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.

“Where shall I find his like?” said he to me.  “Where shall I find such knowledge, such indulgence, such kindness?  The Pere de la Chaise knew the bottom of my heart; he knew, as an intelligent man, how to reconcile religion with nature; and when duty brings me to the foot of his tribunal, as a humble Christian, he never forgets that royalty, cannot be long on its knees, and he accompanies with his attentions and with deference the religious commands which he is bound to impose on me.”

“I hope that God will preserve him to you,” I replied to his Majesty; “but let us suppose the case in which this useful and precious man should see his career come to an end; will you grant still this mark of confidence and favour to the Jesuits?  All the French being your subjects, would it not be fitting to grant this distinction sometimes to the one and sometimes to the other?  You would, perhaps, extinguish by this that hate or animosity by which the Jesuits see themselves assailed, which your preference draws upon them.”