Salesian Literature

6.  Rome and Paris again (1598-1602)

 

François de Sales was at length able to set off on his long-planned visit to the Eternal City in November, 1598. By this time the nervous Rolland had blossomed under his master's tutelage into a cleric and secretary whose value would continuously increase. Favre, called to Rome on diplomatic business, and Louis de Sales (favourite brother to be distinguished from the Canon Louis de Sales) were of the party. The main reasons for the visit were, first, to deputise for Bishop Granier in one of the periodic so-called ad limina visits to the Pope which bishops are called upon to make to report .on the state of their dioceses, and, second, to obtain Clement VIII's agreement to the Coadjutorship with succession to the Geneva diocese. In fact, however, de Sales's three months stay in Rome was to be a matchless experience for a future bishop and diplomat. In Rome he would learn to do as Romans do and make friends with outstanding ecclesiastical personalities of the day.

 

As Dom Mackey has written: "He mixes with Roman society, meets influential personalities, visits cardinals and holy religious, makes friends here and protectors there. Above all, the move­ment, the style, the ways, the customs of the pontifical court keenly interest him. He watches, he observes, he listens, he learns… François de Sales was then thirty-three years old. At that happy age, perspicacious minds interest themselves above all in the serious side of real life. Their vision is just, their ability to learn rapid, their memory good. The Roman court and the

 

 

 

 

 

 

On his return home, much of the work accomplished in the Chablais seemed to be threatened by political events. Because of the 1598 Treaty of Vervins the war between Henri IV of France and Philip II of Spain had been brought to an end and a religious settlement of the Chablais had been made possible. But by the terms of the Treaty, Charles-Emmanuel (who had looked to Catholic Spain for support) had been obliged to give to France the provinces of Bresse and Bugey on the left bank of the Rhone in exchange for his right to keep the Marquisate of Salluzzo in Piedmont. Furious at this, he readily entered into a conspiracy with the French Due de Biron who was promising himself Bur­gundy as a private possession. By this means Charles-Emmanuel hoped to retain his lands beyond the Rhone.

 

Henri IV, victor of so many battles, was not the man to submit to such arrogance, and by the second half of 1599 the Calvinists in Geneva were licking their lips at the thought that war and the humiliation of Catholic Savoie would restore their power in the Chablais. They expected that the ex-Calvinist author of the Edict of Nantes would give them complete freedom in places which they held to be Protestant. De Sales was warning the Nuncio that "the Genevans and the other enemies in the neigh­bourhood were opposing the holy negotiations [with the Knights] through spreading rumours of war and making threats. They also distribute books and writings and secretly spread spies and corrupters of souls."

 

In the late autumn of 1599, Henri IV, always a brilliant soldier, had moved through Savoie as far as Annecy.   The duty of religious leaders, faced with a situation like this when one's own country is occupied by a hostile potentate, is always delicate, Annecy, spiritual and temporal, received the French King with marked coolness.    Bishop Granier and his Coadjutor had one responsibility uppermost in their minds: to seek Henri's protec­tion from the Calvinists, many of whom, as high officers and men, served in the French army.    One cannot help wondering what these holy men really thought of Henri IV, a rough libertine in his private life and a convert whose tolerant attitude to people of his former faith seemed to François to mean grave danger in those parts of the diocese so long religiously controlled by the Calvinists. In those days a favourite time for discussion was High Mass, and it was during High Mass that the King and Granier conferred.    Henri solemnly promised that he would tolerate no change   in   the   Chablais—"truly   royal   words," as   Charles-Auguste de Sales commented in his life of his uncle.    But kings cannot control their followers, and de Sales would have to report to the Nuncio that "both in Thonon and Ternier there has been much suffering under the government of the Huguenot, M. de Montglat, through various Genevan insidious acts (in Ternier they  behave particularly  badly, committing unspeakable acts against sacred things). Nevertheless, despite all this, only four from among the immense number of converts have fallen away, and these low-born types."

 

Though greatly consoled by such evidence of the toughness of his catechumens, de Sales had reason to be anxious about other consequences of the peace between France and Savoie which was signed in January, 1601, after the complete defeat of Charles-Emmanuel. The bailiwick of Gaillard to the south of Geneva was to be returned to Savoie, but the much larger Pays de Gex, west and north of the Calvinist capital, was to be handed over to the over-tolerant Henri IV.

 

Gaillard had been under Calvinist control, like the Chablais, but Catholics had resisted with more effect, and it was soon re­converted—one hopes without too much help from the sinister-sounding Corsican, Captain de Basterga, who drove out the Protestant ministers. Its people, de Sales wrote to the Nuncio, came over "without any force or artifice, but simply by preaching.”

 

Very different was the case of the Pays de Gex, under French rule. The problem of this district of the Annecy diocese, outside Savoie's jurisdiction, was to haunt François de Sales all through his life. Within it the Edict of Nantes operated, and this in practice meant that the rich Calvinists could prevent or greatly hinder all attempts to bring the people back to Catholicism. De Sales could not accept a nominal tolerance which protected the avowedly political authority of Protestant ministers. The latter had even appealed to Elizabeth of England and had sent a delegation to Paris to induce Henri to stand firm against any Catholic intrusion into Gex. De Sales, on his side, was appealing to the Pope and travelling post-haste to Lyons where his friend, the Baron de Lux, the French Governor, was to be found. But the wily Henri IV was more interested in playing the two sides against each other than in following de Sales's idea of what was right, namely to allow the old religion full apostolic scope in Gex and to have the old Catholic parishes and property restored to his diocese. Undeterred, de Sales would soon be travelling to Paris to bring the matter to the King personally.

 

These years, immediately following the Chablais triumph, seem indecisive and even full of frustration, as though the very success of the Chablais had caused the Coadjutor in his early thirties to run ahead of himself and not quite know where he stood. The war had threatened what he had accomplished and lack of material means made the realisation of de Sales's vision of a truly Catholic country impossible. He himself was only Coadjutor in name because he was too busy to attend to the formalities of getting the Bulls from Rome and being consecrated.

 

Typical of his vision and the difficulty of making that vision real was his plan of founding in Thonon a great centre of Catholic training, spiritual and temporal, for the mass of new converts. One rubs one's eyes as one reads of this plan and remembers that even the reforms of the Council of Trent had hardly as yet touched this poor rural diocese lost in the sub-Alps. Most of its monasteries and convents were still in a state of scandalous laxity. The establishment even of a seminary for the training of priests was only a dream. Most of the clergy had to live lonely lives in little peasant communities completely isolated the one from the other and where superstition still abounded. Yet, against that background, this young priest in his early thirties was planning the "Holy House of Thonon " or "Hostel for all the Sciences and Arts."

 

This "Holy House "—the name doubtless reflected de Sales's devotion to the Holy House of Loretto—was to be a kind of super-mission-centre under the direction of a group of secular priests, living together in a manner resembling Ancina's Oratory. Apart from various spiritual services to the converts, it would organise apprenticeship courses for technical training in various trades to give them employment. Among these de Sales naturally had a special place for the printing press which he had already started. The apostolate of the printed word was always a priority for him. Such home industries, he fondly believed, would success­fully compete with the too successful Calvinist-inspired trade of Geneva.

 

It seems strange that a man so naturally cautious, so realistic, should have dreamt this dream. It was, in a way, a young man's fancy, yet much of the pastoral work of the future Bishop of Geneva was to be a slow and patient carrying out through the years of the purposes which he was now envisaging as springing from this missionary centre on the Lake of Geneva.

Nothing was to go well with this Thonon project. Promises of money were not fulfilled. The secular priests did not relish a community life for which they had no vocation. Some Jesuits who had been sent to help did not like not being able to live in com­munity. An Oratorian seminary, a Jesuit University, none of these further projects could be realised. In the end, under Barnabite priests from Milan, the "Holy House" survived its founder, but it was never to be the grandiose spiritual communal and technical centre which its young enthusiastic planner was conceiving.

 

One solid reason for failure was the simple one that when de Sales became Bishop of Geneva he was far too much engaged in episcopal duties, as he conceived these to be, to be able to attend personally to the " Holy House." The project was in the hands of the equally optimistic, but far less realistic and capable, Pere Cherubin and others. De Sales had as much as he could do getting these out of trouble and difficulties. When we remember that this early I7th century plan for a diocesan centre was far ahead of the times and that the aims behind it remain often still unrealised today, it is hardly surprising that they were then doomed to failure. But the imaginative vision remains and the fact that François de Sales could even entertain such a vision throws light on the paradox that one of the most realistic and dedicated bishops of the Church was to rule his obscure diocese and yet speak to the whole world in a manner that seemed to transcend both time and space. The devout humanism of his early years was to be raised to a quality of behaviour, under­standing of human nature, zeal and love that (one may think) has come closest among the saints to the universal charity and understanding of the Incarnate God.

 

Somehow or other, during these busy and difficult years of overwork and worry, de Sales managed to publish his first full-scale book The Defence of the Standard of the True Cross of Our Saviour, Jesus Christ.

 

Despite the printer's trick of calling the first edition the second in order to suggest that the book had already been in great demand, this book, which in effect is a lengthy refutation of the charge that Catholics pay to the Cross the worship due to God alone, did not make a great stir at the time and is the least known of de Sales's books. Yet it contains clear argument, still valuable (and sometimes necessary) to-day, to distinguish between the prayer that is due to God alone and the honour and venera­tion due to exterior signs closely associated with God and hon­oured by Him with miracles and graces.

 

"Our affections are not fixed on the Cross or other relics; they are fixed on the Kingdom of heaven. In seeking the latter we make use of everything which can help us to raise our heart towards Him whom they recall. We must climb towards heaven. That is our aim and our final resting-place. Holy things here below are no more than steps useful for reaching it." "The sign of the Cross has in itself no virtue; but done for God's honour and to symbolise His cross, it becomes a very holy ceremony of which God often makes use to bring about great consequences."

 

Just as the war between France and Savoie was ending, François de Sales, writing to the Bishop on a business matter, went on: "Seeing that the business was not a pressing one, I am forwarding the two letters and remaining here (at Sales) because of the duty I owe to my father. Day by day, he is hastening to the other life and growing so weak in this one that unless God intervenes miraculously, I foresee myself losing in a very few days the consolation which I, as with everyone else at home, have always derived from so good a father. May God, the Lord of our Lives, ever be praised in all His decrees."

 

M. de Boisy lingered on a few weeks and de Sales was obliged to leave his family to preach the Lenten sermons of 1601 in Annecy. On April 6, a messenger reached him as he was ready to enter the pulpit. His father had died the previous evening. At the end of the sermon the preacher said: "I have to tell you that François de Boisy, your friend and my father, is dead. As you loved him, please pray for his soul and allow me two or three days' holiday that I may pay him the last rites."

 

It does not seem that the old man, who died at 79, had ever become fully reconciled to his eldest son's ecclesiastical career, nor had he any inkling of the fact that the name of de Sales would become immortalised through a vocation so much below th.3 proper aspirations of the head of the Sales. On the other hand, the love and reverence which François had always felt for his family fully included the father who had so little understood him and had done so much to thwart his bent and his call. But his father's death, no doubt, brought him even closer to his beloved and still young mother, to Louis (now returning from his studies in Rome) and his other brothers and little Jeanne, his sister, strengthening even further a rare gift for personal relationship which would express itself later in the deep spiritual friendships he would make as he guided men and women along mystical paths.

 

Much later, his friend Camus, the Bishop of Belley, was to say to him: "You have no reason to be dissatisfied with life. Every­thing smiles for you; everything succeeds. Your enemies respect you and even the enemies of religion pay you honour. You delight all who know you." And de Sales answered: " All this amounts to very little and is not to be relied upon. Those who shouted Hosanna to the Son of David cried out three days later ' Crucify Him! Crucify Him! ' Besides, nothing really counts except the soul. If I could live as long again as I have already lived with the certainty of all the happiness and prosperity which this life can offer, what would it all amount to in the light of eternity? "Perhaps the successful, admired and beloved Bishop of Geneva was then thinking back to these days of difficulty, frustration, unsuccessful plans and negotiations in a kind of over-busy half-world, a bishop and yet not a bishop, the maid of all work to whom everyone looked to solve a problem or get them out of a difficulty. Humble as he was, de Sales, one feels, was not a good second. His constructive imagination, bubbling with new ideas, his spirit, filled with the love of God and man in selfless service, needed the genius's personal responsibility and freedom. Yet for a young man with such a future, how valuable the discipline of the Chablais and the practical knowledge of men and affairs which these harsher years were affording him.

 

All this training was to be added to by an experience, even more valuable than the visit to Rome. He felt he had to see the King of France in connection with the ecclesiastical position in the Pays de Gex. This meant a journey to Paris—Paris, for him now, not so much the capital of culture as a centre of fresh spiritual endeavour after the cruel days of the Wars of Religion. Just as Paris in his student days had raised him above the cultural limitations of provincial Savoie, so now it could bring him into contact with men and women who shared and could define the spiritual forces within him that were reaching out for a deeper and more vital religion suited to ordinary men and women growing out of the old ecclesiasticism and the bitternesses of Reformation controversies and quarrels.

 

With Antoine Favre and Deage he set out for Paris at the beginning of 1602, and a January 3 letter makes clear the nature of his immediate business.

 

"In a few words much to say for I am in a hurry. Here I am in Meximiaux with the President [Favre], staying in his property, and just about to start together for Dijon. His business concerns a law-suit of importance to him; mine is to see the Marechal de Biron and the Baron de Lux. From both I hope to obtain a powerful recommendation to the monarch. From Dijon I shall go to him to deal with our business of Gex, the state of whose affairs is as follows. The Baron de Lux took our Bishop last month to the bailiwick of Gex and handed over to him three parishes where the religion would be Catholic: the town of Gex itself, Farges and Asserens, and gave him possession of their revenues. But we are not satisfied with this. We ask for everything, both so far as the exercise of religion is concerned —and this first—and as far as property. Our purpose is not only our own convenience, but the distress of the Huguenot religion which will very quickly and certainly fail if it is to depend on the money of the people. With all this in mind, Baron de Lux is sending us to the King and his Council, and I am going backed by so much good reason that if only we are supported victory will be ours. ... As for the Coadjutorship, I am deeply grateful for your interest. We shall see what happens. Whichever coast the ship makes for, the harbour will suit me."

 

The anticipated few weeks of business were to turn into months. Not until Easter could an audience with the King be arranged, and the first appointment was deferred. " I was never so frustrated," he complained in a letter and " I am terribly afraid that I shall be returning without anything better than a mere hope, but my conscience tells me that I have done all I can." Nicolas de Villerio, the Secretary of State, made empty promises, but the truth was that the Calvinists were pressing their claims equally hard and with more political backing.

 

At last, his luck seemed to turn, for he ran into Antoine des Hayes, a gentleman-in-waiting on the monarch whose private secretary he was. Des Hayes was a former comrade of Paris student days. Des Hayes had no difficulty in securing his friend an invi­tation to preach before the Court on Low Sunday. "If I had not already been converted, Monsieur de Geneve [as he was always called in Paris[1]] would have done it," commented Henri IV, and the next day de Sales and the king were walking together in the gardens of Fontainebleau. They took to each other at once, but on business matters Henri was too experienced to allow personal relations to affect policy. "I fear," wrote de Sales to Quoex, "that the negotiations will not prove very useful, despite the high favour in which I find myself with the great people here, and even with the king."

 

Henri neatly assessed de Sales's qualities: "A rare bird in­deed ; devout, learned and a gentleman into the bargain . . . He does not know the art of flattery; his mind is too sincere for that... He is the person most capable of restoring the ecclesiastical order to its first splendour. He is gentle, good and humble—deeply pious but without useless scruples." And the King, seeing the nature of the renewed friendship between de Sales and des Hayes, asked to be allowed to be the third party in it. The affable and libertine monarch's pen-portrait of de Sales is as neat as any that have been made.

 

This success with the King might have gained him something, but unfortunately "M. de Geneve" suddenly found himself involved in considerable personal danger. The Due de Biron, whose treasonable plot to carve himself out a personal kingdom in South-East France had been discovered, was arrested. De Sales's friend, Baron de Lux, was also arrested, and suspicion fell on de Sales himself as likely to have been involved in the con­spiracy against France.

 

Just as de Sales was about to preach on Corpus Christi, he was warned that he had been reported to the monarch for having come to Paris as the political agent of Charles-Emmanuel to further the machinations of the King's enemies. The charge sounded plausible enough in those times and few men would be able to hear such news without some sign of shock or fear. But de Sales remained completely undisturbed and preached his sermon as though nothing had happened. He then went straight to the Louvre to see Henri himself. Once suspected of being involved in a political conspiracy, it is never easy—nowadays as much as in the past—to clear oneself. But de Sales had made so strong and so good an impression on the King that it was enough for him to be himself. "I cannot help reports reaching me," the King said to him, "but I could never have suspected you." And de Sales could answer with a smile that if he, ignorant as he was of affairs of State, were ever to engage in them, he would certainly not be so foolish as to start in that way, especially after the King's kindness to him.

 

Instead of sending "M. de Geneve " to prison, Henri IV begged him to stay permanently in France, offered him a pension and hinted at a fine See soon likely to become vacant. "Sire," answered de Sales in the famous words, "I have married a poor wife and I cannot desert her for a richer one." His mot became the talk of the town.

 

Far more than such honours, de Sales wanted fair play in Gex. But the political atmosphere was less propitious than ever. Biron was soon to be executed, because he would not confess; de Lux and others were in the end pardoned. De Sales had to report to Clement VIII the royal answer. "More than anyone else," Henri had said to him, "I should personally like to see the entire re-establishment of the Catholic religion, but my wishes do not go hand in hand with my powers." And de Sales in his letter to the Pope sighed: "After nine months, I must return having accomplished virtually nothing."

 

But, looking back, we can see that these months in Paris bore far more important spiritual fruit than any ecclesiastico-political victory could bring. They completed François de Sales's training —the training which would make him a bishop of international fame and a saint.

 

He had arrived in Paris with a quickly growing reputation as an exceptional man, and, possessing as he did, the entree to the great families on the steps of the throne, he very soon had the opportunity of becoming widely known as priest and preacher. It happened that the pious Duchesse de Longueville, to whom the Mercoeurs were kin, had been asked by the Queen, Marie de' Medici, to find at short notice a substitute preacher for the Queen's Chapel in the Louvre. De Sales, intent only on his business, accepted with some reluctance and only out of polite­ness. Inevitably, however, he proved to be a startling success with his fresh simple manner of speaking quietly and thoughtfully from the heart to the hearts and consciences of congregations more accustomed to hear fine words and subtle arguments. Yet this man was no half-educated simpleton. He was a great gentleman and a learned person. We know, from some brief surviving notes, that he preached of" pure love by which God is loved for Himself with a complete dedication of the heart." Perhaps he was recalling those days of temptation in Paris which he overcame by his generous and instinctive elan of pure love. Certainly he was anticipating the spiritual approach which from now onwards was to win him immortal fame.

 

Calvinists, as well as Catholics, were moved by this personal religion of love rather than fear and the letter of the law. De Sales was to explain later how this experience drove home the lesson that "he who preaches with love is preaching well enough against heretics even though he does not utter a word against them." Soon, he was everywhere in demand as preacher and personal adviser in matters of the spirit. There were other great spiritual men in Paris at that date, but the people were captivated by this combination of spiritual freshness addressed to the hearts of all, united as it was with gentleness, graciousness, affability, geniality, a douceur which was neither soft nor sentimental and that seemed connatural to this young and impressive figure. His personality made its immediate mark.

 

Even so, his mind, as we have seen, was not on the pastoral opportunities of the capital, but on his unsuccessful business, and it was an accident that so many men and women in Paris, among them Madame Acarie, the famous mystic, had the chance of appreciating the spiritual value of what he himself as yet hardly suspected, namely the all-importance of his own instinct for getting at the heart of true religion and being its own best exem­plar. De Sales was now to enter into the company of those whose lives were being consciously—almost scientifically—dedi­cated to the unum necessarium, the one necessary and truly meaning­ful aim in human life, namely, the seeking of God within oneself rather than the seeking of oneself within God, as Fenelon was so neatly to put it. From Madame Acarie, one of the most interesting and astonishing contemplative women in the annals of the Saints, de Sales was to learn to formulate what he already instinctively lived, namely the science of detachment from crea­tures and attachment to the divine through the love of Him who alone is pure love. In the annals of the saints she is known as Blessed Mary of the Incarnation, but almost alone among the saints and the beati she lives for posterity by her married name, Madame Acarie.

 

Born Barbe Avrillot, her life-span (1566 to 1618) was nearly-parallel to that of François de Sales. Married to Pierre Acarie at the age of 16, she had by this time borne him six children. Few women can have led a busier and more normal life as wife, mother and Parisian hostess. Her husband, whom she loved deeply, got himself into trouble through his activities on behalf of the Catholic League and after the triumph of Henri IV he had been exiled from Paris and disgraced. He was away from home for about 15 years, and during that long period Barbe had to make herself entirely responsible for her children and the running of her house. Into the bargain she had to deal with the impaired finances of the family and satisfactorily settle them. There could be no doubt that she was a strong and capable person with all her wits about her—the last kind of woman who would be likely to fall for spiritual illusions. Amazingly, Barbe Acarie succeeded somehow in combining her domestic and business duties with a rare contemplative life in the closest union with God.

 

In a 1606 letter to Mme. Briilart, de Sales was to refer to "a lady, one of the greatest souls I ever met," almost certainly Mme. Acarie." She was long subject to the moods of her husband who insisted that even in her most ardent devotions she should be decollete and covered with vanities. She had also to go to Communion secretly, except for Easter. Had she disobeyed, she would have raised many storms in her house. Yet by this road she rose very high as I know having heard her confession many times."

 

It all began, oddly enough, because her husband thought she was wasting her time reading light novels. Pierre Acarie gave her what he thought more suitable reading, if read she must. Thus she came across a sentence from St. Augustine, " trop est avare a qui Dieu ne suffit" (a person must indeed be a miser to need more than God). This sentence was a revelation to her. Not long after, Barbe was found in church, immobile, hardly breath­ing, rapt. On emerging from this consoling but frightening experience, her first worry was that she had been neglecting her household duties. And was it, she asked herself, the effect of a diseased mind? Was it a visitation of the devil? Was it truly from God?

 

Barbe Acarie had to wait some time before she met a priest who was experienced enough in such matters to judge of what it all meant, the more so in that there were many false mystics about in Paris. It was the English Capuchin, Benet of Canfield, who, as we have seen, must have met de Sales in his university days. This experienced mystical theologian had no doubt that this immensely active woman, full of commonsense, had been chosen by God from the first for this rare intimacy with Him. Barbe Acarie, indeed, was the sort of mystic who, when she felt the movement of the divine presence within her, began desperately to play the spinet to ward off the intensity of the experience, and if she started reciting the Rosary with her daughter she went off into an ecstasy at once, leaving the daughter, not at all surprised, to continue on her own.

 

There is something almost comic about the set-up in the Acarie home which resulted. The place buzzed with distinguished clerics and lay people. Theological experts, spiritual directors, pious men and women seeking edification, ladies organising the charities and good works that spread from this spiritual centre, these were always coming and going, while Barbe, in so far as her ecstasies allowed, carried on her wifely, maternal and domestic life. Poor Pierre, deprived of normal married life, not (as one might have thought) because of his wife's exalted vocation, but because she could not have more children without grave physical danger, could no longer call his home his own. Barbe, now wisely directed, seems to have reached a state of almost habitual union with God so perfectly controlled and so detached that she could carry on her normal, over-full life. Nor did she write a word about her experiences, nor found any spiritual school of her own.

 

Barbe was evidently impressed by this new preacher from Savoie for she recommended a well-known Calvinist lady to come with her and hear him. The personal introduction was, however, made by Pierre de Berulle, the future cardinal, diplomat and mystical writer, but then a young cleric and member of a family with close personal relations with the Acaries.

 

De Sales, somewhat awed by it all, must nevertheless have been happy indeed to find in the Acarie home a whole world of learning and holiness—the highest-level focus, it seemed, of the spiritual renovation which was so marked a feature of the capital. Regular visitors included Dom Beaucousin of the Carthusians (the Order that needed no reform); Andre Duval, of the Sor-bonne, and Barbe's future biographer; the Jesuit Coton who brilliantly handled the spiritual direction of the wayward mon­arch; the fascinating de Bretigny who was a kind of Don Quixote in dedicating himself to bringing the Carmelites from Spain to France; François du Tremblay or Pere Joseph, the future Grey Eminence of Richelieu; Ange de Joyeuse; and Benet of Canfield himself. Such men, and many others, were the general staff of Bremond's "mystical invasion" of the 17th century.

 

Soon de Sales was a regular visitor to the Acarie home, crossing Paris on foot "in any weather, sun or rain, and through the mud of which there was plenty in Paris," as Charles-Auguste reports. Some were already looking on him as a saint, and Barbe herself chose him as her confessor—a puzzling commission since, as he later recorded, she never seemed to commit the small­est venial sin and was guilty at worst of mere imperfections.

 

Even so, it was clear that de Sales was very much the disciple, and the mistress of the house the teacher. After her death he wrote: "She was a great servant of God. What a mistake I made in not profiting enough from her conversation, for she was very willing to speak to me of all that went on in her soul, but the infinite respect which I had for her prevented me from asking any questions." The fact was that de Sales's humility and slight fear of the spiritual "experts" then and later, while never preventing him from carrying out his spiritual duties towards them, made him move very cautiously with them. Anyway, Barbe Acarie was not destined to be his teacher, partner or disciple in the mystical way. This was reserved for another saint whom he would soon meet and with whom he would link himself with unique bonds of holy friendship. Nevertheless, the import­ance of Mme. Acarie and her circle in his development should not be underestimated. The experience had all the force of a first encounter with a world of which he knew little, yet which he knew was his world also.

 

"Simplicity," sums up Bremond, "forgive me repeating so often that all-important word. None is more in tune with the spiritual movement which we have undertaken to describe. François de Sales was to be the great doctor of the mystical life reduced to its essential and beneficent simplicity, Mme. Acarie was its great inspirer and its perfect model. Both of them, equally definite, equally liberating, equally wise, followed different ways in their teachings, for their gifts and their rank in the Church were different. But what they taught was the same. The Treatise on the Love of God formulates, establishes, defends and spreads, with the authority of a theologian and a bishop, some­thing which, long before that work appeared, everyone could have read, and many had read, in the living book which was Mme. Acarie."

 

Where for the moment "Monsieur de Geneve," friend of the Pope, friend of the King and well-versed in diplomatic ways, could do useful work was in giving his aid and authority to the great project to bring to France St. Teresa's reformed Carmel. The plan was not new, and Bremond recounts in one of his most delightful chapters the adventures of the Seigneur de Bretigny who had been engaged in trying to carry out this plan. The times however, had not been propitious, for France and Spain had been enemies and the Carmelites were themselves terrified of the French heretics. Barbe Acarie herself had not been very impressed by what she had read of St. Teresa for she was deeply distrustful of visions and marvels. St. Teresa herself undertook to answer that criticism by personally appearing to Barbe in Barbe's first vision, and she asked that the Carmel should be brought to France. From then onwards the project was taken seriously, and de Sales strongly supported it. It fell to de Sales to write to the Pope about it.

 

"During my stay in Paris," he wrote, "where I was occupied with the business whose outcome I have reported to Your Holiness, I had to accept invitations to preach many times to the people and in the presence of the King himself and the princes. It was on such an occasion that madame Catherine d'Orleans, Princesse de Longueville, a most illustrious lady not only because of the nobility of the princes of her house, but far more because of her love of Christ, asked me to join with other theologians of eminent piety and deep learning in studying together a plan of the duchess to found in Paris a monastery of the Order of Reformed Car­melites. We worked together on this plan for some days and, having fully examined it, we agreed that it was inspired by God and would contribute to His greater glory and the salvation of many souls." The letter went on to acquaint the Pope with the difficulty that it did not seem possible also to introduce Carmelite friars to govern the convent, but three men, suitable for this purpose, had been chosen instead. "It remains for me to express the wish that the Holy Apostolic See should approve this under­taking and entrust its carrying out to the will of the King who has given it his consent, a consent which, against expectation, he gave at once. Thus it is that the bearer of this letter throws himself at Your Holiness's feet, praying for the grant of the Apostolic Bulls necessary for the establishment and carrying through of this work."

 

By the autumn of 1604, six Spanish Carmelites under Anne of Jesus, accompanied by Berulle and Bretigny, had entered France, expecting daily to be martyred by the French and heroically I! waving crucifixes and rosaries from the coach window in order I to bring this fate upon them.   Very soon they had changed their I views to the extent of believing that the fervour of French Catho­licism recalled the glories of the primitive Church.

 

From Anne of Jesus and the first Paris Carmel which dc Sales helped prepare, all the reformed Carmels of England and, one I supposes, America today are derived.

 

Barbe Acarie herself, after the death of her husband, entered Carmel as Mary of the Incarnation.  She was to die in Pontoise, and the Bishop of Geneva, then in touch with Angelique Arnauld in near-by Maubuisson, was to make more than one pilgrimage to her grave.

 

De Sales's planned six weeks' visit to Paris had extended to nine months.   Though it was time wasted so far as the business which had taken him there was concerned, one might adopt the Jesuit word " tertianship" to describe its value to him.  Just as the Jesuits after their ordination spend a third year of novitiate, called the tertianship, to prepare them for their ministry, so François de Sales obtained in Paris the spiritual and social preparation for his life's great work as Bishop, spiritual director and writer of the love of God. It seemed to have been providen­tially planned, for on his way home he was given the news of the unexpected death of Mgr. de Granier and his own consequent automatic succession to the See of Geneva-Annecy.  He had never got round to taking up the Bulls appointing him Coadjutor Bishop of Nicopolis, though he had got as far as writing from Paris to his mother to arrange about the payment, "for after having received all this promotion and all these favours I cannot in decency hold back from it."

 

Of his predecessor he wrote in a letter to the Pope: "By his own efforts, together with those of his collaborators, he brought back to the fold of the Lord twenty-five thousand lost sheep. A man of ancient faith, of ancient ways, of ancient piety and ancient constancy, he is surely worthy of immortality and his memory calls for universal blessings."

 

The apostle of the Chablais, who was now giving the chief credit to his predecessor, seemed already to belong to the past. He was getting ready to be married to his " poor wife " of a diocese of which he was to be the saint with a fame even in his own lifetime that spread far beyond the boundaries of Savoie.

 

Deeply filial, he chose to be married to it from his home in Thorens. In the large village church rather than in the pro-cathedral of Annecy he would be consecrated and on the feast of the Immaculate Conception, December 8, 1602.

 

During the ceremony, as he himself later explained to Jeanne-Françoise de Chantal, he experienced a vivid inner sense of the Holy Trinity directly operating on his person that which the consecrating prelates were externally operating with their symbolic actions and words—and the awareness of this divine action within him remained with him for six weeks. "God," he was to say to Ste. Chantal, "deprived me of myself to make me His and to give me to my people. In other words, He changed me from what I had been for myself into what I would become for them." The dedication, as will be seen, was complete and until death through increasing suffering.

 

Six days later, he took possession of his diocese and was solemnly enthroned. All Annecy, magistrates, clergy, regular and secular, and the whole people joined in the enthusiastic welcome to the new Prince-Bishop of Geneva who, if still not well-known to people generally in the great world of Europe, was certainly already a hero in his own country.

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[1] "Here I am treated as a bishop . . . this spurious honour is very useful to me even though I do not like to be so called before my time ; but manco male! It is the lesser evil."

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