“The young heart hot and restless,
And the old subdued and slow.”
“M. GERARD,” said Goudin, in tones low enough to baffle the curiosity of Gustave― “M. Gerard, I am moved to tell you the story of my life. Perhaps it may help you, at some other time, if not now.”
“At all events, monsieur, it will interest me,” Gerard answered courteously.
“I dare not speak of helping you or any man,” said the old priest, with the sad humility habitual to him, “save in so far as one who has suffered and made mistakes may serve as a warning, perhaps as a comfort to others.
“Thirty years ago, when the Bull Unigenitus became the law of the land, and all who refused to acknowledge it the subjects of a vexatious persecution, I was an ardent young priest, full of fire and zeal. I believed, and verily I still believe, that the oppressed Jansenists were contending for truth and freedom. As you do now, I thought much of truth and freedom, and little―far too little―of Him who is the Truth, and whose service is perfect freedom. No one was more active or more fearless in administering the rites of the Church to those who had been refused ‘billets of confession’ on account of their Jansenist opinions. The Deacon Paris was my intimate friend, he was one of the ‘holy and humble men of heart,’ full of charity and of unobtrusive self-denial. His untimely death, the triumph of the Jesuits, the oppression of our friends, made the first great cloud that shut out heaven and darkened earth for me. When the remains of Pâris were laid in the cemetery of St. Médard, I wept long and bitterly over the grave since become so famous, and then turned sadly away repeating the Psalmist’s words, ‘Hath God forgotten to be gracious? hath He in anger shut up his tender mercies forever?’
“But soon a sudden, dazzling light illumed our darkness. Others went, as I did, to weep and pray over that lowly grave. Amongst them were many of the poor, of the blind and lame, to whom the good man was wont to minister. Picture, if you can, the thrill of rapture with which we heard that the Lord had visited His people―that at that grave the lame man leaped as an hart, the deaf heard, and the blind saw. With hearts full of solemn awe and wondering joy, we praised the God of heaven and earth, the same now as in the first ages of the church, when He stretched out his hand, and mighty signs and wonders followed the preaching of the Word.”
The old man’s eye brightened, and his faded cheek glowed with the fires of youth. Nearly every life worth living has some chapter in its past ever recalled with such emotion.
Gerard looked surprised. “Is it possible, monsieur,” he said, “that you really believe in those pretended―well, let us say imagined―miracles of St. Médard?”
“Young man, it is easy to say imagined, or pretended, but not so easy to dispose of the question.”
“You are not offended with my freedom, I hope, monsieur?” said Gerard anxiously. Young as he was, he had learned that it is less dangerous to attack a man’s most cherished convictions than his favorite illusions.
But the priest’s frank smile and kindly manner reassured him. “Many years ago,” he said, “I knew a man called François Goudin, who would have resented the slightest hint of disbelief in those miracles as though it had been a slander against his father’s honor, his mother’s name. But he is dead long since, and the old man you see in his place has learned to keep silence and put his mouth in the dust, knowing this best of all, that he knows nothing. It was the fate of the young François Goudin to be immured for three years amongst fools and madmen, under the case of the monks of Charenton.”
Gerard looked at him with increased interest. He never imagined for a moment that he might have been really inane; he only wondered for what political offense he had been thus incarcerated.
“I had written a pamphlet maintaining the genuineness of the St. Médard miracles,” Goudin continued. “It seems to me now but a foolish performance, which the ruling party might have passed over in contemptuous silence. But they thought otherwise, and paid me my wages.
“Bitter wages,” Gerard said.
“Not all bitter. My lot had many alleviations. I learned much from my poor companions, of whom the most rational imagined himself Louis XV., and must needs be called ‘La France.’ I acquired a deep distrust of the censes, when under the influence of an excited or disordered fancy. I gained an intimate knowledge of certain forms of disease, and of the mysterious powers wherewith they endow, for a season, the frame and the mind of man. But I learned better things than these; else these might have made me as mad as my poor unconscious teachers. I saw the lovingkindness of the Lord in the darkest places of the earth. I learned that no cloud, not even the cloud of madness, is too dense for His love to pierce. I might have fainted when forced to doubt that the power of God was made manifest in the so-called cure of Étienne the cripple, had I not felt Him near the peaceful deathbed of my friend La France. Whether or no Christ says now to the lame, ‘Arise and walk,’ He surely says to the weary and heavy laden, ‘I will give you rest.’ But I wander from my text. I was released; with a shattered constitution, but a heart still fresh and young. Joyfully and eagerly I went back to my old friends. But they were changed. And of what followed I cannot speak calmly, even yet. Enough, my heart was broken.”
“Do not speak of what gives you pain, monsieur,” Gerard said kindly.
“One word only, and for your sake, who have learned so early to see through illusions. During my imprisonment I had gone forward in my own path, and so had my friends in theirs. As day by day, and with keenest interest, I watched those mysterious maladies which haunt the border land between mind and body, I grew less and less inclined to raise the cry, ‘Behold a miracle!’ at every unexplained phenomenon, such as a vision, a trance, or a suspension of susceptibility to pain. Meanwhile my friends had traveled fast and far, and, if all must be told, upon a dangerous road. Every step widened the gulf between us.” The old man paused, while a look of profound, though quiet, sorrow overspread his face.
“I suppose you are aware, monsieur,” Gerard ventured to say, “that M. La Condamine and other savants―enlightened and impartial men―have recently examined those so-called miracles, and even witnessed the crucifixion of two of the convulsionnaires; and that they pronounce the whole affair a tissue of fraud and delusion.”
“Wisdom will not die with the savants, and M. La Condamine, though he knows how to measure the earth, cannot lay rule or plumb-line to the soul of man,” returned the priest with a tinge of asperity. “Delusion I am forced to admit, but farther I need not and I will not go. No man deceives others so completely as he who deceives himself first. Miracles are dangerous playthings, and there is deep truth in that word of Vauvenargues, ‘He who desires illusions shall have them beyond his desire.’ God can send down fire from heaven when He pleases, and He has sent it. But if his priests and prophets must needs have the wonder repeated when they please, they end by offering strange fire upon his altar, and He will put them to shame before their enemies. In separating myself from the convulsionnaires, I did no more than other sober and moderate Jansenists. But what was a light thing to others was the bitterness of death to me; for I had expected the regeneration of the Church and of the world―I had made idols and bowed down before them, only to see them discrowned and dishonored and dragged in the dust.”
“I can understand the anguish of your disappointment,” Gerard said.
“It was aggravated by loneliness of heart, a loneliness which has been my portion ever since, though the sting has left it long ago. My old associates called me renegade and traitor, while my old enemies called me enemy still. And that |iI| would not have wished otherwise. Though forced to keep a shamed and sorrowful silence, never―never―could I take part against the friends who had been to me as my own soul. But it was from within that the worst anguish came. Doubting so much, I was tempted to doubt all. For a while, nothing seemed certain.”
“Ah!” said Gerard eagerly, “did it not occur to you that other miracles―other marvels―like those of St. Médard―?”
“It did,” the priest avowed. “So like the tinsel looked to the true gold, that I found no rest to my soul until I placed them side by side, weighed both in the balances, and tested them by a searching analysis.”
It struck Gerard with something like surprise that a reasonable man might do all this, yet continue a believer in Revelation. “With what results?” he asked.
“Briefly these,” the priest answered. “The cures recorded in the New Testament differ from those alleged in modern times, by being uniform and unfailing in their operation. Only a small number amongst the multitudes who resorted to the tomb of Páris even professed to receive a cure. While of the Son of God it is testified ‘as many as touched Him were made perfectly whole.’ The Gospel miracles, moreover, were morally significant. I know nothing taught by the St. Médard miracles, except that the Jansenists are in the right, and that I think might have been learned without them. But take up and examine the marvels that strew the Gospel page, and you will find each wonderful in moral significance, true to all truth, and full of holy teaching. They were wrought for ends worthy the interposition of God. How else was the mission of the Divine Son to be authenticated, and a new religion introduced into the world? A little thought given to that problem would be better than many arguments. Besides, they were wrought in the presence of friend and foe, of believer and unbeliever. They were wrought upon persons of all ages, conscious and unconscious, even upon inanimate objects. And lastly (for I should weary you far sooner than exhaust my subject), they were of a kind which utterly precludes the idea of fraud or delusion, or even of the operation of an excited imagination. Modem cures, purporting to be miraculous, deal with one class of diseases only. When I see eyes literally given to those born blind, lepers cleansed with a word, unconscious fever patients healed miles away―above all, the dead raised, I shall begin to reconsider the matter.
“The most searching investigation only confirms the verdict already pronounced by the common sense of mankind. The miracles of St. Médard have well-nigh ruined a good cause, which had a fair chance of success without them; the miracles of Christ established His mission in the face of a hostile and unbelieving generation, and prepared the way for the conversion of the world.”
Here, to Gerard’s regret, their conversation was interrupted by the entrance of Madame Bairdon, in all the dainty neatness of a Frenchwoman’s outdoor toilet. “Will M. Gerard condescend to honor us with his escort to the Boulevards?” she asked. “We shall enjoy the evening air and see the marionettes.”
Gerard hesitated a moment and glanced at the priest; who, however, decided his movements by taking leave of his niece and his graceless godson, with the stately and elaborate courtesy of the time.
“I hope this meeting will not be our last, M. l’Abbé?” said the young musician.
“Your courtesy bestows on me a title to which I have no claim,” the priest answered smiling; “I am no abbé, only the officiating deacon of the Church of St. André des Arts.”
Gerard knew What this meant. The officiating deacons were the pariahs of the church, and their lot the portion and the punishment of those who offended their ecclesiastical superior. It was a lot that involved hopeless obscurity; poverty, even semi-starvation. He said, “You may expect better times soon, monsieur. The last hour of the Jesuits has struck. Their day is over now, and those who have suffered from their envy or their malice may look for compensation.”
“I look for nothing from man,” the priest answered. “I expect no change save one, and that cannot be far distant now―from the outer court of my Lord’s Temple to the Holy of Holies. Adieu, mon cher monsieur.” They bowed like courteous Frenchmen, then shook hands like old friends.
As they were about to part, the priest turned back and said very earnestly, “Once more let Vauvenargues speak to you, monsieur. These words are his ‘All the intrepidity of a dying unbeliever cannot secure him against trouble of heart, if he reasons thus: “I have been deceived a thousand times upon my palpable interests, I may be deceived about religion. But I have no longer the time or the strength to investigate, and I die!”’”