At nine, the doors of the apartment were thrown open and the friar gave audience to the high officials of the government and the ambassadors of foreign powers. In cases of a particularly thorny and delicate nature, he took his visitors to see the Cardinal, to whose apartments he could descend unseen by means of a private staircase. These interviews were continued till noon or a little later, when he retired to one of the chapels of whatever palace he happened to be living in, to say mass. (The Cardinal heard mass at the same hour, but, curiously enough, in a different chapel.)
Returning from his devotions, Father Joseph would find his antechamber crowded with ‘visitors of every sort and condition-courtiers who had come to beg a favour, friars bearing reports of their missionary labours among the Huguenots, officials in disgrace, distraught ladies with husbands in the Bastille. None of these was ever sent away uninterviewed, and it was after one o’clock when Father Joseph finally sat down to his first meal of the day, which consisted of soup, followed by’ only one dish of butcher’s meat, without ragout or roast.’ Such claustral simplicity of diet profoundly impressed his contemporaries, who were astonished that a man in his position should content himself with so little. (Parenthetically, what an extraordinary fuss our ancestors made about their food! Throughout the Middle Ages and long after, almost to our own day, a man who drank no wine and lived on a vegetarian or low meat diet was regarded as a person of positively heroic virtue. Conditions have changed, and today millions of people go without meat and alcohol and, so far from regarding themselves as martyrs, are perfectly content and would be most reluctant to change their way of life. If our ancestors suffered and felt virtuous under a lenten regimen, which many now regard as ample and delicious, it was because of the faith that was in them. They believed in meat and alcohol; consequently the lack of meat and alcohol was felt as a dreadful privation.)
Occasionally, Father Joseph dined at the Cardinal’s table; but on most days he took his meals in his own apartment, along with his secretary and sometimes one or two intimate friends ecclesiastics or literary men, of whom (especially of the more edifying and boring ones) the author of the Turciad was a steady patron. When he ate alone, Father Angelus or another friar would read aloud to him from some book of devotion or volume of church history. Father Joseph had no money of his own and received no salary. His victuals were paid for out of a special allowance granted by the King. This allowance was sufficient to provide him, as well as his food, with a coach, in which he had now been given an ‘obedience’ to ride whenever his business required it, together with horses, a coachman and four lackeys, who were dressed in a distinguishing livery of grey and yellow. After dinner, if there was a great press of business, he would be sent for by the Cardinal. More often, however, he was free for a couple of hours to give audience. It was at this time that people of the great world were accustomed to pay their respects and ask their favours of him.
At four, he bowed out the last of his visitors and, accompanied by Father Angelus, went into the garden or, if it were raining, into one of the galleries of the palace to recite the remainder of his office, after which he generally found time for another period of mental prayer. At five, he went back to work; the doors were shut and the next three hours were spent in dictating memoranda to the King, political pamphlets or letters to the agents of the crown in foreign parts. At eight he had supper. The bill of fare for this meal has not come down to us. All we can discover about it is that ‘for dessert he always had gingerbread, either because he liked gingerbread, or else because he wished in this matter to follow the taste of the King, who frequently ate it.’ When supper was over, the friar slipped down the private staircase into Richelieu’s apartments, where the two remained closeted until bed-time, discussing affairs of state. Sometimes, when the business of power politics was slack, a few courtiers might be called in, and there would be general conversation about the new French Academy, about those three unities which M. Chapelain was so keen on getting into French drama, about the war in Germany, about the latest cases of sorcery, and diabolic possession.
The bed to which Father Joseph finally retired was a thin hard mattress, laid on planks. There were no sheets and he slept in the hair shirt he had worn all day beneath his stained and ragged habit. Penitential scourgings kept the broad back and shoulders almost permanently covered with unhealed wounds, and the first contact with the mattress, as he lay down, must always have been acutely painful. But Father Joseph was schooled to such discomforts and had learnt not merely to bear in patience, but actually to rejoice in them; for they were pains imposed and endured for the greater glory of God and the salvation of his soul. Long habit had made his power of endurance so great that, in later life, he chose to add to his religious mortifications a torture prescribed by his physicians. This torture, which consisted in periodically cauterizing the back of the head with a hot iron, was supposed to stimulate his failing sight. Whenever he pushed back his cowl, the scar of that repeated burn could be seen, red and angry, below the tonsure.
Such was the routine of Father Joseph’s life as a politician. But this Minister for Foreign Affairs had other duties, which he regarded as no less important than those of his ministry. Once or twice a week he left the Cardinal’s palace to spend the day among the Capuchins of the rue Saint-Honore, or else in the convent of the Calvarian nuns in the Marais. At the rue Saint-Honoré he dealt with the business of that great organization of foreign and domestic missions, of which, since 1625, he had been the head. At the convent in the Marais he preached, he delivered lectures on scholastic philosophy and psychology, he gave instruction in the art of mental prayer, listened to accounts of spiritual progress and advised the nuns in regard to all the problems of the spiritual life.
It is worth remarking that here in Paris, as at Ratisbon, Father Joseph’s reputation was very bad -so bad that contemporaries would never accept the true explanation of his weekly absences from court. It was whispered that, during the time when he was supposed to be with the Capuchins or the Calvarians, he was really prowling about the town in disguise, spying for the Cardinal, or giving bribes and instructions to agents so secret and so sinister that they could not be interviewed except by night, at street corners or in the back rooms of disreputable taverns. Romance is always poorer and less strange than the facts it distorts and oversimplifies. This imaginary Father Joseph, who is the prototype of the ridiculously villainous figure bearing his name in Vigny’s Cinq Mars, is just a bore, whereas the real Father Joseph moves through history as the most fascinating of enigmas.
Those who knew the Capuchin will never, of course, made the mistake that was made by the gossips of the day. Here, for example, is the brief account of him left by Avaux, a reliable witness who was much in contact with the man. After describing Father Joseph’s extraordinary power of concentration and capacity for work, Avaux writes as follows: ‘By nature and by deliberate study, he was a character shut in on himself, one who, except under necessity, took little relaxation in the common life of the senses and who, besides observing the rule of his order, seemed to have prescribed for himself a special rule of his own. Being thus in full enjoyment of all the faculties of his soul, which was never occupied with all those distractions which make up the half of our lives, and having regularly practised meditation, he could judge in a more orderly fashion of things and affairs.’ This is Father Joseph, the man of affairs, brought by self-discipline and the habit of mental concentration to a pitch of efficiency surpassing that of other men.
For a contemporary account of some of the other facets of the friar’s personality, we may turn to Dom Tarisse, an eminent Benedictine, who often saw him and who, like Avaux, was amazed by the way in which a man with so many and such important things to do could concentrate on any given piece of business, however trifling, as though it were the only one he had to deal with. With this capacity for intellectual concentration there went ‘so great a control over his passions that, if it ever happened that, in the midst of so many thorny interviews, he was surprised into saying something harsh or too emphatic, the words were not out of his mouth before you would hear him moderate the tone of his voice and see him smile.’ Dom Tarisse then goes
