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"Gentlemen," said he, "so and not otherwise would Bossuet have written if he had lived in our day." "I am sure of it," said Merlin. "Bossuet would have been a journalist to-day." "To Bossuet the Second!" cried Claude Vignon, raising his glass with an ironical bow. "To my Christopher Columbus!" returned Lucien, drinking a health to Dauriat. "Bravo!" cried Nathan. "Is it a nickname?"
On this head, Bossuet says, with somewhat excessive laudation, she declared to the chiefs of parties how far she would bind herself, and she was believed to be incapable of either deceiving or being deceived. That is rather a hazardous assertion, for if she indeed aided in the liberation of the Princes, none of the promises she made in all sincerity doubtless became realised.
But our venerable mother had contrived to unite the opposite extremes of bigotry and indifference. The blind activity of idleness urged me to advance without armour into the dangerous mazes of controversy, and at the age of sixteen I bewildered myself in the errors of the church of Rome. Translations of two famous works of Bossuet achieved my conversion, and surely I fell by a noble hand.
A chapel was added to the extensive structure left behind by her father's old comrade, and it was in that chapel that her funeral sermon was preached by Bossuet one of the first of those marvellous pieces of funereal eloquence which more than aught else have contributed to render his name immortal.
When there were no longer any of the leaders left alive, except Enjolras and Marius at the two extremities of the barricade, the centre, which had so long sustained Courfeyrac, Joly, Bossuet, Feuilly and Combeferre, gave way.
"God has laid in this heart the foundation of great things," said Bossuet, who supported her in her conflict: "the world puts great hinderances in her way and God great mercies; I have hopes that God will prevail; the uprightness of her heart will carry everything."
The great theologians who surrounded Bossuet, the Eagle of Meaux, had died one by one, and had left successors who were partly pagan, partly atheist. Art and literature tripped after the flowered skirts of the emancipated Duchess of Maine.
Writing in the seventeenth century Bishop Bossuet expressly affirms this edifying theory of the Midsummer bonfires, and he tells his catechumens that the Church herself participated in the illumination, since in several dioceses, including his own diocese of Meaux, a number of parishes kindled what were called ecclesiastical fires for the purpose of banishing the superstitions practised at the purely mundane bonfires.
Fenelon, who tried to conciliate these two tendencies in preparing a small Mysticism neither too hot nor too cold, a little less lukewarm than that of Saint Francis de Sales, and above all things much less ardent than that of Saint Teresa, ended in his turn by displeasing the cormorant of Meaux, and though he abandoned and denied Madame de Guyon, whose friend he had been for long years, he was persecuted and tracked down by Bossuet, condemned at Rome, and sent in exile to Cambrai.
Brought up by the Duc de Montausier, a sort of monkish soldier, and by Bossuet, a sort of military monk, Monsieur le Dauphin had no good examples from which to profit. Crammed as he is with Latin, Greek, German, Spanish, and Church history, he knows all that they teach in colleges, being totally ignorant of all that can only be learnt at the Court of a king.
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