Now to the Son, and the Spirit above,
Now to the Triune, all holy, eternal,
Worship be ever in faith and in love!
As a poet Santeul fell from grace in 1689, when he fell back on his pagan divinities in a poem addressed to the keeper of the royal gardens. Bossuet made a great ado over it, but Fénelon and others judged him more gently. Next year he goes to see La Trappe, and writes a fine poem on Holy Solitude (Sancta Solitudo), which extorted fresh praise from De Rance, and afterward from Sainte-Beuve. But four years later he got into the worst scrape of his life by a flattering epitaph on the great Arnauld, who died in 1694. Santeul always had been more or less associated with the Jansenist party, a fact which was not forgotten when his hymns were expelled from the churches of France in our own century. There is preserved an account of a visit he paid to Port Royal, in which he chattered to the nuns with equal freedom of his own hymns and of their virtues. But he was not of the stuff of which martyrs are made. The Jesuits had the king’s ear, and he was a pensioner of the king’s bounty. They assailed him for his eulogy of the arch-Jansenist, and threatened him with the disfavor of Louis XIV.; and he hastened to make amends in a poetical epistle, of which he made two copies. By the adroit change of the tense of a single word he made the copy for the Jesuits retract his praises of his great friend, while that for the general public did nothing of the sort. As a consequence he came off with no credit on either side. Both Jesuits and Jansenists resented his duplicity, and a fine shower of squibs and pamphlets fell on him from both the hostile forces, until he was forced to cry for quarter, and Bourdaloue made his peace.
He died in 1697 in Burgundy, whither he had accompanied the younger Condé to the meeting of the Estates. St. Simon has told a very unpleasant story of the cause of his death. He ascribes it to Condé’s having made him drink a bowl of wine into which he had emptied his snuff-box, “just to see what would come of it.” But the prince of scandalmongers has been disproven on this point. Santeul’s death was due to no such cause, but to an inflammation of the bowels and to the malpractice of his doctors, who gave him emetics under the false impression that he was suffering from a surfeit. He made a good end, dying with resignation, and begging pardon for the scandal his life had caused.
His hymns were not without their critics in his own age. Jean Baptiste Thiers, a parish priest of great learning and bad temper, assailed the Breviary of Cluny (in his Commentarii de novo Breviario Cluniacensi, Brussels, 1702), and did not spare Santeul’s hymns, which he declared to be much inferior to those which had come down from the earlier days of the Church. He declared that Santeul had a greater abundance of words than of sense, that he had almost no powers of thought, and that some of his images, such as that in which he wreathes a garland of stones for the martyr Stephen, were simply ridiculous. He was answered not by Rabusson, but by his associate, Claude de Vert, after what fashion I do not know.
It was in 1736 that the Breviary of the Diocese of Paris was published in its third and final revision by a commission of three ecclesiastics: François-Antoine Vigier, François-Philippe Mesengui, and Charles Coffin. It is a significant fact that the second belonged to that Jansenist party in the Church which the relentless efforts of the Pope, the hierarchy, and the kings of France had not been able to exterminate. Archbishop de Vintimille was as eager to accomplish that as his predecessors had been, and he was ably seconded by that pious and orthodox prince, Louis XV. But this revision, like that of 1670-80, was a concession to the historical criticism which the Jansenists had brought to bear upon the Church books both as to the legends of the saints and the extravagances of the growing devotion to the Mother of our Lord. Mesengui had been dismissed from the post Coffin had given him in the University of Paris for his opposition to the bull Unigenitus, which condemned Quesnel’s Jansenist Reflections on the New Testament. Coffin’s sympathies lay in the same direction.
Charles Coffin is the man of the three who chiefly concerns us here. Born at Buzancy, hard by Rheims, in 1676, he very early distinguished himself as a Latin poet and an educator. He graduated at Paris in 1701, and became a teacher in the College of Dormans-Beauvais, and then its principal in 1713. Five years later he was chosen to succeed Rollin as Rector of the University of Paris. He at once showed his force of character by revolutionizing the relation of the university to the public through abolishing the fees exacted of the students. To replace them he extended and developed the system of posts and messages, which the university had established in the thirteenth century and which coexisted with the post-office system of the government, of which it was the forerunner. He devoted its revenues to the support of the colleges. He must have been a character of great administrative capacity, as his plans had entire success, and probably did much to foster the development of the post-office system of France. After remaining rector for three years, he went back to his place at the head of the Dormans-Beauvais College, and remained there till his death.
It was in 1727 that Charles Coffin published his first volume of Latin poetry. The most notable piece in the collection was a fine ode in praise of Champagne. So much were the people of the Champagne country pleased with it, that they sent him a hamper of every vintage as long as he lived, which was twenty-two years. He also had a hand in carrying Cardinal de Polignac’s great poem, Anti-Lucretius, to the state of completeness in which it was given to the public in 1745, three years after its author’s death. He undertook the work of revising the old hymns and preparing new with great reluctance, yielding only to the entreaties of the archbishop.