While still in their nurses' arms you may sometimes see the young Kentuckians shown in the ring at the horse-fair for premiums. From their early years they are taken to the amphitheatre to enjoy its color, its fleetness, and its form. As little boys they ride for prizes. The horse is the subject of talk in the hotels, on the street corners, in the saloons, at the stables, on county court day, at the cross-roads and blacksmiths' shops, in country church-yards before the sermon. The barber, as he shaves his morning customer, gives him points on the races. There will be found many a group of gentlemen in whose presence to reveal an ignorance of famous horses and common pedigrees will bring a blush to the cheek. Not to feel interested in such themes is to lay one's self open to a charge of disagreeable eccentricity. The horse has gradually emerged into prominence until to-day it occupies the foreground. [168]
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A HOME OF THE SILENT BROTHERHOOD
I
More than two hundred and fifty years have passed since the Cardinal de Richelieu stood at the baptismal font as sponsor to a name that within the pale of the Church was destined to become more famous than his own. But the world has wellnigh forgotten Richelieu's godson. Only the tireless student of biography now turns the pages that record his extraordinary career, ponders the strange unfolding of his moral nature, is moved by the deep pathos of his dying hours. Dominique Armand-Jean le Bouthillier de Rancé! How cleverly, while scarcely out of short-clothes, did he puzzle the king's confessor with questions on Homer, and at the age of thirteen publish an edition of Anacreon! Of ancient, illustrious birth, and heir to an almost ducal house, how tenderly favored was he by Marie de Médicis; happy-hearted, kindly, suasive, how idolized by a gorgeous court! In what affluence of rich laces did he dress; in what irresistible violet-colored close coats, with emeralds at his wristbands, a diamond on his finger, red heels on his shoes! How nimbly he capered through the dance with a sword on his hip! How [172] bravely he planned quests after the manner of knights of the Round Table, meaning to take for himself the part of Lancelot! How exquisitely, ardently, and ah! how fatally he flirted with the incomparable ladies in the circle of Madame de Rambouillet! And with a zest for sport as great as his unction for the priestly office, how wittily—laying one hand on his heart and waving the other through the air—could he bow and say, "This morning I preached like an angel; I'll hunt like the devil this afternoon!"
All at once his life broke in two when half spent. He ceased to hunt like the devil, to adore the flesh, to scandalize the world; and retiring to the ancient Abbey of La Trappe in Normandy—the sponsorial gift of his Eminence and favored by many popes—there undertook the difficult task of reforming the relaxed Benedictines. The old abbey—situated in a great fog-covered basin encompassed by dense woods of beech, oak, and linden, and therefore gloomy, unhealthy, and forbidding—was in ruins. One ascended by means of a ladder from floor to rotting floor. The refectory had become a place where the monks assembled to play at bowls with worldlings. The dormitory, exposed to wind, rain, and snow, had been given up to owls. In the church the stones were scattered, the walls unsteady, the pavement was broken, the bell ready to fall. As a single solemn reminder of the vanished [173] spirit of the place, which had been founded by St. Stephen and St. Bernard in the twelfth century, with the intention of reviving in the Western Church the bright examples of primitive sanctity furnished by Eastern solitaries of the third and fourth, one read over the door of the cloister the words of Jeremiah: "Sedebit solitarius et tacebit" The few monks who remained in the convent slept where they could, and were, as Chateaubriand says, in a state of ruins. They preferred sipping ratafia to reading their breviaries; and when De Rancé undertook to enforce reform, they threatened to whip him for his pains. He, in turn, threatened them with the royal interference, and they submitted. There, accordingly, he introduced a system of rules that a sybarite might have wept over even to hear recited; carried into practice cenobitical austerities that recalled the models of pious anchorites in Syria and Thebais; and gave its peculiar meaning to the word "Trappist," a name which has since been taken by all Cistercian communities embracing the reform of the first monastery.
In the retirement of this mass of woods and sky De Rancé passed the rest of his long life, doing nothing more worldly, so far as is now known, than quoting Aristophanes and Horace to Bossuet, and allowing himself to be entertained by Pellisson, exhibiting the accomplishments of his educated spider. There, in acute agony of body and perfect meekness of [174] spirit, a worn and weary old man, with time enough to remember his youthful ardors and emeralds and illusions, he watched his mortal end draw slowly near. And there, asking to be buried in some desolate spot—some old battle-field—he died at last, extending his poor macerated body on the cross of blessed cinders and straw, and commending his poor penitent soul to the mercy of Heaven.