MADAME LOUISE OF FRANCE, CARMELITE NOVICE

We are in 1770. Madame Louise of France, the youngest of the daughters of Louis XV., is thirty-two years old. “For some years,” says Madame Campan, “Madame Louise had led a very retired life; I used to read to her five hours a day; my voice often betrayed the fatigue of my chest; the Princess would then prepare sugared water and place it beside me, excusing herself for making me read so long by saying it was necessary for her to finish a course of reading she had undertaken.” Why is the King’s daughter bent on finishing this course so quickly? That is her secret. In appearance, she is leading a luxurious life. In reality, she is silently making her mysterious apprenticeship of renunciation and immolation, accustoming herself to endure excessive cold or heat, and wearing beneath her linen the serge of the Carmelites. In the evenings, when she is alone in her room, she extinguishes her wax tapers and lights candles, so as to habituate herself to the odor of tallow, which at first had caused her unendurable repugnance. “She had a lofty soul,” says Madame Campan; “she loved great things; she used often to interrupt my reading to exclaim: ‘How fine that is! How noble!’ There was but one brilliant action which she could perform: to quit a palace for a cell, rich garments for a robe of frieze; she performed it.”

Certain writers who, being devoid of the religious sentiment, persist in seeing the earth everywhere, and never look at heaven, have insisted on attributing the holy resolutions of Madame Louise to human motives, and barely refrained from describing a Carmelite as an ambitious intriguant. M. Honoré Bonhomme, the author of _Louis XV. et sa famille_, was better inspired when he wrote: “When the Queen died, Louis XV. had had a glimmering of repentance. People might have fancied that his morals were to be more regular; but no! Very speedily a new favorite, the Du Barry, was presented, and we know the rest. Now, it was after this signal relapse on her father’s part, when she saw him fall back soul and body, and deeper than ever, into shameful disorders, that, heartbroken with sorrow, and deprived of all hope, Madame Louise hastened to demand of God, in the austerity of the cloister, not pardon for herself,—she did not need it,—not the calm and repose which were lacking to her,—she had sacrificed them,—but to ask of God, with tears and fervor, the conversion of her father, the salvation of the King.”

The Countess Du Barry’s formal presentation at court took place April 22, 1769. January 30, 1770, Madame Louise charged Monseigneur de Beaumont, Archbishop of Paris, to ask the King to allow her to enter the religious state. Profoundly surprised by so unexpected a communication, Louis XV. remained silent for awhile. Then he exclaimed several times: “This is cruel! this is cruel!” and deferred his reply for a fortnight. The desired consent was at last obtained. The Abbé du Terney, the Princess’s confessor, brought her the following letter from the King, dated February 20, 1770:—

“Monseigneur the Archbishop, my dear daughter, having given me an account of all that you have said and written to him, will surely have acquainted you exactly with all I said to him in reply. If it is for God alone, I cannot oppose myself to His will nor to His determination. You must have made your reflections; hence, I have nothing more to ask concerning them; it seems even that your arrangements are made; you can speak of them to your sisters when you think proper. Compiègne is not possible; you may choose any other place, and I would be very sorry to prescribe anything on the subject. I have made some involuntary sacrifices; this one will be voluntary on your part. God will give you strength to support your new state, for, the step once taken, there can be no return. I embrace you with all my heart, my dear daughter, and give you my blessing.”

There was, at Saint Denis, a Carmelite convent, so poor that the nuns had been obliged to make retrenchments in their food, already so frugal, and the baker was beginning to refuse them bread. It was this house, reduced to profound distress and threatened with dissolution for lack of pecuniary resources, that Madame Louise selected for her final refuge. At the very time when the nuns were making a novena to entreat God to provide for the existence of their community, Louis XV. gave his daughter the permission she had so ardently desired. Madame Louise still maintained absolute secrecy, especially with her sisters, whose remarks she may have dreaded. April 5, 1770, she received the following note from Louis XV., dated at Choisy:—

“I embrace you with all my heart, my dear daughter, and send you the order you spoke to me about for your departure, and I will execute what you desire for your domestics, and all your other arrangements. You will have only a word from me this evening, my little heart, for it is late.” In the morning of April 11, the Princess entered a carriage, at Versailles, with a maid of honor and an equerry, and drove to Saint Denis. She wore a plain silk dress under a large black mantle, and a high bonnet adorned with a bunch of red ribbons. On reaching Saint Denis, she said: “To the Carmelites.” The door of the cloister opened, and Madame Louise disappeared behind it. Her maid of honor, the Princess de Ghistelles, and her equerry, M. d’Haranguier de Quincerot, thought she would return after having heard Mass. Their surprise can be imagined when, summoned within the convent by the Princess, they read the King’s order.

During the day, the sisters of the novice learned what had occurred. At first they were in despair; but after the first involuntary anger had passed away, they felt nothing but respect for so pious a resolution. In his book on the daughters of Louis XV., which is so full of facts and documents, M. Édouard de Barthélemy has given the letters written her by Mesdames Adelaide and Sophie. This is Madame Adelaide’s:—

“Thou canst fancy better than I can express what has passed and is still passing in my heart. My grief equals my astonishment; but thou art happy, and that is all I want. Pray God for me, dear heart, thou knowest my needs; they are more than ever pressing just now. I will certainly go to see thee as soon as I have strength enough, and thou canst receive me without feeling disturbed. Adieu, dear heart. I am going to _Tenebræ_, where I fear I shall be a little distracted. Love me always, and believe I shall return it well.”

Here is the letter of Madame Sophie:—

“If I never spoke to thee again, dear heart, of the desire I suspected in thee to become a nun, it is because I thought thou wouldst never carry it into effect. I pardon thee with all my heart for telling me nothing about it. Thy sacrifice is beautiful, because it is voluntary. But dost think that the one thou hast imposed on me, in leaving us, and which is not voluntary, is not as hard to bear? Be very sure, dear heart, that I love thee, that I will love thee all my life, and that when thou permittest, I will go to see thee with much eagerness. I embrace thee with all my heart.”

A diplomatic circular addressed to the King’s ambassadors at foreign courts notified them of the “exemplary and affecting event” which had just occurred, and Pope Clement XIV. addressed to the Most Christian King a brief which resembled a canticle of thanksgiving.

Madame Campan relates that when she went to see the Princess at the convent for the first time, she found her coming out of the laundry, where her king’s daughter’s hands had just been doing the washing. The novice said to her former reader at this time: “I greatly abused your young lungs for two years before executing my purpose. I knew I could read nothing here but books tending to our salvation, and I wanted to review all the historians who had interested me.” Speaking afterwards of her religious vocation, she said: “Believe me, the moralists are right when they say that happiness does not dwell in palaces; I have acquired a certainty of that. If you wish to be happy, I advise you to come and enjoy a retreat where the most active mind might find full exercise in the contemplation of a better world.”

The grating is closed at last upon the daughter of Louis XV. Between her and the world the gulf has become impassable. What a contrast between the palace and the cloister! Yesterday, all splendor and magnificence, radiant galleries, marble staircases, majestic apartments; to-day, humility, poverty, a monotonous existence, the rigors of enclosure. Yesterday, robes of gold brocade, laces, precious stones, diadems; to-day, the frieze habit, the bitter chalice. Yesterday, noise, worldly animation; to-day, the silence and obscurity of the tomb.

They say that certain courtiers who did not comprehend Madame Louise, criticised or pitied her; that the Maréchale de Mirepoix called her “a mad woman, entering the cloister to annoy the court in the name of Heaven”; that the Duke d’Agen thought he proved his wit by saying: “If Madame Louise is in such a hurry to go to Paradise, it is because she wants to be certain of not spending eternity with her family.”

The Marquise Du Deffand, who plays the philosopher, writes in one of her letters: “This adventure has not made a great sensation. People shrug their shoulders, pity her weakness of mind, and talk of something else.”

The sarcastic Marquise compassionates a princess who, says she, “makes herself miserable for chimeras.” Madame Du Deffand is mistaken; with all her intelligence, she is much more to be pitied than Madame Louise. There are a good many more chimeras in her salon than in the Carmelite convent. As to Louis XV., he was profoundly convinced that his daughter was happy. “But, Sire,” Madame Du Barry said to him one day, “Madame Louise will have a wretched fate at the convent!”—“Not at all,” he replied, “she will be the most tranquil one of the family. The devotees did not invent quietism for nothing.” Perhaps the voluptuous monarch himself felt, at times, a disgust for his palaces, and what one might call a homesickness for the cloister. Charles V. is not the only one who has dreamed of the monastic life. The greatest debauchees sometimes have their moments of mysticism.

The daughter of an earthly king now confides herself to the King of Heaven. As she is no longer attached to a perishable throne, but to the cross, which is immortal, she finds herself more at liberty in her voluntary captivity than she once was in the whirlpool of the world. She does not regret the crowd of courtiers who hasten to the Œil-de-Bœuf. She does not regret that palace inhabited by cares and troubles, wherein, as La Bruyère puts it, people rise from and lie down on self-interest. She does not regret those base flatteries, a deafening murmur which fatigues ear and heart alike; those protestations of zeal which are merely the calculations of egotism, ambition, and cupidity, that pompous and vain magnificence which gives not one moment of true happiness. The rules of the cloister, though hard and austere, seem to her less painful than the restrictions of etiquette. She prefers one ardent aspiration toward the Christ, one tear of religious ecstasy, to all earthly treasures. Here there are no more scandals, no more falsities, no more infamies; here is repose, here the veritable love!

It is curious to observe that the _angel_ of Madame Louise at the convent of Saint Denis, that is to say, the nun whose duty it was to initiate her into the practices and duties of a Carmelite’s life, was Sister Julie, in the world Julienne de MacMahon, a daughter of that illustrious family to which belonged the Marshal who was at the head of the French government.

Several contemporary publicists have spoken with levity of certain writings connected with the religious vocation of the royal Carmelite, such as the Abbé Proyart’s work, that of the Countess Drohojowska, and the Count de Chambord’s letter to the Holy Father. For my part, I own that such writings seem to me profoundly affecting. Is it not good to think that not far from the boudoir where a Du Barry was degrading the royal authority, there was a little cell wherein a descendant of Saint Louis sought to avert the scourges of God by prayer? If debauchery has its priestesses of vice and scandal, chastity must have its virgins and heroines. At the side of blasphemies, abject even to indecency, there must needs be prayers ardent to exaltation. To compensate for so many outrages against the divine majesty, there must be virtues whose sublime and enthusiastic character seems to profane eyes a sort of exaggeration, a delirium. To make folly and voluptuousness forgotten for a moment, there must be just persons who display what Saint Paul has called the folly of the cross. It is because, in spite of so many debauchees, there were still elect souls who preserved treasures of purity in the sanctuary of their consciences, that the eighteenth century was not altogether ruined, and that, when the revolution came, the women of this society, which was thought so corrupt and frivolous, recalled the force of the primitive Christians and the sacred energy of the martyrs by their greatness of soul and their firmness on the scaffold. Who knows? Perhaps if Madame Louise of France had not become a Carmelite, the august woman whom we are about to behold for the first time in the palace of Versailles would have had less dignity when confronted with her persecutors, less courage in presence of her executioners.