All the obstructive machinery of the law was set in motion, and for three long years the royal edict, which granted the Capuchins a right to found a convent at Saumur, failed to obtain the necessary registration from the local Parlement. But the friars were persistent, and at last, in 1609, the foundation stone of the new convent was solemnly laid. Father Joseph had triumphed. But he was not to enjoy his triumph. What he had hoped and expected from his enterprise at Saumur was the privilege to serve as a missionary among the heretics. What it actually led to was a very different kind of career.
Mme de Bourbon was very favourably impressed by the young friar who had been sent to see her. His zeal and piety were exemplary, his judgment was no less remarkable than his ardour; and, what was more, under the ragged habit and the unkempt beard, he was an aristocrat, consummately well educated and of the most polished address. Once a gentleman, always a gentleman; nothing could disguise the fact that Father Joseph had been the Baron de Mafliers. Great nobles, ministers of the crown, princes and princesses of the blood-with this particular friar such people felt at home.
He was ‘one of us,’ a member of their caste. Besides, in the words of a contemporary, ‘his conversation was ravishing, and he treated the nobility with infinite dexterity.’ Mme de Bourbon was as much ravished as all the rest of them. When the business on which he had been sent was finished, she consulted the young man about her own troubles. These were not inconsiderable. Without being scandalous, life in Fontevrault and its dependent houses was exceedingly worldly. These convents were like very exclusive country clubs for women. Of the three monastic vows, that of chastity was observed in them scrupulously; that of obedience, only grudgingly, and that of poverty, not at all.
The nuns enjoyed their own private incomes and lived surrounded by their own possessions and domestics. Mme de Bourbon was pious in a vague sort of way, and would have liked to do something about her order. But what? But how?
Father Joseph discussed the matter with the Abbess and her coadjutrix and niece, Mme Antoinette d’Orleans. Much more intensely and deeply religious than her aunt, this princess had long dreamed of creating within the order of Fontevrault, or outside it, a congregation of pure contemplatives. This young mystic, with his energy and his gift for business, was exactly the counsellor and helper she had always hoped to find. Father Joseph worked out two plans, one of mild reformation for Mme de Bourbon and the more worldly ladies of Fontevrault, the other, radical, for Mme d’Orleans and such nuns and novices as might wish to share with her a strictly cloistered life of contemplation. With these genuine enthusiasts for a mystical and ascetic religion like his own, Father Joseph was able to co-operate enthusiastically and with the greatest satisfaction.
Not so with Mme de Bourbon and the worldly party. The young man desired only one thing, to go on being an evangelist and an apostle of mysticism; and now, by an unfortunate concatenation of circumstances, here he was, inextricably involved in a labour which he found peculiarly distasteful-the reformation of nuns who didn’t want to be reformed, even in moderation, and who were rich and powerful enough to hamper their reformer at every turn. But the talents he displayed in the performance of this ungrateful task were so conspicuous, that he was never allowed to throw it up and return to his missionary labours. Warden successively of the convents of Rennes, Chinon and Tours, he was constantly recalled to Fontevrault. There, among those great ladies in religious fancy dress, he strove heroically to annihilate the last traces of his own personal feelings towards the task that had been assigned to him. It was God’s will that this task should be accomplished and he was merely the instrument of God’s will. Daily and hourly he renewed his resolution to do that will-actually, uniquely, willingly.
Meanwhile, the fact remained that the job of reforming Fontevrault was peculiarly difficult and delicate. Two heads being better than one in such affairs, Father Joseph turned for assistance and advice to the bishop if the neighbouring see of Luçon, a young man still in his twenties, but enjoying already a high reputation for ability and reforming zeal. The name of this precocious ecclesiastic was Armand Jean du Plessis de Richelieu. The two men met, discussed the immediate business at hand, exchanged views on matters of more general interest, and parted as admiring friends. Another link in the chain of Father Joseph’s destiny had been forged.
The work of reformation dragged on for years. In 1610 Father Joseph was transferred from the province of Paris to that of Tours, in order that he might be more continuously at Fontevrault, and from this time until 1613 he lived for months at a stretch in one or other of the convents of the order, assisting Mme d’Orleans in the creation of her little community of contemplatives, and trying to persuade the members of the Fontevrault country club to behave a little more like the nuns they were supposed to be. The problems with which he had to deal were suddenly complicated by the death of old Mme de Bourbon.
The appointment of her successor belonged to the crown, and the crown at this moment was represented by the regent, Marie de Medicis, who chose the Duchesse de Lavedan. Before and after this appointment the Queen Mother sought the advice of Father Joseph and, like everyone else who met him at this time, conceived a very high opinion of his virtues and abilities -an opinion which she retained until that day in 1630 when her flight to Brussels finally removed her from the French scene.
Once again, circumstances were conspiring to draw the missionary away from his preaching into the world of high politics. It would be unprofitable to describe in detail the work which Father Joseph accomplished at Fontevrault and the neighbouring abbey in which Mme d’Orleans had installed those nuns who genuinely desired a life of austerity and orison. Suffice it to say that thanks to him the behaviour of the worldly ladies became more decorous and that finally, in 1617, the community founded by Mme d’Orleans was promoted, by a papal bull, to the rank of a new and independent order, the Congregation of Our Lady of Calvary. This last labour was carried to a successful conclusion in the teeth of the most determined resistance on the part of the new Abbess of Fontevrault, who was jealous of her authority and hated a reform, however intrinsically excellent, which threatened to deprive her of any of her subjects.
Of the two founders of the Calvarian order, Mme d’Orleans died in 1618, only a few months after it had been declared independent of Fontevrault. Dying, she bequeathed to Father Joseph the task of steering the new congregation along the road which together they had mapped out. It was the road which, from the time of his first entrance into religion, the Capuchin had chosen for himself -the road of mortification, mystical orison and the intensive, hallucinatory practice of the passion of Christ. For almost as long as he could remember Calvary had filled his imagination; and it was to Calvary that the new congregation was dedicated.
To imagine themselves in the position of Mary at the foot of the cross, to feel themselves into her thoughts and the emotions she had felt during her son’s long agony-this was to be the principal devotion of the nuns; for the rest, they were to practise the art of mental prayer as systematized by Father Joseph out of the writings of Benet of Canfield. To their guidance, their spiritual and even their intellectual education, Father Joseph gave henceforth unstintingly of his time, his talents and his energies. Even at the height of his political power and under the heaviest pressure of business, he never neglected the Calvarians.
Whenever he was in Paris or in one of the other towns in which a Calvary had been established, he found time to give at least one day in every week to the instruction and encouragement of the nuns. He composed for their use a small library of treatises on prayer, on morals, on philosophy, on theology, besides a great number of letters on the day-to-day problems of the spiritual life. Much of this material still survives, but has never been printed. According to the computations of the only modern scholar who has had access to them, Father Joseph’s treatises and spiritual letters to the Calvarians would fill, if published, thirty octavo volumes of five hundred pages apiece. Most of this great mass of material was composed at a time when the Capuchin was acting as Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and Apostolic Commissary for Missions-two whole-time jobs, to which he added this third, of spiritual director to an entire congregation of religious. Vicariously, in these cloistered contemplatives, he was able
