Salesian Literature

11.  Foundation of the Visitation (1607-1612)

 

How often the Bishop's letters contain sad, though resigned, complaints of the mountain of work which each day brings to him. And we know, too, that though physically a well-built and strong man, he was easily exhausted. Twice illness had brought him to death's door, though, as with so many people, he enjoyed rather better health in his middle years. Those years, however, brought a certain degree of corpulence which must have increased the strain on a physique always affected by a bad circulation and, one must suppose, a prematurely early hardening of the arteries and high blood pressure. Yet his intense activity under such physical handicaps was less than half the story, for the most important part of François de Sales's busy days was the part which he devoted to prayer.

 

In the early years of his episcopate, he had felt obliged to cut down on the time of prayer that he had planned, and in his last years mounting pressure of work and weakened health forced him once again to desist from a regular timetable of prayer, and this all the more readily in that he had acquired a contemplative habit of continuously attending to God which, as he himself realised quite well, was equal to formal prayer. "I do something which is as good" as he told his first biographer, the Feuillant superior-general, Dom Jean de Saint-François.

 

But in his middle life, he allowed no day to pass without a full hour's morning meditation. "You gave me great pleasure in one of your letters in asking if I made a meditation," he wrote to Jeanne de Chantal in 1607. "My daughter, do so and ask me always about the state of my soul, for I know well that your curiosity in this comes from the great love you have for me. Yes, my daughter, by God's grace I can say that now, better than before, I make my mental prayer, for I never miss a day, unless it be on a Sunday because of confessions. God gives me the strength to rise sometimes before daylight to do this, especially when I foresee the heavy weight of business during the day. And it all goes happily. I feel I enjoy it more and more and would willingly do it twice a day, but this is not possible."

 

To this had to be added, of course, an hour and more of daily Office, his Mass and his daily Rosary which he had vowed never to miss. Intensely spiritual, too, was the part of the day which he devoted to hearing confessions and to his regular visits in Annecy to the poor, the sick and the prisoners. How all this was compatible with the twenty to thirty letters in his own hand which he wrote daily, with the morning hours spent with visiting officials and the afternoon hours, when he held open house for all who wished to see him personally, is a mystery, but it reminds us that behind the intense activity there went a prolonged daily communion with God from which he derived the peculiarly sure insight he possessed in making the great decisions of his life.

 

These decisions were never more mysterious and striking, and yet never more definite and decisive, than in the case of his relations with the Baronne de Chantal. We recall the unhurried and deliberate decision in regard to the vows she had taken to her first spiritual director, a matter that had led to the dramatic meeting at Sainte-Claude, the pilgrimage town where the roads from Dijon and from Annecy met. That had taken place in August, 1604. Each year since then Jeanne de Chantal had made the journey from Monthelon to Thorens at her own request in order to disclose personally the state of her soul to a bishop who welcomed her, yet confessed how hard it was for him to find time to give her. "The place I suggest is with my mother at Thorens, because in this town 1 could not promise you a single moment of my time ... I cannot tell you if we shall need many days to make the balance of your interior state: a little more, a little less, we shall work it out."

 

In the spring of 1607, de Sales welcomed her with greater solemnity; "God will be glorified in your journey and your arrival, in that He alone has arranged it and freed me from the business which I thought a little time ago would prevent so early K date." This time Annecy was the rendezvous. "You will be consoled to see in how small a way we live here in my house, in the daily round, in everything, and to see also our beautiful Office for in this my Chapter excels."

 

As at Sainte-Claude this Pentecostal meeting at Annecy was to mark a decisive step for them both. François de Sales had once again made up his mind, it seemed out of the blue, yet in fact out of his long hours of prayer and meditation. It was Whit-Monday, and Mere de Chaugy has given the story to posterity.

 

"Having taken her aside after Mass, he [de Sales] said to her, his demeanour grave and serious and as though rapt in God: 'Well, my daughter, I have made up my mind what to do with you.' 'And I,' she answered, 'am resolved to obey.' She then fell to her knees. The saint did not tell her to rise, but stood two Steps away from her: 'You must enter Sainte-Claire [the Poor Clares of Annecy],' he answered. 'Father,' she said, 'I am ready.'—'No, you are not strong enough, I waul you to be a sister in the hospital of Beaune.' - 'Just as you please.' - 'No, this is not what I really want,' he went on, 'You must become a Carmelite.' - 'I am ready to obey.' Then he made various other suggestions to try her, and he saw that she was like wax softened by the divine warmth, ready to be shaped to any form of religious life that he wanted her to accept."

 

After this little testing litany the Bishop was ready to disclose his real decision and explain to her his plan to found in Annecy itself a new religious congregation. Jeanne de Chantal later confessed that only when he explained this plan did she feel in entire harmony with him. Yet to both at the time it seemed a hopeless proposition which could not possibly be realised for six or seven years. How could this widowed mother of four children, the youngest only six years old, living with her irascible father-in-law more than 200 miles away, hope to enclose herself in a new religious order in Annecy? No wonder de Sales warned her that he saw great difficulties ahead and not a clue as to how any of them could be overcome, "yet I can give you my word that divine Providence will see to it by ways hidden from His crea­tures." And the Savoyard Bishop can hardly have done much to reassure her when he said that he was quite determined to plant this new tree in such a way that its roots should cling firmly to the mountains of his native land.

 

What many have taken to be the first sign of the providential removal of the immense obstacles to the realisation of François de Sales's plan took place a few days later before Jeanne de Chantal had left Annecy. Returning from the Corpus Christi procession, she was so tired that she could hardly climb the stairs to reach her room. A number of men went to help her, but she turned to the Bishop's 24-year-old brother, Bernard, and said to the others that she would like them to allow him to escort her upstairs. She later definitely asserted that this invitation had no deeper meaning and that what she had said she had said out of mere politeness. But the choice and the words caused tongues to wag, and soon the Bishop's mother was convinced that the rich Baronne de Chantal had it in mind to marry one of her young daughters to the relatively poor Bernard.

 

Subtly, the strange intertwining of events, whose ultimate purpose no one seemed clearly to discern, continued. For when the little Jeanne de Sales died at Monthelon, Jeanne de Chantal for the first time had the real inspiration to make it up to the Sales family by the sacrifice to them of her eldest daughter, Marie-Aimee, a sacrifice, which at the time she only saw as demanding of her in Monthelon a deeply painful separation from her daughter who would have to live near Annecy.

 

Only after making this unselfish decision did she begin to realise that a marriage between her young daughter and Bernard de Sales would pave the way for her own definitive settlement in Savoie. Even so, this was still a dim and distant prospect, for not only did her son and her two younger daughters hold her to France, but both her own father and her father-in-law would never give their consent to losing her. After all, Bernard was of an age to look after a wife older than his own mother had been at the time of her marriage. That mother still lived at Thorens and was perfectly capable of looking after the prospective young Chantal bride. The most that could be looked for was that Jeanne de Chantal would have an excellent excuse for long stays with her daughter and son-in-law in Savoie, near François de Sales. It looked very much as though the latter was not exag­gerating when he had foreseen a six- or seven-year delay before Mme. de Chantal's vocation could be realised.

 

Yet within two years the situation had completely changed, for Mme. de Chantal had found a way of getting her old father half-way at least on her side. The ('duration of her younger daughters now had to be seriously envisaged, for the environment of her choleric father-in-law and his deplorable old servant at Monthelon was not suitable for them as they grew older. Her father, M. Fremyot, desirous in his old age of having his daughter near him, was delighted to hear of her anxiety. Why should she not leave Monthelon and come to live with him in Dijon? Her headstrong boy, Celse-Benigne, in his teens, was already of an age to leave his family, as de Sales had done years before, and train himself for a man's career in Dijon, under her father's care. Marie-Aimee would be settled with her husband at Thorens— "that little Aimee will be 'des très mieux aimées' sisters you can think of, for I shall be her brother," as de Sales put it. And as for the little ones, it was time that they should be put in the hands of the Ursulines.

 

The poor man, in making these suggestions, had dug his own grave. His daughter quickly pointed out that these excellent suggestions would also free her at last "to follow the divine vocation which for so many years has called me to leave the world and consecrate myself entirely to God's service." To get his consent to this terrible separation would take a little time, but the old man had inadvertently yielded what had seemed such solid ground for resistance to the determination of the widowed mother and daughter. By October, 1609, the de Sales-de Chantal marriage had taken place and Marie-Aimee had become the Baronne de Thorens, the title bestowed by the Duke on Bernard who, in the division of the de Sales land, had received the seigneurie and chateau of Thorens. Jeanne's father now had to give his consent.

 

These plans were all the easier to realise when early in 1610, François de Sales's mother died and the presence of Mme. de Chantal near her young married daughter in Savoie became all the more necessary and fitting.

 

Thus it came about that the six or seven years were most unexpectedly shortened to three. By then it had been decided, with the consent of M. Fremyot, his son the Archbishop and even the old father-in-law at Monthelon, that Jeanne should part with her son and take with her to Savoie her little daughter, Françoise. Charlotte, the youngest, had unhappily died, like Jeanne de Sales, only a few weeks before the solemn day of departure, March 29, 1610.

 

It was on this day that took place the famous heartrending scene. Jeanne's father, unable to endure the pain of separation had retired to his study. The other friends and relations were saying the final goodbyes.   Jeanne then turned to enter her father's study and embrace him for the last time when her boy, Celse-Benigne, threw himself at her feet to prevent her passing him. He said: "Mother, I am too weak and too unhappy to be able to stop you leaving, but at least let it be said that you have trampled on your son at your feet."   As Jeanne, in tears, stepped over her son, his tutor said to her: "Are not this young man's tears enough to break your resolution?" "No," she answered, trying to smile, "But what do you expect.    I am a mother." M. Fremyot had by now steeled himself to accept the sacrifice, and the mother, with her two daughters and Bernard de Sales, mounted their horses to begin the journey from Dijon to Thorens.

 

Celse-Benigne's action was so theatrical that it was thought that his relations had coached him in it as a final and rather heartless attempt to prevent Jeanne from burying herself in a convent.    But some may feel that both François de Sales and Jeanne de Chantal were cruel to plan this separation from a 15-year-old boy, the even younger married daughter and the little Françoise.  Jeanne de Chantal, however, was not going into an enclosed convent, and indeed in a year or two she would return to Dijon to see to the family business.  Celse-Benigne was at an age when in those days a nobleman was beginning to make his own career.  He was destined to live a very short life.   He was to be nearly executed through being involved in the conspiracy of the Comte de Chalais against Richelieu in 1626 and he died the next year fighting the English on the He de Re. His daughter, Marie, married Henri, Marquis de Sevigne, and earned her literary immortality. Finally, the separation of mother from daughters was not to be physical. Where Jeanne was to go as a vowed nun, both Marie-Aimee and Françoise would always be welcome as the dearest and closest of guests and friends. Once again, the gentle spirit of François de Sales was to convert what in itself Was an excruciating sacrifice for God into a unique idyll of austerity, as the little girl, "Francon," played among the nuns with her squirrel and her birds, while a smile of silent love would light up the superior's face as, about her spiritual business, she Saw her married daughter and her youngest moving through the convent or its orchard.

 

While Mme. de Chantal was responding with such determina­tion to François de Sales's declared certainty as to God's will for her and so successfully brushing aside the "great difficulties the solution to which I cannot begin to see," as the Bishop had described them, things were happening in Savoie that seemed not less providential.

 

One by one the first little community of which Jeanne-Françoise was to be the head was appearing.   "Mademoiselle Favre has at last made up her mind with the consent of her father to give herself entirely to Our Lord and to be my daughter more than ever—I think with her we shall fashion something good," wrote de Sales to Mme. de Chantal a few weeks before she left for Annecy.   Marie-Jacqueline Favre was the daughter of de Sales's closest friend and not by nature, it seemed, the type to make a nun.   There had once been hope that she would marry Louis de Sales, the brother to whom François felt closest. But the reading of the Devout Life  caused   Marie-Jacqueline   to   think   again about life in the world.   "I no longer need to look for the way of virtue," she wrote to the Bishop. "Against that love of freedom which I feel so strongly I am struggling, seeking to make myself obedient and I dare not be cowardly in such a resolve," she had written to him.

 

An easier vocation was that of Marie-Aimee de Blonay, whom de Sales had known as a little girl in the Chablais days.    Her mother was dead and her father had become a priest. It was only a question of time, as François de Sales knew, but he waited for her to make the first move. For an hour they talked and, as Marie-Aimee described it, "during this very holy and very happy conversation my soul was filled with a new awareness of the divine presence and of God's angels." "Courage, my daughter," the Bishop wrote to Mme. de Chantal, "God wishes to help us in our purpose and he is preparing for us the best. Mile, de Blonay, of whom I used to speak to you, has told me of her desire to be a religious. God has marked her for our congregation."

 

The third vocation was inspired in France, not Savoie, by Mme. de Chantal. Tragedy seemed to hover over this vocation, first, because Jeanne-Charlotte de Brechard, who lost her mother in infancy, led the most miserable of lives under a neglectful father; and, secondly, because it was her close relationship to the man who killed Jeanne-Françoise's husband which, it would seem, drew them together. The Poor Clares, the Carmelites, she had tried them both, but her health could not stand their rule. De Sales, when at Monthelon for the marriage of Bernard to Marie-Aimee, at once realised that here was a woman specially suited for the foundation he was planning. "Yes, truly, I can well believe how much you suffered in leaving your dear mother [Mme. de Chantal]," the Bishop wrote to her, "for she too on her side was deeply upset. But one day your life in company with hers will last eternally if it pleases the Eternal God."

 

But of the first little company none perhaps is more touching than Jacqueline Coste, the devoted Geneva inn servant so faithful to de Sales, who asked to be tourière in the new community.

 

Thus the community selected itself, but what of the convent itself? This problem seemed to resolve itself just as easily. Louis de Sales's father-in-law, Berard de Pingon, and his wife Charlotte had both resolved a few years earlier to separate and enter into religious life. Their first plan to do so had not proved a success. Now they proposed to start a Carmel in Annecy. The wife would live with the community, while the husband would live with the Capuchins of the town. Perfect for the Carmelites was a house which M. de Pingon had bought, but… Let us hear the account as de Sales described it in a letter to Mme. de Chantal. "Here is something rather remarkable. On my arrival, I found that one half at least of our hopes about the erection of a monastery into which to draw our good Carmelites had crashed, for one of those who, we thought, would contribute cannot make up her mind to leave the world. After this, the person who runs the whole ship and on whom the other foundress depends proposed to me, without my having said anything to him and without knowing anything himself, that since the house had already been bought and practically got ready for a dozen nuns, it would be a good thing to use it for a congregation of pious ladies along the lines which he had formerly discussed with an old Italian Capuchin. I gave him no answer, and now he has come back. We discussed the subject and he cannot get it out of his mind. So I am waiting, and if it all seems suitable I shall not refuse the offer. God will be with us, if He approves, in all this."

 

In this way, while Mme. de Chantal, with Bernard and her children, was at Thorens, settling her business affairs in such a way as only to be left with a small annuity for the convent, the house, called La Galerie was prepared for the new community. It was so called because it was linked with an orchard by a little bridge crossing the road outside the town walls by the lake to Faverges.

 

After certain final difficulties, all was ready for the opening on Trinity Sunday, June 6, 1610, significantly the feast of Sainte Claude under whose gates, years earlier, the pilgrimage towards Mme. de Chantal's contemplative life had begun.

 

Jeanne-Françoise, ever a prey in her spiritual life to severe temptations and desolations, spent hours in misery, before the final step haunted by the memory of the parting scene in Dijon and the anguish of her father, her father-in-law, her children and her relations. In the night, she could not have recourse to François, but with a great act of faith and abandonment to God's so clearly expressed will, she overcame the trial and with a renewed joy went to the Bishop's house for the Mass and Holy Communion with which her life of religion would start. Alas, Marie-Aimee de Blonay was not of the little company, for at the last moment her priest-father had withdrawn his consent. She would have to wait eighteen months before joining. Her vacant place was, however, very shortly to be filled by four vocations, those of Peronne-Marie de Chastel, Claude-Françoise Roget, Marie Marguerite Milletot and Marie-Adrienne Fichet, the last espe­cially dear to de Sales because he had baptised her in the course of his Chablais apostolate.

 

Meanwhile, that Trinity Sunday, the first three Visitation nuns, Jeanne-Françoise de Chantal, Jeanne-Charlotte de Brechard and Marie-Jacqueline Favre spent the day praying and visiting the poor. At nine o'clock in the evening, with the sun beginning to set on one of the longest days of the year, the three postulants, accompanied by relations and friends, walked down towards the lake, to be received at the Galerie by Jacqueline Coste, the touriere, who had got everything ready for them. Next morning, they put on their black novices' habit to await the Bishop who would say the first Mass in their little chapel. Incorrigibly, François de Sales when he returned to his own residence smiled and said: "Really, one can't say that our ladies have improved their appearance with their new head-gear."

 

More seriously, but with the same delightful spontaneity which characterised him, François de Sales on the next day turned himself into a composer and gave the new community its simple, three-note chant. He also made up his mind to improve the Latin accent of Mere de Chantal, as she now was, for his view was that "no one pronounces that language as badly as the French."

 

François de Sales, as we have had more than one occasion to note, was never the kind of man who envisaged great horizons already filled in his imagination with elaborate and complex structures one day to be realised. He was not a man of theories and ideas. Rather, he lived experimentally, slowly, filled with the sense of God guiding him and mysteriously showing him the next step. It was in doing things that his love of God and his rich, zealous, but practical, imagination showed him how things should be best and most generously done. The apostolate of the Chablais, his conception of a Catholic bishop's vocation, his spiritual guidance of so many along the road of perfection, none of these did he foresee and plan. Had he been able to do so, he could have done nothing but recoil from seeming impossibilities. He could only have accomplished them because they were for him, with his generosity and imaginative insight, the line of duty inherent in the love and service of God.

 

It was exactly the same with the foundation of the Visitation. Describing the foundation in a letter written about six weeks after the little community had been established, he said: "As to the rules… this Congregation receives either widows or spinsters, but not children under 17. They do a year of probation or, if necessary, two or three… After the novitiate, they are sol­emnly received, but not to vows, that is, solemn ones, but to the kind of establishment and dedication which the Blessed Charles Borromeo drew up for the Ursulines ... No men may enter the house for any reason, and women only with written permission. The younger members only leave the house very rarely, but the elder members leave it to serve the poor, but under safeguards of the same kind as for the Ladies of the Torre di Specchi [St. Frances of Rome's community]. They only sing the Office of Our Lady with a very devotional chant. In the summer they rise at five and go to bed at ten; in the winter at six and half-past ten. They have an hour's mental prayer in the morning and another hour in the evening. For the rest, they have a discipline of work, lilence, obedience, humility and poverty as strict as in any monastery in the world... They only keep the ordinary fasts of the Church, except for Fridays and the vigils of feasts of Our Lady. It is founded under the name of the Visitation of Our Lady."

 

It was a rough-and-ready sketch to be filled out and made precise in rule and spirit as experience and spontaneous growth would suggest. Even now, the name was wrong. De Sales's feelings about the nature of the foundation were, no doubt, expressed as he wondered whether to call it Filles de Sainte-Marthe or Soeurs Oblates de la Sainte Vierge, for the ideals of Martha and Mary were to be blended in the lives of the nuns. Then, on the first feast of the Visitation of Our Lady, he told the community that the Visitation was the name he wanted, not merely because the nuns were to serve the poor, but because it was in meditating on that event that he was obtaining light about the future of the congregation. But the name Visitation de Notre Dame gave way to the popular name given to the community, les Saintes-Maries in the final title: la Visitation Sainte-Marie.

 

What is amply clear from the whole mind and spirituality of the founder, especially in his relations with Mme. de Chantal, is that, from the start, the new congregation was to be contemplative rather than active. Its purpose was to enable women, unfit through health, temperament or vocation to withstand the rigours of the Poor Clares or the Carmelites, to live nevertheless contem­plative lives in a dedicated and approved religious community. In this, it was simply a special application of the general teaching of the Introduction to the Devout Life for a small minority of women who felt called to leave the world, but not called to lives of great external austerity. De Sales, who was very hard on himself, and ready to prescribe to others a degree of external penance, such as the use of the discipline, was nevertheless very moderate in this regard for the times. His real emphasis was always on morti­fication of the mind, will and senses.

 

There has been a good deal of speculation as to why he broke with tradition in not insisting on the enclosure of his community and in prescribing the active work of ministering to the sick and poor in their own homes—this in lay dress. But these first rules correspond with his own commonsense, his naturally experimental mind. He himself was not a set contemplative, but a man called by his work to the most active of lives—so active that to this day one cannot imagine how he could have got through so much work. In him, an ever higher degree of contemplative prayer remained consistent with an ever more busy life. Why then should he not have thought it best that his new nuns should mingle active work with their first contemplative aim, not only because action does not necessarily interfere with contemplation, but because practical good works needed in Annecy should be the fruit of a life of Christian prayer, however high. This view corresponds with his own words in a letter to the Archbishop of Lyons, Mgr. de Marquemont, when the question was raised in connec­tion with the foundation of a Visitation convent in that city. "As for visiting the sick, this was really something extra, suited to the devotion of those who founded this congregation and to the place where they lived, not a principal aim." The belief that the Visitation was really meant to be an anticipation of St. Vin­cent's Sisters of Charity seems to be due to a misreading of the title. This was meant by the Founder to be interpreted in a spiritual sense, but it was taken by others to mean literally visiting the sick and poor. The actual work of visiting the poor was, even in the first practice of the Visitation at Annecy, restricted to a rota of nuns which left the majority to lead a contemplative life in a virtual enclosure.

 

Inevitably, a number of people were scandalised by what seemed to them to be getting the best of both worlds. Was it not a waste of a bishop's time to bother himself in this way about a few pious women who could not face the traditional austerity of convent life and yet would not live in the world? He was severe enough when it came to reforming the old orders, but when he wasted his time creating a new one, it was all softness. There was no future in this kind of semi-convent.

 

But he had many friends who fully appreciated the poten­tialities of this new way of religious life "not too easy for the strong, nor too severe for the weak… Who would not pity a virgin, her lighted lamp in hand and with plenty of oil, prevented nevertheless from entering the cloister, just because her shoulders are not tough enough to endure a camel-skin habit and her stomach not strong enough to fast for half the year or digest roots?" Thus the Jesuit Père Ignace Armand reassured de Sales when he was consulted about the complaints.

 

Whatever the critics, a small minority in a city devoted to its bishop and edified by its new romantic community, might say – some of them objected to marriageable young women being whisked off to easy convent life – the life of the Visitation itself continued along the lines envisaged by de Sales. Exactly a year after the first establishment, on June 6, 1611, Mere de Chantal, Soeur de Brechard and Soeur Favre made their first profession. Marie-Aimee and Françon were, of course, present. Fran9on is a delightful creature in the early Visitation story, for it seemed obvious to the community that Mere de Chantal's daughter, being educated by them, would live to be her mother's successor. The girl, full of fun, yet ready as young children are to imitate those around them, was willing to play up to them, even whipping herself with nettles collected in the orchard. But she had no intention of becoming a nun, and François de Sales understood her perfectly. He was content gently to reprove her for her love of pretty clothes. Catching her one day preening herself with her curls and ribbons, he frowned at her and made her blush. "The dress comes from the world," he said, "but the blush, it seems, from heaven." Françon was destined to marry and live until 1684.

 

Though the community on the day of their first profession consisted only of three with five novices, the founder was full of optimism. He saw the ceremony of profession, as he said in his sermon, as grains of wheat that had fallen in a certain province, destined to multiply in a few years across the whole country. A friend writing to him a little later, said: "It seems to me, Monseigneur, that this congregation was something that the Church needed so that God called you in these days to raise it up. Our Lord has surely visited His people and we must believe that this first blessing will spread to an ever-widening circle. What, indeed, was wanting to the weak but this moderate rule, what to widows but this gentleness, what to the strong and fervent but this mortification?"

 

Amidst so much that could be written about these first days of the Visitation, but which cannot be fitted into these pages, one significant incident cannot be omitted. It suddenly struck de Sales that his foundation, like the great orders of the Church, should have its own coat-of-arms. This would not seem to us a prime necessity, and even the times and de Sales's reasonable pride in his own ancient family would hardly account for his excitement about his idea. "God," he said, "gave me the idea that our Visitation house is, through His grace, noble and important enough to have its arms, blazon, motto and battle-cry. I have thought, my dear Mother, that if you agree we should take for our arms a single heart pierced by two arrows, the whole within a crown of thorns, this poor heart as a ground from which a cross would rise, engraved with the sacred names of Jesus and Mary. My daughter, when I see you, I will tell you all the little thoughts that have come to me from this idea, for truly our little congregation is the work of the heart of Jesus and of Mary."

 

It had been the night before the Friday after the octave of the Corpus Christi when this idea had come to him—in other words, the night before the future feast day of the Sacred Heart revealed later in the century to the Visitation nun of Paray-le-Monial, St. Margaret-Mary Alacoque.[1] There was, of course, no question but that the heart in the Visitation shield, as proposed by de Sales, was a human heart, symbolic of the Visitation nun, not the Sacred Heart which at that time was not a symbol of Catholic devotion to Our Lord, yet de Sales himself in a note to Mere de Chantal before the profession ceremony said that he Would pray to the "royal heart of the Saviour for ours."

 

Vocations to the Annecy Visitation would make it necessary within a short time to find a larger and more suitable house than the Galerie, but the matter had to be attended to within two years, for the damp and coldness of the house was ruining the health Of the inmates – another sign that the Bishop had selected for his Community women who could not have borne the normal convent rigours. Mere de Chantal herself, after her return from Dijon at the beginning of 1612, fell gravely ill, and only after de Sales had given her a relic of Saint Charles Borromeo and himself vowed a pilgrimage to his tomb in Milan did she quickly recover.

 

The Bishop himself had recently changed residences, for when Antoine Favre was made president of the Savoie Senate, he made over his fine house in Annecy, reputedly the largest in the town, to the diocese.  Its new owner, after spending the days in the vast apartments, was glad each night to retire to a humble little bedroom.  As he said, he could walk about as Bishop of Geneva i by day and sleep as François de Sales by night.

 

For the Visitation, exactly two years later, in June 1612, a new house was bought just within the walls of the town near where the Town Hall stands today. Here there was room to build, and despite various kinds of opposition and legal difficulties what came to be called the First Monastery and the Grande Visitation, with a fine baroque church, was finally built. A large garden and orchard surrounded by the waters of the lake belonged to it. Its community came to be known as the Sainte Source.

 

The Sainte Source flowed out of Annecy for the first time five years after the foundation with the establishment of the Visitation of Lyons, an event of decisive importance in settling the character of a congregation which its founder had begun in so experimental a fashion.

 

Strangely enough, this took place through a run-away nun. This Madame Elisabeth des Gouffiers belonged to the monastery, founded by Abelard and of which Heloise had been the first abbess. The Paraclete, as it was called, had virtually become a comfortable dwelling for rich ladies who, though without rule or enclosure, took vows. Madame des Gouffiers was most unhappy in this travesty of a real convent. When she read the Introduction to the Devout Life she made up her mind to see its author and join his own foundation. So she ran away from the Paraclete and arrived in Lyons. From there, advised by a friend of de Sales, she went to the Visitation of Annecy. As she had come with two friends from Lyons, the Bishop and Mere de Chantal suggested their founding the second Visitation in Lyons itself.

 

But in Lyons the Archbishop was advised not to imitate the Visitation of obscure Annecy, but to start a new Lyons foundation to be called instead the "Presentation." This proved to be a complete failure, and the Archbishop decided to change back to a Visitation convent with the help of de Sales and Mere de Chantal. By some extraordinary accident, which seemed only explicable by Providential intervention, the royal permission, originally requested for the abortive Presentation, came back from Paris with the word "Visitation " written on it, the secretary being quite unable to account for his having written that word. "I like that kind of Providence," de Sales said when he was told.

 

Mère de Chantal, with three others, set out from Annecy in January, 1615, de Sales, always original in his ideas, giving them seven little spiritual notes for Mere de Chantal to open and read each evening of the seven-day journey. By the summer the Lyons Visitation was in being, with Soeur Favre being trained by the foundress as the future superior, and a little gathering of Lyonnaises asking to be admitted.

 

But a grave crisis was soon to develop. Mgr. de Marquemont, the Archbishop of Lyons, seems never to have really approved of de Sales's new and undefined constitution. Various practical Objections could be raised against it, chiefly in regard to canonical Security. Were the nuns truly religious or really lay women, living a life of religion? Once the original fervour had passed, all kinds of difficulties might arise with such uncertainties, and would parents, once they realised the uncertainty of status, wish to see their daughters involved in a nebulous religious future? Why strive to reform the older foundations by returning to the former strict constitutions if you started innovations of uncloistered religious without solemn vows? De Sales had heard most of it in Annecy already and brushed it aside. De Marquemont had less faith.

 

There was danger that the Archbishop might return to his idea of the Presentation instead of the Visitation so that the Lyons foundation would really become an entirely different congrega­tion, separated from the Annecy founders and completely under the jurisdiction of Mgr. de Marquemont. Indeed, it seemed that this was inevitable since any Visitation convent must be a purely episcopal foundation. Unless and until it received approval and a constitution from Rome, any bishop could change it as he willed.

 

Happily, Mgr. de Marquemont was a holy and humble man, and he assured de Sales that he would take no steps unless the latter agreed. De Sales, on his side, with a humility that amounted to a complete detachment and readiness to leave all to God, made no difficulties about de Marquemont's insistence on enclosure and the adoption of the Rule of St. Augustine, the more readily in that this germinal rule which so many religious orders had adopted was "gentler than ours both for enclosure and everything else " and consistent with innumerable variations in practice. All that he fought for was that the name should not be changed and that the nuns should not be held to the liturgical Office, but only the Office of Our Lady. He was rightly confident that under any outward guise, the spirit which Mere de Chantal and the spirit which he himself had breathed into it would endure.

 

He was too shrewd however to leave it at that. The real solution was simple in principle, though it might prove difficult in practice. It was to obtain the solemn approval of his Visitation from the Pope himself. Then it would become a true Religious Order that could flow across the world from the Annecy Salnte Source under the Church's authority instead of merely under local diocesan authorities. A humble bishop of a humble diocese de Sales might be, but his life and his fame had earned him powerful friends. It was to Cardinal Bellarmine, whom he knew to be deeply sympathetic with his own views about the Visitation, that he applied. Bellarmine was not optimistic about quick results. But Paul V also knew and appreciated the Bishop of Geneva. Contrary to all expectations, the Holy See's approval was given early in 1618 to the Visitation with the Rule of St. Augustine, enclosure and solemn vows. And before the end of the 17th century 146 Visitations in half a dozen countries had been established.

 

The changes, for which the Archbishop of Lyons had pressed, sound important and decisive. Canonically, they are. They were the outward defences of the inner spirit. It was that inner spirit which de Sales and de Chantal, two pre-eminent saints, had breathed into a religious order which made the contemplative life in community possible for women whose physical strength did not correspond with their spiritual vocation. For François de Sales the means were always secondary. Only the end really mattered. If he had attached value to the original plan, it was only, as he himself confessed, because he wanted his daughters, dedicated to lives of love and prayer, to be as simple and unassuming as possible, serving the poor and sick, in the least pretentious of communities. But "God's will made itself known and it was against my own personal taste. It is much better so, and I bless His adorable Majesty for having in His mercy turned our congregation which was to have been but a nymph into a queen bee."

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[1] Paray-le-Monial  is only a short distance from Monthelon, where Jeanne de Chantal stayed so long.

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