He was only potentially saved. To the very last moment of his life, sin might undo the effects of baptism. Hell remained not indeed the certainty it was for Elizabeth and the aged Burleigh and all the rest of them, but a terrifying possibility, even a probability if he continued to lead his present worldly life. Wealth, honours, military glory, the flattering attentions of a king, the compliments of a royal paramour -what was the worth of such trifles in comparison with eternal salvation and the doing of God’s will on earth?
It was with such questions ringing in his ears that the Baron de Maffliers returned to France in the first weeks of 1598. Arriving in Paris, he went at once to see his confessor, Dr. Andre Du Val, who listened attentively to what he said and gave him to read a little book that had been published during his absence in England. It was entitled Bref Discours sur l’ Abnégation intérieure, and its author was none other than Pierre de Berulle, then a young priest, studying theology at the Sorbonne. Inward abnegation! The words seemed magically apposite. François read the book and then re-read it, with passion.
It was another Barlaam and Josaphat -but with the added advantage that its author was alive and in Paris. At once he sought out his old schoolfellow. Berulle received him with delight; and from that time forth, François was seen no more at court, and avoided all the acquaintances he had made there. Consciously and deliberately, he was preparing for the moment, which he now divined was very close at hand, the solemn moment when he should be called to break with his past and begin an entirely new existence.
The little world into which he was now introduced by Berulie and Du Val was a truly extraordinary society, composed for the most part of people in whom the highest intellectual powers were accompanied by an intense religious fervour and, in some cases, by rare and striking spiritual gifts. Its central figure was a woman, Mme Acarie, and it was around her that the others, men and women, lay and religious, respectfully gravitated. Born in 1566, Barbe Avrillot was married at the age of sixteen to a man who, like her own father, belonged to the noblesse de robe.
Pierre Acarie was one of those restless, clever fools, who have to be continually ‘doing something,’ and whose total lack of judgment makes them always choose to do something futile or disastrous. Most of his large fortune he dissipated in financing persuasive swindlers.
Passionately the politician, he espoused the cause of the League with so much ardour that, after the triumph of Henri VI, he was deprived of his post, exiled from Paris and, committing some further imprudence, came near to losing all that remained of his property and even his life. He owed his safety to the untiring efforts of a wife whom he had consistently maltreated. It was not until she was twenty-two that Mme Acarie discovered her religious vocation. Reading a book of devotion, she came upon the phrase: ‘ Trop est avare a qui Dieu ne suffit’-too covetous is he to whom God is not enough. The effect of these words was extraordinary; ‘it was as though God had struck her with a thunderbolt.’ She became a different person -one who knew by immediate intuition that the kingdom is within, that God can be progressively experienced, that it is the duty of human beings to begin here and now the unimaginable task of becoming ‘perfect as their Father in heaven is perfect.’
At the time of François Leclerc’s return from London, Pierre Acarie had been in exile for more than three years and his wife and six children, temporarily reduced to complete penury, were living with the Berulles. Their house in the rue Paradis and, later, when Pierre Acarie’s fortunes had been somewhat restored, the Hotel Acarie became for the religious life of France what the Hotel de Rambouillet was to be, a generation later, for French literature and French manners.
Mme Acarie’s influence was felt only by her contemporaries; for, unlike St. Teresa, whom she resembled in her ceaseless practical activity no less than in the eminence of her mystical gifts, she left no record of her experiences in writing. She is known to us only in her biography (which was written by Dr. Andre Du Val) and in the records left by the men and women who knew her. From these it is evident that nobody could be with her, even for a short time, without recognizing that here was a person, different from ordinary human beings, not only in degree, but actually in kind. Mme Acarie was one in whom the process of illumination and sanctification has gone so far that the merely human element is no more than a thin psycho-physical shell enclosing a core of constantly realized divine immanence.
Some saints have charmed their contemporaries ; Mme Acarie’s sanctity was of a more awe-inspiring kind. St. François de Sales, who was her friend and acted for a time as her confessor, wrote of the ‘infinite respect’ in which he held her; and it was the same With all who approached this extraordinary woman. Those who knew little of the spiritual life were further impressed by the physical phenomena which often accompanied her mystical states-by those trances and ecstasies, which she tried so hard to control and which, along with all experienced directors, then as now, she regarded not so much as a symptom of divine grace as of her own weakness.
(Mme Acarie also received the stigmata, but managed to conceal the marks from those who surrounded her. The fact, which she confided to only three people, of whom Berulle was one, was known only after her death.) Late in the eighteenth century, Barbe Acarie was formally beatified; unofficially, however, her sanctity had been universally recognized during her lifetime. Even professors of theology, like Du Val, could not fail to perceive who and what she was. In 1594, by a kind of providential practical joke, Du Val, the fabulously learned schoolman, had been introduced to Mme Acarie.
For the first time in his life, this expert in the science of deity found himself in the same room with someone whose acquaintance with the subject was not merely discursive and intellectual, but immediate and intuitive. Within the first five minutes, he had recognized that, whereas he himself knew all about God, this woman knew God directly. With an entirely admirable humility, the theologian placed himself under the spiritual guidance of the unlearned mystic, and from that time until her death in 1618, Du Val remained Mme Acarie’s faithful pupil and most trusted friend.
One of the members of Mme Acarie’s circle was a certain Capuchin friar, whose name in religion was Father Benet. This Father Benet had been born in the early fifteen-sixties at Canfield in Essex, the son of a prosperous squire called Fitch. As a young man, William Fitch went up to London to study for the law. The reading of some bootlegged volume of Catholic devotion converted him all of a sudden from a life of dissipation to seriousness and the old religion. To study Catholic theology was impossible in England; accordingly the new convert crossed the Channel and made his way to Douai, where he enrolled himself at the English college. In 1586 he took the habit of a Capuchin and from the first days of his novitiate in Paris revealed himself as a man of the highest spiritual gifts. His contemporary influence was at least as great as that of Mme Acarie -probably even greater; for, as Bremond puts it, Benet of Canfield was ‘the master of the masters,’ the teacher of a whole generation of saintly mystics, who were responsible, by their doctrine and example, for that great renascence of personal religion, which revitalized French Catholicism during the first half of the seventeenth century.
Mme Acarie herself was a disciple of Father Benet. The story of their relationship is a curious one. That phrase, ‘trop est avare ci qui Dieu ne suffit,’ had opened up for Barbe Acarie the kingdom of God existing, latent and unrecognized, in her own spirit. The experience of divine grace was too much for her physical organism; ecstasies and trances became embarrassingly frequent. Her mother-in-law showed a pained disapproval; her husband exploded in indignation.
Doctors were summoned and she was bled to the verge of collapse; the local parson was asked to give her a good talking to, which he did, sometimes even in public. It was all of no avail ; Mme Acarie continued to experience mystical graces and, in spite of all her efforts, continued to be subject to periodical trances and
