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Certainly few English journalists have equalled in ability Louis Veuillot, and few papers have exercised so great an influence over the clergy of the Church as the Univers at the time when he directed it; but no one who read those savagely scurrilous and intolerant pages, burning with an impotent hatred of all the progressive and liberal tendencies of the time, shrinking from no misrepresentation of fact and from no apology for crime if it was in the interest of the Church, could fail to perceive how utterly out of harmony it was with the best lay thought of France.
But life was several shades less cheerless by the time that we left the Hôtel Univers which I ever shall remember gratefully because it ministered so well, even in the very midst of the driving bustle of the Lyons Exposition, to our somewhat exacting needs and went down to the river side.
One of the sentences, however, that which affected the Dictionary of M. Bouillet, greatly offended the Archbishop of Paris—Mgr. Sibour, who had signified his approval of this publication. He blamed the Univers and the lay religious press in general.
He formulated his complaints in a charge of 15th January, 1851, and by a still more vigorous one in 1853, which was written at the instigation of a Canon of Orleans, M. L’Abbe Gaduel, who had accused Donoso Cortes, in the Ami de la Religion, of several heresies, and who complained of having been refuted in the Univers with a warmth that was far from respectful. Mgr.
Then the Reformation would not have been. Yes, she repents, deeply, bitterly repents, her fatal blunder. But it will not be her fault, the Univers assures us, if she have to repent such a blunder a second time. Let us hear the priests speaking through one of the country papers in France: "The wars of religion were not deplorable catastrophes; these great butcheries renewed the life of France.
To prove, however, the magnificent many-sidedness of our noble times, it is we that have returned once more to pictures of the Virgin Mary with winking and with weeping eyes, or to her apparitions talking patois, as that of La Valette, and to a hundred things in the Church, cautiously passed over sub silentio in the last century, but now joyously proclaimed and sustained with defiant erudition by English and German doctores graces, and by the Parisian "Univers," which, openly rejoicing in the English blood spilt by the Sepoys, for it is but Protestant blood, and that of hateful freemen, heralds the second or third advent of universal love and Papacy.
The Bishops of Chartres, Moulins and others, had publicly defended the Univers in opposition to the Archbishop of Paris. Cardinal Gousset, Archbishop of Rheims, patronized the opinions of M. Veuillot in regard to the use of heathen classics.
A caricature from Charivari was trailing on the floor between some copies of the Univers. It represented a citizen the skirts of whose frock-coat allowed a tail to be seen with an eye at the end of it. Marescot explained it amid much laughter. They swallowed their liqueurs, and the ashes of their cigars fell on the paddings of the furniture.
But having developed his views in an episcopal letter to the professors of his lesser seminaries, he would not allow them to be opposed; and so, like Mgr. Sibour, interdicted the Univers to his clergy. M. Louis Veuillot appealed to the supreme bishop. The French episcopate was greatly divided on the subject of these untoward controversies.
We have, indeed, too much on our hands to attend either to fasts or festivals, although in the opinion of the Univers, the last sortie would have been far more successful had it taken place on the 7th of the month, the anniversary of the promulgation of the Immaculate Conception. Among fine people New Year's-day is more of a fête than Christmas.
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