FATHER GIRARD AND LA CADIERE: 1730.
The Jesuits were unlucky. Powerful at Versailles, where they ruled the
Court, they had not the slightest credit with Heaven. Not one tiny
miracle could they do. The Jansenists overflowed, at any rate, with
touching stories of miracles done. Untold numbers of sick, infirm,
halt, and paralytic obtained a momentary cure at the tomb of the
Deacon Pâris. Crushed by a terrible succession of plagues, from the
time of the Great King to the Regency, when so many were reduced to
beggary, these unfortunate people went to entreat a poor, good fellow,
a virtuous imbecile, a saint in spite of his absurdities, to make them
whole. And what need, after all, of laughter? His life is far more
touching than ridiculous. We are not to be surprised if these good
folk, in the emotion of seeing their benefactor's tomb, suddenly
forgot their own sufferings. The cure did not last, but what matter? A
miracle indeed had taken place, a miracle of devotion, of
lovingkindness, of gratitude. Latterly, with all this some knavery
began to mingle, but at that time, in 1728, these wonderful popular
scenes were very pure.
The Jesuits would have given anything for the least of the miracles
they denied. For well-nigh fifty years they worked away, embellishing
with fables and anecdotes their Legend of the Sacred Heart, the story
of Mary Alacoque. For twenty-five or thirty years they had been trying
to convince the world that their helpmate, James II. of England, not
content with healing the king's evil (in his character of King of
France), amused himself after his death in making the dumb to speak,
the lame to walk straight, and the squint-eyed to see properly. They
who were cured squinted worse than ever. As for the dumb, it so
chanced that she who played this part was a manifest rogue, caught in
the very act of stealing. She roamed the provinces: at every chapel of
any renowned saint she was healed by a miracle and received alms, and
then began her work again elsewhere.
For getting wonders wrought the South was a better country. There
might be found a plenty of nervous women, easy to excite, the very
ones to make into somnambulists, subjects of miracle, bearers of
mystic marks, and so forth.
At Marseilles the Jesuits had on their side a bishop, Belzunce, a
bold, hearty sort of man, renowned in the memorable plague,[107] but
credulous and narrow-minded withal; under whose countenance many a
bold venture might be made. Beside him they had placed a Jesuit of
Franche-Comté, not wanting in mind, whose austere outside did not
prevent his preaching pleasantly, in an ornate and rather worldly
style, such as the ladies loved. A true Jesuit, he made his way by two
different methods, now by feminine intrigue, anon by his holy
utterances. Girard had on his side neither years nor figure; he was a
man of forty-seven, tall, withered, weak-looking, of dirty aspect, and
given to spitting without end.[108] He had long been a tutor, even
till he was thirty-seven; and he preserved some of his college tastes.
For the last ten years, namely, ever since the great plague, he had
been confessor to the nuns. With them he had fared well, winning over
them a high degree of power by enforcing a method seemingly quite at
variance with the Provencial temperament, by teaching the doctrine and
the discipline of a mystic death, of absolute passiveness, of entire
forgetfulness of self. The dreadful crisis through which they had just
passed had deadened their spirits, and weakened hearts already
unmanned by a kind of morbid languor. Under Girard's leading, the
Carmelites of Marseilles carried their mysticism to great lengths; and
first among them was Sister Remusat, who passed for a saint.
[107] The great plague of 1720, which carried off 60,000
people about Marseilles. Belzunce is the "Marseilles' good
bishop" of Pope's line--TRANS.
[108] See "The Proceedings in the Affair of Father Girard and
La Cadière," Aix, 1733.
In spite, or perhaps by reason, of this success, the Jesuits took
Girard away from Marseilles: they wanted to employ him in raising
anew their house at Toulon. Colbert's splendid institution, the
Seminary for Naval Chaplains, had been entrusted to the Jesuits, with
the view of cleansing the young chaplains from the influence of the
Lazarists, who ruled them almost everywhere. But the two Jesuits
placed in charge were men of small capacity. One was a fool; the
other, Sabatier, remarkable, in spite of his age, for heat of temper.
With all the insolence of our old navy he never kept himself under the
least control. In Toulon he was reproached, not for having a mistress,
nor yet a married woman, but for intriguing in a way so insolent and
outrageous as to drive the husband wild. He sought to keep the husband
specially alive to his own shame, to make him wince with every kind of
pang. Matters were pushed so far that at last the husband died
outright.
Still greater was the scandal caused by the Jesuits' rivals, the
Observantines, who, having spiritual charge of a sisterhood at
Ollioules, made mistresses openly of the nuns, and, not content with
this, dared even to seduce the little boarders. One Aubany, the Father
Guardian, violated a girl of thirteen; when her parents pursued him,
he found shelter at Marseilles.
As Director of the Seminary for Chaplains, Girard began, through his
seeming sternness and his real dexterity, to win for the Jesuits an
ascendant over monks thus compromised, and over parish-priests of very
vulgar manners and scanty learning.
In those Southern regions, where the men are abrupt, not seldom
uncouth of speech and appearance, the women have a lively relish for
the gentle gravity of the men of the North: they feel thankful to them
for speaking a language at once aristocratic, official, and French.
When Girard reached Toulon, he must already have gained full knowledge
of the ground before him. Already had he won over a certain Guiol, who
sometimes came to Marseilles, where she had a daughter, a Carmelite
nun. This Guiol, wife of a small carpenter, threw herself entirely
into his hands, even more so than he wanted. She was of ripe age,
extremely vehement for a woman of forty-seven, depraved and ready for
anything, ready to do him service of whatever kind, no matter what he
might do or be, whether he were a sinner or a saint.
This Guiol, besides her Carmelite daughter at Marseilles, had another,
a lay-sister to the Ursulines of Toulon. The Ursulines, an order of
teaching nuns, formed everywhere a kind of centre; their parlour, the
resort of mothers, being a half-way stage between the cloister and the
world. At their house, and doubtless through their means, Girard saw
the ladies of the town, among them one of forty years, a spinster,
Mdlle. Gravier, daughter of an old contractor for the royal works at
the Arsenal. This lady had a shadow who never left her, her cousin La
Reboul, daughter of a skipper and sole heiress to herself; a woman,
too, who really meant to succeed her, though very nearly her own age,
being five-and-thirty. Around these gradually grew a small roomful of
Girard's admirers, who became his regular penitents. Among them were
sometimes introduced a few young girls, such as La Cadière, a
tradesman's daughter and herself a sempstress, La Laugier, and La
Batarelle, the daughter of a waterman. They had godly readings
together, and now and then small suppers. But they were specially
interested in certain letters which recounted the miracles and
ecstacies of Sister Remusat, who was still alive; her death occurring
in February, 1730. What a glorious thing for Father Girard, who had
led her to a pitch so lofty! They read, they wept, they shouted with
admiration. If they were not ecstatic yet, they were not far from
being so. Already, to please her kinswoman, would La Reboul throw
herself at times into a strange plight by holding her breath and
pinching her nose.
* * * * *
Among these girls and women the least frivolous certainly was
Catherine Cadière, a delicate, sickly girl of seventeen, taken up
wholly with devotion and charity, of a mournful countenance, which
seemed to say that, young as she was, she had felt more keenly than
anyone else the great misfortunes of the time, those, namely, of
Provence and Toulon. This is easily explained. She was born during the
frightful famine of 1709; and just as the child was growing into a
maiden, she witnessed the fearful scenes of the great plague. Those
two events seemed to have left their mark upon her, to have taken her
out of the present into a life beyond.
This sad flower belonged wholly to Toulon, to the Toulon of that day.
To understand her better we must remember what that town is and what
it was.
Toulon is a thoroughfare, a landing-place, the entrance of an immense
harbour and a huge arsenal. The sense of this carries the traveller
away, and prevents his seeing Toulon itself. There is a town however
there, indeed an ancient city. It contains two different sets of
people, the stranger functionaries, and the genuine Toulonnese, who
are far from friendly to the former, regarding them with envy, and
often roused to rebellion by the swaggering of the naval officers. All
these differences were concentred in the gloomy streets of a town in
those days choked up within its narrow girdle of fortifications. The
most peculiar feature about this small dark town is, that it lies
exactly between two broad seas of light, between the marvellous mirror
of its roadstead and its glorious amphitheatre of mountains,
baldheaded, of a dazzling grey, that blinds you in the noonday sun.
All the gloomier look the streets themselves. Such as do not lead
straight to the harbour and draw some light therefrom, are plunged at
all hours in deep gloom. Filthy byeways, and small tradesmen with
shops ill-furnished, invisible to anyone coming for the day, such is
the general aspect of the place. The interior forms a maze of passages
in which you may find plenty of churches, and old convents now turned
into barracks. Copious kennels, laden and foul with sewage water, run
down in torrents. The air is almost stagnant, and in so dry a climate
you are surprised at seeing so much moisture.
In front of the new theatre a passage called La Rue de l'Hôpital leads
from the narrow Rue Royale into the narrow Rue des Cannoniers. It
might almost be called a blind alley. The sun, however, just looks
down upon it at noon, but, finding the place so dismal, passes on
forthwith, and leaves the passage to its wonted darkness.
Among these gloomy dwellings the smallest was that of the Sister
Cadière, a retail dealer, or huckster. There was no entrance but by
the shop, and only one room on each floor. The Cadières were honest
pious folk, and Madame Cadière the mirror of excellence itself. These
good people were not altogether poor. Besides their small dwelling in
the town, they too, like most of their fellow-townsmen, had a
country-house of their own. This latter is, commonly, a mere hut, a
little stony plot of ground yielding a little wine. In the days of its
naval greatness, under Colbert and his son, the wondrous bustle in the
harbour brought some profit to the town. French money flowed in. The
many great lords who passed that way brought their households along
with them, an army of wasteful domestics, who left a good many things
behind them. All this came to a sudden end. The artificial movement
stopped short: even the workmen at the arsenal could no longer get
their wages; shattered vessels were left unrepaired; and at last the
timbers themselves were sold.
Toulon was keenly sensible of the rebound. At the siege of 1707 it
seemed as if dead. What, then, was it in the dreadful year 1709, the
71st of Louis XIV., when every plague at once, a hard winter, a
famine, and an epidemic, seemed bent on utterly destroying France? The
very trees of Provence were not spared. All traffic came to an end.
The roads were covered with starving beggars. Begirt with bandits who
stopped up every outlet, Toulon quaked for fear.
To crown all, Madame Cadière, in this year of sorrow, was with child.
Three boys she had borne already. The eldest stayed in the shop to
help his father. The second was with the Friar Preachers, and destined
to become a Dominican, or a Jacobin as they were then called. The
third was studying in the Jesuit seminary as a priest to be. The
wedded couple wanted a daughter; Madame prayed to Heaven for a saint.
She spent her nine months in prayer, fasting, or eating nought but rye
bread. She had a daughter, namely Catherine. The babe was very
delicate and, like her brothers, unhealthy. The dampness of an
ill-aired dwelling, and the poor nourishment gained from a mother so
thrifty and more than temperate, had something to do with this. The
brothers had scrofulous glands, and in her earlier years the little
thing suffered from the same cause. Without being altogether ill, she
had all the suffering sweetness of a sickly child. She grew up without
growing stronger. At an age when other children have all the strength
and gladness of upswelling life in them, she was already saying, "I
have not long to live."
She took the small-pox, which left her rather marked. I know not if
she was handsome, but it is clear that she was very winning, with all
the charming contrasts, the twofold nature of the maidens of Provence.
Lively and pensive, gay and sad, by turns, she was a good little
worshipper, but given to harmless pranks withal. Between the long
church services, if she went into the country with girls of her own
age, she made no fuss about doing as they did, but would sing and
dance away and flourish her tambourine. But such days were few. Most
times her chief delight was to climb up to the top of the house, to
bring herself nearer heaven, to obtain a glimpse of daylight, to look
out, perhaps, on some small strip of sea, or some pointed peak in the
vast wilderness of hills. Thenceforth to her eyes they were serious
still, but less unkindly than before, less bald and leafless, in a
garment thinly strewn with arbutus and larch.
This dead town of Toulon numbered 26,000 inhabitants when the plague
began. It was a huge throng cooped up in one spot. But from this
centre let us take away a girdle of great convents with their backs
upon the ramparts, convents of Minorites, Ursulines, Visitandines,
Bernardines, Oratorians, Jesuits, Capuchins, Recollects; those of the
Refuge, the Good Shepherd, and, midmost of all, the enormous convent
of Dominicans. Add to these the parish churches, parsonages, bishop's
palace, and it seems that the clergy filled up the place, while the
people had no room at all, to speak of.[109]
[109] See the work by M. d'Antrechaus, and the excellent
treatise by M. Gustave Lambert.
On a centre so closely thronged, we may guess how savagely the plague
would fasten. Toulon's kind heart was also to prove her bane. She
received with generous warmth some fugitives from Marseilles. These
are just as likely to have brought the plague with them, as certain
bales of wool to which was traced the first appearance of that
scourge. The chief men of the place were about to fly, to scatter
themselves over the country. But the First Consul, M. d'Antrechaus, a
man of heroic soul, withheld them, saying, with a stern air, "And what
will the people do, sirs, in this impoverished town, if the rich folk
carry their purses away?" So he held them back, and compelled all
persons to stay where they were. Now the horrors of Marseilles had
been ascribed to the mutual intercourse of its inhabitants.
D'Antrechaus, however, tried a system entirely the reverse, tried to
isolate the people of Toulon, by shutting them up in their houses.
Two huge hospitals were established, in the roadstead and in the
hills. All who did not come to these, had to keep at home on pain of
death. For seven long months D'Antrechaus carried out a wager, which
would have been held impossible, the keeping, namely, and feeding in
their own houses, of a people numbering 26,000 souls. All that time
Toulon was one vast tomb. No one stirred save in the morning, to deal
out bread from door to door, and then to carry off the dead. Most of
the doctors perished, and the magistrates all but D'Antrechaus. The
gravediggers also perished, and their places were filled by condemned
deserters, who went to work with brutal and headlong violence. Bodies
were thrown into the tumbril, head downwards, from the fourth storey.
One mother, having just lost her little girl, shrunk from seeing her
poor wee body thus hurled below, and by dint of bribing, managed to
get it lowered the proper way. As they were bearing it off, the child
came to; it lived still. They took her up again, and she survived, to
become the grandmother of the learned M. Brun, who wrote an excellent
history of the port.
Poor little Cadière was exactly the same age as this girl who died and
lived again, being twelve years old, an age for her sex so full of
danger. In the general closing of the churches, in the putting down of
all holidays, and chiefly of Christmas, wont to be so merry a season
at Toulon, the child's fancy saw the end of all things. It seems as
though she never quite shook off that fancy. Toulon never raised her
head again. She retained her desert-like air. Everything was in ruins,
everyone in mourning; widowers, orphans, desperate beings were
everywhere seen. In the midst, a mighty shadow, moved D'Antrechaus
himself; he had seen all about him perish, his sons, his brothers, and
his colleagues; and was now so gloriously ruined, that he was fain to
look to his neighbours for his daily meals. The poor quarrelled among
themselves for the honour of feeding him.
The young girl told her mother that she would never more wear any of
her smarter clothes, and she must, therefore, sell them. She would do
nothing but wait upon the sick, and she was always dragging her to the
hospital at the end of the street. A little neighbour-girl of
fourteen, Laugier by name, who had lost her father, was living with
her mother in great wretchedness. Catherine was continually going to
them with food and clothes, and anything she could get for them. She
begged her parents to defray the cost of apprenticing Laugier to a
dressmaker; and such was her sway over them that they could not refuse
to incur so heavy an outlay. Her piety, her many little charms of
soul, rendered her all-powerful. She was impassioned in her charity,
giving not alms only, but love as well. She longed to make Laugier
perfect, rejoiced to have her by her side, and often gave her half her
bed. The pair had been admitted among the _Daughters of Saint
Theresa_, the third order established by the Carmelites. Mdlle.
Cadière was their model nun, and seemed at thirteen a Carmelite
complete. Already she devoured some books of mysticism borrowed from a
Visitandine. In marked contrast with herself seemed Laugier, now a
girl of fifteen, who would do nothing but eat and look handsome. So
indeed she was, and on that account had been made sextoness to the
chapel of Saint Theresa. This led her into great familiarities with
the priests, and so, when her conduct called for her expulsion from
the congregation, another authority, the vicar-general, flew into such
a rage as to declare that, if she were expelled, the chapel itself
would be interdicted.
Both these girls had the temperament of their country, suffering from
great excitement of the nerves, and from what was called flatulence of
the womb. But in each the result was entirely different; being very
carnal in the case of Laugier, who was gluttonous, lazy, passionate;
but wholly cerebral with regard to the pure and gentle Catherine, who
owing to her ailments or to a lively imagination that took everything
up into itself, had no ideas concerning sex. "At twenty she was like a
child of seven." For nothing cared she but praying and giving of alms;
she had no wish at all to marry. At the very word "marriage," she
would fall a-weeping, as if she had been asked to abandon God.
They had lent her the life of her patroness, Catherine of Genoa, and
she had bought for herself _The Castle of the Soul_, by St. Theresa.
Few confessors could follow her in these mystic flights. They who
spoke clumsily of such things gave her pain. She could not keep either
her mother's confessor, the cathedral-priest, or another, a Carmelite,
or even the old Jesuit Sabatier. At sixteen she found a priest of
Saint Louis, a highly spiritual person. She spent days in church, to
such a degree that her mother, by this time a widow and often in want
of her, had to punish her, for all her own piety, on her return home.
It was not the girl's fault, however: during her ecstasies she quite
forgot herself. So great a saint was she accounted by the girls of her
own age, that sometimes at mass they seemed to see the Host drawn on
by the moving power of her love, until it flew up and placed itself of
its own accord in her mouth.
Her two young brothers differed from each other in their feelings
towards Girard. The elder, who lived with the Friar Preachers, shared
the natural dislike of all Dominicans for the Jesuit. The other, who
was studying with the Jesuits in order to become a priest, regarded
Girard as a great man, a very saint, a man to honour as a hero. Of
this younger brother, sickly like herself, Catherine was very fond.
His ceaseless talking about Girard was sure to do its work upon her.
One day she met the father in the street. He looked so grave, but so
good and mild withal, that a voice within her said, "Behold the man to
whose guidance thou art given!" The next Saturday, when she came to
confess to him, he said that he had been expecting her. In her amazed
emotion she never dreamed that her brother might have given him
warning, but fancied that the mysterious voice had spoken to him also,
and that they two were sharing the heavenly communion of warnings from
the world above.
Six months of summer passed away, and yet Girard, who confessed her
every Saturday, had taken no step towards her. The scandal about old
Sabatier had set him on his guard. His own prudence would have held
him to an attachment of a darker kind for such a one as the Guiol, who
was certainly very mature, but also ardent and a devil incarnate.
It was Cadière who made the first advances towards him, innocent as
they were. Her brother, the giddy Jacobin, had taken it into his head
to lend a lady and circulate through the town a satire called _The
Morality of the Jesuits_. The latter were soon apprised of this.
Sabatier swore that he would write to the Court for a sealed order
(lettre-de-cachet) to shut up the Jacobin. In her trouble and alarm,
his sister, with tears in her eyes, went to beseech Father Girard for
pity's sake to interfere. On her coming again to him a little later,
he said, "Make yourself easy; your brother has nothing to fear; I have
settled the matter for him." She was quite overcome. Girard saw his
advantage. A man of his influence, a friend of the King, a friend of
Heaven as well, after such proof of goodness as he had just been
giving, would surely have the very strongest sway over so young a
heart! He made the venture, and in her own uncertain language said to
her, "Put yourself in my hands; yield yourself up to me altogether."
Without a blush she answered, in the fulness of her angelic purity,
"Yes;" meaning nought else than to have him for her sole director.
What were his plans concerning her? Would he make her a mistress or
the tool of his charlatanry? Girard doubtless swayed to and fro, but
he leant, I think, most towards the latter idea. He had to make his
choice, might manage to seek out pleasures free from risk. But Mdlle.
Cadière was under a pious mother. She lived with her family, a married
brother and the two churchmen, in a very confined house, whose only
entrance lay through the shop of the elder brother. She went no
whither except to church. With all her simplicity she knew
instinctively what things were impure, what houses dangerous. The
Jesuit penitents were fond of meeting together at the top of a house,
to eat, and play the fool, and cry out, in their Provencial tongue,
"Vivent les _Jesuitons_!" A neighbour, disturbed by their noise, went
and found them lying on their faces, singing and eating fritters, all
paid for, it was said, out of the alms-money. Cadière was also
invited, but taking a disgust to the thing she never went a second
time.
She was assailable only through her soul. And it was only her soul
that Girard seemed to desire. That she should accept those lessons of
passive faith which he had taught at Marseilles, this apparently was
all his aim. Hoping that example would do more for him than precept,
he charged his tool Guiol to escort the young saint to Marseilles,
where lived the friend of Cadière's childhood, a Carmelite nun, a
daughter of Guiol's. The artful woman sought to win her trust by
pretending that she, too, was sometimes ecstatic. She crammed her with
absurd stories. She told her, for instance, that on finding a cask of
wine spoilt in her cellar, she began to pray, and immediately the wine
became good. Another time she felt herself pierced by a crown of
thorns, but the angels had comforted her by serving up a good dinner,
of which she partook with Father Girard.
Cadière gained her mother's leave to go with this worthy Guiol to
Marseilles, and Madame Cadière paid her expenses. It was now the most
scorching month--that of August, 1729--in a scorching climate, when
the country was all dried up, and the eye could see nothing but a
rugged mirror of rocks and flintstone. The weak, parched brain of a
sick girl suffering from the fatigues of travel, was all the more
easily impressed by the dismal air of a nunnery of the dead. The true
type of this class was the Sister Remusat, already a corpse to outward
seeming, and soon to be really dead. Cadière was moved to admire so
lofty a piece of perfection. Her treacherous companion allured her
with the proud conceit of being such another and filling her place
anon.
During this short trip of hers, Girard, who remained amid the stifling
heats of Toulon, had met with a dismal fall. He would often go to the
girl Laugier, who believed herself to be ecstatic, and "comfort" her
to such good purpose that he got her presently with child. When Mdlle.
Cadière came back in the highest ecstasy, as if like to soar away, he
for his part was become so carnal, so given up to pleasure, that he
"let fall on her ears a whisper of love." Thereat she took fire, but
all, as anyone may see, in her own pure, saintly, generous way; as
eager to keep him from falling, as devoting herself even to die for
his sake.
One of her saintly gifts was her power of seeing into the depths of
men's hearts. She had sometimes chanced to learn the secret life and
morals of her confessors, to tell them of their faults; and this, in
their fear and amazement, many of them had borne with great humility.
One day this summer, on seeing Guiol come into her room, she suddenly
said, "Wicked woman! what have you been doing?"
"And she was right," said Guiol herself, at a later period; "for I had
just been doing an evil deed." Perhaps she had just been rendering
Laugier the same midwife's service which next year she wished to
render Batarelle.
Very likely, indeed, Laugier had entrusted to Catherine, at whose
house she often slept, the secret of her good fortune, the love, the
fatherly caresses of her saint. It was a hard and stormy trial for
Catherine's spirits. On the one side, she had learnt by heart
Girard's maxim, that whatever a saint may do is holy. But on the other
hand, her native honesty and the whole course of her education
compelled her to believe that over-fondness for the creature was ever
a mortal sin. This woeful tossing between two different doctrines
quite finished the poor girl, brought on within her dreadful storms,
until at last she fancied herself possessed with a devil.
And here her goodness of heart was made manifest. Without humbling
Girard, she told him she had a vision of a soul tormented with impure
thoughts and deadly sin; that she felt the need of rescuing that soul,
by offering the Devil victim for victim, by agreeing to yield herself
into his keeping in Girard's stead. He never forbade her, but gave her
leave to be possessed for one year only.
Like the rest of the town, she had heard of the scandalous loves of
Father Sabatier--an insolent passionate man, with none of Girard's
prudence. The scorn which the Jesuits--to her mind, such pillars of
the Church--were sure to incur, had not escaped her notice. She said
one day to Girard, "I had a vision of a gloomy sea, with a vessel full
of souls tossed by a storm of unclean thoughts. On this vessel were
two Jesuits. Said I to the Redeemer, whom I saw in heaven, 'Lord, save
them, and let me drown! The whole of their shipwreck do I take upon
myself,' And God, in His mercy, granted my prayer."
All through the trial, and when Girard, become her foe, was aiming at
her death, she never once recurred to this subject. These two
parables, so clear in meaning, she never explained. She was too
high-minded to say a word about them. She had doomed herself to very
damnation. Some will say that in her pride she deemed herself so
deadened and impassive as to defy the impurity with which the Demon
troubled a man of God. But it is quite clear that she had no accurate
knowledge of sensual things, foreseeing nought in such a mystery save
pains and torments of the Devil. Girard was very cold, and quite
unworthy of all this sacrifice. Instead of being moved to compassion,
he sported with her credulity through a vile deceit. Into her casket
he slipped a paper, in which God declared that, for her sake, He would
indeed save the vessel. But he took care not to leave so absurd a
document there: she would have read it again and again until she came
to perceive how spurious it was. The angel who brought the paper
carried it off the next day.
With the same coarseness of feeling Girard lightly allowed her, all
unsettled and incapable of praying as she plainly was, to communicate
as much as she pleased in different churches every day. This only made
her worse. Filled already with the Demon, she harboured the two foes
in one place. With equal power they fought within her against each
other. She thought she would burst asunder. She would fall into a
dead faint, and so remain for several hours. By December she could
not move even from her bed.
Girard had now but too good a plea for seeing her. He was prudent
enough to let himself be led by the younger brother at least as far as
her door. The sick girl's room was at the top of the house. Her mother
stayed discreetly in the shop. He was left alone as long as he
pleased, and if he chose could turn the key. At this time she was very
ill. He handled her as a child, drawing her forward a little to the
front of the bed, holding her head, and kissing her in a fatherly way.
She was very pure, but very sensitive. A slight touch, that no one
else would have remarked, deprived her of her senses: this Girard
found out for himself, and the knowledge of it possessed him with evil
thoughts. He threw her at will into this trance,[110] and she, in her
thorough trust in him, never thought of trying to prevent it, feeling
only somewhat troubled and ashamed at causing such a man to waste upon
her so much of his precious time. His visits were very long. It was
easy to foresee what would happen at last. Ill as she was, the poor
girl inspired Girard with a passion none the less wild and
uncontrollable. One freedom led to another, and her plaintive
remonstrances were met with scornful replies. "I am your master--your
god. You must bear all for obedience sake." At length, about
Christmas-time, the last barrier of reserve was broken down; and the
poor girl awoke from her trance to utter a wail which moved even him
to pity.
[110] A case of mesmerism applied to a very susceptible
patient.--TRANS.
An issue which she but dimly realized, Girard, as better enlightened,
viewed with growing alarm. Signs of what was coming began to show
themselves in her bodily health. To crown the entanglement, Laugier
also found herself with child. Those religious meetings, those suppers
watered with the light wine of the country, led to a natural raising
of the spirits of a race so excitable, and the trance that followed
spread from one to another. With the more artful all this was mere
sham; but with the sanguine, vehement Laugier the trance was genuine
enough. In her own little room she had real fits of raving and
swooning, especially when Girard came in. A little later than Cadière
she, too became fruitful.
The danger was great. The girls were neither in a desert nor in the
heart of a convent, but rather, as one might say, in the open street:
Laugier in the midst of prying neighbours, Cadière in her own family.
The latter's brother, the Jacobin, began to take Girard's long visits
amiss. One day when Girard came, he ventured to stay beside her as
though to watch over her safety. Girard boldly turned him out of the
room, and the mother angrily drove her son from the house.
This was very like to bring on an explosion. Of course, the young
man, swelling with rage at this hard usage, at this expulsion from his
home, would cry aloud to the Preaching Friars, who in their turn would
seize so fair an opening, to go about repeating the story and stirring
up the whole town against the Jesuit. The latter, however, resolved to
meet them with a strangely daring move, to save himself by a crime.
The libertine became a scoundrel.
He knew his victim, had seen the scrofulous traces of her childhood,
traces healed up but still looking different from common scars. Some
of these were on her feet, others a little below her bosom. He formed
a devilish plan of renewing the wounds and passing them off as
"_stigmata_," like those procured from heaven by St. Francis and other
saints, who sought after the closest conformity with their pattern,
the crucified Redeemer, even to bearing on themselves the marks of the
nails and the spear-wound in the side. The Jesuits were distressed at
having nought to show against the miracles of the Jansenists. Girard
felt sure of pleasing them by an unlooked-for miracle. He could not
but receive the support of his own order, of their house at Toulon.
One of them, old Sabatier, was ready to believe anything: he had of
yore been Cadière's confessor, and this affair would bring him into
credit. Another of these was Father Grignet, a pious old dotard, who
would see whatever they pleased. If the Carmelites or any others were
minded to have their doubts, they might be taught, by warnings from a
high quarter, to consult their safety by keeping silence. Even the
Jacobin Cadière, hitherto a stern and jealous foe, might find his
account in turning round and believing in a tale which made his family
illustrious and himself the brother of a saint.
"But," some will say, "did not the thing come naturally? We have
instances numberless, and well-attested, of persons really marked with
the sacred wounds."
The reverse is more likely. When she was aware of the new wounds, she
felt ashamed and distressed with the fear of displeasing Girard by
this return of her childish ailments; for such she deemed the sores
which he had opened afresh while she lay unconscious in the trance. So
she sped away to a neighbour, one Madame Truc, who dabbled in physic,
and of her she bought, as if for her youngest brother, an ointment to
burn away the sores.
She would have thought herself guilty of a great sin, if she had not
told everything to Girard. So, however fearful she might be of
displeasing and disgusting him, she spoke of this matter also. Looking
at the wounds, he began playing his comedy, rebuked her attempt to
heal them, and thus set herself against God. They were the marks, he
said, of Heaven. Falling on his knees, he kissed the wounds on her
feet. She crossed herself in self-abasement, struggled long-time
against such a belief. Girard presses and scolds, makes her show him
her side, and looks admiringly at the wound. "I, too," he said, "have
a wound; but mine is within."
And now she is fain to believe in herself as a living miracle. Her
acceptance of a thing so startling was greatly quickened by the fact,
that Sister Remusat was just then dead. She had seen her in glory, her
heart borne upward by the angels. Who was to take her place on earth?
Who should inherit her high gifts, the heavenly favours wherewith she
had been crowned? Girard offered her the succession, corrupting her
through her pride.
From that time she was changed. In her vanity she set down every
natural movement within her as holy. The loathings, the sudden starts
of a woman great with child, of all which she knew nothing, were
accounted for as inward struggles of the Spirit. As she sat at table
with her family on the first day of Lent, she suddenly beheld the
Saviour, who said, "I will lead thee into the desert, where thou shalt
share with Me all the love and all the suffering of the holy Forty
Days." She shuddered for dread of the suffering she must undergo. But
still she would offer up her single self for a whole world of sinners.
Her visions were all of blood; she had nothing but blood before her
eyes. She beheld Jesus like a sieve running blood. She herself began
to spit blood, and lose it in other ways. At the same time her nature
seemed quite changed. The more she suffered, the more amorous she
grew. On the twentieth day of Lent she saw her name coupled with that
of Girard. Her pride, raised and quickened by these new sensations,
enabled her to comprehend the _special sway_ enjoyed by Mary, the
Woman, with respect to God. She felt _how much lower angels are_ than
the least of saints, male or female. She saw the Palace of Glory, and
mistook herself for the Lamb. To crown these illusions she felt
herself lifted off the ground, several feet into the air. She could
hardly believe it, until Mdlle. Gravier, a respectable person, assured
her of the fact. Everyone came, admired, worshipped. Girard brought
his colleague Grignet, who knelt before her and wept with joy.
Not daring to go to her every day, Girard often made her come to the
Jesuits' Church. There, before the altar, before the cross, he
surrendered himself to a passion all the fiercer for such a sacrilege.
Had she no scruples? did she still deceive herself? It seems as if, in
the midst of an elation still unfeigned and earnest, her conscience
was already dazed and darkened. Under cover of her bleeding wounds,
those cruel favours of her heavenly Spouse, she began to feel some
curious compensations....
In her reveries there are two points especially touching. One is the
pure ideal she had formed of a faithful union, when she fancied that
she saw her name and that of Girard joined together for ever in the
Book of Life. The other is her kindliness of heart, the charmingly
childlike nature which shines out through all her extravagances. On
Palm Sunday, looking at the joyous party around their family table,
she wept three hours together, for thinking that "on that very day no
one had asked Jesus to dinner."
Through all that Lent, she could hardly eat anything: the little she
took was thrown up again. The last fifteen days she fasted altogether,
until she reached the last stage of weakness. Who would have believed
that against this dying girl, to whom nothing remained but the mere
breath, Girard could practise new barbarities? He had kept her sores
from closing. A new one was now formed on her right side. And at last,
on Good Friday, he gave the finishing touch to his cruel comedy, by
making her wear a crown of iron-wire, which pierced her forehead,
until drops of blood rolled down her face. All this was done without
much secresy. He began by cutting off her long hair and carrying it
away. He ordered the crown of one Bitard, a cagemaker in the town. She
did not show herself to her visitors with the crown on: they saw the
result only, the drops of blood and the bleeding visage. Impressions
of the latter, like so many _Veronicas_,[111] were taken off on
napkins, and doubtless given away by Girard to people of great piety.
[111] After the saint of that name, whose handkerchief
received the impress of Christ's countenance.--TRANS.
The mother, in her own despite, became an abettor in all this
juggling. In truth, she was afraid of Girard; she began to find him
capable of anything, and somebody, perhaps the Guiol, had told her, in
the deepest confidence, that, if she said a word against him, her
daughter would not be alive twenty-four hours.
Cadière, for her part, never lied about the matter. In the narrative
taken down from her own lips of what happened this Lent, she expressly
tells of a crown, with sharp points, which stuck in her head, and made
it bleed. Nor did she then make any secret of the source whence came
the little crosses she gave her visitors. From a model supplied by
Girard, they were made to her order by one of her kinsfolk, a
carpenter in the Arsenal.
On Good Friday, she remained twenty-four hours in a swoon, which they
called a trance; remained in special charge of Girard, whose
attentions weakened her, and did her deadly harm. She was now three
months gone with child. The saintly martyr, the transfigured marvel,
was already beginning to fill out. Desiring, yet dreading the more
violent issues of a miscarriage, he plied her daily with reddish
powders and dangerous drinks.
Much rather would he have had her die, and so have rid himself of the
whole business. At any rate, he would have liked to get her away from
her mother, to bury her safe in a convent. Well acquainted with houses
of that sort, he knew, as Picard had done in the Louviers affair, how
cleverly and discreetly such cases as Cadière's could be hidden away.
He talked of it this very Good Friday. But she seemed too weak to be
taken safely from her bed. At last, however, four days after Easter, a
miscarriage took place.
The girl Laugier had also been having strange convulsive fits, and
absurd beginnings of _stigmata_: one of them being an old wound,
caused by her scissors when she was working as a seamstress, the other
an eruptive sore in her side. Her transports suddenly turned to
impious despair. She spat upon the crucifix: she cried out against
Girard, "that devil of a priest, who had brought a poor girl of
two-and-twenty into such a plight, only to forsake her afterwards!"
Girard dared not go and face her passionate outbreaks. But the women
about her, being all in his interest, found some way of bringing this
matter to a quiet issue.
Was Girard a wizard, as people afterwards maintained? They might well
think so, who saw how easily, being neither young nor handsome, he had
charmed so many women. Stranger still it was, that after getting thus
compromised, he swayed opinion to such a degree. For a while, he
seemed to have enchanted the whole town.
The truth was, that everyone knew the strength of the Jesuits. Nobody
cared to quarrel with them. It was hardly reckoned safe to speak ill
of them, even in a whisper. The bulk of the priesthood consisted of
monklings of the Mendicant orders, who had no powerful friends or high
connections. The Carmelites themselves, jealous and hurt as they were
at losing Cadière, kept silence. Her brother, the young Jacobin, was
lectured by his trembling mother into resuming his old circumspect
ways. Becoming reconciled to Girard, he came at length to serve him as
devotedly as did his younger brother, even lending himself to a
curious trick by which people were led to believe that Girard had the
gift of prophecy.
* * * * *
Such weak opposition as he might have to fear, would come only from
the very person whom he seemed to have most thoroughly mastered.
Submissive hitherto, Cadière now gave some slight tokens of a coming
independence which could not help showing itself. On the 30th of
April, at a country party got up by the polite Girard, and to which he
sent his troop of young devotees in company with Guiol, Cadière fell
into deep thought. The fair spring-time, in that climate so very
charming, lifted her heart up to God. She exclaimed with a feeling of
true piety, "Thee, Thee only, do I seek, O Lord! Thine angels are not
enough for me." Then one of the party, a blithesome girl, having, in
the Provencial fashion, hung a tambourine round her neck, Cadière
skipped and danced about like the rest; with a rug thrown across her
shoulders, she danced the Bohemian measure, and made herself giddy
with a hundred mad capers.
She was very unsettled. In May she got leave from her mother to make a
trip to Sainte-Baume, to the Church of St. Mary Magdalen, the chief
saint of girls on penance. Girard would only let her go under charge
of two faithful overlookers, Guiol and Reboul. But though she had
still some trances on the way, she showed herself weary of being a
passive tool to the violent spirit, whether divine or devilish, that
annoyed her. The end of her year's _possession_ was not far off. Had
she not won her freedom? Once issued forth from the gloom and
witcheries of Toulon, into the open air, in the midst of nature,
beneath the full sunshine, the prisoner regained her soul, withstood
the stranger spirit, dared to be herself, to use her own will.
Girard's two spies were far from edified thereat. On their return from
this short journey, from the 17th to the 22nd May, they warned him of
the change. He was convinced of it from his own experience. She fought
against the trance, seeming no longer wishful to obey aught save
reason.
He had thought to hold her both by his power of charming and through
the holiness of his high office, and, lastly, by right of possession
and carnal usage. But he had no hold upon her at all. The youthful
soul, which, after all, had not been so much conquered as
treacherously surprised, resumed its own nature. This hurt him.
Besides his business of pedant, his tyranny over the children he
chastised at will, over nuns not less at his disposal, there remained
within a hard bottom of domineering jealousy. He determined to snatch
Cadière back by punishing this first little revolt, if such a name
could be given to the timid fluttering of a soul rising again from its
long compression. On the 22nd May she confessed to him after her wont;
but he refused to absolve her, declaring her to be so guilty that on
the morrow he would have to lay upon her a very great penance indeed.
What would that be? A fast? But she was weakened and wasted already.
Long prayers, again, were not in fashion with Quietist directors,--were
in fact forbidden. There remained the _discipline_, or bodily
chastisement. This punishment, then everywhere habitual, was enforced
as prodigally in convents as in colleges. It was a simple and summary
means of swift execution, sometimes, in a rude and simple age, carried
out in the churches themselves. The _Fabliaux_ show us an artless
picture of manners, where, after confessing husband and wife, the
priest gave them the discipline without any ceremony, just as they
were, behind the confessional. Scholars, monks, nuns, were all
punished in the same way.[112]
[112] The Dauphin was cruelly flogged. A boy of fifteen,
according to St. Simon, died from the pain of a like
infliction. The prioress of the Abbey-in-the-Wood, pleaded
before the King against the "afflictive chastisement"
threatened by her superior. For the credit of the convent,
she was spared the public shame; but the superior, to whom
she was consigned, doubtless punished her in a quiet way. The
immoral tendency of such a practice became more and more
manifest. Fear and shame led to woeful entreaties and
unworthy bargains.
Girard knew that a girl like Cadière, all unused to shame, and very
modest--for what she had hitherto suffered took place unknown to
herself in her sleep--would feel so cruelly tortured, so fatally
crushed by this unseemly chastisement, as utterly to lose what little
buoyancy she had. She was pretty sure too, if we must speak out, to be
yet more cruelly mortified than other women, in respect of the pang
endured by her woman's vanity. With so much suffering, and so many
fasts, followed by her late miscarriage, her body, always delicate,
seemed worn away to a shadow. All the more surely would she shrink
from any exposure of a form so lean, so wasted, so full of aches. Her
swollen legs and such-like small infirmities would serve to enhance
her humiliation.
We lack the courage to relate what followed. It may all be read in
those three depositions, so artless, so manifestly unfeigned, in
which, without being sworn, she made it her duty to avow what
self-interest bade her conceal, owning even to things which were
afterwards turned to the cruellest account against her.
Her first deposition was made on the spur of the moment, before the
spiritual judge who was sent to take her by surprise. In this we seem
to be ever hearing the utterances of a young heart that speaks as
though in God's own presence. The second was taken before the King--I
should rather say before the magistrate who represented him, the
Lieutenant Civil and Criminal of Toulon. The last was heard before
the great assembly of the Parliament of Aix.
Observe that all three, agreeing as they do wonderfully together, were
printed at Aix under the eye of her enemies, in a volume where, as I
shall presently prove, an attempt was made to extenuate the guilt of
Girard, and fasten the reader's gaze on every point likely to tell
against Cadière. And yet the editor could not help inserting
depositions like these, which bear with crushing weight on the man he
sought to uphold.
It was a monstrous piece of inconsistency on Girard's part. He first
frightened the poor girl, and then suddenly took a base, a cruel
advantage of her fears.
In this case no plea of love can be offered in extenuation. The truth
is far otherwise: he loved her no more. And this forms the most
dreadful part of the story. We have seen how cruelly he drugged her;
we have now to see her utterly forsaken. He owed her a grudge for
being of greater worth than those other degraded women. He owed her a
grudge for having unwittingly tempted him and brought him into danger.
Above all, he could not forgive her for keeping her soul in safety. He
sought only to tame her down, but caught hopefully at her oft-renewed
assurance, "I feel that I shall not live." Villanous profligate that
he was, bestowing his shameful kisses on that poor shattered body
whose death he longed to see!
How did he account to her for this shocking antagonism of cruelty and
caresses? Was it meant to try her patience and obedience, or did he
boldly pass on to the true depths of Molinos' teaching, that "only by
dint of sinning can sin be quelled"? Did she take it all in full
earnest, never perceiving that all this show of justice, penitence,
expiation, was downright profligacy and nothing else?
She did not care to understand him in the strange moral crash that
befell her after that 23rd May, under the influence of a mild warm
June. She submitted to her master, of whom she was rather afraid, and
with a singularly servile passion carried on the farce of undergoing
small penances day by day. So little regard did Girard show for her
feelings that he never hid from her his relations with other women.
All he wanted was to get her into a convent. Meanwhile she was his
plaything: she saw him, let him have his way. Weak, and yet further
weakened by the shame that unnerved her, growing sadder and more sad
at heart, she had now but little hold on life, and would keep on
saying, in words that brought no sorrow to Girard's soul, "I feel that
I shall soon be dead."