When the interview was over, Father Joseph respectfully accompanied the nuncio as far as the main entrance of the palace. On the way back he had to cross the great hall, which was being got ready for the performance of a play. Here he found Richelieu, who had come out of his apartment to see how the work was going forward. The Cardinal was in good spirits and banteringly invited his old friend to come that evening and see the show, assuring him that he could do so with a clear conscience; for the play was written on a most serious theme, and was highly edifying. In the same vein, Father Joseph replied that unfortunately he had a prior engagement to ‘do some play-acting with his breviary’; and taking leave of the Cardinal, he returned to his room. Here he said his office, passed some time in prayer, then sat down to supper.
While he was eating, his secretary, Father Angelus of Mortagne, read aloud to him from a chronicle of the crusades. These strange tales of heroism and brutality, of devotion and greed, of single-mindedness and the most cynical double-dealing, were the last messages which came through to Father Joseph from the world of politics. As he rose from the table, he was suddenly struck down by another attack of apoplexy. Speechless and almost completely paralysed, he was laid on his bed. Messengers ran to summon a priest and the Cardinal’s physicians.
On the stage in the great hall, the actors were mouthing their alexandrines into the darkness, where sat the Cardinal and his courtiers. Suddenly there was a little stir in the audience. The captain of the guard was bringing a friar, who had something urgently important to say to His Eminence. Richelieu frowned angrily at the interruption, began a sharp phrase of rebuke; then, hearing what the friar was whispering, uttered what was almost a cry of pain and sprang to his feet. The actors were silenced in mid-harangue. Staring open-mouthed into the auditorium, now suddenly alive with lights, they saw the Cardinal hurrying out between two lines of obsequiously bowing and curtseying ladies and gentlemen.
Greatly distressed, Richelieu went up to the friar’s room and, sitting down beside the narrow bed, took the sick man’s hand and felt it lifeless and unresponding in his own. ‘Mon appui,’ he was thinking, ‘ou est mon appui?’ The doctors came and bled their patient. Then it was the turn of the priest. All knelt ; extreme unction was administered.
Father Joseph lived throughout the night, and next morning seemed slightly better. The news of his second stroke had been carried to Paris, where a prudent secretary immediately drew up, for the King’s signature, a letter to the Pope, in which His Holiness was informed of the sad event and begged not to proceed with the announcement of Father Joseph’s promotion. His Most Christian Majesty had the right to ask for only a limited number of promotions to the Sacred College; for this reason, a Hat inadvertently presented to a dying man would be a total loss to the French monarchy.
Meanwhile, from the Capuchin convent of the rue Saint-Honoré, three of the friar’s colleagues had posted down to Reuil -Pascal of Abbeville, the Warden of the convent, the Provincial of Paris, and the General of the Capuchin order, an Italian, who happened at the moment to be in France. They were shown into the friar’s room, and the General asked in Italian: ‘Do you know me?’ Father Joseph was able to press his hand to signify that he did. The General then went on to explain that, if the sick man were to be given absolution and a plenary indulgence according to the rules of the order, he must make some sign of repentance. With an immense effort of will, Father Joseph lifted his right hand and feebly struck it several times against his breast. Then, pausing a long time to rest, he made the sign of the Cross.
His eyes filled with tears. Absolution was given, and the General and Provincial retired, leaving Father Pascal, who remained with the sick man to the last. Later in the day an even more eminent and wholly unexpected visitor presented himself, no less a person than Gaston of Orleans. For the last fifteen years Gaston had been leading and betraying conspiracies against the royal authority, and on several of these occasions Father Joseph had played the part of an intermediary between the King and his despicable young brother. In the course of these encounters, Gaston had conceived a great liking and respect for the friar. This death-bed visit was motivated by a genuine affection.
Towards evening came the priest who had received Father Joseph’s general confession at the Marais, four days before. Taking his place at the bedside, he told his penitent that the time had now come for him to put aside all thought of creatures and to set his mind solely upon God-the God to whom he would so soon be required to render an account of all his acts. As he spoke of repentance, the friar’s eyes filled once again with tears, and suddenly, to the amazement of the physicians, who thought for a moment that this might be a sign of recovery, he found his voice. ‘Render an account,’ he whispered, echoing the confessor’s final phrase. ‘Yes,’ the priest insisted, ‘you will have to render an account; for God is your judge, and will weigh you in the balance.’ Still weeping, Father Joseph continued to repeat the same three words. ‘Render an account,’ he said again and again, ‘render an account.’
Hopeful now of saving their patient, the doctors redoubled their efforts. Opening a vein, they let a great quantity of blood; but the effect was contrary to what they had expected. The ability to move his limbs, which in some slight measure he had recovered during the day, began, as night advanced, to leave him.
Father Angelus, whom as a youth Father Joseph had converted and who, for almost twenty years, had been his constant companion, knelt beside the bed and, with the patience of one who teaches a child, helped the dying man to make a few last little gestures of contrition, little signs of love for God and confidence in the divine mercy. A crucifix was placed in Father Joseph’s hands, and he was able once or twice to bring it to his lips. In spite of the creeping advance of paralysis, the power of speech still remained -just enough power to permit of the continued repetition of the same single phrase: ‘Render an account, render an account.’
Towards midnight the hands lost their ability to hold the crucifix. Seeing that the end was very near, Father Angelus asked his old friend to give him his blessing. For a time there was no movement in the stiffening body; then, slowly, one finger of the right hand was lifted a little way from the sheet, and after a few seconds dropped back, never to move again. The death agony lasted through the night, and it was not till the early morning of Saturday, December 18th, that the heart finally stopped beating. In the interval between the friar’s death and his interment, Charles de Condren, the man who had succeeded Berulle as General of the Oratory and one of the most beautifully saintly figures of his age, was asked if he would preach the funeral sermon.
To the highly placed personage who brought the invitation Condren answered that he could not, with a good conscience, praise a man who had been the instrument of the Cardinal’s passions, and who was hated by the whole of France. Father Joseph’s body was buried in the church of the Capuchins, in a grave near the steps of the altar next to that of the great gentleman-friar who had received him into the order, Ange de Joyeuse. A few days after the funeral, all Paris was chuckling over the exploit of an anonymous practical joker. On the slab which covered what remained of the man who had once been called the perfect Capuchin, an unknown hand had chalked this distich :
“Passant, n’est-ce pas chose etrange
Qu’un demon soit pres d’un ange”24
It is always easier to make an epigram about a man than to understand him.
APPENDIX
The posthumous history of Father Joseph is so odd and improbable that it deserves to be made the subject of a full-length study. Within ten years of his death a long and detailed biography of the Grey Eminence was written by a certain Lepre-Balin, who was a friend of Father Angelus of Mortagne and had access to all the relevant documents in the possession of the Capuchins, as well as to the entire collection of Father Joseph’s state papers.
These last he put together and edited under the title of Supplement to the History of France. For some unexplained reason, neither the biography nor the Supplement was ever published. The manuscript of the first remained in the archives of the Calvarian nuns, whence it passed into the keeping of the Capuchins of Paris. That of the second disappeared for two hundred and fifty years and was discovered, about 1890, by Gustave Fagniez in
