Bossuet had triumphed:  his vaster mind, his more sagacious insight, his stronger judgment had unravelled the dangerous errors in which Fenelon had allowed himself to be entangled.  The Archbishop of Cambrai, however, had grown in the estimation of good men on account of his moderation, his gentle and high-spirited independence during the struggle, his submission, full of dignity, after the papal decision.  The mind of Bossuet was the greater; the spirit of Fenelon was the nobler and more deeply pious.  “I cannot consent to have my book defended even indirectly,” he wrote to one of his friends on the 21st of July, 1699.  “In God’s name, speak not of me but to God only, and leave men to think as they please; as for me, I have no object but silence and peace after my unreserved submission.”

Fenelon was not detached from the world and his hopes to quite such an extent as he would have had it appear.  He had educated the Duke of Burgundy, who remained passionately attached to him, and might hope for a return of prosperity.  He remained in the silence and retirement of his diocese, with the character of an able and saintly bishop, keeping open house, grandly and simply, careful of the welfare of the soldiery who passed through Cambrai, adored by his clergy and the people.  “Never a word about the court, or about public affairs of any sort that could be found fault with, or any that smacked the least in the world of baseness, regret, or flattery,” writes St. Simon; “never anything that could give a bare hint of what he had been or might be again.  He was a tall, thin man, well made, pale, with a large nose, eyes from which fire and intellect streamed like a torrent, and a physiognomy such that I have never seen any like it, and there was no forgetting it when it had been seen but once.  It combined everything, and there was no conflict of opposites in it.  There were gravity and gallantry, the serious and the gay; it savored equally of the learned doctor, the bishop, and the great lord; that which appeared on its surface, as well as in his whole person, was refinement, intellect, grace, propriety, and, above all, nobility.  It required an effort to cease looking at him.  His manners corresponded therewith in the same proportion, with an ease which communicated it to others; with all this, a man who never desired to show more wits than they with whom he conversed, who put himself within everybody’s range without ever letting it be perceived, in such wise that nobody could drop him, or fight shy of him, or not want to see him again.  It was this rare talent, which he possessed to the highest degree, that kept his friends so completely attached to him all his life, in spite of his downfall, and that, in their dispersion, brought them together to speak of him, to sorrow after him, to yearn for him, to bind themselves more and more to him, as the Jews to Jerusalem, and to sigh after his return and hope continually for it, just as that unfortunate people still expects and sighs after the Messiah.”