François de sales was now well into his forties, an age which in those days was considered much older than it is today. Bald and with his greying beard, as we see him in his portrait, he looked venerable, though we cannot but think that the light touch, often gay and smiling, which characterises his writings and especially his letters, showed more than ever in his features and especially in his eyes, despite the slight deformity in one of them.
At his time of life, the death of those to whom a man has owed much in his younger years marks the passage of time. As we have noted in passing, the death of his mother, towards the end practically blind, took place in 1610 just before the Visitation was established.
Always specially devoted to her eldest son, Mme. de Boisy found it ever more difficult to reconcile herself to the way in which her son's increasing occupations kept them too often separated from one another. She even suffered pangs of jealousy because he paid, she thought, more attention to the women he spiritually directed than to herself. Just before his own death, de Sales, recalling doubtless these last weeks of his own mother's life, wrote, "These mothers, they are altogether admirable. They feel that one never loves them enough and that the love owed them can only be measured by what is beyond measure. How can one deal with this? One must have patience and do as far as one possibly can everything necessary to correspond with it."
Having a premonition that she had little longer to live, though still under sixty, Mme. de Boisy went from Thorens to Annecy to be as near her son as possible. François tells the story of her death in a letter to Mme. de Chantal. "You would wish to know how this good woman has ended her days. Here is a little account of it, for it is to you that I speak—you to whom I have given the place of my mother in my Memento in the Mass without taking away the place you had in it before, for I could not omit this, so close do I hold you in my heart. You are first and last in it. This mother of mine, then, came here this winter and, during the month she stayed here, she made a general review of the state of her soul, renewing with very deep feeling her purpose to live well. She left me as satisfied as anyone could be in my regard, saying that never before had she derived such help from me. In this happy state of mind she lived on until Ash Wednesday.
"That day she went to the parish church of Thorens, going to confession and communion with very great devotion and hearing three Masses as well as Vespers. The same evening, she could not sleep as she lay in bed. She asked her maid to read to her three chapters of the Introduction so that her mind would be filled with good thoughts and she had the chapter on the Protestation [Part I, Chapter 20] marked so that she could make it the next morning. But God, accepting her good will, arranged otherwise.
"Next morning, while rising and attending to her toilet, she suddenly collapsed and seemed to be dead. My poor brother who was still asleep was wakened. He ran to her in his night-shirt and helped her to rise and walk, giving her smelling salts and waters such as are used when such collapses take place. At length she regained consciousness and began to talk, though almost unintelligibly seeing that her throat and tongue were paralysed. Then they called for me here, and I went at once with the doctor and the chemist who found her to be in a state of lethargy with her body half-paralysed. Yet she could be easily roused and then her judgment was sound whether in what she tried to say or in her gesture with the one hand she could still use. She talked much to the point about God and her soul. Feeling for the crucifix (for she was now quite blind), she took it up and kissed it. Everything she touched she signed with the cross and so received the Holy Oils. Blind and half-conscious as she was, she caressed me saying 'This is my son and also my father.' She kissed me, holding on to my arm, and first of all she kissed my hands. For two and a half days she remained like this. After that she could hardly be roused, and on March i she gave up her soul to Our Lord gently, peacefully and with a countenance and beauty more striking than in anyone else I have ever seen. It was one of the most beautiful deaths I have ever witnessed. And I must tell you that I had the courage to give her the last blessing, to close her eyes and to give her the last kiss of peace as she died. Only after that did my heart melt, and I wept for so good a mother more than I have ever done since I became a churchman. But my sorrow was, thanks be to God, without any spiritual bitterness. This is all that happened."
Another great break with the past took place when only four months later François de Sales's old tutor, Deage, died in Annecy. Deage seems always to have been a somewhat cantankerous person, but de Sales's loyalty to those nearest to him and to whom he felt he owed much was absolute. Deage remained with him all his life and was made a Vicar-General of the diocese. During the requiem and funeral, the Bishop was deeply moved and wept a great deal. Afterwards he explained what it was that had so affected him especially at the Pater Noster. "I was recalling the fact that it was that good priest who first taught me to say it."
In that same summer of 1610 Henri IV was assassinated by Ravaillac, as has already been mentioned. The young François de Sales had had little use for the broad-minded, ex-Calvinist monarch who showed such tolerance for the heretics whose heresy he had abjured to gain a kingdom. Nor could he but deeply deplore the private morals of the gay king. But he had come to know him better and to appreciate his great qualities as a ruler and a man. He had welcomed, too, the personal friendship Henri IV had shown, a friendship in contrast with the suspicions of his own sovereign, Charles-Emmanuel, and recognised that Henri had been sincerely desirous of meeting his wishes, as bishop, about Gex and the French part of the diocese.
Only a year earlier, matters had been so arranged so as to enable three more of the Gex parishes to return to their former Catholicity. To Jeanne-Françoise's father, so loyal in his life to his old master, Henri IV, he wrote: "How true it is, my friend, that Europe could witness no more lamentable death than that of the great Henri IV. How can we not wonder at the inconstance, the vanity and the perfidy of worldly greatness! This Prince, so great in his family, so great in his warlike valour, so great in his victories, so great in his triumphs, so great in his reputation, so great in every sort of greatness—who would not have expected that such greatness would be inseparably bound to his life so that, held together by a bond of unbreakable fidelity, it would shine forth with the applause of all the world in his last days to end in a glorious death? One would have thought that so great a life would have ended amidst the booty of the Orient after the final ruination of heresy and the Turks. The fifteen or eighteen years of life that he could still reasonably expect, given his strong constitution and health, given, too, the good wishes of France and many outside France, such years of continued vigour till the end would have sufficed for this. And now this great career of greatness ends with a death that has only one thing great about it, the greatness of its fatality, its sorrow, its misery, its pity. He whom one would have thought to be almost immortal, since he could not die among so many perils so long warded off to reach the happy peace that he has enjoyed these last ten years, now lies dead of a contemptible thrust of a small knife and by the hand of an unknown person in the middle of a road! . . . As for me I have prayed that the sovereign Goodness should be merciful to him who was merciful to so many and pardon him who pardoned so many enemies ... As for myself, I must confess that the favours towards myself of that great king seemed to be infinite ... I have been greatly consoled that that royal courage, once having shown me its benevolence, should have graciously continued it for so long and with such kindness, as a thousand examples on different occasions have proved."[1]
François de Sales, lamenting the death at the age of 57 of a king with such good prospects of a long life of successful labour for his country, could not know that he himself would die even younger overcome by the continuous intensity of his own spiritual labours.
Towards the end of March in 1609, de Sales answered a letter from a Monseigneur Camus which had been written on St. Joseph's feast day. Referring to St. Joseph, de Sales wrote: "My imagination can perceive of nothing tenderer than the sight of that celestial little Jesus in the arms of the great saint, calling him a thousand times 'Papa!' in His childish language and with a filially loving heart." And the letter went on to accept the invitation to consecrate Mgr. Camus bishop in September, for such a consecration created " a spiritual parentage which neither death nor the ashes of our bodies can destroy."
This letter was the prelude to a friendship and an association which has ever since linked together the names of François de Sales and Jean-Pierre Camus, Bishop of Belley. The friendship is somewhat puzzling for it would be hard to think of two more different people. Camus, seventeen years younger than de Sales, was one of the oddest of prelates. Among other things, he wrote a. vast quantity of stories or novels of a secular nature, though written to point the good moral, his pen, apparently, flowing on without pause or correction. He nursed a peculiar hatred of monks, though once he called himself "a Jesuit in heart and soul, in everything." Yet these external extravagances went with a personal life of great holiness and special dedication to the poor. Long outliving de Sales, he was to hold various ecclesiastical positions, having resigned the Belley diocese at the age of 45. He finally settled in the Paris hospice of Incurables where he lived in great austerity, only to be taken from what would seem to have been a suitable place for his incurable oddity in order to accept the See of Arras. Then he died before the Roman Bull of appointment had reached him.
Henri IV, who relished his company, had nominated him for the See of Belley before he reached the canonical age, and a dispensation had to be obtained before de Sales could consecrate him.
Nearly twenty years after de Sales's death, Camus published the six volumes of the Esprit de Saint François de Sales, for ever after to be used – and abused – as a rich source-book of reminiscences for the character, way of living, devotional teaching – not to mention its endless stories and anecdotes – of the Saint. To inform himself the better about the man he so deeply reverenced, he went to the length of making a hole in the wall so that he could observe the Saint off his guard, rather like a scientific specimen.
For many generations, Camus's highly readable living portrait of François de Sales was accepted as a faithful and close likeness, but modern historians are on their guard against the vivid imagination of the novelist bishop who was recalling events that had happened so long before he described them. A letter from Mme. de Chantal, written ten years after de Sales's death, witnesses to the fact that the ex-bishop of Belley needed cautioning lest his feelings and his pen ran away with him and gave scandal.
De Sales undoubtedly came to feel deeply for his young episcopal neighbour, for the See of Belley, though in France, was only some thirty miles from Annecy. He could appreciate Camus's charm and lively humour, while discerning the deep piety and zeal that underlay the superficial oddities and prejudices of this very French-sounding character. Most of all, he was always ready to help so young a bishop with his own experience and sometimes with his criticisms and scoldings the more so in that the Bishop of Belley was the only bishop he had consecrated.
Camus himself tells us that de Sales encouraged him to write his novels in order to offset the vulgar and sometimes pornographic writings of the time. It seems that but for de Sales's insistence on his remaining at the post to which God had called him, Camus would have resigned his See very shortly after his appointment. Belley was a very small town a very long way from his native Paris and the more cultured world of northern France. That two such different men could have become so intimate may well be taken as another example of the way in which François de Sales was able to fuse his own austere and saintly spiritual anchorage with an immensely understanding and tolerant breadth of spirit.
Deaths and new friendships, as well as further souls to set along the spiritual paths described in the Devout Life or in the Treatise on the Love of God for the writing of which, as we shall see in the next chapter, he gave every minute not otherwise engaged, could not alter the general tenor of his busy episcopal life during the years when his days seemed to move ever more rapidly towards his fifties. The death of Henri IV did not cut him off from the royal and governmental circles of Paris where Marie de' Medici was regent for the young Louis XIII. On the contrary, in the French Pays de Gex, which de Sales constantly visited, he was so well able to turn to his advantage the Edict of Nantes that his work of reconversion there was, in the words of the editors of the Annecy edition of his collected works, second only to the apostolic labours of his youth in the Chablais. Among his new spiritual children was the considerable figure of the Due de Bellegarde, "Grand Ecuyer " of the Kingdom, and Governor of Gex. He had long known him, because of the denominational problems of Gex, but only in these years do we possess letters which, being addressed to a man, compare interestingly with the many we possess of spiritual direction to women.
"Blessed be God eternally for the goodness He shows to your soul, Monsieur, in so powerfully drawing it to devote the rest of your mortal life to the service of eternal life—that eternal life which is divinity itself in that divinity itself will be the life of glory and happiness in our spirits. That is life, the only true life for which alone we should live in this world since any life which does not end in eternal life had best be called death, not life . . . Without doubt you are called to a virile, courageous, valiant, unchanging devotion—one that will mirror to many the truth of heavenly love, one that will worthily atone for any past faults if indeed you have attached yourself to the vanity of earthly loves ... The world will have a high regard for you, and, despite its perversity, it will honour you when it observes that in its palaces, its galleries, its cabinets you carefully observe the ways of a wise, serious, strong, unchanging, noble and easy-flowing devotion. So be it, my dear son. May God always be your greatness and the world ever spurned—I am your father who loves you as his Benjamin and honours you as his Joseph."
Such relationships with the great of France, including Marie de' Medici and in a short time with Louis XIII himself, who used to refer to him as "my good Father, my saintly Bishop " were not calculated to ease his relations with the increasingly jealous Charles-Emmanuel.
We hear much of praise of the Bishop of Geneva, but so ardent a reformer of easy-going ways and customary abuses had many enemies, and not only among the Calvinists. These people were constantly denouncing not only François himself, but his relations and his friends, to the Prince already far from happy about a subject with steadily growing international prestige. It was only the beginning of this campaign of detraction to which he was referring in a letter to Charles-Emmanuel in the summer of 1611. "Having been warned that I have been denounced to Your Highness for certain evil business of state with foreigners, I am in utter astonishment for I cannot imagine on what ground at all such calumny can be founded. True, I have been obliged these days to go to Gex and remain there for sometime, but neither there nor anywhere else have I done or said anything but what appertains to my profession which is to preach, to argue, to reconcile churches, to consecrate altars and to administer sacraments… Neither I, my Lord, nor those near me have, whether in deed or intention, the wish to do anything but within obedience to Your Highness. I cannot imagine, therefore, how calumny dares to charge me with special foreign interests… "Charles-Emmanuel was even angered by his business with the Visitation in Lyons.
But such unpleasantness, now or later, could not touch his inner peace. It was only a month earlier that he had written from Gex to Mere de Chantal: "God's goodness enables me to experience quite extraordinary sweetness and consolations here where they arise. How good our Saviour is and how kindlily He treats my poor puny courage. How firmly am I resolved to remain deeply faithful to Him—and faithful especially to the service of our heart which, more strongly than ever, I see and feel to be something unique. Who but God, my dear daughter, could cause two spirits to mingle so perfectly that they have become one only spirit, indivisible, inseparable, for He only is one by His very essence... A thousand times a day my heart finds itself near yours; a thousand times it pours out to God prayers for your consolation."
François de Sales was invited by the Savoie Senate to preach the Lenten sermons for a second time in Chambery in 1612, and the Bishop, so much of whose life and correspondence was with the great people of the world, was once again rather nervous of the society of provincial Savoie's capital. "Let me tell you what I think," he wrote to Favre's wife. "I fear that I shall come up against too much worldly wisdom there. You know how the Cross loves simple and humble hearts. Still, it is the Saviour whom I preach, the Saviour who fills the valleys and lowers and flattens the mountains."
He began by taking special trouble to preach in a manner fitted to the pretensions of a provincial society, but soon reverted to his old, simple way, filled with the usual spontaneous felicities of expression, such as the beautiful phrase in reference to the Jews seeing Our Lord weep over Lazarus: "They saw love weeping," or the light-hearted reference to the devil's tactics in making us believe that all preachers are spoil-sports, when what preachers really say is: "Feed on joy and happiness—but as for sin, there is no joy in it, so do not sin."
He was right in anticipating resistance and disinterest among the worldly congregations of Chambery, and he did not hesitate to show the severe side of his nature in warning them that the God who did not spare the angels for a single guilty thought "will not forgive you, you who burst out here in shouts of laughter." But it was not long before he had exerted his spiritual authority, in its strength and in its meekness, on the worldly people so that once again the weeks of Lent were one long uninterrupted ministry in the confessional and the service of souls, rich, poor, the sick, the prisoners, the dying.
As we have more than once pointed out, the genius of François de Sales was not that of the scholar, the learned man, the student, the planner; it was the genius of an intensely spiritual and intensely wise man of action who had the gift of being able to rise to every circumstance and opportunity.
We have a typical example of this special genius of his at about this time when he found himself drawn very much against his will into the current fashionable controversy about the mutual delimitations of the authority of the Church and the authority of the State. The Reformation was over and the traditional authority of the universal Church was challenged, not only in parts of Europe that had rebelled against Catholicity altogether, but also because Catholic States themselves had developed a new consciousness of nationhood and sovereignty. Catholic rulers were, in the circumstances, not unnaturally anxious to claim powers over ecclesiastical affairs within their frontiers which, of course, automatically fell to Protestant princes.
Mgr. Germonio, now Archbishop of Tarentaise, who had enabled François de Sales to give his decisive view in the De Auxiliis controversy, was once again looking for de Sales's valuable opinion in the present discussion. In March 1612, de Sales wrote to Germonio: "From Paris and Dijon advices which I have received, as well as from the booklets printed in those towns, it is obvious that the discussion about the authority of the Holy Sec over kings is spreading more and more. It is the same with the argument about the Councils and the Sovereign Pontiffs. It is clear that most of the Parlements and statesmen, even though Catholic, are taking the least favourable view, or, to put it better, the view most contrary to Papal authority, for they believe that this is in better accord with the royal authority and serves it best." De Sales went on to argue the danger of this, given the minority of Louis XIII, despite the latter's "excellent and most Christian disposition." But, he added "To have the matter discussed by able theologians does not seem to be a good idea, for the more heated the debates become, the more men's spirits will become heated so that disagreements will increase… The best remedy would be that during the regency friendly relations, on the part of His Holiness, should be maintained with the Queen and the Council." In other words, the Bishop very wisely believed that this great question, which Bellarmine had recently sought to solve by the doctrine of the "indirect power" of the Papacy i.e. power over the spiritual and moral elements in political authority, could best be handled, not by a respective taking up of positions, but by tact and mutual understanding in meeting practical difficulties, as they arose.
He had had occasion a little earlier to write sharply to the father of one of the first Visitation nuns, M. Benigne Milletot, who had written a book which took the side of the State.
"I see two things in your book: the work of the writer on the one side and its subject-matter on the other. Truly, I think that the way you write is good and praiseworthy, even exquisite and rare, but the matter displeases me—and if I must say what is in my heart, I say: the matter displeases me very much ... By natural inclination, by the way in which I was brought up, by my ordinary experience and, as I believe, by heavenly inspiration, I hate all contentions and disputes among Catholics. They are purposeless, and I hate even more those whose effects cannot be other than dissensions and quarrels especially in these times when spirits are only too disposed to controversy, back-bitings, censoriousness and the ruin of charity. I have not even found to my taste certain writings of a saintly and most excellent prelate [Bellarmine] in which he has treated of the indirect power of the Pope over Princes—not that I have thought what he wrote not to be to the point, but because in this age when we have so many enemies outside, I believe that we should not disturb anything within the body of the Church."
But the most curious circumstance in regard to this vexed and highly important question with which de Sales had thus accidentally become involved was that he finally gave his full opinion on it, not in any book nor in some public declaration, but in a long private letter to Mme. Brulart, of all people. Mme. Brulart was indeed a person of influence in the world of the magistrates of Dijon, and de Sales was doubtless really writing for them, but one cannot but be moved by the reflection that the future Doctor Of the Church and Patron of Writers thought so little of his own learning and writing that he was ready to treat of a vital controversial question of the day between Church and State in a private letter to one of the women whose spiritual director he was.
It was a "difficult" question, he told her, "not in itself—on the contrary it is very easy to solve for those who seek the solution by the road of charity." But it was "difficult" in an age of hot-heads when one can so easily offend " those who, being good servants either of the Pope or of Princes, insist on holding to extreme views, forgetting that the worst thing one can do to a father is to deprive him of the love of his sons, or for the sons to deprive them of the respect they owe their fathers."
Furthermore, the question was a "useless" one "for the Pope demands nothing from Kings and Princes in this matter. He loves them all tenderly, desiring only the strength and stability of their crowns. With them he lives in peace and friendliness, doing practically nothing within their States, even where purely ecclesiastical matters are in question, without their agreement and good-will."
De Sales then set out in some length the nature of the respective authorities of "the Church or the Pope (for they come to the same thing)" – a significant bracket in view of much later clarifications of the Papal position—and of the State. Summing up, he wrote of the "great but reciprocal obligation as between the Pope and the Kings; an unchanging obligation, an obligation lasting until death inclusively, and a natural obligation, divine and human, by which the Pope and the Church put their spiritual powers at the service of Kings and kingdoms, and the Kings their temporal forces at the service of the Pope and the Church." "The Pope and the Church," he explained, "serve the Kings for spiritual nourishment, conservation and defence towards all and against all. Kings and kingdoms serve the Church and the Pope for temporal nourishment, conservation and defence towards all and against all; for the fathers are at the service of the children and the children of the fathers. Nevertheless, Kings and all sovereign Princes have a temporal sovereignty in which neither Pope nor Church has any part and where they ask for no sort of temporal recognition. In short, the Pope is sovereign pastor and spiritual father; the King is temporal prince and lord. The authority of the one is not against that of the other, but they mutually support one another, for the Pope and the Church excommunicate and hold for heretics those who deny the sovereign authority of Kings and Princes, and the Kings strike with their swords those who deny the authority of the Pope or the Church, or, if they hold back their sword, it is to await amendment and avowal. Leave it at that. Be a humble spiritual daughter of the Church and the Pope and a humble subject and servant of the King. Pray for the one and the other, and be very sure that in so doing you will have God for Father and for King.”
Had Mme. Brulart torn up or lost that letter, the Church would never have had the benefit of a brilliant exposition of the principles which were directly applicable then and which still hold in principle today, adapted in concordats and other agreements or traditions which interpret temporal sovereignty in new constitutional terms and recognise the practical limitations of Catholic ecclesiastical authority in purely secularist States. That he only wrote it for private advice underlines de Sales's real feelings that such questions are best left to work themselves out without dotting i's and crossing t's.
François de Sales had not, of course, forgotten the promises he had made to go in pilgrimage to the tomb of St. Charles Borromeo in Milan in thanksgiving for the recovery of Mere de Chantal during those first months of the Visitation life in the Galerie. How he found the time to accomplish this journey after Easter in 1613 can only be guessed through what he said to Madeleine de Mouxy, an early Visitation nun who was to make her entry into the convent covered with scapulars, medals, sashes and other outward signs of a multitude of other spiritual commitments, to be quickly deprived of them all by the founder as so much spiritual lumber. This worried soul was now getting the bishop's advice about how to live more simply. "My daughter, do as I do," he told her, as she testified later, "I am just about to Start for Milan. Yet imagine how busy I am. I have more than fifty letters to answer. If I tried to hurry over it all, I would be lost. So I intend neither to hurry nor to worry. This evening I shall answer as many as I can. Tomorrow I shall do the same and so I shall go on until I have finished. Do the same as I do, my daughter, for time is ours."
Besides the vow, another pressing matter called for the journey which was to be made across the Mont-Cenis and via Turin. He had to see Charles-Emmanuel, for his friends, his family as well as he himself, stood in the Duke's special displeasure. They had been accused of being involved in a beating that had been given to the secretary of the Due de Nemours in the forest of Sonnaz - the forest, it will be recalled, where the young de Sales had received the three signs of the sword-cross to indicate to him the urgency of taking up his priestly vocation.
In Turin, he found the Due de Savoie in no mood to listen to his plea of the absurdity of such accusations, though the Duke unbended sufficiently to propose his daughter, the Duchess of Mantua, as a protector for the Visitation. "We shall have the Duchess of Mantua, who is virtue itself, as our protector," he wrote to Mere de Chantal, "but do not say anything about it yet for a reason which I shall explain to you." He also wished to get his Sovereign's permission to accept an invitation to preach the next Lent in Paris. "My hopes remained frustrated and useless," he wrote to des Hayes, "for His Highness will not allow me to leave to preach, using polite words, but nothing more and not favourable to my wishes ... If you knew why he refuses, you would admire the industry of the devil who opposes our desires." Charles-Emmanuel, he went on to explain, thought that M. Gharmoisy, under house arrest for alleged complicity in the beating, and des Hayes were in league to establish de Sales in Paris. No wonder the Bishop took the view that princes had quite enough power in ecclesiastical affairs such as where a bishop might preach.
On April 25, ten days after leaving Annecy, François de Sales reached Milan, to be greeted by St. Charles Borromeo's cousin and successor, Cardinal Frederick Borromeo. Never wasting an opportunity, the Bishop declined the offer to stay with the Cardinal and accepted instead the hospitality of the Barnabite Fathers, for he had discussed with Charles-Emmanuel the possibility of bringing a Barnabite community to Annecy to take charge of the college there where he himself had once studied. This business he successfully accomplished. François de Sales's Mass in the-cathedral crypt before the tomb of Saint Charles was celebrated with such fervour and so many outward signs of interior ecstasy that it was said in Milan that the saintly archbishop had himself come to return the visit of the Bishop of Geneva. During one whole night of his short stay he remained in prayer by the tomb.
Certainly not less spiritually inspiring to François de Sales was the feast of the Holy Shroud on May 4, when the famous relic was exposed for veneration, the same relic before which his mother had prayed in Annecy before his conception and birth. He therefore left Milan in time to be in Turin for the feast, passing through Vercelli where rested the remains of Amadeus IX of Savoie, for whose beatification de Sales had pleaded to Rome, asking that the canonisation in 1610 of Charles Borromeo, a prince of the Church, might be coupled with the beatification of Amadeus, a prince of the world. Rome was less immediately interested in the Salesian symbol of lay devout life, and Amadeus was not to be beatified until 1667.
In Turin, the Bishop of Geneva was asked to preach before the immense crowd and then to help in the unwinding of the sacred relic. As he did so, his tears and some drops of sweat, due to the excessive heat, fell on to the winding sheet. Those near him expressed their alarm and indignation at this accident, but, as he wrote to Mere de Chantal: " The Cardinal-Prince was angry when my sweat dropped on to the Holy Shroud of my Saviour. I felt able, however, to say to him that Our Lord was not so touchy, and that He had not poured His sweat and blood but that they should be mingled with ours that these might win us the price of eternal salvation. So may our sighs mingle with His that they may rise like a sweet scent up to the Eternal Father." François de Sales, who wrongly believed himself—if we are to accept Charles-Auguste—to have been taken in his mother's womb before the Holy Shroud, always had a special devotion to this relic which he called the " shield of this country," and his residence had reproductions of the Shroud in many of its rooms.
Once again he saw the Duke whom he now found to be better disposed towards him and his family, but he would do no more than refer the question of false accusations to the Due de Nemours, whose conduct in the matter was to earn from the gentle de Sales the following rebuke: "Your Highness has heard accusations against these poor afflicted people and against my brothers. You have acted rightly in listening to them, so long as your ears alone listened; but if your heart has listened to them also, you will forgive me if I tell you, as your humble and faithful servant, but also as your affectionate though unworthy pastor, that you have offended God and are called upon to repent. If anyone tells you otherwise, he betrays your soul."
Charles-Emmanuel was far more ready to consent to his Bishop of Geneva leaving Savoie when an invitation came from Grenoble, the capital of the Dauphine, to preach the Advent there in 1616. The reason was that the Duke cherished hopes of seeing the Dauphine united one day with Savoie to form a large sovereign State from the Rhone to Turin, for the Dauphine at that time was virtually the possession of its Governor, Lesdiguieres, one of the great French soldiers of his day who had long fought with Henri IV against the League. Lesdiguieres, marshal of France and duke, attracted de Sales for a very different reason. As one of the chief Protestant figures of the kingdom, he was the object of the Bishop's prayers and he could become subject to his spiritual ministrations one day. It was likely that Lesdiguieres would be curious to hear the sermons of the famous preacher and holy man who had been so successful in his apostolate among the Huguenots.
De Sales, we are told, prepared that course of sermons with special care and rested his arguments and exhortations, as never before, on the Bible to which the Protestants appealed. He had not been deceived in his hopes, for the great Lesdiguieres came to the Grenoble Chapel-Royal where he preached. Better still, François de Sales and Lesdiguieres conferred together for four hours, though without any immediate results.
After Christmas and the New Year, de Sales returned to Grenoble, which is only 60 miles away from Annecy, for the Lent of 1617, for he felt that in this town, which contained many Protestants, apart from the governor, much spiritual work was to be done. Among those whose souls he touched, two are worth mentioning as showing the wide ambit of a saint's spiritual conquests.
The first was the strange figure of Claude Boucard, who became a Jesuit when François was still a student and taught at Clermont not long after François had left it. His success was such that it went to his head, and when his superiors called him to Rome for the good of his soul, he ran away from the Order and became a Calvinist in Switzerland. Seven years before this Grenoble Lent, Boucard had come to de Sales in Thonon to be reconciled to the Catholic Church, only to be lured back to Calvinism by his ambition. Now at last in Grenoble this unhappy man, after hearing de Sales preaching on the Last Judgment, fell at the Bishop's feet to be reconciled once more. One feels that it would take a de Sales to remain so patient with him. But this time he was truly reconciled, to the surprise of the city, and he lived the rest of his days piously in Annecy—and at de Sales's expense.
It was the second person, however, whose conversion most thrilled the people of Grenoble. This was a Mme. Armand, who sounds to us very like many a contemporary woman. The greater part of her day was spent at her dressing table, making up her face which she looked after with such care that it had to be protected even against the steam of the soup. A fashion leader of her time, she was the talk of everyone at the theatre and at balls. Out of curiosity about de Sales's reputation as a preacher, she went to hear him. She was completely overcome, entirely changed her manner of life and settled with her husband in Annecy to be near him.
The end of the story is both edifying and charming. The young daughter of the Armands was dying in Annecy and believed to be dead. A messenger from the Bishop had just come, and he was sent back to the Bishop's residence to tell him of the tragedy. De Sales hastened to his chapel where he made a promise to God that if the little girl lived she would one day wear the white habit of the Visitation. When the messenger returned to the Armand home, carrying de Sales's instruction that they must put their trust in the Blessed Virgin, the little girl was alive and said: "The holy papa of Geneva came to bless me and make me well." Not only was the girl, thus raised from the dead, to become a Visitandine, - she founded the Visitation of Bordeaux - but so did Mme. Armand, after she and her husband had decided to enter religion. M. Armand became a Jesuit and was to say the Mass at the religious profession of his wife.
But even such spiritual conquests at Grenoble left the Bishop sadly remarking, as so many preachers have remarked before and since, that "here, like everywhere else, men leave the care of the household and of devotion to the women."
Lesdiguieres, though not converted, asked Charles-Emmanuel to allow the Bishop to return to Grenoble that same year for a second Advent preaching. "If only God should be pleased to touch, attract and win him," de Sales wrote in the summer. "It is often the habit of God's Providence to use humble and weak instruments for the great gifts of His goodness. But between you and me, this hope, if anyone heard it, would be construed as coming from someone with excessive ambition. Yet the truth is that I have as little ambition in the matter as hope because of Our Saviour's words: 'How difficult it is for the rich . . .' "
Indeed it took a further course of preaching, in the Lent of 1618—in other words, de Sales had done for Grenoble what he had never done before, preached two consecutive Advents and Lents—to move Lesdiguieres to decide to abjure the faith he had learned as a young man under a Protestant tutor. Though his change of spiritual outlook had already lost him his influence over the Protestants, political reasons, it seems, delayed his actual return to the Catholic Church until 1622, a few months before the death of François de Sales.
A permanent fruit of de Sales's work in Grenoble was the foundation there of the fourth Visitation convent.
Some modern readers may feel that the close relationship between François de Sales and Jeanne-Françoise de Chantal, while most edifying, must nevertheless have had many tender human compensations, not easily reconcilable with the spiritual denudation to which they ever more ardently aspired as they grew older. A poignant tragedy which occurred during this period and the way in which the two future saints accepted a blow which struck at that which, in the order of nature, was deepest in them both exemplifies the depths of their common spirit of self-sacrifice and dedication to God's will.
Early in 1617, Bernard de Sales, beloved brother and beloved son-in-law, died of fever, while on a local military operation. His 19-year old wife, Marie-Aimée, beloved daughter and beloved sister-in-law, was with child, awaited towards the end of the year. The child was prematurely born four months later, and Marie- Aimée could not live. That same evening, the Bishop and Mere de Chantal were at the bedside. Marie- Aimée, completely reconciled to the divine Will, begged her mother to admit her before death as a novice into the Visitation. Shortly after, she begged to be professed and take the three vows, changing the white veil for the black. This was allowed – and so she died.
A year earlier, Mere de Chantal, reviewing the nature of her vocation, had sighed "Oh, how deep the razor has penetrated!" and de Sales had written: "Think no more about friendship, nor about the oneness which God has fashioned between us; your children, your body, your soul or anything whatsoever. For you have placed all in God's hands."
The oneness which God had fashioned between them united them in this double tragedy, so sudden, so overwhelming. Their resignation could not diminish the tearing at their hearts in this unnatural double, triple loss. " It is true," wrote de Sales in a fragment of a letter to an unknown correspondent, " God has afflicted our house in the death of my brother and sister of Thorens. But His divinely fatherly hand calls me to adore that gentle goodness which has so softly touched us. Did not my brother die a holy death among soldiers, where saints are rare? Did not my sister, that dear wife and my only daughter, die holily with God's servants and in His cloister which is the school of sanctity? She is buried in the Visitation habit. The doctor said that if angels could die, so would they wish to die."
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[1] It is a curious thing that the famous saying attributed to François de Sales "You catch more flies with a spoonful of honey than with twenty barrels of vinegar " has also been attributed to Henri IV. Totally dissimilar in spiritual and moral elevation as the bishop and the monarch were, there was an affinity of humanity, tolerance, kindliness and commonsense between them.
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