“Sire,” added the Bishop of Meaux, “circumstances decide everything.  Of old, in the time of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, and much later still, confessions of Christians were public,—­made in a loud voice; sometimes a number together, and always in the open air.  Those of soldiers that I have quoted to madame were somewhat of the kind of these confessions of the primitive Church; and to-day, still, at the moment when battle is announced, a military almoner gives the signal for confession.  The regiments confess on their knees before the Most High, who hears them; and the almoner, raised aloft on a pile of drums, holds the crucifix in one hand, and with the other gives the general absolution to eighty thousand soldiers at once.”

This clear and precise explanation somewhat calmed Madame de Maintenon, and Madame la Dauphine,—­displeased at what she had done on arriving,—­in order to be regular, learned to confess in French.

CHAPTER XV.

Pere de la Chaise.—­The Jesuits.—­The Pavilion of Belleville.—­The Handkerchief.

Pere de la Chaise has never done me good or ill; I have no motives for conciliating him, no reason to slander him.  I am ignorant if he were the least in the world concerned, at the epoch of the Grand Jubilee, with those ecclesiastical attempts of which Bossuet had constituted himself spokesman.  Pere de la Chaise has in his favour a great evenness of temper and character; an excellent tone, which comes to him from his birth; a conciliatory philosophy, which renders him always master of his condition and of his metier.  He is, in a single individual, the happy combination of several men, that is to say, he is by turns, and as it may be needful, a man indulgent or severe in his preaching; a man of abstinence, or a good feeder; a man of the world, or a cenobite; a man of his breviary, or a courtier.  He knows that the sins of woodcutters and the sins of kings are not of the same family, and that copper and gold are not weighed in the same scales.

He is a Jesuit by his garb; he is much more so than they are by his ‘savoir-vivre’.  His companions love the King because he is the King; he loves him, and pities him because he sees his weakness.  He shows for his penitent the circumspection and tenderness of a father, and in the long run he has made of him a spoiled child.

This Pere de la Chaise fell suddenly ill, and with symptoms so alarming that the cabals each wished to appropriate this essential post of confessor.

The Jansenists would have been quite willing to lay hold of it.  The Jesuits, and principally the cordons bleus, did not quit the pillow of the sick man for an instant.

The King had himself informed of his condition every half-hour.  There was a bulletin, as there is for potentates.  One evening, when the doctors were grave on his account, I saw anxiety and affliction painted on the visage of his Majesty.