LAST YEARS OF MGR. DE LAVAL
Illness had obliged Mgr. de Laval to hand in his resignation. He wrote,
in fact, at this period of his life to M. de Denonville: "I have been
for the last two years subject to attacks of vertigo accompanied by
heart troubles which are very frequent and increase markedly. I have had
one quite recently, on the Monday of the Passion, which seized me at
three o'clock in the morning, and I could not raise my head from my
bed." His infirmities, which he bore to the end with admirable
resignation, especially affected his limbs, which he was obliged to
bandage tightly every morning, and which could scarcely bear the weight
of his body. To disperse the unwholesome humours, his arm had been
cauterized; to cut, carve and hack the poor flesh of humanity formed, as
we know, the basis of the scientific and medical equipment of the
period. These sufferings, which he brought as a sacrifice to our Divine
Master, were not sufficient for him; he continued in spite of them to
wear upon his body a coarse hair shirt. He had to serve him only one of
those Brothers who devoted their labour to the seminary in exchange for
their living and a place at table. This modest servant, named Houssart,
had replaced a certain Lemaire, of whom the prelate draws a very
interesting portrait in one of his letters: "We must economize," he
wrote to the priests of the seminary, "and have only watchful and
industrious domestics. We must look after them, else they deteriorate in
the seminary. You have the example of the baker, Louis Lemaire, an
idler, a gossip, a tattler, a man who, instead of walking behind the
coach, would not go unless Monseigneur paid for a carriage for him to
follow him to La Rochelle, and lent him his dressing-gown to protect him
from the cold. Formerly he worked well at heavy labour at Cap Tourmente;
idleness has ruined him in the seminary. As soon as he had reached my
room, he behaved like a man worn out, always complaining, coming to help
me to bed only when the fancy took him; always extremely vain, thinking
he was not dressed according to his position, although he was clad, as
you know, more like a nobleman than a peasant, which he was, for I had
taken him as a beggar and almost naked at La Rochelle.... As soon as he
entered my room he sat down, and rather than be obliged to pretend to
see him, I turned my seat so as not to see him.... We should have left
that man at heavy work, which had in some sort conquered his folly and
pride, and it is possible that he might have been saved. But he has been
entirely ruined in the seminary...." This humorous description proves to
us well that even in the good old days not all domestics were perfect.
The affectionate and respectful care given by Houssart to his master
was such as is not bought with money. Most devoted to the prelate, he
has left us a very edifying relation of the life of the venerable
bishop, with some touching details. He wrote after his death: "Having
had the honour of being continually attached to the service of his
Lordship during the last twenty years of his holy life, and his Lordship
having had during all that time a great charity towards me and great
confidence in my care, you cannot doubt that I contracted a great
sympathy, interest and particular attachment for his Lordship." In
another letter he speaks to us of the submission of the venerable bishop
to the commands of the Church. "He did his best," he writes,
"notwithstanding his great age and continual infirmities, to observe all
days of abstinence and fasting, both those which are commanded by Holy
Church and those which are observed from reasons of devotion in the
seminary, and if his Lordship sometimes yielded in this matter to the
command of the physicians and the entreaties of the superiors of the
seminary, who deemed that he ought not to fast, it was a great
mortification for him, and it was only out of especial charity to his
dear seminary and the whole of Canada that he yielded somewhat to nature
in order not to die so soon...."
Never, in spite of his infirmities, would the prelate fail to be present
on Sunday at the cathedral services. When it was impossible for him to
go on foot, he had himself carried. His only outings towards the end of
his life consisted in his visits to the cathedral or in short walks
along the paths of his garden. Whenever his health permitted, he loved
to be present at the funerals of those who died in the town; those
consolations which he deigned to give to the afflicted families bear
witness to the goodness of his heart. "It was something admirable," says
Houssart, "to see, firstly, his assiduity in being present at the burial
of all who died in Quebec, and his promptness in offering the holy
sacrifice of the mass for the repose of their souls, as soon as he had
learned of their decease; secondly, his devotion in receiving and
preserving the blessed palms, in kissing his crucifix, the image of the
Holy Virgin, which he carried always upon him, and placed at nights
under his pillow, his badge of servitude and his scapulary which he
carried also upon him; thirdly, his respect and veneration for the
relics of the saints, the pleasure which he took in reading every day in
the _Lives of the Saints_, and in conversing of their heroic deeds;
fourthly, the holy and constant use which he made of holy water, taking
it wherever he might be in the course of the day and every time he awoke
in the night, coming very often from his garden to his room expressly to
take it, carrying it upon him in a little silver vessel, which he had
had made purposely, when he went to the country. His Lordship had so
great a desire that every one should take it that he exercised
particular care in seeing every day whether the vessels of the church
were supplied with it, to fill them when they were empty; and during the
winter, for fear that the vessels should freeze too hard and the people
could not take any as they entered and left the church, he used to bring
them himself every evening and place them by our stove, and take them
back at four o'clock in the morning when he went to open the doors."
With a touching humility the pious old man scrupulously conformed to the
rules of the seminary and to the orders of the superior of the house.
Only a few days before his death, he experienced such pain that Brother
Houssart declared his intention of going and asking from the superior of
the seminary a dispensation for the sick man from being present at the
services. At once the patient became silent; in spite of his tortures
not a complaint escaped his lips. It was Holy Wednesday: it was
impossible to be absent on that day from religious ceremonies. We do not
know which to admire most in such an attitude, whether the piety of the
prelate or his submission to the superior of the seminary, since he
would have been resigned if he had been forbidden to go to church, or,
finally, his energy in stifling the groans which suffering wrenched from
his physical nature. Few saints carried mortification and renunciation
of terrestrial good as far as he. "He is certainly the most austere man
in the world and the most indifferent to worldly advantage," wrote
Mother Mary of the Incarnation. "He gives away everything and lives like
a pauper; and we may truly say that he has the very spirit of poverty.
It is not he who will make friends for worldly advancement and to
increase his revenue; he is dead to all that.... He practises this
poverty in his house, in his living, in his furniture, in his servants,
for he has only one gardener, whom he lends to the poor when they need
one, and one valet...." This picture falls short of the truth. For forty
years he arose at two o'clock in the morning, summer and winter: in his
last years illness could only wrest from him one hour more of repose,
and he arose then at three o'clock. As soon as he was dressed, he
remained at prayer till four and then went to church. He opened the
doors himself, and rang the bells for mass, which he said, half an hour
later, especially for the poor workmen, who began their day by this
pious exercise.
His thanksgiving after the holy sacrifice lasted till seven o'clock, and
yet, even in the greatest cold of the severe Canadian winter, he had
nothing to warm his frozen limbs but the brazier which he had used to
celebrate the mass. A good part of his day, and often of the night, when
his sufferings deprived him of sleep, was also devoted to prayer or
spiritual reading, and nothing was more edifying than to see the pious
octogenarian telling his beads or reciting his breviary while walking
slowly through the paths of his garden. He was the first up and the last
to retire, and whatever had been his occupations during the day, never
did he lie down without having scrupulously observed all the spiritual
offices, readings or reciting of beads. It was not, however, that his
food gave him a superabundance of physical vigour, for the Trappists did
not eat more frugally than he. A soup, which he purposely spoiled by
diluting it amply with hot water, a little meat and a crust of very dry
bread composed his ordinary fare, and dessert, even on feast days, was
absolutely banished from his table. "For his ordinary drink," says
Brother Houssart, "he took only hot water slightly flavoured with wine;
and every one knows that his Lordship never took either cordial or
dainty wines, or any mixture of sweets of any sort whatever, whether to
drink or to eat, except that in his last years I succeeded in making him
take every evening after his broth, which was his whole supper, a piece
of biscuit as large as one's thumb, in a little wine, to aid him to
sleep. I may say without exaggeration that his whole life was one
continual fast, for he took no breakfast, and every evening only a
slight collation.... He used his whole substance in alms and pious
works; and when he needed anything, such as clothes, linen, etc., he
asked it from the seminary like the humblest of his ecclesiastics. He
was most modest in matters of dress, and I had great difficulty in
preventing him from wearing his clothes when they were old, dirty and
mended. During twenty years he had but two winter cassocks, which he
left behind him on his death, the one still quite good, the other all
threadbare and mended. To be brief, there was no one in the seminary
poorer in dress...." Mgr. de Laval set an example of the principal
virtues which distinguish the saints; so he could not fail in that which
our Lord incessantly recommends to His disciples, charity! He no longer
possessed anything of his own, since he had at the outset abandoned his
patrimony to his brother, and since later on he had given to the
seminary everything in his possession. But charity makes one ingenious:
by depriving himself of what was strictly necessary, could he not yet
come to the aid of his brothers in Jesus Christ? "Never was prelate,"
says his eulogist, M. de la Colombière, "more hostile to grandeur and
exaltation.... In scorning grandeur, he triumphed over himself by a
poverty worthy of the anchorites of the first centuries, whose rules he
faithfully observed to the end of his days. Grace had so thoroughly
absorbed in the heart of the prelate the place of the tendencies of our
corrupt nature that he seemed to have been born with an aversion to
riches, pleasures and honours.... If you have noticed his dress, his
furniture and his table, you must be aware that he was a foe to pomp and
splendour. There is no village priest in France who is not better
nourished, better clad and better lodged than was the Bishop of Quebec.
Far from having an equipage suitable to his rank and dignity he had not
even a horse of his own. And when, towards the end of his days, his
great age and his infirmities did not allow him to walk, if he wished to
go out he had to borrow a carriage. Why this economy? In order to have a
storehouse full of garments, shoes and blankets, which he distributed
gratuitously, with paternal kindness and prudence. This was a business
which he never ceased to ply, in which he trusted only to himself, and
with which he concerned himself up to his death."
The charity of the prelate was boundless. Not only at the hospital of
Quebec did he visit the poor and console them, but he even rendered them
services the most repugnant to nature. "He has been seen," says M. de la
Colombière, "on a ship where he behaved like St. François-Xavier, where,
ministering to the sailors and the passengers, he breathed the bad air
and the infection which they exhaled; he has been seen to abandon in
their favour all his refreshments, and to give them even his bed, sheets
and blankets. To administer the sacraments to them he did not fear to
expose his life and the lives of the persons who were most dear to him."
When he thus attended the sick who were attacked by contagious fever, he
did his duty, even more than his duty; but when he went, without
absolute need, and shared in the repugnant cares which the most devoted
servants of Christ in the hospitals undertake only after struggles and
heroic victory over revolted nature he rose to sublimity. It was because
he saw in the poor the suffering members of the Saviour; to love the
poor man, it is not enough to wish him well, we must respect him, and we
cannot respect him as much as any child of God deserves without seeing
in him the image of Jesus Christ himself. No one acquires love for God
without being soon wholly enkindled by it; thus it was no longer
sufficient for Mgr. de Laval to instruct and console the poor and the
sick, he served them also in the most abject duties, going as far as to
wash with his own hands their sores and ulcers. A madman, the world will
say; why not content one's self with attending those people without
indulging in the luxury of heroism so repugnant? This would have
sufficed indeed to relieve nature, but would it have taught those
incurable and desperate cases that they were the first friends of Jesus
Christ, that the Church looked upon them as its jewels, and that their
fate from the point of view of eternity was enviable to all? It would
have relieved without consoling and raising the poor man to the height
which belongs to him in Christian society. Official assistance, with the
best intentions in the world, the most ingenious organization and the
most perfect working, can, however, never be charity in the perfectly
Christian sense of this word. If it could allay all needs and heal all
sores it would still have accomplished only half of the task: relieving
the body without reaching the soul. And man does not live by bread
alone. He who has been disinherited of the boons of fortune, family and
health, he who is incurable and who despairs of human joys needs
something else besides the most comfortable hospital room that can be
imagined; he needs the words which fell from the lips of God: "Blessed
are the poor, blessed are they that suffer, blessed are they that
mourn." He needs a pitying heart, a tender witness to indigence nobly
borne, a respectful friend of his misfortune, still more than that, a
worshipper of Jesus hidden in the persons of the poor, the orphan and
the sick. They have become rare in the world, these real friends of the
poor; the more assistance has become organized, the more charity seems
to have lost its true nature; and perhaps we might find in this state of
things a radical explanation for those implacable social antagonisms,
those covetous desires, those revolts followed by endless repression,
which bring about revolutions, and by them all manner of tyranny. Let us
first respect the poor, let us love them, let us sincerely admire their
condition as one ennobled by God, if we wish them to become reconciled
with Him, and reconciled with the world. When the rich man is a
Christian, generous and respectful of the poor, when he practises the
virtues which most belong to his social position, the poor man is very
near to conforming to those virtues which Providence makes his more
immediate duty, humility, obedience, resignation to the will of God and
trust in Him and in those who rule in His name. The solution of the
great social problem lies, as it seems to us, in the spiritual love of
the poor. Outside of this, there is only the heathen slave below, and
tyranny above with all its terrors. That is what religious enthusiasm
foresaw in centuries less well organized but more religious than ours.