Cardinal de Richelieu

by Eleanor C. Price

The clever Capuchin had a troublesome affair on hand: the management of a woman who, though “illustre religieuse et grande servante de Dieu,” was resolved to follow her own way and not that which director, Pope and King had marked out for her. Père Joseph was a crusader by nature, and a reformer to the backbone, with a fiery obstinacy and positive, autocratic will. He had already reformed several convents in Poitou, in which the civil war, the invasion of an outside world, had strangely travestied the religious life. Some of these convents belonged to the great Benedictine Order of Fontevrault; and even in the Mother House itself, under the gentle and charitable guidance of Madame Eléonore de Bourbon, the strictness of the old Rule was half forgotten.

Madame Antoinette d’Orléans, of the Longueville family, the young widow of the Marquis de Belle-Isle, had become a nun at Toulouse, at a convent of the Feuillantines, and asked nothing better than to spend her remaining days there. But she was known to Père Joseph as a woman like-minded with himself, an enthusiast and a saint; and when, in 1604, a bull of Pope Paul V. appointed her Coadjutrix of her aunt the Abbess of Fontevrault, the young reformer welcomed her as an ally in his work. And as far as outside convents were concerned, she did not disappoint him. But though she loyally helped and supported the old Abbess in the government of the Order, her heart was never at Fontevrault. Her religious ideals were totally different from those of the two hundred or more Sisters who marched with such stately dignity through the venerable cloisters and took their high place in the choir where Plantagenets slept. Their rich possessions, their amusements—innocent enough, for Fontevrault, owing to the character of its long and regal line of abbesses, was never seriously touched by scandal; their little parties and cabals and gossip—good women, simple in faith and practice, but not lofty-minded or mystical: all this fell far below the standard of Madame d’Orléans, and her one desire was to escape from her dignity, to return to her “dear solitude.” As she had never formally accepted the office of Coadjutrix, with the prospect of succession, this did not seem impossible.

The difficulty was that Père Joseph would not let her go. In her authority and influence he saw the only means by which the reform of the great Abbey might be carried through. There were divisions in the community; some of the nuns being ready to welcome a change, others strongly opposed to it. Père Joseph and Madame de Bourbon both saw that no unanimity was to be hoped for, as long as the future was known to be uncertain.

Père Joseph took the matter into his own hands, and settled it by a coup d’état, secret and sudden. After a private consultation with the King in Council, he wrote to the Pope; and Paul V., convinced by his arguments, commanded Madame d’Orléans, under pain of excommunication, to accept her office immediately with all the duties it involved, and to assume the government of the Order, with the certainty of succeeding her aunt as Abbess of Fontevrault.

The command fell on Madame d’Orléans like a thunder-bolt, but she could only obey. The consequence was what Père Joseph had desired and foreseen. The new ruler, once forced to rule, advanced “à pas de géant” in the appointed way. In one short week Fontevrault was reformed; every one of the nuns accepting the inevitable, all giving up their worldly indulgences, and returning to the old strict regulation of work and prayer.

This happy state of things went on for two years, and Père Joseph, seeing his reformation well at work, was occupied with his other duties as a director of souls—especially of that of the Duchesse de Montpensier, living retired at Champigny and mourning both her husband and her father, the Capuchin Duc de Joyeuse, who did not long survive his son-in-law—when Madame d’Orléans played him the same trick he had played her. She wrote secretly to the Pope, imploring him to have compassion on her trouble of mind, explaining how seriously her “tumultuous occupations” interfered with her personal sanctification, and praying him to withdraw his command that she should succeed Madame de Bourbon and to allow her, on her aunt’s death, to return to her beloved Feuillantines of Toulouse. She begged His Holiness to inquire into the matter through commissaries of his own, without consulting Père Joseph. The Pope did as she wished, and she received full liberty to go where she pleased. Then she sent for Père Joseph and told him all, on condition that nothing should be said to Madame de Bourbon. The old Abbess was to die in peace, imagining that her Coadjutrix would succeed her.

Père Joseph needed all his prudence and self-control, says his biographer, to hide his vexation at being thus “joué par une Princesse.”

But the thing was done, and he made the best of it, secretly hoping that, “women being naturally inconstant,” the joy of supreme authority might yet induce Madame d’Orléans to change her mind.

On March 26, 1611, at the age of seventy-eight, Madame Eléonore de Bourbon died. To all appearance, her Coadjutrix was ready to accept the succession. She even seemed to listen with favour to the persuasions of Père Joseph, who pointed out in glowing terms her duty to the Order. It was near the end of Lent, and Madame d’Orléans held her peace until after the Festival of Easter. On Low Sunday, having assembled the Community, she announced to them that she was about to write to the King and the Queen Regent, praying them to nominate an abbess in her stead.

This was a heavy blow to Père Joseph, and the affair was complicated by his knowledge of the fact that Madame d’Orléans did not now wish to return to Toulouse, but dreamed of founding a new convent in the province of Poitou, where the religious life, as she understood it, would be lived in all devotion and austerity.