To prevent the scandal, the other servants were sent away. Nothing can be kept secret except for a day.
A person of Madame Guyon's worth could not be lost or secreted. For Fenelon to defend her and then secrete her was unpardonable to the arrogant Bossuet.
Fenelon had now to defend himself. How much of political rivalry as well as ecclesiastic has been made by the favor of women, who shall say!
Of her intimate relationship with Fenelon, Madame Guyon says nothing. The bond was of too sacred a nature to discuss, and here her frankness falters, as it should. She does not even defend it.
Fenelon and Madame Guyon were plotting against the Church and State—how very natural! The Madame was fifty; Fenelon was forty-seven—they certainly were old enough to know better, but they did not.
They parted of their own accord, solemnly and in tearful prayer, for parting is such sweet sorrow. And then, in a few weeks, they met again to consult as to the future.
Soon Bossuet stepped in and induced the Vatican to do for them what they could not do alone. Fenelon was stripped of his official robes, reduced to the rank of a parish priest, and sent to minister to an obscure and stricken church in the south of France. The country was battle-scarred, and poverty, ignorance and want stalked through the streets of the little village. Here Fenelon lived, as did the exiled Copernicus, forbidden to travel more than six miles from his church, or to speak to any but his own flock. Here he gave his life as a teacher of children, a nurse, a doctor and a spiritual guide to a people almost devoid of spirituality.
Madame Guyon was sent to a nunnery, where she was actually a prisoner, working as a menial. Fenelon and Madame Guyon never met again, but once a month they sent each other a love-letter on spiritual themes in which love wrote between the lines. Time had tamed the passions of Madame Guyon, otherwise no convent-walls would have been high enough to keep her captive. Sweet, sad memories fed her declining days, and within a few weeks of her death she declared that her life had been a success, "for I have been loved by Fenelon, the greatest and most saintly man of his time."
And as for the Abbe Fenelon, the verdict of the world seems to be that he was ruined by Madame Guyon; but if he ever thought so, no sign of recrimination ever escaped his lips.