Berulie owed even more to father Benet than did Mme Acarie. The Capuchin taught him, not merely the technique of meditation and contemplation, but also a complete theory of mysticism-a theory which, as we shall see in the next chapter, differed in certain important respects from the traditional theology of Dionysius and his followers down to the time of St. John of the Cross, and whose propagation by Berulie and the members of his school was to affect the whole future course of Christian mysticism.
Berulie and Mme Acarie were Father Benet’s most influential pupils; but there were many, many others of lesser note. ‘God alone knows,’ writes his contemporary biographer, ‘the number of religious who, with the aid of his documents, delivered by word of mouth and in writing, have raised themselves to sublime states of perfection.’
It was from this master of the masters that François Leclerc received his initiation into the ‘unitive life.’ Father Benet and, to an even higher degree, Mme Acarie possessed that profound insight into character which comes to men and women of advanced spirituality, and which is technically known as the discernment of spirits. It is recorded of Mme Acarie that she could distinguish infallibly between those who had been graced with a gift for contemplation and those who had not, and that she considered it very unwise to impose a mystical education upon the latter. The fact that Father Benet undertook to teach him, and that Mme Acarie saw no objection to it, seems on the face of it sufficient proof that François had in him the makings of a genuine mystic. It is the business of his biographer to discover why and in the name of what religious principle this potential John of the Cross preferred to become the right-hand man of Cardinal Richelieu.
Mme Acarie, as I have said, was an active mystic. The house in the rue Paradis was the rallying point of all those, lay or religious, who took an interest in the reform of existing monastic orders or the creation of new congregations. At the same time, It was the headquarters of a very efficient organization for the distribution of charity. Contributions came from the most unexpected sources. For example, each time the King sat down to play for high stakes, he would propitiate the Almighty and sacrifice to the goddess of luck by sending five and twenty crowns to Mme Acarie for her good works. Voluntary helpers distributed the sums collected and undertook the labour of visiting the poor, the sick, the imprisoned. It was labour far from light or agreeable.
Paris at the beginning of the seventeenth century was an overgrown medieval city, undrained, unswept, pestilential and brutalized with overcrowding. The hospitals were like charnel houses, and the prisons like hells on earth. It was in this frightful Paris of the poor and the criminal that, as one of Mme Acarie’s helpers, the youthful Baron de Massiers began a new chapter of his education. He had tasted successively of learning, travel, courts, war and diplomacy. Now, under the tutorship of Father Benet and Mme Acarie, he was being given a first-hand experience of divine illumination on the one hand and the darkness of human misery and wickedness on the other.
François Leclerc’s unofficial novitiate was interrupted after a few months by a curious episode. Secretly, without telling a soul, he left home and headed post-haste for the south. His destination was the Grande Chartreuse, in the hills above Grenoble.
Was it on the advice of Du Val or Father Benet or Mme Acarie that the young man made this decision to become a Carthusian monk? One may be permitted to doubt it. St. Bruno’s medieval imitation of primitive Egyptian monasticism had survived almost unchanged through the centuries, ‘never reformed because never deformed,’ a venerable institution, but somewhat out of touch with the life of an age which was busily engaged in modernizing the old religious organizations and creating a multitude of new ones. His friends in Mme Acarie’s circle would almost certainly have advised him to join some other, newer order than the Carthusian. The young man’s choice was probably due in part to the impression left upon his mind by the visits he had made in childhood to the Charterhouse of Paris; in part, we may guess, to the fact that, by taking the Carthusian habit, he would be performing an act of self-abnegation, the most complete of which he was capable.
It was not that the Carthusian rule was more rigid and mortificatory than all others. The Capuchins, to take but one example, treated their bodies with no less severity. But the Capuchins were actives as well as contemplatives, whereas the Carthusians lived immured and in almost perpetual silence. To a man of François Leclerc’s ardent temperament and busy intellect, this total retirement from the world of men must have seemed the final and absolute sacrifice of self. The child, who had begged to be sent to a boarding school for fear his mother might turn him into a mollycoddle, had grown up into this young man, hungry for a life of confinement, and enforced inactivity-hungry for it precisely because he knew it would be the most difficult of all for him to bear.
He set out, then, fully resolved to make the supreme sacrifice of all his inclinations; but on the road, near Nevers, something happened to make him change his mind. He heard an inward voice telling him to return at once to Paris, and that he should not enter religion without first obtaining his mother’s consent. He obeyed. St. Bruno lost a monk, but St. Francis gained a friar, and Cardinal Richelieu a secretary of state for foreign affairs.
As François had foreseen, when he left home without taking leave of even his mother, Mme Leclerc had no intention of helping her eldest son to abandon a world in which he might reasonably expect to make a brilliant military or administrative career.
Moreover, she had long been negotiating for an heiress, and now the girl had been as good as promised her. With the dowry François could restore the family fortune, sadly diminished since M. du Tremblay’s death, could buy a good position for his young brother and see to it that his sister got a satisfactory husband. Not to mention, of course, all the things that money would permit him to do for himself. And now the boy was talking about throwing it all up and going into a cloister. The folly of it. And, after all she had done for him, the ingratitude. Stubbornly, during the months that followed his return from Nevers, she fought against her son’s vocation; and, no less stubbornly, the young man defended it.
In the end, torn by conflicting allegiances, he fell sick. The illness dragged on and grew worse, until at last Mme Leclerc’s maternal solicitude got the better of her ambition. Reluctantly and conditionally, she assented to a compromise. She would let him enter religion on condition that he chose an order whose rule would permit her to go on seeing him. At this, the divided allegiances were reconciled; François began at once to recover. After some hesitation, he decided in favour of the Capuchins. Father Benet of Canfield was consulted; and by him, in his capacity as Warden of the Capuchin convent of the rue Saint-Honore, François was given a written ‘obedience’ and sent to the house of novices at Orleans. Secretly, as on the previous journey, he left Paris; and this time there was no turning back. On February 2nd, 1599, he put on the habit of a Franciscan novice.
That he had done wisely to leave home without saying goodbye to his mother was proved a short time later, when Mme Leclerc appeared at the convent gates accompanied by a high legal dignitary and bearing a royal injunction that commanded the Capuchins to give her back her son. There was one last prolonged discussion. The mother’s tone was violent; the son’s gentle, but unshakably resolute. She declared that she had never really given her consent; that he was a runaway and the friars no better than kidnappers; that he was neglecting sacred duties, condemning his brother and sister to penury, breaking her own heart. François replied that God had called him and that to neglect this summons would be a sin.
His words were spoken with such a moving sincerity, that Mme Leclerc was touched, wavered and finally broke down in tears. She gave him her blessing, burnt the royal lettre de mission and left him to the Church. From having been the implacable enemy of her son’s vocation, Mme Leclerc henceforth became its most ardent friend. In her mind, this interview produced the effects of a conversion. She turned from worldliness to a piety which her son fostered by a long series of spiritual instructions; she devoted herself to good works. Her reward, in this world, was to live long enough to see Father Joseph making a career for himself
