Meanwhile the only biographies of Father Joseph to be published were the three put out in the first years of the eighteenth century by a singular personage called the Abbe Richard. An unbeneficed priest in sore straits for money, Richard had his eye on a certain canonry of Notre-Dame of Paris, which was in the gift of a M. du Tremblay, who was the grandson of Father Joseph’s younger brother, Charles. To ingratiate himself with the nephew, Richard conceived the plan of writing a flattering biography of the great-uncle. Obtaining access to the manuscript of Lepre-Balin’s Life, he quickly turned out a little book which, so far as it goes, is tolerably accurate. It was duly published, and the Abbe waited for his reward. It did not come. Furious, Richard decided to take his revenge. In the text of his first eulogistic biography he interpolated a number of new paragraphs, in which Father Joseph was accused of every crime from murder to simony.
The new version was published anonymously under the alluring title of Le Veritable Père Joseph. Needless to say, this ‘true’ Father Joseph sold a great deal better than Father Joseph tout court. But the sums which could be picked up from the booksellers were paltry in comparison with the income from that delicious canonry. The Abbe had an idea of genius. Rushing to his desk he penned an impassioned refutation of his own calumnies. This refutation was duly printed, and excited a certain interest in the public, but left the Du Tremblay family unmoved. The Reverend Richard died in penury.
For more than a century and a half historians were content to take Richard’s flattery, calumny and refutation, add them together and divide by three. The result of this operation was supposed to be a true picture of the Grey Eminence. In the middle of the nineteenth century, a learned archivist, called M. Pelletier, became interested in Father Joseph and spent years collecting the materials for a new and adequate biography. This huge preliminary labour was practically completed when Napoleon III went to war with Prussia. During the Commune of 1871, the building in which M. Pelletier had stored the vast accumulations of his notes was burnt to the ground.
It began to look as though some higher power were concerned to keep the world in ignorance of Father Joseph. This impression, it must be confessed, was not dispelled even in 1894, when Gustave Fagniez published his huge work, Le Père Joseph et Richelieu. For though Fagniez had made extensive researches, though he had been the happy discoverer of Lepre-Balin’s Supplement, his book cannot be said to do much to illuminate its subject. Not light, but darkness visible, is what it sheds on the scene. Le Père Joseph et Richelieu consists of twelve hundred pages of miscellaneous historical documents, .very badly arranged and published without an index. The book is not a biography (for Fagniez’s concern was with political history, and he was hardly even aware of Father Joseph as a living man); it is a collection of raw materials for a biography and as such it must, unfortunately, be read by anyone who is interested in the Grey Eminence.
At the time when Fagniez published his book, a learned young ecclesiastic, the Abbe (afterwards Canon) Dedouvres, had just begun what was to be a lifetime of research on Father Joseph. Dedouvres, who died about 1929, was professor of Latin at a Catholic university in the west of France, a post which he combined with the duties of almoner to the Congregation of Our Lady of Calvary, in whose archives are preserved its founder’s unpublished papers-three or four million words of diversified documentation, at which, from 1638 to the present day, no scholar, with the exception of Dedouvres, has ever so much as glanced.
The relations between the two historians of Father Joseph were anything but cordial. Fagniez felt that he had a right to an absolute monopoly of Grey Eminences, a corner in political Capuchins. So acute was his sense of proprietorship that for years he absolutely refused to divulge the whereabouts of Lepre-Balin’s precious Supplement, which he had had the luck to discover in the British Museum. The cream of Lepre-Balin went into his Le Père Joseph et Richelieu; but he was determined that no other historian should get a drop even of the milk. To all requests for information he returned a blank refusal. What, then, was his rage when young Dedouvres rediscovered the Supplement on his own account and published the fact to the whole learned world! A few years later the Abbe added insult to injury. Fagniez had declared that the Turciad was irretrievably lost. Dedouvres, by a process of pure inductive ratiocination, came to the conclusion that the poem must be extant and in the Barberini library at Rome.
A postcard to the librarian brought back the answer that there, in effect, it was. The rules of the game demanded that Fagniez should congratulate his rival on this triumph; but his real feelings found vent in the ferocious review he wrote of the Abbe’s next brochure.
Up to this time the story is like something out of Balzac, Le Balzac of Le Cure de Tours. But from now on it becomes pure Anatole France. For about forty years the Abbe worked away at Father Joseph, and in the course of those years he published fully twenty articles and pamphlets about his hero. But the articles appeared in parish magazines and provincial Catholic quarterlies; the pamphlets were issued in editions of two or three hundred by country printers in obscure subprefectures. At the time of their author’s death only four of these twenty items had found their way even into the Bibliotheque Nationale. Lord Acton himself hardly provides a finer example of learning for learning’s sake and not for the public’s. In the later years of his life Canon Dedouvres decided to work up his notes and articles into a continuous biography of Father Joseph.
I need hardly add that death interrupted him long before his task was finished. Here, if one were writing a novel, one would conclude with a delightful little chapter describing the gradual annihilation of the old scholar’s life-work. Father Joseph’s childhood gnawed up by mice to line their nests, his spiritual directions to the Calvarians serving as toilet paper, the Diet of Ratisbon used by the cat’s-meat man to wrap his wares. And so on. But history is rarely so definitive as fiction. In 1932 the two volumes which Dedouvres had actually completed were published. In them the biography of Father Joseph was brought down, in great detail, to the siege of La Rochelle.
But the powers which for so long had been so careful to preserve a darkness round the memory of the Capuchin, saw to it that even this partial lifting of the veil should enlighten only the smallest possible number of readers. Like the pamphlets and articles, the unfinished book was published in the provinces and in a very small edition. Even among professional historians few have read or even heard of it. And yet the book deserves to be known; for though it is by no means what one would call a great biography, it succeeds in giving the reader some impression of the enigmatic figure about whom it is written. Which is more than can be said of Fagniez’s Le Père Joseph et Richelieu.
The present volume is based, in the main, upon the materials contained in the two thousand pages of Fagniez and Dedouvres. Many things have been omitted as intrinsically without much interest and, above all, as irrelevant to the dominant theme of this book, which is the history of a man who tried to reconcile politics with spiritual religion. Thus, I have made no mention of Father Joseph’s dealings with the extreme Gallicans of his day; nor of his collision with Saint-Cyran, the fascinating, pathetic and absurd pseudo-saint of Port-Royal; nor of his campaigns against those precursors of the Quietists, the Illumines.
Nor has it seemed to me necessary to reproduce the details, still extant, of Father Joseph’s negotiations or the minutes of his despatches. In themselves, these accounts of diplomatic haggling and chicanery are about as interesting as would be the shorthand record of the discussion between two peasants over the merits and price of a broken-winded horse. In such dismal transactions there is nothing historically significant except their outcome and its generally disastrous consequences. For the religious history of Father Joseph’s time I have relied on the first five volumes of Bremond’s Histoire du Sentiment Religieux en France.
This book, which is at once an historical narrative, a critical commentary and an anthology culled from a practically inaccessible literature, ranks as one of the most valuable works of scholarship produced in the present century. To anyone who is interested in the psychology of human beings as they normally are and as they might be if they chose, Bremond’s volumes constitute an indispensable source book. They are no less indispensable to those who, more modestly, take an interest in French seventeenth century history. Only a few of the significant religious writings of our period have been reprinted and, of most of them, the early editions are hard to find even in important libraries.
I count myself very fortunate in having been able to
