaffold, and so terrific was the shower of blows that assailed him that he fell exhausted to the ground: “God alone,” he exclaims—“God alone, for whose love and glory it is sweet to suffer, can tell what cruelties they wreaked upon me then.” Unable to proceed, he was dragged to the scaffold, when, on reviving, he suffered the ordeal of fire and steel. His closing wounds were reopened, his remaining nails were torn from their sockets, and the bones forced through the crushed fingers. Twice one of his tormentors rushed to cut off his nose—a certain prelude of death to follow—and was twice restrained by some invisible, some providential power. Falling repeatedly to the ground, the blazing brands and burning calumets forced him to rise. Thus tortured and fainting, the paternal eyes of Jogues still possessed tears of tenderest sympathy to shed for the sufferings of his fellow‐captive, Ahasistari, who, amidst his own sufferings, cried aloud in praise of the father’s courage and love of his children. The night was spent without food, and in the morning the voyage was resumed. While passing over the lake, again they met a Mohawk fleet, and again the victorious Mohawks must honor their countrymen by fresh tortures of the prisoners. On the next day, the ninth of the captivity, the flotilla reached the extremity of the lake, where the entire party landed. The prisoners, weakened and suffering with wounds and hunger, were now loaded with all the luggage, and, in this plight, forced to commence a four days’ journey by land. Some berries, gathered on the wayside, constituted their only food, and the exhausted father narrowly escaped being drowned in crossing the first river. On the eve of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, they reached the river near the Mohawk village. Here again the captives became the objects of cruel tortures for the amusement of the crowds swarming from the settlement to see them. “And as he ran the gauntlet, Jogues comforted himself with a vision of the glory of the Queen of Heaven,”(77) for it was the eve of her glorious Assumption into Heaven. Some Hurons, who met them at the river, exclaimed in compassion, “Frenchmen, you are dead!” Before going up to the village, Father Jogues was again cruelly beaten with clubs and sticks, especially on the head, which by its baldness excited the derision of the savages. Two remaining finger‐nails, which had escaped their impatient cruelty before, were now torn out with the roots. “Conscious that, if we withdrew ourselves from the number of the scourged, we withdrew from that of the children of God, we cheerfully presented ourselves,” were the words of the martyr himself, relating how he advanced to receive new tortures.
The line of march was formed for the village, Father Jogues closing as before the procession. Again the scaffold was erected, again the heroic band ran the gauntlet in marching to the scaffold hill, and the signal for the tortures to begin was given by a chief, who struck each captive three times on the back with a club. An old man approached Father Jogues, and compelled an aged captive woman to sever his left thumb from his hand with a dull knife. Long and various were the tortures which Father Jogues and his companions now endured, and though exhausted from the loss of blood, he consoled them in their sufferings. As night approached, the prisoners were tied to stakes driven in the ground, and thus exposed to the maltreatment of the children, who threw burning coals upon them, “which hissed and burned in the writhing flesh, till they were extinguished there.”(78)
On the following day the prisoners were led forth half naked through the broiling sun, to be exhibited and tortured in all the Mohawk towns. At the second village the same tortures were endured as at the first. On entering the last town the heart of Father Jogues was melted at the sight of a fresh band of Huron prisoners just brought in. Forgetting his own captivity and sufferings, he approached the captives with every expression of sympathy and kindness: he could not release their bodies from bondage; but he offered to their immortal souls the freedom of the Gospel. There was no water at hand with which to baptize these devoted captives; when, lo! the dews of heaven were supplied. An Indian at that anxious moment passed by with Indian corn, and threw a stalk at the father’s feet. As the freshly cut plant passed through the sunlight, dew‐drops upon the blades were revealed to the eager eyes of the missionary, who, gathering the precious drops into his hands, baptized two Hurons on the spot. A little brook they afterwards crossed supplied the saving water for the others.
In this town, also, the tortures were repeated with many horrid additions. Father Jogues, ever tender and sympathetic for the sufferings of his converts, was compelled to look on, and see the fingers of one of his Hurons nearly sawed off with a rough shell, and then violently torn off with the sinews uncut. Father Jogues and his companion René Goupil were led to a cabin and ordered to sing. Availing themselves of the command, they devoutly chanted the Psalms of David. They were burned in several parts of their bodies. Then two poles were erected in the air, in the form of a cross, and Father Jogues was tied to it by cords of twisted bark, thus throwing the whole weight of his body upon his wounded and lacerated arms. He asked to be released in mercy, in order that he might prepare for death, which he thought would result from his tortures, but this was refused him. Begging pardon of God for having made such a request, he had already resigned himself to the mercies of heaven, when suddenly an Indian in the crowd, touched with compassion, rushed forward and cut the cords that bound him to the cross. During the night he was again tied to a stake driven in the ground, and his sufferings were prolonged without relief till morning. On the following day the prisoners were carried back to the second town they had entered. Here the council decided to spare the lives of the French for the present, and to put the Hurons to death.
Father Jogues and René Goupil lingered in suffering, and almost at the point of death, for three weeks, at Gandawagué, now Caughnawaga, in New York. The Mohawks had concluded to send them back when convenient to Three Rivers. In the meantime, the Dutch settlers in New Netherland, who were allies of the Mohawks, heard that their Iroquois neighbors and friends had taken some European prisoners. These generous Dutch, headed by their minister, the worthy Dominie Megapolensis, took the matter in hand, and raised six hundred guilders for the ransom of the French prisoners. Accordingly Arendt Curler set out with this sum, accompanied by two burghers from Rensselaerswyck, now Albany, for the Mohawk castles. The treaty between the Dutch and the Mohawks was renewed, but neither money nor diplomacy could move the chiefs to deliver up the prisoners, whose importance they began now to perceive from the effort made for their release. All that the Dutch could obtain was a promise to send them back to Three Rivers.
Afterwards, divisions arose among the savages as to what disposition should be made of Father Jogues and René. In the meantime their lives were suspended upon the capricious humors and passions of the cruel Mohawks. The master of the cabin on seeing this ordered a young brave to put René to death; that order was afterwards obeyed.
After the death of René, Father Jogues remained among the Mohawks, the sole object of their barbarous cruelty and superstitious hatred. Amidst the countless sufferings he endured, his consolation consisted in prayer and visits of religion to the Huron prisoners. In his poverty he was rich in the possession of a volume containing one of the Epistles of S. Paul, and an indulgenced picture of S. Bruno. These, his only possessions, he carried always about his person.
In the fall, he was obliged to accompany the tribe as a slave on a grand hunt, and then for two months inconceivable hardships and labors were his constant lot. When the chase was unproductive, he was accused as the demon of their ill success. When sacrifice was offered to the god Aireskoi, he refused to eat any of the food of the idolatrous sacrifice, and was thereupon repulsed and avoided as polluted and polluting; and every door was closed against him, food was denied him, and a shelter refused. After performing the menial and oppressive labors which they imposed upon him, he retired at night to his little oratory, with its roof of bark and floor of snow, to commune with his Heavenly Father, his only friend; even to that sacred spot, the arrows, clubs, and once the tomahawk, of his persecutors followed him. He was finally sent back to the village, loaded with venison, over a frozen country, thirty leagues in extent, and almost perished of cold on the way. But even such a journey possessed its consolations; for on the way, by an act of heroism, he saved an Indian woman and her infant from drowning, and, as the infant was on the point of expiring from its exposure and injuries, he poured the waters of regeneration on its head, and saved another soul for heaven.
On arriving at the village, he was ordered to return over the same road to the hunting‐ground, but his repeated falls on the ice compelled him to abandon the journey and return to the village, to endure equal torments there. Obliged to become the nurse of one of the most inveterate of his enemies, who was lying devoured by a loathsome disease, the good Samaritan entered upon his task as a work of love, and for an entire month bestowed the most tender care and sympathetic attention upon his patient. In the spring of 1643, he was compelled to accompany a fishing party to a lake four days’ journey off, when he suffered over again the cruelties of the recent hunt. On the lake shore, as on the hunting‐grounds, his cross and little oratory of fir branches were his only consolations. His mode of life in these wildernesses is thus described by Bancroft: “On a hill apart he carved a long cross on a tree, and there, in the solitude, meditated the imitation of Christ, and soothed his grief by reflecting that he alone, in that vast region, adored the true God of earth and heaven. Roaming through the stately forests of the Mohawk Valley, he wrote the name of Jesus on the bark of trees, graved the cross, and entered into possession of these countries in the name of God—often lifting up his voice in a solitary chant.”
Repeatedly during this period was the murderous tomahawk suspended over his head; and twice was he selected to be sacrificed to the manes of some Indian warrior who had gone on the hunt and had not returned. But his life was in the hands of an invisible Protector. A generous Indian matron adopted him as her son, in the place of her own son she had just lost; and now, when he mingled with the Mohawks as their brother, he spoke to them of God, heaven, eternity, and hell. Though he convinced them that his words were true, they were too much wedded to their idols to yield to the grace of conversion. On one occasion he was led out to be sacrificed to the manes of the braves who had gone on a war party, and, not having returned, were supposed to be lost; but before the ceremony proceeded too far, the warriors returned just in time to save his life. They brought with them some Abnaki prisoners whom they destined for the stake. Father Jogues secured the services of an interpreter, instructed them in the faith, and succeeded in converting several of them, whom he baptized at Easter.
It was shortly after this that Father Jogues was compelled to witness the horrid spectacle of human sacrifice offered to the demon Aireskoi. How wonderful are the ways of divine Providence! for it was in the midst of this act, the lowest point in the scale of human degradation and of insult to God, that a human soul is regenerated by one of the Christian sacraments, and that soul is the victim itself of the superstitious rite. A woman was chosen for the victim, and was tied to the stake. The savages formed a line, and as they approached the stake each one did his share in burning, cutting, or otherwise torturing the unhappy victim. Father Jogues had previously instructed the woman. He took no part, of course, in this awful and wicked sacrifice, but he availed himself of an opportunity to press forward in the crowd, and as the victim bowed to receive the sacrament from his hands, the missionary poured the baptismal waters on her head, in the midst of the raging flames of the heathen sacrifice.
An effort was now made by his friends in Canada to secure the release of Father Jogues. Some braves of the Sokoki tribe, living on the Connecticut, had been captured by the Algonquins, and were now led forth for torture. The French governor procured their liberation, committed them to the care of the hospital nuns, and, after their wounds were healed, sent them back to their own country, with a request that they would induce their tribe to send an embassy to their allies the Mohawks to intercede for the relief of Father Jogues. The embassy was accordingly sent, the Mohawks lit their council fires, the Sokoki presents were accepted, but the main question was parried, and finally the old promise to send him back to Three Rivers was the only result. Perceiving now more than ever the dignity and importance of their prisoner, the Mohawks led him forth in triumph to show their allies that even the powerful French nation was tributary to the Iroquois. This cruel journey, two hundred and fifty miles long, was over a rugged and barren country, and many were the sufferings our missionary had to endure. Yet this journey was not without its peculiar consolations to Father Jogues. On one occasion he baptized five dying infants; and as he passed through the cabins in search of souls, he heard the voice of a former benefactor, the Indian who had so generously cut loose the cords that bound him to the cross of logs hoisted in the air in the village of Tinniontiogen, crying to him from his bed of misery and death. Father Jogues embraced his benefactor with a burst of gratitude and sympathy. Unable to reward him with worldly goods or temporal relief, the father instructed him in the truths of eternal life, bestowed upon the willing convert the treasure of the faith, and shortly before his death sealed all with the sacrament of baptism.
After his return to the village he was rushed upon one day by an infuriated savage, whose club laid him almost lifeless on the ground. Every day he was thus exposed to some imminent peril. His life was suspended upon the merest chance or savage caprice or passion. The good old woman who had adopted him, and whom he called his aunt, was his only friend in that vast region. She advised him to make his escape, but he believed it to be the will of God that he should remain there.
In August, 1643, he had to accompany a portion of the tribe on a hunting and fishing party, during which he visited for the second time the Dutch at Rensselaerswyck, the present city of Albany. The inhabitants again made a generous effort to secure the liberation of Father Jogues, but their appeal to the savage Mohawk was in vain. It was here, too, amid the dangers and distractions that encompassed him at Rensselaerswyck, that he produced that beautiful monument of taste and learning, as well as of apostolic zeal and love, the relation of his captivity and sufferings to his superior, which has been so greatly admired for its pure and classic Latin. In this letter, he says: “I have baptized seventy since my captivity, children, and youth, and old men of five different tongues and nations, that men of every tribe, and tongue, and nation, might stand in the presence of the Lamb.”
While engaged in helping the Iroquois to stretch their nets for fish, he heard of more Huron prisoners brought to the village, two of whom had already expired at the stake unbaptized. Obtaining the permission of his good aunt who had adopted him, he at once dropped the fish‐nets, and returned to the village in order that he might set his net for human souls. On his way to the village he passed through Rensselaerswyck. Van Curler insisted on his making his escape by flight, since certain death awaited him at the village, and offered a shelter and a passage on board of a ship destined first for Virginia and then for Bordeaux or Rochelle. It has already been related that Father Jogues had resolved to regard the Mohawk as his mission, he therefore hesitated to accept the generous offer of the Dutch, though inevitable death would soon remove him from that chosen field. But Van Curler and the minister of the settlement, John Megapolensis, pressed their appeal with such powerful arguments that the missionary promised to consider it, and asked one night for prayer and consultation with his soul and with God. After fervent supplication for the aid of heaven in deciding the matter with impartiality, and after much reflection, Father Jogues, knowing that if he returned to the village death would soon remove him from it, and convinced that his return to France or Canada would prove the only means of founding a regular mission in the Mohawk, resolved to attempt his escape, and went in the morning to announce his resolution to Van Curler and Megapolensis. They then arranged together the plan of escape. Returning to the custody of his guards, he accompanied them to their quarters. When they all retired at night to their barn to rest, the Iroquois slept around the father, in order to secure him closely within, while without the premises were guarded by ferocious watch‐dogs. In his first attempt early in the night, the dogs rushed upon him and tore his leg dreadfully with their teeth, and he was obliged to return into the barn. Towards daybreak a second attempt was more successful; the dogs were silenced; the prisoner quietly escaped over the fence, and ran limping and suffering with his lacerated limb fully a mile to the river where the ship lay. But here he found the bark sent by Van Curler for his escape lying high and dry and immovable on the beach, and the vessel was not within hailing distance. In these straitened circumstances, he had recourse to prayer. In making another effort to move the bark he seemed to be gifted with renewed strength, and soon the boat was afloat, and thus he succeeded alone in reaching the vessel. He was immediately concealed in the bottom of the hold, and a heavy box was placed over the hatch. In the filth of this narrow and unventilated place he remained two days and nights, suffering extremely from his wound, from hunger and the noisome air.
Father Jogues was then carried into the settlement to remain until all was quiet and it was time to embark. He was confided to the care of a man who permitted him to be thrust into a miserable loft, where he remained six weeks crouched behind a hogshead as his only shelter, with scarcely food sufficient to keep him alive, enduring every discomfort, and exposed to detection and recapture by the Iroquois or Mohawks, who incessantly haunted the house.
After six weeks thus spent, Father Jogues, accompanied by the minister, Dominie Megapolensis, took the first boat for New Amsterdam, as the city of New York was then called. The voyage lasted six weeks, during which Father Jogues became a great favorite with all on board. As they passed a little island in their route, the crew named it in honor of Father Jogues amid the discharge of cannon, and the Calvinist minister honored the Jesuit by contributing a bottle of wine to the festivities of the occasion. After an agreeable voyage, they arrived at New Amsterdam. The germ of the present monster city consisted then of a little fort garrisoned with sixty men, a governor’s house, a church, and the houses of four or five hundred men scattered over and around the entire Island of Manhattan. There were many different sects and nations represented there. The director‐general told Father Jogues that there were eighteen different languages spoken on the island. The Jesuit was enthusiastically received at New Amsterdam, for the people turned out in crowds to greet him. One of them, a Polish Lutheran, when he saw the mangled hands of Father Jogues, ran and threw himself at his feet to kiss his wounded hands, exclaiming, “O martyr of Christ! O martyr!” So practical, however, were the notions of the old Dutch inhabitants of the city about such matters, that they asked the missionary how much the company of New France would pay him for all he had suffered! Father Jogues made a vigilant search in New Amsterdam for Catholics. He found two: one, a Portuguese woman, with whom he could not converse, showed that she still clung to her faith by the pious pictures which were hanging round her room; the other, an Irishman, trading from Virginia, who availed himself of the father’s presence to go to his confession. It was from the latter that he learned that the English Jesuits had been driven from Maryland by the Puritan rulers of that colony, and had taken refuge in Virginia.
He remained there three months altogether in the old Dutch colony. Receiving commendatory letters from William Kieft, the governor of New Netherland, he sailed from the majestic harbor of New Amsterdam on the 5th of November, 1643. The little vessel possessed no comforts or accommodations. The father’s only bed was a coil of rope on deck, where he received severe drenchings from the waves breaking over him. A furious storm drove the vessel in on the English coast, near Falmouth, which was then in possession of the king’s party: two parliamentary cruisers pursued the Dutch vessel, but she escaped and anchored at the wharf. The storm‐ beaten crew went ashore to enjoy themselves, leaving only Father Jogues and another person on board, when the vessel was boarded by robbers, who pointed a pistol at the missionary’s throat and robbed him of his hat and coat. He appealed to a Frenchman, the master of a collier at the wharf, for relief, who took him on board his boat, gave him a sailor’s hat and coat, all his own poverty could spare, and a passage to France. In this plight, this celebrated missionary, whose fame filled all France, landed on his native shore on Christmas morning, at a point between Brest and St. Pol de Leon.
He borrowed a more decent hat and cloak from a peasant near the shore, and hastened to the nearest chapel, to make his thanksgiving and unite in the glorious solemnity of Christmas. As it was early he had the consolation of approaching the tribunal of penance, and of receiving the Holy Eucharist, for the first time in sixteen months. The touching story of his captivity and sufferings among the savages subdued their hearts and drew floods of sympathizing tears from the peasants whose hospitality he shared. They offered him all they had to forward him on his journey. A good merchant of Rennes, then passing on his way, heard the thrilling incidents he related, and saw his mangled hands: touched with compassion, he took the missionary under his care, and paid his expenses to Rennes, where he arrived on the eve of the Epiphany. He went to the college of his order in that city, and as soon as it was known that he was from Canada, all the members of the community gathered round him to ask him if he knew Father Jogues, and whether he was yet alive and in captivity. He then disclosed his name, and showed the marks of his sufferings; all then pressed forward to embrace their saintly brother, and kiss his glorious wounds.
He reposed for a few days at the college at Rennes, and then pushed on towards Paris, to place himself again at the disposal of his superior, humbly and modestly intimating a desire, however, to be sent back to his mission in America. His fame had long preceded him, and, when he arrived at the capital, the faithful pressed forward in crowds to venerate him and kiss his wounds. The pious queen‐mother coveted the same happiness, and he, whom we saw so recently the captive and slave of brutal savages, is now honored at the court of the first capital of Christendom. But the humility of Father Jogues took alarm at the honors paid to him. Throwing himself at his superior’s feet, he entreated that he might be sent back to the wilderness from which he had just escaped. The superior consented; but an obstacle here presented itself. So great were the injuries inflicted upon his hands by the Mohawks that he was canonically disqualified from offering up the holy sacrifice of the Mass. Application for the proper dispensation was made to the Sovereign Pontiff, upon a statement of the facts. Innocent XI. was moved by the recital, and, with an inspired energy, exclaimed, “Indignum esse Christi martyrem, Christi non bibere sanguinem”—“It were unjust that a martyr of Christ should not drink the blood of Christ!” Pronounced by the Vicar of Christ on earth to be a martyr, though living, he now goes to seek a double martyrdom in death. In the spring he started for Rochelle, and F. Ducreux, the historian of Canada, sought the honor of accompanying him thither.
He embarked from Rochelle for Canada, where he arrived on the 16th May, 1644. He found the Iroquois war still raging with unabated fury, and the colony of New France reduced to the verge of ruin. When his brethren in Canada heard and saw how cruelly Father Jogues had been treated in the Mohawk, and that his timely flight alone had saved his life, they felt the saddest apprehensions about the fate of Father Bressani, who had also fallen into the hands of the Iroquois. Finding it impossible to return to Lake Huron, Father Jogues joined Father Buteux in the duties of the holy ministry at the new town of Montreal, to which its founders gave the name of the City of Mary, in consecrating it to the Mother of God. It was during their sojourn together that the superior endeavored to draw from Father Jogues, by entreaty, and even by command, the circumstances of his sufferings in captivity; but his humility and modesty were so great that it was with the greatest difficulty that anything concerning himself could be drawn from him. In this spirit he avoided all the honors that were pressed upon him. After his return to Canada, he was so desirous of being unknown and unhonored that he ceased signing his name, and even his letters which he addressed to his superior after his return to Canada are without signatures.
Some Mohawk prisoners, kindly treated by the Governor of Canada and released, returned to their country, and disposed the Mohawks to make peace. A solemn deputation of their chiefs came to Three Rivers, and were received on the 12th of July, 1645, with great ceremony and pomp. Father Jogues was present, though unseen by the deputies; so was Father Bressani, who, having passed the ordeal of a most cruel captivity among the Mohawks, had been ransomed by the Dutch of New York, sent to France, and had now, like Father Jogues, returned to New France to suffer again. When all was silent, the orator of the deputies arose, and opened the session with the usual march and chants. He explained, as he proceeded to deliver the presents, the meaning of each. Belt after belt of wampum was thrown at the governor’s feet, until at last he held forth one in his hand, beautifully decorated with the shell‐work of the Mohawk Valley. “This,” he exclaimed, “is for the two black‐gowns. We wished to bring them both back; but we have not been able to accomplish our design. One escaped from our hands in spite of us, and the other absolutely desired to be given up to the Dutch. We yielded to his desire. We regret not their being free, but our ignorance of their fate. Perhaps even now that I name them they are victims of cruel enemies or swallowed up in the waves. The Mohawk never intended to put them to death.”
The French had little faith in the sincerity of the Mohawk, yet they wanted peace. The past was forgiven, the missionaries buried the remembrance of their wrongs with the hatchet of the Mohawk, and peace was concluded. The deputies returned to their castles to get the sachems to ratify the peace, and Father Jogues to Montreal to prepare himself for the terrible ordeal which he foresaw a Mohawk mission would open to him. His preparation consisted in prayer, meditations, and other spiritual exercises. The peace was ratified; the Indians asked for missionaries; the French resolved to open a mission among them, and Father Jogues was selected for the perilous enterprise. When he received the letter of his superior informing him of his selection, Father Jogues joyfully accepted the appointment, and prepared at once to depart. His letter in reply to the superior contains these heroic words: “Yes, father, I will all that God wills, and I will it at the peril of a thousand lives. Oh! how I should regret the loss of so glorious an occasion, when it depends but upon me that some souls may be saved. I hope that his goodness, which did not forsake me in the hour of need, will aid me yet. He and I are able yet to overcome all the difficulties which can oppose our project.”
On arriving at Three Rivers, he ascertained that he and the Sieur Bourdon were to go to the Mohawk castle, in the first instance, merely as ambassadors, to make sure of the peace. They departed on this dangerous embassy on the 16th of May, 1646, and during their absence public prayers, offered for their return, testified the fears felt for their safety. As they were about to start, an Algonquin thus addressed Father Jogues: “There is nothing more repulsive at first than this doctrine, that seems to annihilate all that man holds dearest, and as your long gown preaches it as much as your lips, you would do better to go at first in a short one.” Thereupon the prudent ambassador parted for the time with the habit of his order, and substituted a more diplomatic costume.
They were accompanied by four Mohawks and two Algonquins. After ascending the Sorel, and gliding through the beautiful islands of Lake Champlain, they arrived at the portage leading to the Lake Andiatarocté on the 29th of May, which was the eve of Corpus Christi. Here Father Jogues paused, and named the lake Saint Sacrament; but by a less Christian taste that beautiful name, given in honor of the King of kings, has since yielded to one given in honor of one of the kings of earth.(79) They suffered greatly for food on the way, but obtained a supply of provisions at Ossarane, a fishing station on the Hudson, supposed to be Saratoga. Then, gliding down the Hudson, they came to Fort Orange, where Father Jogues again, in the most earnest and sincere terms, expressed his deep gratitude to his liberators, the Dutch, whose outlay in his behalf he had already reimbursed to them from Europe. Not satisfied with expressing his thanks, Father Jogues endeavored to bestow upon his friend, Dominie Megapolensis, the greatest of possible returns—the true faith. He wrote from this place a letter to the minister, in which he used every argument that his well‐ stored mind or the unbounded charity of his heart could suggest to reclaim him to the bosom of that ancient church which his fathers had so unfortunately left.
After a short repose at Albany, they proceeded to the Mohawk, and arrived at the nearest town on the 7th of June. A general assembly of the chiefs was called to ratify the peace, and crowds came from all sides; some through curiosity to see, and others with a desire to honor, the untiring and self‐sacrificing Ondessonk. Father Jogues made a speech appropriate to the occasion and the purposes of his visits, which the assembled chiefs heard with great enthusiasm; presents were exchanged, and peace was finally and absolutely ratified. The Wolf family in particular, being that in which Father Jogues had been adopted, exclaimed, “The French shall always find among us friendly hearts and an open cabin, and thou, Ondessonk, shalt always have a mat to lie on and fire to keep thee warm.” Father Jogues endeavored to impress favorably the representatives of other tribes who were there by presents and friendly words. Then remembering his sacred character as a minister of God, he visited and consoled the Huron captives, especially the sick and dying; he heard the confessions of some, and baptized several expiring infants. Before departing Father Jogues desired to leave behind his box containing articles most necessary for the mission, which he was soon to return and commence among them; the Mohawks, however, dreading some evil from the box, objected at first, but the father opened it, and showed them all it contained, and finally, as he supposed, overcame their superstitious fears, and the box was left behind among them.
The ambassadors and their suite set out on their return, on the 16th of June, bearing their baggage on their backs. They also constructed their own canoes at Lake Superior, and, having crossed the lake in safety, arrived at Three Rivers, after a passage of thirteen days, on the feast of SS. Peter and Paul, to the infinite joy and relief of all their friends.
On the 28th day of September, Father Jogues was on his way to the Mohawk, accompanied by Lalande, a young Frenchman from Dieppe, an Iroquois of Huron birth, and some other Hurons. As they advanced, tidings of war on the part of the Mohawks became more frequent, and the Indian escorts began to desert. They passed Lake Champlain in safety, and had advanced within two days’ journey of the Mohawk when a war‐party, marching on Fort Richelieu, came upon them. The savages rushed upon them, stripped Father Jogues and Lalande of their effects, bound them as prisoners, and turning back led them to the village of Gandawagué,(80) the scene of Father Jogues’ first captivity and sufferings. Here they were received with a shower of blows, amid loud cries for their heads, that they might be set up on the palisades.
Towards evening, on the 18th of October, some of the savages of the Bear family came and invited Father Jogues to sup in their cabin. Scarcely had the shadow of the black‐gown darkened the entrance of their lodge, when a concealed arm struck a well‐aimed blow with the murderous tomahawk, and the Christian martyr fell lifeless to the ground. The generous Kiotsaeton, who had just arrived as a deputy of a council called to decide on his case, rushed to save him, but the blade had done its work, and now spent its remaining force by inflicting a deep wound in the arm of that noble chief. The head of Father Jogues was severed from his body, and raised upon the palisade. The next day the faithful Lalande, and a no less faithful Huron, shared the same fate.
Father Jogues was in his fortieth year when he received the fatal stroke. When the tidings of his death arrived, every tongue in Canada and in France was zealous in the recital of his many virtues, and in praise of his glorious death. His zeal for the faith, his courage in danger, his humility, his love of prayer and suffering, his devotion to the cross, were conspicuous among the many exalted virtues that adorned his life and death. While his brethren lamented the loss the missions had sustained, they envied him the crown he had won. “We could not,” says Father Ragueneau, “bring ourselves to offer for Father Jogues the prayers for the dead. We offered up the adorable sacrifice, indeed, but it was in thanksgiving for the favors which he had received from God. The laity and the religious houses here partook our sentiments as to this happy death, and more are found to invoke his memory than there are to pray for his repose.”