Priests, Women, and Families

by Jules Michelet

The heart, a more noble organ, had the advantage of furnishing a number of dubious though decent expressions, a whole language of equivocal tenderness which did not cause a blush, and facilitated the intrigue of devout gallantry.

In the very beginning of the seventeenth century, the directors and confessors find a very convenient text in The Sacred Heart. But women take it quite differently, and in a serious sense: they grow warm and impassioned, and have visions. The Virgin appears to a country girl of Normandy, and orders her to adore the heart of Mary. The Visitandines called themselves the daughters of the Heart of Jesus: Jesus does not fail to appear to a Visitandine, Mademoiselle Marie Alacoque, and shows her His heart and wound.

She was a strong girl, and of a sanguine temperament, whom they were obliged to bleed constantly. She had entered the convent in her twenty-fourth year, with her passions entire; her infancy had not been miserably nipped in the bud, as it often happens to those who are immured at an early age. Her devotion was, from the very first, a violent love, that wished to suffer for the object loved. Having heard that Madame de Chantal had printed the name of Jesus on her breast with a hot iron, she did the same. The Lover was not insensible to this, and ever after visited her. It was with the knowledge, and under the direction of a skilful superior, that Marie Alacoque made this intimate connection with the Divine Bridegroom. She celebrated her espousals with Him; and a regular contract was drawn up by the superior, which Marie Alacoque signed with her blood. One day, when, according to her biographer, she had cleaned with her tongue the lips of a sick person, Jesus was so satisfied with her, that He permitted her to fix her lips to one of His Divine wounds.

There was nothing in this relating to theology. It was merely a subject of physiology and medicine. Mademoiselle Alacoque was a girl of an ardent disposition, which was heightened by celibacy. She was by no means a mystic in the proper sense of the word. Happier far than Madame Guyon, who did not see what she loved, she saw and touched the body of the Divine Lover. The heart He showed her in His unseamed breast was a bloody intestine. The extremely sanguine plethory from which she was suffering, and which frequent bleeding could not relieve, filled her imagination with these visions of blood.

The Jesuits, who were great propagators of the new devotion, took good care not to explain precisely whether homage was to be paid to the symbolical heart and celestial love, or whether the heart of flesh was to be the object of adoration. When pressed to explain themselves, their answers depended on persons, times, and places. Their Father Galiffet made, at the same time, two contradictory replies: in Rome he said it was the symbolical heart; and in Paris he said in print that there was no metaphor, that they honoured the flesh itself.

This equivocation was a source of wealth. In less than forty years four hundred and twenty-eight brotherhoods of the Sacred Heart were formed in France.

I cannot help pausing a moment, to admire how Equivocation triumphed throughout this age.

On whatever side I turn my eyes, I find it everywhere, both in things and persons. It sits upon the throne in the person of Madame de Maintenon. Is this person a queen who is seated by the king's side, and before whom princesses are standing—or is she not? The equivocal is also near the throne in the person of the humble Père la Chaise, the real king of the clergy of France, who from a garret at Versailles distributes the benefices. And do our loyal Galileans and the scrupulous Jansenists abstain from the equivocal? Obedient, yet rebellious, preparing war though kneeling, they kiss the foot of the pope, while wishing to tie his hands; they spoil the best reasons by their distinguo and evasions. Indeed, when I put in opposition to the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries this Janus of the seventeenth, the two others appear to me as honest centuries, or, at the very least, sincere in good and in evil. But what falsehood and ugliness is concealed under the majestic harmony of the seventeenth! Everything is softened and shaded in the form, but the bottom is often the worse for it. Instead of the local inquisitions, you have the police of the Jesuits, armed with the king's authority. In place of a Saint Bartholomew, you have the long, the immense religious revolution, called the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, that cruel comedy of forced conversion; then the unheard-of tragedy of a proscription organised by all the bureaucratical and military means of a modern government!—Bossuet sings the triumph; and deceit, lying, and misery reign everywhere! Deceit in politics; local life destroyed without creating any central life. Deceit in morals: this polished court, this world of polite people receives an unexpected lesson from the chamber of poisons: the king suppresses the trial, fearing to find every one guilty!—And can devotion be real with such morals?—If you reproach the sixteenth century with its violent fanaticism, if the eighteenth appear to you cynical and devoid of human respect, confess at least also that lying, deceit, and hypocrisy are the predominant features of the seventeenth. That great historian Molière has painted the portrait of this century, and found its name—Tartuffe.

I return to the Sacred Heart, which, in truth, I have not quitted, since it is during this period the illustrious and predominant example of the success of the equivocal. The Jesuits who, in general, have invented little, did not make the discovery, but they perceived very plainly the profit they might derive from it. We have seen how they gradually made themselves masters of the convents of women, though professing all the time to be strangers to them. The Visitation, especially, was under their influence. The superior of Marie Alacoque, who had her confidence, and directed her connection with Jesus Christ, gave timely notice to Père La Chaise.

The thing happened just in time. The Jesuits sadly wanted some popular machine to set in motion, for the profit of their policy. It was the moment when they thought, at least they told the king so, that England, sold by Charles II., would, in a short time, be entirely converted. Intrigue, money, women, everything was turned to account, to bring it about. To King Charles they gave mistresses, and to his brother, confessors. The Jesuits, who, with all their tricks, are often chimerical, thought that by gaining over five or six lords, they would change all that Protestant mass, which is Protestant not only by belief, but also by interest, habit, and manner of living; Protestant to the core, and with English tenacity.