He observed that, when he was on service with his regiment, he had often witnessed the ceremony of taking the veil. “It was a ceremony very much attended by the officers, and which raised our indignation, particularly when the victims were handsome. We ran in crowds to it, and our attention was alive to the slightest incident. Had they but said, No, we should have carried them off sword in hand. It is consequently false that violence was employed: seductive means only were resorted to. Those, upon whom they were practised, were kept secluded perhaps, like recruits. The fact is that, before they had done, they had to pass the ordeal of the nuns, the abbess, the spiritual director, the bishop, the civil officer, and finally the public spectators. Can it be supposed that all these had agreed to concur in the commission of a crime?”
The Emperor declared that he was an enemy to convents in general, as useless, and productive of degrading inactivity. He allowed, however, in another point of view, that certain reasons might be pleaded in their favour. The best mezzo termine, and he had adopted it, was, in his opinion, that of tolerating them, of obliging the members to become useful, and of allowing annual vows only.
The Emperor complained that he had not had time enough to complete his institutions. It had been his intention to enlarge the establishments of Saint Denis and Ecouen, for the purpose of affording an asylum to the widows of soldiers, or women advanced in years. “And then,” he added, “it must also be admitted that there were characters and imaginations of all kinds; that compulsion ought not to be used with regard to persons of an eccentric turn, provided their oddities are harmless, and that an empire, like France, might and ought to have houses for madmen, called Trappistes. With respect to the latter,” he observed, “that if any one ever thought of inflicting upon others the discipline which they practised, it would be justly considered a most abominable tyranny, and that it might, notwithstanding, constitute the delight of him who voluntarily exercised it on himself. Such is man, such his whims, or his follies!... He had tolerated the monks of Mount Cenis, but these, at least,” he added, “were useful, very useful, and might be even called heroic.”
The Emperor expressed himself in his Council of State in the following words, when the organization of the University was about to take place: “It is my opinion that the monks would be far the best body for communicating instruction, were it possible to keep them under proper control, and to withdraw them from their dependence upon a foreign master. I am disposed to be favourable to them. I should, perhaps, have had the power to reinstate them in their establishments, but they have made the thing impossible. The moment I do any thing for the clergy, they give me cause to repent it. I do not complain of the old established clergy, for with them I am sufficiently satisfied; but the young priests are brought up in a gloomy fanatical doctrine; there is nothing Gallican in the young clergy.
“I have nothing to say against the old bishops. They have shewn themselves grateful for what I did for religion; they have realized my expectations.
“Cardinal de Boisgelin was a man of sense, a virtuous character, who had faithfully adopted me.
“The Archbishop of Tours, Barral, a man of great acquirements, and who was of essential service to us in our differences with the Pope, was always very much attached to me.
“The worthy Cardinal du Belloy, and the virtuous Bishop Roquelaure, had a sincere affection for me.
“I made no difficulty whatever in placing Bishop Beausset among the Dignitaries of the University, and I am convinced that he was one of those who, in that capacity, most sincerely conducted themselves in conformity with my views.
“All these old bishops possessed my confidence, and none of them deceived me. It is not a little singular that those whom I had the greatest cause to complain of were precisely those whom I had chosen myself; so very true is it that the holy unction, though it attaches us to the kingdom of Heaven, does not deliver us from the infirmities of the earth, from its irregularities, its obscenities, its turpitudes.”