Was it an inanimate object? No, it was a man; let us speak out plainly, the director. The director was a novelty, hardly known to the middle ages, contented with the confessor.
Yes, a man is to inherit all this vast vacant place: his conversation and teaching are to fill up the void. Prayers, reading, if it be permitted, everything, will be done according to his direction and by him. God, whom they imbibed in their books, or in their sight, even God is henceforward dispensed to them by this man—measured out to them day by day according to the standard of his heart.
Ideas come crowding here—but they must wait; we will examine them afterwards. Now they would only interrupt the thread of our historical deduction.
At the first outbreak of religious re-action, the nuns were generally governed by the friars of their order. The Bernardin nuns were directed by the Bernardin friars, the Carmelite nuns by the Carmelite friars, and the nuns of St. Elizabeth by the Picpus friars. The Capuchin nuns were not only confessed by their friars, but were fed at their expense, and by the produce of their begging.[[2]]
The monks did not long preserve this exclusive possession. For more than a quarter of a century, priests, monks, and friars of every order, carried on a furious war against one another on this question. This mysterious empire of shut-up and dependent women, over whom unlimited sway may be held, was, not without reason, the common aim of the ambition of all. Such houses, apparently quiet and strangers to the world, nevertheless are always grand centres of action. Here was an immense power for the orders that should get possession of it; and for individuals, whether priests or friars, it was (let them confess it, or not) an affair of passion.
What I say here, I say of the purest and most austere, who are often the most tender. The honourable attachment of Cardinal Bérulle for the Carmelite nuns, whom he had brought here, was know to everybody. He had lodged them near his house; he visited them every hour of the day, and even in the evening. The Jesuits said at night. It was to them he went when he was ill, in order to get better. When Paris was infested by a plague, he said he would not leave it, "on account of his nuns."
The Oratorians and the Jesuits, naturally enemies and adversaries, joined together at first in a common cause to remove the Carmelite friars from the direction of these nuns; but no sooner had they succeeded, than they began to dispute with each other.
The austere order of the Carmelites, which spread but little in France, obtained its importance as the beau idéal of penitence, a sort of religious poetry. The enthusiastic spirit of Saint Theresa still animated them. There it was that the most violent converts came to seek refuge; and there it was, also, that those whose wounds were too deep, and who, like Madame de la Vallière, sought death as their last resource, came to die.
But the two great institutions of this age, those which expressed its spirit and had an immense development, were the Visitandines and the Ursulines. The former had, in the reign of Louis XIV., about a hundred and fifty monasteries, and the latter from three to four hundred.
The Visitandines were, as is well known, the most gentle of these orders: they awaited the coming of their divine Bridegroom in a state of inaction; and their sluggish life was well calculated to make them visionaries. We know the astonishing success of Marie Alocoque, and how it was turned to account by the Jesuits.