French Classics

by William Cleaver Wilkinson

But saintliness of character was in Fénelon commended to the world by equal charm of person and of genius. The words of Milton describing Eve might be applied, with no change but that of gender, to Fénelon, both the exterior and the interior man:

Grace was in all his steps, heaven in his eye, In every gesture dignity and love.

The consent is general among those who saw Fénelon, and have left behind them their testimony, that alike in person, in character, and in genius, he was such as we thus describe him.

Twice, in his youth, he was smitten to the heart with a feeling of vocation to be a missionary. Both times he was thwarted by the intervention of friends. The second time, he wrote disclosing his half-romantic aspiration in a glowing letter of confidence and friendship to Bossuet, his senior by many years, but not yet become famous. Young Fénelon’s friend Bossuet was destined later to prove a bitter antagonist, almost a personal foe.

Until he was forty-two years old, François Fénelon lived in comparative retirement, nourishing his genius with study, with contemplation, with choice society. He experimented in writing verse. Not succeeding to his mind, he turned to prose composition, and, leading the way, in a new species of literature, for Rousseau, for Chateaubriand, for Lamartine, and for many others, to follow, went on writing what, in ceasing to be verse, did not cease to be poetry.

The great world will presently involve Fénelon in the currents of history. Louis XIV., grown old, and become as selfishly greedy now of personal salvation as all his life he had been selfishly greedy of personal glory, seeks that object of his soul by serving the Church in the wholesale conversion of Protestants. He revokes the Edict of Nantes, which had secured religious toleration for the realm, and proceeds to dragoon the Huguenots into conformity with the Roman Catholic Church. The reaction in public sentiment against such rigors grew a cry that had to be silenced. Fénelon was selected to visit the heretic provinces, and win them to willing submission. He stipulated that every form of coercion should cease, and went to conquer all with love. His success was remarkable. But not even Fénelon quite escaped the infection of violent zeal for the Church. It seems not to be given to any man to rise wholly superior to the spirit of the world in which he lives.

The luster of Fénelon’s name, luminous from the triumphs of his mission among the Protestants, was sufficient to justify the choice of this man, a man both by nature and by culture so ideally formed for the office as was he, to be tutor to the heir prospective of the French monarchy. The Duke of Burgundy, grandson to Louis XIV., was accordingly put under the charge of Fénelon to be trained for future kingship. Never, probably, in the history of mankind, has there occurred a case in which the victory of a teacher could be more illustrious than actually was the victory of Fénelon as teacher to this scion of the house of Bourbon. We shall be giving our readers a relishable taste of St. Simon, the celebrated memoir-writer of the age of Louis XIV., if out of the portrait in words, drawn by him from life, of Fénelon’s princely pupil, we transfer here a few strong lines to our pages. St. Simon says:

In the first place, it must be said that Monseigneur the Duke of Burgundy had by nature a most formidable disposition. He was passionate to the extent of wishing to dash to pieces his clocks when they struck the hour which called him to what he did not like, and of flying into the utmost rage against the rain if it interfered with what he wanted to do. Resistance threw him into paroxysms of fury. I speak of what I have often witnessed in his early youth. Moreover, an ungovernable impulse drove him into whatever indulgence, bodily or mental, was forbidden him. His sarcasm was so much the more cruel, as it was witty and piquant, and as it seized with precision upon every point open to ridicule. All this was sharpened by a vivacity of body and of mind that proceeded to the degree of impetuosity, and that during his early days never permitted him to learn any thing except by doing two things at once. Every form of pleasure he loved with a violent avidity, and all this with a pride and a haughtiness impossible to describe; dangerously wise, moreover, to judge of men and things, and to detect the weak point in a train of reasoning, and to reason himself more cogently and more profoundly than his teachers. But at the same time, as soon as his passion was spent, reason resumed her sway; he felt his faults, he acknowledged them, and sometimes with such chagrin that his rage was rekindled. A mind lively, alert, penetrating, stiffening itself against obstacles, excelling literally in every thing. The prodigy is, that in a very short time piety and grace made of him a different being, and transformed faults so numerous and so formidable into virtues exactly opposite.

St. Simon attributes to Fénelon “every virtue under heaven”; but his way was to give to God rather than to man the praise of the remarkable change which, during Fénelon’s charge of the Duke of Burgundy, came over the character of the prince.

The grandfather survived the grandson; and it was never put to the stern proof of historical experiment whether Fénelon had indeed turned out one Bourbon entirely different from all the other members, earlier or later, of that royal line.