CHAPTER IV.
CONVENTS.—NEIGHBOURHOOD OF CONVENTS.—CONVENTS IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.—CONTRAST WITH THE MIDDLE AGE.—THE DIRECTOR.—DISPUTE ABOUT THE DIRECTION OF THE NUNS.—THE JESUITS TRIUMPH THROUGH CALUMNY.
An ingenuous and intellectual German lady told me one day that, when she came with her husband to Paris for the first time, they had wandered about in a grand but very dull quarter of the town, where they made an infinite number of turns and windings without being able to find their way. They had entered by a public garden, and found at last another public garden that brought them out again at the quay. I saw that she meant the learned and pious neighbourhood which contains so many convents and colleges, and reaches from the Luxembourg to the "Jardin des Plantes."
"I saw," said this lady, "whole streets with gardens, surrounded with high walls, that reminded me of the deserted districts of Rome, where the malaria prevails, with this difference, that these were not deserted, but, as it were, mysteriously inhabited, shut up, mistrustful, and inhospitable. Other streets, exceedingly dark, were in a manner buried between two rows of lofty grey houses with no front aspect, and which showed, as it were in derision, their walled-up windows, or their rivetted lattices, turned upside down, by which one may see—nothing. We asked our way several times, and it was often pointed out to us; but somehow or other, after having gone up and down and up again, we ever found ourselves at the same point. Our ennui and fatigue increased. We invincibly and fatally met with the same dull streets, and the same dismal houses sullenly shut, which seemed to look at us with an evil eye. Exhausted at last, and seeing no end to the puzzle, oppressed more and more by a certain dispiriting influence that seemed to ooze from these walls, I sat down upon a stone and began to weep."
A dispiriting lassitude does indeed seize and oppress our hearts at the very sight of these disagreeable-looking houses; the most cheerful are the hospitals. Having been for the most part built or rebuilt in those times of solemn dulness, the reigns of Louis XIII. and Louis XIV., there is nothing about them to remind us of the lovely art of the renaissance. The latest memento of that art is the Florentine front of the Luxembourg Palace. All those houses that were built at a later period, even those which affect a certain severe luxury (the Sorbonne, for example), are occasionally great, but never grand. With their lofty pointed roofs, and stiff straight lines, they have always a dry, dull, and monotonous appearance, a priestly or old-maidenish look. In this they scarcely belie themselves, the greater part of them having been built to accommodate the numberless females belonging to the nobility and upper class of citizens, who, in order to enrich a son, condemned their unfortunate daughters to a sad, but decent death.
The monuments of the middle ages have a melancholy, but not a dispiriting look; we feel, on looking at them, the vigour and sincerity of the sentiment that inspired their builders. They are not, generally speaking, official monuments, but living works of the people, the offspring of their faith. But these, on the contrary, are nothing else than the creation of a class,—that class of newly-created nobles that swarmed into life in the seventeenth century by subserviency, the ante-chamber, and ministerial offices. They are hospitals opened for the daughters of these families. Their great number might almost deceive us as to the strength and extent of the religious re-action of that time. Look at them well, and tell me, I pray you, whether you can discern the least trace about them of the ascetic character—are they religious houses, hospitals, barracks, or colleges? There is nothing to prove what they are. They would be perfectly fit for any civil purpose. They have but one character, but it is a very decided one: serious uniformity, decent mediocrity, and ennui.—It is ennui itself, personified in an architectural form—a palpable, tangible, and visible ennui.
The reason of these houses being indefinitely multiplied is, that the austerity of the ancient rules having been then much modified, parents had less hesitation in making their daughters take the veil; for it was no longer burying them alive. The parlours were saloons frequented by crowds, under the pretext of being edified. Fine ladies came there to confide their secrets, filling the minds of the nuns with intrigues and vexations, and troubling them with useless regrets.
These worldly cares caused the interior of the convents to appear to them still more dismal; for there they had nothing but trifling insipid ceremonies, a sort of modified austerity, and an idle and empty routine of monotonous life.
Monastic life was quite a different thing in the middle ages; it was much more serious. There were then in the convents both more training for death, and a more active life. The system was, generally speaking, based upon two principles, which were sincerely and strictly adhered to: the destruction of the body, and the vivification of the soul. To war against the body they employed an exterminating fasting, excessive vigils, and frequent bleeding. For the development of the soul, the monks and nuns were made to read, transcribe, and sing. Up to the eleventh century they understood what they sang, as there was but little difference between Latin and the vulgar tongues of that period. The service had then a dramatic character, which sustained and constantly captivated the attention. Many things that have been reduced to simple words, were then expressed in gestures and pantomimes; what is now spoken was then acted. When they inflicted upon worship that serious, sober, and wearisome character that it still wears, the nuns were still allowed, as an indemnification, pious reading, legends, the lives of saints, and other books that had been translated. All these consolations were taken from them in the sixteenth century; the discovery was made, that it was dangerous to give them too great a taste for reading. In the seventeenth, even singing appeared to be an object of suspicion to many confessors; they were afraid the nuns might grow tender in singing the praises of God.[[1]]
But what did they give them as a substitute? What did they get in return for all those services which they no longer understood, for their reading and singing that were now denied them, and for so many other comforts, of which they were successively deprived?
Was it an inanimate object? No, it was a man; let us speak out plainly, the director. The director was a novelty, hardly known to the middle ages, contented with the confessor.
Yes, a man is to inherit all this vast vacant place: his conversation and teaching are to fill up the void. Prayers, reading, if it be permitted, everything, will be done according to his direction and by him. God, whom they imbibed in their books, or in their sight, even God is henceforward dispensed to them by this man—measured out to them day by day according to the standard of his heart.
Ideas come crowding here—but they must wait; we will examine them afterwards. Now they would only interrupt the thread of our historical deduction.
At the first outbreak of religious re-action, the nuns were generally governed by the friars of their order. The Bernardin nuns were directed by the Bernardin friars, the Carmelite nuns by the Carmelite friars, and the nuns of St. Elizabeth by the Picpus friars. The Capuchin nuns were not only confessed by their friars, but were fed at their expense, and by the produce of their begging.[[2]]
The monks did not long preserve this exclusive possession. For more than a quarter of a century, priests, monks, and friars of every order, carried on a furious war against one another on this question. This mysterious empire of shut-up and dependent women, over whom unlimited sway may be held, was, not without reason, the common aim of the ambition of all. Such houses, apparently quiet and strangers to the world, nevertheless are always grand centres of action. Here was an immense power for the orders that should get possession of it; and for individuals, whether priests or friars, it was (let them confess it, or not) an affair of passion.
What I say here, I say of the purest and most austere, who are often the most tender. The honourable attachment of Cardinal Bérulle for the Carmelite nuns, whom he had brought here, was know to everybody. He had lodged them near his house; he visited them every hour of the day, and even in the evening. The Jesuits said at night. It was to them he went when he was ill, in order to get better. When Paris was infested by a plague, he said he would not leave it, "on account of his nuns."
The Oratorians and the Jesuits, naturally enemies and adversaries, joined together at first in a common cause to remove the Carmelite friars from the direction of these nuns; but no sooner had they succeeded, than they began to dispute with each other.
The austere order of the Carmelites, which spread but little in France, obtained its importance as the beau idéal of penitence, a sort of religious poetry. The enthusiastic spirit of Saint Theresa still animated them. There it was that the most violent converts came to seek refuge; and there it was, also, that those whose wounds were too deep, and who, like Madame de la Vallière, sought death as their last resource, came to die.
But the two great institutions of this age, those which expressed its spirit and had an immense development, were the Visitandines and the Ursulines. The former had, in the reign of Louis XIV., about a hundred and fifty monasteries, and the latter from three to four hundred.
The Visitandines were, as is well known, the most gentle of these orders: they awaited the coming of their divine Bridegroom in a state of inaction; and their sluggish life was well calculated to make them visionaries. We know the astonishing success of Marie Alocoque, and how it was turned to account by the Jesuits.
The Ursulines, a more useful body, devoted themselves to education. In the three hundred and fifty convents which belonged to them in this century, they educated, at the smallest computation, thirty-five thousand young girls. This vast establishment for education, directed by skilful hands, might, indeed, become a political engine of enormous power.
The Ursulines and the Visitandines were governed by bishops, who appointed their confessors. St. François de Sales, so excellent a friend to the Jesuits and friars in general, had showed himself distrustful of them in the subject that was dearest to his heart, that of the Visitation:—"My opinion is (says he) that these good girls do not know what they want, if they wish to submit themselves to the superiority of the friars, who, indeed, are excellent servants of God; but it always goes hard for girls to be governed by the orders, who are accustomed to take from them the holy liberty of the mind."[[3]]
It is but too easy to perceive how the orders of women servilely reproduced the minds of the men who directed them. Thus, the devotion of those who were governed by monks was characterised by every species of caprice, eccentricity, and violence; whilst they who were under the direction of secular priests, such as the Oratorians and the Doctrinaires, show some faint traces of reason, together with a sort of narrow-minded, common-place, and unproductive wisdom.
The nuns, who received from the bishops their ordinary confessors, chose for themselves an extraordinary one besides, who, as being extraordinary, did not fail to supplant and annul the former: the latter was, in most cases, a Jesuit. Thus the new orders of the Ursulines and Visitandines, created by priests, who had endeavoured to keep friars out of them, fell, nevertheless, under the influence of the latter: the priests sowed, but the Jesuits reaped the harvest.
Nothing did greater service to the cause of the Jesuits than their constantly repeating that their austere founder had expressly forbidden them ever to govern the convents of women. This was true, as applied to convents generally, but false as regarded nuns in particular, and their special direction. They did not, indeed, govern them collectively, but they directed them individually.
The Jesuit was not pestered with the daily detail of spiritual management, or the small fry of trifling faults. He did not fatigue; he only interfered at the right time; he was particularly useful in dispensing the nuns from telling the confessor what they wished to conceal. The latter became, by degrees, a sort of husband, whom they might disregard.
If he happened, indeed, to have any firmness in his composition, or to be able to exercise any influence, the others worked hard to get rid of him by force of calumny. We may form an opinion of the audacity of the Jesuits in this particular, since they did not fear to attack the Cardinal de Bérulle himself, notwithstanding his power.[[4]] One of his relatives, living with the Carmelites, having become pregnant, they boldly accused him of the crime, though he had never set his foot within the convent. Finding no one to believe them, and seeing they would gain nothing by attacking him on the score of morality, they joined in a general outcry against his books. "They contained the hidden poison of a dangerous mysticism: the cardinal was too tender, too indulgent, and too weak, both as a theologian and a director." Astounding impudence! when everybody knew and saw what sort of directors they were themselves!
This, however, had, in time, the desired effect, if not against Bérulle, at least against the Oratory, who became disgusted with, and afraid of, the direction of the nuns, and at last abandoned it.
This is a remarkable example of the all-powerful effects of Calumny, when organised on a grand scale by a numerous body, vented by them, and continually sung in chorus. A band of thirty thousand men repeating the same thing every day throughout the Christian world! Who could resist that? This is the very essence of Jesuitical art, in which they are unrivalled. At the very creation of their order, a sentence was applied to them, similar to those well-known verses in which Virgil speaks of the Romans:—
"Excudent alii spirantia mollius æra," &c., &c.
Others shall animate brass, or give life to marble; the Romans shall excel in other arts. "Remember, Jesuit, thy art is calumny."
[[1]] Châteaubriand, Vie de Rancé, pp. 227-229.
[[2]] See Héliot; and, for Paris especially, Félibien.
[[3]] OEuvres, vol. xi. p. 120 (ed. 3318.)
[[4]] Tabaraud, Life of Bérulle, vol. i. passim.