“The worldwide throes
That went to make the popedom; the despair
Of free men, brave men, good men.”
THE Eighteenth century was an age of Iconoclasm. The destroyer’s hand was busy everywhere. Old idols fell before it, all the more easily because they were already crumbling and tottering upon their pedestals. They were hollow with slow decay within; while, to the careless eye at least, their outward forms remained fair and stately as ever.
But however determinately a generation may pluck up, and pull down, and destroy, no generation can be wholly destructive. Because man was created after the image of God, the great Maker, he must needs try to make. Because man was created to worship, if he know not the living and true God, he must needs make idols for himself.
Many were the idols which philosophers and theorists constructed, to place on the empty pedestals of those that they destroyed. Reason, Liberty, Progress, Humanity, had each its votaries. Yet there were some who preferred to all these the idea of the Family; who would fain have bestowed upon the hearth that sacredness of which they robbed the altar; and who expected the regeneration of society from the sweet influences of domestic life. It is singular that this sentimental dream should have haunted Diderot―rudest and coarsest of Atheists and Democrats who, himself “a bad husband and a bad father,” thought the affection of husbands and wives, of parents and children, only needed cultivation to make the world a Utopia. In that age of general disorganization, the class that most frequently preserved the sanctities of domestic life were the bourgeoisie. The family circle that met around the table of the Bairdons in the low-ceiled entresol of Numéro 18, Rue Béthizy, might have gladdened the heart of Diderot; and in that great, brilliant, confused world of Paris there were many such, both amongst the grande and the petite bourgeoisie,―simple, well-conducted, attached to each other, and not without respect for those above, and consideration for those beneath them.
Gerard was too young to care for the idea of the family; Liberty, Mercy, Humanity were the idols before which he burned incense. But he liked the Bairdons, and took his seat at their Sunday dinner table with genuine pleasure.
His quick eye noted every member of the little group the grave and stately Scotchman, with his tall erect figure and soldier-like bearing; the plump, active, good―humored French woman, so proud of her husband, so willing to toil and save that he and his children might be surrounded with comforts and luxuries; Gustave lying on his couch, and claiming as an invalid a double share of all good things; Griselle, doing homage to fashion in a gown of stiff brocaded silk, but wearing her fair hair ‘all naturel;’ the child Henri, dressed like a man of fashion in miniature, with a velvet coat, silk stockings, and a toy sword; and Valérie, still younger, her little frock overloaded with costly lace, and her head encumbered with a grotesque structure like a tower. Madame Bairdon’s uncle, a gray-haired, worn-looking man, in a rusty threadbare soutane, sat between the children, who evidently looked upon him as their special friend and possession; nor did anyone seem inclined to dispute their claim. Madame Bairdon treated him with cold and rather contemptuous civility; M. Bairdon courteously but not cordially, for they had nothing in common save that both were gentlemen; while Griselle, who usually atoned for her stepmother’s lack of assiduity, was silent and absent, except when the imperious voice, of Gustave summoned her to wait upon him.
Gerard, quite at ease with everyone else, tried in vain to address himself to her. But he never ceased to see her, his eye followed her slightest movement; and when, leading the children by the hand, she accompanied Madame Bairdon (who conformed so far to the fashions of her husband’s country, as to leave the gentlemen for a little while alone over their coffee and their wine), he felt as if the sun had suddenly gone down, and the room was cold and dark.
M. Bairdon, or, as he would far rather have been styled, Bairdon of Glenmair, recalled him to himself. “I am a man of few words,” he said; “but M. Gerard should hear from my own lips the thanks I owe to the brave and generous preserver of my boy.”
“Do not speak of that, monsieur,” Gerard interrupted. “Any one in my place would have done as I did.”
“Not any one, monsieur. Few, in our days, would expose themselves to peril for a little bourgeois, who had no claim upon their generous protection, and no right to expect it. I trust Gustave will show himself grateful.”
Gustave was heard to mutter something from his couch, but no words were audible, except, “very sorry,” “harpsichord,” and “never again.” “Have the kindness to say no more, monsieur,” Gerard entreated. More would have been said, however, had not the old priest come to the rescue. Raising his head, and fixing upon Gerard dark melancholy eyes that had once been full of fire and energy as Gerard’s own, he said with animation, “‘Let us do generously and without reckoning, all the good that tempts our hearts, one can never be the dupe of a virtue.’”
“Eh, M. L’Abbé!” cried Gerard, “you are quoting the maxims of Vauvenargues.”
“And why not?” asked the priest with a smile.
Gerard could not say that Madame Bairdon, when inviting him, had described her uncle as a harmless piece of antiquity, quite behind the age, and only fit to drone over his Breviary, say mass, and hear confessions.―At last he answered, “I did not suppose, M. L’Abbé, that your studies lay in that direction.”
“Nor do they,” said the priest. “But I have studied Vauvenargues, and with deep though painful interest.”
“May I ask,” said Gerard, “why you selected Vauvenargues in preference to others who have gone farther than he in the same path?”
“Chiefly because Vauvenargues seems to me the Pascal of Deism.”
Bairdon, suppressing a yawn, filled his own glass and those of his companions, while Gerard answered, “I know Vauvenargues better than Pascal; not so well as Voltaire.”
“There speaks the child of the age!” said the priest. “Yet surely it were well for you to know the man whom Voltaire reverenced.”
“Ah!” said Gerard brightening. “That must indeed have been a rare spirit which won not only love, but actual veneration from the patriarch himself! What a star looks up, to must needs be lofty.” A piece of bombast which only Gerard’s youth and the taste of the day could render excusable.
“Messieurs,” said Bairdon, with some embarrassment, and a glance at Gustave, who was listening eagerly to the conversation― “Messieurs, you would oblige me by being a little more cautious. No doubt M. de Voltaire is a great genius, and I have no objection to―to the ‘Henriade,’ for instance. But you will acknowledge that he has written some things calculated to corrupt and mislead the young and unstable.”
“Many things,” said the old priest sadly. “And if God ever speaks to the heart of M. de Voltaire, he will wish he had never been born rather than have penned them. Still I say, if the Marquis de Vauvenargues had been alive, ‘La Pucelle’ would never have been written at all, and ‘Candide’ would have been written far otherwise.”
“You wrong the patriarch,” said Gerard, with some warmth. “It is because he is the enemy of cruelty, of intolerance, of priestcraft―But I pray you to pardon me, M. L’Abbé,” he said, breaking off in some confusion.
“There is no occasion, monsieur,” the priest returned courteously. “I may have suffered in my time from intolerance; but I trust that has not made me intolerant. Let us return to Vauvenargues. His evident earnestness and sincerity awaken my interest; and, like all men who inspire reverence, he himself knows how to revere.”
“And yet,” Gerard interposed, “you implied just now that M. de Voltaire is a man not very prone to revere; while even you must admit that no man was ever more passionately worshipped, I may almost say.”
“Worship is not reverence,” said the priest. “Does the savage revere the idol he bows down before tonight, and tomorrow casts into the fire because he has returned unsuccessful from the chase? Believe this, my young friend, when a man has ceased to reverence God, he ceases very soon to reverence his own soul. And if he acknowledges nothing sacred in himself, his fellow men may do homage to his splendid gifts, they may even build an altar and burn incense before him; but true reverence they will never pay him. When M. de Voltaire thinks fit to repudiate a piece that he has written, solemnly denying that he even knows the author’s name” ―
“This is not fair, monsieur,” Gerard interrupted impatiently. “An attack upon a man’s character is the worst possible argument against his opinions.”
“I am not at present arguing against the opinions of M. de Voltaire; but trying to show that, although he may be idolized, he is not revered.”
“Pardon me, monsieur―he is revered, and shall be to the latest generations, as a man who has taught the world great and noble truths.”
“And these truths, monsieur? Will you name them?”
“He has overthrown superstition,” said Gerard.
“You overrate the influence of M. de Voltaire,” the priest returned quietly. “He leads his generation, but he is also led by it. He resumes its tendencies in himself, he formulates and gives them brilliant expression; but he has not made them, nor does he carry them out to their legitimate consequences. Others continue his work, and go much farther than he does. D’Alembert, Diderot, Helvetius―”
“‘Small change for Voltaire,’” laughed Gerard.
“That, and much more. But your view is natural at your age. You young men expect everything from personal influence. You are always looking out for a hero, and holding your hearts in readiness to lay at his feet. Therein you do well; and perhaps you are nearer a great truth than you think, for it is God’s way to send salvation to his people by the hands of a man―a hero. But not by hands unclean, as those of M. de Voltaire. I wish you a better hero, M. Gerard.”
“Yet, suppose he had overthrown what you call superstition, what truth has he revealed? To destroy falsehood is not necessarily to reveal truth. You find a man perishing with thirst about to drink from a poisoned spring. You dash the cup from his lips―so far, well; but if you give him no water, how have you helped him?”
“But there is water given; there are positive truths revealed,” said Gerard.
“Once more, monsieur, will you oblige me by naming them?”
Gerard, with an air of pride and satisfaction, quoted a maxim of the prophet’s: “‘Love God, but love mortals also.’”
Bairdon, who had been for some time looking impatient, could contain himself no longer. “M. Gerard is enjoying a little jest at your expense, my friend,” he said to the priest. “He is pretending to give you the sentiments of Voltaire, and quoting the Bible instead.”
“Monsieur,” said the priest gravely, “I believe you have gone straight to the heart of the matter, with the proverbial directness of your nation. I shall do well if I convince this young gentleman that whatever truth Voltaire teaches was taught long ago by One whom Voltaire, in his folly, blasphemes and derides.”
“It was certainly not taught, for many generations, by the priests of your religion, M. L’Abbé,” said Gerard.
The priest took out his Breviary, found, and pointed to the words, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbor as thyself.”
“Ay; it was acknowledged in words, but denied in fact, systematically and persistently,” Gerard replied. “It is as though I said,” he added, with a smile, “I love my dear young friend Gustave as I love myself; but he shall toil and starve that I may eat the fat and drink the sweet; he shall be burned, racked, or scourged to death the moment he dares to resist my will.”
Gustave, who had been listening with fixed attention, considered this reference to himself as an invitation to join the conversation. “If your dear young friend had not sense enough to take the winning side, he would deserve all you could do to him,” he said. “What could you expect? The priests were learned and clever; so they had their way, and trampled on everything that opposed them. Now it is they who are stupid, while the philosophers are clever. I am a philosopher, M. Gerard.”
The old priest looked very mournfully into the keen, hard, boyish face. “God help thee, poor child!” he said; “thou art old, and hast never been young. Pray God to make thee, in very truth, a little child, so shalt thou enter the kingdom of heaven.”
“I know nothing of entering the kingdom of heaven,” said Gustave pertly; “I want the kingdom of earth.”
“Child, your wants are the greater because you know them not. But such is the training the Jesuits give their pupils,” said the Jansenist with a sigh. Then, resuming his argument, “I understand you, M. Gerard. But are you not doing with regard to the ministers of religion what you objected to my doing with regard to Voltaire?”
“No, monsieur,” Gerard said with warmth; “surely it is fair to infer the character of a system from its effects. And what, hitherto, have been those of the Christian religion?”
“Schools, hospitals, infirmaries, food and clothing for the poor; so at least I heard in my youth,” the Scotchman threw in drily.
“Schools like those of the Jesuits! Hospitals and infirmaries like the Hotel Dieu and the Bicêtre! Help to the poor and miserable, like that given at St. Lazare!”
“Pray explain yourself, monsieur.”
“I will, as far as I dare, especially before this boy. The Jesuits have done much for the cause of education in France; so have the Christian Brethren, whose excellent schools owe their origin to the great Jansenist party. Yet in the Jesuit system of education there are glaring faults. Too often intolerance and cruelty have filled their schools, extortion has maintained them, and the spirit of finesse and management has made them nurseries of intrigue and conspiracy. However, France has now well-nigh decided the cause of the Jesuits; and M. L’Abbé will agree with me that it is cowardly to strike a falling foe. Rather let us praise them, because what the Church of France did not, that they tried to do. The Church of France, messieurs, has in her hands at this moment an enormous proportion of the property of the country, and her immense revenues are exempt from ordinary taxation. Yet, in return for that well-nigh boundless wealth, she will not even teach poor Jacques, who starves at her stately gates, to read and write and say his catechism. Messieurs, in the district where I was Rom, the, majority of the population are Protestants. The laws― laws framed by Churchmen, or for them―take their children from these sectaries (by force if needful), and send them to Catholic schools. Think you that the Church, in her charity, provides the education she forces upon these worse than orphaned little ones? No; it is the heartbroken parents that must pay for it, to the uttermost farthing! From that one fact, infer a hundred, and spare me the pain of detailing what it wrings my heart to recall.”
Gerard paused; his hearers looked at him in surprise, but with different thoughts. “A clever young man, who has acquired a singular amount of information for his years,” thought Bairdon. “An honest-hearted youth, after all, and a great foe of the Jesuits,” thought the Jansenist priest. “It may be he is not far from the kingdom of heaven.” “A pupil of the Jesuits, who was ill-treated at one of their schools,” guessed the shrewd Gustave. “Now, if they would get him a good benefice, he might change his tone.”
Gerard presently resumed with, energy. “From schools, messieurs, turn to hospitals. The heart is the standard of the body’s health. France is the heart of Christendom, Paris the heart of France. In this world-renowned Paris, can you point proudly to the Intel Dieu, the house of God, where He lodges his guests, the sick poor? Go thither, if you dare. You will see four or five miserable patients thrown together into one wretched bed, whence neglect, mismanagement, and the lack of all things hurries them quickly, to another, where at least there is no more pain. Do you know that out of every nine patients who enter those fatal gates (often for very trivial maladies) two, at least, come not forth alive? If this be Christian charity, it is charity that kills I restrain myself, for it is not Christian charity. Your prelates with their princely revenues, your abbés with their priceless lace and matchless jewelry, are too poor to afford the patients of the Hotel Dieu their miserable dole of bread and tisane. It is the spectacles of Paris―the theaters―that support its one great hospital. The Church, denies the actor Christian burial―stamps his calling as infamous, soul destroying―yet takes the hard-earned fruit of his toil to supply her own lack of service. Baser than those of old, who shrank from bringing into the treasury the price of blood, the priests of France offer their God, for his poor, the blood of the actor’s soul! Turn from the Hôtel Dieu to the Bicêtre, to―”
“Nay, monsieur,” Bairdon interrupted. “You have said quite enough to prove that the charities of Paris are badly managed, and the priests far from what they should be. No one here doubts it. Indeed, I myself could tell more than one story much to the point, were I not restrained by the respect due to my esteemed guest M. Goudin.”
The priest bowed gravely, and Gerard took the hint so far as to make his attack a little less personal, and to disregard Gustave’s muttered suggestion― “That fine Church of St. Sulpice, too, built with the proceeds of a lottery!” He resumed, “You will say the age is degenerate, and the glory of the Catholic Church in great measure departed. You are right: the Church has had her golden era, when the State was but her humble and submissive handmaid, and all her enemies were beneath her feet.”
Here Goudin interposed, “I frankly acknowledge, monsieur, that the Middle Ages were times of much ignorance and disorder.”
“The Middle Ages!” Gerard cried scornfully. “Do you think I was going back to their old-world horrors and absurdities? Though, I may remark, it is no thanks to the Catholic Church that we ever got out of them. The revival of learning―the invention of printing―the Reformation, began the new day, whose light hour by hour increases and shall increase, until the glorious coming time, when superstition and intolerance are swept away, and man, the true king of the universe, the lord of all things, shall rule and reign forever and ever!”
“It is a noble dream!” the priest said, looking with admiration and interest upon the young enthusiast. “But if man has not yet learned to rule himself, how shall he rule the world?”
“Better, at least, than did the Catholic Church. Look at the age of her triumph in this realm―the age of Louis, miscalled the Great.”
“So vaunted by the philosophers, so lauded by Voltaire,” the priest observed quietly. Perhaps the taunt was scarcely generous; but who is always generous in the heat of battle?
“So vaunted by every one,” Gerard frankly allowed. “A brilliant epoch, alike for the arms, the arts, the literature of France. And for the Church, the culminating epoch of her glory. The age of Bossuet, of Bourdaloue, of Fléchier, of Massillon―ay, and of Fénelon and the Port Royalists. Louis Quatorze, converted and penitent, was on the throne; Bossuet was in the pulpit. An absolute monarch Tent his scepter to an absolute Church; and France lay beneath it ―inert, prostrate, dumb.”
“But are you not forgetting,” said the priest mildly, “the noble resistance opposed to ecclesiastical tyranny by the free Gallican spirit?”
“No. Nor yet the services rendered to humanity by the Jansenists, and the bitter thanks they received from the holy Catholic Church. But how can I listen to the wail of the exiled nuns of Port Royal, while my ears are ringing with the groans, the cries, the agonies with which the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes filled the land? Oh, M. l’Abbé, that story has yet to be read by the civilized world, in all its horror, its pathos, and I dare to add, its glory too! What are your boasted Acta Sanctorum beside it? Can they match the cruelty on one side, the endurance on the other? Of the endurance I speak not now. To me it is a sublime and solemn mystery, like the midnight starry sky. But the cruelty! Call up the myrmidons of Diocletian, the soldiers of Mahomet, the priests of Montezuma, and they will look angels of mercy beside the booted missionaries of the most Christian king, and the priests and Jesuits that inspired and directed them! But I forget myself,” Gerard said, his tone suddenly changing from deep emotion to mournful, almost listless, calm. “I speak I know not what, or how. Allow me to resume. In that great age of the Church, when she sat enthroned in splendor, where were the People?”
“The People?” the priest repeated with an air of perplexity.
“Yes, the People―the masses―the suffering, toiling millions―who are not nobles, nor priests, nor even bourgeois―only men, men that till the ground, and pay the taille, the corvée, the gabelle, the aides―what message had the Catholic Church for these? What word for them had Bossuet, her eloquent mouthpiece, her able representative? When Louise de la Vallière took the veil (these churchmen were very tender to the vices of most Christian kings), Bossuet could pour forth the treasures of his eloquence, for the tears of the great and noble were priceless jewels, to be gathered up and set in the wrought gold of his stately periods, while the tears of tortured millions fell unheeded on the soil they delved to enrich others. The eagle of Meaux was too busy gazing on the sun of royalty to have one glance, one thought for these. He was like the rest. ‘During all that triumphal era, the people escape our search. La Bruyère only affords us a glimpse of them, half buried in the furrows they are digging; and an impotent and passing insurrection lets us see them for a moment in some cruelly frivolous lines of Madame de Sévigné. That is all.’ Yet I have heard preachers say it was for these Christ died.
“In fine, messieurs, the Catholic Church has ignored, denied, trampled upon Humanity. Voltaire has raised it from the dust, set it on a pedestal, embraced it, appealed to it. The Catholic Church has despised Nature, discouraged all study of her works and ways, crushed out science wherever she could. The philosophers cultivate science, and recognize Nature as their teacher, their guide, their noblest study. They anatomize the frame and analyze the mind of man. They weigh and measure the earth, and dive into her secret chambers. Everywhere they seek truth, and they reverence Humanity. Therefore, messieurs, I am of the Church of M. de Voltaire and the Philosophers.”
A silence ensued, of which Bairdon, tired out by the discussion, took advantage to leave the disputants to themselves and rejoin his wife. She reproached him for his want of courtesy and tact. “You should have known how to stop my uncle’s lengthy periods,” she said. “Did I not ask you, at the first pause, to pray M. Gerard to do us the favor of accompanying us to the Boulevards to see the marionettes?”
“They never paused at all till now,” Bairdon answered. “M. Gerard himself has been the chief speaker. And I will not disturb them now; for the priest must have his turn, and answer him, if he can. Fair play forever. Thou and I can go to the Boulevards, and let the young folk follow at their leisure.”
“Fi donc, mon cher! wilt thou never learn to respect the proprieties?” Madame Bairdon cried, horror-stricken at the thought of Gerard and Griselle walking the Boulevards together without an escort, though more than willing they should do so under her own and her husband’s protection. “No, mon ami; since thou hast managed so badly, we must wait for the end of their tiresome discussions about what no one knows or cares to know. Ma foi! where is the use of talking of philosophy and religion? I know how to sell my lace at a good figure, and to use the gold I get for it in purchasing all we can desire; and what more could philosophy teach me?”
“Or religion either?” asked her husband with a half amused, half-doubtful air.
“No one can reproach us with neglecting religion,” said Madame Bairdon, in the tone of one whose respectability was undeservedly called in question. “I go to mass and confession; so does Griselle; and Gustave has taken his first communion, though I had hard work to persuade him to it. I do everything that is right, in my position,” said this amiable Pharisee, who, like many a Pharisee, was at heart a Sadducee, really believing in what she saw and touched, and in little else.