CHAPTER VI

Suspension of _l'Avenir_--Its three principal editors present themselves at Rome--The Abbé de Lamennais as musician--The trouble it takes to obtain an audience of the Pope--The convent of Santo-Andrea della Valle--Interview of M. de Lamennais with Gregory XVI.--The statuette of Moses--The doctrines of _l'Avenir_ are condemned by the Council of Cardinals--Ruin of M. de Lamennais--The _Paroles d'un Croyant_

The position of affairs was no longer tenable for the editors of _l'Avenir._ If, on the one hand, the religious democracy, overwhelmed with sadness and bitterness, listened with affection to the words of the messengers; on the other hand, the opposition of the heads of the Catholic Church became formidable, and the accusation of heresy ran from lip to lip. The Abbé de Lamennais looked about him and, like the prophet Isaiah, could see nothing but desolation all around. Poland, wounded in her side, her hand out of her winding sheet, slept in the ever deceived expectation of help from the hand of France; and yet she had fallen full of despair and doubt, crying, "God is too high, and France too far off!" Ireland, sunk in misery and dying from starvation, ground down under the heel of England, in vain prostrated herself before its wooden crosses to implore succour from Heaven: none came to her! Liberty seemed to have turned away her face from a world utterly unworthy of her. Poland and Ireland, those two natural allies in all religious democracy, disappeared from the political scenes, dragging down with them in their fall the existence of _l'Avenir._ The wave of opposition, like an unebbing tide, still rose and ever rose. Some detested M. de Lamennais's opinions; others, his talent; the latter were as much incensed against him as any. He was obliged to yield. Like every paper which disappears into space, _l'Avenir_ had to announce _suspension_ of publication; this was his farewell from Fontainebleau--

"If we withdraw for a while," wrote M. de Lamennais, "it is not on account of weariness, still less from discouragement; it is to go, as the soldiers of Israel of old, _to consult the Lord in Shiloh._ They have put our faith and our very intentions to the doubt; for what is there that people do not attack in these days? We leave the field of battle for a short time to fulfil another duty equally pressing. Traveller's stick in hand, we pursue our way to the eternal throne to prostrate ourselves at the feet of the pontiff whom Jesus Christ has established as the guide and teacher to His disciples, and we will say to him, 'O Father! condescend to look down upon these, the latest of thy children to be accused of being in rebellion against thy infallibility and gracious authority! O Father! pronounce over us the words which will give life and light, and extend thy hand over us in blessing and in acknowledgment of our obedience and love.'"

It would be puerile to question the sincerity of the author of those lines at this point. For, like Luther, who also promised his submission to Rome, the Abbé de Lamennais meant to persevere in the Catholic faith. If, later, his orthodoxy wavered; if, upon closer view of Rome and her cardinals, his faith in the Vicar of Christ and the visible representation of the Church gave way, we should rather accuse the pagan form under which the religion of Christ was presented to him, as in the case of the monk of Eisleben, when he visited the Eternal City. When I reach that period in my life, I will relate my own feelings, and will give my long conversations on the subject with Pope Gregory XVI.

The three pilgrims of _l'Avenir,_ the Abbé de Lamennais, the Abbé Lacordaire and the Comte Charles de Montalembert, started, then, for Italy, not quite, as one of their number expressed it, with travellers' staffs in their hands, but animated with sincere faith and with sorrow in their hearts. They did not leave behind them the dream of eleven months without feeling deep regret; _l'Avenir_ had, in fact, lasted from 16 October 1830 to 17 September 1831. We will not relate the travelling impressions of the Abbé de Lamennais, for the author of the _Essai sur l'indifférence_ was not at all the man to notice external impressions. He passed through Italy with unseeing eyes; all through that land of wonders he saw nothing beyond his own thoughts and the object of his journey. Ten years later, when prisoner at Sainte-Pélagie, and already grown quite old, Lamennais discovered a corner in his memory still warm with the Italian sunshine; by a process of photography, which explains the character of the man we are dealing with, the monuments of art and the country itself were transferred to a plate in his brain! It needed meditation, solitude and captivity, just as the silvered plate needs iodine, to bring out of his memory the image of the beautiful things he had forgotton to admire ten years previously. On this account, he writes to us in 1841, under the low ceiling of his cell--

"I begin to see Italy.... It is a wondrous country!"

A curious psychological study might be made of the Abbé de Lamennais, especially by comparing him with other poets of his day. The author of the _Essai sur l'indifférence_ saw little and saw that but imperfectly; there was a cloud over his eyes and on his brain; the sole perception, the only sense he had of the outside world, which seemed to be always alert and awake, was that of hearing, a sense equivalent to the musical faculty: he played the piano and especially delighted in the compositions of Liszt. Hence arose, probably, his profound affection for that great artist. As regards all other outward senses of the objective world, his perceptions seem to have been within him, and when he wishes to see, it is in his own soul that he looks. To this peculiarity is owing the nature of his style, which is psychological in treatment. If he describes scenery, as in his _Paroles d'un Croyant_, or in the descriptions sent from his prison, it is always the outlines of the infinite that is drawn by his pen in vague horizons; with him it is his thoughts which visualise, not his eyes. M. de Lamennais belongs to the race of morbid thinkers, of whom Blaise Pascal is a sample. Let not the medical faculty even attempt to cure these sensitive natures: it will be but to deprive them of their genius.

The journey, with its enforced waits for relays of horses, often afforded the Abbé de Lamennais leisure for the study of our modern school of literature, with which he was but little acquainted. In an Italian monastery, where the pilgrims received hospitality, MM. de Lamennais and Lacordaire read _Notre-Dame de Paris_ and _Henri III._ for the first time. When they reached Rome, the Abbé de Lamennais put up at the same hotel and suite of rooms that had been occupied a few months previously by the Comtesse Guiccioli. His one fixed idea was to see the Pope and to settle his affairs, those of religious democracy, with him direct. After long delays and a number of fruitless applications, after seven or eight requests for an audience still without result, the Abbé de Lamennais complained; then a Romish ecclesiastic, to whom he poured out his grievances, naively suggested that he had perhaps omitted to deposit the sum of ... in the hands of Cardinal.... The Abbé de Lamennais confessed that he would have been afraid of offending His Eminence by treating him like the doorkeeper of a common courtesan.

"You need no longer be surprised at not having been received by His Holiness," was the Italian abbé's reply.

The ignorant traveller had forgotten the essential formality. But, although instructed, he still persisted in trying to obtain an audience of the Pope gratis; by paying, he felt he should be truckling with simony. The editors of _l'Avenir_ had remained for three months unrecognised in the Holy City, waiting until the Pope should condescend to consider a question which was keeping half Catholic Europe in suspense. The Abbé Lacordaire had decided to return to France; the Comte de Montalembert made preparations for setting out for Naples; M. de Lamennais alone remained knocking at the gates of the Vatican, which were more inexorably closed than those of Lydia in her bad days. Father Ventura, then general of the Theatine, received the illustrious French traveller at Santo-Andrea della Valle.

"I shall never forget," says M. de Lamennais in his _Affaires de Rome_, "those peaceful days I spent in that pious household, surrounded by the most exquisite care, amongst those instructively good and religious people devoted to their duty and aloof from all intrigue. The life of the cloister-regular, calm and, as it were, set apart and self-contained-holds a kind of _via media_ between the purely worldly life and that of the future, which faith reveals to us in but shadowy outlines, and of which every human being possesses within himself a positive assurance."

Finally, after many solicitations, the Abbé de Lamennais was received in private audience by Gregory XVI. He went to the Vatican, climbed the huge staircase often ascended and descended by Raphael and by Michael Angelo, by Leo X. and Julian II.; he crossed the high and silent chambers with their double rows of superposed windows; at the end of that long, splendid and desolate palace he reached, under the escort of an usher, an ante-chamber, where two cardinals, as motionless as statues, sat upon wooden seats, solemnly reading their breviary. At the appointed moment the Abbé de Lamennais was introduced. In a small room, bare, upholstered in scarlet, where a single armchair denoted that only one man had the right to sit there, a tall old man stood upright, calm and smiling in his white garments. He received M. de Lamennais standing, a great honour! The greatest honour which that divine man could pay to another man without violating etiquette. Then the Pope conversed with the French traveller about the lovely sunshine and the beauties of nature in Italy, of the Roman monuments, the arts and ancient history; but of the object of his journey and his own special business in coming there, not a a single word. The Pope had no commission at all for that: the question was being considered somewhere in the dark by the cardinals appointed to inquire into it, whose names were not divulged. A petition had been addressed to the Court of Rome by the editors of _l'Avenir_; and this petition must necessarily lead to some decision, but all this was shrouded in the most impenetrable mystery. The Pope himself, however, showed affability to the French priest, whose genius was an honour to the Catholic Church.

"What work of art," he asked M. de Lamennais, "has impressed you most?"

"The _Moses_ of Michael Angelo," replied the priest.

"Very well," replied Gregory XVI.; "then I will show you something which no one sees or which very few indeed, even of the specially favoured, see at Rome." Whilst saying this, the great white-haired old man entered a sort of recess enclosed by curtains, and returned holding in his arms a miniature replica in silver of the _Moses_ done by Michael Angelo himself.

The Abbé de Lamennais admired it, bowed and withdrew, accompanied by the two cardinals who guarded the entrance to that chamber. He was compelled to acknowledge the gracious reception he had been accorded by the Holy Father; but, in all conscience, he had not come all the way from Paris to Rome just to see the statuette of Moses! It was a most complete disillusionment. He shook the dust of Rome off his feet, the dust of graves, and returned to Paris. After a long silence, when the affair of _l'Avenir_ seemed buried in the excavations of the Holy See, Rome spoke: she condemned the doctrines of the men who had tried to reunite Christianity to Liberty.

The distress of the Abbé de Lamennais was profound. The shepherd being smitten, the sheep scattered, the news of censure had scarcely had time to reach La Chesnaie before the disciples were seized with terror and took to flight. M. de Lamennais remained alone in the old deserted château, in melancholy silence, broken only by the murmur of the great oak trees and the plaintive song of birds. Soon, even this retreat was taken from him, and he woke one day to find himself ruined by the failure of a bookseller to whom he had given his note of hand. Then the late editor of _l'Avenir_ began his voyage through bitter waters; anguish of soul prevented his feeling his poverty, which was extreme; his furniture, books, all were sold. Twice he bowed his head submissively under the hand of the Head of the Church, and twice he raised it, each time sadder than before, each time more indomitable, more convinced that the human mind, progress, reason, the conscience could not be wrong. It was not without profound heart-rendings that he separated himself from the articles of belief of his youth, from his career of priesthood and of tranquil obedience and from great and powerful harmony; in a word, from everything that he had upheld previously; but the new spirit had, in Biblical language, gripped him by the hair commanding him to "go forward!" It was then, in silence, in the midst of persecutions which even his gentleness was unable to disarm, in a small room in Paris, furnished with only a folding-bed, a table and two chairs, that the Abbé de Lamennais wrote his _Paroles d'un Croyant._ The manuscript lay for a year in the author's portfolio; placed several times in the hands of the editor Renduel, withdrawn, then given back to him to be again withdrawn, this fine book was subjected to all sorts of vicissitudes before its publication and met with all sorts of obstructions; the chief difficulties came from the abbé's own family, especially from a brother, who viewed with terror the launching forth upon the sea of democracy tossed by the storms of 1833. At last, after many delays and grievous hesitations, the author's strength of will carried the day against the entreaties of friendship; and the book appeared. It marked the third transformation of its writer: the ABBÉ DE LA MENNAIS and M. de LAMENNAIS gave place to CITIZEN LAMENNAIS. We shall come across him again on the benches of the Constituent Assembly of 1848. In common with all men of great genius, who have had to pilot their own original course through the religious and political storms that raged for thirty years, M. de Lamennais has been the subject of the most opposite criticisms. We do not undertake here to be either his apologist or denouncer; simply to endeavour to render him that justice which every true-hearted man owes to any man whom he admires: we have tried to show him to others as he appeared to our own eyes.