“Signed: Louis.”
The child, however, would forget himself, and relapse into his mad fits. When his preceptor was chiding him one day for a grave fault, he went so far as to say, “No, no, sir; I know who I am and what you are.” Fenelon made no reply; coldly and gravely he allowed the day to close and the night to pass without showing his pupil any sign of either resentment or affection. Next day the Duke of Burgundy was scarcely awake when his preceptor entered the room. “I do not know, sir,” said he, “whether you remember what you said to me yesterday, that you know what you are and what I am. It is my duty to teach you that you do not know either one or the other. You fancy yourself, sir, to be more than I; some lackeys, no doubt, have told you so, but I am not afraid to tell you, since you force me to it, that I am more than you. You have sense enough to understand that there is no question here of birth. You would consider anybody out of his wits who pretended to make a merit of it that the rain of heaven had fertilized his crops without moistening his neighbors. You would be no wiser if you were disposed to be vain of your birth, which adds nothing to your personal merit. You cannot doubt that I am above you in lights and knowledge. You know nothing but what I have taught you; and what I have taught you is nothing compared with what I might still teach you. As for authority, you have none over me; and I, on the contrary, have it fully and entirely over you; the king and Monseigneur have told you so often enough. You fancy, perhaps, that I think myself very fortunate to hold the office I discharge towards you; disabuse yourself once more, sir; I only took it in order to obey the king and give pleasure to Monseigneur, and not at all for the painful privilege of being your preceptor; and, that you may have no doubt about it, I am going to take you to his Majesty, and beg him to get you another one, whose pains I hope may be more successful than mine.” The Duke of Burgundy’s passion was past, and he burst into sobs. “Ah! sir,” he cried, “I am in despair at what took place yesterday; if you speak to the king, you will lose me his affection; if you leave me, what will be thought of me? I promise you. I promise you . . . that you shall be satisfied with me; but promise me . . .”
Fenelon promised nothing; he remained, and the foundation of his authority was laid forever in the soul of his pupil. The young prince did not forget what he was, but he had felt the superiority of his master. “I leave the Duke of Burgundy behind the door,” he was accustomed to say, “and with you I am only little Louis.”
God, at the same time with Fenelon, had taken possession of the Duke of Burgundy’s soul. “After his first communion, we saw disappearing little by little all the faults which, in his infancy, caused us great misgivings as to the future,” writes Madame de Maintenon. “His piety has caused such a metamorphosis that, from the passionate thing he was, he has become self-restrained, gentle, complaisant; one would say that that was his character, and that virtue was natural to him.” “All his mad fits and spites yielded at the bare name of God,” Fenelon used to say; “one day when he was in a very bad temper, and wanted to hide in his passion what he had done in his disobedience, I pressed him to tell me the truth before God; then he put himself into a great rage and bawled, ‘Why ask me before God? Very well, then, as you ask me in that way, I cannot deny that I committed that fault.’ He was as it were beside himself with excess of rage, and yet religion had such dominion over him that it wrung from him so painful an avowal.” “From this abyss,” writes the Duke of St. Simon, “came forth a prince affable, gentle, humane, self-restrained, patient, modest, humble, and austere towards himself, wholly devoted to his obligations and feeling them to be immense; he thought of nothing but combining the duties of a son and a subject with those to which he saw himself destined.”
“From this abyss” came forth also a prince singularly well informed, fond of study, with a refined taste in literature, with a passion for science; for his instruction Fenelon made use of the great works composed for his father’s education by Bossuet, adding thereto writings more suitable for his age; for him he composed the Fables and the Dialogues des Morts, and a Histoire de Charlemagne which has perished. In his stories, even those that were imaginary, he paid attention before everything to truth. “Better leave a history in all its dryness than enliven it at the expense of truth,” he would say. The suppleness and richness of his mind sufficed to save him from wearisomeness; the liveliness of his literary impressions communicated itself to his pupil. “I have seen,” says Fenelon in his letter to the French Academy, “I have seen a young prince, but eight years old, overcome with grief at sight of the peril of little Joash; I have seen him lose patience with the chief priest for concealing from Joash his name and his birth; I have seen him weeping bitterly as he listened to these verses:—
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‘O! miseram Euridicen anima fugiente vocabat; Euridicen toto referebant flumine ripx.’” |
The soul and mind of Fenelon were sympathetic; Bossuet, in writing for the grand-dauphin, was responsive to the requirements of his own mind, never to those of the boy’s with whose education he had been intrusted.
Fenelon also wrote Telemaque. “It is a fabulous narrative,” he himself says, “in the form of an heroic poem, like Homer’s or Virgil’s, wherein I have set forth the principal actions that are meet for a prince whose birth points him out as destined to reign. I did it at a time when I was charmed with the marks of confidence and kindness showered upon me by the king; I must have been not only the most ungrateful but the most insensate of men to have intended to put into it satirical and insolent portraits; I shrink from the bare idea of such a design. It is true that I have inserted in these adventures all the verities necessary for government and all the defects that one can show in the exercise of sovereign power; but I have not stamped any of them with a peculiarity which would point to any portrait or caricature. The more the work is read, the more it will be seen that I wished to express everything without depicting anybody consecutively; it is, in fact, a narrative done in haste, in detached pieces and at different intervals; all I thought of was to amuse the Duke of Burgundy, and, whilst amusing, to instruct him, without ever meaning to give the work to the public.”