guised retractation of his own opinions, but would bide his time and set matters before the public at a favourable opportunity.1 Deaf to all entreaties and suggestions of compromise, his gathering feverishness saw more and more clearly into Bossuet's fiendish treachery and vanity, that yearned after the spolia opima of the Quietist War, and, not content with present triumphs, was determined to feast the eyes of his creatures with the richer spectacle of an Archbishop crushed and beaten, driven into a thinly veiled abjuration of his errors, and publicly owning himself a partaker in this wretched woman's iniquities.2

Doubtless, in these protestations there was an element of real sympathy for Mme. Guyon, a feeling that Bossuet had treated her harshly, and mistaken her vaporous inconsequences for artful and deliberate errors. Still Fénelon's apologies for her are not the work of a whole-hearted confidence; only too often does their halting incompleteness betray a knowledge of the badness of his cause. Against the justice of the censure he can only plead the purity of her intentions, an issue never raised by Bossuet, nor considered by the general jurisprudence of the Church. Or else he takes somewhat firmer ground, admits the reasonableness of Bossuet's attack, is ready to sign a Formulary imposed by lawful authority, yet excuses himself from taking an active part against her, lest he should seem to be wantonly flouting a former friend.

And Bossuet, it seems, would have admitted the justice of this argument, and been satisfied to forego his demand for an official approbation, if Fénelon had promised to express general agreement with his censures, whenever conversation turned on Mme. Guyon and her books. But Fénelon was too filled with terror for the safety of his doctrine to consent; to utter even informally one word of censure on her seemed, in his present state of panic, like the suicide of his independence, his abject confession of defeat.

1 Wks., ix. pp. 87, 100, 104.

2 Ibid. ii. p. 48, iii. p. 31.

3 ix. p. 81.

And therefore he did not pronounce it, though his silence caused unspeakable dismay to M. Tronson, lost him Mme. de Maintenon's friendship, meant an open breach with Bossuet. At this great price he had bought his freedom, the coast was clear, he could publish what he pleased.

Nor did he long delay. In October he sent to de Noailles (now Archbishop of Paris) the manuscript of a book dealing with the whole question of the Interior Life, a domain, he said, little understood by those who did not love it, and never before sufficiently explained by those who did. He had therefore set himself to reduce to rule the experiences of many Saints, welding them into a reasonable coherent system, that bore no traces of illusion or extravagance. Nor need the timorous de Noailles fear his vital disagreement from his brother of Meaux; he had only accomplished with thoroughness and good-will what Bossuet would do grudgingly and under constraint, less keen to affirm than to deny, readier with his refutations than his proofs.1

Luckless de Noailles could never follow an argument or see a difficulty, but he knew it, and sent the book back with a few vague compliments and an earnest recommendation not to publish till Bossuet's Instruction had appeared.2 This advice Fénelon promised to follow; he spent some time collecting opinions from other theologians, but, at last, grew impatient, and went back to Cambrai, leaving Chevreuse to settle the date of publication.

Under cover of

This last manœuvre had its advantages. an agent, Fénelon could slip, if need be, out of his promise to de Noailles, and be the first to publish; for Chevreuse was told nothing of a definite undertaking, and only knew that de Noailles, like Tronson and others, was urgent for delay.3 Nay, Fénelon himself gave the same advice to his follower, well knowing that the Duke's precipitate zeal would be sure in the end to assert itself, if there were anything to be gained by being beforehand with Bossuet.

And matters fell out exactly as he had intended. ChevIbid. ix. pp. 120-122.

1

1 p. 105.

2 Wks., iii. p. 38.

reuse, in time, got tired of waiting; "without my knowledge and in my absence" the book was sent to the printers; furtively and in haste-for there was fear lest Bossuet should set the police in motion-it was smuggled through the press, Chevreuse himself, to the great scandal of St Simon, sitting in the printer's office to correct the proofs; and on the Ist of February, 1697, afterwards the saddest of anniversaries, Beauvilliers presented to the King the first copy of the Maxims of the Saints.

FROM

CHAPTER VIII

AT WAR WITH BOSSUET

Dans ces combats où nos prélats de France
Semblent chercher la vérité,

L'un dit qu'on détruit l'espérance

L'autre que c'est la charité ;

C'est la foi qu'on détruit, et personne n'y pense.

-Contemporary Epigram.

ROM the first moment of its appearance the Maxims was doomed. The world had looked for something worthy of Fénelon's name : it found the Interior Life reduced to a code of forty-five dreary theorems, all phrases and subtleties and abstractions.' And it was drawn up in a style that invited hostility; Fénelon, as his enemies said, arrogated to his book all the authority of a Pontifical Definition and dealt out approbations and censures with no sparing hand, giving to each proposition its false as well as its true meaning this last, 'the voice of a tradition uninterrupted between the Apostles and St Francis of Sales,' the other its heretical counterpart, its caricature by the Quietists.1

The book shocked everyone, said St Simon, the ignorant because they understood not a word of it, the more intelligent because they could not accustom themselves to its strange and barbarous terminology, the bishops because they believed that even under the Maxims so-called 'True' grave errors lay concealed.2 Some thought the book very bold, others very heterodox, others that the design was bad but the execution subtle, others that Fénelon would have done

1 Bossuet however, said with some truth that the False Maxims were mere dummies, meant to satisfy the popular hatred of Molinos without seriously condemning his doctrines. Works, xv. p. 280.

2 St Simon, i. p. 409.