Salesian Literature

16.  Suffering and death in Lyons (1622)

 

in october, 1622, the Bishop of Geneva received the second summons to leave Annecy and all hope of retirement to Talloires vanished. It came from Charles-Emmanuel, who commanded him to travel to Avignon to form part of the suite of the Duke and Princes of Savoie who were there to meet Louis XIII and officially congratulate him on the successful ending of the recent Calvinist revolt in the West and South-West of France.

 

The presence of François de Sales at the meeting and triumphant celebration of the Catholic victory had, of course, been demanded by Princess Christine, her husband and Cardinal Maurice of Savoie, and it was certainly fitting that the most eminent churchman of Savoie should be there. But the princes and Christine herself who had so lately met the sick Bishop should surely have wished to spare him a commission that must inevitably endanger his life.

 

In Annecy, the summons deeply upset everyone and de Sales was implored to make his excuses and inform the Duke that he was quite beyond undertaking the fatigues of such a journey and of the ceremonial. He absolutely refused to do so, one reason being that he could never forget the unsatisfactory state of those parts of his diocese which were within France. Despite Henri IV, Marie de Medici and Louis XIII, all so devoted to him personally, he had never been able to obtain French consent to a free apostolate in Gex and the other affected parts. After this latest victory over the Protestants, he doubtless hoped to persuade the young King to grant him his wishes. "We must go where­soever God calls us," he said. "We shall go on as far as we are able and we shall stop when illness allows us to go no further."

 

In a letter he does not seem to have anticipated that the journey would prove fatal, for he wrote to a friend on November 1: "I must start tomorrow for Provence, and I do not know when I shall return, but I hope that it will be very soon! " On the other hand, he was ready to face the worst. With his brother, the Coadjutor, he spent a long time settling his own affairs, making his will and seeing to it that all the business of the diocese was in order. Having done all this, he spent many hours with his con­fessor. At the end of all the arrangements, spiritual and temporal, he said to his brother "Now I really feel that, by God's grace, I am only attached to the earth by one foot, for the other is already off the ground and ready to fly away."

 

One cannot imagine him saying this without a chuckle. But whatever he may have thought himself, there is no doubt that everyone else was far from smiling and quite convinced that their Bishop would never be seen alive again. He did not contradict the many people who implored him not to go because if he did they would never see him again. At least, they would see him in heaven, he insisted, and he declared that all this was "in the good pleasure of God."

 

The most moving farewell was with his daughters of the Visitation. The day before the party was due to start, he cele­brated Mass in the convent vested in a magnificent chasuble given by Princess Christine and he preached to the sisters: "My dear daughters," he said, "ask for nothing and refuse nothing. Always be ready to do what God and obedience demand of you. Let your one and only desire be to love God—your only ambition to possess Him. Goodbye, my daughters, until eternity." And when the nuns protested that he would return, he simply said that if it was God's good pleasure not to allow him to return to them, they should not bless Him any the less. "Whatever His good pleasure, it is always equally loving." It was characteristic of him that his last words were for the humble tourie're of Geneva, Jacqueline Coste, who knelt at his feet, crying. He assured her that if he did not return, they would meet again sooner than she expected. In fact, she was to die on August 23, 1623, eight months after him.

 

And so the last journey started on the morning of November 9, the Bishop being accompanied by nine companions including the ever-faithful Georges Rolland of Chablais days, now a dignified canon, and his valet, François Favre. Many people from Annecy accompanied him the twenty miles or so to the frontier town of Seyssel where the party was to take ship for the Rhone river journey to Lyons. In Seyssel François de Sales wrote his last letter to the great friend of his life, Antoine Favre. Typically, it was now a simple letter making a business request and ending: "Do this for me, Monsieur mon frere, while I go to Provence where Monseigneur the Prince Cardinal will pay his homage and where I, visiting the many places of devotion there, will pray God to keep you and Madame my sister [Favre's wife] and bless all whom you love." Did he recall when writing this brief letter, with no mention of any premonition of death, those days long before when the two young amateurs of stylistic elegance vied with one another in the turning of the best Latin phrase?

 

In the face of an intensely cold November wind, the party sailed the short distance to Belley where faithful Camus took him to the most recently founded Visitation convent. There he said Mass. Here was another sad parting—de Sales from his Boswell-to-be, a man with many prejudices and faults, but with an unbounded love for his saintly colleague and a deep desire to imitate him; a man never to have remotely the balance of a saint, but as capable of spiritual heroism as of spiritual waywardness.

 

By the 10th of November, the party had reached Lyons. There, after three and a half years' separation, he met again the woman with whom his whole spiritual teaching and work had been most closely, most intimately, linked in surely the most remarkable of spiritual friendships between a man and a woman, Jeanne-Françoise de Chantal. He could not know that he would see her again, for she was travelling on the business of the Order and he at least could not be certain of any measurable duration of life. Yet, heroically, he was content with a few words, for she had work to do and he had to press on.

 

Celebrated as he was, he had passport difficulties with the boatman on leaving Lyons,—to his companions' anger but not to his, for he was content to remark that the man had his duties to perform. He made a point of making friends with him as they continued their river journey. At Vienne, he left a letter making his excuses to the Archbishop "my superior," for the Archbishop of Vienne was the metropolitan of the Annecy diocese—"I can write no more for I haven't the time." At Valence he had time to visit the Visitation convent, and to enable an old lady of 88 to enter it as a nun. "You must appreciate the spirit of our Institute," he told the Superior. "It has been established for the young, for the old, for the healthy and the sickly and infirm." At Bourg-Saint-Andeol, some forty miles from Avignon, the Bishop was received in triumph by the people who insisted on taking him, willy nilly, to their ancient church and singing a Te Deum just because he was there in their midst.

 

At last, by the middle of November, François de Sales reached the city of the Popes to be greeted by the Vice-Legate of Pope Gregory XV and the acclamations of the people, calling out "the great Bishop of Geneva," "the apostle of the Chablais," "the author of the Introduction to the Devout Life." Such greetings followed him wherever he went as soon as he was recognised, so much so that he had to take refuge in the hostelry where he was staying or in some near-by shop. It was in a bookshop that he uttered the wise words about such public praise. "Left to myself I would be tempted to make a fool of myself so as to undeceive these people. But we must live with Christian sincerity, neither playing the fool nor the wise man, but simply and once and for all carry on serving God, our divine Master." All this, one might say, was his Palm Sunday.

 

So far as the record goes, François de Sales might just as well have never made this journey to Avignon. He avoided the great festivities associated with the entry of the victorious Louis XIII, staying in his hotel quietly writing, and though he had to give some of his time to official duties with the Savoie suite and to social functions with the French court, we have no details of them. All we know is that he remained at the beck and call of the churches, priests and people all only too anxious to have the great bishop and already near-canonised saint with them, saying Mass and preaching. He was asked to found a Visitation convent, and prophesied that one day the town would have two. The first was established two years later; the second twenty.

 

The Bishop had sufficient energy left to ask the Cardinal de Savoie for leave of absence to make a pilgrimage to the shrine of the Sainte-Baume, high up to the east of Marseilles, where, according to the legend, St. Mary Magdalene ended her days. The shrine was sixty or seventy miles from Avignon and in mountain country likely to be very cold at that time of the year. Perhaps François secretly wanted to die there, if he could not die at Saint-Germain above Talloires. The Cardinal, however, would not give permission, because duty on the Court came first. "Anyway," he said, "your heart is at Sainte-Baume where you are always a solitary." François did, however, get as far as Tarascon to venerate the relics of Saint Martha. Perhaps it was fitting that it should be so. The saint of the Love of God, asking only to dedicate himself to "the one thing necessary," was chosen by God to find it in "the cares and troubles " of which Martha complained, but in which he could find "the better part."

 

At last the celebrations and conversations were over, and François was able to leave Avignon, following the courts of France and Savoie travelling by land to Lyons. François de Sales's Passion had begun.

 

It appears to have been nobody's fault, except perhaps his own refusal ever to look after himself. One must picture a very sick man, suffering all the time from severe inconveniences and pains, easily fatigued and inevitably having to overcome the bad temper, restlessness, easy irritation that goes with the last stages of his disease. We must also remember that, however humble he might be, he was a bishop and already an almost legendary figure, not to mention his position in the princely suites. Yet somehow it happened that from now onwards he was to live personally in extreme discomfort and in almost sordid circumstances—and so die. During the whole time, he manifested nothing but serenity, thought for others and complete resignation to his strange lot. In fact, he welcomed it.

 

It began near Pont-Saint-Esprit, some thirty miles north of Avignon. There all the rooms in the inn were taken. He refused to allow anyone to say who he was and he slept on straw in a loft. At Valence he was given a good room, but gave it up to a foreign lady who asked to have it. He himself had to share a single-bed room with Georges Rolland. Holland slept on the mattress with the bed-clothes. He slept in his clothes on the straw palliasse. And when finally Lyons was reached, he refused many offers of hospitality because he wanted to stay near the Sisters of the Visitation. All they could offer him—indeed, it was all they had —was the little upstairs room in what was scarcely more than the gardener's hut or shed. It was clean, but the fire smoked badly, and it was nearly December. At least, it would have to do for the night. Next day he could accept one or other of the many offers of accommodation suited to his rank and his only too visible infirmities. But he was adamant, though we cannot but believe that if a doctor had been called or if someone in authority had really insisted, he would have allowed himself to be persuaded by them. At least, the poor sisters said, let him have a carriage for the carrying out of his duties. But he refused again, insisting on walking from one place to another on his badly swollen feet. For twenty-nine days he was to drag himself through the dirty streets and to sleep in that little smoke-filled room. In it he was to die.

 

There are penances and penances, but it is hard to think of a more unbearable martyrdom for a man in his state than the acceptance of such discomfort by night and by day until he in­evitably collapsed. All that he had preached in the way of little and humble, unglamorous, unceasing mortification was being realised in those last days and most of all in the manner of his death.

 

All this discomfort can have meant little to him, however, in comparison with the pleasure of a day with Mere de Chantal again. She had come from Montferrand to discuss the accumu­lation of business which years of letters cannot cover. She had come, too, to obtain her Father's advice on the state of her soul, more apt than his to worry and self-questioning. He was, of course, well used to speaking through the enclosure grille and one wishes that it had been on the occasion of his many hours' con­versation with her that he had been warned that the door of the room was half-open on to the road and letting in the cold. He got up to shut it when he saw some children outside gaping at the strange sight of a priest talking to a wall. Rather than dis­appoint them of their fascinating sight, he left the door untouched.

 

Mere de Ghaugy has given an account of that last meeting between the co-Founders. "Mother," he said, " we have some free hours together. Which of us shall start the conversation? "Mere de Chantal answered at once: "May I, please, Father? My heart is in great need of being looked over by you."—"What, Mother," he answered, "have you still keen desires and a wish to choose? I expected to find you entirely angelic." And then he said: "We shall talk about ourselves in Annecy. Now it is our duty to talk of the business of our congregation."

 

Mere de Chantal immediately put away the notes she had made about the state of her soul, and for four hours they discussed matters concerning the Visitation. Then at the end of the con­versation, François gave her his orders to leave Lyons at once and continue her visitation of the convents in Grenoble, Valence and Belley, and to visit the reformed Bernardines in Rumilly. In this last conversation with the lady with the light-brown hair who had sat under his pulpit in the Sainte-Chapelle in Dijon eighteen years earlier, he preached to her the final, the hardest lesson: utter self-forgetfulness, utter reliance on the God who had chosen to enter so closely into the fine pointe of her soul.

 

His days in Lyons were devoted wholly, when he was free from attendance at Court, to his customary pastoral work, to preaching, to hearing confessions and to begging alms of the great gentlemen and ladies with whom he had to spend too much of his short time, that he might distribute them to the poor. He saw the King, but we do not know whether it was possible for him to introduce the old subject of Gex and French territories under his care. On December 19, he wrote two letters, the first to an unknown lady, the second to Mere de Chastellux, Superior at Moulins. In the first he wrote: "O God, how happy are those who, free from the trammels of courts and their flatteries, live peacefully in a saintly solitude at the feet of the Crucifix. I have never, I must say, had a good opinion of any vanity, but the vanity which is the atmosphere of the feeble grandeurs of court is worse than I thought. My very dear daughter, the longer I walk the way of our mortality, the more I despise it and the more attractive, each day, seems that holy eternity to which we aspire and for the sake of which alone we should have regard for ourselves. Let us only live for that life, my very dear daughter, for it alone deserves the name of life. In comparison with it the lives of the greatest of this world are but a very miserable death." His second letter to Mere de Ghastellux ended with the words "I am not yet leaving this town and I believe I shall have the consolation of writing to you again."

 

Now Christmas was approaching, and on Christmas Eve, at the request of Marie de' Medici, François laid the foundation stone of a new church of the Recollets and preached. The ceremony lasted three hours. The day had been cold and foggy, and suddenly he felt very chilled and ill. Nevertheless, he did not flinch from singing Midnight Mass and preaching in the Visitation convent and then saying his second Mass for the Court at the Dominican church where he gave Holy Communion to Prince Victor-Amadeus and Princess Christine. One of those who went to Communion at that royal Mass was Robert Arnauld d'Andilly, the brother of Angelique. Later, the then Jansenist recalled in his memoirs how after the Mass he went to the sacristy to see the Bishop. "He received me with unbelievable joy and embracing me, said: 'My son, I recognised you in the breaking of the bread.' "It was as though he was again anticipating the Jan­senist repugnance to the frequent Communion which he himself had always recommended, reminding his readers and those he spiritually directed of the custom of the early Christians to go to Communion daily.

 

After that second Mass he had been obliged to return to the court and because of this had asked another priest to say the three Christmas Masses at the Visitation convent. When he himself reached the convent, the other priest was still saying his Masses, and patiently he waited and prayed in the chapel until he could say his own third Mass. Later that Christmas Day he received two postulants and preached for the occasion. Then until late into the night he had to be at court again to bid Marie de' Medici farewell as she was leaving the next day.

 

No wonder that next morning, St. Stephen's day, people noticed how very ill he looked "one side of his face drawn, the eye retreating into its socket and dull." His memory was also failing and he had difficulty in recognising people. Expecting to leave Lyons and return home, he arranged to spend the evening with the sisters and to give them a conference—the Entretien on "Asking Nothing and Refusing Nothing." They begged for some last advice before he started his journey home.

 

"What do you want me to say, my dear Daughter," he said to the Superior, as torches were held up to light him to the garden cottage. "I told you everything when I said: Desire nothing and refuse nothing. I cannot say anything else. Think of the Infant Jesus in the crib. He suffers all the trials of weather and cold—all that His Father allows to happen to Him. He does not refuse the little comforts His Mother gives him. Nowhere do we read that He held out His hands to His Mother's breast. He left all that to her care and foresight. So we too should desire nothing and refuse nothing, accepting what God sends us, the cold and the troubles of the times." And his last words to his nuns were, characteristically, a simple concrete example. Asked if then one should never warm oneself—they must have been feeling the cold in that poor Visitation convent—he said: "When the fire is burning, obedience clearly means us to warm ourselves, but we need not get excited and rush over to do so."

 

The next day, the feast of St. John, he had a heavy programme before him for he had to take formal leave of the Savoie princes. When he rose, he noticed that his sight seemed to be failing, and he said Mass late at the convent after going to confession to the chaplain. Once again, the Superior asked for a last word of advice. This time he gave her just one word, writing it on a piece of paper. Thrice in very large letters he wrote "Humility."

 

As he was leaving the convent, as usual on foot, he met the Due de Bellegarde, to whom he had written on Christmas Eve, asking his help in connection with a common friend seeking employment. De Sales stood in the cold and fog, his head un­covered, talking to the Duke. Then he fulfilled his appointments with members of the court which, as usual, meant much ceremonial and standing up.

 

At last, tired out, he returned to the convent in the middle of the day. His servants noticed that after his very light midday meal, he seemed unable to rise, but sat on at table in a kind of torpor. He roused himself to meet a number of religious who had come to bid him farewell and most uncharacteristically he let them depart without accompanying them to the door. He tried to write some letters, while the attendants were wondering whether he could possibly travel in his state and whether the homeward journey had not better be deferred. As they watched him, he tried to rise from his chair. Just as he painfully got to his feet, he collapsed.

 

Quickly, the half-paralysed man was undressed and put to bed, and a priest and doctor sent for. The diagnosis of apoplexy through a rupture of a cerebral artery was quickly made. For this the treatment in those days was to do anything and every­thing to rouse the patient from his stupor and from falling back into sleep. He was given Extreme Unction, but he was unable to receive the Viaticum. He asked that his rosary should be twisted round his right wrist.

 

Then began those strange long hours of evening, night and morning when the poor patient in his agony was delivered to the crude and cruel remedies of the doctors of those days and the scarcely less trying personal and spiritual good will of a long procession of pious and curious visitors. Outside in the town the news had spread and people flocked to the churches to pray for the Bishop's recovery.

 

However good-intentioned the spiritual and temporal minis­trations, one cannot but think of the dying man reduced to a public exhibition, a mere thing in the hands of his friends and well-wishers. The doctors maltreated the poor, paralysed, swollen body, shaking and slapping it, pinching it and rubbing it, opening veins and even tearing at the hair. Even his friends thought it well to try to rouse him by saying things that would scandalise him. He was told that his brother, the Coadjutor, was at the door, and they promised him that soon he would be enthroned in the cathedral of St. Peter in Geneva. Most of the time he seemed to be conscious, and such questions did rouse him to protest vehe­mently. He had never wanted his episcopal throne in Geneva, he had only wanted the salvation of the people of Geneva. People should not lie, his brother could not be near. To the pious exhortations he answered mostly with apt quotations from Scripture.

 

Hour after hour the agony endured as the morning of the 28th, the feast of the Holy Innocents, came and passed to afternoon. Now it was clear to the doctors that their half-measures were not proving successful. If the Bishop's life was to be saved, more desperate measures must be used. A plaster of cantharides or blister-beetles was applied to his bald head, the effect of which is distressing especially to a patient in public view, for there appears to have been no privacy during this unhappy scene. Then he was lifted out of bed and placed in a chair. The doctors asked him whether he would agree to being cauterised. "My body is in the doctors' hands, let them do what they think best," the Saint replied. A surgeon meanwhile was heating the iron rods. A priest reminded the patient to unite his sufferings with the Crown of Thorns, and he protested, murmuring that there could be no comparison. The surgeon then approached and pressed the red-hot iron on the back of the skull, but doing it so clumsily as to make two burns. By now the blister-beetle plaster had done its work and the skin under it was all blisters. It was torn off to lay bare the live flesh. Into it the red-hot iron was once more plunged, smoke rising from it with the smell of burning flesh. François de Sales bore this cruel treatment without murmur and only a reflex of the tautening of his shoulders. He cried quietly and murmured Jesu Maria.

 

He was then taken back to his bed, still mouthing the holy names. By eight o'clock of the evening, he was dead.

 

Surely no one could say that in that last month of humiliation and service to others despite grave discomforts and constant dis­tressing illness until the moment of actual collapse, all to be followed by three days of public agony in the most literal sense of the word, François de Sales had not drunk to the last drop the chalice which was the secret and the whole meaning of his own spiritual life and of the teaching he had given to others and to the world.

 

The most human, gay, approachable and encouraging of all the saints was also the least compromising in following his Master, supreme model of all that we mean by human attraction, to the very foot of the Cross.

 

In his will, François de Sales had asked that if his body could not be buried in the cathedral of St. Peter in Geneva, it should rest in the Visitation Convent of Annecy. Permission of Louis XIII was needed to take so venerable a relic from Lyons and France, and it was carried in a triumphant procession to Annecy. On the Saint's future feast-day, January 29, the solemn funeral service was celebrated by his brother and successor, Jean-François de Sales, the coffin covered with white satin and on it a shield with the name "Jesus" inscribed on it.

 

Mere Jeanne-Françoise de Chantal then received the body at the gates of the Visitation, where it rested near the grille of the Sisters. Kneeling by the coffin, the future Sainte Jeanne-Françoise finished the conversation about the state of her soul which Saint François de Sales in Lyons had promised her once they were together again in Annecy.

 

The solemn ceremonies of beautification took place in St. Peter's on 8 January, 1662, but the Brief was signed by Pope Alexander VII on 28 December 1661—39 years to the day after St. François's death. He was canonised on 19 April 1665, which happened, appropriately enough, to be Good Shepherd Sunday.

 

"O God, who willed that Francis, your Confessor and Bishop, should become all things to all men to save souls, enable us also to be filled with your gentle love and so, led aright by his advice and with the help of his prayers, may we also attain to eternal joy." (Collect of St. Francis's feast on January 29)

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