Francois de sales, nobleman, Provost, Coadjutor and then Bishop of Geneva, with an international reputation in his lifetime as writer, theologian, preacher and saint, managed through fifty years of life to remain personally obscure and truly married to his poor diocese. It was a remarkable achievement, never very satisfactorily explained. Such a person in those days could hardly avoid the high promotions showered on the friend of Popes, Princes and the highest clerical dignitaries. It was not even due to any conscious will on his part absolutely to refuse promotion however much he would have detested it. Being a bishop at all was bad enough. He was too detached, too conscious that only the will of God counted, to make an issue of the pursuit of humility and obscurity, however much he loved these and sought them. One can only conclude that, supernaturally, this was God's will for him and, on the natural plane, the quality of his desire not to be great in the eyes of the world held the hands of those who would otherwise have made such a fuss of him.
Now that his explanation of a short illness was simply "I imagine it is just because I am old," he was for the first time to be transferred for long periods to the kind of ecclesiastical life in the immediate service of the great people of the world which so far he had so successfully avoided. Even so he was to manage to escape the preferred coadjutorship of the See of Paris with its right of succession which Louis XIII pressed on him.
The change was due, strangely enough, to Charles-Emmanuel of Savoie who had for so long been one of the causes of his fidelity to his poor wife of a diocese. "As for me, I am about to start at once on the service of the Most Serene Prince Cardinal, according to the will of His Highness," he wrote on October 16, 1618.
Charles-Emmanuel's change of mind was simply due to the fact that he wanted to marry his son Victor Amadeus, Prince of Piedmont, to Louis XIII's younger sister, Christine of France (the youngest sister was Henriette, to be Queen of England) and had appointed his son Cardinal Maurice of Savoie to be his ambassador in the accomplishment of the plan. What more imposing people to be in the Cardinal's suite than the famous Francois de Sales and his friend Antoine Favre?
One may perhaps suitably mention that not long before de Sales was to start on this high mission he had performed a miracle of the type that must be rare in the annals of the saints and somehow in tune with the ampler days to come. He had been on his way to the Abbey of Sixt in the mountains. The September day had been one of excessive heat, and the company felt obliged to halt and slake their thirst at an inn. Alas, the innkeeper had to confess that his wine had gone sour, so much so that he was going to use it to make cement. "The only thing you can do is to drink water," he said. But the travellers—and one must suppose Francois himself—were not too happy at the prospect even of mountain water. The innkeeper was asked to draw a glass which Frangois tasted. "But it is excellent wine," he said, "do not hesitate to give it to our people." The incredulous innkeeper had to admit that it was "first-class and very strong wine." One naturally thinks of the marriage feast of Cana, but there the need for wine was clear. This—if one may use the theological term—was very much a miracle of supererogation, and one wonders why Francois de Sales has not been acclaimed as the patron of wine-growers and sellers.
The ambassadorial journey to Paris started in mid-October, 1618, and de Sales, having excused himself for not being able to write a life of his old friend, Juvenal Ancina, was happy to think that he would have the chance of visiting the new Visitations in France. He met Mere de Chantal, also on her way to Paris, in Lyons, but missed Moulins, where Mere de Brechard was superior, because it had been arranged to travel by river from Roanne to Orleans.
After the journey, de Sales wrote from Paris. "The journey has been excellent. Our most serene Lord has been very happy. Everywhere he has been heartily welcomed by great and little people, each one of them blessing God and the Royal House and expressing an ardent wish for the projected marriage. During the five days of the river journey, I had time to enjoy the company of the most serene cardinal and we talked together of many things. Twice a day, His Highness read French books so as to get to know the language better and initiate himself into the affairs of this kingdom. Sometimes His Highness rowed and made me row with him. He thought I did not know how to, but he discovered that I was already doctor in the art. In Orleans we spent two days resting ourselves. His Highness went to Holy Communion on All Saints Day, and so by small stages we have reached here, where His Highness was received with unprecedented honours by an unprecedentedly large crowd. The King, the Queen, Monsieur the King's brother, Madame 1'ainee (Christine) and Madame la cadette (Henriette) gave a great feast for His Highness, and it was the king himself who, his people tell me, was extraordinary in his happiness."
De Sales took it all, no doubt, with his usual restraint, but Favre, for once, indulged in the sense of worldly glory as he heard the crowds shouting: "There goes the illustrious Bishop of Geneva, the greatest theologian of our days! There goes the President Favre who has written so many books, and who has become another brother of François de Sales by the tender affection and incomparable love which unites them." Curious shouts from a crowd—it must be admitted.
The Bishop was delighted by the royal family, the king 17 years old, his queen, Anne of Austria, the same age, Christine 13, Gaston d'Orleans 10, and Henriette, 9. "Madame 1'ainee is accomplished, majesty and goodness written on her face... It is impossible to exaggerate the esteem in which our first Prince is held: all call him the mirror of princes in his goodness towards the people, his piety, his courage, in a word all the qualities he needs." He noted, too, "a truly marvellous increase of piety in Paris" and the king's "high idea of the most holy Catholic religion."
The true value of a court, whose "novitiate" he said he was making though he would never make his "profession" in it, was doubtless brought home to him by the great mansion where he was lodged, the former home of Concini, Louis XIII's favourite, assassinated a year earlier while his wife Galigai was arrested as a sorceress and sent to the stake.
Paris was once again a field for preaching and apostolic work as well as the place where he could meet the great men of religion. Sixteen years earlier, he had been a nobody of great promise and a holiness which more and more had impressed all whom he had met. Now he was a great theologian, the author of the Devout Life which everyone had to read and the Love of God—a man of whom everyone had heard as bishop, as reformer, as preacher, as saint.
Much was expected and great crowds, the royal family above all, pressed to hear him in the pulpit. At first they were disappointed for, as he wrote to Mere de Chantal "I preached this morning before the Queen and all her fine world. But in truth I preached with no more care, affection and pleasure than in my poor little Visitation" and a day or two later after another sermon "I assure you I preached neither better nor in better heart before all those princes and princesses than in our poor little Visitation of Nessy."
The truth was that he could only preach in one way: simply, directly, from his heart, and of the Love of God—the more so now that his personal spiritual life was being more and more lived on the mystical plane. It did not take him long to conquer congregations who had come to enjoy themselves and who went away moved as never before by the "orator of holy Love," as a duchess put it.
Meanwhile the object of the embassy from Piedmont and Savoie was safely accomplished, though not without difficulties having been overcome which threatened to send the visitors home. Favre related that only de Sales kept up their courage and one morning after Mass assured them that God would ensure success.
"You have no further doubts about our marriage, I am sure, for you will have heard that the contract was solemnised nine days ago and that everything went an unprecedented success," he wrote to Mere de Chantal on January 19, 1619. "The ambassadors have visited our dear little Madame with the title "Your Highness" and congratulations on the marriage: she is the finest princess that one can see. The King has written to the M. le Prince de Piedmont calling him brother-in-law. The King of Spain [one of whose sons was an alternative candidate] has given his agreement. In Piedmont and Savoie extraordinary celebrations have been held over Christmas . . . The Prince ordered a general tournament to which he challenged all Italy to come and see dying at his feet anyone who would maintain that amaranth is not the most beautiful of all colours, and the Princess who favours it not the finest who has ever lived, and her knight who is also her slave not the happiest in the world. However, I do not really know much about the challenge—besides it is hardly suitable for reading in the refectory." Have two other saints in history, founders of a religious order, ever corresponded together quite so frivolously—and charmingly? Ama et fac quod vis.
Correspondence with the different Visitations, as one sees, remained in the midst of court and apostolic life in Paris a regular task for the Bishop who was helping Mere de Chantal to found a Visitation in Paris, and it is at this period that de Sales sent to Mere de Chastel in Grenoble a remarkable letter warning her about the extraordinary spiritual habits of one of her community, Soeur Marie-Constance. One might be tempted to suppose that in the early atmosphere of Visitation, appearances of supernatural extravagances could easily be confounded with the genuine article. If so, de Sales was not to be caught. "I find nothing that makes me think her to be an especially good woman, though we must love and cherish her with all our heart. But as for her visions, revelations and prophecies, they are for me infinitely suspect as being useless, vain and unworthy of consideration. On the one hand, they are so frequent that this alone makes them suspect. On the other, they involve manifestations of certain things that God very rarely reveals: assurance of eternal salvation, confirmation in grace, the degree of sanctity of different persons, and a hundred other useless things." And the writer went on to tell the story of Nicole Tavernier who among other marvels multiplied bread for the poor and caused a host to be carried by an angel. She took refuge with Barbe Acarie who loon realised that though Nicole was innocent herself, she was in fact possessed by the devil. Happily, as it turned out, this was far from true of Soeur Marie-Constance who, pruned of her early extravagances, lived to become a most saintly person.
Alas, Barbe Acarie, who had brought Carmel to France and herself become a Carmelite after her husband's death, was no more. She had died a few weeks before de Sales had arrived in Paris. Often he visited her tomb. But other old friends were there to renew the friendships made sixteen years earlier.
The great friend of Mme. Acarie, Pierre de Berulle, founder of the French Oratory and mystical writer of the Sulpician school, was one of the first of his old friends whom de Sales met again in Paris. De Sales always seems to have had a special affection for the idea of secular priests living together in a community according to a rule; he had hoped to solve the problems of the Sainte Maison in Thonon through the Oratorians, and he himself nursed the hope that when, through age or sickness, he could retire from the bishopric he might live with an Oratorian community. Shortly before his death, François de Sales was to bless Jean-Jacques, the wayward and troublesome son of Mme. Olier, and prophesy that the boy would grow up to be a great servant of the Church. He even promised to take the boy with him into his retirement and teach him theology with his nephew Charles-Auguste. Jean-Jacques Olier, as the founder of the Sulpicians, would one day say that François de Sales had been called by God to carry through within the Church the work of St. Ignatius, St. Teresa and St. Charles Borromeo—St. Ignatius in extirpating heresy; St. Teresa in renewing religious life in the Visitation; St. Charles in reforming the clergy.
Of new friends made, the most important was "Monsieur Vincent," introduced to him by Berulle. Of their relationship we know little, but the two men had much in common. It was not the gentleman and prince-prelate whom Monsieur Vincent admired, but the man who had been brought up in the rough Savoie country where rank counted for little, the man who was neighbour to the humble Gascon, the slave of the Barbary pirates, the dedicated servant of the poor of Paris.
Both of them had found in the combination of apostolic and inner mystical life the same priestly path of imitation of Christ. It is false, as we have seen, to suppose that de Sales's Visitation had anything in common with Monsieur Vincent's Sisters of Charity, except the accident that the early Visitation nuns served the poor in ordinary clothes as did the Sisters of Charity, but Saint Vincent was to have no more enthusiastic helpers in his work in hospitals and among the poor than some of the Philotheas of Paris who were under François de Sales's spiritual direction. The ageing Bishop and the young priest at the height of his powers must have had much to talk about. The practical outcome was that de Sales made Monsieur Vincent the religious superior and chaplain of the Paris Visitation. Monsieur Vincent was to hold this charge until his death in 1660.
But by far the most unexpected and curious friendship François de Sales was to make in this his last visit to Paris was no other than that of Mere Angelique Arnauld, of Port Royal des Champs and Maubuisson, the future Jansenist rebel against everything, spiritual and ecclesiastical, for which the Bishop of Geneva had spent his life. It is difficult from all that we know of Angelique Arnauld to understand how this, sometimes called his last spiritual friendship, could have been established.
Angelique had been thrust against her will into religious life as a small child, and her influential father had been able, though not without falsifying the girl's age, to make her Abbess of the spiritually and materially decayed Cistercian Abbey of Port Royal at the age of eleven. For some years her position and her duties were little more than a child's game—a stubborn, wilful child thwarted of natural affections.
Tired of what she came to realise to be an inhuman prospect of living her years in the prison of even a much relaxed monastery, she planned to run away when suddenly in her deep depression she felt herself converted to an ascetical ideal by hearing a sermon on the humiliation of Christ in becoming man preached by a young Cistercian monk who, as it happened, afterwards was to apostatise. Her whole outlook changed and she dedicated herself and her community—much to their surprise and annoyance—to a life of extreme, harsh and even repulsive austerity. All the bitterness accumulated in her unnatural childhood came to express itself in this passion for denudation and severity. She Owed much to the help of Pere Archange of Pembroke, whom the young de Sales had probably met in Paris. Not very long before this reformer Abbess was to meet François de Sales she had gone to the Abbey of Maubuisson, near Pontoise, to reform and cleanse it after the years during which it had been under the rule of Angelique d'Estrees, the sister of Henri IV's famous mistress, Gabrielle d'Estrees. Angelique d'Estrees, though an Abbess, was indeed no better than her sister, for she had had twelve children by twelve different men. Angelique Arnauld, though herself living a life of extreme penance and poverty, both because these seemed to express her nature and in the hope of shaming the Maubuisson nuns, could make little real impression on so extraordinary a community. So she began to interest herself in new religious orders that she felt to be more suited to her spiritual ideals. The first was the Carmelites in nearby Pontoise where the famous Madame Acarie had just died and the second that new order which had been founded by the Bishop of Geneva about whom everyone was talking.
The two, seemingly so ill-consorted spirits, the first, all-fierceness and self-centred, the other all gentleness and self-detached, met for the first time on April 5, 1619. Angelique had planned the meeting, getting the father of a girl in her care who knew de Sales to persuade him to come to Maubuisson to confirm the girl. François de Sales, there is no doubt, was at once spiritually attracted by this 27-year old ascetical reformer of so much of the religious laxity that he hated. Within three weeks he was writing to her and telling her that he could not but call her "my very dear daughter," but his spiritual advice showed that he had at once discerned her needs. "The child will not perish if it rests in the arms of a Father who is all-powerful. If our God does not grant us every day what we ask, it is because He wants to hold us near Him . . . He is gracious and kindly-natured, for the moment we are ready to be humble according to His will, He suits Himself to ours." ' Such advice seemed to drive straight against the self-reliance and fear of Angelique. A few weeks later, he was telling her "Do not burden yourself too much with vigils and austerities (believe me, my most dear daughter, I know what I am talking about in this). Proceed instead to the-Port Royal of the religious life by the royal road of the love of God and of one's neighbour, of humility and kindliness." In another letter, de Sales, almost foreseeing the future Jansenist fear of frequent Communion, tells her to "go to Communion boldly in peace, with all humility, so as to correspond with the Spouse who, to unite Himself with us, has made Himself nothing and courteously abased Himself."
We do not know how often de Sales managed to get to Maubuisson, but it is thought that because of his frequent visits to the Carmelites of nearby Pontoise he must have sometimes called at Maubuisson. Angelique herself has described one visit in July. "He was ill for nine days staying here, but never ceased to work in helping souls. [He gave Angelique herself a retreat.] Noting that the high altar had not been consecrated, he said to me: 'I must not leave without doing you some small service; would you like me to consecrate the altar? 'Ill as he was, he carried out that long ceremony with an incredible devotion. After it, he preached for an hour and a half, explaining all the ceremonies of the consecration."
Under the direction of François de Sales which lasted by correspondence until shortly before his death, Angelique seemed to blossom and change, losing her scruples and introversion to share something of her director's humility and confidence and his supreme trust in the love and will of God. She grew also in friendship with Mere de Chantal who remained in her poor Paris Visitation after François had returned home.
More and more, Angelique grew desirous of entering the Visitation, but François de Sales strongly discouraged her, ostensibly at least because he did not believe in changes of vocation and could appreciate how much she had done and how much more she could do for the reform of her own Cistercian order.
As he wrote to a Jesuit, "I would never wish to turn away the most excellent creature of the world from her right vocation, even though she were to become a canonised saint of the Visitation… The inconstancy of women is to be feared… and this one's constancy is something that one can reasonably expect." Nevertheless Angelique appealed to Rome for permission; but permission was not given. One cannot help feeling that only François de Sales could have added humanity to the fierce, dark and proud spirituality of Angelique Arnauld and that with Mere de Chantal in the Visitation she would have found happiness as well as crucifixion in her earthly pilgrimage. " How human you still are," she said forty years later to a nun in tears by her death-bed. François and Jeanne-Françoise de Chantal would have inspired her to say: Thank God, how very human I still am.
Exhausted as François de Sales was by the endless social life and entertainment of the court and the ceremonial of the journey of Prince and Princess to Turin, he at least had the great consolation of visiting the convents of the Visitation on his way home— the one in Bourges where he met Archbishop Fremyot, Jeanne-Françoise's brother, and would not allow the Sisters to be distracted by seeing the Princess Christine, and the one in the attractive old town of Moulins. Near (he end of his journey, Christine laid the foundation stone of a Visitation convent in Chambery. Such an event gave him far more happiness than the sudden notion which Christine had of being as grand as her mother, Marie de' Medici, in being spiritually served by her own "Grand Chaplain." Naturally, it would have to be the Bishop of Geneva whom she had grown to love and trust during the past months.
"Madame, Her Highness and M. le Prince want me to be Grand Chaplain to her," he wrote to Mere de Chantal. "You will have no difficulty in believing that neither directly nor indirectly have I coveted such a post. Certainly not, my very dear Mother, for I feel no sort of ambition save to be able to employ the rest of my days for the service and honour of Our Lord. No indeed, I have an utter contempt for the court, since more and more do I abhor the ruling pleasures of the world, the world itself, its spirit, its maxims, its silliness." The honour, however, could not be refused without discourtesy. But he was determined to get back to what he called his nest and asked his brother who accompanied the party to Turin to undertake the duties of the office in his place. Nor would he accept the emoluments of the office. His brother, he said, "must grow and I must diminish."
How happy he must have felt after living for so long with the great world to find himself once again with the Sisters of the Visitation, at the moment deprived of their Mother, and, typically, to choose for his conference with them the subject of Simplicity.
"This is a purely Christian virtue," he told them as they eagerly sat around him listening to words they would soon hear no more, "for the pagans, even those who have spoken so well of other virtues, like Plato and Aristotle, never knew anything about it, any more than they knew about humility. Of magnificence, of liberality, of prudence, of constancy, they have written well— but of simplicity and humility, not a word. It needed Our Lord Himself to come down from Heaven to make these virtues known to men. Had He not come they would never have known them."
He ended his conference with the words: "We must have an entirely simple confidence which will enable us to rest peacefully within the arms of our Father and of our Mother, being assured, as we must be, that Our Lady, as our dearest Mother, will always protect us with her motherly care, since we are united together in her honour and for the glory of her beloved Son, who is our good Father and most sweet Saviour."
Such was his own real climate, his real happiness, and one he had never more deserved than after the worldly glory of his days in Paris and his journey home when, even in the piety of the courts of France and Savoie at that date, he could doubtless find only too little of the Christian virtue of simplicity.
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