CONVENTS.--NEIGHBOURHOOD OF CONVENTS.--CONVENTS IN THE SEVENTEENTH
CENTURY.--CONTRAST WITH THE MIDDLE AGE.--THE DIRECTOR.--DISPUTE ABOUT
THE DIRECTION OF THE NUNS.--THE JESUITS TRIUMPH THROUGH CALUMNY.
An ingenuous and intellectual German lady told me one day that, when
she came with her husband to Paris for the first time, they had
wandered about in a grand but very dull quarter of the town, where they
made an infinite number of turns and windings without being able to
find their way. They had entered by a public garden, and found at last
another public garden that brought them out again at the quay. I saw
that she meant the learned and pious neighbourhood which contains so
many convents and colleges, and reaches from the Luxembourg to the
"Jardin des Plantes."
"I saw," said this lady, "whole streets with gardens, surrounded with
high walls, that reminded me of the deserted districts of Rome, where
the _malaria_ prevails, with this difference, that these were not
deserted, but, as it were, mysteriously inhabited, shut up,
mistrustful, and inhospitable. Other streets, exceedingly dark, were
in a manner buried between two rows of lofty grey houses with no front
aspect, and which showed, as it were in derision, their walled-up
windows, or their rivetted lattices, turned upside down, by which one
may see--nothing. We asked our way several times, and it was often
pointed out to us; but somehow or other, after having gone up and down
and up again, we ever found ourselves at the same point. Our _ennui_
and fatigue increased. We invincibly and fatally met with the same
dull streets, and the same dismal houses sullenly shut, which seemed to
look at us with an evil eye. Exhausted at last, and seeing no end to
the puzzle, oppressed more and more by a certain dispiriting influence
that seemed to ooze from these walls, I sat down upon a stone and began
to weep."
A dispiriting lassitude does indeed seize and oppress our hearts at the
very sight of these disagreeable-looking houses; the most cheerful are
the hospitals. Having been for the most part built or rebuilt in those
times of solemn dulness, the reigns of Louis XIII. and Louis XIV.,
there is nothing about them to remind us of the lovely art of the
_renaissance_. The latest memento of that art is the Florentine front
of the Luxembourg Palace. All those houses that were built at a later
period, even those which affect a certain severe luxury (the Sorbonne,
for example), are occasionally great, but never grand. With their
lofty pointed roofs, and stiff straight lines, they have always a dry,
dull, and monotonous appearance, a _priestly_ or _old-maidenish_ look.
In this they scarcely belie themselves, the greater part of them having
been built to accommodate the numberless females belonging to the
nobility and upper class of citizens, who, in order to enrich a son,
condemned their unfortunate daughters to a sad, but decent death.
The monuments of the middle ages have a melancholy, but not a
dispiriting look; we feel, on looking at them, the vigour and sincerity
of the sentiment that inspired their builders. They are not, generally
speaking, official monuments, but living works of the people, the
offspring of their faith. But these, on the contrary, are nothing else
than the creation of a class,--that class of newly-created nobles that
swarmed into life in the seventeenth century by subserviency, the
ante-chamber, and ministerial offices. They are hospitals opened for
the daughters of these families. Their great number might almost
deceive us as to the strength and extent of the religious re-action of
that time. Look at them well, and tell me, I pray you, whether you can
discern the least trace about them of the ascetic character--are they
religious houses, hospitals, barracks, or colleges? There is nothing
to prove what they are. They would be perfectly fit for any civil
purpose. They have but one character, but it is a very decided one:
serious uniformity, decent mediocrity, and _ennui_.--It is _ennui_
itself, personified in an architectural form--a palpable, tangible, and
visible _ennui_.
The reason of these houses being indefinitely multiplied is, that the
austerity of the ancient rules having been then much modified, parents
had less hesitation in making their daughters take the veil; for it was
no longer burying them alive. The parlours were saloons frequented by
crowds, under the pretext of being edified. Fine ladies came there to
confide their secrets, filling the minds of the nuns with intrigues and
vexations, and troubling them with useless regrets.
These worldly cares caused the interior of the convents to appear to
them still more dismal; for there they had nothing but trifling insipid
ceremonies, a sort of modified austerity, and an idle and empty routine
of monotonous life.
Monastic life was quite a different thing in the middle ages; it was
much more serious. There were then in the convents both more training
for death, and a more active life. The system was, generally speaking,
based upon two principles, which were sincerely and strictly adhered
to: the destruction of the body, and the vivification of the soul. To
war against the body they employed an exterminating fasting, excessive
vigils, and frequent bleeding. For the development of the soul, the
monks and nuns were made to read, transcribe, and sing. Up to the
eleventh century they understood what they sang, as there was but
little difference between Latin and the vulgar tongues of that period.
The service had then a dramatic character, which sustained and
constantly captivated the attention. Many things that have been
reduced to simple words, were then expressed in gestures and
pantomimes; what is now spoken was then _acted_. When they inflicted
upon worship that serious, sober, and wearisome character that it still
wears, the nuns were still allowed, as an indemnification, pious
reading, legends, the lives of saints, and other books that had been
translated. All these consolations were taken from them in the
sixteenth century; the discovery was made, that it was dangerous to
give them too great a taste for reading. In the seventeenth, even
singing appeared to be an object of suspicion to many confessors; they
were afraid the nuns might grow tender in singing the praises of God.[1]
But what did they give them as a substitute? What did they get in
return for all those services which they no longer understood, for
their reading and singing that were now denied them, and for so many
other comforts, of which they were successively deprived?
Was it an inanimate object? No, it was a man; let us speak out
plainly, the _director_. The director was a novelty, hardly known to
the middle ages, contented with the confessor.
Yes, a man is to inherit all this vast vacant place: his conversation
and teaching are to fill up the void. Prayers, reading, if it be
permitted, everything, will be done according to his direction and by
him. God, whom they imbibed in their books, or in their sight, even
God is henceforward dispensed to them by this man--measured out to them
day by day according to the standard of his heart.
Ideas come crowding here--but they must wait; we will examine them
afterwards. Now they would only interrupt the thread of our historical
deduction.
At the first outbreak of religious re-action, the nuns were generally
governed by the friars of their order. The Bernardin nuns were
directed by the Bernardin friars, the Carmelite nuns by the Carmelite
friars, and the nuns of St. Elizabeth by the Picpus friars. The
Capuchin nuns were not only confessed by their friars, but were fed at
their expense, and by the produce of their begging.[2]
The monks did not long preserve this exclusive possession. For more
than a quarter of a century, priests, monks, and friars of every order,
carried on a furious war against one another on this question. This
mysterious empire of shut-up and dependent women, over whom unlimited
sway may be held, was, not without reason, the common aim of the
ambition of all. Such houses, apparently quiet and strangers to the
world, nevertheless are always _grand centres of action_. Here was an
immense power for the orders that should get possession of it; and for
individuals, whether priests or friars, it was (let them confess it, or
not) an affair of passion.
What I say here, I say of the purest and most austere, who are often
the most tender. The honourable attachment of Cardinal Berulle for the
Carmelite nuns, whom he had brought here, was know to everybody. He
had lodged them near his house; he visited them every hour of the day,
and even in the evening. The Jesuits said _at night_. It was to them
he went when he was ill, in order to get better. When Paris was
infested by a plague, he said he would not leave it, "on account of his
nuns."
The Oratorians and the Jesuits, naturally enemies and adversaries,
joined together at first in a common cause to remove the Carmelite
friars from the direction of these nuns; but no sooner had they
succeeded, than they began to dispute with each other.
The austere order of the Carmelites, which spread but little in France,
obtained its importance as the _beau ideal_ of penitence, a sort of
religious poetry. The enthusiastic spirit of Saint Theresa still
animated them. There it was that the most violent converts came to
seek refuge; and there it was, also, that those whose wounds were too
deep, and who, like Madame de la Valliere, sought death as their last
resource, came to die.
But the two great institutions of this age, those which expressed its
spirit and had an immense development, were the Visitandines and the
Ursulines. The former had, in the reign of Louis XIV., about a hundred
and fifty monasteries, and the latter from three to four hundred.
The Visitandines were, as is well known, the most gentle of these
orders: they awaited the coming of their divine Bridegroom in a state
of inaction; and their sluggish life was well calculated to make them
visionaries. We know the astonishing success of Marie Alocoque, and
how it was turned to account by the Jesuits.
The Ursulines, a more useful body, devoted themselves to education. In
the three hundred and fifty convents which belonged to them in this
century, they educated, at the smallest computation, thirty-five
thousand young girls. This vast establishment for education, directed
by skilful hands, might, indeed, become a political engine of enormous
power.
The Ursulines and the Visitandines were governed by bishops, who
appointed their confessors. St. Francois de Sales, so excellent a
friend to the Jesuits and friars in general, had showed himself
distrustful of them in the subject that was dearest to his heart, that
of the Visitation:--"My opinion is (says he) that these good girls do
not know what they want, if they wish to submit themselves to the
superiority of the friars, who, indeed, are excellent servants of God;
but it always goes hard for girls to be governed by the orders, _who
are accustomed to take from them the holy liberty of the mind_."[3]
It is but too easy to perceive how the orders of women servilely
reproduced the minds of the men who directed them. Thus, the devotion
of those who were governed by monks was characterised by every species
of caprice, eccentricity, and violence; whilst they who were under the
direction of secular priests, such as the Oratorians and the
Doctrinaires, show some faint traces of reason, together with a sort of
narrow-minded, common-place, and unproductive wisdom.
The nuns, who received from the bishops their ordinary confessors,
chose for themselves an extraordinary one besides, who, as being
extraordinary, did not fail to supplant and annul the former: the
latter was, in most cases, a Jesuit. Thus the new orders of the
Ursulines and Visitandines, created by priests, who had endeavoured to
keep friars out of them, fell, nevertheless, under the influence of the
latter: the priests sowed, but the Jesuits reaped the harvest.
Nothing did greater service to the cause of the Jesuits than their
constantly repeating that their austere founder had expressly forbidden
them ever to govern the convents of women. This was true, as applied
to convents generally, but false as regarded nuns in particular, and
their special direction. They did not, indeed, govern them
_collectively_, but they directed them _individually_.
The Jesuit was not pestered with the daily detail of spiritual
management, or the small fry of trifling faults. He did not fatigue;
he only interfered at the right time; he was particularly useful in
dispensing the nuns from telling the confessor what they wished to
conceal. The latter became, by degrees, a sort of husband, whom they
might disregard.
If he happened, indeed, to have any firmness in his composition, or to
be able to exercise any influence, the others worked hard to get rid of
him by force of calumny. We may form an opinion of the audacity of the
Jesuits in this particular, since they did not fear to attack the
Cardinal de Berulle himself, notwithstanding his power.[4] One of his
relatives, living with the Carmelites, having become pregnant, they
boldly accused him of the crime, though he had never set his foot
within the convent. Finding no one to believe them, and seeing they
would gain nothing by attacking him on the score of morality, they
joined in a general outcry against his books. "They contained the
hidden poison of a dangerous mysticism: the cardinal was too tender,
too indulgent, and too weak, both as a theologian and _a director_."
Astounding impudence! when everybody knew and saw what sort of
directors they were themselves!
This, however, had, in time, the desired effect, if not against
Berulle, at least against the Oratory, who became disgusted with, and
afraid of, the direction of the nuns, and at last abandoned it.
This is a remarkable example of the all-powerful effects of _Calumny_,
when organised on a grand scale by a numerous body, vented by them, and
continually sung in chorus. A band of thirty thousand men repeating
the same thing every day throughout the Christian world! Who could
resist that? This is the very essence of Jesuitical art, in which they
are unrivalled. At the very creation of their order, a sentence was
applied to them, similar to those well-known verses in which Virgil
speaks of the Romans:--
"Excudent alii spirantia mollius aera," &c., &c.
Others shall animate brass, or give life to marble; the Romans shall
excel in other arts. "Remember, Jesuit, thy art is calumny."
[1] Chateaubriand, Vie de Rance, pp. 227-229.
[2] See Heliot; and, for Paris especially, Felibien.
[3] OEuvres, vol. xi. p. 120 (ed. 3318.)
[4] Tabaraud, Life of Berulle, vol. i. passim.