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And thus the destiny of empires involves the consideration of the destiny of man. Yet it anticipates Fichte's retort to Rousseau. Spinoza, if this were written circa 1665, has in view, perhaps, the Trappists, then reorganized by Bossuet's friend, and perhaps also Port Royal aux Champs. The writings of St.
His work, like Voltaire's, was to be a challenge to Bossuet's view of history; his purpose was to trace the fortunes of the race in the light of the idea of Progress. He occasionally refers to Providence but this is no more than a prudent lip-service. Providence has no functions in his scheme.
It was no longer simply Bossuet's Cromwell the soldier, Cromwell the politician; it was a complex, heterogenous, multiple being, made up of all sorts of contraries a mixture of much that was evil and much that was good, of genius and pettiness; a sort of Tiberius-Dandin, the tyrant of Europe and the plaything of his family; an old regicide, who delighted to humiliate the ambassadors of all the kings of Europe, and was tormented by his young royalist daughter; austere and gloomy in his manners, yet keeping four court jesters about him; given to the composition of wretched verses; sober, simple, frugal, yet a stickler for etiquette; a rough soldier and a crafty politician; skilled in theological disputation and very fond of it; a dull, diffuse, obscure orator, but clever in speaking the language of anybody whom he wished to influence; a hypocrite and a fanatic; a visionary swayed by phantoms of his childhood, believing in astrologers and banishing them; suspicious to excess, always threatening, rarely sanguinary; a strict observer of Puritan rules, and solemnly wasting several hours a day in buffoonery; abrupt and contemptuous with his intimates, caressing with the secretaries whom he feared, holding his remorse at bay with sophistry, paltering with his conscience, inexhaustible in adroitness, in tricks, in resources; mastering his imagination by his intelligence; grotesque and sublime; in a word, one of those men who are "square at the base," as they were described by Napoleon, himself their chief, in his mathematically exact and poetically figurative language.
In his retirement or his exile, after Bossuet's death, it was around Fenelon that was concentrated all the lustre of the French episcopate, long since restored to the respect and admiration it deserved. Fenelon was born in Perigord, at the castle of Fenelon, on the 6th of August, 1651. Like Cardinal Retz he belonged to an ancient and noble house, and was destined from his youth for the church.
"The justice which all the bishops of Christendom had rendered to the memory of this great man, is to us a sufficient guarantee of his accuracy and authority. The work of the compilers of the new catechism is in reality but a second copy of Bossuet's work." The great bishop would certainly have felt some difficulty in recognizing certain pages of the work so prudently presented under his aegis.
The consequence was that the public instantly responded to his appeal, and we have continued to contemplate with reverence Bossuet's huge historical outlines, but to turn for sheer pleasure to La Bruyère's finished etchings of the tulipomaniac and the collector of engravings. Everyone who approaches an analysis of the "Caractères" is obliged to pause to commend the style of La Bruyère.
No one in Canada could deny the value of his services at the time of crisis which was not a matter of months but of years. Father Goyer, of the Recollets, delivered a eulogy which in fervour recalls Bossuet's funeral orations over members of the royal family. But the most touching valedictory was that from Champigny, who after many differences had become Frontenac's friend.
Soon after this, the young man fell in with Bossuet's controversial writings, and was speedily converted by them to the Roman Catholic faith. The apostasy of a gentleman commoner would of course be for a time the chief subject of conversation in the common room of Magdalene.
Turn from Bossuet's orations to Boisguillebert's Détail de la France; from the pulpit rhetorician's courtly reminders that even majesty must die, to Vauban's pity for the misery of the common people; from Corneille and Racine to La Bruyère's picture of "certain wild animals, male and female, scattered over the fields, black, livid, all burned by the sun, bound to the earth that they dig and work with unconquerable pertinacity; they have a sort of articulate voice, and when they rise on their feet they show a human face, and, in fact, are men."
I thought it most amusing that the King should have commissioned M. de Bossuet to deliver this second missive, and I believe I said as much to certain persons, which perhaps gave rise to a rumour that he actually brought me love-letters from the King. But the purveyors of such gossip could surely know nothing of Bossuet's inflexible principles, and of the subtlety of his policy.