He tells Madame de Bourges, of whose kind and active interest he seems very sure, that he has bought the velvet bed belonging to his aunt, Madame de Marconnay. He has also come into possession of a stately bed with hangings of silk and gold, which belonged to his great-uncle, “deffunct M. de Luçon.” This style is out of fashion, apparently, for he asks advice and help as to arranging the episcopal bed with Bergamesque tapestry. A little later, he concludes that even a beggar like himself must entertain his neighbours with a noble air, so that the country may esteem him “un grand monsieur.” He will therefore be obliged to Madame de Bourges if she will let him know the cost of two dozen silver plates “de belle grandeur.” He hopes to get them for five hundred crowns, but seems pretty sure that his kind friend will make up any deficiency: “I know that for the sake of a hundred crowns you would not let me have anything mean.”
In return for all these services the Bishop was expected to interest himself in finding a husband for Madame de Bourges’ daughter Magdeleine. The task was not easy: he assures his correspondent that there is not a gentleman in the country possessing either money or goods. “Nous sommes tous gueux en ce pays, et moi le premier,” he says with a light-hearted air.
From the first he was very fortunate in his servants, several of whom came to him at this time and stayed with him all his life. One of these was his maître d’hôtel, a young man named La Brosse, who had been in the service of the late Duc de Montpensier. La Brosse ordered everything in the household, knew how the Bishop’s guests should be entertained, and troubled him with nothing but accounts. This was well, for the work of the diocese, once undertaken, was enough to occupy both thought and time.
The destitution of the flock was twofold—bodily and spiritual. Richelieu’s first care was to get his poor people relieved of some of the heavy burden of taxes which weighed them down. Under the system of those days, France was divided into pays d’états and pays d’élection. The pays d’états—chiefly provinces which had been originally independent of the crown of France—were taxed by their own representative Estates, sitting at the principal town. The pays d’élection were assessed by crown officials, who farmed out the taxes to local companies; and among the provinces thus farmed was that of Poitou.
The system meant local greed, dishonesty and oppression; the small townspeople of such a place as Luçon and the country-folk of its poverty-stricken neighbourhood had no redress from the tax-gatherers of Poitiers. The worst burden of all was the direct tax known as la taille. A man paid this on all his possessions in money and kind, and it always amounted to a quarter of his property, sometimes to a great deal more. The clergy and nobles were exempt from la taille, which crushed the poor peasants and the smaller people to the earth.
In later years, Louis XIII.’s Minister was ready enough to tax these suffering millions for the sake of absolutism and glory; but the young Bishop of Luçon, not yet hardened by power, touched by the piteous sight of thin hands worn by toil, the bread snatched from them by those who made an unfair living out of the taxes, wrote to head-quarters at Poitiers more than one letter of strong remonstrance, letters in which a warm indignation pierces through the studied courtesy of the words.
He writes of “the misery of the place, the poverty of the people, the excessive tax of the taille which they have paid till now....” He begs that the load they have to bear may be lightened. He reminds the officials that their own town pays much less than it ought, and hints very plainly that unless things are voluntarily set right, he will call the higher powers of justice to his aid.
As one would naturally expect, the traitants of Poitiers, worthy forerunners of the farmers-general of a later century, took very little notice of the appeal or the veiled threat of M. de Luçon—a young fellow, a “new broom,” who might as well mind his own ecclesiastical business and let the King’s taxes alone. But he was as good as his word. Two months later he wrote to the Minister of Finance, the all-powerful Sully, to lay the grievances of his flock before him; the appeal being seconded by his courtier brother, Henry de Richelieu. Thus the Poitevin tax-gatherers had a taste of Richelieu’s quality.
The spiritual needs of the diocese were quite as crying and as serious. Religious matters all over France were in a terrible state, and nowhere worse than in Bas-Poitou. “Error and vice were rampant,” says a writer of the time. Where the Church was concerned, Christianity seemed extinct; and Huguenot zeal had died down into political discontent. Church property was misused, wasted on pensions to princes and courtiers; the bishops were worldly and non-resident, the monasteries were scandalously corrupt, and their revenues often in lay hands; the parish clergy were ignorant and poor, and the long civil wars had made havoc with the churches; many had been desecrated, put to profane uses, if not destroyed altogether. It was only forty or fifty years since the “Monk” Richelieu and men like him had stormed over Poitou, and the memory of his exploits was still green.
The consequence of all this was a state of morals and civilisation which has been described by Michelet—not without exaggeration, possibly—in his terrible chapters on witchcraft in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Dark and cruel superstitions haunting the God-forsaken villages; horrible Mumbo-Jumbo rites, relics of heathenism, performed on lonely heaths or in the shadow of the forests; families in which black magic and sorcery were handed down from father to son, from mother to daughter—such were the discoveries lying in wait for any active bishop who visited his diocese in the year 1609.