Of the Character of Jerôme Coignard.
“His free intelligence trampled under foot vulgar beliefs and never accepted without examination the common opinion, except in what had to do with the Catholic faith in which he was immovable.
“The sagest of moralists, a sort of marvellous blend of Epicurus and Saint Francis of Assisi.... He preserved, in his boldest explorations, the attitude of a peaceful promenader.... It is certain that the world, to his eyes, resembled less the deserts of the Thébaïde than the gardens of Epicurus. He sauntered therein with the audacious ingenuousness which is the essential trait of his character and the elemental principle of his teaching.”
“Never did spirit show itself at once so daring and so pacific, nor temper its disdain with more sweetness.... He despised men with tenderness. He endeavoured to teach them that, since they have nothing anywhere near great in themselves except their capacity for suffering, they can cultivate nothing useful or beautiful but compassion.”
“It was his benevolence which impelled him to humiliate his fellows in their sentiments, their knowledge, their philosophy, and their institutions. He had to show them that their imbecile natures have neither imagined nor constructed anything worth being attacked or defended very energetically, and that, if they knew the fragile crudity of their greatest works, such as laws and empires, they would fight over them only in play, for the sheer fun of the thing, like the children who build castles of sand on the rim of the sea.”
“The majesty of the laws did not impose on his clairvoyant soul; and he deplored the fact that the unfortunate are burdened with so many obligations of which, for the most part, it is impossible to discover the origin or the sense.”
“What he had the least of was the sense of veneration. Nature had refused it him, and he did nothing to acquire it. He would have feared, in exalting some, to debase others; and his universal charity embraced equally the humble and the proud.”
Some of Jerôme Coignard’s Sayings.
Of Society and Governments: