Salesian Literature

8.  Francois and Jeanne Francoise (1604)

 

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."

​

Back to Top

​