THE titles given below are far from representing all that has lately been published in England on the subject of St. Francis de Sales. The amount and character of this literature indicate a degree of reverent interest in that remarkable man almost amounting to a new cultus. The feeling is manifested, not only by the authors of these books (in whom something is to be pardoned to the enthusiasm of biography), but also by their readers and critics, that in the person of "the Apostle of the Chablais," we have a type of sanctified humanity quite superior to anything that can be expected from the English stock, and which mere Protestantism cannot attain unto. Now there is nothing but good to be said of the naturalization of foreign saints, provided only it be done with discretion and fidelity to historic truth. But there is large scope here for the function of the avvocato del diavolo; and we are bound to say of all these books that they are wholly negligent of this duty. The Francis de Sales whom they present to us is neither the legendary Francis nor the historical Francis. The blaze of colour which

1 St. Francis de Sales, Bishop and Prince of Geneva. By the author of A Dominican Artist. Rivingtons, 1876.

A Selection from the Spiritual Letters of St. Francis de Sales. Translated by the same Author. Rivingtons, 1871.

The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales. By Jean Pierre Camus, Bishop of Belley. Translated by the same Author. Rivingtons, 1872.

The Mission of St. Francis of Sales in the Chablais. By Lady Herbert. Bentley, 1868. Selections from the Letters of St. Francis de Sales. Translated from the French by Mrs. C. W. Bagot. Revised by a Priest of the English Church. Masters, 1871.

The "Salesian" literature in French, always voluminous, has received unusual increments of late, in consequence of the project, just accomplished, for constituting St. Francis a "doctor of the Church."

No. 227.-VOL. XXXVIII.

characterises the former portraiture is toned down to suit the English taste, though no attempt is made to correct the drawing. Not even Lady Herbert's Mission in the Chablais ventures to reproduce that wild profusion of miracle, and those unctuous details concerning the saint's resistance to temptation in which his panegyrists so much delight. Not even the author of A Dominican Artist, in whose writings appear so many indications of industry and good taste, ventures on anything, with regard to the facts of her hero's life, but a servile though distant and timid following of the Roman Catholic tradition.

It is not necessary to go beyond Francis's own letters and the documents of his friends and partizans for the materials for correcting these distorted representations; and it is not creditable to intelligent writers who have had these materials under their eyes, to persist in repeating the old fiction as truth. A less labour-saving course would not only be more honourable to themselves, and more just to their readers, but it would not be in all respects disadvantageous to their hero. He would doubtless lose some rays of the halo that envelops him; he might be constrained to descend a step or two from that lofty pedestal on which he seems sometimes to be consciously posing for a saint; and certainly there would be some qualifying of that preternatural sweetness which (to the Protestant taste) approaches now and then the very verge of mawkishness; but whatever his portrait might lose in heroic dimensions and in the air of sanctity, not to say sanctimony, it would gain in human interest and probability. In the early pages of his biography, we should miss that solemn little prig described in the

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bull of canonization as having when a child none of the traits of childhood," and in the eulogy of Father Morel as "having manifested in the cradle such chaste modesty as to shrink from the caresses of his nurse, and hardly permit her to kiss him; "1 and in the later chapters we should part with more regret from the figure of the Apostle of the Chablais," taking his life in his hand and encountering the lofty mountains of the Chablais, its frightful precipices, its eternal winters, its ferocious beasts and still more savage inhabitants, opposing the malignity and heresy of the latter only with the arms of love and meekness, and with the eloquent preaching of the true faith, until "at last, his gentleness triumphed over their brutality, his love over their hate, his patience over their fury, his constancy to serve them over their obstinacy." 2 But we should get in exchange a most interesting and racy character, with a great deal of human nature in it, a genial bonhomie, a bright wit, a love of society, especially that of cultivated ladies; a taste and talent for diplomacy of the sort that approaches intrigue; and an unaffected ardour of mystical devotion combining and cooperating with a practical shrewdness which made him a capital adviser of the pious but sentimental ladies who were his favourite correspondents, but which proved a dangerous gift to a man who had been taught by one of the most eminent Jesuits connected with the affair of St. Bartholomew's Day, to make an unscrupulous use of it for the greater glory of God.

It is no wonder that a mind constituted like that of Francis should give early evidence of a vocation to the ecclesiastical career. It is not difficult to believe the story told of him that

1 Canonization de St. Fr. de Sales, en XVI. Discours. Grenoble, 1665.

2 See that tremendous piece of pulpit eloquence, the Oration of Bottini, Consistorial Advocate, at the canonization of Francis, transcribed in full by Father Morel.

3 Father Possevin, author of the Soldat Chrétien.

when other children were playing soldiers, he would be playing church, and leading about the little peasants in a procession instead of a battalion; nor that when he returned to his father's castle at Thorens in Savoy, from his costly education at Paris and Padua, an accomplished and brilliant young man of twenty-five, he should already have set before himself the position of Bishop and Prince of Geneva as a more congenial one than any he would be likely to attain in the profession of arms, or in the career which his father's ambition had marked out for him, of country gentleman and senator of Savoy.

The story of the disappointment of the father's plans is told by the most voluminous and authoritative of the saint's biographers, the Abbé Marsollier, with a naïveté characteristic of that class of writers. Soon after Francis's return home, his father announced that he had arranged a marriage for him with a charming young heiress in the neighbourhood, daughter to the Baron de Végy. "It struck the young count like a thunderbolt," says the biogra pher, who has been dwelling with delight on the early vows of celibacy which the young student had made in his private devotions ;-and yet not so much like a thunderbolt after all, but that he was quite willing to ride over to Castle Végy and take a look at the young lady. In fact, a sense of respect for his father's wishes, or something, led him to call often on Mademoiselle de Végy, until her feelings, at least, had become very tenderly engaged. "This young lady" (we quote from the biography of Loyau d'Amboise) "no longer concealed from him how dear he had become to her. She never looked on him without an indefinable smile that bespoke the feelings of her soul. Not more soft were Rachel's sighs for Jacob, not more tender the looks with which she greeted his return to the roof of Laban after charming away the

So the Abbé Marsollier, Vie de St. François, Livre I.

fatigues of the day with thoughts of her.” To the great satisfaction of both families the affair was looked upon as settled. Mutual congratulations were exchanged, and in the Château de Sales they began to choose the place for the bride's portrait, and to talk about the arrangements for the wedding party. But either the young count had changed his mind in the course of the wooing, or, as his biographers proudly assert, he never had had the slightest intention of marrying the girl at all. At all events, while this billing and cooing was going on, the young saint was in consultation with his cousin Louis, canon of the chapter of Geneva, to get him neatly out of the affair; which was managed by securing for him from the Pope the most brilliant ecclesiastical appointment in the diocese, that of provost of the cathedral, that had just fallen vacant. Not till the document that secured him this prize was fairly in his hand, did Francis take any step that could compromise his hopeful relations with Mademoiselle de Végy. The

disappointment, mortification, and shame of his parents, when he came to them in company with his cousin, the canon, showing the brief of nomination, and announcing his intention to accept it, are described with exultation by his panegyrists. His mother, with her woman's heart, pleaded tenderly for the forsaken girl. "Think," she said, "of her distress when she finds that you have jilted her, and that she is repelled by the heart that should have been her refuge and her love. Bitter will be her tears, for she has given you her heart without the slightest mistrust." There was nothing to be alleged in answer to this appeal, but his vow and his vocation, reinforced by certain miraculous indications of duty that were conclusive to his own conscience, but which, in the crude judgment of a man of the world, it would have been better to have forgotten altogether than to have recollected only at that stage of the affair.

His mother, who seems to have had a very clear view of the matter, merely answered, "This vow of yours was a very fine impulse; but you know just as well as I do, that you could be released from it by a single word of the Bishop of Geneva."1

This incident in the life of Francis has no adequate justice done to it in the English biographies; but by the Abbé Marsollier and by Loyau d'Amboise it is detailed as a heroic instance of sacrifice for conscience' sake. In reading it, however, one can hardly resist the thought how near the young saint might have been, at the time, to a premature martyrdom to his principles;-that if Mademoiselle de Végy had happened to have a big brother, the bodily sufferings of Francis for his devotion to the Church might have begun before he had so much as entered on his apostolic work among the fierce Protestants of the Chablais.

It is no more than justice to the memory of the saint, to say that this seems to have been the most serious of the indiscretions into which he fell in his relations with the fair sex. The excessive protestations, on the part of himself and his clerical eulogists, of a very exceptional virtue in this regard, and his too frequent occasions for hand-to-hand encounter with temptation, such as do not usually occur to honest gentlemen who keep temptation at a proper distance, suggest suspicions for which there is no corroboration. He was eminently a ladies' man, "for ever surrounded by women; and he was evidently disposed by nature to a sort of coquetry, against which he doubtless strove to guard himself. The mild terms of almost playful rebuke with which he answers letters of amorous adulation are in

1 See the Lives of the Saint by the two authors cited. The complacency with which they tell the story so as to show all the essential facts, and yet without a suspicion that there is anything but heroism in their hero's course, is wonderful.

2 Spirit of St. Francis, III., i., § 24. Ed. Rivington.

bad taste; but bad taste is not always sinful, whatever Mr. Ruskin may say. The bishop writes, for instance, in 1618, to one of these enthusiastic adorers: "Dearest girl of my heart,—I want to tell you that I have a child who writes to me that, being separated from me has thrown her into distress; that if she did not restrain her eyes they would shed tears over my departure, as the sky does rain, and other fine things of the sort. But she goes beyond this, and says that I am not a mere man, but some divinity sent on earth to compel us to love and admire him; and she even adds that she would use still stronger language if she dared. Now, my child, what do you think of that? Isn't it very naughty to talk so? Isn't it extravagant language?" &c., &c.1 Let him that is without sin rebuke the genial, warmn-hearted bachelor bishop for not dropping that sort of letter into the fire unanswered, or for not answering it sharply. Our censure, if we should venture upon any, would be reserved for the editor who, in culling from the voluminous masses of the saint's correspondence, materials for a Complete Religious Letter-writer for English clergymen and their fair parishioners, should, out of so much that is admirable, have selected this

one.

It is withal an injustice to the character of Francis, who, in very trying circumstances, proved himself, we honestly think, as pure as the average of Protestant ministers—and that is high praise.

Of course no one will justify everything in his affair with Madame de Chantal. We will not deny that a miraculous revelation from heaven 2 may justify, in extreme cases, a fascinating clergyman of thirty-seven in cultivating a platonico-religious intimacy with an extraordinarily beautiful widow of thirty-two. But no case

1 Lettre à une Dame: du 22 avril 1618. Page 182 of this volume of Messrs. Rivington. Ed. Blaise, 418.

* Francis himself makes no pretence of the heavenly vision.

could justify the parties in clandestine correspondence such as took place at the outset of this acquaintance. It was June 14th, 1604, that Francis wrote to the Baroness de Chantal: "Since your father-director permits you to write me sometimes, I beg you will do so freely and heartily. It will be an act of charity. My present circumstances and occupation make me an object of compassion. To hear from persons like you refreshes me like dew. The length of this letter shows you how my mind relishes intercourse with yours. "This letter was intended to be shown freely to her father and to her confessor, and contained expressions highly gratifying to their feelings. Ten days later it was followed by a strictly confidential letter, tending to supplant the influence of both these gentlemen by his own. "My last letter," he says, "will help you to quiet the mind of the good father to whom you ask leave to show it. I stuffed it well with things calculated to forestall any suspicion on his part that it was written with design;" and he goes on to urge her by the example of St. Teresa, not to limit her confidences to her confessor, but to accept him, Francis, in a more intimate and spiritual relation. We really believe that much good came of this friendship with Madame Chantal, especially as the parties grew older; and that no serious harm came of it, beyond some temporary distress in the family of President Frémiot, a revolting and fatal marriage of convenience," and a certain amount of duplicity, and of unwholesome excitement in both the bishop and the baroness growing out of their unnatural relation. The affair turned out much better than it began. If any document nearly as scandalous as the letter above quoted had been produced in a recent cause célèbre in which the character of one of the most famous of modern preachers was at issue, it would have gone hardly with him

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3 Letter of June 14, 1604. No. 58. 4 Letter 59.

before the jury. We will not say more than that our saint was indiscreet; but it is impossible to say less: and the disposition to dodges and intrigues illustrated by this incident throws a light on other portions of his history which it would not be honest to refuse to accept.

The character in which Francis has had least justice done him by the publications commonly current is that of Missionary. His greatest achievement, the conversion of the Chablais, is related copiously and effusively by Lady Herbert and more briefly by the author of A Dominican Artist. But the substance of the story, as they tell it, may be condensed into a few words. Being sent as a young man to destroy by his preaching the Protestant heresy that had become rooted in the province of the Chablais, he devoted himself to this task, in the face of excessive dangers and hardships, refusing military aid and protection, for the space of four years. The force of his arguments, the persuasiveness of his eloquence, the meekness and gentleness of his life, the sweetness of his disposition, his forgiving love towards his enemies, and the miracles that were wrought by him, overcame the bitter prejudices of the Protestants, who came to him in thousands to abjure their errors, until, by the influence of his ministry, the whole population of the province was won to the Church, and heresy completely extirpated.1

Thus runs the story; but the biographies of the saint, even in the mitigated form in which they are delivered to the British public, enrich this outline with magnificent colours. We are led by them through a bewildering haze of fictions and exaggerations. The project of canonizing Francis was entertained even before his death, and the work of procuring

1 The most condensed summary of the fictitious legend of Francis de Sales is perhaps the Bull of Canonization, which may be found in the Appendix of the Life by Loyau d'Amboise.

proofs of his sanctity was diligently begun by his influential family. The miracles of the saint are boldly compared to those of the Saviour of mankind, and under the one head of the raising of the dead are declared to be fully equal to those of the divine model.2 But the wonders wrought by Francis himself are far below those effected by the imagination of his eulogists. Not only do they multiply the population of the province tenfold, but they change the face of nature and create new heavens and a new earth for the scene of their hero's exploits. The charming plain on the southern shore of Lake Leman, fenced from harsh winds by magnificent walls of mountain, where the fig-trees grow in the open gardens, and the gravest of the winter hardships is the rarity of a week's skating, becomes an awful wilderness in which "eternal winter " reigns, such as Salvator Rosa loved to paint. The quiet, good - humoured peasants are transformed into fierce assassins, ambushed in every hedge; and the stalwart young apostle, "one of the best-built men of his time," flush of money and resources of every kind, backed by the treasury and army of Savoy, and perhaps the best protected man in Europe, is changed into a suffering martyr, confronting daily deaths with heroic resignation, and answering the warnings and entreaties of his friends with a calm, patient smile. Everything becomes heroic. For better security, he takes his lodging at the Castle of Allinges, on a pretty knoll of rock commanding a delicious landscape, where he is the petted guest

The original Life of Francis, published by apostle's death, concludes thus, with almost his nephew, Auguste, about ten years after the

inconceivable bad taste :-"It is that son and nephew that Francis loved that testifieth of these things, and he knoweth that his witness is true. And many other things did Francis de Sales which are not written in this book, which, if they were written, I believe that the world would not contain them." But it is a notable fact that with the single exception of the casting out of devils, no one of these miracles is mentioned or alluded to by Francis himself.