But this is by no means his only claim to our attention. If Father Joseph had been nothing more than an adept at the game of power politics, there would be no compelling reason for singling him out from among a number of concurrents. But the friar’s kingdom was not like the kingdoms of ordinary power politicians, exclusively of this world. Not merely intellectually, but by actual, direct acquaintance, he knew something of the other world, the world of eternity. He passionately aspired to become, and in some measure, with a part of his being, he actually was, a citizen of the Kingdom of Heaven. Alone of power politicians, Father Joseph was able to provide, out of the depths of his proper experience, the final, objective criterion, in relation to which his policies could be judged.
He was one of the forgers of one of the most important links in the chain of our disastrous destiny; and at the same time he was one of those to whom it has been given to know how the forging of such links may be avoided. Doubly instructive in the fields of politics and religion, his life is further interesting as the strangest of psychological riddles-the riddle of a man passionately concerned to know God, acquainted with the highest forms of Christian gnosis, having experienced at least the preliminary states of mystical union, and at the same time involved in court intrigue and international diplomacy, busy with political propaganda, and committed whole-heartedly to a policy whose immediate results in death, in misery, in moral degradation were plainly to be seen in every part of seventeenth century Europe, and from whose remoter consequences the world is still suffering today.
It was in the spring of 1625 that Father Joseph plodded southward on his third visit to Rome. His business there was diplomatic and religious. On behalf of the French government he had come to talk about the Valtelline and the passes connecting Spanish-controlled Italy with the Hapsburg empire beyond the Alps. On behalf of his order he had come to get leave to found some missions. On his own account, he had come to talk with the Pope and the Cardinal Nephew about his own favourite scheme of a crusade against the Turks. Wherever he went in Rome, he would speak with authority, would be heard with deference and attention. This bare-footed monk was the confidential adviser and right-hand man of Cardinal Richelieu.
Moreover, long before Richelieu came to power, he had been the confidant and agent of Marie de Medicis and a number of other great personages of almost equal importance. Richelieu had been President of the Council of State for only a year; but Father Joseph of Paris had been known and appreciated at the Roman Curia for more than ten. Now in 1625, he was forty-eight, and he still had thirteen years of life before him -thirteen years of life that were also to be years of steadily increasing political power. Before half that time had passed, he was destined to take his place among the five or six most important men in Europe -among the two or three most generally and cordially detested. But before we trace the later stages of this strange career, let us go back to the beginnings.
François Leclerc du Tremblay was born on the fourth of November 1577, the eldest son of Jean Leclerc, Chancellor of the Duc d’Alençon and Premier President des Requetes du Palais, and of Marie de La Fayette, his wife. On his father’s side he came from a distinguished line of lawyers and administrators.
His mother’s family belonged, not to the noblesse de robe, but to the landed nobility. Claude de La Fayette, her father, was the possessor of four baronies, one of which was bequeathed to his grandson, François, who was known, during his brief sojourn at Court, as the Baron de Maffliers. Claude de La Fayette and his wife, Marie de Suze, were Calvinists; but having been blessed with six daughters and, despite the four baronies, little money, they had had Marie brought up in the Catholic religion, so that she might enter a convent and so spare them the expense of a dowry. It may be remarked in passing that such transactions were not uncommon in the France of this period. Civil wars of religion might be fought, Huguenots alternately massacred and tolerated. But all the time French families continued to keep their eyes unflinchingly on the main chance. Thus in parts of the country where Catholics and Protestants were pretty evenly divided, parents would bring up their daughters without any definite religion. When a satisfactory suitor presented himself, a girl could be hurriedly trained and confirmed in whichever faith her future husband happened to profess. Not a very ‘heroic’ way of settling denominational differences in a mixed community; but at any rate it worked, it made for peace and quiet.
It has been fashionable for some time past to believe that the causes of strife are generally, even invariably, economic. This is far from true. Many disputes are purely ideological in origin. In these cases considerations of economic advantage will often intervene in the happiest manner to mitigate the furies of theological hatred.
Marie de La Fayette was saved from the convent by a distant cousin of her mother’s, no less a person than the one-time favourite of Francis I, Anne, Duchess of Etampes. This superannuated royal concubine was now a benevolent old lady of nearly seventy and a good friend of the Leclercs. It was she who arranged the match between her young cousin and Jean Leclerc, she who supplemented Marie’s meagre dowry by a considerable settlement from her own purse. The marriage, which turned out to be a happy one, was celebrated in 1574, and the first child was born, as we have seen, in 1577 and christened François.
(Was the choice of that particular name intended as a delicate compliment to the old Duchess? Who knows?) A sister, Marie, entered the world in the following year. Charles, the youngest of the Leclercs’ three children, was not born until 1684.
François, as he emerged from babyhood, revealed himself as a strange and very remarkable little boy. At once active and introverted, he loved to be up and doing, but he loved at the same time to be left alone, so that he could think his own thoughts. Isolated even in company, he lived in nobody could discover what private world of his own. This secretiveness was not, however, incompatible with powerful emotions. He passionately loved his father and mother; he was deeply attached to his home, to the family servants, to the dogs and horses, the pigeons and the tame ducks, the falcons.
Violent impulses, gusts of consuming passions not only of love, but of hatred and anger too, were an important element of that private world of his; but they existed, even in childhood, behind an iron wall of self-control, of voluntary reserve, unexpressed in words or those countless little actions by means of which the outward-turning nature gives vent so easily to its emotions. François only ‘let himself go’ in situations where other people were not immediately and personally involved. He could be ardently enthusiastic about things and ideas; but he shrank from what he felt to be the indecency of expressed emotional intimacy with other human beings.
Intellectually, the child was almost preternaturally bright and precocious. At the age of ten he was chosen by his schoolmasters to deliver an hour-long funeral oration on Ronsard, in Latin, before a large and brilliant audience. If the large and brilliant audience had been able to understand him, he could have delivered an equally effective oration in Greek, a language he had learnt at almost as ‘early an age as John Stuart Mill and by the same conversational methods as had been used to teach Montaigne his Latin.
Along with his intellectual precocity there went a no less extraordinary forwardness in matters of religious devotion. At the age of four, we are told, the child was brought down to the dinner table one day when his parents were entertaining a distinguished company of guests. Let us try to visualize the scene, to translate it from the telegraphic shorthand in which Father Joseph’s first biographer records it into language a little more adequate to the events described. Next to his proud but rather anxious mother sits the tiny boy, dressed already in a miniature edition of a grown man’s clothes and looking almost indecently ‘cute’ in his claret-coloured doublet and starched ruff. From the other end of the table his father tells him to get up and he obeys with
