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Updated: May 12, 2025
Death had stalked rampant. Fenelon shared the poverty of the people, their lowliness, their sorrows. All the tragedy of their life was his; he said to them, "I know, I know!" Twelve years of Madame Guyon's life were spent in prison. Toward the last she was allowed to live in nominal freedom. But despotism, with savage leer and stealthy step, saw that Fenelon was kept far away.
M. de Leuze, who translated the Botanic Garden as well as it could be translated into Fenelon prose; and M. and Madame de Vinde, who have a superb gallery of paintings, and the best concerts in Paris, and a library of eighteen thousand volumes well counted and well arranged; and what charms me more than either the books or the pictures, a little grand-daughter of three years old, very like my sweet Fanny, with stockings exactly the same as those Aunt Mary knitted for her, and listing shoes precisely like what Fanny used to wear: she sat on my knee, and caressed me with her soft, warm little hands, and looked at me with her smiling intelligent eyes.
And then here's a cream cheese, real cream, you know, it will be delicious! Ah! and here's the surprise, something dainty, some radishes, some pretty little pink radishes. Just fancy! radishes in March, what a luxury!" She triumphed like the good little housewife she was, one who had followed a whole course of cookery and home duties at the Lycee Fenelon.
Madame de Maintenon dined regularly once a week at the house of one or other of the two Dukes, fifth of a little party, composed of the two sisters and the two husbands, with a bell upon the table, in order to dispense with servants in waiting, and to be able to talk without restraint. Fenelon was at last admitted to this sanctuary, at foot of which all the Court was prostrated.
The pious councillors of the king were working against him at Rome, bringing all the influence of France to weigh upon Innocent XII. Fenelon had taken no part in the declarations of the Gallican church, in 1682, which had been drawn up by Bossuet; the court of Rome was inclined towards him; the strife became bitter and personal; pamphlets succeeded pamphlets, letters.
An immense mass of papers was sent with them for the instruction of the king; and Frontenac wrote a long despatch, in which he sets forth the offences of Perrot and Fenelon, the pretensions of the ecclesiastics, the calumnies he had incurred in his efforts to serve his Majesty, and the insults heaped upon him, "which no man but me would have endured so patiently."
France rocks them in security, by oily-mouthed Diplomatists, Fenelon and others: "Would not touch a stone of your Barrier, for the world, ye admirable Dutch neighbors: on our honor, thrice and four times, No!" They have an eloquent Van Hoey of their own at Paris; renowned in Newspapers: "Nothing but friendship here!" reports Van Hoey always; and the Dutch answer his Britannic Majesty: "Hm, rise?
There could scarcely be a better example of the insensible degrees in which, by the infirmity of human nature, sound spiritualism may decline into visionary fancies and a morbid state of religious emotion, than to notice how the writings of Guyon and Bourignon form transitory links between Fénelon and the extreme mystics.
One has only to consider for a moment the French writers of this period, Pascal, Bossuet, Fénelon, Malherbe, Corneille, Racine, Molière, all that brilliant company which makes the reign of Louis XIV the Elizabethan Age of French literature, to see how far astray the early writers of the Restoration went in their wretched imitation.
How dread is the power of sovereign majesty, operative even at the death-bed of the greatest and noblest spirits, causing Fenelon in his dying hour to be anxious about the good graces of a monarch ere long, like him, a-dying !
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