The preaching brother who wrote the "Travels through Spain and Italy" (Voyage d'Espagne et d'Italie), published at Paris, avec privilège by Jean-Baptiste de l'Épime, speaking of this bull, thus expresses himself: "Is it not very gracious to come off at so little cost, and be at liberty to steal more, when one has occasion for a larger sum?"
Bull Unigenitus.
The bull In cœna Domini was an indignity offered to all Catholic sovereigns, and they at length proscribed it in their states; but the bull Unigenitus was a trouble to France alone. The former attacked the rights of the princes and magistrates of Europe, and they maintained those rights; the latter proscribed only some maxims of piety and morals, which gave no concern to any except the parties interested in the transient affair; but these interested parties soon filled all France. It was at first a quarrel between the all-powerful Jesuits and the remains of the crushed Port-Royal.
Quesnel, a preacher of the Oratory, refugee in Holland, had dedicated a commentary on the New Testament to Cardinal de Noailles, then bishop of Châlons-sur-Marne. It met the bishop's approbation and was well received by all readers of that sort of books.
One Letellier, a Jesuit, a confessor to Louis XIV. and an enemy to Cardinal de Noailles, resolved to mortify him by having the book, which was dedicated to him, and of which he had a very high opinion, condemned at Rome.
This Jesuit, the son of an attorney at Vire in Lower Normandy, had all that fertility of expedient for which his father's profession is remarkable. Not content with embroiling Cardinal de Noailles with the pope, he determined to have him disgraced by the king his master. To ensure the success of this design, he had mandaments composed against him by his emissaries, and got them signed by four bishops; he also indited letters to the king, which he made them sign.
These manœuvres, which would have been punished in any of the tribunals, succeeded at court: the king was soured against the cardinal, and Madame de Maintenon abandoned him.
Here was a series of intrigues, in which, from one end of the kingdom to the other, every one took a part. The more unfortunate France at that time became in a disastrous war, the more the public mind was heated by a theological quarrel.
During these movements, Letellier had the condemnation of Quesnel's book, of which the monarch had never read a page, demanded from Rome by Louis XIV. himself. Letellier and two other Jesuits, named Doucin and Lallemant, extracted one hundred and three propositions, which Pope Clement XI. was to condemn. The court of Rome struck out two of them, that it might, at least, have the honor of appearing to judge for itself.
Cardinal Fabroni, in whose hands the affair was placed, and who was devoted to the Jesuits, had the bull drawn up by a Cordelier named Father Palerno, Elio a Capuchin, Terrovi a Barnabite, and Castelli a Servite, to whom was added a Jesuit named Alfaro.
Clement XI. let them proceed in their own way. His only object was to please the king of France, who had long been displeased with him, on account of his recognizing the Archduke Charles, afterwards emperor, as King of Spain. To make his peace with the king, it cost him only a piece of parchment sealed with lead, concerning a question which he himself despised.
Clement XI. did not wait to be solicited; he sent the bull, and was quite astonished to learn that it was received throughout France with hisses and groans. "What!" said he to Cardinal Carpegno, "a bull is earnestly asked of me; I give it freely, and every one makes a jest of it!"
Every one was indeed surprised to see a pope, in the name of Jesus Christ, condemning as heretical, tainted with heresy, and offensive to pious ears, this proposition: "It is good to read books of piety on Sundays, especially the Holy Scriptures;" and this: "The fear of an unjust excommunication should not prevent us from doing our duty."
The partisans of the Jesuits were themselves alarmed at these censures, but they dared not speak. The wise and disinterested exclaimed against the scandal, and the rest of the nation against the absurdity.
Nevertheless, Letellier still triumphed, until the death of Louis XIV.; he was held in abhorrence, but he governed. This wretch tried every means to procure the suspension of Cardinal de Noailles; but after the death of his penitent, the incendiary was banished. The duke of Orleans, during his regency, extinguished these quarrels by making a jest of them. They have since thrown out a few sparks; but they are at last forgotten, probably forever. Their duration, for more than half a century, was quite long enough. Yet, happy indeed would mankind be, if they were divided only by foolish questions unproductive of bloodshed!
CÆSAR
It is not as the husband of so many women and the wife of so many men; as the conqueror of Pompey and the Scipios; as the satirist who turned Cato into ridicule; as the robber of the public treasury, who employed the money of the Romans to reduce the Romans to subjection; as he who, clement in his triumphs, pardoned the vanquished; as the man of learning, who reformed the calendar; as the tyrant and the father of his country, assassinated by his friends and his bastard son; that I shall here speak of Cæsar. I shall consider this extraordinary man only in my quality of descendant from the poor barbarians whom he subjugated.
You will not pass through a town in France, in Spain, on the banks of the Rhine, or on the English coast opposite to Calais, in which you will not find good people who boast of having had Cæsar there. Some of the townspeople of Dover are persuaded that Cæsar built their castle; and there are citizens of Paris who believe that the great châtelet is one of his fine works. Many a country squire in France shows you an old turret which serves him for a dove-cote, and tells you that Cæsar provided a lodging for his pigeons. Each province disputes with its neighbor the honor of having been the first to which Cæsar applied the lash; it was not by that road, but by this, that he came to cut our throats, embrace our wives and daughters, impose laws upon us by interpreters, and take from us what little money we had.
The Indians are wiser. We have already seen that they have a confused knowledge that a great robber, named Alexander, came among them with other robbers; but they scarcely ever speak of him.
An Italian antiquarian, passing a few years ago through Vannes in Brittany, was quite astonished to hear the learned men of Vannes boast of Cæsar's stay in their town. "No doubt," said he, "you have monuments of that great man?" "Yes," answered the most notable among them, "we will show you the place where that hero had the whole senate of our province hanged, to the number of six hundred."
"Some ignorant fellows, who had found a hundred beams under ground, advanced in the journals in 1755 that they were the remains of a bridge built by Cæsar; but I proved to them in my dissertation of 1756 that they were the gallows on which that hero had our parliament tied up. What other town in Gaul can say as much? We have the testimony of the great Cæsar himself. He says in his Commentaries' that we 'are fickle and prefer liberty to slavery.' He charges us with having been so insolent as to take hostages of the Romans, to whom we had given hostages, and to be unwilling to return them unless our own were given up. He taught us good behavior."
"He did well," replied the virtuoso, "his right was incontestable. It was, however, disputed, for you know that when he vanquished the emigrant Swiss, to the number of three hundred and sixty-eight thousand, and there were not more than a hundred and ten thousand left, he had a conference in Alsace with a German king named Ariovistus, and Ariovistus said to him: 'I come to plunder Gaul, and I will not suffer any one to plunder it but myself;' after which these good Germans, who were come to lay waste the country, put into the hands of their witches two Roman knights, ambassadors from Cæsar; and these witches were on the point of burning them and offering them to their gods, when Cæsar came and delivered them by a victory. We must confess that the right on both sides was equal, and that Tacitus had good reason for bestowing so many praises on the manners of the ancient Germans."
This conversation gave rise to a very warm dispute between the learned men of Vannes and the antiquarian. Several of the Bretons could not conceive what was the virtue of the Romans in deceiving one after another all the nations of Gaul, in making them by turns the instruments of their own ruin, in butchering one-fourth of the people, and reducing the other three-fourths to slavery.
"Oh! nothing can be finer," returned the antiquarian. "I have in my pocket a medal representing Cæsar's triumph at the Capitol; it is in the best preservation." He showed the medal. A Breton, a tittle rude, took it and threw it into the river, exclaiming: "Oh! that I could so serve all who use their power and their skill to oppress their fellow-men! Rome deceived us, disunited us, butchered us, chained us; and at this day Rome still disposes of many of our benefices; and is it possible that we have so long and in so many ways been a country of slaves?"
To the conversation between the Italian antiquarian and the Breton I shall only add that Perrot d'Ablancourt, the translator of Cæsar's "Commentaries," in his dedication to the great Condé, makes use of these words: "Does it not seem to you, sir, as if you were reading the life of some Christian philosopher?" Cæsar a Christian philosopher! I wonder he has not been made a saint. Writers of dedications are remarkable for saying fine things and much to the purpose.
CALENDS
The feast of the Circumcision, which the church celebrates on the first of January, has taken the place of another called the Feast of the Calends, of Asses, of Fools, or of Innocents, according to the different places where, and the different days on which, it was held. It was most commonly at Christmas, the Circumcision, or the Epiphany.
In the cathedral of Rouen there was on Christmas day a procession, in which ecclesiastics, chosen for the purpose, represented the prophets of the Old Testament, who foretold the birth of the Messiah, and – which may have given the feast its name – Balaam appeared, mounted on a she-ass; but as Lactantius' poem, and the "Book of Promises," under the name of St. Prosper, say that Jesus in the manger was recognized by the ox and the ass, according to the passage Isaiah: "The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master's crib" (a circumstance, however, which neither the gospel nor the ancient fathers have remarked), it is more likely that, from this opinion, the Feast of the Ass took its name.
Indeed, the Jesuit, Theophilus Raynaud, testifies that on St. Stephen's day there was sung a hymn of the ass, which was also called the Prose of Fools; and that on St. John's day another was sung, called the Prose of the Ox. In the library of the chapter of Sens there is preserved a manuscript of vellum with miniature figures representing the ceremonies of the Feast of Fools. The text contains a description of it, including this Prose of the Ass; it was sung by two choirs, who imitated at intervals and as the burden of the song, the braying of that animal.
There was elected in the cathedral churches a bishop or archbishop of the Fools, which election was confirmed by all sorts of buffooneries, played off by way of consecration. This bishop officiated pontifically and gave his blessing to the people, before whom he appeared bearing the mitre, the crosier, and even the archiepiscopal cross. In those churches which held immediately from the Holy See, a pope of the Fools was elected, who officiated in all the decorations of papacy. All the clergy assisted in the mass, some dressed in women's apparel, others as buffoons, or masked in a grotesque and ridiculous manner. Not content with singing licentious songs in the choir, they sat and played at dice on the altar, at the side of the officiator. When the mass was over they ran, leaped, and danced about the church, uttering obscene words, singing immodest songs, and putting themselves in a thousand indecent postures, sometimes exposing themselves almost naked. They then had themselves drawn about the streets in tumbrels full of filth, that they might throw it at the mob which gathered round them. The looser part of the seculars would mix among the clergy, that they might play some fool's part in the ecclesiastical habit.
This feast was held in the same manner in the convents of monks and nuns, as Naudé testifies in his complaint to Gassendi, in 1645, in which he relates that at Antibes, in the Franciscan monastery, neither the officiating monks nor the guardian went to the choir on the day of the Innocents. The lay brethren occupied their places on that day, and, clothed in sacerdotal decorations, torn and turned inside out, made a sort of office. They held books turned upside down, which they seemed to be reading through spectacles, the glasses of which were made of orange peel; and muttered confused words, or uttered strange cries, accompanied by extravagant contortions.
The second register of the church of Autun, by the secretary Rotarii, which ends with 1416, says, without specifying the day, that at the Feast of Fools an ass was led along with a clergyman's cape on his back, the attendants singing: "He haw! Mr. Ass, he haw!"
Ducange relates a sentence of the officialty of Viviers, upon one William, who, having been elected fool-bishop in 1400, had refused to perform the solemnities and to defray the expenses customary on such occasions.
And, to conclude, the registers of St. Stephen, at Dijon, in 1521, without mentioning the day, that the vicars ran about the streets with drums, fifes, and other instruments, and carried lamps before the pré-chantre of the Fools, to whom the honor of the feast principally belonged. But the parliament of that city, by a decree of January 19, 1552, forbade the celebration of this feast, which had already been condemned by several councils, and especially by a circular of March 11, 1444, sent to all the clergy in the kingdom by the Paris university. This letter, which we find at the end of the works of Peter of Blois, says that this feast was, in the eyes of the clergy, so well imagined and so Christian, that those who sought to suppress it were looked on as excommunicated; and the Sorbonne doctor, John des Lyons, in his discourse against the paganism of the Roiboit, informs us that a doctor of divinity publicly maintained at Auxerre, about the close of the fifteenth century, that "the feast of Fools was no less pleasing to God than the feast of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin; besides, that it was of much higher antiquity in the church."