It is time now to retrace my steps to the point from which I have been
led away in relating all the incidents which arose out of the terrible
winter and the scarcity it caused.
The Court at that time beheld the renewal of a ministry; which from the
time it had lasted was worn down to its very roots, and which was on
that account only the more agreeable to the King. On the 20th of
January, the Pere La Chaise, the confessor of the King, died at a very
advanced age. He was of good family, and his father would have been rich
had he not had a dozen children. Pere La Chaise succeeded in 1675 to
Pere Ferrier as confessor of the King, and occupied that post thirty-two
years. The festival of Easter often caused him politic absences during
the attachment of the King for Madame de Montespan. On one occasion he
sent in his place the Pere Deschamps, who bravely refused absolution.
The Pere La Chaise was of mediocre mind but of good character, just,
upright, sensible, prudent, gentle, and moderate, an enemy of informers,
and of violence of every kind. He kept clear of many scandalous
transactions, befriended the Archbishop of Cambrai as much as he could,
refused to push the Port Royal des Champs to its destruction, and always
had on his table a copy of the New Testament of Pere Quesnel, saying that
he liked what was good wherever he found it. When near his eightieth
year, with his head and his health still good, he wished to retire, but
the King would not hear of it. Soon after, his faculties became worn
out, and feeling this, he repeated his wish. The Jesuits, who perceived
his failing more than he did himself, and felt the diminution of his
credit, exhorted him to make way for another who should have the grace
and zeal of novelty. For his part he sincerely desired repose, and he
pressed the King to allow him to take it, but all in vain. He was
obliged to bear his burthen to the very end. Even the infirmities and
the decrepitude that afflicted could not deliver him. Decaying legs,
memory extinguished, judgment collapsed, all his faculties confused,
strange inconveniences for a confessor--nothing could disgust the King,
and he persisted in having this corpse brought to him and carrying on
customary business with it. At last, two days after a return from
Versailles, he grew much weaker, received the sacrament, wrote with his
own hand a long letter to the King, received a very rapid and hurried one
in reply, and soon after died at five o'clock in the morning very
peaceably. His confessor asked him two things, whether he had acted
according to his conscience, and whether he had thought of the interests
and honour of the company of Jesuits; and to both these questions he
answered satisfactorily.
The news was brought to the King as he came out of his cabinet. He
received it like a Prince accustomed to losses, praised the Pere La
Chaise for his goodness, and then said smilingly, before all the
courtiers, and quite aloud, to the two fathers who had come to announce
the death: "He was so good that I sometimes reproached him for it, and he
used to reply to me: 'It is not I who am good; it is you who are hard.'"
Truly the fathers and all the auditors were so surprised at this that
they lowered their eyes. The remark spread directly; nobody was able to
blame the Pere La Chaise. He was generally regretted, for he had done
much good and never harm except in self-defence. Marechal, first surgeon
of the King, and possessed of his confidence, related once to me and
Madame de Saint-Simon, a very important anecdote referring to this time.
He said that the King, talking to him privately of the Pere La Chaise,
and praising him for his attachment, related one of the great proofs he
had given of it. A few years before his death the Pere said that he felt
getting old, and that the King might soon have to choose a new confessor;
he begged that that confessor might be chosen from among the Jesuits,
that he knew them well, that they were far from deserving all that had
been said against them, but still--he knew them well--and that attachment
for the King and desire for his safety induced him to conjure him to act
as he requested; because the company contained many sorts of minds and
characters which could not be answered for, and must not be reduced to
despair, and that the King must not incur a risk--that in fact an unlucky
blow is soon given, and had been given before then. Marechal turned pale
at this recital of the King, and concealed as well as he could the
disorder it caused in him. We must remember that Henry IV. recalled the
Jesuits, and loaded them with gifts merely from fear of them. The King
was not superior to Henry IV. He took care not to forget the
communication of the Pere La Chaise, or expose himself to the vengeance
of the company by choosing a confessor out of their limits. He wanted to
live, and to live in safety. He requested the Ducs de Chevreuse and de
Beauvilliers to make secret inquiries for a proper person. They fell
into a trap made, were dupes themselves, and the Church and State the
victims.
The Pere Tellier, in fact, was chosen as successor of Pere La Chaise, and
a terrible successor he made. Harsh, exact, laborious, enemy of all
dissipation, of all amusement, of all society, incapable of associating
even with his colleagues, he demanded no leniency for himself and
accorded none to others. His brain and his health were of iron; his
conduct was so also; his nature was savage and cruel. He was profoundly
false, deceitful, hidden under a thousand folds; and when he could show
himself and make himself feared, he yielded nothing, laughed at the most
express promises when he no longer cared to keep to them, and pursued
with fury those who had trusted to them. He was the terror even of the
Jesuits, and was so violent to them that they scarcely dared approach
him. His exterior kept faith with his interior. He would have been
terrible to meet in a dark lane. His physiognomy was cloudy, false,
terrible; his eyes were burning, evil, extremely squinting; his aspect
struck all with dismay. The whole aim of his life was to advance the
interests of his Society; that was his god; his life had been absorbed in
that study: surprisingly ignorant, insolent, impudent, impetuous, without
measure and without discretion, all means were good that furthered his
designs.
The first time Pere Tellier saw the King in his cabinet, after having
been presented to him, there was nobody but Bloin and Fagon in a corner.
Fagon, bent double and leaning on his stick, watched the interview and
studied the physiognomy of this new personage his duckings, and
scrapings, and his words. The King asked him if he were a relation of
MM. le Tellier. The good father humbled himself in the dust. "I, Sire!"
answered he, "a relative of MM. le Tellier! I am very different from
that. I am a poor peasant of Lower Normandy, where my father was a
farmer." Fagon, who watched him in every movement, twisted himself up to
look at Bloin, and said, pointing to the Jesuit: "Monsieur, what a cursed
--------!" Then shrugging his shoulders, he curved over his stick again.
It turned out that he was not mistaken in his strange judgment of a
confessor. This Tellier made all the grimaces, not to say the
hypocritical monkey-tricks of a man who was afraid of his place, and only
took it out of, deference to his company.
I have dwelt thus upon this new confessor, because from him have come the
incredible tempests under, which the Church, the State, knowledge, and
doctrine, and many good people of all kinds, are still groaning; and,
because I had a more intimate acquaintance with this terrible personage
than had any man at the Court. He introduced himself to me in fact, to
my surprise; and although I did all in my power to shun his acquaintance,
I could not succeed. He was too dangerous a man to be treated with
anything but great prudence.
During the autumn of this year, he gave a sample of his quality in the
part he took in the destruction of the celebrated monastery of Port Royal
des Champs. I need not dwell at any great length upon the origin and
progress of the two religious parties, the Jansenists and the Molinists;
enough has been written on both sides to form a whole library. It is
enough for me to say that the Molinists were so called because they
adopted the views expounded by, the Pere Molina in a book he wrote
against the doctrines of St. Augustine and of the Church of Rome, upon
the subject of spiritual grace. The Pere Molina was a Jesuit, and it was
by the Jesuits his book was brought forward and supported. Finding,
however, that the views it expounded met with general opposition, not
only throughout France, but at Rome, they had recourse to their usual
artifices on feeling themselves embarrassed, turned themselves into
accusers instead of defendants, and invented a heresy that had neither
author nor follower, which they attributed to Cornelius Jansenius, Bishop
of Ypres. Many and long were the discussions at Rome upon this ideal
heresy, invented by the Jesuits solely for the purpose of weakening the
adversaries of Molina. To oppose his doctrines was to be a Jansenist.
That in substance was what was meant by Jansenism.
At the monastery of Port Royal des Champs, a number of holy and learned
personages lived in retirement. Some wrote, some gathered youths around
them, and instructed them in science and piety. The finest moral works,
works which have thrown the most light upon the science and practice, of
religion, and have been found so by everybody, issued from their hands.
These men entered into the quarrel against Molinism. This was enough to
excite against them the hatred of the Jesuits and to determine that body
to attempt their destruction.
They were accused of Jansenism, and defended themselves perfectly; but at
the same time they carried the war into the enemy's camp, especially by
the ingenious "Provincial Letters" of the famous Pascal.
The quarrel grew more hot between the Jesuits and Port Royal, and was
telling against the former, when the Pere Tellier brought all his
influence to bear, to change the current of success. He was, as I have
said, an ardent man, whose divinity was his Molinism, and the company to
which he belonged. Confessor to the King, he saw himself in a good
position to exercise unlimited authority. He saw that the King was very
ignorant, and prejudiced upon all religious matters; that he was
surrounded by people as ignorant and as prejudiced as himself, Madame de
Maintenon, M. de Beauvilliers, M. de Chevreuse, and others, and he
determined to take good advantage of this state of things.
Step by step he gained over the King to his views, and convinced him that
the destruction of the monastery of Port Royal des Champs was a duty
which he owed to his conscience, and the cause of religion. This point
gained, the means to destroy the establishment were soon resolved on.
There was another monastery called Port Royal, at Paws, in addition to
the one in question. It was now pretended that the latter had only been
allowed to exist by tolerance, and that it was necessary one should cease
to exist. Of the two, it was alleged that it was better to preserve the
one, at Paris. A decree in council was, therefore, rendered, in virtue
of which, on the night from the 28th to the 29th of October, the abbey of
Port Royal des Champs was secretly invested by troops, and, on the next
morning, the officer in command made all the inmates assemble, showed
them a 'lettre de cachet', and, without giving them more than a quarter
of an hour's warning, carried off everybody and everything. He had
brought with him many coaches, with an elderly woman in each; he put the
nuns in these coaches, and sent them away to their destinations, which
were different monasteries, at ten, twenty, thirty, forty, and even fifty
leagues distant, each coach accompanied by mounted archers, just as
public women are carried away from a house of ill-fame! I pass in
silence all the accompaniments of this scene, so touching and so
strangely new. There have been entire volumes written upon it.
The treatment that these nuns received in their various prisons, in order
to force them to sign a condemnation of themselves, is the matter of
other volumes, which, in spite of the vigilance of the oppressors, were
soon in everybody's hands; public indignation so burst out, that the
Court and the Jesuits even were embarrassed with it. But the Pere
Tellier was not a man to stop half-way anywhere. He finished this matter
directly; decree followed decree, 'Lettres de cachet' followed 'lettres
de cachet'. The families who had relatives buried in the cemetery of
Port Royal des Champs were ordered to exhume and carry them elsewhere.
All the others were thrown into the cemetery of an adjoining parish, with
the indecency that may: be imagined. Afterwards, the house, the church,
and all the buildings were razed to the ground, so that not one stone was
left upon another. All the materials were sold, the ground was ploughed
up, and sown--not with salt, it is true, but that was all the favour it
received! The scandal at this reached even to Rome. I have restricted
myself to this simple and short recital of an expedition so military and
so odious.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Compelled to pay, who would have preferred giving voluntarily
Conjugal impatience of the Duc de Bourgogne
Desmarets no longer knew of what wood to make a crutch
He was so good that I sometimes reproached him for it
Indiscreet and tyrannical charity
Jesuits: all means were good that furthered his designs
Said that if they were good, they were sure to be hated