Bossuet’s Sermon.
Jacques Benigne Bossuet, the eloquent pulpit orator of the court of Louis XIV., added a classic to French literature in his masterly discourse at the obsequies of Henrietta Maria. It was delivered in the convent chapel of the nuns of the Visitation of Chaillot, whom the late Queen particularly favored, and for whom she had founded the convent.
The nobility of France were gathered together on this occasion, the “most illustrious assembly of the world” sat spell-bound under the eloquence of the “Eagle of Meaux.” Bossuet had proved equal to his opportunity.
Perhaps, though, Bossuet is better known today by that other funeral oration delivered some months later at the obsequies of Queen Henrietta Maria’s youngest daughter, Henriette of England, Duchess of Orleans.
When the old die, well—there can be no Shelleyan lamentation.
“Grief made the young Spring wild,
And she threw down her opening buds
As if she autumn were and they dead leaves.”
—Shelley.
The young spring may, indeed, thus lavishly lament for the young, but not for the old. When a poet Keats, aged twenty-six, lies brokenheartedly and beautifully dead; when a queenly woman, wife and bereaved mother, aged twenty-eight, lies pathetically dead—oh, then, all that Shelley may poetically declare, all that Bossuet may magically proclaim, seem fitting and just and true. We understand the young Spring tantrums; and the sobbings of the buds as roughly sundered from the grief-swept trees, seem strangely familiar, as though ages ago we ourselves had thus wildly wept when the world was young.
Wealth, station, honor, health, happiness, youth, beauty, love—today; and the tomb tomorrow! This contrast has ever most forcefully appealed to the human heart. Bossuet knew full well the force of this appeal and again the orator and the occasion were well met.
“O vanity,” he exclaimed, “O nothingness! O mortals, ignorant of their destiny! Ten months ago would she have believed it? And you, my hearers, would you have thought, while she was shedding so many tears in this place, while I was discharging a like office for the Queen, her mother—that she would so soon assemble you here to deplore her own loss? ‘Vanity of vanities; all is vanity.’ Nothing is left for me to say but that that is the only sentiment which, in presence of so strange a casualty, grief so well grounded and so poignant permits me to indulge. No; after what we have just seen, health is but a name, life is but a dream, glory is but a shadow, charms and pleasures are but a dangerous diversion.”