Until the year 1604, François de Sales, the Chablais apostolate apart, was just another bishop, even though one about whom many people were talking because of his growing reputation as an admirable, intelligent and saintly prelate of quite exceptional personal charm. But those who knew him best through ties of friendship or because they had taken his spiritual advice realised that in a quite special way this man seemed instinctively to go to the heart of the matter where real religion, the personal link between man and God, was concerned. He ardently loved a loving God, and in this relationship between God who is all love, i.e. infinitely wishing well to man, with man called upon to do no more than return that love in ever greater knowledge and service of God, he saw—or rather he lived—the key to the purpose and meaning of human life. This new hammer of the heretics of his native land really loved the man within the heresy because God also loved him; this bishop, uncompromising in the cleansing of the part of the Church entrusted to him, was all love and gentle reason in his personal government; this teacher and preacher, who never dreamt of minimising doctrine and standards, was also the compassionate, even indulgent (it seemed to some) priest who coaxed and gently drew men, women and children along God's loving, seemingly easy, way.
Yet this spiritual flair, this taste, for the personal religion of love, of simplicity, of urbanity was as yet more potentiality than a thought-out, driving actuality, whether in himself or for others. To turn this taste and practice of his into a consciously realised, objective thing, the key of true spiritual progress itself, not only for himself or for special people, but for all men and women of any genuine spiritual good-will, he needed help. He needed, as it were, to be able to see himself in another, to objectify in that way his own inner feelings. Nor is it surprising that this was so. From the start, friendship and love had meant so much to him. His own family, Antoine Favre, Bishop Granier, Barbe Acarie and her circle, des Hayes, they all in some way mirrored back to him his own spiritual instinct which otherwise might be no more than the personal complement to his immensely activist nature. One can reason to this conclusion, not only by observation of his character with its natural diffidence, compensated for by his love of action and apostolic zeal, but also through the obviously providential nature of the immensely fruitful contact with Jeanne-Françoise Fremyot de Chantal—the contact that grew into a spiritual intimacy that places him apart and makes him unique in the ranks of the saints. She would teach him truly to know himself as he would teach her how best to apply her spiritual vocation and genius. Between them, they would map out the way of spiritual perfection in its application to men and women of every kind according to the nature of their spiritual call.
As bishop, a matter of Church business made it desirable for him to go to Dijon, the chief town of Burgundy, on which the affairs of Gex depended. He was also unexpectedly invited to preach the Lenten sermons of 1604 in that city. Yet he was strongly advised not to make the journey because of immediately pressing diocesan affairs at home. He even wrote to the Pope, almost excusing himself for undertaking it. "I can never believe that Your Holiness would disapprove of this short absence which the need of the diocese imposes on me. I leave it well provided in spiritual matters and I hope to return in two months."
Much later, he confessed to Jeanne de Chantal "God, whose will I looked to directly, so drew my soul towards that blessed journey that nothing could have stopped me." One morning, indeed, while he was making his thanksgiving after Mass, he became somehow vividly and intimately aware of the fact that he would found a new religious order, and he saw before him the phantasm of a woman, dressed as a widow, with two other young women similarly dressed. Two years earlier, the widowed Jeanne de Chantal, praying for guidance in her own spiritual life, saw in the distance the figure of an unknown bishop and heard a voice saying, "Here is the guide, beloved of God and men, in whose hands you must put your conscience." These strange phenomena, of which there can be no doubt, may have been miraculous or they may have been some mysterious psychological insight reflecting the need on both sides for help along the way of perfection and God's call.
The family with which François de Sales had business in Dijon was the Fremyots, old, rich and distinguished in their service to king and country. Benigne Fremyot had been presented by Henri IV with the Archbishopric of Bourges and the Abbey of Saint-Etienne in Dijon for his fidelity to Henri during the wars of religion. His son, Andre, had been captured during the fighting and threatened with death. Benigne had declared "Better for my son to die innocent than for his father to live ignobly." Twice married himself, Benigne had passed on the Archbishopric of Bourges to Andre, while retaining Saint-Etienne as his own private residence.
Preaching one day in the Sainte-Chapelle of Dijon, François de Sales noticed near his pulpit a lady with light-brown hair and dressed as a widow, listening apparently with the closest attention to his words. Her figure seemed to him to recall the vision he had had before leaving Annecy.
After the service, he asked Andre Fremyot, the Archbishop-designate of Bourges, who she was.
"But it is my sister, Jeanne-Françoise," he answered. And de Sales said: "How very glad I am to know that she is your sister," and he proceeded to find out all he could about her. Who was she?
Jeanne-Françoise Fremyot, daughter, as we have seen, of Benigne Fremyot, generally called President Fremyot, because of parliamentary office, was born on January 23, 1572, and so was four and a half years younger than François de Sales. On the side of both father and mother, she was of noble blood. We know little of her childhood except, by inference, that she was extremely well educated, developing a natural gift for writing beautiful French, a generation ahead of de Sales in style. She was to be the grandmother of Mme. de Sevigny.
Bremond sees in her childhood an upbringing which prevented her from ever being a "devote" in manners and ways of speaking. "A beautiful, cheerful girl, liking to play, restless, goon to be much sought after in marriage." She called herself "fille a toute folie" and described how the starlings she used to feed with sugar followed her about wherever she went. "Sainte Chantal," observes Bremond, "before leading her novices in Annecy wherever she wanted, had once charmed little birds in some garden of Burgundy." Having lived for five years in her teens with a sister in Poitou, Calvinist country, she reacted like François to the destruction of churches and religious houses, often weeping at the desolation. The story is told of how on one occasion she, as a child, was offered some sweets by a Calvinist. She threw them into the fire and pointed out to the benefactor that that was how heretics would burn in hell. One can imagine François doing the same though at a rather earlier age. It was part of the religious climate of the times.
At the age of 21, she married Christophe de Rabutin de Chantal, son of a veteran of the League who had lost a good deal of the family fortune in the wars. The marriage to a Fremyot, was, no doubt, calculated to improve the Rabutin fortunes. Many years later, Jeanne confided to her friend and secretary, Mere Marie-Madeleine de Chaugy, most of what we know about her early years, and the latter, on what precise grounds we know not, gave this portrait of Jeanne at the time of her wedding. " Very tall, of full and noble figure, of gracious, charming, natural and strong beauty, lively and gay in manner, with a clear, quick and decisive mind and solid judgment." Her hair was fair, gradually turning chestnut brown—another resemblance to the young François.
Her husband was an observant Catholic but one who had been strongly addicted to duelling in his youth, loving soldiering and action of every kind. He was a softened reflection of his father who had been called "Guy the Terrible" in his family pride, his bellicosity and his debts.
Though the marriage was a pre-arranged family affair, there is not the smallest doubt that it turned out to be a love match between two complementary characters. Christophe appreciated better than the young Jeanne herself her outstanding qualities, and to her he entrusted the task of managing the impaired family business affairs of the great castle of Bourbilly, and its lands, near Semur-en-Auxois, some forty miles north-west of Dijon. To her daughter Jeanne would one day write: "Take pains to concentrate on the running of your house. Had I not had the courage to do so after my marriage, we should not have had enough to live on."
Heavy responsibilities were thus thrown on to the young wife, responsibilities which she at first feared, but which she admirably carried through, not in any niggardly spirit, but with generosity and humour, if we are to believe the story of how she winked an eye during the year of famine when some of the poor, having been given help, walked round the castle and came again. She had been thinking how little she would have liked it had God refused to answer her prayers the second and third time of asking. Another delightful habit of hers was to rescue prisoners in the castle cell, give them a bed, and send them back to the cell before her husband returned. This combination of efficiency with charity and a sense of humour about it all parallels both Francis's strength and gentleness.
This happy Christian marriage was to last eight years, during which six children were born, of whom four survived: Celse-Benigne, to be the third baron de Chantal; Marie-Aimee, who was to marry François's brother, Bernard de Sales; Franchise; and Charlotte. It ended in tragedy. Three weeks after Jeanne's last child was born, her father went out shooting with a friend. Mistaking him, as he was taking cover behind some brushwood, for a deer, the friend shot at him and broke his thigh. He was carried home dying, messengers being sent at once to four neighbouring churches to make sure of a priest before he died. Jeanne, after hearing the terrible news, insisted on leaving her bed and going to him.
By a strange inversion in the face of disaster, it was Jeanne, the future saint, who was unresigned to the will of God; the young husband was resigned to die with the thought uppermost in his mind that no one must blame his friend who had shot him. For nine days he lingered, Jeanne never succeeding in becoming resigned and, after his death, she endangered her own life with the weight of her sorrow. The depths of her feelings were such that she could not bring herself to forgive the unwitting cause of the tragedy. It is frightening to think of a reaction so intense that even five years later François de Sales was writing to her about the young man in the following terms. "If he comes to see you, I want you to greet him with a heart gentle, gracious and sympathising. Of course I know that your heart within you will rise up, that your very blood will boil—but that does not matter ... Such emotions are God's way of reminding us how we are made of flesh, bone and feeling. I have said enough. Again I say I do not want you to seek to meet that poor man—only that you should be kind to those who want you to see him
again."
It was Jeanne herself who was later to confess that when her husband was away from home, her mind turned eagerly to God with an arriere-pensee, growing stronger as she prayed that her husband might soon return; and when he was home again, her devotions considerably weakened. Even so, she had not failed to keep him up to his religious duties, for it had been her habit as a wife to rouse him out of bed in time for Mass. When he grunted and turned over to fall asleep again, she would take her lighted candle and wave it near his eyes so that in despair he had to get out of bed. The little scene is as human as any in the long annals of the saints and was recounted by the saint herself to her Visitation community, "Is it not delightful," writes Bremond, "to hear a great saint telling such a story to young religious?"
So far as ordinary life was concerned, she was saved from despair by her love for her little children and her duties to them. But on the spiritual plane something more complicated was happening. Alas, we know little about it, because she could never bring herself to open her heart to anyone on the subject. Her old consoling, simple religious life had faded away to be replaced by a period of undescribed violent temptations which nevertheless went with a new-found religious austerity of vowing perpetual widowhood, wearing only wool, turning her fine dresses into ornaments for the church, fasting, hair-shirts and vague dreams of total self-dedication in some unknown part of the world. It was a "dark night" of which she herself had no understanding whatever. "The happy clear light of faith which no sophism had yet troubled, the sweet ease of praying, the simple and straight appreciation of the line of duty, peace of conscience—of all these which were once her joy and her strength the soul is implacably stripped," so Bremond speculates about this period. It was during this time of desolation that the widow had her vision of the "unknown bishop," now that, even more strangely, she heard a voice saying "You must go beyond and further; never will you enter into the sacred repose of the sons of God save through the gate of Sainte-Claude." What could all this mean?
She returned for a time to Dijon, and there she found herself with some pious ladies on a pilgrimage. With them was a priest, whose name has never been disclosed. He was the religious director of these women, and when Jeanne spoke of her perplexities to these ladies, she was advised to put herself in his hands. Unwillingly she did so. Mme. de Chaugy tells us: "She let herself be bound by this shepherd who obliged her to four vows, the first, obedience; the second, never to change; the third, to remain secret about their relations; and fourth, to speak to him alone about her soul."
Under this strange priest, Jeanne was simply guided to more and more of her own recipe of mechanical prayer and penance to ward off the temptations of the devil. Deep within her, she knew it was all wrong and that her director had no understanding of her needs, but she obeyed.
Hardly worse was the misfortune which recalled her to live in 1602 with her old father-in-law, Guy, now 75 years old. Always, it seems, slightly eccentric, the old man threatened to remarry and disinherit her and the children unless she came to live with him at his home of Monthelon, near Autun. There, the daughter-in-law and her children were to suffer from that most mortifying of trials, subjection to a servant, whose relations with the master of the house were questionable, and determined for obvious reasons to make bad blood between father-in-law and daughter-in-law. Though expected to keep house, Jeanne in practice could do nothing against the will of the old man's companion.
For seven and a half years Jeanne de Chantal, once mistress of Bourbilly, with its gaiety, its social life, its successfully mastered problems of money and land, and, above all, the tender love at its heart, had to endure this horror, relieved only by the pathos of the fact that the old man had really called Jeanne to his house in order to help him escape from the pit which he had dug for himself.
Bremond evokes the picture of how the old soldier of Henri IV would try to rise from his chair and hold out a shaking hand to his daughter. "Under the white moustache his lips would move in a tender and ashamed smile. From the room next door came the noise of children playing and the spelling of alphabets. Somewhere in the distance the phantom with her ring of keys was prowling—unseen, unheard."
It was while Jeanne de Chantal was living at Monthelon and on a Lenten visit to her father in his Dijon Abbey of St. Stephen that she first saw from her chair in the church her " unknown bishop," preaching from the pulpit.
They met from time to time in the Fremyot house, where the Bishop was always welcome. How strange these first meetings of the two saints who were to be spiritually bound together for twenty years! François, on his side, always cautious, always slow to move; Jeanne, still bound by her vows to her spiritual director who, when away from her, went so far as to have her watched lest he lose the guidance of so remarkable a woman. Surely both, deeply aware within them that God had called them to one another, were wondering with some nervousness how God's will was to manifest itself and how they must be careful to tread the way God wanted. It is hard enough for one soul alone to follow that way without mistake; but for two together, how much more difficult.
We know from her own account that she "was dying to talk" to this so "good-natured, charming" holy bishop. He was content to pray and closely observe this ardent chosen woman, with the perfect manners of the world hiding her personal sorrows and struggles. François chose his time for a little probe, almost a hint about the future, perhaps only a hint that he already understood a great deal about her. He asked her one evening as they were at table whether she had intentions of re-marriage. She answered, as he expected, that she had no such intentions. "Well, then," he said, "why not lower your colours?" He meant, as she well understood, the frills and ornaments which she still wore. By the next evening, she came down without them. The Bishop surely smiled at her when he pointed and teased: "Madame, if there was no lace there, would you be improperly dressed? " And that night Jeanne herself cut the lace off her dress.
Bremond, in his earlier life of Ste. Chantal, but not in the later "History of Religious Sentiment in France," showed less than his usual insight in suggesting that François misunderstood the significance of these last signs of worldly elegance, thinking them marks of continuing vanity. Rather, one would think, a little comedy was being played between the two future saints, almost a gentle leg-pull on the Bishop's part and a gesture on hers to show that she had taken his point.
Meeting often at the Fremyot table, they must have had further opportunities of conversation. We know, at least, that Jeanne, despite her obligations to her director, plucked up courage to speak to the Bishop of the temptations of discouragement from which she was suffering once again. Her behaviour itself must have been affected by these temptations because her scruples were such that she only dared express to him "a part" of what was going on in her mind. Whatever he said to her, she took it as the voice of "an angel." It was a voice which pressingly recalled the voice that many months earlier had mysteriously told her that she must pass through the gate of Sainte-Claude.
Sainte-Claude is a charming and busy little town in the Jura mountains and had long been a place of pilgrimage to the 7th century saint whose name it bore. More relevant perhaps at the moment was the fact that it was situated on the much frequented road between Dijon and Annecy. Jeanne, at dinner on Maundy Thursday, mentioned that she greatly wished to go in pilgrimage to Sainte-Claude. François overheard the remark and said that his own mother had also long wanted to make that same pilgrimage. "Madame," he went on, "if I knew when you were going to Sainte-Claude, I could arrange to find myself there with my mother accomplishing her vow."
François, who described himself as "bound hand and foot " by the cares of his diocese, had, we recall, felt urged, against advice, to accept the invitation to preach in Dijon. Now, he, most uncharacteristically, engaged himself to leave his diocese again at some unknown moment in the future in order to meet Jeanne at Sainte-Claude. The drawing of these two souls together must have been under a most powerful impulse.
After Easter, the Bishop went so far as to hear Jeanne's confession, but he insisted that she must for the time being remain under the spiritual direction of the priest to whom she had made her promises. He was not yet ready to take his place, for he could not see God's will for her. But he promised to write as often as possible. Thus ended the first encounter between François de Sales and Jeanne-Franchise de Chantal.
That he was leaving Dijon with her very much in his mind, despite the triumphant good-bye which the town was giving him, is shown by the fact that on the day he left, he wrote her a note: "God, I am feeling, has given me to you. That is all I can say. Pray for me to your Guardian Angel."
Hardly was he home again when he wrote her a long letter. So slow to talk, so much at ease was he with a pen in his hand, telling her that the further away he was from her, the closer he felt to her within himself. He told her to build her spiritual life on a desire for Christian perfection and her holy state of widowhood. But as always he warned her not to take advice too literally.
"In everything and by everything my wish is that you should feel a holy freedom of spirit as to the ways of seeking perfection... Beware of scruples and rest entirely in what I have said to you by word of mouth… Beware of over-eagerness and anxieties, for nothing stands more in our way as we journey towards perfection."
He had told her to keep her spiritual director, but what he wrote to her seemed to be advice exactly contrary to what that priest had for so many years recommended. The ambiguous position caused her to have fresh scruples, and in mid-June François had to write another long letter trying to explain to her that his advice was not incompatible with her duty to her director.
Frankly, it was not a very successful attempt, unless history has exaggerated the obtuseness of that priest. Jeanne had given his name to the Bishop, and the latter in this letter reminds her that he would not object to her communication with him "so much do I see him as a friend of mine." But his real mind comes out again when he writes: "Respect for him must certainly hold you to the holy ways to which you have conformed with him, but it must not stamp out the just liberty which the Spirit of God gives to those He holds."
And in his next letter, written ten days later, he confesses that his last letter, "though written with all truth and sincerity," was written for her director to see and allay his suspicions. Now he could write in greater freedom and from heart to heart. He had been reading Ribera's life of "the good Mother Teresa" who had vowed obedience to Father Gracian, but who confesses to have greatly profited from others whose advice she took so long as it was not contrary to her vowed obedience.
"What importance has it for you to know whether you can take me as your spiritual director or not, so long as you realise how my soul feels in your regard and I know how yours feels for mine. I know you have a perfect and complete confidence in my feeling for you. Of that I have no doubt and it much consoles me. Please be assured of my keen and extraordinary will to serve your soul with all my strength. I could not explain to you either the quality or the greatness of that affection for your spiritual service; but I can tell you that I think it is from God… God has given me to you; believe me to be yours in Him and call me what you will—it does not matter."
A dozen times, he tells her, he had to take up his pen again writing this letter and it seemed that "the enemy was heaping on him distraction and business to prevent him writing it." "Interpret its length therefore in the light of my need to forestall, if possible, the replies and scruples which so easily rise in the minds of your sex. Beware of them, I beg you, and be of good courage."
François in the above letter commented with pleasure on Jeanne's news that they would meet again in September, but in fact the rendezvous under the gates of Sainte-Claude was to be earlier.
In the third week of August, just before the feast of Saint Louis, a cavalcade of three women, with their servants, set out from Diion: Jeanne herself with two close friends from near Monthelon, equally dedicated to the service of God and already correspondents of the Bishop, Marie Brulart and her sister Rose Bourgeoise de Crepy, Abbess of the royal Abbey of Puits-d'Orbe, a relaxed Benedictine house whose Abbess could do very much as she pleased. Travelling through plain and hilly country and finally over steep spurs of the Jura, they reached Sainte-Claude on the evening of August 24, and passed under the town's gateway. From the other and much harsher side, across the Faucille pass, a carriage had already brought the Bishop of Geneva, his mother and his doomed youngest sister, Jeanne.
Both parties stayed at the same house, and that very evening Mme. de Chantal, for the first time, opened her heart to François. She told him the whole story of her life and the story of her soul. He allowed her to speak on as long as she would. And the fluent correspondent, not having uttered a single word, left her.
Next morning, before Mass, they met again. "Let us sit down," the Bishop invited her. "I am tired and have not slept. All night I have been pondering about you. It is true enough that God wills me to take charge of your spiritual conduct and that you should follow my advice." One can almost hear him slowly picking his words as, after a night's prayer, he had realised the will of God clearly and strongly in regard to this woman with whom his life was to be so closely linked. He seemed all the time rapt, as Jeanne was to say. "Madame, how shall I speak? But I must speak because it is the will of God. Those four vows which you took—they can be good for nothing except to destroy your peace of conscience. Please do not wonder at the time it has taken me to give you a firm decision. I had to know fully what God Himself wanted; I had to be sure that nothing in this business should be done save as though His hand had done it." Gone were the hesitations and excuses of the letters. Now there was only plain, stark truth and decision.
At Mass after their meeting, Jeanne vowed perpetual chastity and obedience to her new spiritual director. But of future plans, of Francis's own vision of the religious order he would one day found with Jeanne, no word was said.
It was enough for François there and then to write out a series of points outlining the spiritual road he wished Jeanne to follow in future. This paper is now lost, but a few weeks after his return to Annecy, he wrote it all out in a letter of some seven thousand words.
"One word summarises the spiritual direction which Saint François de Sales was to give to Sainte Chantal," writes Bremond. "That word, in fact, may be said to be the direction itself. He freed both her soul and the grace to which she had not dared completely to yield herself, thus leading her along the mystical way far more successfully than any personal intervention could have done."
That was what she herself was to say: "How happy for me was that day. I felt my spirit changing and escaping from the inner hold where the advice of my first director had held me until then."
In that lengthy letter, the advice in which was set out in nine points, one sentence stands out in François's own capital letters: "Everything must be done through love, nothing through force. Obedience must be loved rather than disobedience feared." And he went on in his normal handwriting: "I leave you the spirit of liberty—not the liberty that excludes obedience, for that is the liberty of the flesh, but the liberty which excludes coercion, scruple or nervous eagerness. If you truly love obedience and submission, I want you to consider it a kind of obedience to give up your spiritual exercises for a good reason or through charity, and making up for this by love."
Near the end of the letter, François wrote: "In one part of Sainte Jeanne de Chantal your letter you write as though you were taking it for granted that we should meet again. May God will it, my most dear Sister, but as for me I see nothing at present which can give me hope that I shall be free to leave this place. In confidence I told you why in Sainte-Claude. Here I am bound hand and foot; and you, my good Sister, are you not worried by the difficulty of the journey? But between now and Easter we shall know what God wants of us. May His holy will always be ours! I ask you to thank God with me for the graces which have come since the journey to Sainte-Claude. I cannot tell you of them, but they are great."
In those last words, it would seem, François de Sales was hinting at the spiritual benefits which he himself had received from that meeting and that decision. He would, it is true, always be the director of Jeanne de Chantal, but Jeanne de Chantal in her sweep forward to ever higher states of mystical union with God would carry François himself with her.
Bremond wrote: "If they do not as yet see one another from the same point of view, nor penetrate together to the same point, the sole reality, it is that sole reality which equally fills their minds, namely the Love of God, the supreme object of the devout life as it is the object of the mystical life. And since this supreme object is to be reached, whichever the goal, by the same discipline -by detachment and self-denudation, there is no reason to fear that the sternly mortifying spiritual direction of Saint François should hinder the progress of Sainte Chantal. He may not understand these things yet—the presence of God in the fine point of the soul; that completeness of denudation which is both the condition and the consequence of that grace; even perhaps what Sainte Chantal has to tell him about these perplexing matters. Even so, his spiritual direction, even of itself, goes straight to the point and infallibly so in helping towards both ends. His is a spiritual direction which both calms and denudes, which allows God to act upon us because we do not resist nor remain anxious ... He guides her from below, and in guiding her he rises towards her without realising it, while she, for her part, thinks she is following him and from a long way away. Thus between them there is—what shall I call it? - a charming misunderstanding."
The effect of de Sales's extraordinary activity at this time betrays itself in the pages-long letters of his which have survived. He had promised, for example, to write an annual letter of spiritual advice to Benigne Fremont, Jeanne's father. In the letter of October 7, 1604, in which he fulfils his promise, he writes towards the end: "This, Monsieur, is surely enough, if not more than enough for this year, which is passing and running away before our eyes, and in two months we shall see how fleeting and vain it is, just as we realise the vanity of the past years that are now gone." A tired sentiment for a man of 37, even though a saint. And two days later, he begins a letter to the Abbesse du Puits-d'Orbe with words that explain the reason: "I have kept your servant, Philibert, a long time, but the reason is that I have not had a single day to myself, even though I am in the country. The burden that I carry brings its martyrdom with it in everything. I cannot say that I can call a single hour my own, except when I am saying my Office. So you see how earnestly I must ask your prayers for me." At the end of the letter, he asks pardon for his tired handwriting.
Despite a holiday with his mother at Thorens, overwork was leading to an illness at the turn of the year which he himself took lightly but which the doctors could only account for by some form of poisoning though this time there were no heretics to blame.
In the middle of January he wrote to Mme. de Chantal: "Brother John [from Dijon] has found me emerging from a continuous fever, the effects of which prevent me from writing save by another person's hand." By the middle of February, he still needs someone to write for him, though he can add some words of his own. Despite this, he later brushes away his illness with the words: "My illness was nothing at all, I think. But the doctors who thought I was poisoned frightened those who loved me so much that they thought that I was going to slip away from them altogether."
The winter's illness, it need hardly be said, was not allowed to stop him from fulfilling his next important engagement, preaching the Lenten sermons in the little town of La Roche, where he had been at school for a short time. All the grandeur of Dijon and its famous Sainte-Chapelle one year; the humble Savoie townlet the next. It was all the same to him so long as he was helping others. Still, we may perhaps discern in a letter to Jeanne de Chantal the need he felt to strengthen his resolution for an undertaking to which his health was hardly equal. He was explaining that the will of God is to be discerned in two ways, necessity and charity. "I want to preach in a little spot in my diocese. If, however, I fall ill or break my leg, I need have no regrets or worry at not preaching, for then it is certain that God wills me to serve Him by suffering, not preaching. But if I am not ill, yet I have the chance of going somewhere else where the people may well become Huguenots unless I go, here too the Will of God shows itself and makes me gently change my plans."
But his illness was over and there were no Huguenots calling, so to La Roche he gave himself. And for him preaching the Lent meant visiting all the people, most of all the poor, catechising the children, spending hours in the confessional and even administering the sacraments of Confirmation and Ordination. What we to-day call a "Mission," lasting a few days when the mission-priests seek to bring all the people of the parish to church, was François de Sales's idea of preaching in a little town, swollen by people from all the neighbourhood. Incredibly, he even found time to instruct a deaf-mute whom no one had thought worth consideration and take the instruction far enough to enable him to make his first communion. In doing so, he gained a personal servant, for Martin, the deaf-mute, joined the staff of his residence in Annecy.
The Lent at La Roche turned out to be a prelude to an episcopal labour which he had not been able to carry out since his consecration: the visitation of the diocese.
By the Council of Trent a bishop was obliged to make a formal pastoral visit to all the parishes of his diocese every two years. Even today this is a heavy burden in large dioceses, despite the facility of means of communication. In those days, travelling on horseback or jolting carriage or even on foot, bishops must have dreaded the fatigue involved. But François de Sales's diocese was no ordinary diocese. Its parishes were often far distant from one another, separated by mountains through which communication depended on primitive paths. Pastoral journeying from week to week would involve climbing and descending at all heights up to 4,000 feet and more. Such was the prospect that faced him after a summer in the middle of which he could write to Jeanne de Chantal: "Don't be jealous, I tell you again. You are not the only one to have a cross to carry. Yes, since you desire it, I must start speaking to you of myself from this aspect. After all, it is the truth: yesterday, all day and all night, I had to carry a cross like yours, not in my head but in my heart ... It is true that yesterday I felt my will to be so feeble that a mite would have been strong enough to crush it."
In August, 1605, he had a moment of consolation to set against the fatigues and depressions of the year. Ecclesiastical business took him once again to his beloved Chablais and Thonon. "I have just come back," he wrote to Mme. de Chantal, "from the Swiss end of my diocese. I have finished the establishment of 33 parishes where, eleven years ago, only Protestant ministers were to be found, while I had been for three years preaching alone the Catholic faith. God enabled me to feel in this journey a sense of complete consolation, as I reflected on the fact that where once I found only a hundred Catholics, now I cannot find a hundred Huguenots. Yet it was a troublesome journey and very awkward as I found much obstruction in regard to temporal matters and provision for the churches. But God's grace made everything turn out for the best, and some spiritual fruit resulted. I tell you all this because my heart cannot hide anything from yours. It cannot be different or other than yours—but just one with yours."
And so he came to October when the formal visitation of the diocese was to start. Actually, it took four years to complete, a number of months each year being devoted to it. "Delayed up till now by a number of difficult matters," he wrote on October 13 to Jeanne, "I am off on this blessed visitation, though I foresee crosses of all kinds at every corner. I tremble at the thought of it, but in my heart I love it all."
Different though the work might be, it is the apostle of the Chablais that one meets again on these visitations, as he trudges along on horseback, with Rolland and his servant Favre, through every sort of weather, putting up at night with such rough accommodation as could be found, preaching, often in patois, confirming, hearing confessions, sometimes having severely to deal with negligent and tepid priests, sometimes delighted to find immense fervour and young men desirous of instruction for the priesthood so that he sighed at the lack of any diocesan seminary.
The enthusiasm of the mountain folk could be as embarrassing and fatiguing as the lack of proper accommodation, for they would demand souvenirs of his visit and even tear pieces off his clothes to keep as relics. Strange superstitions held sway in remote villages and on occasion the Bishop, so widely venerated as a saint, was criticised as being anything but a good man since he put a stop to keeping wolves away with blessed bread or protecting houses from fire by throwing paper with one's name written on it into Christmas bonfires.
"All things to all men"—it is strange to think of the elegant and learned de Sales, sought after as prize preacher in Paris and Dijon, as spiritual director to men and women of sanctity and rank, as diplomat and writer, spending week after week among the simplest folk of the world, talking their language, sharing their living, solving their problems and warming their hearts with the message of that same love of God as, in very different terms, he would explain in lengthy letter after lengthy letter to souls who could share in this high mystical vision. To him, the universal apostle, it was always the same work, the same will of God, adapted to an infinity of different circumstances and people.
The best story of his visitations is the one Holland relates. On a visitation journey when the weather was very hot, the little cavalcade was quietly making its way from one village to another. Rolland and Favre were ahead. Looking back after a time, they could see no Bishop. They halted their horses and waited. After a time, the silhouette of Bishop and horse could be seen in the distance against the sunset. When he had caught up with them, they exclaimed: "How slowly you are riding, Monseigneur!" The Bishop smiled and answered: "My dear Monsieur Rolland, old friend, one jogs along as one can!" That was how he always saw it: to shirk nothing, to accept everything as it came, and to do it at his own pace and in his own way.
Describing this first 1605 visitation, while en route, de Sales wrote in a letter to Jeanne de Ghantal: "What more shall I say? I reached this place on Saturday evening, after scouring the country for six weeks, without stopping in any one place more than half-a-day. I have usually preached every day, and sometimes twice a day. How good God is to me. I never felt stronger. All the crosses I foresaw at the start have turned into palm-trees and olive-trees. I had expected vinegar and it has proved to be honey—or nearly so. But I can truthfully say that except on horseback or during waking periods at night, I have never had a moment to think of myself and worry about my feelings, so busy have I been with one important matter after another. I have confirmed a numberless quantity of people. And you have shared in all the good done among these simple folk, just as you have shared in everything else that has been done and will be done in this diocese so long as it is in my hands. Why do I tell you this? Because with you I speak as I do with my own heart."
De Sales was to refer to other visitations in his letters to Jeanne de Chantal, which greatly help us to see him at work and to understand his feelings.
In the middle of 1606, he would write: "You know how ready I am to go to Burgundy, my dear Daughter, for visitations are necessary and a principal part of my duties. I go with great courage, and this morning I felt a special sense of consolation in undertaking it, though for some days past I have been feeling a thousand vain apprehensions and sadness—but they only touched the skin of my heart, not the heart itself. It was like the shivering one gets just before a cold."
Two months later he was writing: "During these last few days I have seen some formidable mountains covered with thick ice, and the people of the neighbouring valleys told me that a shepherd, trying to follow his cow, fell into a crevasse in which he died of cold. O God, I said to myself, was the zeal of this shepherd so keen in the quest of his cow that the thought of the ice did not deter him? Why then should I be so cowardly in seeking out my sheep? The thought moved my heart and, tepid as it was, it melted within me. I saw marvels in those places. The valleys with their many habitations and the mountains all covered with ice: the simple people, like the valleys, so fertile, but the bishops, raised so high in God's Church, so frozen! Will no sun prove strong enough to melt the cold that runs through me!" And a little later: "It is one of God's little miracles, for every day I am so tired that I cannot move body or spirit; but in the morning I am brighter than ever. What a wonderful people I have found among these high mountains. What honour, what welcome, what veneration for their Bishop! The day before yesterday I came to a little town late at night, but the people had so many lights and festivities that it was like day. How much better a bishop they deserve."
After the evidence of what these visitations meant to a bishop like François de Sales, one can read—with a certain amusement— the way he distinguished between episcopal and lay life in the letter he wrote to Archbishop Fremyot on the art of preaching. A bishop, he wrote in that letter, must not be "vicious with moral sin and must avoid certain venial sins, as well as some actions which are not sinful at all ... A layman may hunt, or go out at night for social chatting, and there is nothing wrong in this, nor as a means of recreation is there any sin in it. But in the case of a bishop, if such actions are not seasoned by thousands of circumstances not easily realised, they are scandalous and gravely so. People say: they are having a good time; their hearts are given over to it. Preach mortification after that, and everyone will make fun of the preacher. I do not say that a bishop may not play at some decent game once or twice a month by way of recreation; but he must do this with great circumspection. Hunting is absolutely forbidden. And the same for unnecessary expenses in festivities, clothes, books. Such things are superfluities for lay people, but for bishops they are great sins . . . Hospitality does not consist in giving feasts, but in willingly asking people to meals such as are suited to bishops and in keeping with the instructions of the Council of Trent, Oportet mensam Episcoporum essefrugalem. I except certain occasions which prudence and charity will easily pick out."
It seems a long cry from the Bishop in his Savoie mountains or even from the Bishop writing his endless letters to the Baronne de Ghantal and other women correspondents to the affairs of the great world outside. But it was in this private pastoral year of 1605 that François de Sales only just escaped the high ecclesiastical honours which would probably have forced him to separate himself from his "poor wife" of a diocese.
In 1605 the Pope, Clement VIII, who had supported him in the Chablais apostolate and had instituted the devotion of the "Forty Hours" which the Provost de Sales had put to such good use in that mission, died. His successor could hardly fail to be one of the great cardinals with whom de Sales had made friends in Rome. In fact, the conclave unanimously elected the Cardinal Alexander de Medici who had been Clement's legate for the triumphal "Forty Hours" of Thonon. He took the name of Leo XI.
Soon de Sales had news that the new Pope intended to create a number of new cardinals and his own name was on the list. His nomination, it seems, was largely due to the efforts of Henri IV who was extremely anxious to press his view that François de Sales was lost to the world in his mountain diocese and should shine before the world from one of the great Sees of France.
" From two sides I have news that they want to raise me higher before the world," he wrote to Jeanne. "My answer before God is 'No.' Be certain, my daughter, that I shall not blink an eyelid for all the world which I heartily despise. Unless it be for the greater glory of God, there will be no movement that way from me. All this between the father and the daughter—it must not go further, please. And by the way in regard to that word ' daughter'; I do not want you to use in your letters any other title than that of 'father'; it is stronger, more pleasing, more holy, more glorious for me."
When the chaplain at his home was at this time asking for instructions about any messages to his mother, the Bishop answered: "Tell my mother to pray to God and to implore Him not to raise me to a higher position. The present one is already too heavy for me."
François de Sales was saved—if this is the right word—from the Sacred College by the untimely death of the new Pope, three weeks from his coronation. Leo XI was succeeded by Cardinal Borghese, Pope Paul V, whom he knew much better than Leo. We seem to have no explanation of why Paul V, who was to live until a few months before de Sales's death, never raised the question again. But the last person to worry about this apparent neglect was de Sales himself, dedicated, as he felt himself to be, to what he called his "cher Nessy " [Annecy]
After his first visitation at the end of 1605, he once again fell ill. "You were ill after the Conception (December 8) and I was also for seven or eight days running," he wrote to Jeanne in January, 1606. "I thought it was going to be much longer, but that was not God's will. I cannot write as lengthily as I would, for this is a day of farewells, as I have to start tomorrow for Chambery, where the Jesuit Rector awaits me for the five or six Lenten days that I am keeping apart to refresh my poor spirit storm-tossed by so much business."
He had been asked by the Senate of Savoie to preach the 1606 Lent and in preparation he was putting himself into retreat under the Jesuit Pere Fourier whom he made his own spiritual director. The Bishop of Grenoble, in whose diocese, Chambery, the capital of Savoie, lay had given him permission to act in his name during the Lenten preaching. At first, he seemed to make little impression on the people, and he confessed to Jeanne, "as for myself I am here where I can see little happening save a slight rousing to devotion on the part of souls. God will increase it, if He wills, for His greater glory."
By Holy Week, the de Sales spiritual magic had taken full effect, and his days and nights (despite medical objection) were given up to the heavy apostolic round of preaching, confessions, confirmations and personal visits to all whom he could help. Apart from this, there were the heavy Holy Week ceremonies. So busy was he that a critic grumbled that he must be thinking himself to be the Bishop of Grenoble—to which he answered in words that warn against episcopal jealousies: "It is rather a pleasant thought, but anyway the bishopric of Grenoble is just like mine: one tiny portion of the heritage of Jesus Christ, our only and sovereign Pere de famille" It was on Good-Friday in Chambery that people saw the great Crucifix above the preacher give out rays of light surrounding him. The figure of this crucifix, after a chequered history, rests today in the Visitation cloister in Chambery.[1]
But the year 1606 does not stand out in François de Sales's life for the Chambery Lent, but for one of the other facets of his many-sided personality. In telling the story of his life, we have almost forgotten his close friend, Antoine Favre. But their intimacy had never been broken. Letters took the place of personal contact when they were separated. From 1597, however, they had been close to one another, for Favre, appointed to the presidency of the Council of Genevois, had left Chambery to live in Annecy. Delighted at the change, he had hoped to be able to spend half the day with François, discussing together literary matters and reading to one another examples of fine poetry and prose. It was, of course, a vain hope, but François, apostle, missioner, spiritual director, priest and bishop, had never lost his taste for fine writing and the turning of a classical phrase nor for the ideal of devout humanism: beauty and style in the service of the good, in the service of God.
Favre convinced de Sales that the time was ripe for founding in Annecy a literary academy in which the best minds of Annecy and Savoie could devote themselves together to the study of science and the arts in the service of the Church. It was one of the ideals of the Sainte Maison of Thonon, but doomed there to remain dormant. Called the Academic Florimontane — interestingly a purely secular name, commemorating the beauty of Savoie — it was established in the autumn of 1606, with a severe and almost stoical ideal. "None of the academicians will show any sign of frivolity of mind, however small — or else they will be reprimanded by the Censors " one of the constitutions reads. "The style of speaking or reading will be grave, exquisite, rounded and it must not in any way smack of pedantry. The lessons will comprise theology, politics, philosophy, rhetoric, cosmology, geometry and arithmetic. The style of languages, and especially of the French language, will be treated." Public sessions would be held to which could come "the worthy masters of honest arts, such as painters, sculptors, carpenters, architects and the like."
Annecy, it was hoped, would blossom into a Christian Athens. But the high hopes were never realised, no doubt because the Bishop, however delighted with the idea, was no longer in a position to give his full mind to such a project, nor had he the time to spare to ensure its standards and its success. Certainly, when one reads his letters and remembers the constant burden of work falling on his tiring shoulders, it is difficult to see him concentrating on a project, very much in tune with his ideals, but outside the present range of the spiritual interests which more and more absorbed him. No reference to the founding of the Academy is to be found in his surviving letters, and he would surely have described it to Jeanne de Chantal, herself a woman of literary interests, had he considered it of great importance. It was he who opened it, however, in the absence of the Due de Nemours, but no records of its meetings were apparently kept. When, after a few years, Favre had to leave Annecy for good, the Academy fizzled out. Its chief interest lies in the fact that it was a precursor of the French Academy, founded thirty years later by Richelieu. One of the first of the French academicians was a son of Antoine Favre who would have attended the open meetings of the Academic Florimontane which held its sessions in Favre's house in Annecy.
De Sales was now coming to the end of his first four years as bishop—Bishop of Geneva, not of Annecy, as he himself never forgot. The thought that he remained exiled from his rightful episcopal city was never far from his mind, not because he had the smallest interest in the worldly glory attached to the title "Bishop and Prince of Geneva," but because even the spiritual cure of the Chablais was but the cure of the body, while the head remained mortally injured so long as Geneva remained, as he put it in a letter to a cardinal "the throne of Satan." " I plead to-day the cause of this diocese," he wrote in this letter, "which, more than all the other dioceses of the Christian world, merits the support of the apostolic goodwill, the favour of prelates and the sympathy of men of good will . . . My adversaries are men who hold the doctrine of the devil."
It was now time for him to journey to Rome and make his canonical visit to the new Pope, Paul V, and the thought of what his old friend, then Cardinal Borghese, could do to recover Geneva and settle the problems of the French part of his diocese was uppermost in his mind. Yet, despite this great urge, he felt unable to make the journey to Rome himself.
" At the approach of the fifth year of my episcopate," he wrote to the Pope, "I have the duty, according to the constitution of the Apostolic See, to visit the tombs of the holy Apostles. But this journey is so lengthy that I cannot undertake it owing to my lack of means, the difficulty of travel and the care of the diocese itself. So I am sending my brother [Jean-François], Canon of my Church, in my place. He will bring as clear and precise a report of this diocese as possible. Here it is in summary. Large is its extent, but equally large is its devastation. Yet its restoration demands reforms which cannot be carried out, save in virtue of the authority of the Holy See . . ." And he signs with the words "From Annecy, the place of our pilgrimage and exile, where we sit, weeping at the memory of our Geneva."
François de Sales's constant prayer for the recovery of Geneva has been used by Protestant historians, such as Mr. Woolsey Bacon, as an example of his readiness to stick at nothing in order to defeat heretics and exalt the Catholic Church. Just before de Sales's consecration as bishop, the Due de Savoie attempted to take Geneva by surprise, which he was entitled to do since they were still formally at war. The alarm, however, was given, and the attempt completely failed. It has been maintained that de Sales knew of the attempt and hoped to celebrate his first Christmas as bishop in Geneva's cathedral of Saint Pierre. He might well have done so, but in fact there is no evidence that he knew of the abortive coup, and Mr. Bacon's argument that he did rests on his mistaken impression that de Sales made his pre-consecration retreat in Annecy, through which the troops passed. Actually at that time he was in Thorens and cut off, by his retreat, from normal communications with the outside world.[2] Before he was bishop, de Sales, as has been said, entered Geneva for his abortive conversations with Beza. He was only to enter it once again in his life.
It was in the year 1609, when he was suddenly called to Gex. He decided to go the quickest way—through Geneva. By that date, Catholics were allowed to do business in the Calvinist city, and a number lived there. But all open religious acts and all proselytism were forbidden. To the surprise of those with him, the Bishop insisted on wearing his normal episcopal dress. He tells what happened in a letter to his old tutor, Possevino.
"Recently, while on my way to Gex, I got the inspiration, after saying Mass in a near-by village, to cross through Geneva. It was the quickest way. I was not at all apprehensive, perhaps because of a kind of boldness, more compounded of simplicity than prudence. As we reached the gates of the city, the official asked for my name. I told my Vicar-General to answer and say that I was ' Monsieur 1'Eveque.' To the answer 'Which Bishop?,' I asked him to reply 'Monsieur 1'Eveque de ce diocese.' The official then wrote in the register 'Monsieur François de Sales, Eveque de ce diocese.' I do not really know whether he knew what the word 'diocese ' meant. Anyway, he let me go in, and so I rode on horseback through the town, saluted with great respect by most of the men and women. After I had left, the news that I had passed through spread among the people, and differing views of it all were taken. The seditious said that I ought to have been held so that I could have been forced to deny my office; but the more sincere said that on the contrary I should have been detained so that the proper courtesies could have been paid to me as a neighbouring lord and friend. In general, my boldness in coolly passing through their midst, dressed as a bishop, was taken as a bad augury."
Though it took a François de Sales to break through all precedent in this way, the Bishop had, of course, no hope of seeing the integrity of his diocese restored, and his only real personal concern was the souls of Geneva's inhabitants, not the worldly glory of any return to his true cathedral of Saint-Pierre.
Even more unexpected was the next strange incident in his life. It was to be the ex-student of Paris whose soul had been torn by the fear of predestination to eternal loss of God, to make what appears to have been the decisive contribution to the final ecclesiastical resolution of the conflict between the Dominicans and the Jesuits over the problem of God's efficacious grace and human free-will.
On appeal to Rome, Clement VIII had in 1598 established the Special Congregation De Auxiliis to settle the quarrel once and for all. Paul V was now determined to find a practical settlement to the impassioned theological discussion. It happened that de Sales gave to his brother, Jean-François, when he set out on his ad limina visit to Rome, a memorandum on the controverted subject. Jean-François passed it on to Mgr. Germonio, an old friend of the Bishop's, who held an official position. In a letter to de Sales, of August 8, 1607, Germonio wrote: "I was most happy to receive Your Reverence's letter and to welcome your brother ... I have read your letter to His Holiness, and he appreciated it so much that he ordered me to show it to Cardinal Pinelli in his capacity of prefect of the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office and therefore of the Congregation De Auxiliis. He went further and asked me to make him a copy so that it could be read to the said Congregation, as I did the day before yesterday.""
Though de Sales's memorandum was never published and has never been found, it is generally believed that it had a decisive effect on the views of the Pope who made up his mind to bring the dispute to an end by allowing both parties to maintain their position and respect one another m doing so. Pius IX in the Briel proclaiming François de Sales a Doctor of the Church accepted the tradition and said that it was "on his (de Sales's) advice that he (Paul V) imposed silence on both parties, believing that so delicate and dangerous a dispute should be allowed to rest."
In his Treatise on the Love of God, François de Sales wrote that God truly willed the salvation of all "but in a way and by means suited to the condition of human nature with its gift of free-will. In other words, He willed the salvation of all who were ready to consent to the graces and favours which He was to prepare, offer and give for this purpose. So, among these favours, He willed that the call to salvation should be the first, and one so tempered to our freedom that we could accept it or reject it as we chose. And to those who, as He foresaw, would accept it, He willed to furnish the sacred movements of penitence; to those who would follow up these movements He arranged to give holy charity; to those who received this charity, he decided to give what was necessary for perseverance; and to those who made use of this divine help He resolved to give final perseverance and the glorious bliss of His everlasting love."
The truth is that only the subtlest theologians can hope to throw any glimmer of light on the relation between grace and human freedom, and the faithful may feel grateful to François de Sales for having been instrumental in the forming of a Papal decision which leaves the field open to the theologians, while leaving the faithful to accept without worry firstly that in the work of salvation all is from God, even our own co-operation in it, and secondly that nevertheless man possesses what we call free-will in the choice of good and bad.
Of the days, weeks and months of these years, as François de Sales moved from the thirties (how young he still was after so much accomplished) to the forties, one sentence in a letter to Mme. de Chantal may stand as a permanent witness. He was preaching what he was calling his first Lent in Annecy in the spring of 1607, since of the first which he preached immediately after his consecration, he said in the letter that then "people just came to see what I looked like."
"For seven or eight days I have not even been able to give a thought to myself. I can only get a superficial glimpse of myself. So many have come to me that I might see and serve them, thus leaving me no time for thinking of myself. For your consolation, however, I will assure you that I do feel deep-down-within-me, God be praised. For the truth is that this kind of work is infinitely profitable to me." This is interesting evidence that active work to the point of utter exhaustion need not weaken a person's spiritual inner peace, but on the contrary strengthen it.
The Annecy Lent; a special two months' Jubilee granted by the Pope for Thonon, to which pilgrims came from France as well as Savoie; the death of Anne d'Este, mother of the suzerain of Annecy, the Due de Nemours, the princess for whose devotion the Holy Shroud had been brought from Chambery to Annecy before François's birth, demanding of de Sales a funeral oration, a task he disliked because it meant mixing worldliness with spirituality —such were some of the outstanding events in the daily round of pastoral work and business, whether at Annecy or in the visitation of the diocese, to which he gave up time each year, completing it only in 1608.
But for François de Sales, so closely bound to his family, so fond of children, so tender in all personal relations, one event must have stood out—an event, the sorrow of which could be shared by even the humblest of his flock. It was the death of his youngest sister, Jeanne, news of which he received while on visitation high up in the mountain country of the Saleve between Annecy and Geneva. Jeanne, eleven years old, had been sent in the spring of 1605 to the Abbesse du Puits-d'Orbe for her education, but, unhappy there and elsewhere, it was arranged in 1607 that she should go to Monthelon to live with Mme. de Chantal and her family. François took the closest interest in these arrangements. "I am rather worried about whether our Abbess will be annoyed," he wrote to her, "but there is no help for it. It would not be reasonable to keep so long in a monastery a girl who does not wish to live there all her life." And he goes on to ask her to tell of all that is needed for the child. "You must tell me all that is needed for her in the way of equipment, and just as you yourself would wish it, like the princesses of Spain do when they are given noble girls as companions. I insist on this, even to her having a cloth hood and cloak, if it suits your livery."
Under the eye of Mme. de Chantal, they were happy times at Monthelon for Jeanne de Sales, as she worked and played with the boy Celse-Benigne de Chantal, three years younger than her, and with his little sisters, Marie-Aimee, Françoise and Charlotte. Alas, in the midst of this idyllic upbringing for a girl, privileged to be the sister of a saint and under the guardianship of another laint, death came in the homely fashion of catching an autumn cold which would not yield to treatment. On October 8, 1607, Jeanne de Sales died at fourteen years of age. Jeanne de Chantal felt the tragedy almost as keenly as she had felt the death of her husband. She had worn herself out striving in vain to save the child's life. She had eagerly offered up her own life if only God would take it and save Jeanne de Sales.
François interrupted the visitation on which he was engaged and returned to Thorens to console his mother. Writing on the feast of All Souls to Jeanne de Chantal, he poured forth his feelings in a moving letter.
"My dear daughter, is it not reasonable that God's holy Will should be done, as well when it touches the things we cherish as otherwise? But I must first tell you that my good mother has drunk of this chalice with a wholly Christian fidelity . . . Last Sunday, she sent for my brother, the canon (Jean-François), and noticing that he and his brothers were so unhappy, she said to him: 'I dreamt all night that my daughter Jeanne was dead; tell me, is it true ?' My brother, who was waiting for my arrival before breaking the news to her, for I was on visitation, seeing that this was a good opportunity, as she lay in bed, to offer her the chalice, said 'It is true, mother.' He stopped there because he was too unhappy to say anything more. 'God's will be done,' said my mother, and she cried and cried for a time. Then she called to Nicole (a servant) 'I want to get up and pray to God in the chapel for my poor daughter.' At once she did so ... I know that you want to ask me how I have borne the news and what I am doing. Alas, my daughter, I am a man and nothing if not a man. My heart has been broken in a way I could not have believed possible . . . You well know, my dear daughter, how wholeheartedly I loved that little girl. I engendered her to the Lord, for it was I who baptised her with my own hands, about fourteen years ago. She was the first creature on whom I exercised my priestly Orders. I was her spiritual father and I was confident that one day I would make something good of her. Besides, what made her so dear to me (I must tell you the truth) was that she was yours. Still, my dear daughter, within my heart of flesh which has suffered so much from this death, I very strongly feel a certain sweetness, tranquillity and repose of spirit in divine Providence which pours into my soul a great contentment even with its sorrows ... I am sending you the coat-of-arms you ask for, and since you wish to have the service in the place where she rests in her body, I agree, but no pomp and ceremony, except for what Christian custom demands. Of what use the rest? Afterwards, please, make a list of all the costs, including those of her illness, and send them to me. I want it to be so. Meanwhile we shall pray from here for that soul and nicely carry out the little honours due to her. But we shall not send representatives to the forty-day anniversary. No, my daughter, there is no need for such mysteries in the case of a girl who has held no rank in the world. It would look ridiculous. You know me. I like simplicity whether in death or life. But I should like to know the name and the title of the church where she will lie."
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[1] * This seven-foot Crucifix was taken to the Chambery Visitation convent in 1672, though apparently its story had been forgotten, for it was sold and then rebought. It was hacked about during the French Revolution and finally returned to the Chambery Visitation in 1830 where the figure was repaired and repainted and affixed to a new cross.
[2] Dublin Review, 3rd Series, Vol. VII, p. 114.
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