After this agitating and fruitless journey, Lacordaire returned to Paris, where he lived in seclusion, in duty, and silence, for three years. Immediately after his return the cholera broke out, and he gave himself up with grave enthusiasm to the necessities of the time, attaching himself to one of the temporary hospitals. “The prejudices against the clergy were still in full force,” says M. de Montalembert; “the authorities refused the help of the Archbishop of Paris, and priests could not show themselves in the streets en soutane.” But the attendance of Lacordaire and a few of his more zealous brethren was tolerated. “Each day I make a little harvest for eternity,” he writes. “Most of the patients do not confess, and the priest is here only a deputy of the Church, coming timidly to seek, if there may happen to be some soul which belongs to the flock. Here and there one or two confess—others are dying without ear and without voice. I put my hand upon their forehead, and, trusting in divine mercy, I say the words of absolution. It is seldom that I go away without a feeling of satisfaction in having come.” But amid these unappreciated labours, and in the loneliness, deeper than actual solitude, of a great town, the young priest amused his lonely heart with dreams of the tranquil country and a secluded life. He thought of becoming a rural curé, and in imagination chose Franche Comté, the country of his friend. “I would bury myself in the depths of the country,” he writes again, with an effusion of visionary yet profound sadness. “I would live only for a little flock, and find all my Joy in God and in the fields. It should be manifest that I am a simple man and without ambition. Adieu, great works! adieu, fame and great name! I have known their vanity, and I desire nothing more than to live obscure and good. Some day when Montalembert shall have grown grey in the midst of ingratitude and celebrity, he will come to see upon my forehead the remains of our common youth. We shall weep together at the hearth of the presbyterié—he will do me justice before we die. I shall bless his children.... For me, a poor Catholic priest, I shall neither have children growing up under my eyes to survive me, nor domestic hearth, nor Church brilliant with knowledge and sanctity. Born in degenerate times, I shall pass from the earth among things unworthy of the memory of man. I shall endeavour to be good, simple, pious,—hoping disinterestedly in the future, since I shall not see it—working for those who perhaps will see it—and not accusing Providence, which might weigh down with heavier evils a life which deserves so little.”
Such were the sad thoughts of the young man thus stopped short in the beginning of his career. He was not, however, permitted to leave Paris; he returned to his little convent of the Visitandines, where he lived, strengthening himself “in prayer and labour, in charity, in solitude—in a life grave, simple, unknown, truly hidden in God;” but where that sadness and wistful uneasiness which so often tries to persuade itself into contentment, by dwelling upon the advantages of solitude, betrays itself in his utterances. “How happy are they,” he writes, “who are born and die under one roof without ever having quitted it.” Then he congratulates himself on his retirement. “I have always needed solitude, if only to say how much I loved it.... My days all resemble each other. I work regularly in the morning and afternoon. I see no one, save some country ecclesiastics, who come to see me now and then. I feel with joy the solitude which encircles me—it is my element, my life. Nothing can be done but with solitude—it is my great axiom.... A man makes himself from within and not from without!” “Nevertheless,” adds the biographer, “a certain instinct of the future which awaited him combined with this passionate inclination for solitude, and disclosed itself now and then in his soul like a gleam in the night. To speak and to write, to live solitary and in study, this is my whole desire,” he wrote. “However, the future will justify me, and still more the judgment of God. A man has always his hour; he must wait for it, and do nothing contrary to Providence.”
All this was the natural language of a young and exuberant life, whose hour had not yet come, and which was fully occupied in the endeavour to content and satisfy itself in its compulsory calm. During this interval he preached his first sermon, which, after all the brilliant orations which he had made at the bar and before the public courts, was a failure. “He is a man of talent, but he will never be a preacher,” said his disappointed friends; and he acknowledged and tried to reconcile himself to the fact. “But I may one day be called to a work which requires youth, and which will be devoted solely to youth,” says the preacher, with a sigh of disappointment, yet hope. But soon the skies opened, and the work for which he longed presented itself at last.
It was as lecturer to the pupils of the College Stanislas, “the most humble in Paris,” that he recommenced in 1834 his public work. After his second lecture the chapel could not contain the crowd of hearers who joined his young auditory. At once, without any interval, he seems to have vindicated his own gifts and flashed into immediate popularity. But the shadow of ‘L’Avenir’ and all its combats was still upon him. After two winters occupied thus, the Archbishop, who was his friend, and had sanctioned his lectures, changed his mind, and forbade him to continue them. Lacordaire obeyed without a murmur. “Obedience is hard,” he wrote, “but I have learned by experience that it is sooner or later rewarded, and that God above knows what is best for us; light comes to him who submits, as to a man who opens his eyes.”
Shortly, however, his reward came. The heart of the Archbishop melted; at the repeated petition of a deputation of law students, headed by the celebrated Ozanam, he called the preacher of the College Stanislas to the pulpit of Notre Dame, to a lectureship which had been established a year before for the students of the metropolis. Here Lacordaire rose at once to the height of fame as a preacher. His genius had been maturing in the silence and disappointment of the past. Now there were no longer two opinions on the subject. The venerable walls of Notre Dame had never seen such an audience, says M. de Montalembert; and the highest applause, the applause of his gratified diocesan, crowned the triumph. The Archbishop, “who was present at all the sermons, and who for the first time since the violences of which he had been the victim after the Revolution of July, found himself in the presence of the crowd, was transported by a success which avenged him so nobly by associating him with the popularity of this new-born glory. One day, rising from his archiepiscopal throne before that immense audience, he bestowed on his young disciple the title of the new prophet.”
Around this new prophet a circle of young and fervent souls occupied the closest place. The Society of St Vincent de Paul, newly formed, and in all the ardour of its first love, whom the preacher apostrophised as “that chivalry of youth, purity, and brotherhood,” formed the nucleus of the congregation; and, looking back upon the image of his friend triumphant amid such a surrounding, it is not wonderful that M. de Montalembert breaks sharply off with a cry of indignation over the downfall of that admirable Society, “the most beautiful work of the nineteenth century,” as he exclaims, with natural fervour, “the most pure and spontaneous fruit of Christian democracy.” “Imagine Lacordaire in his strength, and with the liberty of the press, before such an act!” says his biographer, recalling the days of ‘L’Avenir;’ “imagine the justice which he would have done with that pen which of old had stigmatised much smaller culprits by burning invectives, the echo of which still vibrated in the pulpit of Notre Dame: Lui, ce sous-préfet!”
When he had thus reached the height of popularity, and attained the sphere of labour for which he had longed, Lacordaire stopped short in a manner which cannot fail to amaze the English reader. Here terminated the first chapter in the life of the great preacher. In the midst of his triumphant success, and of this work so congenial to his mind and satisfactory to his highest ambition, he came of his own will to a sudden pause in his career. “By one of those marvellous intuitions, of which he had more than any one else the secret, he recognised,” says M. de Montalembert, “that self-examination, labour, silence, and solitude were still necessary to him.” He paused at the height of his triumph. “I leave in the hands of my bishop this pulpit of Notre Dame, founded by him and by you, by the pastor and by the people. This double suffrage has shone for a moment on my head; suffer me to remove it, and to find myself again alone for a time with my weakness and my God.” With these words he concluded his second Lent in 1836. “After he had left the pulpit, he declined, notwithstanding the repeated entreaties of the Archbishop, to re-enter it, and departed for Rome.”
No outward circumstances accounted for this sudden pause. It was an internal need to which he responded by such a simple and actual withdrawal from life as seems unprovided for, even in the conceptions of Protestant piety. The spirit of Lacordaire, says one of his closest companions, his maternal friend, Madam Swetchine, required only the power of “subduing and containing itself in obscurity,” to become sublime; a great and general necessity of all others the least easily attainable. To accomplish such a victory over ourselves, we, in our heretical pride of reason and self-command, have no external aids. What we can do towards this greatest of conquests we must do under the cover of ordinary circumstances and labour, and few and happy are the men who do not find this perennial conflict recur in their disengaged moments all through their lives. But the Catholic Church has ordained a system of helps and stimulants in the great work of ruling their own spirit, which is harder to most men than taking cities. When the young Father Lacordaire felt the reins gliding out of his hands, in whatever way that occurred—for we have no information on the subject—the expedient of flight suggested itself to him, as it would have been very unlikely to do to an Englishman in similar circumstances. The Catholic priest thought it no shame to acknowledge to himself that his spirit stood in need of discipline. All the saints and holy men of his Church had at some period of their lives fled from the attractions of the world, and used sharp methods of subduing the flesh, which they did not hesitate to acknowledge was too strong for them. Lacordaire, too, withdrew to get the mastery of his own spirit. This was his object in going to Rome. He was in the height of manhood, thirty-four years old—the very noon of life. He was no superstitious or visionary priest, but a man already versed in the ways of the world, who had acquitted himself with intuitive good sense in more than one difficult crisis. He had passed through scepticism, through criticism, to that dutiful and steadfast faith which knew both how to reason and how to obey. He was not disappointed or unfortunate, but, on the contrary, glowing with success and triumph of the kind most gratifying to such a man. He was not even of an archæological type of mind, nor romantically prejudiced in favour of the antique institutions of Christendom; he was a liberal, a man of his day, an educated modern mind—able, surely, if ever priest or Catholic was, to form his opinion freely. He had arrested himself by his own will in a career abundantly flattering to all his tastes and vanities, and now stood thoughtful in the mid-current of his life to determine how he should best perfect and utilise that existence still in its highest force and power. Wandering about Rome, among its monuments and relics, praying to God, as he himself says, in its basilicas, he pondered this great question. Nowhere could have been found a fitter scene. Amid the ruins of many a grand ambition, over the traces engraven in the earth by many a haughty and undisciplined spirit, the thoughtful priest wandered, meditating the highest uses of his own life. His thoughts came to a conclusion which, to our eyes, seems the most inconceivable and astonishing ever made by man. He decided upon becoming a monk. Aware by many a mortifying experience that the very name of priest was still suspected and disliked in his own country, where all his power and influence lay, this man, so sensible, so moderate, so dutiful, whose genius had not made him eccentric, and whose sympathies were all with his own age, decided that the best thing he could do for France and the glory of God was to clothe his own vigorous life and personality in the obsolete dress of the cloister. It was not the cloistered indolence of an Italian convent to which he looked forward. In the strength of his life and genius he felt no need of that repose, which would but have chafed him. Eager for work, conscious of his own powers, devoted to his own country, and seeking to qualify himself for renewed and advancing labour, this was the decision to which Lacordaire came; a decision altogether inexplicable and amazing, which we are unable to account for at this distance, much less to explain.
Nor was this resolution adopted by any capricious impulse, or in any flash of imaginative ardour. It was a conclusion obtained not without pain and resistance of the flesh. “I persuaded myself then,” he explains, in one of his latest productions, quoted by M. de Montalembert, “while wandering about Rome, and praying God in its basilicas, that the greatest service which could be rendered to Christendom in the times in which we live, was to do something for the restoration of the religious orders. But this persuasion, though it was for me the very light of the Gospel, left me undecided and trembling, when I came to consider how unfit I was for such a great work. My faith, thank God, was profound. I loved Jesus Christ and His Church above everything created. I had loved glory before I loved God, but nothing else. Besides, in descending into myself, I found nothing there which seemed to me to answer to the idea of a founder or even restorer of an order. When I contemplated these Colossi of Christian strength and piety my soul fell under me, like a horseman under his horse—I was struck to the ground discouraged and wounded. The mere idea of sacrificing my liberty to a rule and to superiors overwhelmed me. The son of an age which scarcely knew how to obey, independence had been my couch and my guide. How could I transform myself suddenly into a docile heart, and henceforward trust only in submission for the light of my conduct?” The question was hard to answer. Of all men the young editor of ‘L’Avenir’ might have seemed the least likely to attain such a height of virtue; but from this difficulty he escapes, after much further self-argument, by the following conclusion:—
“I encouraged myself by these thoughts, and it occurred to me that all my previous life, and even my faults, had prepared for me a certain access to the heart of my country and my time. I asked myself if I should not be guilty if I neglected these openings by a timidity which was good for nothing but repose, and if the greatness even of the sacrifice was not a reason for attempting it?... Urged by the situation, and solicited by a grace stronger than myself, I at last made up my mind; but the sacrifice was terrible. It had not cost me nothing to leave the world for the priesthood, but it cost me everything to add to the priesthood the burden of monastic life. However, in the second case as in the first, as soon as I had consented to it I knew neither weakness nor repentance, and went forward courageously to meet the trials which awaited me.”