“Thou’rt mad,” said Roland; “thou hast betrayed thy brethren; thou shouldst die of shame. Go tell the marshal that I am resolved to remain sword in hand until the entire and complete restoration of the Edict of Nantes!” The Cevenols thought themselves certain of aid from England; only a handful followed Cavalier, who remained faithful to his engagements. He was ordered with his troop to Elsass; he slipped away from his watchers and threw himself into Switzerland. At the head of a regiment of refugees he served successively the Duke of Savoy, the States-General, and England; he died at Chelsea in 1740, the only one amongst the Camisards to leave a name in the world.
The insurrection still went on in Languedoc under the orders of Roland, who was more fanatical and more disinterested than Cavalier; he was betrayed and surrounded in the castle of Castelnau on the 16th of August, 1704. Roland just had time to leap out of bed and mount his horse; he was taking to flight with his men by a back door when a detachment of dragoons came up with him; the Camisard chief put his back against an old olive and sold his life dearly. When he fell, his lieutenants let themselves be taken “like lambs” beside his corpse. “They were destined to serve as examples,” writes Villars, “but the manner in which they met death was more calculated to confirm their religious spirit in these wrong heads than to destroy it. Lieutenant Maille was a fine young man of wits above the common. He heard his sentence with a smile, passed through the town of Nimes with the same air, begging the priest not to plague him; the blows dealt him did not alter this air in the least, and did not elicit a single exclamation. His arms broken, he still had strength to make signs to the priest to be off, and, as long as he could speak, he encouraged the others. That made me think that the quickest death is always best with these fellows, and that their sentence should above all things bear reference to their obstinacy in revolt rather than in religion.” Villars did not carry executions to excess, even in the case of the most stubborn; little by little the chiefs were killed off in petty engagements or died in obscurity of their wounds; provisions were becoming scarce; the country was wasted; submission became more frequent every day. The principals all demanded leave to quit France. “There are left none but a few brigands in the Upper Cevennes,” says Villars. Some partial risings, alone recalled, up to 1709, the fact that the old leaven still existed; the war of the Camisards was over. It was the sole attempt in history on the part of French Protestantism since Richelieu, a strange and dangerous effort made by an ignorant and savage people; roused to enthusiasm by persecution, believing itself called upon by the spirit of God to win, sword in hand, the freedom of its creed under the leadership of two shepherd soldiers and prophets. Only the Scottish Cameronians have presented the same mixture of warlike ardor and pious enthusiasm, more gloomy and fierce with the men of the North, more poetical and prophetical with the Cevenols, flowing in Scotland as in Languedoc from religious oppression and from constant reading of the Holy Scriptures. The silence of death succeeded everywhere in France to the plaints of the Reformers and to the crash of arms; Louis XIV. might well suppose that Protestantism in his dominions was dead.
It was a little before the time when the last of the Camisards, Abraham Mazel and Claris, perished near Uzes (in 1710), that the king struck the last blow at Jansenism by destroying its earliest nest and its last refuge, the house of the nuns of Port-Royal des Champs. With truces and intervals of apparent repose, the struggle had lasted more than sixty years between the Jesuits and Jansenism. M. de St. Cyran, who left the Bastille a few months after the death of Richelieu, had dedicated the last days of his life to writing against Protestantism, being so much the more scared by the heresy in that, perhaps, he felt himself attracted thereto by a secret affinity. He was already dying when there appeared the book Frequente Communion, by M. Arnauld, youngest son and twentieth child of that illustrious family of Arnaulds in whom Jansenism seemed to be personified. The author was immediately accused at Rome, and buried himself for twenty years in retirement. M. de St. Cyran was still working, dictating Christian thoughts and points touching death. Stantem mori oportet (One should die in harness), he would say. On the 3d of October, 1643, he succumbed suddenly, in the arms of his friends. “I cast my eyes upon the body, which was still in the same posture in which death had left it,” writes Lancelot, “and I thought it so full of majesty and of mien so dignified that I could not tire of admiring it, and I fancied that he would still have been capable, in the state in which he was, of striking with awe the most passionate of his foes, had they seen him.” It was the most cruel blow that could have fallen upon the pious nuns of Port-Royal. “Dominus in coelo! (Lord in heaven!)” was all that was said by Mother Angelica Arnauld, who, like M. de St. Cyran himself, centred all her thoughts and all her affections upon eternity.
With his dying breath M. de St. Cyran had said to M. Gudrin, physician to the college of Jesuits, “Sir, tell your Fathers, when I am dead, not to triumph, and that I leave behind me a dozen stronger than I.” With all his penetration the director of consciences was mistaken; none of those he left behind him would have done his work; he had inspired with the same ardor and the same constancy the strong and the weak, the violent and the pacific; he had breathed his mighty faith into the most diverse souls, fired with the same zeal penitents and nuns, men rescued from the scorching furnace of life in the world, and women brought up from infancy in the shade of the cloister. M. Arnauld was a great theologian, an indefatigable controversialist, the oracle and guide of his friends in their struggle against the Jesuits; M. de Sacy and M. Singlin were wise and able directors, as austere as M. de St. Cyran in their requirements, less domineering and less rough than he; but M. de St. Cyran alone was and could be the head of Jansenism; he alone could have inspired that idea of immolation of the whole being to the sovereign will of God, as to the truth which resides in Him alone. Once assured of this point, M. de St. Cyran became immovable. Mother Angelica pressed him to appear before the archbishop’s council, which was to pronounce upon his book Theologie familiere. “It is always good to humble one’s self,” she said. “As for you,” he replied, “who are in that disposition, and would not in any respect compromise the honor of the truth, you could do it; but as for me, I should break down before the eyes of God if I consented thereto; the weak are more to be feared sometimes than the wicked.”
Mother Angelica Arnauld, to whom these lines were addressed, was the most perfect image and the most accomplished disciple of M. de St. Cyran. More gentle and more human than he, she was quite as strong and quite as zealous. “It is necessary to be dead to everything, and after that to await everything; such was the motto of her inward life and of the constant effort made by this impassioned soul, susceptible of all tender affections, to detach herself violently and irrevocably from earth. The instinct of command, loftiness and breadth of views, find their place with the holy priest and with the nun; the mind of M. de St. Cyran was less practical and his judgment less simple than that of the abbess, habituated as she had been from childhood to govern the lives of her nuns as their conscience. A reformer of more than one convent since the day when she had closed the gates of Port-Royal against her father, M. Arnauld, in order to restore the strictness of the cloister, Mother Angelica carried rule along with her, for she carried within herself the government, rigid, no doubt, for it was life in a convent, but characterized by generous largeness of heart, which caused the yoke to be easily borne.
“To be perfect, there is no need to do singular things,” she would often repeat, after St. Francis de Sales; “what is needed is to do common things singularly well!” She carried the same zeal from convent to convent, from Port-Royal des Champs to Port-Royal de Paris; from Maubuisson, whither her superiors sent her to establish a reformation, to St. Sacrament, to establish union between the two orders; ever devoted to religion, without having chosen her vocation; attracting around her all that were hers; her mother, a wife at twelve years of age, and astonished to find herself obeying after having commanded her twenty children for fifty years; five of her sisters; nieces and cousins; and in “the Desert,” beside Port-Royal des Champs, her brothers, her nephews, her friends, steeped like herself in penitence. Before her, St. Bernard had “dispeopled the world” of those whom he loved, by an error common to zealous souls and exclusive spirits, solely occupied with thoughts of salvation. Even in solitude Mother Angelica had not found rest. “I am not fit to live on earth,” she would say; “I know not why I am still there; I can no longer bear either myself or others; there is none that seeketh after God.” She was piously unjust towards her age, and still more towards her friends; it was the honorable distinction of M. de St. Cyran and his disciples that they did seek after God and holiness, at every cost and every risk.
Mother Angelica was nearing the repose of eternity, the only repose admitted by her brother M. Arnauld, when the storm of persecution burst upon the monastery. The Augustinus of Jansenius, Bishop of Ypres, a friend of M. de St. Cyran’s, had just been condemned at Rome. Five propositions concerning grace were pronounced heretical. “The pope has a right to condemn them,” said the Jansenists, “if they are to be found in the Augustinus, but, in fact, they are not to be found there.” The dispute waxed hot; M. Arnauld threw himself into it passionately. He, in his turn, was condemned by the Sorbonne. “This is the very day,” he wrote to his sister, Mother Angelica, “when I am to be wiped out from the number of the doctors; I hope of God’s goodness that He will not on that account wipe me out from the number of His servants. That is the only title I desire to preserve.” M. Arnauld’s friends pressed him to protest against his condemnation. “Would you let yourself be crushed like a child?” they said. He wrote in the theologian’s vein, lengthily and bitterly; his friends listened in silence. Arnauld understood them. “I see quite well that you do not consider this document a good one for its purpose,” said he, “and I think you are right; but you who are young,” and he turned towards Pascal, who had a short time since retired to Port-Royal, “you ought to do something.” This was the origin of the Lettres Provinciales. For the first time Pascal wrote, something other than a treatise on physics. He revealed himself all at once and entirely. The recluses of Port-Royal were obliged to close their schools; they had to disperse. Arnauld concealed himself with his friend Nicole. “I am having search made everywhere for M. Arnauld,” said Louis XIV. to Boileau, who was supposed to be much attached to the Jansenists. “Your Majesty always was lucky,” replied Boileau; “you will not find him.”
The nuns’ turn had come; orders were given to send away the pensioners (pupils); Mother Angelica set out for the house at Paris, “where was the battle-ground.” [Memoires pour servir a l’Histoire de Port-Royal, t. ii. p. 127.] As she was leaving the house in the fields, which was so dear to her, she met in the court-yard M. d’Andilly, her brother, who was waiting to say good by to her. When he came up to her, she said to him, “Good by, my dear brother; be of good courage, whatever happens.” “Fear nothing, my dear sister; I am perfectly so.” But she replied, “Brother, brother, let us be humble. Let us remember that humility without fortitude is cowardice, but that fortitude without humility is presumption.” “When she arrived at the convent in Paris, she found us for the most part very sad,” writes her niece, Mother Angelica de St. Jean, “and some were in tears. She, looking at us with an open and confident countenance, said, ‘Why, I believe there is weeping here! Come, my children, what is all this? Have you no faith? And at what are you dismayed? What if men do rage? Eh? Are you afraid of that? They are but flies! You hope in God, and yet fear anything! Fear but Him, and, trust me, all will be well;’ and to Madame de Chevreuse, who came to fetch her daughters, ‘Madame, when there is no God I shall lose courage; but, so long as God is God, I shall hope in Him.’” She succumbed, however, beneath the burden; and the terror she had always felt of death aggravated her sufferings. “Believe me, my children,” she would say to the nuns, “believe what I tell you. People do not know what death is, and do not think about it. As for me, I have apprehended it all my life, and have always been thinking about it. But all I have imagined is less than nothing in comparison with what it is, with what I feel, and with what I comprehend at this moment. It would need but such thoughts to detach us from everything.” M. Singlin, being obliged to conceal himself, came secretly to see her; she would not have her nephew, M. de Sacy, run the same risk. “I shall never see him more,” she said; “it is God’s will; I do not vex myself about it. My nephew without God could be of no use to me, and God without my nephew will be all in all to me.” The grand-vicar of the Archbishop of Paris went to Port-Royal to make sure that the pensioners had gone. He sat down beside Mother Angelica’s bed. “So you are ill, mother,” said he; “pray, what is your complaint?” “I am dropsical, sir,” she replied. “Jesus! my dear mother, you say that as if it were nothing at all.—Does not such a complaint dismay you?”