Béarn yielded without a blow, and was formally incorporated into the kingdom of France. Jeanne d’Albret’s decrees were rescinded, confiscated Church lands were restored to their original owners, and Catholicism was reintroduced into the province. Father Joseph, who accompanied the army, was kept very busy founding convents, re-consecrating churches, organizing the missionaries who were to win the heretics back to the true faith. Like Richelieu, Father Joseph did not believe in dragooning the Huguenots into conformity. ‘Forced religion,’ he declared, ‘is no longer religion.’ Military action against the Huguenots was to be taken not because they were Protestants, but because of their claim to constitute a quasi-independent state within the state of France.
Once reduced to obedience, they were to be allowed to worship as they pleased. To convert them would then become the business of Catholic missionaries, such as the Capuchins. Such were Father Joseph’s principles in regard to the heretics; and, for the most part, his practice conformed to those principles. There were plenty of Catholics who would have liked to see the Protestants more harshly treated. Thanks to Richelieu, the shrewd, conservative statesman, thanks, too, to Father Joseph, the ardent evangelist and the missionary, a more tolerant policy prevailed. The result was that, after their political defeat, the Huguenots remained a loyal minority of useful and contented citizens.
Louis XIV’s persecution of them, in the latter part of the century, was without political or economic excuse; it was an act of what is called ‘high idealism,’ in other words of pure and gratuitous bigotry. From Béarn the royal forces marched on the great Huguenot fortress of Montauban. They were under the command of Luynes, who had been made Constable of France. The contrast between the General’s resounding title and his hopeless incapacity as a soldier was a source to all of contemptuous merriment. Weeks passed, and the siege of Montauban had to be ingloriously raised; then after other humiliating failures, the Constable forestalled his imminent fall from the king’s good graces by catching typhoid and, in the last days of 1621, miserably dying.
The king was now without either a favourite or a competent adviser, and for the next two and a half years the government was carried on by a succession of feeble and generally unsatisfactory ministries. Coming and going between Touraine and Paris, Father Joseph worked unobtrusively for the advancement of his friend, the new-made Cardinal. The task was not easy. For though Richelieu was by far the ablest man in French public life, the king was reluctant to make use of him. There were many reasons for this reluctance. To begin with, the Cardinal’s mere physical presence was extremely repugnant to Louis. Sickly and neurotic himself, the king liked to be surrounded with healthy bodies and healthy minds. He shrank with a kind of disgust from the contact of this invalid priest, whose ordinary restraint of manner concealed nervous abnormalities at least as considerable, in their own way, as his own.
Furthermore, Louis was painfully conscious of his own shortcomings; he knew he was slow-witted and ignorant, pathologically moody and vacillating. The Cardinal’s prodigious abilities and the almost superhuman quality of his undeviating will were felt by the younger man as a kind of standing reproach and at the same time as a menace to his personal independence. His harsh and loveless upbringing had left him with a fear of being bullied, a mistrust of dominating personalities. Besides disgusting and shaming, the Cardinal actually frightened him. But over and against these private reasons for rejecting Richelieu were ranged all the public and political reasons for accepting him.
True, his reputation in certain respects was bad. He had flattered the infamous Concinis and had openly acknowledged himself their creature. Then, while in exile, at Blois, he had kept up a secret correspondence with Luynes, informing him of all the Queen Mother’s plans. The information had been useful; but in the giving of it the informer had not increased his reputation for trustworthiness. Meanwhile, the fact remained that he was an incomparable politician, and to all appearances the only man capable of solving his country’s most urgent problems.
Louis XIII took his duties as a king very seriously; the fact that he overcame his personal distaste for Richelieu and that he contrived to repress it through all the eighteen years of their association bears witness to the strength of his public spirit. The first and most decisive manifestation of that public spirit came when, yielding to a now irresistible pressure of advice and persuasion, the king admitted Richelieu to the council of state. That was in April 1624.
Four months later came the second. In August of the same year, La Vieuville, the head of the ministry, was arrested and the Cardinal installed in his place. One of Richelieu’s first acts as prime minister was to send a letter to the Provincial of Touraine. ‘Next to God,’ he declared, ‘Father Joseph had been the principal instrument of his present fortune,’ and he begged the Capuchin to come at once to Paris, where there was important work for him to do. The necessary ‘obediences’ were obtained from the general of the order, and within a very short time Father Joseph had taken the place he was to occupy until his death in 1638 -the place of unofficial chief of staff for foreign affairs.
CHAPTER VI The Two Collaborators
Finally and unequivocally, Father Joseph had now surrendered to his destiny. His career as an evangelist and a teacher of spiritual exercises was not indeed over -for he continued with almost superhuman energy to instruct his nuns and direct an ever-growing organization of foreign and domestic missionaries -but had become secondary to his career as a politician. From now on he was primarily the collaborator of Richelieu and, in all but name, his country’s minister for foreign affairs. In the Capuchin’s life, as in the Cardinal’s, that summer of 1624 marked a decisive turning point. Having reached this date in our narrative, we may, I think, appropriately devote a few paragraphs to a comparison of the two men, who were henceforward to work together in such intimate collaboration. In the course of his fruitless visit to Madrid, in 1618, Father Joseph had received from his hosts only one concrete proposition, and that was strictly dishonourable. Important personages in close touch with the government waited upon the friar in his cell at the Capuchin convent, assured him of the high esteem in which he was held by the king, the admiration felt by the Duke of Lerma for his virtues and talents, the desire of both for a better understanding with France and their readiness, if he would support the pro-Spanish policy which had been pursued by Marie de Medicis and had now, with her exile, fallen into discredit, to place at the friar’s disposal practically any sum he cared to mention -oh, not for his own use, of course! How could the Reverend Father imagine such a thing? No, no, for some good work in which the Reverend Father was interested -some mission, for example, some new order of religious, dedicated to the contemplation of God’s transcendent majesty and beauty…
It was the classic temptation, reserved for souls of quality. The common run of merely animal men and women can be left to Belial-
“Belial, the dissolutest Spirit that fell,
The sensualest and, after Asmodai,
The fleshiest Incubus, who thus advised:
‘Set women in his eye and in his walk.”
But when fishing for the elect, it is a waste of time to bait the hook with such too, too solid, such obviously unidealistic worms.
“Among the sons of man,
How many have with a smile made small account
Of beauty and her lures, easily scorned
All her assaults, on worthier things intent.”
Therefore, Satan concludes,
“Therefore with manlier objects we must try
His constancy with such as have more show
Of worth, of honour, glory and popular praise
(Rocks, whereon greatest men have oftest wrecked).”
Through the Spanish government, Satan set to work on Father Joseph, but with no success. The friar was a good Frenchman, who mistrusted foreigners et dona ferentes. He was also (and this is much more significant) a good Capuchin, who mistrusted money as such.
How Richelieu would have received a similar offer is uncertain. He was as good a Frenchman as Father Joseph; but in that age many good Frenchmen did not scruple to accept substantial gifts and pensions from foreign governments. The current conventions of honour and morality did not unequivocally condemn such practices, which were common among the aristocracies of every country in Europe. This being so, Richelieu would quite probably have seen no reason for refusing such a gift, all the more so as he would not have felt bound by it to keep his side of the bargain. He could have taken the bribe with a good social and political conscience. As for his personal conscience, that would not have been troubled even for a moment. He felt no scruples about money and could indulge 1:his covetousness without a qualm. Such scruples as he had were mainly sexual.
He had a high opinion of continence -no doubt because he had a low opinion of women. ‘These animals,’ he said of them, ‘are very strange. One sometimes thinks they must be
