Part 44 (2/2)

The fact is that these exercises leave no initiative to the soul; they consider it as a soft paste good to run into a mould; they show it no horizon, no sky. Instead of trying to stretch it, and make it greater, they make it smaller deliberately; they put it back into the cases of their wafer box, nourish it only on faded trifles, on dry nothings.

This j.a.panese culture of deformed toes which remain dwarf; this Chinese deformation of children planted in pots, horrified Durtal, who closed the volume.

He opened another, the ”Introduction to the Devout Life,” by Saint Francis de Sales.

Certainly he found no need to read it again, in spite of its affectations, and its good nature, at first charming, but which ends by making you sick, by making the soul sticky with sweets with liqueurs in them, and lollypops; in a word, that work so much praised by Catholics was a julep scented with bergamot and ambergris. It was like a fine handkerchief shaken in a church in which a musty smell of incense remained.

But the man himself, the Bishop Saint Francis de Sales, was suggestive; with his name was called up the whole mystical history of the seventeenth century.

And Durtal recalled the memories he had kept of the religious life of that time. There were then in the Church two currents:

That of the high Mysticism, as it was called, originating from Saint Teresa and Saint John of the Cross; and this current was concentrated on Marie Guyon.

And another that of so-called temperate Mysticism, of which the adepts were Saint Francis de Sales and his friend the celebrated Baroness de Chantal.

It was naturally this second current which triumphed. Jesus, putting Himself within the reach of drawing-rooms, descending to the level of women of the world, a moderate and proper Jesus, only dealing with the soul of His creature just enough to give it one attraction the more, this elegant Jesus became all the fas.h.i.+on; but Madame Guyon, whose source was above all Saint Teresa, who taught the mystical theory of love, and familiar intercourse with heaven, raised the opposition of the whole clergy who abominated Mysticism without understanding it; she exasperated the terrible Bossuet, who accused her of the fas.h.i.+onable heresy, Molinism and Quietism. She refuted, unhappy as she was, this trouble without much difficulty, but he persecuted her for it none the less; he was furious against her, and had her imprisoned at Vincennes; revealed himself obstinate, surly, and atrocious.

Fenelon, who tried to conciliate these two tendencies in preparing a small Mysticism neither too hot nor too cold, a little less lukewarm than that of Saint Francis de Sales, and above all things much less ardent than that of Saint Teresa, ended in his turn by displeasing the cormorant of Meaux, and though he abandoned and denied Madame de Guyon, whose friend he had been for long years, he was persecuted and tracked down by Bossuet, condemned at Rome, and sent in exile to Cambrai.

And here Durtal could not but smile, for he remembered the desolate complaints of his partisans weeping for this disgrace, representing thus as a martyr this archbishop whose punishment consisted in quitting his post as courtier at Versailles to go at last and administer his diocese, in which he appeared till then to have never resided.

This mitred Job, who remained in his misfortune Archbishop and Duke of Cambrai, Prince of the Holy Roman Empire, and rich, so unhappy because he was obliged to visit his flock, well shows the state of the episcopate under the redundant reign of the great king. It was a priesthood of financiers and valets.

Only there was at any rate a certain attraction, there was talent in every case; while now bishops are not for the most part less intriguing nor less servile, but they have no longer either talent or manners.

Caught in part, in the fishpond of bad priests, they show themselves ready for everything, and turn out to be souls of old usurers, low jobbers, beggars, when you press them.

”It is sad to say it, but so it is,” concluded Durtal. ”As for Madame Guyon,” he went on, ”she was neither an original writer nor a saint; she was only an unwelcome subst.i.tute for the true mystics; she was presuming and certainly lacked that humility which magnified Saint Teresa and Saint Clare; but after all she burst into a flame, she was overcome by Jesus; above all, she was not a pious courtier, a bigot softened by a court like the Maintenon.

”After all, what a time for religion it was? All its saints have something formal and restricted, wordy and cold, which turns me away from them. Saint Francis de Sales, Saint Vincent de Paul, Saint Chantal ... No, I prefer Saint Francis of a.s.sisi, Saint Bernard, Saint Angela ... The Mysticism of the seventeenth century is all the fas.h.i.+on with its emphatic and mean churches, its pompous and icy painting, its solemn poetry, its gloomy prose.

”But look,” he said, ”my cell is still neither swept nor set in order, and I am afraid that in lingering here I may give some trouble to Father Etienne. It rains, however, too hard to allow of my walking in the wood; the simplest thing is to go and read the Little Office of Our Lady in the chapel.”

He went down there; it was at this hour almost empty; the monks were at work in the fields or in the factory; two fathers only, on their knees before the altar of Our Lady, were praying so absorbedly that they did not even hear the opening of the door.

And Durtal, who had placed himself near them opposite the porch which gave upon the high altar, saw them reflected in the sheet of gla.s.s, placed before the shrine of the Blessed Guerric. This sheet had indeed the effect of a mirror, and the white fathers were in the depths of it, lived in prayers under the table, in the very heart of the altar.

And he also appeared there in a corner, reflected, at the back of the shrine, near the sacred remains of the monk.

At one moment he lifted his head, and saw that the round window in the apse, behind the altar, reproduced on its gla.s.s ornamented with grey and blue, the marks engraved on the reverse of the medal of Saint Benedict, the first letters of its imperative formulas, the initials of its distiches.

It might have been called an immense clear medal, sifting a pale light, straining it through prayers, not allowing them to penetrate to the altar till sanctified and blessed by the Patriarch.

And while he was dreaming, the clock struck; the two Trappists regained their stalls, while the others entered.

Waiting thus in the chapel, the hour of s.e.xt had struck. The abbot advanced. Durtal saw him again for the first time since their conversation; he seemed less ill, less pale; he marched majestically in his great white cowl, at the hood of which hung a violet acorn, and the fathers bowed, kissing their sleeve before him; he reached his place, which was designated by a wooden cross standing before a stall, and all enfolded themselves with a great sign of the cross, bowed to the altar, and the feeble imploring voice of the old Trappist rose: ”Deus in adjutorium meum intende.”

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