CHAPTER X

CAMBRAI

On my word, I must quit this place as soon as possible, for if I stay here another week, I shall be a Christian in spite of myself.-LORD Peterborough, writing from Cambrai to John Locke.

'HE disgrace brought on by the Maxims and Télémaque was the great turning-point in their author's life. Taken by himself as the most disastrous of calamities, under a wide view it bears good witness to a saying often in his mouth, that only through their trials and misfortunes do men rise to moral dignity and worth.

For the stroke brought Fénelon just what his character needed. Banishment from the Court freed one who was by nature an intriguer, from the temptations of the place, where, as Bossuet said, all the affairs of the Universe have their starting-point and centre; shame and wounded honour and sense of failure broke through the crust of dilettantist affectation and unreality, which had numbered even religion among its provinces, and laid out the very Love of God according to the four-square measure of its rules. Under stress of his troubles Fénelon gained new breadth and depth of piety, new self-reliance, self-control; a moral unity never before observable, began to draw together the scattered fibres of his mind. Heretofore he had lain himself under the condemnation his lips had more than once pronounced on others; he could not make his own heart his home, but was driven thence, a houseless vagabond, compelled to wander between two spheres, between an upper realm of cloudy hopes and fancies, too unsubstantial for the solid earth, and a nether-world of mean realities, of daily action, pitched too low. But in these later years the gulf of

separation was bridged over; Fénelon's ideals became more practical, his practice grew more ideal; the dreamy Utopian, the supple smiling courtier, met in the highminded, generous-hearted counsellor of ministries; mystic enthusiasm joined with worldly graces to make the great, devoted, idolized Archbishop.

Two of his letters mark the contrast. A few days after his nomination to Cambrai he wrote that: 'my life has been full of liberty and pleasantness, of congenial study and delightful friends; I am leaving them for a life of ceaseless slavery in a foreign land.' Hardly had the blow of condemnation fallen, when he wrote again: 'Nothing now remains to me but a perpetual silence, wherein the one consolation will be the labours of my diocese.'

Cambrai, a town of no great size or beauty on the Scheldt, was the ecclesiastical centre of the Flemish provinces conquered during the earlier half of Louis XIV.'s reign, and confirmed to France by the Treaty of Nymwegen in 1678. Formerly a dependency of the chaotic Empire, there still clung round it some of the perfume of departed glories, of days when its Bishop's jurisdiction extended over Brussels and Antwerp, and he governed the territory immediately around him as an almost Sovereign Prince, with his own fortresses and garrisons and mint.1 Fénelon himself ranked both as a Prince of the Holy Roman Empire and as a Duke of France, and, though all feudal privileges had long been lost, was still the principal landowner of his province, with a floating revenue of 100,000 francs, perhaps about £20,000 in modern English money.

But the position though one of the most splendid in Louis' gift, was not without its geographical thorns. Quite half the arch-diocese lay altogether beyond the frontiers of France, and Fénelon's administration had much to suffer from its local government, the jealous Hainault Estates, and

1 See Fén. Wks., vii. p. 179, and Wks., viii. p. 293 for a history of the vicissitudes of the diocese.

from the indolence of the dispossessed Bavarian Elector, then Spanish Viceroy at Brussels. And matters became far worse with the outbreak of the War of the Spanish Succession. The capture of Tournai in 1709, and the subsequent flight of its Bishop, led Fénelon into interminable negotiations with his not very heroic suffragan, who could not be persuaded to return, and fight out with the Dutch States-General 'a cause stronger than that of St. Thomas of Canterbury.' And for several years his own arch-diocese was a principal theatre of the war, the great battles of Malplaquet and Denain being fought within its borders.

Nor were the inhabitants of Cambrai, Flemings not Frenchmen in their language, their habits, their modes of thought, very eager to welcome an Archbishop born in southerly Périgord, and coming to them straight from Versailles. Fénelon's predecessor M. de Brias, had been one of themselves and a prelate altogether after their heart, good and firm and wise and boundlessly charitable, an excellent Flemish gentleman, says St Simon, as highly thought of by the French Government after the taking of Cambrai as he had been by the Spanish before it.1 But Fénelon, on his first appearance, overawed them by his elaborate courtesies and delicate fine gentleman airs; perhaps, too, he did not hide his low opinion of their capacities or his amusement at their blunt straightforwardness of speech. There were no refinements of piety at Cambrai, he told Me de Maintenon, nor indeed, was their refinement of any kind; the virtues of the natives were as coarse-fibred as their manners. The ecclesiastical arrangements, in particular, struck him by their primitive simplicity; the nuns received whom they would in their parlours, without a thought of gratings or enclosure, and many of the country priests engaged a fiddler on winter evenings, and gave dances to their servants and parishioners and friends. But, on the whole, Fénelon thought the moral level fairly high;

1i. p. 271.

the heavy Flemings were neither as virtuous nor as vicious as the French, but there seemed to be more innocence and honesty among the mass, and especially among their nuns.1

And friendlier relations were soon established; two years after his arrival Fénelon could flatter himself that he was already fairly popular. Even the affair of the Maxims, which had, at first, threatened to wreck his authority, became in the end a new source of strength; for his edifying submission, and St Simon would add-extraordinary adroitness in making a merit out of his tribulations, won him the heart of every party and of every rank.

Moreover, as the great caviller himself allows, Fénelon's episcopal duties were perfectly performed. To his clergy he professed himself, and was, a Father and a Brother in God; the laity adored him for his charities, for the gentle firmness of his government, for the natural grace of manner that enhanced an hundred fold the value of everything he said or did. Always ready to help, yet always modest in offering assistance, he seemed, when about some kindly action, to be receiving, rather than doing a favour; in visits to the sick at home, to the hospitals and wounded soldiers, he was indefatigable, nor was he a stranger to the Cambrai prisons. Tours of inspection, repeated several times a year, brought him into touch with every corner of his diocese; it was administered with great strictness, and yet on broad and liberal lines; there was no harrying of Protestants or Jansenists, no bureaucratic fussiness, no seeking after popularity, but every man, whether great or small, was treated exactly as became his station in the world.2

To certain more rigid spirits, indeed, Fénelon's administration seemed almost wrongfully tolerant, une pure politique, said Bossuet, full of concession to the prejudices of the Flemish law-courts, or to those detestably irregular practitioners in souls, the Jesuits and the other Religious Orders. But, as Fénelon urged in self-defence, the Friars and the 1 Wks., ix. p. 71.

2 St Simon, xi. p. 62, and see viii. pp. 469, etc.