‘Woven,’ the Bishop drily interrupted, ‘in Madrid and embroidered at Vienna.’
And so the discussions went on. In spite of their disagreements on the matter of foreign policy, Father Joseph’s admiration for the young bishop daily increased. Among all the corrupt, self-seeking, hopelessly incompetent creatures who gravitated, either as friends or foes, around the young king and his vain stupid mother, Richelieu seemed to him the only person capable of giving to France the things of which that distracted country stood so sorely in need-internal peace, a strong government, the reform of abuses. The more he thought and prayed over the sorry state of the kingdom, the more clear it became to him that here, in the Bishop of Luçon, was the man whom God had chosen to be his instrument. He resolved henceforward to do everything in his power to help his friend to accomplish his manifest destiny. On all his visits to Tours he found opportunities of recommending Richelieu’s abilities to the Queen Mother. Later, when the Capuchin had departed for Italy, Marie de Medicis followed his advice and appointed M. de Luçon to continue and complete the work of appeasement which had been begun at Loudun.
In the negotiations which led up to the peace of Loudun Father Joseph displayed to the full his extraordinary political talents. His chief opponent in the diplomatic game was the protestant Duke of Bouillon, a man of such force and ability that he was able to hold out for years against Richelieu in a condition of almost complete political independence. At the end of these negotiations Bouillon paid the friar a tribute of which any politician might he proud. ‘This man,’ he said, ‘penetrates my most secret thoughts; he knows things that I have communicated only to a few people of tried discretion; and he goes to Tours and returns, on foot, in the rain, the snow and the ice, in the most frightful weather, without anybody being able to observe him. I swear, the devil must be in this friar’s body.’
The treaty was finally concluded as the result of a decisive intervention by Ezechiely. Condé fell sick of the prevailing influenza and seemed for a day or two at the very door of death. Father Joseph chose this moment to represent to him, in the most solemn manner, the dangers to which he would be exposing his soul if he died leaving his country a prey to civil war. The prince was so terrified that, though he recovered and lived to make a nuisance of himself for many years to come, he promptly made his peace with the Queen Mother, as Father Joseph had insisted that he should.
The treaty of Loudun settled nothing; for the magnates were to rebel many times more before they were finally curbed by Richelieu. It was decisive only for Father Joseph. The negotiations with Condé and Bouillon had revealed him to those in authority as a consummate politician. Henceforward he would never be allowed to give himself exclusively to the life of a missionary and mystic. Even if Richelieu had never come to power, Father Joseph would still have played a part, albeit a subsidiary part, in the political life of his time. At Loudun his destiny had drawn him into a position from which he could hardly retreat, even if he had wanted to. And though a part of him did want to retreat, though he was often, in the coming years, to protest that political life was like a hell on earth, there was always a Tenebroso-Cavernoso who enjoyed the game he played so brilliantly well, there was always the ardent patriot who knew that God’s purposes and those of the French government were at bottom identical.
Among the great nobles assembled at Loudun there was one, the Duke of Nevers, with whom Father Joseph had many long and private conversations. The historical significance of this personage was in no wise due to his native abilities. Like Dryden’s Zimri, he was a man, who, stiff in opinions, always in the wrong, was everything he starts and nothing long. Nor did the resemblance end there. He was as vain as Buckingham, as extravagant and ostentatious, as thoroughly unreliable. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about him was the fact, attested on oath by one of his body-servants, ‘that he always slept with his eyes open, and that from those open eyes came rays so frightful that he (the servant) was often frightened and could never get used to them.’ The secret of the Duke’s peculiar contemporary importance was due to his genealogical tree.
By upbringing and title, he was French; by birth, Italian, Greek and German. His mother was a princess of the house of Cleves; his paternal grandmother, an imperial Palaeologus; and his father, a Gonzaga. (In a letter to the Queen Mother Nevers once wrote, with more truthfulness than tact, that ‘it was well known that the Gonzagas had been princes long before the Medici had even been gentlemen.’) Being a Gonzaga, he was in the running, should the direct line fail, for one of the most important of the Italian states.
Years later, the question of his succession to Mantua led to war between France and Spain, and the settlement of the quarrel was to call for Father Joseph’s most astute diplomacy. At present, however, it was not as a Gonzaga, but as a Palaeologus, that the duke aroused his interest. The sultans had ruled in Constantinople for more than a hundred and fifty years; but among the conquered and downtrodden Greeks the memory of political freedom and their last emperors was still very much alive. The Duke of Nevers was a descendant of those emperors, and it was therefore to him that the people of the Morea had recently sent a delegation, begging him to put himself at the head of a projected uprising of Christians against their Turkish overlords. The Duke was to bring his name and a store of munitions; the Greeks promised to do the rest.
Nevers, who had a thirst for glory as well as a keen sense of his own hereditary eminence, was greatly tempted. But though foolish and impulsive, he had at least sense to know that the Ottoman empire could not be overthrown by an undisciplined force of Greek mountaineers, even under the command of a Palaeologus. If the uprising was to be successful, it must be supported by a military and naval expedition fitted out by the great powers of Western Europe. But would the great powers consent to use their resources in this way? That was the question. And that was the subject of those long intimate conversations between the Duke and Father Joseph.
In an age when there were no Westerns or detective stories, the most exciting reading matter an imaginative boy could get hold of was probably to be found in the chronicles of the Crusades. To a child of François du Tremblay’s time, the infidels occupied the place reserved in the minds of a more recent generation of schoolboys for the Redskins. Most men, as they grew up, forgot about the infidels, just as they now forget about the Indians. Not so François du Tremblay. Entering the cloister, he found himself in a world where the infidels were a constant subject of conversation and even of prayer. St. Francis had been deeply concerned with missions, martyrdom, and the recovery of the Holy Places. This concern had become a tradition among his followers.
All Franciscans, including of course the Capuchins, took a kind of professional interest in crusading. To this professional interest, Father Joseph added his own private enthusiasm. Ever since childhood Calvary had been the home of his imagination. The Holy Places were as dear to him as his native land. To deliver them was a matter of spiritual patriotism. From the premises of Christ’s sufferings, the logic of emotion and imagination led to the conclusion that crusading against the Turks was among the Christian’s highest duties. Father Joseph’s meditations upon this theme had often crystallized into visions and auditions; God had commanded him to work for the crusade, had seemed obscurely to promise success. And now, suddenly, providentially, here was the last of the Palaeologi; and the Greeks had begged him to come and lead them against the infidels.
It was a new vocation, a call to tasks even higher and more glorious than those of preaching to the indifferent and the misguided. Ezechiely’s enthusiasm blazed up. And simultaneously Tenebroso-Cavernoso surveyed the political scene and found the juncture peculiarly favourable for a crusade. The existing equilibrium in Europe was desperately unstable. The Hapsburgs, as Richelieu was never tired of pointing out, were
