MONSEIGNEUR'S SOLITUDE.
There is nearly always round a bishop a squad of little abbés, as
there is a swarm of young officers round a general. They are what that
delightful St. Francis de Sales calls somewhere "sucking priests."
Every career has its aspirants, who pay their respects to those who
have reached the goal; there is not a power without its following, not
a fortune without its court. The seekers for a future buzz round the
splendid present. Every metropolitan has his staff: every bishop who is
at all influential has his patrol of Seminarist Cherubim, who go the
rounds, maintain order in the episcopal palace, and mount guard round
Monseigneur's smile. Pleasing a bishop is a foot in the stirrup for a
sub-deaconry; after all, a man must make his way, and apostles do not
despise canonries.
In the same way as there are "gros bonnets," otherwhere, there are
large mitres in the Church. They are bishops who stand well with the
Court, well endowed, clever, favorites of society, who doubtless know
how to pray, but also how to solicit, not scrupulous about having a
whole diocese waiting in their ante-rooms, connecting links between
the sacristy and diplomacy, more abbés than priests, rather prelates
than bishops. Happy the man who approaches them! As they stand in good
credit they shower around them, on the obsequious and their favored,
and on all the youth who know the art of pleasing, fat livings,
prebends, archdeaconries, chaplaincies, and cathedral appointments,
while waiting for episcopal dignities. While themselves advancing, they
cause their satellites to progress, and it is an entire solar system
moving onwards. Their beams throw a purple hue over their suite, and
their prosperity is showered over the actors behind the scenes in
nice little bits of promotions. The larger the patron's diocese, the
larger the favorite's living. And then there is Rome. A bishop who
contrives to become an archbishop, an archbishop who manages to become
a cardinal, takes you with him as a Conclavist; you enter the rota, you
have the pallium, you are an auditor, a chamberlain, a Monsignore, and
from Grandeur to Eminence there is but a step, and between Eminence
and Holiness there is only the smoke of the balloting tickets. Every
cassock can dream of the tiara. The priest is in our days the only
man who can regularly become a king, and what a king! The supreme
king! Hence what a hotbed of longings is a seminary! How many blushing
choristers, how many young abbés, have on their head Perrette's
milk-jar! how easily ambition calls itself a profession! and perhaps it
does so in good faith and in self-deception, for it is so unworldly.
Monseigneur Welcome, humble, poor, and out of the world, was not
counted among the large mitres. This was visible in the utter absence
of young priests around him. We have seen that at Paris "he did not
take," and not an aspirant tried to cling to this solitary old man; not
the most youthful ambition tried to flourish in his shade. His canons
and vicars were good old men, walled up like him in this diocese which
had no issue to the Cardinal's hat, and who resembled their bishop
with this difference, that they were finished while he was completed.
The impossibility of growing up near Monseigneur Welcome was so well
felt, that young priests whom he ordained at once obtained letters
commendatory to the Archbishop of Aix, or Auch, and went off at score.
For, after all, we repeat, men wish to be pushed upward. A saint who
lives in a state of excessive self-denial is a dangerous neighbor, he
might possibly communicate to you by contagion an incurable poverty, a
stiffening of the joints useful for advancement, and, in a word, more
renunciation than you care for: and such scabby virtue is shunned.
Hence came the isolation of Monseigneur Welcome. We live in the midst
of a gloomy society. Succeed,--such is the teaching which falls drop by
drop from the corruption hanging over us.
Success is a very hideous thing, and its resemblance with merit
deceives men. For the herd, success has nearly the same profile as
supremacy. Success, that twin brother of talent, has a dupe,--history.
Tacitus and Juvenal alone grumble at it. In our days an almost official
philosophy wears the livery of success, and waits in its ante-room.
Succeed, that is the theory, for prosperity presupposes capacity.
Win in the lottery and you are a clever man, for he who triumphs is
revered. All you want is to be born under a fortunate star. Have luck
and you will have the rest, be fortunate and you will be thought a
great man; leaving out five or six immense exceptions, which form the
lustre of an age, contemporary admiration is blear-eyedness. Gilding
is gold, and it does you no harm to be any one so long as you are the
parvenu. The mob is an old Narcissus, adoring itself and applauding the
mob. That enormous faculty by which a man is a Moses, Æschylus, Dante,
Michael Angelo, or Napoleon, the multitude decrees broadcast and by
acclamation to any one who attains his object, no matter in what. Let
a notary transfigure himself into a deputy; a false Corneille produce
Tiridates; an eunuch contrive to possess a harem; a military Prudhomme
accidentally gain the decisive battle of an age; an apothecary invent
cardboard soles for the army of the Sambre-et-Meuse, and make out of
the cardboard sold for leather an income of 400,000 francs a year; a
pedler espouse usury and put it to bed with seven or eight millions, of
which he is the father and she the mother; a preacher become a bishop
by his nasal twang; let the steward of a good family be so rich on
leaving service that he is made Chancellor of the Exchequer--and men
will call it genius, in the same way as they call Mousqueton's face
beauty and Claude's mien majesty. They confound with the constellations
of profundity the stars which the duck's feet make in the soft mud of
the pond.