They ask him what he means to do when he is a man, how he likes his baby sister, when he is going to learn to ride. Finally, a magistrate puts him a question with a double meaning. The innocence of the answer raises a laugh which the child is utterly at a loss to understand. Tears comes into his eyes; his mother takes him on her knee and kisses him. The guests go back to their eating and the child is set down on stool and given a sweetmeat, which he eats in silence. His presence is forgotten. Then, suddenly, in a lull of the conversation, he shouts down the table to his father: may he tell there’s something? Marie tries to check him; but Jean Leclerc is indulgent: little François shall tell them whatever he likes. The child stands up on his stool. Smiling, the guests prepare the heckle and applaud.
After the first few words their faces become suddenly serious, and they listen in silence, profoundly touched The little boy is telling them a story he has just heard from on of the servants of the house, the story of the Passion. He tells of the scourging, the crown of thorns. As he describes the crucifixion, his voice trembles and, all at once, he breaks down into irrepressible sobbing. His mother takes him into her arms an tries to comfort him; but for this unhappiness there seems to be no consolation. In the end she has to carry him from the room.
The child is father of the man. This tiny boy, grief-stricked by the story of his Saviour’s death, was destined to become the co-founder and, for many years, the guardian and spiritual director of a new reformed order of nuns, the Calvarians, whose principal devotion was to be directed to the suffering mother at the foot of the cross. He was also destined to become a states man, absorbed in the most dangerous kind of power politics and to all appearances quite indifferent to the appalling sufferings for which his policy was responsible.
The child in tears for Jesus the grown man meditating himself, and teaching others to meditate upon the sufferings endured on Calvary-were these the father and the brother of Richelieu’s collaborator, of the man who did everything in his power to prolong the Thirty Year War? This is a question to which, in its proper place, we shall have to try to find an answer. Meanwhile, our immediate concern is with a sixteenth-century boyhood. At the age of eight, François de Tremblay was sent to boarding school in Paris. Or, rather, he went there at his own wish; for he actually asked to leave home, on the ground that he was being spoilt by his mother, qui en voulut faire un délicat.
Once more the child is father of the man. This little Spartan was to come to manhood as the militant Capuchin, eager to undertake all kinds of supererogatory self-mortification, was to grow up as the tonsured and bare-footed politician who, even at the height of his power, even in the extremities of sickness and fatigue, consistently refused to accept for himself any mitigation of his order’s Franciscan rule.
At the College de Boncourt François learned more Greek and Latin and was no doubt as mercilessly beaten, bullied and ill-fed as little boys were in most of the boarding schools of the period. Among his fellow pupils and friends at Boncourt was one of whom we shall hear a good deal in a later chapter of this book, Pierre de Berulle, future Cardinal, founder of the Oratory, and the most influential member of the French School of mysticism, which flourished during the first half of the seventeenth century.
Like François, Pierre was precociously serious-minded. From childhood his piety had been at once ardent and intellectual, spontaneous and learned. At twelve, we are told by a young Protestant lady, who afterwards became a Carmelite, he could discuss theology like a doctor of the Sorbonne. At eighteen he was a controversialist so powerful and acute that Huguenot ministers were afraid of meeting him in public debate.
Pierre was two years older than François, even more intelligent and no less precocious. Moreover, like the younger boy, he was already passionately religious and serious beyond his years. Their friendship was that of two future theologians and mystics. One conjures up a picture of these strange children, squatting apart, in a corner of the school’s high-walled playground. The other urchins play ball or exchange those imbecile witticisms which small boys find so exquisitely funny. With a passionate earnestness and in high treble voices, Pierre and François discuss the deepest problems of metaphysics and religion. When François was ten, there occurred an event which must have provided them with food for many such discussions of the significance of life and the nature of God and man.
In 1587 Jean Leclerc du Tremblay died. ‘François loved his father with all the repressed violence of which his passionate, inward-turning nature was capable. His grief on this occasion was profound; and when the first paroxysm was past, there remained with him, latent at ordinary times, but always ready to come to the surface, a haunting sense of the vanity, the transience, the hopeless precariousness of all merely human happiness.
This precocious conviction that ours is a fallen world was confirmed by all that François heard or saw around him. All over France the Leaguers and the Huguenots, assisted by their foreign allies, were busily engaged in trying to do to their unhappy country what the Lutherans and Imperialists, with their allies, were to do a generation later to Germany. For a variety of reasons, the Leaguers and the Huguenots did not succeed in destroying France, as Father Joseph’s political friends and enemies were later to succeed in destroying Germany. Fifteen years of peace and good management under Henry IV were sufficient to restore the country to prosperity-to fatten it up like a Christmas turkey, against the coming of Richelieu’s tax collectors. But while the religious wars lasted, France had to endure all the horrors of massacre and depredation, of plague and famine, of lawlessness and political anarchy.
Those who had to live through this bloody chaos came to appreciate the virtues of order and of that institution of monarchy, which alone at that time could bring them the order they desired. At the same time the presence of foreigners -Spaniards, Germans, English, who kept the wars on French soil going and exploited France’s weakness-served to stimulate French patriotism. It was in these years of civil strife and foreign intervention that François Leclerc became what he was to remain all his life a firm believer in absolute monarchy and an ardent nationalist. These political convictions were to be elaborately justified in terms of theology, and this justification was to give them added strength; but it must always be remembered that they had their source, not in any abstract theory, but in the brute facts of the boy’s experience.
In 1585 life in Paris became so dangerous that Mme Leclerc decided to remove with all her family to Le Tremblay, near Versailles, where she had a fortified house and a band of tenants and farm hands to protect her. Here François continued his education under a private tutor to whom he gave the affectionately respectful nickname of Minos. His studies now included modem languages, especially Spanish and Italian, both of which he subsequently learnt to write and speak almost as well as his own native tongue, the rudiments of Hebrew, philosophy, jurisprudence and mathematics. In the intervals of study he learned to ride and use the arquebuse, he wandered in happy solitude through the woods, he indulged his taste for reading. There were not many books at Le Tremblay; but among those few was a copy of Plutarch’s Lives in translation and a collection of Christian biographies, mostly of hermits.
These two books he read and re-read. Plutarch confirmed his innate taste for heroism and the strenuous life; and under the influence of those hermits, his latent sense of the world’s vanity grew so strong within him that he felt inspired to write a little treatise on the advantages of the religious life. This was completed shortly before his twelfth birthday and was much admired for its style.
Nobody, not even his mother, had sufficient insight to perceive that the really significant thing about this juvenile production was not the absurd, strained elegance of its laboriously imitated form, but its Early Christian substance. Indirectly, in this rather pretentious little piece of abstract argumentation, the child had announced his own intention of some day entering religion.
Two and a half years later, when he was fourteen, he made his first, premature attempt to carry out that intention. This very significant episode was recorded by François himself when, eight years after the event, as a Capuchin novice, he was ordered by his superiors to write an account of his vocation. The document, which bears the curious title Discours en forme d’ Exclamation, is still extant. Briefly, this is the story it tells of the events of 1591.
Mme Leclerc was away from home on business, and had left her three children in the care of one of the neighbouring Squires. It was a gay household, noisy with a whole troop of young girls, Among these there was one, of about François’s own age, at whom the boy found himself looking with an ever-increasing persistence. He had known her from childhood (she was probably a distant cousin); but up till that moment neither she
