CAPTAIN LEOPOLD INTRODUCES HIS FRIEND.
Blanche Léopold was in great delight at having Pearl and Polly with her.
“We are just like three sisters, are not we, petite maman?” she said, as
they lightly tossed their skirts over each other so as not to crush
them.
“Exactly, chères enfants!” said Mme. Léopold, with a smile at both her
_protégées_; but it was Pearl’s hand she pressed, it was Pearl’s
forehead that she stooped to kiss, in answer to Blanche’s appeal.
“Is M. Léon to be at the ball?” inquired Polly.
“Of course he is! What a question, you wicked child!” said Léon’s
mother; and then she turned to Pearl and laughed, and pressed her hand
again.
Pearl’s cheeks were burning like two live coals, but nobody saw this in
the dim light of the carriage.
“I thought he was on duty at the _Etat Major_ this evening?” persisted
terrible Polly.
“So he was, but he contrived to get off,” said Blanche.
“A higher duty called him to the Tuileries to-night,” said his mother.
“Oh! the emperor has named him on his staff? How glad I am!” said Polly,
and Pearl longed to choke her. “Yes, it will be very nice for you to
have him in the emperor’s service,” went on the incorrigible Polly, as
innocent as a babe of any mischievous intentions. “You are sure to be
asked to the _Petits Lundis_ now; and we shall enjoy them more for
having you all there. Are you very deep in engagements to-night,
Blanche?”
They compared notes and discussed partners till they drew up before the
palace; that is to say, Blanche and Polly did. Pearl lay back very
silent all the way, and when they alighted Mme. Léopold noticed that she
was very pale and seemed provokingly out of tune with the gay scene.
Who that has ever beheld it can forget how gay it was, that brilliant
gathering in the old palace?—the blaze of light, the flashing uniforms,
the splendidly-attired women, all the stars of fashion and wealth
forming a dazzling galaxy round the beautiful Spaniard’s throne, she
herself the centre of the firmament, outshining all in grace and beauty
and magnificence of attire.
“There is Léon!” cried Blanche the moment they entered the Salle des
Maréchaux. And Léon, obeying the magnetic attraction that we all know
of, suddenly turned round, and, across the crowd of “fair women and
brave men,” espied his mother and her maidens, and at once made towards
them. He was very striking in his picturesque hussar uniform with its
hanging dolman.
“_Il n’est pas trop mal, mon fils?_” said Mme. Léopold, glancing from
him to Pearl and smiling at the latter. But Pearl made no answer, only
crimsoned and looked away.
“How late you are!” exclaimed Léon. “I have been on the watch for you
this last hour. Are you all engaged, mesdemoiselles?” bowing in one
sweep to the three young ladies.
They all were, but their partners were not to the fore yet, and they
might not meet for a long time.
“_Les absents ont toujours tort_,” said Léon; “so I claim the privilege
of replacing one of them.”
It was to Polly he spoke; she responded by holding out her hand, and in
a moment they were wheeling along in a waltz.
“That is a bit of masculine coquetry; he fancies he will make somebody
jealous,” said Mme. Léopold, trying to look as if the joke amused her
very much; but she was really annoyed with Léon.
Pearl set her face like a flint this time, and, without blushing
happily, looked about her with an unconcerned air. She and Blanche were
not left long waiting. Partners quickly found them out, and came up in a
body, quarrelling over their claim to priority. Before Pearl had come to
a decision Mr. Kingspring was at her elbow, and proclaimed his right to
the first quadrille over all comers. She caught at this with avidity and
hurried away with him.
“How I hate being here to-night!” she said when they were out of Mme.
Léopold’s hearing. “I can’t imagine why mamma insisted on our coming.
You could tell me if you liked?”
Mr. Kingspring was taken aback by this direct appeal. He was very fond
of Pearl, and she treated him with a sisterly _sans façon_ that he was
proud of. They were friends, in fact. He might easily put her off with
some platitude or prevarication now, but he felt this would not be
acting as a loyal friend.
“Is it fair of you to ask me? If your father has not let you into his
confidence yet, it would not be honorable in me to do so. It would not
be acting as one gentleman should towards another. You would not have me
do this? You would not have one whom you call your friend act otherwise
than as a gentleman?”
“I can’t imagine why there should be a mystery about it,” sighed Pearl.
“If anybody was dead, we should not have been sent to a ball, I
suppose?”
Mr. Kingspring coughed and muttered a vague assent.
“Is Cousin Darrell dead?” asked Pearl abruptly.
“No, no; it is nothing about Darrell.”
“Is it anything about money?”
“Well, perhaps it may be; but I hope not. I mean I hope it will turn out
a mistake.”
“Mamma was crying this morning,” said Pearl; “she does not cry for
nothing.”
“I hope there may be no real cause for her tears. I believe myself there
is not.”
“Papa was in a dreadful state,” continued Pearl. “I heard him storming
in his study for more than an hour. Was it about a letter he got from
England?”
“There was a letter. But don’t cross-examine me; don’t, Pearl. It is not
fair, and I really must not speak.”
Pearl never remembered him calling her by her name before, though he
declared he used to do so when she was a baby.
“To think of their insisting on our coming here to-night when there is
this horrible anxiety at home!” she said, and her eyes began to fill in
spite of her.
“There is no _certain_ cause for it so far,” protested Mr. Kingspring.
“Don’t worry till you know there is real cause for it; there is no use
in saying good-morrow to the devil till you meet him. Let us take a turn
with the waltzers; you have done me out of my quadrille.”
They took a few turns down the long gallery, now densely crowded, and
then he stopped to let her rest.
“Who is that Polly is dancing with?” said Pearl, as she spied her sister
in the distance with a tall, distinguished-looking man in the uniform of
the hussars.
“I don’t know; probably some fellow Léopold has introduced.”
While they were still standing in the embrasure of a window Léon came
up.
“May I claim the honor of a dance, mademoiselle?” he said, doubling
himself in two before Pearl.
“I don’t feel a bit in the mood for dancing,” said Pearl, “the rooms are
so hot and so dreadfully crowded. Do you know who that is that my sister
is waltzing with?”
“Captain Darvallon, one of the most distinguished officers in the
service, and quite the best fellow I know; he is a great friend of
mine.”
“Then it was you who introduced him to her?”
“I was proud to procure him that honor.”
“Poor devil!” said Mr. Kingspring. “I suspect you have done for him; if
he has such a thing as a heart he will go home a miserable man to-night.
I never saw Mlle. Polly looking so unmercifully pretty. D’Arres-Vallon
you say his name is? Does he spell it in one word or two? I used to know
two families of that name; one spelt it D’Arvalhon, the other
D’Arres-Vallon. Which is his?”
“Neither; he writes it in one word with a big D; he does not boast the
noble _particule_.”
“Then he is a man of no family?”
“None whatever. He is what we call the son of his works; he has risen in
his profession by sheer force of intelligence and moral worth. There is
not an officer in the army more respected than Darvallon.”
Pearl looked again at Polly’s partner, and he struck her as still more
prepossessing than at the first glance.
“Amongst military men I can imagine its making no difference; but
socially his low birth must subject him to disagreeables now and then,”
observed Mr. Kingspring, following the direction of Pearl’s eyes, and
surveying the hussar with the sort of interest one bestows on a curious
variety of animal new to one’s experience.
“The man who would subject Darvallon to anything of the sort would be
either a fool or a snob,” replied Léon coldly. “I suppose there are
plenty of both going about the world; but men like Darvallon have a sort
of charm that keeps them at a distance.”
Mr. Kingspring felt that this remark addressed to him was not that of a
perfect gentleman; it sounded too like a snub. But the Léopolds, as Mme.
de Kerbec said, were after all only Empire people, Léon’s grandfather
having been made a baron by the first Napoleon.
Pearl admired Léon for standing up so bravely for his friend; there was
that in her which responded instinctively to everything noble, even when
it was violently against her own opinions or sympathies.
“He must be a nice man, as well as clever,” she said. “Introduce him to
me when he has finished his waltz with my sister.”
“Reward me beforehand for that act of generosity by finishing the waltz
with me,” said Léon.
And Pearl did, Mr. Kingspring being left alone to meditate on the low
ideas of modern Frenchmen and the strange inconsistencies of well-born
English maidens.
“Mademoiselle, may I have the honor of presenting to you my friend and
brother officer, Captain Darvallon?”
M. Darvallon bowed low, and when he looked up Pearl’s soft brown eyes
met his with a glance of interest so full and frank that, if he had been
a coxcomb, he might have flattered himself he had slain her on the spot.
Polly was a little tired and said she wanted an ice, so Léon offered her
his arm to the buffet, and Pearl followed with her new acquaintance. He
was a tall, powerfully-built man, with a Gothic head set on broad
shoulders, and long, well-bred hands and feet. Judging from his hands
and feet, Captain Darvallon might have had the blood of the Montmorencis
in him; not that he needed this _cachet_ of distinction to redeem his
appearance otherwise or stamp him outwardly as a gentleman. Pearl, even
in the distance, had singled him out as somebody above the common. His
head, massive as it was, had nothing coarse about it; his features,
without being handsome, were marked by an expression of energy,
intelligence, and refinement that impressed you more than mere good
looks; and though the prominent characteristic of his whole appearance
was power, it was too tempered by gentleness to be alarming or
repulsive. An array of stars and crosses on his breast bore witness to
his prowess on the field, but his manner had borrowed no tinge of
soldierly roughness from the camp; it was, on the contrary, marked by a
courtesy towards the fair sex rare enough in these days, when the
independence of women who have rights is too often pleaded as an excuse
for forgetting that they still have privileges.
“What a crowd there is to-night!” said Pearl.
It was a silly remark, but she wanted to say something that would put
her companion at his ease. It was the first time that she had been in
the company of a man who had risen from the ranks, and she fancied the
experience on his side must be novel enough, too, to be embarrassing.
“Just at this point the crush is rather great; but I don’t think the
rooms are more crowded than usual. Is it your first ball, mademoiselle?”
“Oh! no; I came out last season in London. You have never been to
England, monsieur?”
“Pardon me; I spent five months there three years ago.”
“Indeed! And did you think it a horrible place? Was it raining all the
time?”
“No; it behaved very well in that respect, and I liked the country very
much, and London especially; perhaps it was owing in a measure to all
the kindness I received there.”
Pearl wondered who the people were who had shown him so much kindness;
good-natured middle-class people, no doubt, who thought it rather fine
to have a French officer to entertain.
“The English understand the virtue of hospitality in a charming way,”
continued M. Darvallon; “the mere fact of your being a stranger opens
every door to you.”
“Whereas in France it shuts them?” said Pearl.
“I am sorry if that is your experience of us, mademoiselle.”
“I don’t say that; I only thought you meant to say so. But it is true;
we are fond of foreigners in England.”
“Nothing is more delightful, certainly, than the way in which you make
them welcome. I was staying at our embassy—I went over with the Comte
X—— as military _attaché_—but it was merely a kind of nominal
headquarters; I spent most of the time in the houses of English people.
The Duke of S—— was particularly kind to me. I had known his brother in
the Crimea, and he made this a pretext for receiving me as an old
friend; so did Lord B——. I spent two days at his place on the Thames.
What a little paradise it is! The grounds and the house and the view
combine to make it a perfect Eden. Some of the country places of your
old aristocracy are the most magnificent residences in the world, I
suppose; but they are so home-like, there is such a genial atmosphere in
them, that one is not oppressed by the magnificence.”
“I am glad to hear you say so; one so often hears foreigners complain of
our _morgue_ and stiffness.”
“I saw none of it.”
“Did you visit any of our palaces?”
“Yes; St. James and Buckingham I saw at once, of course. But Windsor is
glorious. We have nothing like Windsor in France. I have seen the finest
palaces in Europe, and to my mind Windsor is the most beautiful of all.
There is such a prestige of historic interest about it, added to its
artistic beauty; then the grounds and the surrounding country are so
beautiful. Nature and art have put forth their best to make it a worthy
abode of royalty.”
“And our royalties—did you approve of them, too?”
“Most highly,” said M. Darvallon, smiling; “they are excellent hosts,
since we are on the subject of hospitality. No one is overlooked. La
Reine Victoria has in a high degree that royal faculty of making all her
guests, from the highest to the humblest, feel that they are duly
noticed in her salon.”
So these were the middle-class people who had been ostentatiously civil
to the French officer. Pearl was laughing to herself at the false hit
she had made, and also at her foolish idea that he needed to be
encouraged to be put at his ease. It was impossible to be more entirely
simple and free from all shyness and affectation than he was. They had
reached the buffet now, and Léon and Polly were pushing their way to get
next to them. This was not so difficult, for the crowd fell back, as it
instinctively does for all royalties, and made way for Polly as she
advanced. Pearl looked up at her companion, and saw his eyes fixed on
her sister with an expression of admiration so unfeigned, and so full of
respect at the same time, that she felt quite tenderly toward the
stalwart hussar.
“Monsieur le Capitaine,” said Polly, as soon as they all came together
round the ices, “he insists that it was you who took Sebastopol all by
yourself!”
“_Voyons_, Léopold, don’t push modesty too far,” protested M. Darvallon.
“You lent me a hand; he did, I assure you, mademoiselle.”
“Don’t believe him; he is a flatterer. It is a trick he learned at
courts,” said Léon, and his solemn black eyes stared Darvallon full in
the face without a smile; but Pearl detected an expression of almost
feminine fondness in them as they met the gray eyes looking down on him.
“I don’t believe either of you took it,” she said, with saucy defiance;
“it was my papa who took it. Did M. Léopold tell you our father is a
soldier too, and that he lost a leg at Balaklava?”
“Col. Redacre’s name and valor were known to us all in the Crimea,
mademoiselle,” said M. Darvallon, bowing deferentially.
Both the girls blushed with pleasure, and turned a smile of fullest
approbation on the speaker.
“I told you he was a flatterer,” said Léon.
Before M. Darvallon could enter a protest some one spoke from behind
him.
“I say, Léopold, you are going to catch it for staying away from your
mother so long with these young ladies. She’s very angry with you.”
“It’s no fault of M. Léon’s,” said Polly. “We stayed ourselves, dancing;
that’s what we came for.”
“We had better go back to my mother and make an _acte de présence_,”
said Léon. “Where is she, Kingspring?”
“Where you left her, in the Salle du Trône. I have just conducted Mlle.
Blanche there after waltzing with her.”
Mr. Kingspring moved towards Pearl, as if he expected to conduct her
back; but M. Darvallon proffered his arm, and she took it.
On their way through the long ball-room they met Blanche waltzing down
on them with a slim, sallow-faced partner, of the type that Polly called
“scrubby.” The partners pulled up, and then she saw that Blanche was
radiant with smiles, and listening with delighted attention to whatever
the scrubby man was saying.
“_Qui est ce monsieur?_” Polly inquired of Léon.
“That monsieur is the Marquis de Cholcourt, the greatest _parti_ in
France just now.”
“Is he amusing?”
“I really don’t know. I shouldn’t say he was, to look at him.”
“Blanche is listening to him as if she thought him so.”
Léon made no remark, and they went on till they reached the Salle du
Trône. There they saw Mme. Léopold, just where they had left her; but
she had risen from her velvet seat, and was expostulating in an excited
manner with M. Léopold, who had just joined her, and who seemed vainly
endeavoring to pacify her. Madame shook her head, and opened and shut
her fan, talking all the time volubly, and with a countenance disturbed
by no pleasant emotion. When she caught sight of Léon and his companion
she became suddenly silent, and awaited their approach with an air of
grave displeasure.
“Mesdemoiselles, you forget you are not in England; you must know that
it is not the custom here,” she began; but the good-natured deputy cut
short the scolding, and broke out into compliments to the two
delinquents: they were the stars of the Imperial firmament to-night;
every French girl in the room was dying with jealousy, etc.
Mme. Léopold was not sorry to have their attention drawn away from
herself for the moment, and while this bantering went on with Pearl and
Polly she said in a _sotto voce_ to Léon:
“My son, you have behaved with criminal imprudence. Have you _said_
anything to compromise you? Tell me the truth.”
“Compromise! What on earth do you mean, mother?” said Léon in amazement.
“I have spoken to no one but these two young ladies.”
“That is just it! You have been parading yourself with Pearl for the
last hour. Have you said anything to lead her to hope—”
Léon began to understand, and the look of indignant surprise that
answered his mother completely reassured her.
“Thank Heaven!” she muttered under her breath. “I knew you were
incapable of it, my son, but—”
Léon did not wait to hear more; he abruptly turned away, fearful lest
Pearl should have overheard his mother’s offensive insinuations; but a
glance at her face showed him she had heard nothing.
“Are you engaged for the cotillon, mademoiselle?” he said.
“No.”
“Then may I claim your hand for it?”
“Good gracious, my son! you are not so selfish as to want to keep me
here till four in the morning? I am worn out already—I am indeed,”
protested the terrified mother, whom her son and everybody else knew to
be simply indefatigable when the duty to society was in question.
“Pray don’t let _us_ detain you here, madame,” said Polly with a certain
asperity; “we shall be glad to go the moment you feel inclined.” She saw
that a change had come over their chaperon, and she was annoyed at the
way she snapped at Léon about the cotillon.
“Is it indeed true? You would not mind coming away now? I am so
exhausted by the heat! I never knew the palace so overheated. But
Marguerite wishes to remain for the cotillon?”
“I have not the least wish to remain for it, madame,” said Pearl; the
sudden change from affectionate familiarity to being called “Marguerite”
showed that she had in some way incurred Mme. Léopold’s displeasure.
“Then let us come,” said that lady, signing to her husband to give his
arm.
“And Blanche?” said Léon.
“Good gracious! It shows how ill I am that I could have forgotten her.
Where is she? It appears that English manners are _à la mode_ everywhere
to-night. Why is your sister so long away from me? Who is she with?”
“I saw her dancing with M. de Cholcourt; but it is some time ago,” said
M. Darvallon.
“She was dancing with him again then, five minutes ago,” said Polly.
“M. de Cholcourt!” repeated Mme. Léopold in a tone of unmistakable
satisfaction. “Are you sure?”
“M. Léon told me that was his name,” said Polly. “I asked him because
Blanche seemed particularly to enjoy his conversation.”
“Dear child! I am glad she is amused. I wonder if she has made an
engagement for the cotillon?” This was said interrogatively to the two
girls and the two gentlemen with them.
Nobody knew. Meantime, Léon had gone in pursuit of Blanche, and it was
not long before he returned with her. She looked angry.
“What is the matter with you, mamma?”
“Chérie, I am rather tired to-night, and these good children are anxious
to get home.”
“It was hardly worth coming to go away so soon,” said Blanche, “and I
have made an engagement for the cotillon.”
“With whom?”
“The Marquis de Cholcourt.”
“Ha! My dear child, I am always ready to sacrifice myself to your
pleasure.... If your young friends don’t mind waiting, I will stay for
the cotillon.”
“Pardon, ma mère,” said Léon, “Blanche prefers your comfort to her
amusement; she will go home now.”
“My son, you should consider your sister. If she has made an
engagement....”
“I will make her excuses to Cholcourt.”
Mme. Léopold looked exceeding displeased, and tried to convey the full
motives of her displeasure to Léon through her eyes. But Léon would not
see it. Blanche saw there was a conflict between the two, and she sided
with her brother.
“Yes, you will tell M. de Cholcourt,” she said. “We had better go at
once, mamma, as you are not well.”
“What an angel she is!” said the enraged mother, swallowing her vexation
under the fondest smile.
The drive home was performed almost in silence. Mme. Léopold lay back
with a pretence of utter exhaustion, and never said a word. Blanche and
Polly sat opposite, and had a little confidential talk to themselves.
“Is he nice, that marquis who was dancing with you?” inquired Polly.
“Nice! He is the greatest _parti_ in all France. He is heir to the
dukedom, and he has a fortune _now_ of two hundred and fifty thousand
francs a year; besides that he is heir to his aunt, who has _enormous_
property in the south; and I believe, only I am not sure, that the
Comtesse de V—— has left all the family diamonds to him—just think!”
Blanche summed up all this in a voluble whisper to her friend.
“What a catch he will be!” said Polly. “I hope he may fall in love with
you, Blanche.”
“_Pas tant de chance, ma chère_; my _dot_ will be a drop compared to M.
de Cholcourt’s. I have not the ghost of a chance of making a marriage
like that.” And the young French girl sighed.
“He might fall in love with you,” suggested Polly.
“His family would never allow him.”
They drew up at Colonel Redacre’s door, and the two girls, thanking Mme.
Léopold for her kindness, wished her and Blanche good-night.
* * * * *
At a preternaturally early hour next morning Mme. Léopold presented
herself at Mrs. Monteagle’s.
“I make no apologies,” she said on being admitted into that lady’s
dressing-room. “The case is so urgent that I could not delay an hour.
Did you speak yesterday to the Redacres about that absurd idea of mine?”
“You mean did I offer your son’s hand to Pearl?”
“Oh! you have done it. We are compromised!” exclaimed Mme. Léopold in
despair.
“Console yourself, madame; I had not an opportunity of doing your
commission—”
“You have said nothing! I thank Heaven! Then indeed we have had a narrow
escape. My son is so chivalrous there is no saying what folly he might
have committed had he known it.”
“Known what?”
“That I had asked Pearl in marriage for him. Happily, he has not the
faintest suspicion of anything. But I am heartily sorry for the poor
child,” continued Mme. Léopold, finding room in her heart to pity Pearl
the moment her terrors for Léon were allayed. “I feel deeply for her.
The disappointment will be a terrible blow, she is so much in love with
my son. That is the dreadful part of your English way of doing things;
but it is no fault of mine.”
“Ha! ha! ha!” laughed Mrs. Monteagle. “A terrible blow to Pearl, you
say? My good lady, take comfort; Pearl is perfectly heart-whole. Your
son is the only person to be pitied in the affair. Ha! ha! ha! Capital!
So you thought Pearl was in love with him? What an excellent joke!”
Mme. Léopold did not see the joke, and was deeply offended by this
manner of treating the matter.
“I see nothing surprising in the fact of my son’s inspiring a
sentiment,” she replied. “You yourself seemed of that opinion yesterday.
As to Léon, he could not deny it when I put it to him; he had to admit
that it was true.”
“True that Miss Redacre had a _passion malheureuse_ for him? He says so,
does he? Then I heartily congratulate Pearl on escaping him,” said Mrs.
Monteagle, bridling with the spirit of a gentlewoman and a loyal friend.
“I thought your son was a gentleman; it seems he is a cowardly coxcomb.”
“Madame!” Mme. Léopold stood up in wrath.
“I sincerely congratulate my young friend on escaping such a husband!”
“You mean to insult me?”
“I mean to speak my mind. I am sorry if it insults you; but you may tell
your son from me, madame, he is stating what is false when he says that
Miss Redacre is in love with him: it is a delusion of his own vanity.”
“He never said it,” said Mme. Léopold. “When I said so he did not deny
it; he feigned not to believe it; but when I persisted in affirming it
he spoke in the kindest terms of Miss Redacre, and declared he was ready
to make any sacrifice of his own inclination and happiness if it was
necessary to—”
“Pray tell him nothing of the sort is necessary. I am sure it is most
kind of him,” said Mrs. Monteagle with a contemptuous chuckle. “He never
will have the luck to get such a wife; he is not worthy of her.”
“Madame!”
“But since we are on the subject, may I ask why _you_ have so suddenly
changed your views about this marriage?”
“Have you not heard? They are ruined.”
“Who? The Redacres?”
“Yes. Is it possible you have not heard of it?”
Mrs. Monteagle stared at Mme. Léopold with a troubled countenance for a
moment.
“Sit down, I beg of you, and tell me what all this means,” she said, her
tone changed in a second from anger to one of intense and painful
interest.
Mme. Léopold was not sorry for the change as regarded her share in it;
she did not want to quarrel with Mrs. Monteagle, and she felt that the
wrong had been on her own side. She sat down and told all she knew. It
seemed that a letter had arrived on the previous day, by the early post,
with news of the death of some person, who by dying in this sudden way
let Colonel Redacre in for an enormous sum of money—in fact, utterly
ruined him. This was all that Mme. Léopold knew. Who the man was, or how
the money was gone, she had not heard; but the main fact was positively
true. M. Léopold heard it from M. de Kerbec, who knew more than he liked
to tell; Mme. Léopold had heard it from her husband at the ball last
night. Mr. Kingspring knew it too; he had been to see the Redacres in
the morning. Apparently they wanted to keep the affair quiet for some
little time, and this was why the door was closed yesterday on the plea
of the colonel’s not being well.
“And this was why they sent the girls to the ball, no doubt,” said Mrs.
Monteagle. “It is a most extraordinary affair. Do you know, I am
inclined to think there is some mistake. I don’t believe Colonel Redacre
ever speculated to the extent of half a crown in his life; in fact, he
had nothing to speculate with, as he tells you himself; the money is his
wife’s, and that, I know, is bound up so that he could not touch it.”
“I know nothing except that in some way they are ruined,” said Mme.
Léopold. “The letter fell on them like a bombshell. I am very sorry for
them—very.”
“To me it is like a personal misfortune,” said Mrs. Monteagle. “And to
think of their not sending for me at once! How did M. de Kerbec hear it,
do you know? But I tell you there is some mistake; I feel certain there
is. Those poor, dear girls! It is heartbreaking to think of them if this
be true. And the boys—what is to become of them?”
“Boys always pull through somehow,” said Mme. Léopold. “It is the girls
that my heart bleeds for. I suppose they will have to go out as
governesses—Pearl at least. Polly’s beauty would make it impossible for
her to do anything; no family would run the risk of letting that face in
amongst them.”
“They shall never be asked to run the risk so long as I can prevent it,”
said Mrs. Monteagle with a touch of her old asperity. “While I have a
home those children have one.”
“That is real friendship; it consoles me wonderfully to hear you say so,
chère madame.”
Mrs. Monteagle made no answer. She was speculating on the possible truth
of this story of sudden ruin, and it occurred to her how mysterious Mr.
Kingspring had been on the subject of Mrs. Redacre’s not receiving the
day before.
“I will go down the moment I am dressed,” she said. “I can’t lose an
hour till I know the truth.”
Mme. Léopold rose to go.
“Have you breakfasted, or will you stay and have a cup of tea with me?”
said Mrs. Monteagle.
“Thank you; I had my coffee before I came out. You will not mention that
I have been here? They think at home that I am gone to see my poor
people; I always go early, because then they do not interfere with my
day.”
Mrs. Monteagle hurried through her breakfast and went down to the
entresol. She was admitted at once.
“What is this? What does it all mean?” she said, as Mrs. Redacre, who
was not lying on the sofa, but actively sorting letters at a table,
stood up with an exclamation of welcome and hastened to meet her.
The colonel was standing with his back to the fire.
“It means this: that we are beggared,” he said.
“Only for a few years, Hugh. Don’t speak in that despairing way about
things!” said his wife, and she cast a look of tender entreaty at him.
“Tell me, for goodness’ sake, what has happened,” said Mrs. Monteagle.
“I hear that somebody has died and that you are ruined by their death.”
“That is about it,” said the colonel. “I put my name to a bill for
£30,000 some five years ago, and the man for whom I did it is dead, and
died a bankrupt, leaving me to pay the money.”
“Thirty thousand pounds!” repeated Mrs. Monteagle.
“We can pay it, Hugh, and Providence will come to our aid,” said his
wife.
“By sending us another income when every penny has gone to meet this
bill?”
“I don’t know how; but trust me, dearest, help will come. If only you
won’t break down under it! What does poverty or anything matter so long
as we are left to bear it together?”
He made no answer, but stooped down and gave the fire a savage poke.
“What madness possessed you, Redacre? I always thought you had a horror
of speculation,” said Mrs. Monteagle, her resentment against him rising
at the sight of Alice’s gentle face of anguish.
“It was no speculation,” said the wife quickly; “he did it to oblige a
friend. Any one would have done it in his place.”
“Any fool would,” thought her friend, but she said nothing.
“Fortunately we can meet it,” Mrs. Redacre went on. “I thought at first
that it might have been paid off at once with my fortune; but it shows
what a goose I am in practical things,” she said, trying to laugh. “My
money is so tied up that neither Hugh nor I can alienate the capital;
all we can do is to surrender the income for a few years till the debt
is paid off.”
“She means that we must raise the money to pay it off, and pay back the
loan by mortgaging our income for about ten years.”
“It may not be for half that time, dearest. Providence may shorten the
trial for us unexpectedly.”
“You mean that Darrell may die. He is more likely to bury us all. Those
kind of men live for ever. I am sure I don’t want to hurry him away; I
have made a point of wishing him a long life. You have always heard me
say I hoped he might have a long life? Of course, if the Almighty saw
fit to call him home, I could not but feel that the loss would be also a
gain to me—to you and the children, that is; for myself, I count no
man’s money.”
“Has he a very large property to leave?” inquired Mrs. Monteagle. Col.
Redacre talked very openly about his money affairs, but in such a vague,
exaggerated way that one never knew what to believe about his prospects
or his difficulties.
“Broom Hollow is a glorious old place,” he said, “but it brings in
nothing; that must come to me. Darrell himself is a rich man, but he may
leave his money to whom he pleases. As likely as not he will leave it to
pay off the national debt. He is just the man to do a thing of that
sort.”
“My dear Hugh! he told you himself that you were to be his heir; that he
had made his will and left you sole legatee!” said Alice.
“That’s just it. When a man tells you he has made his will in your
favor, be you sure you will never see a penny of his money. I make a
point of never believing what men say about their wills.”
“The dean is not the least likely to tell a falsehood, dear, even about
his will,” said Alice.
“I don’t say he is. I never said he was not a truth-telling man; but
people have crotchety notions about wills. However, we are a long way
off from the settling of that question, I fear—that is to say, I hope; I
devoutly hope the poor fellow may live for twenty years. At the same
time, if the Almighty sees good to call him to his reward sooner, and
that he leaves me his money, he will do as good an action as he ever
performed in his life.”
“Have you written to him about this unfortunate business?” inquired Mrs.
Monteagle.
“No. I will worry nobody about it. What is the use? We are beggared, and
there is an end of it.”
“There is no use making things out worse than they are,” said his
friend. “They are bad enough as it is; but, as Alice says, Providence
will pull you through somehow. I may turn out of some use myself; but we
will come to those matters by and by. The thing is, What are you going
to do now? Is it out of the question—your getting something to do? You
have friends who have influence; so have I.”
“What could they do for me? Could they get me back my leg? If it were
not for Balaklava I should not let this catastrophe cast me down a bit;
but it makes all the difference when a man has to face the world with
one leg.”
“Nonsense!” said Mrs. Monteagle. “You have not half the sense I gave you
credit for, Redacre. What difference can it make, your having one leg or
two? I don’t expect you to enter an infantry regiment and go on the
march. There are appointments to be had where legs are not wanted at
all. My nephew, Percy Danvers, has an appointment of fifteen hundred
pounds a year at the Horse Guards.”
“But Danvers has both his legs?”
“But he doesn’t write with his legs, and the work he does is all
writing.”
“How did he get the appointment?”
“His father got it for him. And, by the way, he had no legs at all, poor
fellow; he lost one in the Crimea and the other in China. And he used to
joke about it, and say that the loss of his legs was the best investment
he ever made, and the only one that paid regularly.”
“That’s just it: if a man loses both he is a hero; if he loses only one
he is a cripple. Balaklava never did anything for me but worry my life
out.”
“That is a most excellent idea!” said Mrs. Redacre, turning with a look
of sunny hopefulness to Mrs. Monteagle. “I don’t see why Hugh should not
get something at the Horse Guards. We know so many old generals, and
some of them are influential, and I am sure all our friends will be kind
and anxious to help us. Hugh, dear, we must lose no time in seeing about
this.”
“First of all, we have got to pay this £30,000. When that is done, it
will be time to think of the other. But with the government we have now
I don’t expect we would succeed. They are a beggarly lot, who toady all
the self-made men, as they call them—fellows who have risen Heaven knows
from what, and to whom it is as well to throw a bone to stop their
mouths. I would see them farther before I asked a favor of them if I had
my two legs to stand on.”
“Where are the girls?” said Mrs. Monteagle; she was losing patience with
these lamentations over the missing leg.
“I sent them out for a ride before breakfast; they may as well enjoy it
while they can, poor darlings!” And the mother’s voice faltered a
little.
“Have you told them?”
“Not the whole terrible truth. I prepared them for it yesterday a
little, and again this morning. But they guess that worse is coming, and
they are very brave.”
The noise of hoofs pattering under the porte cochère announced that the
girls had come back. In a few minutes they both entered the room. The
fair young things, in their beautifully-fitting habits, their
complexions freshened by exercise in the morning air, their features
lighted up with the buoyancy of youth hitherto untouched by sorrow, made
a pathetic and striking contrast with the group they broke in upon—the
father stern and irritable, his fine face ploughed into sudden furrows
of care, the mother courageous and tender, with undried tears on her
cheeks. Pearl spied the tears at once, and, taking a bunch of violets
out of her riding-habit, she went and kissed the wet face lovingly and
fastened the flowers in her mother’s breast.
“My darling! Have you had a nice ride?”
“Yes; but we had no heart to care about it. I wish you would let us stay
at home with you, and not send us off to amuse ourselves while you are
worried. It is not kind of her, is it, Mrs. Monteagle?”
Polly was standing at the table, holding up her habit, and looking from
one to the other of them all, with an expression of awakening terror in
her large, lustrous eyes.
“I don’t know what it all means,” she said. “Is it very bad? Is it going
to last long? Papa, we are not babies; you ought to tell us the truth.”
“I ought, my dear; but I have not the courage to do it. Ask your
mother.”
“Redacre, you are a selfish brute!” burst out Mrs. Monteagle, glaring at
him.
“Oh! don’t,” cried Alice, with a look at once imploring and angry. “Of
course it is my duty, but I am such a coward!” She let her head fall on
Pearl’s shoulder, and sobbed aloud.
“For God’s sake, Alice, don’t give way!” cried her husband. “I can bear
anything but that; I can indeed, my love. It is quite true I am a
selfish brute. I ought not to have asked you to tell them. Come, now,
don’t! It will all come right, if you will only cheer up and help me to
bear it.” And he went over and laid his hand on her shoulder.
“Help you to bear it!” repeated Mrs. Monteagle; but she checked herself
as she met Alice’s eyes uplifted in supplication through her tears.
“Come with me both of you, children,” said the old lady; “I know all
about it now, and I will tell you everything. Come, and leave the
colonel and your mother to themselves a little; they were very busy when
I came and interrupted them.”
The two girls kissed Alice with many a tender endearment, and followed
Mrs. Monteagle up to her own apartment. She told them the truth as
gently as possible, but without disguising anything.
“Then we have nothing at all to live on except papa’s half-pay?” said
Polly, her eyes wide open in dismay, her lily-white hands lying
motionless on her knees.
“I fear not, my dear child; but I hope we will soon be able to get an
appointment for him. Meantime you must not worry too much. I have some
money lying by that he can have and welcome; he won’t refuse me an old
friend’s privilege at a moment like this. You must both do your very
best to help him and your mother to bear it. You will not let them see
you cast down.”
“And the boys,” said Pearl—“they must come home and grow up dunces; that
is the worst of all. What is to become of the boys?”
“What is to become of any of us?” said Polly. “What could have possessed
papa to promise to pay such an enormous sum of money for any one? It was
very wicked of him.” And the big tears welled up and came streaming down
the lovely face.
“Has he written to Cousin Darrell?” said Pearl.
“No,” said Mrs. Monteagle. “I asked him, and he said he would not write;
that it would worry the dean.”
“But he might give us the money to pay this, or some of it, at any
rate,” argued Pearl. “I am certain he would; since we are to have all
his money by and by, he would not refuse a portion of it now to do us
such a service.”
“I would not be too sure of that, dear Pearl,” said her friend, with a
dubious shake of the head. “Giving and bequeathing are very different
things. Still, I agree with you, Colonel Redacre ought to write and tell
your cousin the truth; he owes that to the dean and to you all.”
“I will make him do it!” said Polly, brushing away the tear-drops and
shaking back her head with a resolute air; “and if he won’t write, I
will.”
“You mustn’t do it against papa’s will, Polly,” said Pearl, a little
frightened by this unexpected display of will. Polly had always had her
own way hitherto without making any effort to get it.
“I think we had better go down now,” she said, not answering Pearl’s
remark. There was an energy in her manner and look that amazed Mrs.
Monteagle.
“Perhaps you had, dears,” said their friend; she was anxious to have a
little private talk with Pearl on other things, but she did not venture
to ask her pointedly to stay.
“I will go to papa at once, and tell him he must write to Cousin
Darrell,” said Polly; and gathering up the folds of her long habit, she
walked away, too absorbed in her own thoughts to say good-by or notice
if Pearl was following her. Mrs. Monteagle signed to Pearl to stay.
The idea that this misfortune was weighted to Pearl with a super-added
individual sorrow had been in her friend’s mind ever since Mme. Léopold
had announced the bad news to her. When that lady declared so
emphatically that Pearl was attached to her son, Mrs. Monteagle had
denied it and laughed to scorn the pretended compassion of the
manœuvring mother. This was clearly her duty as a stanch friend, whether
she believed or not that Pearl loved Léon; but, indeed, she so earnestly
desired at the moment not to believe it that she concluded she did not,
that it was a delusion of Léon’s vanity or his mother’s; but now there
recurred to her Pearl’s vivid blush at the mention of Léon’s name, and
her confusion when Mme. Léopold was announced. It was dreadful if the
young heart was to set out on the rude battle of life with its bloom
rubbed off and all its brightness quenched. But though she had a true
woman’s heart, Mrs. Monteagle indulged little in sentiment. If the
mischief was done, it must be undone as quickly as possible, and Pearl
was a girl of rare sense.
“My dear, did Léon Léopold propose to you last night?” said the old lady
when they were left alone.
“No,” said Pearl, looking her straight in the face. “What put that into
your head?”
“But he ought to do so, ought he not? He has been paying you a great
deal of attention.”
“Léon!” The old innocent laugh rang out in spite of all her trouble, as
Pearl repeated in amazement, “Léon?”
“And you really don’t care for him?”
“Not I, and I should be very sorry to think that he cared for me; but I
am perfectly certain he does not. If I were a _pot de confiture_ he
might.”
“You relieve me immensely, my dear,” said Mrs. Monteagle, quite at rest
now on the score of Pearl’s heart. “It would have been dreadful had you
been in love with that young man.”
“It would indeed,” assented Pearl. “I had better be going now; I don’t
like leaving mamma alone—without me, that is. Poor darling mamma, if I
could take some of the worry off her! What are we to do? I’m sure I
don’t know.”
“Keep a cheerful spirit and a brave heart; that is all you have to do
for the present. I promise you things will come right in good time.”
* * * * *
Mr. Kingspring called very early, and was closeted a long time with Col.
Redacre. Pearl met him in the hall as she was coming out of her father’s
study, and whispered to him:
“Make papa write to Cousin Darrell.”
Mr. Kingspring nodded yes and went in.
It had got wind that the Redacres were ruined, and everybody was very
sorry for them. It was all conjecture yet how the ruin came about. The
general belief was that a banker with whom he had lodged his money had
“gone smash.” Mr. Kingspring and M. de Kerbec were the only two who had
known the truth from the first, and they were not communicative as to
details; Mr. Kingspring from innate discretion, M. de Kerbec from
friendly desire to shield Col. Redacre from the ridicule which awaited a
man imbecile enough to fool away his money by signing a bill.
“No, I can’t write to Darrell,” said Col. Redacre in answer to Mr.
Kingspring’s urgent advice that he should at once apply to his rich
cousin. “Darrell is a man who never did a foolish thing in his life, and
he despises people who do. If he knew I had been idiot enough to put my
name to a bill, he would disinherit me for a fool; he is a most
eccentric fellow.”
“But he is sure to hear of it,” said Mr. Kingspring, “and he will be
more likely to resent it if you seem trying to hide it from him.”
“I don’t see that he need ever hear of it. He never sees any one, never
writes to any one, I believe, except his medical man, and his lawyer
perhaps; he leads the life of a hermit down there with his books. If he
does not hear of this miserable business from ourselves, he is likely
never to hear of it.”
Mr. Kingspring could not press the point after this. Pearl, meantime,
was on the watch to catch him when he left the study, and in answer to
her eager “Has he promised to write?” Mr. Kingspring only replied, “No;
he says it would do no good; and I think he is right.” Pearl was
disappointed, and took the news to her sister, who was awaiting it in
her own room.
“It is nothing but pride that prevents him,” said Polly, angry and
impatient; “it is cruel and selfish of papa to sacrifice us all to spare
his own pride.”
“He is sacrificing himself as well as us,” said Pearl; “and I don’t
believe it is pride. I am sure papa has some good reason for it; he
knows Cousin Darrell better than we do.”
“Do you write to him,” said Polly; “he is your godfather, and he
pretends to be greatly interested in you. Tell him you will have to go
out as a governess if he won’t come to papa’s help.”
“I could not write against papa’s will,” said Pearl.
“Stuff! Then I will.” And Polly tossed back her head, and her
almond-shaped eyes had a light of dangerous wilfulness in them as she
rose and went towards her writing-table.
“O Polly! you must not do that; papa would be so angry,” pleaded Pearl.
“He will forgive me when Cousin Darrell sends the money.” And Polly sat
down and opened her dainty blotting-book and prepared for action.
“Polly, you sha’n’t. I will go and tell mamma of it. I won’t be a party
to your defying papa in this way,” said Pearl resolutely, moving towards
the door.
Polly started up.
“Come back; you need not play tell-tale. I won’t write.” And she shut
the blotting-book and flung the pen angrily aside.
“I am sure it is better not, darling,” said Pearl. “We can’t know as
well as papa in a matter of this kind.” She went over to Polly and would
have kissed her; but Polly repulsed the caress with an impatient
movement of her head. Pearl did not force the kiss on her, but she felt
the tears rising as she turned away and left the room. If misfortune was
going to change Polly like this, it was a worse sorrow than anything she
had anticipated.
TO BE CONTINUED.
THE ESPOUSALS OF OUR LADY.[152]
(SCENE: _Before the Temple_.)
ST. JOSEPH.
From boyhood up I had but one desire:
To live alone with God—as much alone
As wholesome concourse with my fellow-men,
And scope of humble traffic, would allow:
Not sullenly churlish—with a helping hand
For others’ need—but peacefully obscure.
And so, when came the glow of youth, and thoughts
Of woman’s love dawn’d roseate, I upraised
My heart to Him who was indeed to me
The Good Supreme, the Beauty Infinite,
And made, at once, a vow perpetual
Of perfect chastity; and straightway knew
’Twas He had drawn me to it.
Strangely, then,
Sounded the High-Priest’s message, summoning
The unwed of David’s lineage who had claim,
By sacred right of kinship, to espouse
Its sole surviving maiden—bidding them
Bring each a wand, whereby the Lord might show
Whom he had chosen—and, among them, me,
Nearest of kin, but hoping to lie hid
Half-way in the fifth decade of my years!
But, ever wont to obey the voice divine,
Within heard or without, I came, and stood
Unseemly ’mid the suitors. Then the wands
Were laid upon the altar—the High-Priest
Seeking the sign to Moses given of yore,
When, in the wilderness, the tribes rebelled
’Gainst privileged Aaron.[153] So we knelt, and went,
And waited on the Lord.
And I, that night,
Like Joseph, son of Jacob, dream’d a dream.
I saw a maiden, robed in purest white,
Sit throned where once, in Solomon’s vanished fane,
Reposed the Ark beneath the Mercy-seat,
Within the Holy of Holies. While I gazed,
Behold, a sudden vista of long light
Opened as into heaven; and, swiftly, a dove
Descended on the maid, yet settled not,
But o’er her head hung brooding! Then a voice
Said softly: “Fear not, Joseph, for thy vow.
Bride of the Dove is she; and thou, her spouse,
Shalt guard her for her Spouse.” Whereat I woke,
Astonished: and to find, upon the morrow,
That one of the rods had budded in the night—
Budded and blossom’d; and that rod was mine!
SINGS:
Though the dream brought me peace, there is mystery still:
But in time He will solve it, the Lord of my love.
’Tis enough that I know I am wedding His will—
Beheld in this maiden, the “Bride of the Dove.”
Ah, who can she be—there enthroned as a bride
Where the Ark of the Covenant rested of old?
Is it She for whose advent our fathers have sigh’d—
The long-promised Virgin Isaias foretold?
And what was the Dove? When the voice said “her Spouse,”
Did it mean that Jehovah had seal’d her his own?
Has she too, like me, made the sweetest of vows—
To live evermore for Divine love alone?
But she comes: and I feel that the angels are here.
Their charge to be mine! They will share it, then, still.
And the dear God himself, was He ever so near?
Be at peace, O my soul! Thou art wedding His will.
MARY (SINGS).
My God, to Thee I bow:
Thy will is ever mine.
Thy grace inspired the vow
That made me wholly thine.
If Thou dost bid me wed,
Thou canst but guide aright.
I follow, darkly led,
Till break the perfect light.
I take my chosen lord,
And plight him troth for Thee.
So find thy sovran word
Its handmaid still in me.
CHORUS.
All hail, blest pair, all hail!
As yet ye little know
What words that cannot fail
To after-times will show.
Not angel eyes command
The glorious lot that waits,
As, meekly, hand-in-hand,
Ye leave the temple’s gates!
MAY, 1878.
Footnote 152:
Written for a children’s “May Cantata.”
Footnote 153:
Numbers xvii.
THE BOLLANDIST _ACTA SANCTORUM_.
For many reasons the Bollandist series of saints’ lives is one of the
most remarkable works that ever issued from the pen of man. As a serial
publication, what other work of the kind extends over a period of nearly
two centuries and a half, comprises upwards of sixty volumes in large
folio, and is still advancing, with upwards of one-sixth part of the
whole remaining to full completion? Or as a monument of devotion to the
saints of God, as a vast storehouse of example and instruction in the
way of eternal life, there is nothing that can be put in competition
with it. Even this view of it is narrow, as compared with other claims
to regard which it possesses, and which are fully recognized by literary
men, even among those who have little or no sympathy with the religious
side of this great work. The whole range of history, from the foundation
of Christianity, forms an essential portion of it. The lives of the
apostles demand the investigation of all that is known of that remote
period; a large proportion of the Roman pontiffs are among the
canonized, and their records belong to the history of the Christian
world, including that of the middle ages. The sainted founders of
religious orders, from Benedict to Ignatius, from Anthony to Paul of the
Cross, cannot be described without entering at length into the origin
and progress of their holy institutes, many of which were asylums and
homes of refuge for letters and learning during the darkest and most
troubled periods of European history, and others served as
training-places, whence the confessors and martyrs of the Christian
faith went forth to the ends of the earth to propagate divine truth and
love at the sacrifice of everything that humanity holds dear, even of
liberty and life itself. Or, if it is question of kings and emperors
whom the church venerates as saints, the secular history of their
dominions naturally falls within the scope of their biographies: as of
Hungary under St. Stephen; of Germany under Henry II.; of England under
Edward the Confessor; of Denmark under Canute IV.; of Spain under
Ferdinand III.; and of France under Louis IX. Not unfrequently the
biography of a saint comprises the history of his age: as of the fourth
century in the life of St. Athanasius; of the eleventh in that of St.
Gregory VII.; of the twelfth in that of St. Bernard; and of the
thirteenth in those of St. Dominic and St. Francis of Assisi. The limits
of the _Acta_ are not confined to Europe; they are as wide as our globe
itself. Wherever the seed of the Gospel has been sown or watered by the
blood of martyrs, among every race of mankind, from China to Paraguay,
from Lima to Japan, nothing is foreign to the Bollandists’ pen; their
work embraces, incidentally or formally, all the history of all nations.
Intimately connected with the historical researches of their work are
several auxiliary branches of knowledge which largely enter into it and
cannot be overlooked in estimating its scope and value. The aid of
geography, for example, had to be called in to settle the boundaries of
episcopal sees, of provinces, of kingdoms; to reconcile history with
topography by determining the obsolete or corrupted names of certain
places, about which different authors may have held different opinions.
Several treatises on chronology entered into the general scheme.
Archæology furnished the means of a minute and complete examination into
ancient manners, rites, laws, arts, and the rudiments of languages, and
of a comparison among the sacred and secular monuments of various
nations. Then, again, the art of employing the materials, characters,
and other portions of ancient MSS. for the determination of dates
engaged the attention of the Bollandists, and of Père Papebroch in
particular; and this father, with the frankness inseparable from true
genius, did not hesitate to acknowledge his debt to the illustrious
master _Rei Diplomaticæ_, the Benedictine Mabillon. As might have been
expected, theology, canon law, and ecclesiastical history are largely
represented in those sixty volumes. The teaching of the holy fathers,
the decrees of councils, the laws of the church constantly demanded
scientific statement and vindication, as also did the perpetual glory of
miracles, of prophecy, of celestial revelations, and the undying gift of
the loftiest contemplation, as against a class of critics who, while
affecting to patronize letters, assume that the lives of saints must be
nothing more than a tissue of idle tales and old women’s fables, or at
least speak of them as if they thought them so. In the judgment,
however, of several eminent critics of the modern school even the
legends of saints, regarded as popular beliefs in a remote and
half-instructed age, have their value as evidence of the ideas, manners,
and customs of the people in the middle ages. M. Guizot was at pains to
count twenty-five thousand legends in the Bollandists’ work; and these,
he remarks, were the real literature of the first half of that period,
and served for aliment to the intellectual, moral, and æsthetic life of
those ages, and, from a historian’s point of view, were on that account
beyond all price. Another French critic, M. Renan, also regarding the
_Acta_ from an external point of view, expresses himself in language of
eulogy little to have been anticipated: “Quelle incomparable galerie, en
effet, que celle de ces 25,000 héros de la vie désintéressée! Quel air
de haute distinction! quelle noblesse! quelle poésie! Il y en a
d’humbles et de grands, de doctes et de simples; mais je n’en connais
pas un seul qui ait l’air vulgaire. Tous m’apparaissent tels que les
pose Giotto, grandioses, hardis, détachés des liens terrestres, et déjà
transfigurés. Ils plaisent peu au sens positif, je l’avoue; mais qu’ils
ont, après tout, mieux compris la vie, que ceux qui l’embrassent comme
un étroit calcul d’intérêt, comme une lutte insignifiante d’ambition et
de vanité.”
Such being the character of the _Acta_, who conceived the comprehensive
scheme and gave it actual form and being? The names of its originator
and early continuators are preserved in the following lines:
Quod Rosweydus preparaverat,
Quod Bollandus inchoaverat,
Quod Henschenius formaverat,
Perfecit Papebrochius.
Herbert Rosweyd, a native of Utrecht in Holland, entered the Society of
Jesus in 1589, at the age of twenty, and taught philosophy and theology
successively at Douay and Antwerp. He was a man in whom great learning
was united to great piety. He composed and edited many works in Latin
and Flemish, and among the rest published an edition of the Oriental
ascetic Moschus’ _Spiritual Meadow_, and an original treatise on the
_Imitation of Christ_ to prove its author to have been Thomas à Kempis.
Eleven years before his death, in 1629, Père Rosweyd published the
_Lives of the Fathers of the Desert_, in a folio volume, at Antwerp. It
may be regarded as a first instalment of the _Acta Sanctorum_. While he
was engaged on one of his books the idea occurred to him to collect in
some twelve volumes the lives and acts of the beatified and canonized
saints of the Catholic Church. At the time when he first conceived his
great plan he was too deeply committed to other literary works to take
it up at once; but the idea never was abandoned, and death alone
prevented him from at least commencing it. When the project was
mentioned to Cardinal Bellarmine, he inquired if Père Rosweyd expected
to live two hundred years; such was the cardinal’s estimate of the
magnitude of the undertaking—an estimate fully borne out by the result.
Yet, as we shall presently see, in the first century and a half of the
work not a dozen only but four times that number of volumes were
published; and if twelve volumes could have comprised it the end would
have been reached in little more than forty years from its commencement.
What Papebroch said of Bolland may be said of Rosweyd: It was
providential that he who first started such a work could not foresee its
vast extent. Who but a rash man, or one assured by divine revelation of
his success, would otherwise ever have dared to extend his plans and
hopes to an age beyond his own, or counted upon the co-operation of
future authors yet unborn in an association of labor up to that time
without a parallel in the history of letters? It was probably only in
the bosom of a religious order like the Society of Jesus, in which years
count for days and centuries for years, that such a scheme could ever
have been carried out.
Rosweyd, then, was dead, but his conception survived him. The duty of
giving effect to it devolved on John Bolland (Latinized, in the style of
the period, into Bollandus), after whom the whole body of succeeding
editors has since been named BOLLANDISTS.[154] Bolland was by his birth,
August 13, 1596, a native of Tillemont, in Flanders. At the age of
sixteen he entered the society, and professed the four solemn vows
January 27, 1630. His studies had been distinguished, and as a professor
he stood high in many various attainments, in letters and in Oriental
and other languages. But, better still, his piety and religious fervor
kept equal pace with his other acquirements. Even after his appointment
to carry on the work suggested by Père Rosweyd, Père Bolland would never
intermit the duties of the confessional in the church of St. Ignatius
attached to the house of the professed fathers of the society at
Antwerp—now the church of St. Charles Borromeo, at the corner of Wyngard
Street and the Katelina Rampart. It was only the spare time unoccupied
by hearing confessions that he gave to sacred literature.
A glance at what had been previously done in the way of saints’ lives
will enable us the better to understand the plan now adopted by Père
Bolland. Of the acts of the martyrs and the other saints the very
earliest form is the record of St. Stephen’s origin, arrest, trial,
condemnation, and martyrdom, contained in the Acts of the Apostles.
Similar records began to be kept first of all in the Roman Church by
order of Pope Clement. Notaries were appointed for the purpose of
collecting and authenticating the acts of martyrs. The testimony of
eye-witnesses was taken down, and, when duly attested, the records were
submitted to the judgment of the pope. Similarly the martyrologies took
their origin from the burying-places of the martyrs in the catacombs.
When a martyr was carried to his rest from the Amphitheatre an
inscription was placed beside him, a name, a date, a title, a
palm-branch or a dove, perhaps a monogram. Such were the rudiments of
the earliest martyrologies. The Roman martyrology, in a few lines, each
day records the names of the martyrs of the day under the favorite term
of _Depositio_. The earliest calendar of the Roman Church is composed of
a list of depositions copied as it were from the galleries of the
cemeteries. These honored names thence passed into the diptychs, and
were read aloud to the Christian assemblies on public occasions.
Separate churches had their own diptychs, and frequently exchanged them
with one another. At first martyrs only were admitted among the select
number; but in the fourth century in the Western Church the first
exception was made in favor of St. Martin. In the East the lists were
opened to confessors somewhat earlier in favor of SS. Ephrem,
Athanasius, Hilarion, and Antony. As regarded confessors, the acts were
in fact an authenticated narration of their lives. In this way the
martyrologies and acts of the martyrs and other saints assumed the form
we now know, subject to the scrutiny of the bishops of particular sees,
till a later date, when the admission of a new name into the calendar
was reserved for the Supreme Pontiff. During the middle ages the
literature of saints’ lives was in great part the work of the
monasteries. Eusebius, the ecclesiastical historian, at an earlier
period laid the foundation of this class of composition. Prudentius, in
the third century, celebrated in verse the martyr’s crown of victory.
There was the _Spiritual Meadow_ of Moschus, and the _Mirror_ of Vincent
of Beauvais; and, most celebrated of all, the _Legends of the Saints_,
composed by Da Varaggio, or De Voragine, Archbishop of Genoa—a work
better known by its title of the _Golden Legend_, given it by its
admirers. This collection was by far the most popular of all the works
of the kind, and was translated into nearly every European language. It
was one of the earliest books printed in England by Caxton, in 1483, in
folio. To a somewhat later period belonged Surius the Carthusian, from
whose _Lives_, in seven folio volumes, we find Charles Kingsley
admitting that he had picked up his knowledge of ecclesiastical history.
After Surius came Père Ribadeneira, the Spanish Jesuit, author of the
_Flower of Saints’ Lives_. The work contemplated by Rosweyd and put in
hand by Bolland was different from everything of the kind that had gone
before it. The new scheme aimed at the collection and publication of the
original acts and lives of all the saints in the order in which they
stand in the Roman calendar and martyrology. Difficult and obscure
passages were to be elucidated. It was adopted as a general rule that no
testimony could be admitted which the editors had not thoroughly
examined; that, in adducing an important witness, the age he lived in,
his trustworthiness and judgment as an author, should be rigorously
estimated. Nothing which tended to fuller acquaintance with any saint
was to be slurred over without discussion; no place to be deemed too
obscure, no people too ignoble, no country too remote, to which a saint
had at any time belonged; and, in a word, no language too rude to occupy
their careful attention, as far as either the intervention of published
and unpublished authors, or correspondence, or the agency of ubiquitous
friends could utilize human labor. Their plan was not simply to write a
history of the church in numerous countries, strenuously as they meant
to labor for that; its scope included the particular foundations of
bishoprics, of cities, of monasteries, and of religious orders, the
successive stages of whose histories they professed, to the full extent
of their powers, to investigate.
Père Bolland’s first care was to collect materials for so extensive a
work. He opened a correspondence with churches and monasteries all over
Europe and beyond its limits, inquiring in all directions for offices
peculiar to different places, and for copies of the rarest archives of
the religious houses. These he gradually accumulated, until the
foundation of a valuable library and museum was established, which long
occupied the upper floor of a detached building in the professed house
at Antwerp. Out of these materials Père Bolland then commenced to form
his _Acta_ for the month of January. Six years he toiled single-handed;
but in 1635 a coadjutor was given him in Père Godfrey Henschen, S.J., a
native of Gueldres, in Holland, then in the thirty-sixth year of his age
and the sixteenth of his religious profession. The fathers prosecuted
the work in company for eight years, and in 1643 the first two volumes
were published, comprising the saints belonging to the month of January,
to the number of upwards of twelve hundred. Père Bolland struck the
keynote of his great work at a sublime height in these few words of
dedication:
SANCTO SANCTORUM
JESU CHRISTO
ÆTERNO PONTIFICI
EIUSQUE INTER MORTALES VICARIO
URBANO OCTAVO
ROMANO PONTIFICI.
It was no exaggeration of the fact when Père Paul Oliva, afterwards
elected father-general of the Jesuits, thus addressed Père Henschen:
“Your reverence and your coadjutor are dwelling, in your every thought
and with your pen, in the church in heaven.” The success of the January
volumes was from the first assured, and went on increasing after the
publication of the February saints, in three volumes, followed in 1658.
Pope Alexander VII., the reigning pontiff, recorded his opinion that “a
work more useful to the church of God or more glorious for her had never
been accomplished, or even begun, by any one.” About the same time a
second coadjutor was taken into the work in Père Daniel Papebroch, S.J.,
a native of Antwerp. His family was originally from Hamburg, but at the
Reformation his father removed to Antwerp, where Daniel was born in
1628. At the end of the usual studies he entered the Society of Jesus in
1646, three of his brothers eventually following his example. Père
Papebroch was ordained in 1658, and called from the chair of philosophy
at Antwerp to assist PP. Bolland and Henschen in the _Acta_. After the
February volumes appeared the pope invited the Bollandist Fathers to
Rome. Père Bolland himself was too infirm to accept the invitation, but
his younger coadjutors went instead of him. They left Antwerp July 22,
1660, old Père Bolland accompanying them as far as Cologne. Their
literary tour, which lasted about two years and a half, was eminently
successful. They visited monasteries and libraries without number all
over Germany, Italy, and France; every door, every drawer was thrown
open to them. Hundreds of precious documents were copied by them and for
them; their library and museum were enriched, beyond the expectation of
the most sanguine, with manuscripts and books; with missals, breviaries,
martyrologies, sacramentaries, rituals, graduals, antiphonaries, and
other similar works of many various rites or “uses,” such as the
Mozarabic in Spain, the Ambrosian at Milan, the Sarum in England, and
its Aberdeen daughter in Scotland. When at its best this library
possessed some twelve thousand volumes, and in value and rarity is
believed to have surpassed either the Barberini in Rome or the Mazarine
in Paris—collections especially noted for their pre-eminence in similar
works.
Père Bolland, who was now approaching his seventieth year, survived the
return of his coadjutors from their tour only a few months. To the last
he took part in the work of the museum, while the fervor of his regular
and holy life seemed to increase. The 29th of August, 1665, was the last
day he visited the working-room, but on a proof-sheet being put into his
hand he was forced to lay it aside and retire to bed. He lingered about
a fortnight, and then expired, after receiving all the sacraments of the
dying. In his life and in his death, as well as with his indefatigable
pen, he proved how well he had studied the saintly models he had been
for upwards of thirty years daily contemplating.[155]
The next issue of the _Acta_, in three volumes, comprising the saints
for March, appeared in 1668, the joint work of PP. Henschen and
Papebroch. It was memorable for more reasons than one. With it began one
of the customs of the Bollandists, to open a new volume with a
biographical notice of any of their number who had died since the issue
of the last. The first volume for March opened with an _Eloge_ of Père
Bolland, accompanied by an excellent engraving of his fine head, taken
from a portrait of him executed by Fruytiers, a pupil of Rubens. The
first difficulty that beset the undertaking arose from passages in the
same volumes, in which a favorite opinion of the Carmelite Order, that
their founder and first general was the prophet Elias, was quietly
ignored. Not only had Baronius and Bellarmine anticipated the Bollandist
view of the question, but it had already been taken for granted by two
preceding authors belonging to the Carmelite Order itself. The Flemish
Carmelites, however, took umbrage at Père Papebroch’s opinion, and a
quarto volume soon afterwards appeared in opposition, the first in a
tolerably long series of publications resulting from this curious
controversy.[156] The Bollandists took no notice of their opponents
until the publication of the saints’ lives for April, in three volumes,
in 1675, afforded an opportunity of repeating and confirming their view
of the actual origin of the order in question in the twelfth century of
the Christian era. The Flemish Carmelites again asserted the more
ancient origin; and when it was known in 1680 that three volumes of the
May saints’ lives were about to appear, containing the life of another
Carmelite saint, the order addressed an unusual request to Père
Papebroch that a copy of the life might be shown them before
publication. After some difficulty the Bollandist forwarded a copy to
his father-general in Rome to be shown to the general of the Carmelites
there. For a long time no answer was returned; three of the May volumes
were ready; the bookseller was impatient; and Père Papebroch was on the
point of leaving home for Westphalia. He therefore permitted the volumes
to be issued for sale. He had hardly gone when Père Henschen received an
order from Rome to suppress the life of St. Angel, and despatched it to
Père Papebroch. But by this time many copies of the Bollandist May lives
had got into circulation; it was too late to attempt the suppression of
the life in question, and his father-general accepted Père Papebroch’s
apologies. The result was another large volume from a Carmelite pen. Up
to this time the dispute had been restricted to the Flemish province of
the Carmelites, but in 1682 its area was extended to France by the
casual discovery of an opinion favorable to the Bollandist view,
expressed by Ducange, the illustrious archæologist, in a private letter
to a friend. The provincial of the Flemish Carmelites next called on
Pope Innocent XI. to interpose his authority in the matter; and Père
Janning, a younger member of the Bollandist body, was sent to Rome to
watch the proceedings. In 1690, two-and-twenty years after the dispute
began, Père Papebroch was summoned to the tribunal of Pope Innocent
XII., who referred the matter to the Congregation of the Index. Rome,
however, did not move fast enough for Carmelite zeal. The _Acta_ were
denounced, 1691, before the Spanish Inquisition as a work originating
within the dominions of the Catholic king. Four years later a decree of
the Inquisition condemned the March, April, and May volumes of the
_Acta_ as “containing erroneous propositions, scenting of heresy,
dangerous to faith, scandalous, impious, offensive to pious ears,
schismatical, seditious, presumptuous, offensive,” etc., etc.
That this was a bitter trial to Père Papebroch and his coadjutors cannot
be doubted. All the learned men of Europe were on their side, and the
Jesuits succeeded in obtaining a subsequent decree of the Inquisition,
1696, permitting the Bollandists to appear and answer the charges; for
the former decree had been pronounced in their absence. Upon this Père
Papebroch produced a categorical defence of everything laid to his
charge, in three volumes (1696-1699). The Carmelites also were quite as
busy. Meanwhile, also in 1696, Innocent XII. forbade the disputants to
attack each other. The Carmelite general, little satisfied with a
neutral decision, petitioned His Holiness to end the dispute by a
positive decree. After consulting the Congregation of the Council the
pope decided to impose silence on the whole question regarding the
origin of the Carmelites, and issued a brief to that effect, dated
November 20, 1698. The judgment of the Spanish Inquisition, June 11,
1697, prohibited all the books relating to the dispute, but presumably
excluding the _Acta_ themselves; for in 1707 an index of forbidden
books, published at Madrid under the authority of the Inquisition, made
no mention of the Bollandist lives.
For thirty years, then, Père Papebroch had to bear this unwelcome
interruption; and forty years after his death circumstances made it
desirable to restate his defence. In 1755 a _Supplementum Apologeticum_
took its place in the Bollandist series, containing all the apologetic
volumes published in defence of Père Papebroch’s view in his Carmelite
controversy. The successors of the early Bollandists had a noble
opportunity, and used it nobly, to bury all former rancors, in the first
volume of their revived work, in 1845, and the fifty-fifth of the
series. _The Life of St. Teresa_, the great Carmelitess, occupies nearly
the whole of its seven hundred folio pages—the largest scale on which
any one life had hitherto been executed by the Bollandists. It was the
solitary work of its author, Père Vandermoere, and was illustrated by
drawings of places in Spain connected with the saint, and engraved in
the highest style of art.
Père Henschen lived to see the first three May volumes issue from the
press in 1680, and the following year closed his useful life, of which
forty-six years had been devoted to work as a Bollandist. Père Papebroch
was now at the head of the work, and had for his assistants PP. Janning
and Baert. It went steadily on, and before his death, in 1714, Père
Papebroch saw five volumes of the month of June, and of the series
twenty-four, completed. For five years preceding his death he was nearly
blind, and when it occurred he had reached the age of eighty-seven. This
second founder of the great series was the author of several other
important works, such as the _Annals of the City of Antwerp_ and the
_Acta Vitæ Scti. Ferdinandi Regis Castillæ_.
It would protract our sketch beyond all reasonable limits if we were to
follow the progress of the great work, during the sixty years following
Père Papebroch’s death, with as much detail as we have hitherto given.
Let it suffice to say that it was prosecuted by fifteen Jesuit fathers
in succession in addition to those already named; and when the work was
suspended in 1773, the year in which the Society of Jesus was for the
time suppressed, fifty volumes of the _Acta_ had appeared, and the
fiftieth was the third of the month of October. The plan of the work had
indeed grown and expanded since Rosweyd estimated its contents at twelve
volumes, since Bolland found two sufficient for the month of January,
February, March, and April had each of them occupied three, August six,
June and July seven, May and September eight. The chief sources relied
upon for the heavy expenses of such a work were at first the gifts of
private persons, bishops, abbots, and others, the patrimony of Père
Papebroch and his sister forming no inconsiderable item in the account.
Afterwards the sale of the volumes ensured a limited annual profit; and
in 1688 the court of Vienna granted the fathers a pension, but burdened
with the condition that subsequent volumes should each of them be
dedicated to some member of the imperial house. Hence, after that date,
every volume bears at the head of it an engraved portrait of an emperor
or empress, of an archduke or archduchess. The Bollandists also enjoyed
a certain revenue from their monopoly of the sale of classical books in
the Jesuit colleges of Belgium.
A word as to the place where they lived and worked. Travellers who have
visited Antwerp must remember the handsome Renaissance tower of St.
Charles Borromeo’s Church, on the corner of the Katelina Rampart and
Wyngard Street. That church was originally dedicated to St. Ignatius,
the great first Jesuit, and was once a museum of Rubens’ art. At the
suppression of the society its best ornaments were removed to Vienna,
where many of them may be seen in the public gallery. The church itself
perished by fire in 1718, but soon rose again as before. The small
square it stands in is formed on two sides by massive buildings,
formerly the Antwerp house of the professed fathers of the society. In
the upper floor of the building opposite the church Père Bolland
established his museum and printing-press, and there the work was
carried on for nearly one hundred and fifty years. Few places in the
history of Christian literature have a better title to be remembered
with honor. In another article we shall trace the progress of the
Bollandist _Acta_ after the suppression of the Jesuit fathers until the
long suspension of the work itself consequent on the French Revolution.
We shall then give our readers an account of its revival some forty
years ago, together with a description of the new museum and library in
the Collége St. Michel, Brussels, which the writer had the honor of
visiting a short time ago.
Footnote 154:
Nothing could give a truer idea of the fog of misconception and
ignorance that envelops every subject connected with Catholicity in
England than an incident which occurred to the writer in the course of
last summer. He had applied to the editor of an influential monthly of
high standing, published in London, for permission to contribute a
paper on the Bollandist _Acta_. The editor in reply said that he
should be happy to receive an article on such a subject, adding, “They
were old friends and benefactors of mine.” The phrase was somewhat
puzzling; but it was fully explained to the writer by a literary
friend of great experience as referring to the respectable family of
the late Baron Bolland, a judge of the English Exchequer Court. The
Catholic Bollandists were strangers even in name to the popular
editor.
Footnote 155:
Among the numerous errors in the few lines devoted to the Bollandists
in the new _Encyclopædia Britannica_, not the worst is the statement
that Père Bolland was only a short time engaged on the _Acta_. More
than one-half of a life of sixty-nine years was spent in the
production of five folio volumes for his own share, besides
superintending the preparation of others.
Footnote 156:
Particulars may be found in the _Bibliothèque des Ecrivains de la
Comp. de Jésus_, of the Pères de Backer, S.J. Liége, 1854. Also in
Nicéron, _Histoire des Hommes Illustres_, II.
TOMBS OF THE HOUSE OF SAVOY.
“Let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings.”—_Shakspere._
One of the most secluded and picturesque valleys of Savoy is to be found
about twenty miles north of Chambéry, shut in, as by cyclopean walls,
among gray jagged rocks, height piled on height—Mont du Chat on the one
hand, and the mountains of Beauges on the other, while away to the
north, through the gorges that give passage to the arrowy Rhone, is the
dark Jura range, and to the south-east, rising into the very clouds,
shine the everlasting glaciers of the Alps. At the base of Mont du Chat,
which here rises abruptly fifteen hundred feet from the shore, is the
beautiful lake of Bourget, clear, calm, and pure as the bright summer
sky which is reflected in its bosom. It is the _lac enchanté_ of
Lamartine, who opens his impassioned romance of _Raphael_ upon its
shores, and under the inspiration of the glorious scenery wrote his poem
of “Le Lac,” in which he calls upon the hours on these enchanted waters
to suspend their course, and thus prolong a bliss which, to use his
expression, neither time nor eternity could ever restore. In the fulness
of delight and feeling he cries:
“Assez de malheureux ici-bas vous implorent,
Coulez, coulez pour eux,
Prenez avec leurs jours les soins qui les dévorent,
Oubliez les heureux!”
The lake of Bourget winds for several leagues in and out among the capes
and headlands, forming a beautiful series of bays and inlets which wash
picturesque cliffs and verdant slopes covered with vines and fig-trees
and fields of waving corn. Towards one end is the little islet of
Châtillon, with an old manor-house that seems to grow out of the rock,
the seat of an ancient race, flanked with towers, and surrounded by
gardens with steps cut in the rock leading from terrace to terrace where
grow fruitful espaliers and the fragrant jasmine. Further south is the
promontory of Saint-Innocent, with its granite cliffs and ancient
château jutting into the lake, of which it commands the entire view. Not
far from the eastern shore is Aix-les-Bains, whose hot sulphur springs
were frequented in ancient times by the Roman emperors, and are still
resorted to for health or pleasure. Between Aix and the lake is the
verdant hill of Tresserves, that rises almost perpendicularly from the
water, covered with enormous old chestnut-trees. To the south you can
see the mountains gradually descending towards the Arcadian valley of
Chambéry, with many a village spire peering forth amid the dark walnut
groves, or the tower of some ancient castle with battlements still
frowning, though they now only serve to point a moral and adorn the
landscape, if not, perchance, a tale. On the other side, at the foot of
Tresserves, is the château of Bon Port, overshadowed by trees, near a
sheltered bay where boats are to be found for crossing the lake. Every
one goes over to the western shore, where in the gloomy shade of Mont du
Chat, which veils it from the glare of the sun the greater part of the
day, is the royal abbey of Hautecombe, the ancient burial-place of the
house of Savoy. The profound solitude, the grandeur of the scenery,
varying from stern mountain height to fair, sunny slopes and luxuriant
valleys, and the pure, limpid waters of the tranquil lake giving
expression to the landscape, render it one of the most lovely as well as
peaceful spots in which to rest after life’s fitful fever. The luminous
sky, the purple, light on the mountains, the stately colonnade of the
pines with their solemn shades, the lulling sound of the torrents and
cascades, the wind murmuring through the defiles, the sunny terraces
where the eye passes from gloom to light, as the soul from darkness to
joy, all dispose the heart to peace.
Hautecombe may be reached in less than an hour, but there is a delicious
charm in floating idly around this gem of a lake, all blue and gold,
giving one’s self up to dreamy thought, breathing the mountain air,
listening to the gentle waves as they break against the shore and to the
melancholy songs of the boatmen, and looking at the chalets on the
hillsides, the meadows and pastures, the herds with their tinkling
bells, the insects floating in the sun, the quivering leaves and
shimmering lights, and the dark pile of the abbey with its shadowy
cloisters on the further shore.
At length we land on the terrace at the foot of a tall, octagon tower
that looks like a pharos, and, indeed, serves as one. The vast buildings
that constitute the abbey, the Gothic church with its painted walls, its
storied windows, the tombs and cenotaphs on every side, and the three
hundred statues that people its chapels and aisles, are well worth a
visit. More than one tomb tells of the brave exploits of a valiant race,
the glorious part its chiefs took in the Crusades, their attachment to
the Holy See, for which they often shed their blood in the continual
wars of Italy, and their prowess on every battle-field of Europe. All
these monuments of white stone, and these pale statues standing in
niches or lying on tombs, have a somewhat ghastly, ghostly look that is
the more striking from the groundwork of black schist. The house of
Savoy, which gradually rose by the bravery, policy, and fortunate
alliances of its counts, first ruled over a sterile domain in the
Cottian Alps of which Chambéry was the principal town. These princes
were remarkable for their political sagacity and gallantry on the
battle-field. This was in part owing to their peculiar position. Savoy
was in the middle ages a border-land which forced its knights to live in
the saddle and hold themselves in readiness to meet the enemy, whether
on the side of France or the vast domain of the German Empire. And when
not needed at home they were always at the service of their allies, so
that they took part in all the wars of the times, and led a life of
knight-errantry that often bordered on romance. Humbert _aux Blanches
Mains_, the first count, was a descendant of Duke Witikind, a
contemporary of Charlemagne. His benefactions to the churches of that
day are still on record. The line of counts ended with Amédée VIII., who
was created duke in the fifteenth century. The ducal line extended
through three centuries, when the peace of Utrecht in 1713 recognized
Victor Amédée as King of Sardinia.
The abbey of St. Mary of Hautecombe was founded in the year 1125 by
Count Amédée III. through the influence of St. Bernard and St. Guérin,
with whom he had intimate relations. _Combe_ is an old French word
signifying a valley between two mountains. The Cistercians generally
built their convents in a valley. The first abbot was St. Amédée
d’Hauterive, of a distinguished family in Dauphiné, who passed his youth
at the court of the Emperor Henry of Germany, but afterwards became a
monk at Clairvaux, and was appointed abbot of Hautecombe by St. Bernard
himself. The Emperor Conrad II. held him in such esteem that he made him
a member of his council, and Frederic I., his chancellor. And when, in
the time of the Second Crusade, preached by St. Bernard, Count Amédée
took the cross at Metz in presence of an immense multitude, and set
forth with his nephew, Louis VII. of France (in 1147), he left both his
son and estates to the guardianship of the holy abbot of Hautecombe, who
proved himself fully equal to the trust. He was an able writer also, and
left eight homilies in honor of the Blessed Virgin, which still form
part of the collection of the fathers. They used to be read on certain
days of the year in the churches of Lausanne, of which he died
archbishop in 1158. His tomb is still to be seen in the cloister at
Hautecombe.
The second abbot was St. Vivian, likewise a disciple of St. Bernard’s.
By his exalted sanctity he gave additional renown to the abbey, which so
prospered that when St. Bernard visited it a few years after its
foundation it already numbered two hundred monks. Many eminent prelates
have sprung from this house, two of whom were elevated to the pontifical
chair—Geoffroy de Châtillon in 1241, under the name of Celestin II., and
Nicholas III. in 1277, who belonged to the Orsini family. It was the
latter who gave the highest sanction to the devotion of the scapular of
Mount Carmel by the beatification of Simon Stock, who died at Bordeaux
in 1265, in the hundredth year of his age.
Hautecombe does not seem to have been at first intended as a place of
sepulture. Count Amédée III. died two years after his departure, on the
isle of Cyprus, of some epidemic in the camp. His son, Humbert III.,
succeeded him. This prince was an able ruler, as brave as he was pious,
and valiantly defended his domains against Guy IV. of Dauphiné. He also
distinguished himself at the siege of Milan, and was always the ally and
ardent defender of the rights of the Holy See. The religious education
he had received from St. Amédée gave him a proper estimate of earthly
things, and he would have gladly renounced the world and become a monk
at Hautecombe, had it not been for the remonstrances of his people. He
often retired here for a season, as well as at Notre Dame des Alpes, and
when he felt his life was drawing to a close he took the holy habit and
died a few days after with a reputation for sanctity which time has not
dimmed. Pope Gregory XVI. authorized public honors to be paid him, and
Savoy celebrates his festival on the 4th of March, believed to be the
day of his death. It was he who conceived the idea of making Hautecombe
the burial-place of his family, and he was the first to find a grave
here. The statue on his tomb represents him in the Cistercian habit with
_sabots_ on his feet.
Two brothers of Humbert the Saint, as he is called, Peter and John, and
a sister named Margaret, embraced the monastic life and died in the odor
of sanctity. Several other members of the house of Savoy have also been
raised to our altars. A grandson of Humbert’s, buried behind the high
altar at Hautecombe, was beatified by Pope Gregory XVI. in 1838 under
the name of the Blessed Boniface. His festival is on the 13th of March.
He was styled, when young, the Absalom of the age, on account of his
personal beauty, but he early sought refuge from the seductions of the
world in the Grande Chartreuse, where he took the habit of St. Bruno. He
was subsequently called forth from his cell and appointed archbishop of
Canterbury and primate of England. Pope Innocent IV. consecrated him at
Lyons. He was noted for his charity, and was at once an able theologian
and jurisconsult. He defended the rights of the church against Henry
III. with energy, and showed equal zeal in supporting the royal
authority amid the disaffections of the times, thereby inspiring so much
confidence in the king that he appointed him regent when he went to
France in 1259. Having gone to Savoy in 1270 to visit his brother, Count
Philip, Archbishop Boniface fell ill and died, after an episcopate of
twenty-five years, at the castle of St. Hélène, in the valley of the
Isère, and was buried at Hautecombe. The statue on his tomb represents
him with a serpent at his feet, emblem of prudence, and a bas-relief
depicts him defending the rights of the church before Henry III.
Count Amédée IX. and two princesses of the house of Savoy are also
invoked as saints. There is a statue of St. Margaret of Savoy in the
chapel of St. Felix at Hautecombe, representing her in a monastic dress,
her hands meekly crossed on her breast. She was a daughter of Amédée,
prince of Achaia, and after the death of her husband, the Marquis of
Montferrat, having been wholly converted to God by the preaching of St.
Vincent Ferrer, she entered a monastery and devoted herself to the care
of the sick in a hospital. She was canonized by Pope Clement X.