The memory of the French émigrés in England must be almost extinct. A few survivors may remain among us, who can just remember the marquis with faded decorations who taught them French or drawing, or the venerable abbé who patted them on the head and whispered his blessing. But the horrors that led to the sudden appearance on our shores of several thousand French exiles, the burst of compassion and friendliness with which they were welcomed, the sustained respect which they continued to excite, the noble efforts successfully made, under the crushing pressure of a fearfully expensive war, to provide for their wants, and the recompense that came in the shape of prejudices cleared away and preparation for the reception of truth—these things are now matters of history, and we have few traditions of them to supply the place of recollection. They do not even enter much into our current literature. In our own younger days the courteous and dignified, although threadbare, French nobleman, and even the snuff-box and shoe-buckles and silver hairs of the kind-hearted French priests, not unfrequently figured in the moderate supply—very different from the present inundation—of tales and works of fiction which sufficed for the wants of that remote epoch. We know of no work of note of the present day in which use is made of the character of an émigré, except the Tale of Two Cities; and that is hardly an exception, since the exiles there introduced are little more than pegs to the story. We would gladly know more of the intercourse of our grandfathers with these confessors for the faith, of the homage which their courage and cheerfulness extorted, and especially of the working of that influence for good, which, indirectly, must have had vast effects, and have tended greatly both to accelerate the removal of the penal laws, and to bring about that reaction toward the church of which we are now reaping the harvest; and which, even directly, was probably the cause of very numerous conversions. A memorandum found among the papers of Abbé Carron, with the title, "A little memorandum most precious to my heart and to my faith," contained a list of fifty-five Protestants received by him into the church before the year 1803; and many more, whose names did not appear in that list, were known to have been converted by his ministry. The simple fact that, within twelve years after the public burning of Catholic chapels and the houses of Catholics in London, our parliament was voting money by acclamation to support several thousands of foreign priests who were in exile purely for their loyalty to the Catholic Church, is at first sight almost startling. The British lion must surely have worn rather a puzzled expression of countenance when he found himself bringing bread to popish priests of the most thoroughly popish kind, and respectfully licking their hands. While great admiration is really due to the generosity of the noble animal on this occasion, it is perhaps only fair, as well as obvious, to remark, that he probably somewhat confounded the cause of the clergy, who suffered only for their faith, with that of the exiles in general, and was somewhat influenced by his hatred first of the sans-culottes, and afterward of Bonaparte. The clergy, however, although for the most part very strongly attached to the French throne, were quite ready to work on under any government, and in whatever privations, and were driven into exile or threatened with death solely for the same sort of offence as that of St. Thomas of Canterbury, of Fisher and More; that is, for their repudiation of the wry principle which is the essential basis of the so-called Church of England.
An exceedingly interesting life,[Footnote 54] notwithstanding its somewhat superfluous diffuseness, has lately been published at Paris of the venerable Abbé Carron, to whom the Catholics of London are indebted for the chapel and schools of the Somers-town Mission, and indirectly, through his successor Abbé Nerinckx, for the establishment among us of the "Faithful Companions of Jesus."
[Footnote 54: Vie de l'Abbé Carron, par un Bénédictin de la Congrégation de France. Paris, 1866.]
We can hardly help envying the good religious who has sent forth this huge volume of nearly 700 pages, the thorough roominess in which he carries on his labor of love; omitting no detail that in any way furthers his purpose, describing not only the holy priest himself, but most of his relations and intimate friends, and freely inserting letters and documents at full length. Some of these, such as letters of commendation from royal personages, and other notabilities, and the official answers, which show that the "Circumlocution Office" was a French quite as much as an English institution, we could perhaps forego. But the letters of the abbé himself, numerous as they are, do not contain a line too many for our taste; for every line exhales the fragrance of a love the strength of which, as a natural affection, could seldom have been surpassed, and which, at the same time, although not so thoroughly predominated over by the supernatural as in the highest order of saints, is yet always under its influence, and ready to pass into it. Few men have ever lived less in or for themselves. He lived for his mother, brother, and sisters, for his nephews and nieces and adopted children, for his king and country, for his fellow-exiles, and, above all, for the poor, to whose special service he bound himself by repeated vows, which were gloriously fulfilled. We cannot see in his most confidential letters or in his most private memoranda a trace of indulgence in a single natural pleasure, except that of being loved. Although a very voluminous writer, he seems to have been absolutely free from literary vanity. He allowed the Abbé Gérard, the author of Valmont—to whom he submitted most of his productions—to go on criticising and correcting without mercy, and was ready to suppress anything at a word from him. As he had no vulnerable point, so to speak, but in his affections, it was here, as is usual with those whom God would train for great things, that the sharpest wounds were inflicted. The early death of a younger sister born soon after himself, who had been his confidante and associate in piety and in all his schemes of devotion and devotedness as a child; the death of his mother, whom he would have idolized if he could have idolized anything, but from whose death-bed he went back calmly to sit all the evening in the confessional; the deaths of several others of those nearest and dearest to him, and the defection of a few; the overthrow of his gigantic and successful undertakings in behalf of the poor of his native town; two deportations and nearly half a life spent in banishment from his beloved France; banishment from Normandy and from home even after his return to France; frequent contact with distress greater than even his wonderful ability to relieve; and, perhaps worst of all, his own share, however innocently, in the ruin of an intimate friend whom he had encouraged to invest all his property in his favorite undertaking of workshops at Rennes, and who died broken-hearted, leaving a widow and seven children destitute: these were the things that made his way of the cross, and moulded his loving and bleeding heart to a greater likeness of the Crucified.
It was on the 16th of September, 1792, that Abbé Carron, then in the thirty-third year of his age, and the tenth of his priesthood, landed in Jersey with 250 other priests, after a tempestuous passage of forty-eight hours from St. Malo, in which they had narrowly escaped the fate to which those who forced them to put to sea in a storm had apparently destined them. These were nearly the last of the exiles. The September massacres gave the crown of martyrdom to most of the clergy faithful to their vows, who had not either been alarmed into flight or forcibly banished. The Abbé Carron, and those who accompanied him, were not, properly speaking, émigrés but déportés. Of the émigrés or fugitives, again, there were two classes: those who, like most of the nobility, had fled when their property was seized and their privileges taken away; and those who, as was the case with most of the clergy, had remained at their posts till they were exposed to indignities and outrages, and their lives endangered. But nothing would induce the Abbé Carron and those who were influenced by his example to fly. The civil character of the clergy had been decreed by the National Assembly on the 12th of July, 1790, and unfortunately accepted by Louis XVI on the 24th of August. On the 4th of January, 1791, the oath which was the test of confessorship had been demanded of the bishops, and almost unanimously refused; and soon afterward began the persecution of the priests and the religious who followed their noble example. On the 11th of May the municipality of Rennes endeavored to install the schismatical clergy in the chief parishes of the town, and threatened summary proceedings against all who had refused the oath for any attempt to discharge their ministry any more. The Abbé Carron, the chief curate of the large parish of St. Germain, in which he had labored from the time of his ordination, was one of those specially interdicted. At the same time, the violent republicans of the town, who, although comparatively few—for the mass of the inhabitants continued Catholic and loyal—were prevailing, as elsewhere, over the more moderate, had begun to threaten his life. He preached the last course of Lent sermons that were heard for many years to come in his native town, although parties of armed men were known to be in wait for him; but after Easter, by order of the vicar-general, he retired to the house of a brother a few leagues out of the town. On his way, early in the morning, he was met by forty armed men who had been searching for him at the very house to which he was going, with the intention of murdering him, and whose violence had so agitated his brother, who was in weak health, that he died not long after; but although they spoke to the abbé, they did not touch him. His life had been still more wonderfully preserved several years before, when three men—one of whom was enraged at the conversion by the abbé's preaching of a woman whom he had seduced—had laid a plot for his assassination, and had entrapped him, under pretence of his services being required for a wounded man, into a solitary house on the bank of the river. When he approached the bed in which his pretended penitent had laid himself ready to strike the murderous blow, he exclaimed, "You have sent for me too late: the unfortunate man is no more;" and his companions found that the wretch had suddenly expired. Carron had not yet finished his work; and, although in a less signally supernatural manner, the divine hand that had then fallen on his would-be murderer interposed again and again to protect him. From his retirement, where he had composed and published a vigorous and pathetic remonstrance to those religious who were yielding to the storm and breaking their vows, he returned to his perish, and did not intermit his work till he was seized and carried to prison, and into forced exile in the August of the next year. He continued to carry on and even to extend, in addition to his sacerdotal labors, the weaving, rope and sail-making, and other manufactures that he had established for the benefit of the poor, and was actually giving employment and subsistence to 1500 artisans when he was arrested. At the same time he had expended 100,000 francs on the buildings where the works were carried on; and when they were taken possession of by the republicans, the stock in hand was valued at more than 94,000 francs, and 90,000 more were due to him for sails supplied to the navy from his establishment. His success in this undertaking was probably the reason for which, although he was unflinching in his zeal, and resolutely refused to allow any constitutional priest to officiate in his church, his arrest was so long delayed. While inflexibly firm in matters of conscience, he was ready enough to accommodate himself in everything else to the new state of things, in order to carry on his work. He was willing to be known as citoyen Carron, and to be tutoyed to any extent. He obeyed the law which ordered all the imermentés to present themselves every day to the municipal authorities. He implored that, if they thought fit to imprison him, he might still be permitted to carry on his works of charity, and offered to visit them accompanied by an officer, and to live contentedly in confinement. "Although breathing infected air," he said, "I may still manage to live a few years, and discharge the sacred obligation of reimbursing the friends who lent me money to do good with. Then I will make a present of my establishment to my country, and I shall die satisfied with having undeceived those who think that I had in view to enrich myself or my family."
But the fatal blow, though delayed, was not very long in coming. On the 10th of August a party of the national guard took him to the hôtel de ville, and thence to the Abbey of St. Melaine, which had been turned into a prison; and on the 8th of September he and his fellow-prisoners were escorted to St. Malo to be shipped for Jersey. His bishop, his rector, and many of his clerical friends had fled months before; but he had kept to his resolution, more expressively, his biographer says, than grammatically worded, "Jamais je n'ai voulu consentir à m'émigrer." He was in bad health, and suffering besides from a violent toothache; but neither of this, nor of his being made to share the single mattress of a prisoner in a high fever, nor of any of the brutal insults which he received in prison and on the journey to the coast, does he say a word in the letters which he managed to send to his sister and nephews. He addresses them all by name, longs to fold them to his breast, hopes one day to see them again, consoles and advises them, and sends the little ones the few sous that he happened to have in his possession. But his thoughts of his own sufferings are only such as these:
"Believe me, I do not suffer the hundredth part of what I have deserved. An unfortunate sinner, a base and too frequent transgressor, such as I know myself to be, ought not to think anything of such slight drops of bitterness. My God, when we love you, how sweet, how consoling, how delicious it is to suffer for you; and how magnificently does the love which we bear you recompense us for all the miseries of life! Do not, my dear child, think of your friend's imprisonment, without remembering at the same time that I deserve to be at the bottom of the most loathsome dungeon, and under a thousand chains, to bewail the sins of my youth."
His last message, when on the point of embarking, was to M. Paris, whom be had commissioned to watch over his factories.
"I hope that this letter, in which I enclose my heart, will find you in good health. Mine has had some variations, but it is at present quite sound; and I desire, if my God preserves me in it, to consecrate it again one day entirely to the service of my dear fellow-citizens; for I shall always love them, and shall always sigh for the moment when, recovering from their unfounded prejudices, they cease to close their heart to me. Speak of me now and then to the members of that dear colony whose prosperity formed the sweetest enjoyment of my youth. Tell them that I shall always be their father and their friend, and that I shall seek all my life for the means of making them happy. If I can gain any practical knowledge of manufactures in England, I shall make haste to apply it to the improvement of La Piletière,"
He was never permitted to revisit his work at Rennes; but his indefatigable activity and burning zeal found a still wider field, and achieved still greater wonders in exile.