[256] Crét. vol. iv. p. 366.
[257] This is the bull by which the Pope declared that the five propositions were to be found in Jansenius; and this gave rise to the celebrated distinction of fact and right.
[258] The place was called Mont Louis, but was afterwards converted into a magnificent and beautiful cemetery, which now bears the name of Lachaise.
[259] A lettre de cachet was an order bearing the king’s signature, generally requiring the arrest or exile of the person specified. Under the reign of the despotic Louis, lettres de cachet were issued with scandalous profusion. The courtiers, the ministers, the king’s mistresses, asked, in exchange for a flattery or a caress, a lettre de cachet. Often the letter was blank, having only the king’s signature, and left to the person who had obtained it to fill it up with any name and any sort of punishment he pleased. Father Lachaise had always by him a quantity of letters of this last sort.
[260] In the first years of Louis’s reign that right resided in a commission composed of two prelates and a Jesuit; but Ferrier, Lachaise’s predecessor, possessed himself of the exclusive right, which ever after belonged to the king’s confessor.
[261] Letellier was accused of being the contriver of the following shameful deception. In 1690, during a dispute, M. de Ligny, Professor of Moral Philosophy at the Royal College of Douay, fell out with Father Beckman, a Jesuit professor. Drawn to extremities in the argument, he menaced his opponent with revenge, saying, Ego te flagellabo—“I will give you a whipping.” Fifteen days after, Ligny received a letter under the false signature of Antoine A——; that is, Antoine Arnauld, the famous Jansenist, with an address for the expected answer. Now, the professor, flattered by the honour of receiving a letter from so famous a man as Arnauld, replied to the letter, and continued the correspondence—so that at last the impostor, under the name of Arnauld, drew from Ligny the names of those who opposed the Jesuits, all of them doctors and professors in theology. The impostor thereupon began and continued a correspondence with these doctors, who supposed they were writing to the true Arnauld, the staunch opponent of Jesuit doctrine. Ligny even begged the invisible Arnauld to be his spiritual director, and sent him a general confession of the state of his conscience. Thereupon he was induced to leave his chair, his benefice, and to send all his papers to the impostor, whilst he set out by the same command to a place appointed, which was Paris. He went to St Magloire, but found no Arnauld; proceeded from place to place, until at last the simple Fleming found that he was duped. Meanwhile, however, all the professors before alluded to were denounced by the Jesuit Letellier, and exiled to various towns in France; and Ligny himself was sent to Tours. Meanwhile, the Jesuit published a letter directed to a doctor of Douay, under the title of Secrets of the party of M. Arnauld lately discovered. Then Arnauld, in his place of exile, discovering the cheat, published a first and second complaint, and a third, concluding one in answer to the Jesuit who had replied to his second. Every one was indignant, and even Louis XIV. himself. But the Jesuits assured him that they were innocent of the plot; and having obtained forgiveness for a supposed contriver, Tournelay, a doctor whom the Jesuits had named professor in the place of the expelled Gilbert, confessed that he had himself played the part of the false Arnauld, and the Jesuits were by this imposture exculpated from this act of perfidy. In the Gazette of Rotterdam, 1692, it is said, “But little esteem was felt for him (Tournelay) since it was discovered that he consented to pass for the father of the false Arnauld, to exculpate the Jesuits, and above all, author de Vaudripont, the man who had answered Arnauld’s complaint, and who was supposed to act by Letellier’s inspiration.”
[262] See Edinburgh Review, vol. lxxiii. p. 361.
[263] Crét. vol. iii. p. 356.
[264] Ibid. p. 363.
[265] Crét. vol, iii. p. 362.