CHAPTER XI.

NO MORE SYSTEMS;--AN EMBLEM.--BLOOD.--SEX.--THE IMMACULATE WOMAN.--THE

SACRED HEART.--MARIE ALACOQUE.--DOUBLE MEANING OF SACRED HEART.--THE

SEVENTEENTH CENTURY IS THE AGE OF DOUBLE MEANING.--CHIMERICAL POLICY OF

THE JESUITS.--FATHER COLOMBIERE AND MARIE ALACOQUE,

1675.--ENGLAND;--PAPIST CONSPIRACY.--FIRST ALTAR OF THE SACRED HEART,

1685.--RUIN OF THE GALLICANS, 1693;--OF THE QUIETISTS, 1698;--OF PORT

ROYAL, 1709.--THEOLOGY ANNIHILATED IN THE EIGHTEENTH

CENTURY.--MATERIALITY OF THE SACRED HEART.--JESUITICAL ART.

Quietism, so accused of being obscure, was but too evident. It formed

into a system, and established frankly, as supreme perfection, that

state of immobility and impotency which the soul reaches at last, when

it surrenders its activity.

Was it not simplicity itself to prescribe in set terms this lethargic

doctrine, and give out noisily a theory of sleep? "Do not speak so

loud if you want to make people doze?" This is what the theologians,

men of business, instinctively perceived; they cared little for

theology, and only wanted results.

We must do the Jesuits the justice to confess that they were

disinterested enough in speculative opinions. We have seen how, since

Pascal, they themselves wrote against their own casuistry. Since then

they had tried Quietism: at one time they let Fenelon believe they

would support him. But as soon as Louis XIV. had declared himself,

"they ducked like divers," preached against their friend, and

discovered forty errors in the _Maxims of Saints_.

They had never well succeeded as theologians. Silence suited them

better than all their systems. They had got it imposed by the pope

upon the Dominicans, in the very beginning of the century, and

afterwards upon the Jansenists. Since then their affairs went on

better. It was precisely at the time they ceased writing, that they

obtained for the sick king the power of disposing of benefices (1687),

and thus, to the great surprise of the Gallicans, who had thought them

conquered, they became the kings of the clergy of France.

Now, no more ideas, no more systems; they had grown tired of them.

Long ago we mentioned the prevailing lassitude. Besides, there is, we

must confess, in the long lives of men, states, and religions; there

is, I say, a time when, having run from project to project, and from

dream to dream, every idea is hated. In these profoundly material

moments, everything is rejected that is not tangible. Do people then

become positive? No. But they do not return any more to the poetical

symbols which in their youth they had adored. The old doter, in his

second childhood, makes for himself some idol, some palpable, tangible

god, and the coarser it is, the better he succeeds.

This explains the prodigious success with which the Jesuits in this age

of lassitude spread, and caused to be accepted, a new object of

worship, both very carnal and very material--the Heart of Jesus, either

shown through the wound in His partly opened breast, or as plucked out

and bloody.

Nearly the same thing had happened in the decrepitude of paganism.

Religion had taken refuge in the sacrifice of bulls, the sanguinary

Mithraic expiation--the worship of blood.

At the grand festival of the _Sacred Heart_ which the Jesuits gave in

the last century, in the Coliseum of Rome, they struck a medal with

this motto, worthy of the solemnity, "He gave Himself to the people to

eat, in the amphitheatre of Titus:"[1] instead of a system, it was an

emblem, a dumb sign. What triumph for the friends of obscurity and

equivocation! no equivocation of language can equal a material object,

which may be interpreted in a thousand ways, for rendering ideas

undecided and confused. The old Christian symbols, so often

translated, and so variously interpreted, present to the mind, at first

sight, too distinct a meaning. They are austere symbols of death and

mortification. The new one was far more obscure. This emblem, bloody

it is true, but carnal and impassioned, speaks much less of death than

of life. The heart palpitates, the blood streams, and yet it is a

living man who, showing his wound with his own hand, beckons to you to

come and fathom his half-opened breast.

The heart! That word has always been powerful; the heart, being the

organ of the affections, expresses them in its own manner, swollen and

heaving with sighs. The life of the heart, strong and confused,

comprehends and mingles every kind of love. Such a sentence is

wonderfully adapted to language of double meaning.

And who will understand it best? Women. With them the life of the

heart is everything. This organ, being the passage of the blood, and

strongly influenced by the revolutions of the blood, is not less

predominant in woman than her very sex.

The heart has been, now nearly two hundred years, the grand basis of

modern devotion; as sex, or a strange question that related to it, had,

for two hundred before, occupied the minds of the middle ages.

Strange! in that spiritual period, a long discussion, both public and

solemn, took place throughout Europe, both in the schools and in the

churches, upon an anatomical subject, of which one would not dare to

speak in our days, except in the school of medicine! What was this

subject? Conception. Only imagine all these monks, people sworn to

celibacy, both Dominicans and Franciscans, boldly attacking the

question, teaching it to all, preaching anatomy to children and little

girls, filling their minds with their sex and its most secret mystery.

The heart, a more noble organ, had the advantage of furnishing a number

of dubious though decent expressions, a whole language of equivocal

tenderness which did not cause a blush, and facilitated the intrigue of

devout gallantry.

In the very beginning of the seventeenth century, the directors and

confessors find a very convenient text in _The Sacred Heart_. But

women take it quite differently, and in a serious sense: they grow warm

and impassioned, and have visions. The Virgin appears to a country

girl of Normandy, and orders her to adore the heart of Mary. The

Visitandines called themselves the daughters of the _Heart of Jesus_:

Jesus does not fail to appear to a Visitandine, Mademoiselle Marie

Alacoque, and shows her His heart and wound.

She was a strong girl, and of a sanguine temperament, whom they were

obliged to bleed constantly. She had entered the convent in her

twenty-fourth year, with her passions entire; her infancy had not been

miserably nipped in the bud, as it often happens to those who are

immured at an early age. Her devotion was, from the very first, a

violent love, that wished to suffer for the object loved. Having heard

that Madame de Chantal had printed the name of Jesus on her breast with

a hot iron, she did the same. The Lover was not insensible to this,

and ever after visited her. It was with the knowledge, and under the

direction of a skilful superior, that Marie Alacoque made this intimate

connection with the Divine Bridegroom. She celebrated her espousals

with Him; and a regular contract was drawn up by the superior, which

Marie Alacoque signed with her blood. One day, when, according to her

biographer, she had cleaned with her tongue the lips of a sick person,

Jesus was so satisfied with her, that He permitted her to fix her lips

to one of His Divine wounds.

There was nothing in this relating to theology. It was merely a

subject of physiology and medicine. Mademoiselle Alacoque was a girl

of an ardent disposition, which was heightened by celibacy. She was by

no means a mystic in the proper sense of the word. Happier far than

Madame Guyon, who did not see what she loved, she saw and touched the

body of the Divine Lover. The heart He showed her in His unseamed

breast was a bloody intestine. The extremely sanguine plethory from

which she was suffering, and which frequent bleeding could not relieve,

filled her imagination with these visions of blood.

The Jesuits, who were great propagators of the new devotion, took good

care not to explain precisely whether homage was to be paid to the

symbolical heart and celestial love, or whether the heart of flesh was

to be the object of adoration. When pressed to explain themselves,

their answers depended on persons, times, and places. Their Father

Galiffet made, at the same time, two contradictory replies: in Rome he

said it was the symbolical heart; and in Paris he said in print that

there was no metaphor, that they honoured the flesh itself.

This equivocation was a source of wealth. In less than forty years

four hundred and twenty-eight brotherhoods of the Sacred Heart were

formed in France.

I cannot help pausing a moment, to admire how Equivocation triumphed

throughout this age.

On whatever side I turn my eyes, I find it everywhere, both in things

and persons. It sits upon the throne in the person of Madame de

Maintenon. Is this person a queen who is seated by the king's side,

and before whom princesses are standing--or is she not? The equivocal

is also near the throne in the person of the humble Pere la Chaise, the

real king of the clergy of France, who from a garret at Versailles

distributes the benefices. And do our loyal Galileans and the

scrupulous Jansenists abstain from the equivocal? Obedient, yet

rebellious, preparing war though kneeling, they kiss the foot of the

pope, while wishing to tie his hands; they spoil the best reasons by

their _distinguo_ and evasions. Indeed, when I put in opposition to

the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries this Janus of the seventeenth,

the two others appear to me as honest centuries, or, at the very least,

sincere in good and in evil. But what falsehood and ugliness is

concealed under the majestic harmony of the seventeenth! Everything is

softened and shaded in the form, but the bottom is often the worse for

it. Instead of the local inquisitions, you have the police of the

Jesuits, armed with the king's authority. In place of a Saint

Bartholomew, you have the long, the immense religious revolution,

called the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, that cruel comedy of

forced conversion; then the unheard-of tragedy of a proscription

organised by all the bureaucratical and military means of a modern

government!--Bossuet sings the triumph; and deceit, lying, and misery

reign everywhere! Deceit in politics; local life destroyed without

creating any central life. Deceit in morals: this polished court, this

world of polite people receives an unexpected lesson from the _chamber

of poisons_: the king suppresses the trial, fearing to find every one

guilty!--And can devotion be real with such morals?--If you reproach

the sixteenth century with its violent fanaticism, if the eighteenth

appear to you cynical and devoid of human respect, confess at least

also that lying, deceit, and hypocrisy are the predominant features of

the seventeenth. That great historian Moliere has painted the portrait

of this century, and found its name--Tartuffe.

I return to the Sacred Heart, which, in truth, I have not quitted,

since it is during this period the illustrious and predominant example

of the success of the equivocal. The Jesuits who, in general, have

invented little, did not make the discovery, but they perceived very

plainly the profit they might derive from it. We have seen how they

gradually made themselves masters of the convents of women, though

professing all the time to be strangers to them. The Visitation,

especially, was under their influence. The superior of Marie Alacoque,

who had her confidence, and directed her connection with Jesus Christ,

gave timely notice to Pere La Chaise.

The thing happened just in time. The Jesuits sadly wanted some popular

machine to set in motion, for the profit of their policy. It was the

moment when they thought, at least they told the king so, that England,

sold by Charles II., would, in a short time, be entirely converted.

Intrigue, money, women, everything was turned to account, to bring it

about. To King Charles they gave mistresses, and to his brother,

confessors. The Jesuits, who, with all their tricks, are often

chimerical, thought that by gaining over five or six lords, they would

change all that Protestant mass, which is Protestant not only by

belief, but also by interest, habit, and manner of living; Protestant

to the core, and with English tenacity.

See then these famous politicians, gliding as stealthily as wolves, and

fancying they will carry everything by surprise. An essential point

for them was to place with James, the king's brother, a secret

preacher, who, in his private chapel, might work silently, and try his

hand at a few conversions. To act the part of a converter, they

required a man who was not only captivating, but especially ardent and

fanatical; such men were scarce. The latter qualifications were

deficient in the young man whom Pere La Chaise had in view. This was a

Father La Colombiere, who taught rhetoric in their college at Lyons; he

was an agreeable preacher, an elegant writer, much esteemed by Patru,

mild, docile, and a good sort of man. The only thing that was wanting

was a little madness. To inoculate him with this, they introduced him

to Mademoiselle Alacoque: he was sent to Paray-le-Monial, where she

resided, as confessor extraordinary of the Visitandines (1675). He was

in his thirty-fourth year, and she in her twenty-eighth. Having been

well prepared by her superior, she immediately saw in him the great

servant of God, whom her visions had revealed to her, and the very same

day she perceived in the ardent heart of Jesus her own heart united to

the Jesuit's.

La Colombiere, being of a mild and feeble nature, was hurried away

unresistingly into this ardent vortex of passion and fanaticism. He

was kept for a year and a half in this spiritual furnace; he was then

snatched away from Paray, and hurled red-hot into England. They were,

however, still mistrustful of him, fearing he might cool, and sent him,

from time to time, a few ardent and inspired lines: Marie Alacoque

dictated, and the superior was her amanuensis.

He remained thus two years with the Duchess of York in London, so well

concealed and shut up, that he did not even see the town. They brought

to him, mysteriously, a few lords, who thought it advantageous to be

converted to the religion of the heir presumptive. England having at

last discovered the Papal conspiracy, La Colombiere was accused,

brought before Parliament, and embarked for France, where he arrived

ill; and though his superior sent him to Paray to see whether the nun

could revive him, he died there of a fever.

However little inclined people may be to believe that great results are

brought about by trifling causes, they are obliged, however, to confess

that this miserable intrigue had an incalculable effect upon France and

the world. They wanted to gain England, and they presented themselves

to her, not in the persons of the Gallicans, whom she respected, but in

those of the Jesuits, whom she had always abhorred. At the very moment

when Catholicism ought, in prudence at least, to have discarded the

idolatries with which the Protestants reproached it, they published a

new one, and the most offensive of all, the carnal and sensual devotion

of the Sacred Heart. To mingle horror with ridicule, it was in 1685,

the sad and lamentable year of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes,

that Marie Alacoque raised the first of those altars which overspread

the whole of France. We know how England, confirmed in her

Protestantism and horror of Rome by the Jesuits, took to herself a

Dutch king, carried away Holland in her movement, and by this

conjunction of the two maritime powers obtained the dominion of the

seas.

The Jesuits may boast that they have been the means of setting

Protestantism in England upon a very solid foundation. All the Father

Mathews in the world will never be able to remove it.

Their political work, as we have seen, is important: it ended in

marrying England to Holland--a marriage nearly fatal to France.

And what was their religious work among us in the old days of Louis

XIV.? What was the last use made of the omnipotent sway of the La

Chaises and the Telliers? We well know: the destruction of Port-Royal,

a military expedition to carry off fifteen old women, the dead dragged

from their graves, and sacrilege committed by the hands of authority.

This authority expiring in the terrible year 1709, which seemed to

carry off at one blow the king and the kingdom, was employed by them,

in all haste, to destroy their enemies.

Port-Royal came to an end in 1709, Quietism had finished in 1698, and

Gallicanism itself, the great religion of the throne, had been placed

at the feet of the pope by the king in 1693. Behold Bossuet laid in

the tomb by the side of Fenelon, and the latter next to Arnaud. The

conquerors and the conquered repose in a common nullity.

The emblem prevailing, and being substituted for every system, people

felt less and less the need of analysing, explaining, and thinking; and

they were glad of it. The explanation the most favourable to authority

is still a giving of accounts, that is to say, a homage paid to the

liberty of the mind. But in the shadow of an obscure emblem one may

henceforth without shaping any theory, or allowing any advantage to be

taken, apply indifferently the practice of all the various theories

that had been abandoned, and follow them alternately or conjointly,

according to the interest of the day.

Wise policy, excellent wisdom, with which they cover their nothingness!

Having dispensed with reasoning for others, they lose the faculty of

reasoning altogether, and, in the hour of danger, they find themselves

disarmed. This is what happened to them in the eighteenth century.

The terribly learned contest that then took place found them mute.

Voltaire let fly a hundred thousand arrows against them, without

awakening them. Rousseau pressed and crushed them without getting one

word out of them.

Who then could answer? Theology was no longer known to the

theologians. The persecutors of the Jansenists mingle in their books

published in the name of Marie Alacoque, both Jansenist and Molinist

opinions, and without being aware of it. They composed in 1708 the

manual which has since become the basis of instruction adopted in our

seminaries; and this manual contains the entirely new doctrine, that on

every Papal decision Jesus Christ _inspires_ the pope to decide, and

the bishops to obey: every thing is an oracle and a miracle in this

clownish system. Reason is decidedly rooted out of theology.

From that time there is very little of a dogmatical character, and

still less of sacred history; an instruction which would be void, if

ancient casuistry did not assist in filling up the vacuum with immoral

subtilties.

The only part of mankind to whom they have addressed themselves for a

long time, namely, women, is the world of sensibility. They do not ask

for science; they wish for impressions rather than ideas. The less

they are busied about ideas the easier it is to keep them ignorant of

outward events, and make them strangers to the progress of time.

When they maintain that holiness consists in sacrificing the mind, the

more material the worship, the more it serves to attain that end; the

more the mind is degraded the holier it becomes. To couple salvation

with the exercise of moral virtues, would be to require the exercise of

reason. But what do they want with virtue? Wear this medal: "_It will

blot out your iniquities_." Reason would still have a share in

religion, if, as reason teaches us, it was necessary for salvation

absolutely to love God. Marie Alacoque has seen that it was sufficient

_not to hate Him_; and those who are devoted to the Sacred Heart are

saved unconditionally.

When the Jesuits were suppressed, they had in their hands no other

religious means than this paganism, and in it they placed all their

hope of coming to life again. They had engravings made, to which they

added the motto, "I will give them the shield of my heart."

The popes, who, at first, were uneasy about the weak point which such a

materialism would offer to the attacks of the philosophers, have found

out in our time that it is very useful to them, being addressed to a

class of people who seldom read the philosophers, and who, though

devout, are nevertheless material. They have therefore preserved the

precious equivocation of the ideal and the carnal heart, and forbidden

any explanation as to whether the words "_Sacred Heart_" designated the

love of God for man, or some bit of bleeding flesh. By reducing the

thing to the idea, the impassioned attraction in which its success

consisted would be taken from it.

Even in the last century, some bishops had gone farther, declaring that

_flesh_ was here the _principal_ object; and they had placed this flesh

in certain hymns, after the Trinity, as a fourth person. Priests,

women, and young girls have all since then vied with one another in

this devotion. I have before me a manual, much used in country places,

in which they teach the persons of their community, who pray for one

another, how they join hearts, and how these hearts, once united,

"ought to desire to enter into the opening of the heart of Jesus, and

be incessantly sinking into that amorous wound."

The brotherhood, in their manuals, have occasionally found it gallant

to put the heart of Mary above that of Jesus (see that of Nantes,

1769). In their engravings she is generally younger than her Son,

being, for instance, about twenty, whereas he is thirty years old, so

that, at first sight, He seems to be rather her husband or lover than

her Son.

This very year I saw at Rouen, in the Church of St. Ouen, in the Chapel

of the _Sacred Heart_, a pen-and-ink drawing, by young ladies, having

the written approbation of the ecclesiastical authorities, in which

Jesus is represented on His knees before the Virgin, who is also

kneeling.

The most violent satire against the Jesuits is what they have made

themselves--their art, the pictures and statues they have inspired.

They are at once characterised by the severe sentence of Poussin, whose

Christ did not appear to them pretty enough: "We cannot imagine a

Christ with His head on one side, or like Father Donillet's." Yet

Poussin saw the best days of the Jesuit art: what would he have said if

he had seen what followed? all that decrepid coquetry that thinks it

smiles whilst it grimaces, those ridiculous glances, dying eyes, and

such like deformities. The worst is, they who think only of the flesh

know no longer how to represent it. As the thought grows more and more

material and insipid, the form becomes defaced, degraded from picture

to picture, ignoble, foppish, affected, heavy, dull--that is to say,

shapeless.[2]

We may judge of men by the art they inspire; and I confess it is no

easy task to augur favourably of the souls of those who inspire this

art, and recommend these engravings, hanging them up in their churches

and distributing them by thousands and millions. Such taste is an

ominous sign. Many immoral people still possess a sentiment of

elegance. But willingly to take to the ignoble and false discovers a

sad degradation of the soul.

An undeniable truth is here made manifest; which is, that art is the

only thing inaccessible to falsehood. Being the offspring of the heart

and natural inspiration, it cannot be allied to what is false, it will

not be violated; it protests, and if the false triumphs, it dies. All

the rest may be aped and acted. They very well managed to make a

theology in the sixteenth and a morality in the seventeenth century;

but never could they form an art. They can ape the holy and the just;

but how can they mimic the beautiful?--Thou art ugly, poor Tartuffe,

and ugly shalt thou remain: it is thy token. What! you reach the

beautiful, or ever lay a finger upon it? This would be impious beyond

all impiety!--The beautiful is the face of God!

[1] In 1771. On Sacred Hearts (by Tabaraud), p. 82.

[2] In 1834, being busy with Christian iconography, I looked over the

collections of the portraits of Christ in the Royal Library. Those

published within the last thirty years are the most humiliating I have

ever seen, both for art and human nature. Every man (whether a

philosopher or a believer) who retains any sentiment of religion will

be disgusted with them. Every impropriety, every sensuality and low

passion is there: the childish, dandified seminarist, the licentious

priest, the fat curate who looks like _Maingrat_, &c. The engraving is

as good as the drawing--a skewer and the snuff of a tallow candle.

PART II.

ON DIRECTION IN GENERAL, AND ESPECIALLY IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

CHAPTER I.

RESEMBLANCES AND DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE SEVENTEENTH AND NINETEENTH

CENTURIES.--CHRISTIAN ART.--IT IS WE WHO HAVE RESTORED THE

CHURCH.--WHAT IT ADDS TO THE POWER OF THE PRIEST.--THE CONFESSIONAL.

There are two objections to be made against all that I have said, and I

will state them:--

First. "The examples are taken from the seventeenth century, at a time

when the direction was influenced by theological questions, which now

no longer occupy either the world or the Church; for instance, the

question of grace and free-will, and that of Quietism or repose in

love." But this I have already answered. Such questions are obsolete,

dead, if you will, as theories; but, in the spirit and practical method

which emanate from these theories, they are, and ever will be, living.

There are no longer to be found speculative people, simple enough to

trace out expressly a doctrine of lethargy and moral annihilation; but

there will always be found enough quacks to practice quietly this

lethargic art. If this be not clear enough, I will, in a moment, make

it clearer than some people would desire.

Secondly. "Are the examples you have shown from the books and letters

of the great men of the famous age sufficiently conclusive for our own

time? Might not those profound and subtle men of genius, who dived so

deeply into the science of directing souls, have entered into

refinements, of which the common herd of confessors and directors

cannot now conceive any idea? Can you fear anything of the sort from

the poor simple priests whom we have now? Pray where are our St.

Francois de Sales, our Bossuets, and our Fenelons? Do you not see that

not only the clergy no longer possess such men, but that they have

degenerated generally, and as a class. The great majority of the

priests are of rustic families. The peasant, even when he is not poor,

finds it convenient to lighten the expenses of his family, by placing

his son in the seminary. To nursery education, that which we receive

from our parents before any other, they are total strangers. The

seminary by no means repairs this inconvenience of origin and former

condition. If we judge by those who come from the hands of the

Sulpicians, Lazarists, &c., we shall be inclined to believe that there

has been a deep plan laid among the upper leaders, to form none but

indifferent priests, who would be so much the more dependent, and blind

to the influence exercised over them contrary to their real interests.

What then do you fear? Is not this intellectual degradation of the

clergy sufficiently comforting? How could such men follow, in the

confession and direction, the learned tactics of the priests of former

ages? The dangers you point out are imaginary."

To this it is easy to answer:--

Mental distinction and good education are not so necessary, as is

generally thought, for enslaving souls that are willing to be ruled.

Authority, character, position, and costume fortify the _Priest_, and

make good in him what was wanting in the _Man_. He gains his

ascendency less by his skill than by time and perseverance. If his

mind is but little cultivated, it is also less taken up with a variety

of new ideas, which incessantly come crowding upon us moderns, amusing

and fatiguing us. With fewer ideas, views, and projects, but with an

interest, an aim, and ever the same end invariably kept in view--this

is the way to succeed.

Must we take it for granted, because you are clownish, you are less

cunning on that account? Peasants are circumspect, often full of

cunning, and endued with an indefatigable constancy in following up any

petty interest. How many long years, what different means, and often

indirect ones, will such a one employ, in order to add two feet of land

to his field. Do you think that his son, _Monsieur le Cure_, will be

less patient or less ardent in his endeavours to get possession of a

soul, to govern this woman, or to enter that family?

These peasant families have often much vigour, a certain sap, belonging

to the blood and constitution, which either gives wit, or supplies the

place of it. Those in the South especially, where the clergy raise

their principal recruits, furnish them with intrepid speakers, who do

not need to know anything; and who, by their very ignorance, are,

perhaps, only in a more direct communication with the simple persons,

to whom they address themselves. They speak out loudly, with energy

and assurance; educated persons would be more reserved, and less proper

to fascinate the weak; they would not dare to attempt so audaciously a

clownish _Mesmerism_ in spiritual things.

In this, I must confess, there is a serious difference between our own

century and the seventeenth, when the clergy of all parties were so

learned. That culture, those vast studies, that great theological and

literary activity were, for the priest of that time, the most powerful

diversion in the midst of temptations. Science, or, at the very least,

controversy and disputation, created for him, in a position that was

often very worldly, a sort of solitude, an _alibi_, as one may say,

that effectually preserved him. But ours, who have nothing of the

sort, who, moreover, spring from a hardy and material race, and do not

know how to employ this embarrassing vigour, must indeed require a fund

of virtue!

The great men from whom we have drawn our examples, had a wonderful

defence against spiritual and carnal desires; better than a defence,

they had wings that raised them from the earth, at the critical moment,

above temptation. By these wings, I mean the love of God, the love of

genius for itself, its natural effort to remain on high and ascend, its

abhorrence of degradation.

Being chiefs of the clergy of France, the only clergy then flourishing,

and responsible to the world for whatever subsisted by their faith,

they kept their hearts exalted to the level of the great part they had

to perform. One thought was the guardian of their lives--a thought

which they repressed, but which did not the less sustain them in

delicate trials: it was this, "In them resided the Church."

Their great experience of the world and domestic life, their tact and

skilful management of men and things, far from weakening morality, as

one might believe, rather defended it in them, enabling them to

perceive, and have a presentiment of perils, to see the enemy coming,

not to allow him the advantage of unexpected attacks; or, at least, to

know how to elude him.

We have seen how Bossuet stopped the soft confidence of a weak nun at

the very first word. The little we have said of Fenelon's _direction_

shows sufficiently how the dangerous director evaded the dangers.

Those eminently spiritual persons could keep up for years between

heaven and earth this tender dialectic of the love of God. But is it

the same in these days with men who have no wings, who crawl and cannot

fly? Incapable of those ingenious turnings and windings by which

passion went on sportively, and eluding itself, do they not run the

risk of stumbling at the first step?

I know well that this absence of early education, and vulgarity or

clownishness, may often put an insurmountable barrier between priests

and well-bred women. Many things, however, that would not be tolerated

in another man are reckoned in them as merits. Stiffness is austerity,

and awkwardness is accounted the simplicity of a saint, who has ever

lived in a desert. They are measured by a different and more indulgent

rule than the laity. The priest takes advantage of everything that is

calculated to make him be considered as a man apart, of his dress, his

position, his mysterious church, that invests the most vulgar with a

poetical gleam.

Who gave them this last advantage? Ourselves. We, who have

reinstated, rebuilt, as one may say, those very churches they had

disregarded. The priests were building up their Saint-Sulpices, and

other heaps of stones, when the laity retrieved Notre-Dame and Saint

Ouen. We pointed out to them the Christian spirit of these living

stones,[1] but they did not see it; we taught it them, but they could

not understand. And how long did the misconception last? Not less

than forty years, ever since the appearance of the _Genie de

Christianisme_. The priests would not believe us, when we explained to

them this sublime edifice; they did not recognise it; but who can

wonder? It belongs only to those who understood it.

At length, however, they have changed their opinion. They have found

it to be political and clever to speak as we do, and extol Christian

architecture. They have decked themselves out with their churches,

again invested themselves with this glorious cloak, and assumed in them

a triumphant posture. The crowd comes, looks, and admires. Truly, if

we are to judge of a well-dressed man by his coat, he who is invested

with the splendour of a Notre-Dame of Paris, or a Cologne cathedral, is

apparently the giant of the spiritual world. Alexander, on his

departure from India, wishing to deceive posterity as to the size of

his Macedonians, had a camp traced out on the ground in which a space

of ten feet was allotted to each of his soldiers. What an immense

place is this church, and what an immense host must inhabit this

wonderful dwelling! Optical delusion adds still more to the effect.

Every proportion changes. The eye is deceived and deceives itself, at

the same time, with these sublime lights and deepening shades, all

calculated to increase the illusion. The man whom in the street you

judged, by his surly look, to be a village schoolmaster, is here a

prophet. He is transformed by this majestic framework; his heaviness

becomes strength and majesty; his voice has formidable echoes. Women

and children tremble and are afraid.

When a woman returns home, she finds everything prosy and paltry. Had

she even Pierre Corneille for a husband, she would think him pitiful,

if he lived in the dull house they still show us. Intellectual

grandeur in a low apartment does not affect her. The comparison makes

her sad, bitterly quiet. The husband puts up with it, and smiles, or

pretends to do so; "Her director has turned her brain," says he aloud,

and adds, aside, "After all, she only sees him at church." But what

place, I ask, is more powerful over the imagination, richer in

illusions, and more fascinating than the church? It is precisely the

church that ennobles, raises, exaggerates, and sheds a poetical ray

upon this otherwise vulgar man.

Do you see that solemn figure, adorned with all the gold and purple of

his pontifical dress, ascending with the thought, the prayer of a

multitude of ten thousand men, the triumphal steps in the choir of St.

Denis? Do you see him still, above all that kneeling mass, hovering as

high as the vaulted roofs, his head reaching the capitals, and lost

among the winged heads of the angels, whence he hurls his thunder?

Well, it is the same man, this terrible archangel himself, who

presently descends for her, and now, mild and gentle, goes yonder into

that dark chapel, to listen to her in the languid hours of the

afternoon! Delightful hour of tumultuous, but tender sensations! (Why

does the heart palpitate so strongly here?) How dark the church

becomes! Yet it is not late. The great rose-window over the portal

glitters with the setting sun. But it is quite another thing in the

choir; dark shadows envelope it, and beyond is obscurity. One thing

astounds and almost frightens us, however far we may be, which is the

mysterious old painted glass at the farthest end of the church, on

which the design is no longer distinguishable, twinkling in the shade,

like an illegible magic scroll of unknown characters. The chapel is

not less dark on that account; you can no longer discern the ornaments

and delicate moulding entwined in the vaulted roof; the shadow

deepening blends and confounds the outlines. But, as if this chapel

were not yet dark enough, it contains, in a retired corner, a narrow

recess of dark oak, where that man, all emotion, and that trembling

woman, so close to each other, are whispering together about the love

of God.

[1] See my History of France (1833), the last chapter of Vol. II., and

particularly the last ten pages. In this same volume I have made a

serious mistake which I wish to rectify. In speaking of ecclesiastical

celibacy (temp. Gregory VII.), I have said that married men could never

have raised those sublime monuments, the spire of Strasbourg, &c. I

find, on the contrary, that the architects of the Gothic churches were

laymen, and generally married. Erwin de Steinbach, who built

Strasbourg, had a celebrated daughter, Sabina, who was herself an

artist.

CHAPTER II.

CONFESSION.--PRESENT EDUCATION OF THE YOUNG CONFESSOR.--THE CONFESSOR

IN THE MIDDLE AGES:--FIRST, BELIEVED; SECONDLY, MORTIFIED HIMSELF;

THIRDLY, WAS SUPERIOR BY CULTURE; FOURTHLY, USED TO INTERROGATE

LESS.--THE CASUISTS WROTE FOR THEIR TIME.--THE DANGERS OF THE YOUNG

CONFESSOR.--HOW HE STRENGTHENS HIS TOTTERING POSITION.

A worthy parish priest has often told me that the sore part of his

profession, that which filled him with despair, and his life with

torment, was the _Confessional_.

The studies, with which they prepare for it in the seminaries, are such

as entirely ruin the disposition, weaken the body, and enervate and

defile the soul.

Lay education, without making any pretension to an extraordinary degree

of purity, and though the pupils it forms will, one day, enjoy public

life, takes, however, especial care to keep from the eyes of youth the

glowing descriptions that excite the passions.

Ecclesiastical education, on the contrary, which pretends to form men

superior to man, pure virgin minds, angels, fixes precisely the

attention of its pupils upon things that are to be for ever forbidden

them, and gives them for subjects of study terrible temptations, such

as would make all the saints run the risk of damnation. Their printed

books have been quoted, but not so their copy-books, by which they

complete the two last years of seminary education. These copy-books

contain things that the most audacious have never dared to publish.

I dare not quote here what has been revealed to me about this idiotic

education by those who have been its martyrs, and narrowly escaped

destruction from it. No one can imagine the condition of a poor young

man, still a believer, and very sincere, struggling between the terrors

and temptations with which they surround him, at pleasure, with two

unknown subjects, either one of which might drive him mad, _Woman!

Hell!_--and yet obliged to look incessantly at the abyss, blinded,

through these impure books, with his sanguine youthful constitution.

This surprising imprudence proceeded originally from the very

scholastic supposition, that the body and soul could be perfectly well

kept apart. They had imagined they could lead them like two coursers

of different tempers, the one to the right and the other to the left.

They did not reflect that, in this case, man would be in the

predicament of the chariot sculptured upon the tablet of the Louvre,

which, pulled both ways, must inevitably be dashed to pieces.

However different these two substances may be in nature, it is but too

manifest that they are mingled in action. Not a motion of the soul but

acts upon the body, which re-acts in the same manner. The most cruel

discipline inflicted upon the body will destroy it rather than prevent

its action upon the soul. To believe that a vow, a few prayers, and a

black robe, will deliver you from the flesh, and make you a pure

spirit--is perfect childishness.

They will refer me to the middle ages, and to the multitudes who have

lived mortified lives.

For this I have not one answer, but twenty, which admit of no reply.

It is too easy to show that priests in general, and especially the

confessor, were then totally different from what they have been for the

two last centuries.

I. The first answer will seem, perhaps, harsh--_Then the priest

believed_. "What! the priest no longer believes? Do you mean to say

that in speaking of his faith with so much energy, he is a hypocrite

and a liar?" No, I will allow him to be sincere. But there are two

manners of believing, there are many degrees in faith. We are told

that Lope de Vega (who, as it is known, was a priest) could not

officiate: at the moment of the sacrifice, his fancy pictured the

Passion too strongly, he would burst into tears and faint. Compare

this with the coquettish pantomine of the Jesuit, who acts mass at

Fribourg, or with the prelate whom I have seen at the altar showing to

advantage his delicate small hand. The priest believed, and _his

penitent believed_. Unheard-of terrors, miracles, devils, and hell,

filled the church. The motto, "God hears you," was engraven not only

in the wood, but in the heart. It was not a plank that partitioned off

the confessional, but the sword of the archangel, the thought of the

last judgment.

II. If the priest spoke in the name of the _spirit_, he was partly

justified in doing so, having purchased spiritual power by the _suicide

of the body_. His long prayers at night would have sufficed to wear

him out; but they found more direct means in excessive fasts. Fasting

was the diet of those poor schools of Beggars and Cappets, whose scanty

meal was composed of arguments. Half dead before the age of manhood,

they cooled their blood with herbs producing a deadly chill, and

exhausted it by frequent bleedings. The number of bleedings, to which

the monks had to submit, was provided in their rules. Their stomachs

were soon destroyed, and their strength impaired. Bernard and Theresa

were weakened by continual vomitings, even the sense of taste was lost:

the Saint, says his biographer, took blood for butter. _Mortification_

was not then an idle word, it was not a separation of the body and

soul, but a genuine and honest suppression of the body.

III. The priest believed himself to be, in this sense, the man of the

spirit, and he really was so, by the _superiority of culture_. _He_

knew everything, the layman nothing. Even when the priest was young,

he was truly the father, the other the child. In our days it is just

the contrary; the layman, in cities at least, is generally more learned

than the priest. Even the peasant, if he be a father of a family, with

business and interests, or has served in the army, has more experience

than his cure, and more real knowledge; his speaking more

ungrammatically is of no consequence. But the contrast is still more

striking, when this inexperienced priest, who has known nothing but his

own seminary, sees at his knees a fashionable, intriguing, impassioned

woman, who now, perhaps, at the close of her seventh lustrum, has

passed through everything sentimental and ideal. What! _she_ ask his

advice? _she_ call him _father_? Why, every word she utters is a

revelation for him--astonishment and fear take possession of his soul.

If he is not wise enough to hold his tongue, he will be ridiculous.

His penitent, who came to him all trembling, will depart laughing.

IV. There is another difference which will strike only those who are

acquainted with the middle ages--_the language was not developed_ as it

now is. No one being then acquainted with our habits of analysing and

developing, confession was naturally reduced to a simple declaration of

sin, without any detail of circumstances. Still less could they deduce

the phenomena which accompany passion--the desires, doubts, and fears

which give it the power of illusion, and make it contagious. There

was, if you will, confession; but the woman could not express herself,

nor could the priest have understood her; she was not able to reveal

the depth of her thought, nor could he have reached it if she had done

so. Confession on one side, and sentence on the other, nothing more;

there was neither dialogue, confidence, nor disclosing of the heart.

If the priest has not enough imagination and wit to put the questions

from the store of his own mind, he has had in his hands for the last

two centuries ready-made questions, which he may ask in due order, and

by which he will force his fair penitent to dive into her own thoughts,

sift her own secrets to deliver them over to him, open her heart's

fibres, as one may say, thread by thread, and wind off before him the

complete skein, which he henceforth holds in his hands.

This terrible instrument of inquiry, which in unskilful hands may

corrupt the soul by its injudicious probing, must necessarily be

modified when morals change. Morality does not vary, but morals do,

according to the lapse of time; yet this very simple truth never once

entered their heads. They have adhered to the morals of the period,

when the intellectual movement ceased, as far as they were concerned.

The manuals they put into the hands of the young confessor are grounded

upon the authority of the casuists, whom Pascal annihilated long ago.

Even if the immorality of their solutions had not been demonstrated,

remember that Escobar and Sanchez made their questions for a horribly

corrupt period, from which, thank God, we are far removed. Their

casuistry was from the first addressed to the corrupt and disordered

state of society occasioned by long religious warfare. You will find

among them crimes that were perhaps never perpetrated, except by the

brutal soldiers of the Duke of Alva, or by the exiled, lawless, and

godless band that Wallenstein drew after him, a wandering mass of

iniquity which would have been abhorred by ancient Sodom.

We know not how to qualify this culpable routine. These books,

composed for a barbarous age, unparalleled in crimes, are the same that

you give to your pupils in our own civilised age. And this young

priest, who, according to your instructions, believes that the world is

still that dreadful world, who enters the Confessional with all this

villanous science, and his imagination full of monstrous cases, you,

imprudent men! (what shall I call you?) you confront him with a child

who has never left her mother's side, who knows nothing, has nothing to

say, and whose greatest crime is that she has not learned her catechism

properly, or has hurt a butterfly!

I shudder at the interrogatories to which he will subject her, and at

what he will teach her in his _conscientious brutality_. But he

questions her in vain. She knows nothing, and says nothing. He scolds

her, and she weeps. Her tears will be soon dried, but it will be long

before she ceases to reflect.

A volume might be composed on the first start of the young priest, and

his imprudent steps, all fatal either to himself or others. The

penitent is occasionally more circumspect than the confessor. She is

amused at his proceedings, and looks at him coldly when he becomes

animated and goes too far. Sometimes, forgetting himself in his

impassioned dream, he is suddenly and roughly awakened by a lesson from

an intelligent and satirical woman kneeling before him.

This cruel lesson has given him an icy chill. Confessors do not suffer

such a repulse, without remaining a long time bitter, sometimes

spiteful for ever. The young priest knew well that he was the victim,

the disinherited of this world, but it had not been forced home upon

him. Gall drowns his heart. He prays to God (if he can still pray)

that the world may perish!

Then returning to his senses, and seeing himself irremediably limed in

that black winding-sheet, that death-robe that he will wear to the

grave, he shrouds himself within it as he curses it, and muses how he

may make the best of his torment.

The only thing he can do, is to strengthen his position as a priest.

He has two way of succeeding, either by an understanding with the

Jesuits, or by paying a servile court to _Monseigneur_ the bishop. I

recommend him especially to be violent against the philosophers, and to

bark at _pantheism_. Let him also blacken his fellow-priests, and he

will appear so much the purer himself. Let him prove himself a

thorough hater, and they will forgive him his love.

The Brotherhood will henceforth protect, defend, and cover him. What

would have ruined the solitary priest, becomes sanctity itself when he

becomes one of a party. Before, he would have been suspended, and sent

perhaps for six months to _La Trappe_--now he is made Vicar-general.

Only let him be prudent in the delicate business which the fraternity

wishes to conceal; let him learn the arts of priests--to feign, to

wait, to know when and how to be satisfied; to advance but slowly,

openly, and above ground sometimes, but more often secretly, underneath.

CHAPTER III.

CONFESSION.--THE CONFESSOR AND THE HUSBAND.--HOW THEY DETACH THE

WIFE.--THE DIRECTOR.--DIRECTORS ASSOCIATED TOGETHER.--ECCLESIASTICAL

POLICY.

When I reflect on all that is contained in the words _confession_ and

_direction_, those simple words, that immense power, the most complete

in the world, and endeavour to analyse their whole meaning, I tremble

with fear. I seem to be descending endless spiral stairs into the

depths of a dark mine. Just now I felt contempt for the priest; now I

fear him.

But we must not be afraid; we must look him in the face. Let us

candidly put down in set terms the language of the confessor.

"_God hears you_, hears you through me; through me God will answer

you." Such is the first word; such is the literal copy. The authority

is accepted as infinite and absolute, without any bargaining as to

measure.

"But you tremble, you dare not tell this terrible God your weakness and

childishness; well! _tell them to your father_; a father has a right to

know the secrets of his child. He is an indulgent father, who wants to

know them only to absolve them. He is a sinner like yourself: has he

then a right to be severe? Come, then, my child, come and tell

me--what you have not dared to whisper in your mother's ear; tell it

me; who will ever know?"

Then is it, amid sobs and sighs, from the choking heaving breast that

the fatal word rises to the lips: it escapes, and she hides her head.

Oh! he who heard that has gained an immense advantage, and will keep

it. Would to God that he did not abuse it! It was heard, remember,

not by the wood and the dark oak of the confessional, but by ears of

flesh and blood.

And this man now knows of this woman, what the husband has not known in

all the long effusion of his heart by day and night, what even her own

mother does not know, who thinks she knows her entirely, having had her

so many times a naked infant upon her knees.

This man knows, and will know--don't be afraid of his forgetting it.

If the confession is in good hands, so much the better, for it is for

ever. And she, she knows full well she has a master of her intimate

thoughts. Never will she pass by that man without casting down her

eyes.

The day when this mystery was imparted, he was very near her, she felt

it. On a higher seat, he seemed to have an irresistible ascendency

over her. A magnetic influence has vanquished her, for she wished not

to speak, and she spoke in spite of herself. She felt herself

fascinated, like the bird by the serpent.

So far, however, there is no art on the side of the priest. The force

of circumstances has done everything, that of religious institution,

and that of nature. As a priest, he received her at his knees, and

listened to her. Then, master of her secret, of her thoughts, the

thoughts of a woman, he became man again, without, perhaps, either

wishing or knowing it, and laid upon her, weakened and disarmed, the

heavy hand of man.

And her family now? her husband? Who will dare to assert that his

position is the same as before?

Every reflecting mind knows full well that thought is the most personal

part of the person. The master of a person's thoughts is he to whom

the person belongs. The priest has the soul fast, as soon as he has

received the dangerous pledge of the first secrets, and he will hold it

faster and faster. The two husbands now take shares, for now there are

two--one has the soul, the other the body.

Take notice that in this sharing, one of the two really has the whole;

the other, if he gets anything, gets it by favour. Thought by its

nature is prevailing and absorbing; the master of her thought, in the

natural progress of his sway, will ever go on reducing the part that

seemed to remain in the possession of the other. The husband may think

himself well off, if a widower with respect to the soul, he still

preserves the involuntary, inert, and lifeless possession.

How humiliating, to obtain nothing of what was your own, but by

authorisation and indulgence;[1] to be seen, and followed into your

most private intimacy, by an invisible witness, who governs you and

gives you your allowance; to meet in the street a man who knows better

than yourself your most secret weaknesses, who bows cringingly, turns

and laughs. It is nothing to be powerful, if one is not powerful

alone--alone! God does not allow shares.

It is with this reasoning that the priest is sure to comfort himself in

his persevering efforts to sever this woman from her family, to weaken

her kindred ties, and, particularly, to undermine the rival

authority--I mean, the husband's. The husband is a heavy encumbrance

to the priest. But if this husband suffers at being so well known,

spied, and seen, when he is alone, he who sees all suffers still more.

She comes now every moment to tell innocently of things that transport

him beyond himself. Often would he stop her, and would willingly say,

"Mercy, madam, this is too much!" And though these details make him

suffer the torment of the damned, he wants still more, and requires her

to enter further and further into these avowals, both humiliating for

her, and cruel for him, and to give him the detail of the saddest

circumstances.

The Confessor of a young woman may boldly be termed the jealous secret

enemy of the husband. If there be one exception to this rule (and I am

willing to believe there may be), he is a hero, a saint, a martyr, a

man more than man.

The whole business of the confessor is to insulate this woman, and he

does it conscientiously. It is the duty of him who leads her in the

way of salvation to disengage her gradually from all earthly ties. It

requires time, patience, and skill. The question is not how these

strong ties may suddenly be broken; but to discover well, first of all,

of what threads each tie is composed, and to disentangle, and gnaw them

away thread by thread.

And all this may easily be done by him who, awakening new scruples

every day, fills a timid soul with uneasiness, about the lawfulness of

her most holy affections. If any one of them be innocent, it is, after

all, an earthly attachment, a robbery against God: God wants all. No

more relationship or friendship; nothing must remain. "A brother?"

No, he is still a man. "But at least my sister? my mother?" "No, you

must leave all--leave them intentionally, and from your soul; you shall

always see them, my child; nothing will appear changed; only, close

your heart." A moral solitude is thus established around. Friends go

away, offended at her freezing politeness. "People are cool in this

house." But why this strange reception? They cannot guess; she does

not always know why herself. The thing is commanded; is it not enough?

Obedience consists in obeying without reason.

"People are cold here:" this is all that can be said. The husband

finds the house larger and more empty. His wife is become quite

changed: though present, her mind is absent; she acts as if unconscious

of acting; she speaks, but not like herself. Everything is changed in

their intimate habits, always for a good reason: "To-day is a fast

day"--and to-morrow? "Is a holy-day." The husband respects this

austerity; he would consider it very wrong to trouble this exalted

devotion; he is sadly resigned: "This becomes embarrassing," says he:

"I had not foreseen it; my wife is turning saint."[2]

In this sad house there are fewer friends, yet there is a new one, and

a very assiduous one: the habitual confessor is now the director;[3] a

great and important change.

As her confessor he received her at church, at regular hours; but as

director he visits her at his own hour, sees her at her house, and

occasionally at his own.

As confessor he was generally passive, listening much, and speaking

little; if he prescribed, it was in a few words; but as director he is

all activity; he not only prescribes acts, but what is more important,

by intimate conversation he influences her thoughts.

To the confessor she tells her sins; she owes him nothing more; but to

the director everything must be told: she must speak of herself and her

relations, her business and her interests. When she entrusts to that

man her highest interest, that of eternal salvation, how can she help

confiding to him her little temporal concerns, the marriage of her

children, and the WILL she intends to make? &c., &c.

The confessor is bound to secrecy, he is silent (or ought to be). The

director, however, is not so tied down. He may reveal what he knows,

especially to a priest, or to another director. Let us suppose about

twenty priests assembled in a house (or not quite so many, out of

respect for the law against meetings), who may be, some of them the

confessors, and others directors of the same persons: as directors they

may mutually exchange their information, put upon a table a thousand or

two thousand consciences in common, combine their relations, like so

many chessmen, regulate beforehand all the movements and interests, and

allot to one another the different parts they have to play to bring the

whole to their purpose.

The Jesuits alone formerly worked thus in concert; but it is not the

fault of the leaders of the clergy, in these days, if the whole of this

body, with trembling obedience, do not play at this villanous game. By

their all communicating together, their secret revelations might

produce a vast mysterious science, which would arm ecclesiastical

policy with a power a hundred times stronger than that of the state can

possibly be.

Whatever might be wanting in the confession of the master, would easily

be supplied by that of his servants and valets. The association of the

Blandines of Lyons, imitated in Brittany, Paris, and elsewhere, would

alone be sufficient to throw a light upon the whole household of every

family. It is in vain they are known, they are nevertheless employed;

for they are gentle and docile, serve their masters very well, and know

how to see and listen.

Happy the father of a family who has so virtuous a wife, and such

gentle, humble, honest, pious servants. What the ancient sighed for,

namely, to live in a glass dwelling, where he might be seen by every

one, this happy man enjoys without even the expression of a wish. Not

a syllable of his is lost. He may speak lower and lower, but a fine

ear has caught every word. If he writes down his secret thoughts, not

wishing to utter them, they are read:--by whom? No one knows. What he

dreams upon his pillow, the next morning, to his great astonishment, he

hears in the street.

[1] St. Francois de Sales, the best of them all, takes compassion on

the poor husband. He removes certain scruples of the wife, &c. Even

this kindness is singularly humiliating. (See ed. 1833, vol. viii. pp.

254, 312, 347, 348.) Marriage, though one of the sacraments, appears

here as a suppliant on its knees before the _direction_, seems to ask

pardon, and suffer penance.

[2] For the _insulated state_ of a father of a family in Catholic

countries, see M. BOUVET'S _Du Catholicisme_, p. 175. (ed. 1840). An

English gentleman, whose wife goes to Confession, said to me one day,

"I am a lodger in my own house--I come to my meals."--ED.

[3] The name is rare in our days, but the thing is common; he who

confesses for a length of time becomes director. Several persons have,

at the same time, a confessor, an extraordinary confessor, and a

director.

CHAPTER IV.

HABIT.--ITS POWER.--ITS INSENSIBLE BEGINNING.--ITS PROGRESS.--SECOND

NATURE.--OFTEN FATAL.--A MAN MAKING THE MOST OF THE POWER OF

HABIT.--CAN WE GET CLEAR OF IT?

If spiritual dominion be really of the spirit, if the empire over

thought be obtained by thought itself, by a superiority of character

and mind, we must give way; we have only to be resigned. Our family

may protest, but it will be in vain.

But, for the most part, this is not the case. The influence we speak

of by no means supposes, as an essential condition, the brilliant gifts

of the mind. They are doubtless of service to him who has them,

though, if we have them in a superior degree, they may possibly do him

harm. A brilliant superiority, which ever seems a pretension to

govern, puts the minds of others on their guard, warns the less

prudent, and places an obstacle on the very threshold; which here is

everything. People of mediocrity do not alarm us, they gain an

entrance more easily. The weaker they are the less they are suspected;

therefore are they the stronger in one sense. Iron clashes against the

rock, is blunted, and loses its edge and point. But who would distrust

water? Weak, colourless, insipid as it is, if, however, it always

continues to fall in the same place, it will in time hollow out the

flinty rock.

Stand at this window every day, at a certain hour in the afternoon.

You will see a pale man pass down the street, with his eyes cast on the

ground, and always following the same line of pavement next the houses.

Where he set his foot yesterday, there he does to-day, and there he

will to-morrow; he would wear out the pavement, if it was never

renewed. And by this same street he goes to the same house, ascends to

the same story, and in the same cabinet speaks to the same person. He

speaks of the same things, and his manner seems the same. The person

who listens to him sees no difference between yesterday and

to-day:--gentle uniformity, as serene as an infant's sleep, whose

breathing raises its chest at equal intervals with the same soft sound.

You think that nothing changes in this monotonous equality; that all

these days are the same. You are mistaken; you have _perceived_

nothing, yet every day there is a change, slight, it is true, and

imperceptible, which the person, himself changed by little and little,

does not remark.

It is like a dream in a bark. What distance have you come, whilst you

were dreaming? Who can tell? Thus you go on, without seeming to

move--still, and yet rapidly. Once out of the river, or canal, you

soon find yourself at sea; the uniform immensity in which you now are

will inform you still less of the distance you go. Time and place are

equally uncertain; no sure point to occupy attention; and attention

itself is gone. The reverie is profound, and becomes more and more

so:--an ocean of dreams upon the smooth ocean of waters.

A pleasant state, in which everything becomes insensible, even

gentleness itself. Is it death, or is it life? To distinguish, we

require attention, and we should awake from our dream.--No, let it go

on, whatever it may be that carries me along with it, whether it lead

me to life or death.

Alas! 'tis habit! that gently sloping formidable abyss, into which we

slide so easily! we may say everything that is bad of it, and, also,

everything that is good, and it will be always true.

Let us be frank: if the action that we did in the first instance

knowingly and voluntarily, was never done but with will and attention,

if it never became habitual and easy, we should act but little and

slowly, and our life would pass away in endeavours and efforts. If,

for instance, every time we stepped forward we had to reflect upon our

direction, and how to keep our balance, we should not walk much better

than the child who is trying to go alone. But walking soon becomes a

habit, an action that is performed without any need of invoking the

constant and intermediate operation of the will. It is the same with

many other acts which, still less voluntary, become at last mechanical,

automatical, foreign, as I may say, to our personality. As we advance

in life a considerable portion of our activity escapes our notice,

removes from the sphere of liberty to enter that of habit, and becomes

as it were fated; the remainder, relieved in that respect, and so far

absolved from attention and effort, finds itself, by a process of

compensation, more free to act elsewhere.

This is useful, but it is also dangerous. The fatal part increases

within us, without our interference, and grows in the darkness of our

inward nature. What formerly struck our attention, now passes

unperceived. What was at first difficult, in time grows easy, too

easy: at last we can no longer say even that it is easy, for it takes

place of its own accord, independently of our will; we suffer, if we do

not do it. These acts being those, of all others, that cost the least

trouble, are incessantly renewed. We must, at last, confess that a

second nature is the result, which, formed at the expense of the

former, becomes, in a great measure, its substitute. We forget the

difficulties of our early beginnings, and fancy we have always been so.

This favours at least our idleness, and excuses us from making any

efforts to stop ourselves on the brink. Besides, the very traces of

the change are at length effaced, the road has disappeared; even though

we desire to go back, we could not. It is as though a bridge were

broken down behind us; we have passed over it--but for the last time.

We then resign ourselves to our lot, and say, with a faint attempt to

smile, "_For me it is a second nature_," or, better still, "_It is my

nature_." So much have we forgotten! But between this nature and our

real primitive nature, which we received at our birth, there is a great

difference; which is, that the latter, derived from the bosom of the

mother, was like the real mother herself, an attentive guardian of

life, that warned us of whatever may compromise it, that sought and

found in its benevolence a remedy for our ills. Whereas this second

nature, habit, under this perfidious name is often nothing else than

the high road that leads to death.

"It is my second nature," says the opium drinker in a sad tone, when he

sees dying by his side one who had taken to the deadly beverage only a

few months before himself: "I have still so many months to live." "It

is my second nature," says a miserable child, a devoted victim of idle

and bad habits. Neither reasoning, chastisement, nor maternal grief,

is of any avail. They both go, and will go, to the end, following the

road by which people travel but once.

A vulgar proverb (but too true in this case) tells us, "_Whoever has

once drunk, will drink_." We must generalise it, and say, "_Whoever

has acted, will act; whoever has suffered, will suffer_." But this is

still more true with respect to passive than active habits. Accustomed

to let things take their course, to suffer and to enjoy, we become

incapable of resuming our activity. At last we do not even require the

enticement of pleasure; even when it is no more, and pain usurps its

place, inexorable habit pours out still from the same cup: it then no

longer takes the trouble to dissemble; we recognise, when too late, how

ugly and invincible this tyrant is, who says coldly, "You drank the

honey first, now you shall drink the gall, and to the last drop."

If this tyrant, habit, is so strong when it acts blindly, when it is

only a thing such as opium or gin, what does it become when it has

eyes, a will, _an art_, in a word, when it is a man? A man full of

calculation, who knows how to create and cherish habit for his own

advantage, a man who for his first means brings against you your

belief; who begins personal fascination in the authority of a respected

character; who, to exercise it over you and create a habit in you, has

daily occasions, days, months, years, time, irresistible time, the

tamer of all human things, time, that can eat away iron and brass! Is

the heart of woman hard enough to resist it?

A woman? a child! still less, a person _who will be a child_, who

employs all the faculties she has acquired since childhood to fall back

into childishness, who directs her will to wish no longer, and her

thoughts no longer to know anything, and gives herself up as if asleep.

Suppose her to awake (it is a very rare case), to awake for a moment

(surprising the tyrant without his mask, seeing him as he really is),

and then to wish to escape. Do you think she can? To do so, she must

act; but she no longer knows what it is, not having acted for so long a

time; her limbs are stiff; her legs are paralysed and have lost all

motion; her heavy hand rises, falls again, and refuses.

Then you may perceive too well what is habit, and how, once bound in

its thousand imperceptible threads, you remain tied in spite of you to

what you detest. These threads, though they escape the eye, are,

nevertheless, tough. Pliable and supple as they seem to be, you may

break through one, but underneath you find two; it is a double, nay

triple, net. Who can know its thickness?

I read once in an old story what is really touching, and very

significant. It was about a woman, a wandering princess, who, after

many sufferings, found for her asylum a deserted palace, in the midst

of a forest. She felt happy in reposing there, and remaining some

time: she went to and fro from one large empty room to another, without

meeting with any obstacle; she thought herself alone and free. All the

doors were open. Only at the hall-door, no one having passed through

since herself, the spider had woven his web in the sun, a thin, light,

and almost invisible network; a feeble obstacle which the princess, who

wishes at last to go out, thinks she can remove without any difficulty.

She raises the web; but there is another behind it, which she also

raises without trouble. The second concealed a third, that she must

also raise:--strange! there are four.--No, five! or rather six--and

more beyond. Alas! how will she get rid of so many? She is already

tired. No matter! she perseveres; by taking breath a little she may

continue. But the web continues too, and is ever renewed with a

malicious obstinacy. What is she to do? She is overcome with fatigue

and perspiration, her arms fall by her sides. At last, exhausted as

she is, she sits down on the ground, on that insurmountable

threshold:--she looks mournfully at the aerial obstacle fluttering in

the wind, lightly and triumphantly.--Poor princess! poor fly! now you

are caught! But why did you stay in that fairy dwelling, and give the

spider time to spin his web?

CHAPTER V.

ON CONVENTS--OMNIPOTENCE OF THE DIRECTOR.--CONDITION OF THE NUN FORLORN

AND WATCHED.--CONVENTS THAT ARE AT THE SAME TIME BRIDEWELLS AND

BEDLAMS.--INVEIGLING.--BARBAROUS DISCIPLINE.--STRUGGLE BETWEEN THE

SUPERIOR NUN AND THE DIRECTOR.--CHANGE OF DIRECTORS.--THE MAGISTRATE.

Fifteen years ago I occupied, in a very solitary part of the town, a

house, the garden of which was adjacent to that of a convent of women.

Though my windows overlooked the greatest part of their garden, I had

never seen my sad neighbours. In the month of May, on Rogation-day, I

heard numerous weak, very weak voices, chanting prayers, as the

procession passed through the convent garden. The singing was sad,

dry, unpleasant, their voices false, as if spoiled by sufferings. I

thought for a moment they were chanting prayers for the dead; but,

listening more attentively, I distinguished on the contrary, "_Te

rogamus, audi nos_," the song of hope which invokes the benediction of

the God of life upon fruitful nature. This May-song, chanted by these

lifeless nuns, offered to me a bitter contrast. To see these pale

girls crawling along on the flowery, verdant turf, these poor girls;

who will never bloom again!--The thought of the middle ages that had at

first flashed across my mind soon died away: for then monastic life was

connected with a thousand other things; but in our modern harmony what

is this but a barbarous contradiction, a false, harsh, grating note?

What I then beheld before me was to be defended neither by nature nor

by history. I shut my window again, and sadly resumed my book. This

sight had been painful to me, as it was not softened or atoned for by

any poetical sentiment. It reminded me much less of chastity than of

sterile widowhood, a state of emptiness, inaction, disgust--of an

intellectual[1] and moral fast, the state in which these unfortunate

creatures are kept by their absolute rulers.

We were speaking of habit; it is certainly there that it reigns a

tyrant. Very little art is required to rule over these poor,

insulated, immured, and dependent women; as there is no outward

influence to counterbalance the impression that one person, ever the

same person, makes on them daily. The least skilful priest may easily

fascinate their natures, already weakened, and brought down to the most

servile, trembling obedience. There is little courage or merit in thus

trampling over the creature which is already crushed.

To speak first of the power of habit: nothing of all that we see in the

world can give us an idea of the force with which it acts upon this

little immured community. Family society, doubtless, modifies us, but

its influence is neutralised by outward events. The regularity with

which our favourite newspaper comes every morning with uniform

monotony, has certainly some influence; but this newspaper has its

rivals, its opponents. Another influence which exists less in our

time, but is still very powerful over secluded persons, is that of a

book, the captivating perusal of which may detain us for months and

years. Diderot confesses that Clarissa was read by him over and over

again, and that it was for a long time his very life, his joy, his

grief, his summer and winter. But the finest thing of this class is,

after all, but a book, a dumb, inanimate thing, which, though you may

call it as animate as you please, does not hear, and cannot answer; it

has no words with which it may answer yours, nor eyes to reflect your

own.

Away, then, with books, those cold paper images!

Imagine in a monastery, where nothing else intrudes, the only living

object, the only person who has a right to enter, who monopolises all

the influences of which we have spoken, who is, in himself, their

society, newspaper, novel, and sermon; a person whose visit is the only

interruption to the deadly monotony of a life devoid of employment.

Before he comes, and after he has been, is the only division of time in

this life of profound monotony.

We said a person, we ought to have said a man. Whoever will be candid

would confess that a woman would never have this influence; that the

circumstance of his being of the opposite sex has much to do with it,

even with the purest and with those who had never dreamed of sex.

To be the only one, without either comparison or contradiction, to be

the whole world of a soul, to wean it, at pleasure, from every

reminiscence that might cause any rivalry, and efface from this docile

heart even the thought of a mother that might still[2] be cherished

within it! To inherit everything, and remain alone and be master of

this heart by the extinction of all natural sentiments!

_The only one_! But this is the good, the perfect, the amiable, the

beloved! Enumerate every good quality, and they will all be found to

be contained in this one term. A thing even (not to say a person), a

thing, if it be the only one, will in time captivate our hearts.

Charlemagne, seeing from his palace always the same sight, a lake with

its verdant border, at last fell in love with it.

Habit certainly contributes much; but also that great necessity of the

heart to tell everything to what we are always in the habit of seeing:

whether it be man or thing, we must speak. Even if it were a stone, we

should tell it everything, for our thoughts must be told, and our

griefs be poured out from an overflowing heart.

Do you believe that this poor nun is tranquil in this life so

monotonous? How many sad, but, alas! too true confessions I could

relate here, that have been communicated to me by tender female

friends, who had gone and received their tears in their bosom, and

returned, pierced to the heart, to weep with me.

What we must wish for the prisoner is, that her heart, and almost her

body, may die. If she be not shattered and crushed into a state of

self-oblivion, she will find in the convent the united sufferings of

solitude and of the world. Alone, without being able to be alone![3]

Forlorn, yet all her actions watched!

Forlorn! This nun still young, yet already old through abstinence and

grief, was yesterday a boarder, a novice whom they caressed. The

friendship of the young girls, the maternal flattery of the old, her

attachment for this nun, or that confessor, everything deceived her,

and enticed her onward to eternal confinement. We almost always fancy

ourselves called to God, when we follow an amiable, enchanting person,

one who, with that smiling, captivating devotion, delights in this sort

of spiritual conquest. As soon as one is gained, she goes to another;

but the poor girl who followed her, in the belief that she was loved,

is no longer cared for.

Alone, in a solitude without tranquillity of mind, and without repose.

How sweet, in comparison with this, would be the solitude of the woods!

The trees would still have compassion; they are not so insensible as

they seem: they hear and they listen.

A woman's heart, that unconquerable maternal instinct, the basis of a

woman's character, tries to deceive itself. She will soon find out

some young friend, some candid companion, a favourite pupil. Alas! she

will be taken from her. The jealous ones, to find favour with the

superiors, never fail to accuse the purest attachments. The devil is

jealous, in the interest of God--he makes his objections for the sake

of God alone.

What wonder, then, if this woman is sad, sadder every day, frequenting

the most melancholy-looking avenues, and no longer speaks? Then her

solitude becomes a crime. Now she is pointed out as suspected: they

all observe and watch her. In the day-time? It is not enough. The

spy system lasts all night: they watch her sleeping, listen to her when

she dreams, and take down her words.

The dreadful feeling of being thus watched night and day must strangely

trouble all the powers of the soul. The darkest hallucinations come

over her, and all those wicked dreams that her poor reason, when on the

point of leaving her, can make in broad daylight and wide awake. You

know the visions that Piranesi has engraved: vast subterraneous

prisons, deep pits without air, staircases that you ascend for ever

without reaching the top, bridges that lead to an abyss, low vaults,

narrow passages of catacombs growing closer and closer. In these

dreadful prisons, which are punishments, you may perceive, moreover,

instruments of torture, wheels, iron collars, whips.

In what, I should like to know, do convents of our time differ from

houses of correction and mad-houses?[4] Many convents seem to unite

the three characters.

I know but one difference between them; whilst the houses of correction

are inspected by the law, and the mad-houses by the police, both stop

at the convent doors; the law is afraid, and dares not pass the

threshold.

The inspection of convents, and the precise designation of their

character, are, however, so much more indispensable in these days, as

they differ in a very serious point from the convents of the old

_regime_.

Those of the last century were properly asylums, where, for a donation

once paid, every noble family, whether living as nobles, or rich

citizens, placed one or more daughters to make a rich son. Once shut

up there, they might live or die as they pleased; they were no longer

cared for. But now _nuns inherit_, they become an object to be gained,

a prey for a hundred thousand snares--an easy prey in their state of

captivity and dependence. A superior, zealous to enrich her community,

has infallible means to force the nun to give up her wealth; she can a

hundred times a-day, under pretence of devotion and penitence, humble,

vex, and even ill-treat her, till she reduces her to despair. Who can

say where asceticism finishes and captation begins, that "_compelle

intrare_" applied to fortune? A financial and administrative spirit

prevails to such a degree in our convents, that this sort of talent is

what they require in a superior before every other. Many of these

ladies are excellent managers. One of them is known in Paris by the

notaries and lawyers, as able to give them lessons in matters of

donations, successions, and wills. Paris need no longer envy Bologna

that learned female jurisconsult, who, occasionally wrapped in a veil,

professed in the chair of her father.

Our modern laws, which date from the Revolution, and which, in their

equity, have determined that the daughter and younger son should not be

without their inheritance, work powerfully in this respect in favour of

the counter-revolution: and that explains the rapid and unheard-of

increase of religious houses.

Nothing stops the monastic recruiters in their zeal for the salvation

of rich souls. You may see them fluttering about heirs and heiresses.

What a premium for the young peasants who people our seminaries is this

prospect of power! Once priests, they may direct fortunes as well as

consciences![5]

Captation, so conspicuous in the busy world, is not so in the convents;

though it is here still more dangerous, being exercised over persons

immured and dependent. There it reigns unbridled, and is formidable

with impunity. For who can know it? Who dares enter here? No one.

Strange! There are houses in France that are estranged to France. The

street is still France; but pass yonder threshold, and you are in a

foreign country which laughs at your laws.

What, then, are their laws? We are ignorant upon the subject. But we

know for certain (for no pains are taken to disguise it) that the

barbarous discipline of the middle ages is preserved in full force.

Cruel contradiction! This system that speaks so much of the

distinction of the soul and the body, and believes it, since it boldly

exposes the confessor to carnal temptations! Well! this very same

system teaches us that the body, distinct from the soul, modifies it by

its suffering; that the soul improves and becomes more pure under the

lash![6] It preaches spiritualism to meet valiantly the seduction of

the flesh, and materialism when required to annihilate the will!

What! when the law forbids to strike even our galley slaves, who are

thieves, murderers, the most ferocious of men--you men of grace, who

speak only of charity, _the good holy Virgin, and the gentle

Jesus_--you strike women!--nay, girls, even children--who, after all,

are only guilty of some trifling weakness!

How are these chastisements administered? This is a question, perhaps,

still more serious. What sort of terms of composition may not be

extorted by fear? At what price does authority sell its indulgence?

Who regulates the number of stripes? Is it you, My Lady Abbess? or

you, Father Superior? What must be the capricious partial decision of

one woman against another, if the latter displeases her; an ugly woman

against a handsome one, or an old one against a young girl? We shudder

to think.

A strange struggle often happens between the superior nun and the

director. The latter, however hardened he may be, is still a man. It

is very difficult for him at last not to be affected for the poor girl,

who tells him everything, and obeys him implicitly. Female authority

perceives it instantly, observes him, and follows him closely. He sees

his penitent but little, very little, but it is always thought too

much. The confession shall last only so many minutes: they wait for

him, watch in hand. It would last too long, nay, for ever, without

this precaution. To the poor recluse, who received from every one else

only insult and ill-treatment, a compassionate confessor is still a

welcome refuge.

We have known superiors demand and obtain several times from their

bishops a change of confessors, without finding any sufficiently

austere. There is ever a wide difference between the harshness of man

and the cruelty of a woman! What is, in your opinion, the most

faithful incarnation of the devil in this world? Some inquisitor?

Some Jesuit or other? No, a _female Jesuit_,--some great lady, who has

been converted, and believes herself born to rule, who among this flock

of trembling females acts the Bonaparte, and who, more absolute than

the most absolute tyrant, uses the rage of her badly-cured passions to

torment her unfortunate defenceless sisters.

Far from being the adversary of the confessor in this case, he has my

best wishes. Whether he be priest, monk, or Jesuit, I am now on his

side. I entreat him to interfere, if he can. In this hell, where the

law cannot penetrate, he is the only person who can say a word of

humanity. I know very well that this interference will create the

strongest and most dangerous attachment. The heart of the poor young

creature is wholly given up beforehand to him who defends her.

The priest will be removed, driven away, and ruined, if it be

necessary. Nothing is easier to an active influential superior. He

dares not venture there, is afraid of disturbance, and retires timidly.

You will find neither priests nor prelates in these cases mindful of

their power, as confessors and spiritual judges; nor will they refuse

absolution to the tyrant of the nuns, as Las Casas did to those of the

Indians.

There are, fortunately, other judges. The law sleeps, but it still

lives.[7] Some courageous magistrates have been willing to do their

duty.[8] No doubt they will be permitted. The nights of the guilty

have been troubled; they know that every violence which is committed

there, every blow given in defiance of the law, is an accusation

against them before heaven and earth. _Exsurge, Domine, et judica

causam tuam!_

[1] I have already spoken of Sister Mary Lemonnier, persecuted for

knowing too well how to write and draw flowers, &c.--"My confessor,"

says she, "forbade me to gather flowers and to draw. Unfortunately,

walking in the garden with the nuns, there were on the edge of the

grass two wild poppies, which, without any intention, I lopped between

my fingers in passing. One of the sisters saw me, and ran to inform

the superior nun who was walking in front, and who immediately came

towards me, made me open my hand, and, seeing the poppies, told me that

I had done for myself. And the confessor having come the same evening,

she accused me before him of disobedience in having gathered flowers.

It was in vain I told him that it was unintentionally done, and that

they were only wild poppies; I could not obtain permission to confess

myself."--_Note of Sister Marie Lemonnier_, in Mr. Tilliard's Memoire.

The newspapers and the reviews in March, 1845, give extracts from it.

[2] It is often from an instinctive tyranny that the superiors delight

in breaking the ties of kindred. "The curate of my parish exhorted me

to write to my father, who had just lost my mother. I let Advent go by

(during which time nuns are not permitted to write letters), and the

latter days of the month which are passed in retirement in the

institution to prepare us for the renewing of our vows, which takes

place on new-year's day. But after the holy term I hastened to fulfil

my duty towards the best of fathers by addressing to him both my

prayers and good wishes, and endeavouring to offer him some consolation

in the afflictions and trials with which it had pleased God to visit

him. I went to the cell of the superior nun to beg her to read over my

letter, fix the convent seal to it, and send it off; but she was not

there. I therefore put it in my cell upon the table, and went to

prayers; during which time our reverend mother the superior, who knew

that I had written, because she had sent one of the nuns to see what I

was about, beckoned to one of the sisters and bid her go and take my

letter. She did so every time I wrote, seven times running, so that my

father died five months afterwards without ever obtaining a letter from

me, which he had so much desired, and had even asked me for on his

death-bed, by the curate of his parish."--_Note of Sister Lemonnier_ in

Mr. Tilliard's Memoire. See also the _National_, March, 1845.