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Jean-Jacques Olier, member of a family which supplied the state with many trusty servitors, was the contemporary of, and a fellow-worker with, Vincent de Paul, Bérulle, Adrien de Bourdoise, Père Eudes, and Charles de Gondren, founders of congregations for the reform of ecclesiastical education, who played a prominent part in the preparatory reforms of the seventeenth century.
Many other saintly personages were labouring towards the same end, but Olier set to work in very original fashion. Adrien de Bourdoise alone took the same view as he did of ecclesiastical reform.
Sulpice Seminary, so Adrien de Bourdoise, founded the company of Saint Nicholas du Chardonnet, and made this establishment a nursery for young priests which lasted until the Revolution. It had not, however, like the Saint Sulpice establishment, a number of branch houses in other parts of France.
François de Sales admitted that he had not been successful in this attempt, and he told Bourdoise that "after having laboured during seventeen years to train only three such priests as I wanted to assist me in re-forming the clergy of my diocese, I have only succeeded in forming one and-a-half." Following upon him came the men of grave and reasonable piety whom I named above.
Nicholas ventured to speak of his former school, the old tutors would remark: "Oh, yes! in the time of M. Bourdoise," as much as to say that the seventeenth century was the period during which this establishment achieved its celebrity. Whatever its shortcomings in some respects, the education given at St. Nicholas was of a very high literary standard.
Olier and Bourdoise accordingly, while carrying on the work of reform, and becoming heads of religious congregations, remained parish priests of St. Sulpice and Saint-Nicholas du Chardonnet.
They knew that scholasticism would not go down with the only public for which they cared the worldly and somewhat frivolous congregations which sit beneath the preachers at St. Roch or St. Thomas Aquinas. Such were the views entertained by M. de Quélen when he made over to M. Dupanloup the austere and little known establishment of Abbé Frère and Adrien de Bourdoise.
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