your sight is keen enough, you may already perceive Molinos through this transparent abyss.*

*The principle is the same with St. François de Sales, and all the Quietists of whatsoever degree: the annihilation of the will is held up as the ideal of perfection. St. François does not recommend annihilation for the habitual state of the soul; but the others wish that this state, which is that of perfection, should become habitual, if it can (says Fenelon), or even perpetual (says Molinos). Bossuet hunts for, and finds in St. François, some few passages contrary to his general doctrine: they prove only that the saint is not consistent.

CHAPTER III.

LONELINESS OF WOMAN. EASY DEVOTION.
THEOLOGY OF THE JESUITS AND ROME..

WORLDLY

WOMEN AND

CHILDREN ADVANTAGEOUSLY MADE USE OF.-WAR OF GALLANT DEVOTION.

THIRTY YEARS, 1618-1648.

DEVOUT NOVELS. CASUISTS.

HITHERTO We have spoken of a rare exception-the life of a woman full of action, and doubly employed; as a saint and foundress, but especially as a wife, the mother of a family, and prudent housewife. The biographers of Madame de Chantal remark, as a singular thing, that in both conditions, as wife and as widow, she conducted her own household herself, directed her dependents, and administered the property of her husband, her father, and her children.

This indeed was becoming rare. The taste for household and domestic cares which we find every where in the sixteenth century, but especially among citizens and the families of the bar, grows much weaker in the seventeenth, when every one desires to live in great style.

The absence of occupation, being the taste of the period proceeded also from the state of things. All society is ever idle on the morrow of religious wars, each local action has ceased, and central life, that is to say, court life, has hardly begun. The nobility

have finished their adventures, and hung up their swords; the citizens have nothing further to do, being no longer engaged in plots, seditions, or armed processions. The ennui of this want of occupation falls particularly heavy upon woman; she is about to become at once unoccupied and lonely. In the sixteenth century she was kept in communication with man by the vital questions that were debated, even in her family, by common dangers, fears, and hopes. But there was nothing of the sort in the seventeenth century.

Add to this a more serious circumstance which is likely to increase in the following ages; namely, that in every profession the spirit of specialty and detail, which gradually absorbs man, has the effect of insulating him in his family, and of making him, as it were, a mute being for his wife and kindred. He no longer communicates to them his daily thoughts; and they can understand nothing of the minute intricacies and petty technical problems, which оссиру his mind.

But, at least, woman has still her children to console her? No; at the time we are now speaking of, the mansion, silent and empty, is no longer kept alive by the noise of children; instruction at home is now an exception, and gives way daily to the fashion of collective education. The son is brought up among the Jesuits, the daughter by the Ursulines, or other nuns; the mother is left alone.

The mother and the son are henceforth separated! An immense evil, the bud of a thousand misfortunes for families and society! I shall return to this subject later.

Not only separated, but, by the effect of a totally opposite life, they will be more and more opposed in mind, and less and less able to understand each other. The son a little pedant in us*, the mother ignorant and worldly, have no longer a common language between them.

A family thus disunited will be much more open to influence from without. The mother and the child, once separated, are more easily caught; though different means are employed. The child is tamed, and broken in by an overwhelming mass of studies; he must write and write, copy and copy again, at best translate and imitate. But the mother is entrapped by means of her excessive loneliness and ennui. The lady of the mansion is alone in her residence; her husband is hunting, or at the court. The president's lady is alone in her hotel; the gentleman starts every morning for the palace, and returns in the evening: a sad abode is this hotel in the Marais or City, some overgrown grey house in a dismal little street.

The lady in the sixteenth century beguiled her leisure hours by singing, and often by poetry. In the

*

Meaning the Latin declension.

TRANSL.

seventeenth they forbad her all worldly songs; as to religious songs, she abstains from them much more easily. Sing a psalm! It would be to declare herself a Protestant! What then remains for her? Gallant devotion-the conversation of the director or the lover.

The sixteenth century, with its strong morality and fluctuation of ideas, took, as it were, by fits and starts, flying leaps from gallantry to devotion, then from God to the devil: it made sudden and alternate changes from pleasure to penitence. But in the seventeenth century people were more ingenious: thanks to the progress of equivocation, they are enabled to do both at once, and, by mingling the language of love with that of devotion, speak of both at the same time. If, without being seen, you could listen to the conversation in a coquettish neighbourhood, you would not always be able to say whether it is the lover or the director who is speaking.

To explain to one's self the singular success of the latter, we must not forget the moral situation of the time, the uneasy and bewildered state of every one's conscience on the morrow of a period of religious wars, harassed by passions. In the dull tranquillity that succeeded, in the nullity of the present, the past would rise up in glowing colours, and the remembrance of it become the more importunate. Then was awakened in many minds, especially