“For six months,” he wrote under date of Feb. 20, “I have seen only grief and mourning.... My God! must I say to you that I can still hope? Paris has lost the last fibre of moral and religious sense. Its population is mad, delirious. Can we hope for the return of divine mercy when this immense city thinks only of founding a society based on the absence of religion and on the hatred of God? Only a miracle can help us out of the abyss in which we are plunged. I hold my peace.... My heart is too heavy, and my soul too gloomy.”
F. Olivaint, loving his country not less, was filled with joy from the very moment of his arrest. “Ibant gaudentes,” he said with sparkling eyes to the archbishop's secretary, who passed his grating—“Ibant gaudentes; it is for the same Master!” “France,” he said, “like the world, requires to be ransomed by blood—not the blood of criminals, which sinks into the ground, and remains mute and barren, but the blood of the just, which cries to heaven, invoking justice and imploring mercy.”
“There must be victims,” said F. Caubert. “It is God who has chosen them.”
On the evening of Holy Thursday there came a change. The archbishop, the president, Bonjeau, FF. Ducoudray, Clerc, and de Bengy, each in a separate compartment of a prison carriage, were conveyed from the Conciergerie to the prison of Mazas. F. Olivaint and F. Caubert were left alone at the Conciergerie, in separate cells, debarred from all possible communication.
“And from this hour,” cries F. Ponlevoy, in tender remembrance,[113] “I seem to myself to be really writing an episode of the Catacombs. The church is ever fruitful in generous souls, but it is the hour of trial that more than any lays bare the depths of the heart; and if, on one side, there is in the martyrs a patience beyond all grief, there is in the Christian a charity stronger than death itself.”
A system of correspondence was organized outside those now hallowed prison walls, and continued to the very end, consoling and sustaining the captives, and laying up treasures for the faithful far and wide through the edifying little notes thus preserved. And finally, on Thursday, April 13, safe means were found to convey to the prisoners at the Conciergerie not simply a consolation, but the Consoler himself. Only a few hours after this was accomplished, FF. Olivaint and Caubert were removed to Mazas, whither three of their order, as we have seen, had preceded them.
The prison of Mazas, on the boulevard of the same name, is constructed on the system of cells. At its door all motion ceases; life itself fades out; the isolation is [pg 511] complete; the unfortunate detained there are buried alive. But the love and devotion of the faithful contrived to pierce even these gloomy walls, and letters were again carried back and forth between the imprisoned priests and their exiled brethren. These letters contained few facts, but, put together, make a most exquisite journal of the interior life of the saintly captives. F. Ducoudray opens this series of letters by a formal one to his superior, giving an account of the situation and of his own personal disposition. “You know our history and its sadness,” he writes.
“Here I pass much time in prayer, and a little in suffering. Isolation, separation, uncertainty, and, above all, the privation of not being able to celebrate Mass—this is indeed cruel!
“No possible communication cum concaptivis meis. They are there, near to me, in the same corridor; that is all I know.
“This is the part it is the will of God we should perform. For us, we have only to follow the apostle's counsel: ‘In omnibus exhibeamus nosmetipsos, sicut Dei ministros, in multa patientia, in tribulationibus,... in carceribus, in seditionibus, ... per gloriam et ignobilitatem, per infamiam et bonam faman.’[114]