The Basques have always been famous navigators. The first suggestion that led to the discovery of America is said to have been given Christopher Columbus by Sanchez de Huelva, a Basque pilot. The Basques of Labourd certainly discovered Cape Breton. They were the first to go on whale-fisheries, which, in 1412, extended as far as Iceland. And Newfoundland seems to have been known to them in the middle of the XVth century. The first name of Cape Breton—isledes Bacaloas or Bacaloac—is a Basque name.
In the middle ages the Basques maintained a certain independence by means of theirfueros, or special privileges, which had been handed down from time immemorial and confirmed by several of the kings of France. The wood of Haïtze is still pointed out as the place where the assemblies of the elders, orbilçars, were formerly held in the district of Labourd. Here came together the proprietors of the different communes to regulate their administrative affairs. The most of the assembly leaned on their staves or against the venerable oaks of the forest. But the presiding member sat on a huge stone, the secretary on another, while a third was used for recording the decrees of the assembly, to which the kings of France and Navarre were often forced to yield by virtue of theirfueros.
And this country was never over-ruled by oppressive lords who held it in subjection by means of their fortified castles. The device of Bayonne—Nunquam polluta—seems to express the unstained independence that had never been subjected to feudal dominion. It doubtless had great families who distinguished themselves by their bravery and military services, and were noted for their wealth, like thecasas de parientes majores—the twenty-four families of great antiquity—in Guypuzcoa, among which was the family of Loyola of Aspeïtia, to which the immortal founder of the Jesuits belonged, as well as that of Balda, his mother’s family; but they never pretended to the feudal authority of the great nobles of France and Spain. It was only in the XVth century that several Basque families, who had become wealthy, ventured to erect some inoffensive towers like those of Uturbi near St. Jean de Luz, occupied by Louis XI. while on the frontier arranging the treaty between the kings of Castile and Arragon.
It is said of the Basques of Spain: As many Basques, as many nobles. Many of their villages have coats of arms on all the houses, which contrast with the decayed lattices and crumbling roofs. The owners point to their emblazonry with the air of a Montmorency. When the Moors invaded the North of Spain, thousands of mountaineers rose to drive them out. As they made war at their own expense, those who returned alive to their cottages received the reward of gentlemen—the right of assuming some heraldic sign and graving it on their walls as a perpetual memorial of their deeds. In the valley of Roncal the inhabitants were all ennobled for having distinguished themselves at the battle of Olaso, in the reign of Fortunio Garcia. In the village of Santa Lucia, not far from Toledo, an old house of the XIIIth century is still to be seen with double lancet windows, which has its record over the door proving the part a former owner had taken at the bridge of Olaso—an azure field traversed by a river, which is spanned by a bridge with three golden arches surmounted by the bleeding head of a Moor.
In a faubourg of Tolosa is a modest house stating that Juan Perez having borne arms for more than fifty years in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Flanders, etc., and taken part in the great naval victory over the Turks at Lepanto under Don Juan of Austria, the emperor created him knight and gave him for his arms the imperial eagle.
But most of these armorial bearingshave reference to the chase, to which the people were so addicted. The trophies they brought home, instead of being nailed up over the door, were now graven there in stone—sometimes a wolf, or a hare, or even a favorite hound. Two dogs are on the arms inherited by the Prince of Viana, the donor of the fine bells to the basilica of Notre Dame de Lourdes.
In the commune of Bardos is a château which bears the name of Salla from the founder of the family. It was he who, fighting under Alphonse the Chaste, King of Navarre, had his legs broken by the explosion of a rock, from which time the house of Salla has had for its arms threechevrons brisés, d’or, sur un champ d’azur. The most illustrious member of this family is Jean Baptiste de la Salle, who founded the admirable order of the Brothers of the Christian Schools, with a special mission for instructing the poor.
Mgr. de Belsunce, the celebrated bishop of Marseilles, was also of Basque origin. The Château de Belsunce is still to be seen—an old manor-house with Gothic turrets bespeaking the antiquity of the family. The name is associated with the legends of the country. Tradition relates that a winged monster having terrified the whole region, a knight of this house armed himself with a lance and went forth to attack the monster in his den. The dragon, having received a mortal wound, sprang with a dying effort upon his enemy, seized him, and rolled with him into the Nive. From that time the family of Belsunce bore on its shield a dragon sable on a field gules.
The arms of Fontarabia is a siren on the waves bearing a mirror and a comb—symbol of this enchanting region. This historic place, once the rival of St. Jean de Luz, now wears a touching aspect of desolation and mourning which only adds to its attractions. Its ruins have a hue of antiquity that must delight a painter’s eye. The long street that leads to the principal square carries one back three hundred years, most of the houses being in the Spanish style of the XVIth century. There are coats of arms over every door, and balconies projecting from every story, with complicated trellises or lattices that must almost madden the moon-struck serenader. Nothing could be more picturesque than this truly Spanish place. Many of the houses bear the imposing name ofpalacios, which testify to the ancient splendor of thisciudad muy noble, muy leal, y muy valerosa. Overlooking the whole place is the château of Jeanne la Folle, massive, heavy, its walls three yards thick, its towers round—a genuine fortress founded in the Xth century, but mostly rebuilt by Charles V. Its chronicles are full of historic interest. Here took place the interview between Louis XI. and Henri IV. of Castille, whose arrogant favorite, Beltram de la Cueva, in his mantle broidered with gold and pearls and diamonds, and his boat with its awning of cloth of gold, must have offered a striking contrast to the extreme simplicity of the King of France.
The fine, imposing church of Fontarabia, in the transition style, is a marked exception to the Basque churches generally, which are of simple primitive architecture, with but few ornaments; and these, at least on the French side of the frontier, mostly confined to the sanctuary,which is rich in color and gilding. Perhaps over the main altar is a painting, but by no means by Murillo or Velasquez. If on the Spanish side, it may be a S. Iago on a white steed, sword in hand, with a red mantle over his pilgrim’s dress, looking like a genuinematamore, breathing destruction against the Moors. The Madonna, too, is always there, perhaps with a wheel of silver swords, as if in her bosom were centred all the sorrows of the human race.
The galleries around the nave in the Basque churches gives them the appearance of asalle de spectacle; but the clergy think the separation of the sexes promotes the respect due in the sanctuary, and the people themselves cling to the practice. The men occupy the galleries. They all have rosaries in their hands. From time to time you can see them kiss their thumbs, placed in the form of a cross, perhaps to set a seal on their vows to God, as people in the middle ages used to seal their letters with their thumbs to give them a sacred inviolability. Licking the thumb was, we know, an ancient form of giving a solemn pledge; and, till a recent period, the legal form of completing a bargain in Scotland was to join the thumbs and lick them. “What say ye, man? There’s my thumb; I’ll ne’er beguile ye,” said Rob Roy to Bailie Nicol Jarvie.
When Mass is over, every man in the galleries respectfully salutes his next neighbor. This is considered obligatory. Were it even his deadliest enemy, he must bow his head before him. Mass heard with devotion brings the Truce of God to the heart.
The women occupy the nave, sitting or kneeling on the black, funereal-looking carpet that covers the stone above the tomb of their beloved dead. For every family has a slab of wood or marble with an inscription in large characters, which covers the family vault below, and their notions of pious respect oblige the living to kneel on the stone that covers the bones of their forefathers. Or thiswasthe case; for of late years burial in churches has been forbidden, and these slabs now only serve to designate the inalienable right of the families to occupy them during the divine service. It is curious and interesting to examine these sepulchral slabs; for they are like the archives of a town inscribed with the names of the principal inhabitants, with their rank and occupation. In some places the women, by turns, bring every morning an offering for their pastor, which they deposit on these stones like an expiatory libation. Several of them are daily garnished with fruit, wine, eggs, beeswax, yarn, and linen thread, and thecuré, accompanied by his servant or the sacristan, goes around after Mass to collect this tribute of rural piety in a basket, and give his blessing to the families. These offerings of the first-fruits of the earth are still continued, though the dead are buried elsewhere.
The seat of that mighty potentate, the village mayor, is in the choir, as befits his dignity, which he fully sustains by his majestic deportment in sight of the whole congregation. Sometimes he chants at the lectern, like Charlemagne. The square peristyle of the church is often divided between him and the village school-master for their respective functions, as if to invest them with a kind of sanctity.
In Soule the belfry is formed by extending upwards the westernwall of the church in the form of three gables, looking like three obelisks. The bell is hung in the central one. The origin of this custom is thus explained by M. Cénac Montaut:
“In former times, when the Basques had some difficulty about accepting all the truths of the Gospel, the clergy were unable to make them comprehend the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. One of the priests, like S. Patrick with the shamrock, saw he must appeal to the senses in order to reach the mind and heart. Entering his rude pulpit one day, he addressed his flock something after the following manner: ‘Some of you, my dear brethren, recently objected that the God of the Old Testament, in the tables of the law, wished to be worshipped as one God, and that to add now the Son and Holy Spirit to the Deity is to overthrow the law of Sinai and affect the divine Essence itself.… My dear brethren, hitherto we have had but one gable on our belfry, directing towards heaven the innermost prayer of the heart, and bearing the bell by which God seems to speak to us in return. If, now, two other gables were added to this, would not this triple tower, standing on one base, and pointing to the same heaven, still constitute one belfry?’”
This appeal was effective. Those who had been unable to accept the abstract doctrine of the Trinity perfectly comprehended this material unity. The other priests of Soule hastened to make use of so happy an oratorical figure, and all through the valley of the Gave rose the three-gabled, dogmatic belfries, such as we see at the present day.
Near the church is often a modest white house with a small garden containing a few trees and flowers, where the Daughters of the Cross devote themselves to the instruction of children, planting the seeds of piety in their youthful hearts.
The Basque houses, with their triangular, tile-covered roofs, often project like achâlet, and are painted white, green, and even pink. The casements are made in the form of a cross, and stained red. The doorway is arched like a church-portal, and has over it a Virgin, or crucifix, or some pious inscription. There is no bolt on the door; for a Basque roof is too inviolable to need a fastening. At the entrance is abénitier(for holy water), as if the house were to the owner a kind of sanctuary to be entered with purification and a holy thought. You enter a large hall that divides the house into two parts, and contains all the farming utensils. It is here the husbandman husks his corn and thrashes his wheat. The uncolored walls of the rooms are hung with a few rude pictures, as of the Last Judgment, the Wandering Jew, or Napoleon. There are some large presses, a few wooden chairs, a shelf in the corner with a lace-edged covering for the statue of the Virgin, who wears a crown ofimmortelleson her head and a rosary around her neck. At one end of the room is a bed large enough for a whole family, and so high as almost to need a ladder to ascend it. The open pink curtains show the holy-water font, the crucifix, and faded palm branch annually renewed. There is no house without some religious symbol. The Basque has great faith in prayer. He stops his plough or wild native dance to say the Angelus. He never forgets to arm himselfwith the sign of the cross in a moment of danger. He makes it over the loaf of bread before he divides it among the family. The mother makes it on the foreheads of her children at night. At Candlemas a blessed candle burns under every roof in honor of the true Light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world. It is the boast of the country that Protestantism never found entrance therein, even during its prevalence in Béarn at the time of Joan of Navarre, though that princess took pains to have the Huguenot version of the New Testament translated into Basque and published at La Rochelle in 1591 for their benefit. The whole Bible is now translated, M. Duvoisin having devoted six years to the work, and Prince Lucian Bonaparte a still longer time in settling the orthography and superintending the edition.
It must not be supposed, however, that the Basques are an austere race. They are very fond of their national dances, and excel in thejeu de paume. Among their other amusements is thepastorale, acted in the open air with achirula(a kind of flute) and a tambourine for the orchestra. The subject is borrowed from the Bible, the legend of Roland, the wars with the Moors, etc. They are composed by native poets, and have a certain antique simplicity not without its charm. The people flock to these representations, as to their Cantabrian dances, in their gayest attire. The old man wears abéretdrawn over his forehead, while his long hair floats behind in token of the nobility of his ancient race. He wears short breeches, long woollen stockings, and leather shoes with handsome silver buckles.
The young Basque, straight, well formed, and proud in his bearing, wears his bluebéretjauntily perched on one side of his head. His jacket is short. Silver clasps fasten his collar and wristbands. He wears sandals on his feet, with red bars across the instep. A bright red sash girdles his waist—as of all mountaineers, enabling them to endure fatigue the better, like the surcingle of a horse. “Beware of that young man with the loose girdle,” said Sulla, speaking of Cæsar. For among the Romans the worddiscinctuswas applied to the indolent, cowardly soldier, asalte cinctus(high-girdled) meant a prompt, courageous man.
The girls, slender in form, with regular, expressive features, are veiled in a black mantilla, or else carry it on their arms. A gay kerchief is wound around the back of their heads like a turban, leaving visible the shining bands of their beautiful black hair.
The old women wear white muslin kerchiefs on their heads, with one corner falling on the shoulder. On the breast is suspended a golden heart orSaint-Esprit. Sometimes they are enveloped from head to foot in a great black cloak, which is absolutely requisite when they attend a funeral. This mantle forms part of thetrousseauof every bride of any substance, and she wears it on her wedding-day, as if to show herself prepared to pay due honor to all the friends who should depart this life before her. It must be a great comfort for them to see this mourning garment prepared in advance, and the sight of the bride veiled in her long black capuchin must diffuse a rather subdued gayety over the wedding party.
The Basques pay great respect to the dead. When a man dies,his next neighbor on the right carries the crucifix before his bier in the funeral procession, and his nearest neighbor on the left walks at its side. And the whole neighborhood assembles around it in church, with lighted candles in their hands, to hear the Mass for the Dead. They adorn their graveyards with shrubs and flowers. And they never omit the month’s-mind, or anniversary service.
Of course no one goes to the Basque country without visiting the famous Pas de Roland. The whole region is singularly wild and picturesque. We pass through a deep gorge encumbered with rocks, over which the Nive plunges and foams in the maddest possible way. Twin mountains of granite rise to the very heavens, their sides covered with the golden broom, or furrowed with deep gullies that tell of mountain torrents. The overhanging cliffs, and the dizzy, winding road along the edge of the abyss, create a feeling of awe; and by the time we arrive, breathless and fatigued, at the Pas de Roland, we are quite prepared to believe anything marvellous.
“I lie reclinedAgainst some trunk the husbandman has felled;Old legendary poems fill my mind,And Parables of Eld:I wander with Orlando through the wood,Or muse with Jaques in his solitude.”
“I lie reclinedAgainst some trunk the husbandman has felled;Old legendary poems fill my mind,And Parables of Eld:I wander with Orlando through the wood,Or muse with Jaques in his solitude.”
“I lie reclinedAgainst some trunk the husbandman has felled;Old legendary poems fill my mind,And Parables of Eld:I wander with Orlando through the wood,Or muse with Jaques in his solitude.”
“I lie reclined
Against some trunk the husbandman has felled;
Old legendary poems fill my mind,
And Parables of Eld:
I wander with Orlando through the wood,
Or muse with Jaques in his solitude.”
This archway was produced by a mere blow from the heel of the great Paladin, who did not consider the mountain worthy the use of his mighty sword. Everything is bathed in the golden light of the wondrous legend, which harmonizes with the spot. We even fancy we can hear the powerful horn of Orlando—the greatest trumpeter on record. We can see Carloman, with his black plumes and red mantle—opera-like—as he is described in theChant d’Altabisçar! The natives,pur sang, do not call this pass by the name of Roland, butUtheca gaiz—a bad, dangerous passage, as in truth it is. It is the only means of communication with the opposite side of the mountain. After going through it, the mountains recede, the horizon expands, a country full of bucolic delights is revealed to the eye, the exaltation of the soul subsides, and the mind settles down to its normal state of incredulity.
Just below the Pas de Roland, on the French side, are the thermal springs of Cambo, in a lovely little valley watered by the Nive. The air here is pure, the climate mild, the meadows fresh and sprinkled with flowers, the encircling hills are crowned with verdure. Never did Nature put on an aspect of more grace and beauty than in this delicious spot. One of the springs is sulphurous, the other ferruginous. They became popular among the Spanish and Basques during the last century when patronized by Queen Marie Anne de Neuberg, the second wife of Don Carlos II. of Spain. Some of her royal gifts to the church of Cambo are still shown with pride. These springs were visited as early as 1585, among others, by François de Nouailles, Bishop of Dax, who is often referred to in proof of their efficacy; but as that eminent diplomatist died a few weeks after he tried the waters, the less said of his cure the better for their reputation. Napoleon I., however, had faith in their virtues. He visited Cambo, and was only prevented by his downfall from building a military hospital here.
Not two miles from Cambo is the busy town of Hasparren. The way thither is through a delightful country,with some fresh beauty bursting on the eye at every step. On all sides are to be seen the neat white cottages of the laborers in the midst of orchards, meadows, and vineyards; sometimes in the hollows of a valley like a nest among the green leaves; sometimes on the hills commanding the most delicious of landscapes. Hasparren has about six thousand inhabitants, mostly farmers, but who try to increase their income by some trade. Twelve hundred of them are shoemakers; seven or eight hundred are weavers, curriers, or chocolate-makers. The spacious church is hardly able to contain the crowd of worshippers on festivals. A curious history is connected with the belfry.
The government having imposed a tax on salt in 1784, the people around Hasparren, who had hitherto been exempted, resolved to resist so heavy an impost. They rang the bell with violence to call together the inhabitants. Even the women assembled in bands with spits, pitchforks, and sickles, to the sound of a drum, which one of their number beat before them. The mob, amounting to two thousand, entrenched themselves in the public cemetery, where they received with howls of rage the five brigades the governor of Bayonne was obliged to send for the enforcement of the law. Bloodshed was prevented by the venerablecuré, who rose from his sick-bed and appeared in their midst. By his mild, persuasive words he calmed the excited crowd, induced the troops to retire and the mob to disperse. The leaders being afterwards arrested, he also effected their pardon—on humiliating conditions, however, to the town. The hardest was, perhaps, the destruction of the belfry, from which they had rung the alarm; and it was not till some time in the present century they were allowed to rebuild it.
It is remarkable that the ancient Basques left no poems, no war-songs to celebrate their valorous deeds, no epic in which some adventurous mariner recites his wanderings; for the language is flexible and easily bends to rhythm. But the people seem better musicians than poets. There are, to be sure, some rude plaints of love, a few smugglers’ or fishermen’s songs, sung to bold airs full of wild harmony that perhaps used to animate their forefathers to fight against the Moors; but these songs have no literary merit. Only two poems in the language have acquired a certain celebrity, because published by prominent men who ascribed to them a great antiquity. One of these is theChant des Cantabres, published by Wilhelm von Humboldt in 1817 in connection with an essay on the Basque language. Ushered into the world by so distinguished a linguist, it was eagerly welcomed by Germansavants, and regarded as a precious memorial of past ages. M. von Humboldt took it from the MSS. of a Spaniard employed in 1590 to explore the archives of Simancas and Biscay. He pretended to have found it written on an old, worm-eaten parchment, as well it might be if done soon after the invasion of the country by the Romans. We wonder he did not also find the history of the conquest of Cantabria in five books composed by the Emperor Augustus himself, said to have been in existence in the XVIIth century!
TheChant d’Altabisçaris said to have been discovered by M. La Tour d’Auvergne in an old convent at St. Sebastian, in 1821, writtenon parchment in characters of the XIIIth or XIVth century. It is unfortunate so valuable a MS., like the original poems of Ossian, should have been lost! The contents, however, were preserved and published in 1835, and, though now considered spurious, merit a certain attention because formerly regarded as genuine by such men as Victor Hugo, who, in hisLégende des Siècles, speaks of Charlemagne as “plein de douleur” to think
“Qu’on fera des chansons dans toutes ces montagnesSur ses guerriers tombés devant des paysans,Et qu’on en parlera plus que quatre cents ans!”
“Qu’on fera des chansons dans toutes ces montagnesSur ses guerriers tombés devant des paysans,Et qu’on en parlera plus que quatre cents ans!”
“Qu’on fera des chansons dans toutes ces montagnesSur ses guerriers tombés devant des paysans,Et qu’on en parlera plus que quatre cents ans!”
“Qu’on fera des chansons dans toutes ces montagnes
Sur ses guerriers tombés devant des paysans,
Et qu’on en parlera plus que quatre cents ans!”
M. Olivier, in hisDictionnaire de la Conversation, enthusiastically exclaims: “What shall I say of the Basque chants, and where did this people, on their inaccessible heights, obtain such boldness of rhythm and intonation? Every Basque air I know is grand and decided in tone, but none more strikingly so than the national chant of the Escualdunacs, as they call themselves in their language. And yet this fine poem has for some of its lines only the cardinal numbers up to twenty, and then repeated in reverse order. Often, while listening to the pure, fresh melody of this air, I have wondered what meaning was concealed beneath these singular lines. From one hypothesis to another I have gone back to the time when the Vascon race, hedged in at the foot of the Pyrenees by the Celtic invaders, sought refuge among the inaccessible mountains. Then, it seemed to me, thisChantwas composed as a war-song in which, after recounting, one by one, their years of exile, they numbered with the same regularity, but in a contrary direction, their deeds of vengeance!”
Such is the power of imagination. It is the
“Père TournamineQui croit tout ce qu’il s’imagine.”
“Père TournamineQui croit tout ce qu’il s’imagine.”
“Père TournamineQui croit tout ce qu’il s’imagine.”
“Père Tournamine
Qui croit tout ce qu’il s’imagine.”
Let us give the literal translation of the lines in which M. Olivier finds such an expression of sublime vengeance:
“They come! they come! What a forest of lances!With many-colored banners floating in the midst.How the lightning flashes from their arms!How many are there? Boy, count them well!One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve,Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty.…They fly! they fly! Where, then, is the forest of lances?Where the many-colored banners floating in the midst?The lightning no longer flashes from their blood-stained arms.How many left? Boy, count them well!Twenty, nineteen, eighteen, seventeen, sixteen, fifteen, fourteen, thirteen,Twelve, eleven, ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one.”
“They come! they come! What a forest of lances!With many-colored banners floating in the midst.How the lightning flashes from their arms!How many are there? Boy, count them well!One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve,Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty.…They fly! they fly! Where, then, is the forest of lances?Where the many-colored banners floating in the midst?The lightning no longer flashes from their blood-stained arms.How many left? Boy, count them well!Twenty, nineteen, eighteen, seventeen, sixteen, fifteen, fourteen, thirteen,Twelve, eleven, ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one.”
“They come! they come! What a forest of lances!With many-colored banners floating in the midst.How the lightning flashes from their arms!How many are there? Boy, count them well!One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve,Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty.…They fly! they fly! Where, then, is the forest of lances?Where the many-colored banners floating in the midst?The lightning no longer flashes from their blood-stained arms.How many left? Boy, count them well!Twenty, nineteen, eighteen, seventeen, sixteen, fifteen, fourteen, thirteen,Twelve, eleven, ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one.”
“They come! they come! What a forest of lances!
With many-colored banners floating in the midst.
How the lightning flashes from their arms!
How many are there? Boy, count them well!
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve,
Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty.
…
They fly! they fly! Where, then, is the forest of lances?
Where the many-colored banners floating in the midst?
The lightning no longer flashes from their blood-stained arms.
How many left? Boy, count them well!
Twenty, nineteen, eighteen, seventeen, sixteen, fifteen, fourteen, thirteen,
Twelve, eleven, ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one.”
The first book in the Basque language was printed in the XVIth century, in the same year Rabelais published hisPantagruel, in which he makes Panurge ask in the Basque language for anerremedioagainst poverty, that he might escape the penalty of Adam which brought sweat to his brow—a question many are still asking in far more intelligible language.
The most ancient specimens of genuine Basque literature show what changes the language has undergone within four or five centuries, which is a proof against the authenticity of theseChants. M. Bladé, a French critic, says his butter-man readily translated every word of theChant des Cantabres, so admired by the Baron von Humboldt. Fortunately, it is not needed to prove the valor of the Cantabrians when their country was invaded by the Romans, nor that ofAltabisçarto show the part they took in Roncesvalles’ fearful fight.
BY THE AUTHOR OF “THE DIVINE SEQUENCE.”
“Tranquil Hope still trims her lampAt the Eternal Years.”—Faber.
“Tranquil Hope still trims her lampAt the Eternal Years.”—Faber.
“Tranquil Hope still trims her lampAt the Eternal Years.”—Faber.
“Tranquil Hope still trims her lamp
At the Eternal Years.”—Faber.
It is probable that most of us have been, at some time in our intellectual and spiritual life, conscious of a divergence between our mental impressions and our received belief respecting the nature and characteristics of the divine Being. Outside the closed-in boundaries of our faith there has been, as it were, a margin of waste land which we seldom explore, but the undefined, uncultivated products of which flit athwart our imagination with something like an uncomfortable misgiving. We do not go far into it, because we have our certain landmarks to stand by; and while the sun of faith shines bright on these, we can say to ourselves that we have nothing really to do with the sort of fog-land which surrounds our own happy enclosure. Our allotment is one of peace within the true fold of the church.
We know where we are; we know what we have got to do; and we refuse to be seriously troubled by the dubious questions which may possibly never disturb us, unless we deliberately turn to them.
To us, as Catholics, this is a safe resolve. We know the Church cannot err. We believe, and are ready, absolutely and unreservedly ready, to believe, all she puts before us as claiming our belief. And this is no childish superstition. It is no unmanly laying down of our inalienable right to know good from evil; it is no wilful deafness or deliberate closing of our eyes. It is the absolutely necessary and perfectly inevitable result of the one primary foundation of all our belief—namely, that the church is the organ of the Holy Ghost, the infallible utterance of an infallible voice, which voice is none other and no less than the voice of God, speaking through and by the divinely-instituted kingdom which comprises the church of God. With this once firmly fixed in our hearts and intellects, nothing, can disturb us. Even supposing something to be defined by the church for which we were unprepared—as was the case with some on the definition of the Infallibility of the Sovereign Pontiff—still these surprises, if surprises they be, can be no otherwise than sweet and welcome. To us there cannot be a jarring note in that voice which is the voice of the Holy Ghost. The trumpet cannot give a false sound. It is our fault—either intellectually our fault (which is rather a misfortune than a fault) or spiritually (which is from our negligence and lukewarmness)—if the blast of that trumpet painfully startle us from our slumbers. To all who are waking and watching the sound can only be cheering and encouraging. The good soldier is everready to hear it and prompt to obey. The slumberer is among those to whom our Lord says: “You know how to discern the face of the sky, and can you not know the signs of the times?”[242]
He evidently expects us to know the signs of the times. The Lord is not in the strong wind, nor is he in the earthquake or the fire. He is in the gentle air.[243]But the wind and the earthquake and the fire are his precursors, and those who have experienced, and heard, and witnessed these warnings should be all attention for the softer sound which is the utterance of the divine Voice in the church.
There should be no surprise save the surprise of a great joy, the admiring astonishment of finding out how good our God is, and what marvellous treasures of things new and old our great mother, the church, lays before us from time to time, as the Spirit of God moves over the ocean of divine love, as it were incubating the creations of the world of grace. We lie down in our certainty as the infant lies down in its mother’s lap, and we rise on the wings of hope and faith as the lark rises in the morning light, without the shadow of a doubt that the lambient air will uphold the little fluttering wings with which it carries its joyous song to the gates of heaven. Underneath us are the “everlasting arms,”[244]and therefore we “dwell in safety and alone”—alone as regards those outside the church, who cannot understand our security, because they have never grasped the idea that, the voice of the church being the voice of the third Person of the ever-blessed Trinity to doubt the church is the same as to say that God is a liar.
If we have dwelt thus at length upon our certitude, and upon the intellectual and spiritual repose it gives us, we have done so for the purpose of making it absolutely impossible for our readers to suppose that when we speak of a divergence between some of our mental impressions and our received belief, we are in any degree insinuating that we have not got all we require in the absolute and definite teaching of the church; or that we have any cause to feel troubled about any question which the church has left as an open question, and respecting which any one of us individually may have been unable to arrive at a conclusion. All we mean is this: that there are certain feelings, impressions, and imaginings which we find it hard to silence and extinguish, difficult to classify in accordance with our substantial belief, and which hang about us like a sail on the mast of a vessel which the unwary crew have left flapping in a dangerous gale.
The points in question may be various as the minds that contemplate them. They may embrace a variety of subjects, and may assume different shapes and aspects, according to the external circumstances under which they present themselves, or to the color of our own thoughts and feelings at the moment they are before us. Their field is so vast and their possible variety so great that it would be vain for us to attempt to give even a glance at them all. Indeed, the doing so is beyond our capacity, and would be beyond the capacity of any one man. For who shall tell what is fermenting in the thoughts of one even of his fellow-beings?He can merely guess blindly at the souls of others from having dwelt in the depths of his own, and knowing, as the one great fact, that all men are brothers.
We are far, therefore, from intending to take up all the possible questions not hedged in and limited and defined by dogmatic teaching, or to try and help others to come to a conclusion on each. We might as well attempt to count the sands of the sea-shore. All we are proposing to ourselves for our own consolation, and, if possible, for that of our readers, is to lay hold of certain facts which will give a clew to other less certain facts, and, in short—if we may be allowed to resort to a chemical term—to indicate certain solvents which will hold in solution the little pebbles that lie in our path, and which might grow into great stumbling-blocks had we not a strong dissolving power always at our command.
It is self-evident that there is one knowledge which contains all other knowledge, and that is the knowledge of God. As all things flow from him, therefore all things are in him; and if we could see or know him, we should know all the rest. That knowledge, that seeing, is the “light of glory.” Its perfection is only compatible with the Beatific Vision, which vision is impossible to mere man in his condition ofviator, or pilgrim.[245]It is the conclusion of faith just as broad noon is the termination of darkness. But as faith is the leading up to the Beatific Vision, to the light of glory, and to the knowledge of all things, therefore in its degree is it the best substitute for sight—the dawning of a more perfect day, and the beginning of knowledge. Consequently, “faith is the evidence of things that appear not.” And as it is some of the things “that appear not” which are puzzling and bewildering many of us, let us lay hold of our faith and go whither it shall lead us.
We can in this life only know God mediately and obscurely by reason and faith. But as the direct and clear intuition of God in the Beatific Vision will include the knowledge of all else, so even our present imperfect knowledge of him comprises in a certain sense all other and lesser science, and is necessary to the highest knowledge of created things.
To do this thoroughly we will investigate the occasional divergence between our mental impressions, as we sometimes experience them, and our received belief of the Divine Nature and characteristics.
In a burst of holy exultation S. Paul asks, “Who hath known the mind of the Lord?”[246]—not as though regretting his ignorance, but rather with the feelings of one who, having suddenly come upon an evidently priceless treasure, exclaims, Who can tell what wealth now lies before us?
Yes, indeed! we know him well while we know him but imperfectly. There is more to know than we can guess at, but our hearts are too narrow to hold it. And yet sometimes how full to overflowing has that knowledge seemed! Have we not followed him from the cradle to the grave, in that sweet brotherhoodwhich he has established with each one of us? Have we not lost ourselves in far-reaching thoughts of how, and where he was when his brotherhood with us was not an accomplished fact, but only an ever-enduring divine intention co-equal with his own eternal existence—a phase of that very existence, for ever present to the Divine Idea, though not yet subjected to the conditions of time? We have thought of him as in the bosom of the Father in a way in which, wonderful to relate, he never can be again in the bosom of the Father. A something has passed in respect to the existence of God himself, and actually made a difference in the extrinsic relations of the divine Being.
There was an eternity in which the Son of God—he whom we most seem to know of the three Persons of the ever-blessed Trinity—dwelt in the bosom of the Father unconnected with his sacred humanity. There was an eternity when his name was not Jesus, when he was the Son of God only, and not the Son of man.
We are expressing what everybody knows who is a Christian—a platitude almost, and yet so full of wonder that, unless we have thoroughly gone into it and sifted it, we have not ransacked half the riches of what we can and may know of the “mind of the Lord.”
In truth, we are very apt to be repelled by this contemplation. There is something dreary to us in the eternity when the Brother of our race and the Spouse of our souls was only the everlasting Begotten of the Father, dwelling in that inscrutable eternity to which we, as the creatures of time, seem to have no link. Our thoughts and imaginations are shackled by the conditions of our own being. Yesterday we were not. And so all before yesterday seems like a blank to us. To-morrow we know will be—if not for us in this identical state, yet certainly for us in some other state. But that dim yesterday, which never began and of which no history can be written, no details given, only the great, grand, inarticulated statement made that theQui Est, the “I am,” filled it—this appalls us. Can nothing be done to mitigate this stupendous though beautiful horror? Is there no corner into which our insignificance can creep, that so we may look out upon those unknown depths without feeling that we are plunging into a fathomless ocean, there to sink in blank darkness and inanition? Surely the God of the past (as from our point of view we reckon the past) should not be so appallingly unknown to us who have our beloved Jesus in the present, and who look forward to the Beatific Vision of the whole blessed Trinity with trembling hope in the future. But before we can in any degree overcome the stupor with which we think of the backward-flowing ages of eternity, we must endeavor more fully to realize the nature of time.
We are all apt to speak of time as a period; whereas it is more properly a state.
The generality of persons, in thinking of time in relation to eternity, represent to themselves a long, long ago, blind past, and then an interminable but partially appreciable future, and time lying as a sort of sliced-out period between the two, which slice is attached to the eternity behind and the eternity in front, and about which we have the comfort and satisfaction of being able to write history and chronicleevents, either on a large or a small scale. We treat it as we should do a mountain of gold, which we coin into money, and we conveniently cut it up into ages, years, months, days, and hours. It is our nature so to do, and we cannot do otherwise. It is the condition of our being. But as it will not be always the condition of our being, there are few things we are more constantly exhorted to than the attempt to raise our imagination, or rather our faith, as much as possible out of these conventional and arbitrary trammels, and dispose ourselves for that other state which is our ultimate end, and where there are no years and no days.
In point of fact, time is only an imperfection of our being—an absolutely necessary imperfection, because our being is finite, and our state is a probationary state; and probation implies not only that succession which is necessary in every finite being, but change and movement in respect to things which are permanent in a more perfect state. Our condition in time has not inaptly been compared to that of a man looking through the small aperture of a camera-obscura, which only permits him to behold a section of what is passing. The figures appear and vanish. But the window is thrown wide open in eternity, and he sees the whole at once. He is, therefore, under a disadvantage so long as he is in the camera-obscura, viewing the landscape through a small hole. And this is our position, judging of eternity through the aperture of time. Even now we have a wonderful power of adding to our time, or of shortening it, without any reference to clocks or sun-dials, and which, if we think about it, will help to show us that time is a plastic accident of our being.
When we have been very much absorbed, we have taken no note of time, and the hours have flown like minutes. During that interval we have, as it were, made our own time, and modified our condition with reference to time by our own act. Time, therefore, is plastic. Were we by some extraordinary and exceptional power to accomplish in one day all that actually we now take a year to effect, but at the same time intellectually to retain our present perception of the succession of events, our life would not really have been shorter for the want of those three hundred and sixty-four days which we had been able to do without. Life is shorter now than it was in the days of the patriarchs. But possibly the perception of life is not shortened. Nay, rather, from the rapidity with which events are now permitted to succeed each other, partially owing to the progress of science and to man’s increased dominion over material force, the probability is that our lives are not abstractedly much, if at all, more brief than Adam’s nine hundred and thirty years. All things now are hastening to the end. They have always been hastening. But there is the added impetus of the past; and that increases with every age in the world’s history.
Now, let us imagine life, or a portion of life, without thought—that is, without the act of thinking. Immediately we find that it is next door tono thing, to no time, and no life. We can only measure life with any accuracy by the amount of thought which has filled it—that is, by the quantity of our intellectual and spiritual power which we have been able to bring to thesmall aperture in the camera-obscura, by which to contemplate the ever-flowing eternity which lies beyond, and cut it up into the sections we call time.
Another example will show us how plastic is the nature of time. Take the life of an animal. We are inclined to give the largest reasonable and possible importance to the brute creation. It is an open question, in which we see great seeds of future development, all tending to increased glory to the Creator and to further elucidation of creative love. Nevertheless, it is obvious that brutes perceive only or chiefly by moments. There is, as compared with ourselves, little or no sequence in their perceptions. There is no cumulative knowledge. They are without deliberate reflection, even where they are not without perception of relations and circumstances, past or future. Consequently, they are more rigorously subjects to time than ourselves. Therefore, when we deprive an animal of life, we deprive him of a remainder of time that is equal to little more than no time, in proportion to the degree in which his power of filling time with perception is less than our own.[247]All we have said tends to prove that the existence of time is a relative existence; it is the form or phase of our own finite being. It is an aspect of eternity—the aspect which is consistent with our present condition. For time is the measure of successive existence in created and finite beings. As finite spirits we cannot escape from this limit of successive existence, any more than a body can escape from the limit of locality and finite movement in grace. Eternal existence is the entire possession of life, which is illimitable, in such a perfect manner that all succession in duration is excluded. This is possible only in God himself, who is alone most pure and perfect act, and therefore is at once all he can be, without change or movement. But the created spirit must ever live by a perpetual movement of increase in its duration, because it is on every side finite. Time, therefore, will continue to exist while creatures continue to exist.
Having arrived at this conclusion we cannot refuse ourselves the satisfaction of pointing out one obvious deduction—namely, that if time has, in itself, only a relative existence, it is impossible it can ever put an end to the existence of anything else. It is inconceivable that thenon estcan absorb, exterminate, annihilate, or obliterate any one single thing that has ever had one second of real existence, of permitted being, of sentient, or even of insentient, life. God can annihilate, if he so will (and we do not think he will), but time cannot. Time can hide and put away. It can slip between us and the only reality, which is eternity; that is the condition of God, theQui Est. Wait awhile, and time will have, as it were, spread or overflowed into eternity. It will hide nothing from our view. It will be “rent in two from the top to the bottom,” from the beginning to the end, like the veil of the Temple, which is its symbol. And then will appear all that it has hitherto seemed, but only seemed, to distinguish. We shall find it all in the inner recesses of eternity. What cause, in point of fact, have we for supposing that anything whichisshall cease toexist? Why, because we no longer behold certain objects, do we imagine them to be really lost for ever? Is this a reasonable supposition on the part of beings who are conscious that once they themselves were not, and yet believe that they always shall be? Why should the mere diversity in other existences make us apprehend that the missing is also the lost, and that we have any substantial cause for doubting that all which exists will go on existing? Do we anywhere see symptoms of annihilation? It is true we see endless mutations, but those very mutations are a guarantee to us of the continuousness of being. All material things change: but they only change. They do not ever in any case go out and cease to be. If this be true of merely material things, how absolutely true must it be of the immaterial; and how more than probable of that which is partly one and partly the other, of that far lower nature of the brutes, which have a principle of life in them inferior to ours and superior to the plants, and of which, since we do not believe their sensations to be the result of certain fortuitous atoms that have fashioned themselves blindly after an inexorable law, and independently of an intelligent Lawgiver, we may reasonably predicate that they too will have a future and, in its proper inferior order, an advanced existence. Everywhere there is growth—through the phases of time into the portals of eternity.
The idea in the eternal Mind, of all essences, the least as well as the greatest, was, like the Mind that held it, eternal—that is, exempt from all limit of succession. The past, present, and future are the progressive modes of existence and of our own perceptions rather than the properties of the essences themselves. Those essences had a place in the Eternal Idea; they occupy an actual place as an actual existence in the phases of time, and they go on in all probability—may we not say in all certainty?—in the endlessness of the Creator’s intention. Let no one misunderstand this as implying that matter was eternal in any other sense than its essence being an object of the idea of the eternal God, it was always clearly present to the eternal Mind. Its actuality, as we know it, dates from this creation of the crude, chaotic mass. But once formed, and then fashioned, and finally animated, we can have no pretence for supposing that any part of it will ever cease to be. Nor can we have any solid reason for supposing that what has once been endowed with sentient life will ever be condemned to fall back into the all but infinitely lower form of mere organic matter, any more than we have reason to suppose that at some future period organic matter will be reduced to inorganic matter, and that out of this beautiful creation it will please God to resolve chaos back again, either the whole or in any one the smallest part. We have nothing to do with the difficulties of the question. They are difficulties entirely of detail, and not of principle; and they concern us no more than it concerns us to be able to state how many animalcula it took to heave up the vast sierras of the western hemisphere. The details may well puzzle us, and we cannot venture on the merest suggestion. But the principle is full of hope, joy, and security, which in itself is a presumption in its favor. If we would but believe how God values the work of his own hands;if we would but try to realize how intense is creative love, what much larger and deeper views we should have of the future of all creation, and of the glory that is prepared for us! Even the old heathen religions began by taking larger and more accurate measure of these questions (though they necessarily ended in error) than too many of us do with all the light of the Gospel thrown upon them. The animism of the heathens, which makes no distinction between animate and inanimate existence, but lends a soul to each alike, had in it a sort of loving and hopeful reverence for creation which is often wanting to us who alone truly know the Creator. In their blind groping after faith it led them to fetichism, and further on, as a fuller development of the same notion, to pantheism, and then to the ever-renewed and quite endless incarnations of Buddha. But these errors took their rise originally from a respectful and tender love of that beautiful though awful nature which man found lying all around him; external to himself, yet linked to himself, and beneath the folds of which he hoped to find the hidden deity.
If these reflections have at all enabled us to understand the nature of time, and to shake off some of the unreasonable importance we lend to it in our imaginations—making of it a sort of lesser rival to eternity, fashioning it into an actual, existing thing, as if it were an attribute of God himself, instead of being, what it is, a state or phase imposed upon us, and not in any way affecting him—we shall have done much to facilitate the considerations we wish to enlarge upon. Eternity is “perpetually instantaneous.” It is thenunc stansof theology. Time, on the contrary, is the past, present, and future of our human condition—thenunc fluensof theology.
With this truth well rooted in our minds, we will now turn to the investigation of some of those impressions to which we referred at the beginning of this section, and endeavor to throw light upon them from out of the additional knowledge we acquire of the nature and characteristics of the divine Being through the simple process of clearing away some of our false impressions with respect to time. We had in our modes of thought more or less hemmed in the Eternal, with our human sense of time, and subjected even him to the narrowing process of a past, present, and future. Now we are about to think of ourselves only in that position, and to contemplate him in eternity, dealing with us through the medium of time, but distinctly with a reference to eternity, and only apparently imposing on himself the conditions of time in order to bring himself, as it were, on a level with us in his dealings with us.
Strange as it may appear, out of the depths of our stupidity we have fabricated a difficulty to ourselves in his very condescensions, and, looking back from our present to the past, we find ourselves puzzled at certain divers revelations of God made to mankind in gone-by times; just as, in the weakness of our faith, we are sometimes troubled with doubts about our own condition, and that of those about us, in that future which must come, and which may not be far off to any one of us.
The God of Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob—is he really quite the same as our own God? our God of the womb of Mary, of the manger, of the wayside places in Palestine,and Mount Calvary, and now, of the silken-curtained Tabernacle, and the Blessed Eucharist, and the dear, ineffable moments of silent prayer—is he the same?
Of course we know that, literally and absolutely, he is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever. Nevertheless, he appears to us under such different aspects that we find ourselves unintentionally contemplating the Old Testament as a revelation of the divine Being with very different emotions from those with which we contemplate him in the New Testament, and this, again, differing widely from our view of him in the church. It may be a mere matter of feeling, perhaps; but it is nevertheless a feeling which materially influences our form of devotion, the vigor of our faith, and the power of our hope and love.
If we could take in all these different impressions and amalgamate them; if we could group them together, or make them like the several rays of light directed into one focus, we should obtain a more complete and a more influential knowledge of God than we can do while we seem rather to be wandering out of one view of him into another, as if we walked from chamber to chamber and closed each door behind us.
Now, the only way we can arrive at this is by bearing in mind that the acts of God in governing the world are not momentary and solitary facts, but continuous acts, or rather one continuous act.
Our difficulty lies in producing a visibly satisfactory harmony in our own minds as regards the acts of God, and thus (though for our own appreciation of them, they are to us broken up into fragments, or, in other terms, into separate facts) arriving at the same mental attitude towards them as though we saw them as one continuous act.
It will aid us in our search if we, first of all, endeavor to qualify that act.
Its very continuity, its perpetual instantaneousness, must essentially affect its character and make the definition no complex matter. It is an act of love, and it is revealed as such in the whole creation, and in the way God has let himself down to us and is drawing us up unto himself. There have been many apparent modifications, but there have been no actual contradictions, in this characteristic; for even the existence of evil works round to greater good, to a degree sufficiently obvious to us for us to know that where it is less obvious it must nevertheless follow the same law. For law is everywhere; because God is law, though law is not God.
Modern unbelief substitutes law for God, and then thinks it has done away with him. To us who believe it makes no difference how far back in the long continuous line of active forces we may find the original and divine Author of all force. It is nothing but the weakness of our imagination which makes it more difficult to count by millions than by units.
What does it matter to our faith through how many developments the condition of creation, as we now see it all around us, may have passed, when we know that the first idea sprang from the great Source of all law, and that with him the present state is as much one continuous act as the past state and the future state? You may trace back the whole material universe, if you will, to the one first molecule of chaotic matter; but so long as I find that first molecule in the hand of my Creator (and Idefy you to put it anywhere else), it is enough for my faith.
You do not make him one whit the less my Creator and my God because an initial law or force, with which he then stamped it, has worked it out to what I now see it. You may increase the apparent distance between the world as it is actually and the divine Fount from whence it sprang; you may seem to remove the creative love which called the universe into existence further off, by thus lengthening the chain of what you call developments; but, after all, these developments are for ever bridged over by the ulterior intentions of the Triune Deity when he said,“Let us make man in our image,” and by the fact that space and time are mere accidents as viewed in relation to theQui Est. They are, so to speak, divinely-constituted conventionalities, through which the Divinity touches upon our human condition, but which in no way affect the Divine Essence as it is in itself. On the contrary, in the broken-up developments and evolutions which you believe you trace, and which you want to make into a blind law which shall supersede a divine Creator, I see only the pulsations of time breaking up the perpetually instantaneous act of God, just as I see the pulsations of light in the one unbroken ray. The act of God passes through the medium of time before it reaches our ken; and the ray of light passes through the medium of air before it strikes our senses; but both are continuous and instantaneous.
If we have in any degree succeeded in establishing this to our satisfaction, it will become easier for us to estimate the acts of God as they come to us through the pulsations of Time; because we shall be able to bear in mind that they must be in a measure interpreted to us by the time through which they reach us. They were modified by the time in which they were revealed, much as the ray is modified by the substance through which it forces its way to us.
Now, we arrive at the causes of the different impressions we receive of the nature and characteristics of the divine Being. They are a consequence of the different epochs in which we contemplate him. They are the pulsations appropriate to that epoch. Other pulsations belong to our portion of time, and to our consequent view of the divine Being; and so on and on, till time shall be swallowed up in Eternity, and the Beatific Vision burst upon us.
TO BE CONTINUED.
“THE BLOOD OF THE MARTYRS IS THE SEED OF THE CHURCH.”
To the historical student the following paper can have but trifling value, as the writer makes no pretension to originality of matter, and seeks but to bring within the grasp of the general reader, in a condensed form, the gist of many books, a large number of which are rare, and almost inaccessible.
It is hoped, however, that there are many persons who will read with interest a paper thus compiled from undoubted authorities, who have neither the time nor the inclination to consult these authorities for themselves. These persons will learn with wonder of the self-abnegation of the French priests who went forth among the savages with their lives in their hands, with but one thought in their brains, one wish in their hearts, one prayer on their lips—the evangelization of the Indians.
As Shea says: “The word Christianity was, in those days, identical with Catholicity. The religion to be offered to the New World was that of the Church of Rome, which church was free from any distinct national feeling, and in extending her boundaries carried her own language and rites, not those of any particular state.”
The Franciscan, Dominican, and Jesuit bore the heat and burden of the day, and reaped the most bountiful harvest in that part of North America now known as the State of Maine; and the first mission in that neighborhood was planted at Mt. Desert, and called St. Sauveur. A hotel at Bar Harbor is so named, but not one in a hundred of the numerous guests who cross its threshold knows the reason of the French name of their temporary abiding-place.
This reason, and the facts connected therewith, we shall now proceed to give to our readers. In 1610 Marie de Médicis was Regent of France. The king had been assassinated in the streets of Paris in the previous month of May. Sully was dismissed from court. All was confusion and dissension. Twelve years of peace and the judicious rule of the king had paid the national debt and filled the treasury.
The famous Father Cotton, confessor of the late king, was still powerful at court. He laid before the queen the facts that Henri IV. had been deeply interested in the establishment of the Jesuit order in Acadia, and had evinced a tangible proof of that interest in the bestowal of a grant of two thousand livres per annum.
The ambitious queen listened indulgently, with a heart softened, possibly, by recent sorrows, and consented to receive the son of the Baron Poutrincourt, who had just returned from the New World, where he had left his father with Champlain. Father Cotton ushered the handsome stripling into the presence of the stately queen and her attendant ladies. Young Biencourt at first stood silent and abashed, but, as the ladies gathered abouthim and plied him with questions, soon forgot himself and told wondrous tales of the dusky savages—of their strange customs and of their eagerness for instruction in the true faith. He displayed the baptismal register of the converts of Father Fléche, and implored the sympathy and aid of these glittering dames, and not in vain; for, fired with pious emulation, they tore the flashing jewels from their ears and throats. Among these ladies was one whose history and influence were so remarkable that we must translate for our readers some account of her from the Abbé de Choisy.
Antoinette de Pons, Marquise de Guercheville had been famed throughout France, not only for her grace and beauty, but for qualities more rare at the court where her youth had been passed.
When Antoinette was La Duchesse de Rochefoucauld, the king begged her to accept a position near the queen. “Madame,” he said, as he presented her to Marie de Médicis, “I give you a Lady of Honor who is a lady of honor indeed.”
Twenty years had come and gone. The youthful beauty of themarquisehad faded, but she was fair and stately still, and one of the most brilliant ornaments of the brilliant court; and yet she was not altogether worldly. Again a widow and without children, she had become sincerely religious, and threw herself heart and soul into the American missions, and was restrained only by the positive commands of her mistress the queen from herself seeking the New World.
Day and night she thought of these perishing souls. On her knees in her oratory she prayed for the Indians, and contented herself not with this alone. From the queen and from the ladies of the court she obtained money, and jewels that could be converted into money. Charlevoix tells us that the only difficulty was to restrain her ardor within reasonable bounds.
Two French priests, Paul Biard and Enémond Massé, were sent to Dieppe, there to take passage for the colonies. The vessel was engaged by Poutrincourt and his associates, and was partially owned by two Huguenot merchants, who persistently and with indignation refused to permit the embarkation of the priests. No entreaties or representations availed, and finally La Marquise bought out the interest of the two merchants in the vessel and cargo, and transferred it to the priests as a fund for their support.
At last the fathers set sail, on the 26th of January, 1611. Their troubles, however, were by no means over; for Biencourt, a mere lad, clothed in a little brief authority—manly, it is true, beyond his years—hampered them at every turn. They arrived at Port Royal in June, after a hazardous and tempestuous voyage, having seen, as Father Biard writes, icebergs taller and larger than the Church of Notre Dame. The fathers became discouraged by the constant interference of young Biencourt, and determined to return to Europe, unless they could, with Mme. de Guercheville’s aid, found a mission colony in some other spot.
Their zealous protectress obtained from De Monts—who, though a Protestant, had erected six years before the first cross in Maine at the mouth of the Kennebec—a transfer of all his claims to the lands of Acadia, and soon sent out a smallvessel with forty colonists, commanded by La Saussaye, a nobleman, and having on board two Jesuit priests, Fathers du Thet and Quentin.
It was on the 1st of March, 1613, that this vessel left Honfleur, laden with supplies, and followed by prayers and benedictions.
On the 16th of May La Saussaye reached Port Royal, and there took on board Fathers Massé and Biard, and then set sail for the Penobscot. A heavy fog arose and encompassed them about; if it lifted for a moment, it was but to show them a white gleam of distant breakers or a dark, overhanging cliff.
“Our prayers were heard,” wrote Biard, “and at night the stars came out, and the morning sun devoured the fogs, and we found ourselves lying in Frenchmans Bay opposite Mt. Desert.”
L’Isle des Monts Déserts had been visited and so named by Champlain in 1604, and Frenchman’s Bay gained its title from a singular incident that had there taken place in the same spring.
De Monts had broken up his winter encampment at St. Croix. Among his company was a young French ecclesiastic, Nicholas d’Aubri, who, to gratify his curiosity in regard to the products of the soil in this new and strange country, insisted on being set ashore for a ramble of a few hours. He lost his way, and the boatmen, after an anxious search, were compelled to leave him. For eighteen days the young student wandered through woods, subsisting on berries and the roots of the plant known as Solomon’s Seal. He, however, kept carefully near the shore, and at the end of this time he distinguished a sail in the distance. Signalling this, he was fortunate enough to be taken off by the same crew that had landed him. On these bleak shores the colonists decided to make their future home, and, with singular infelicity, selected them as the site of the new colony. It is inconceivable how Father Biard, who had already spent some time in the New World, could have failed to suggest to La Saussaye and to their patroness that a colony, to be a success, must be not only in a spot easily accessible to France, but that a small force of armed men was imperative; for, to Biard’s own knowledge, the English had already seized several French vessels in that vicinity.
On these frowning shores La Saussaye landed, and erected a cross, and displayed the escutcheon of Mme. de Guercheville; the fathers offered the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, and gave to the little settlement the name of St. Sauveur.
Four tents—the gift of the queen—shone white in the soft spring sunshine. The largest of these was used as a chapel, the decorations of which, with the silver vessels for the celebration of the Mass and the rich vestments, were presented by Henriette d’Entraigues, Marquise de Verneuil.
The colonists labored night and day to raise their little fort and to land their supplies. Their toil was nearly over, the vessel, ready for sea, rode at anchor, when a sudden and violent storm arose.
This storm had been felt twenty-four hours earlier off the Isles of Shoals by a fishing vessel commanded by one Samuel Argall. Thick fogs bewildered him, and a strong wind drove him to the northeast; and when the weather cleared, Argall found himself off the coast of Maine. Canoes came out likeflocks of birds from each small bay. The Indians climbed the ship’s side, and greeted the new-comers with such amazing bows and flourishes that Argall, with his native acuteness, felt certain that they could have learned them only from the French, who could not be far away. Argall plied the Indians with cunning questions, and soon learned of the new settlement. He resolved to investigate farther, and set sail for the wild heights of Mt. Desert. With infinite patience he crept along through the many islands, and, rounding the Porcupines, saw a small ship anchored in the bay. At the same moment the French saw the English ship bearing down upon them “swifter than an arrow,” writes Father Biard, “with every sail set, and the English flags streaming from mast-head and stern.”
La Saussaye was within the fort, Lieut. la Motte on board with Father du Thet, an ensign, and a sergeant. Argall bore down amid a bewildering din of drums and trumpets. “Fire!” cried La Motte. Alas! the gunner was on shore. Father du Thet seized and applied the match.
Another scathing discharge of musketry, and the brave priest lay dead. He had his wish; for the day before he left France he prayed with uplifted hands that he might not return, but perish on that holy enterprise. He was buried the following day at the foot of the rough cross he had helped to erect.
La Motte, clear-sighted enough to see the utter uselessness of any farther attempt at defence, surrendered, and Argall took possession of the vessel and of La Saussaye’s papers, from among which he abstracted the royal commission. On La Saussaye’s return from the woods, where he had retreated with the colonists, he was met by Argall, who informed him that the country belonged to his master, King James, and finally asked to see his commission. In vain did the French nobleman search for it. Argall’s courtesy changed to wrath; he accused the officer of piracy, and ordered the settlement to be given up to pillage, but offered to take any of the settlers who had a trade back to Virginia with him, promising them protection. Argall counted, however, without his host; for on reaching Jamestown the governor swore that the French priests should be hung. Useless were Argall’s remonstrances, and finally, seeing no other way to save the lives of the fathers, he produced the commission and acknowledged his stratagem.
The wrath of Sir Thomas Dale was unappeased, but the lives of the priests were, of course, safe. He despatched Argall with two additional ships back to Mt. Desert, with orders to cut down the cross and level the defences.
Father Biard was on board, as well as Father Massé; they, with refined cruelty, being sent to witness the destruction of their hopes.
This work of destruction completed, Argall set sail for Virginia. Again a storm arose, and the vessel on which were the ecclesiastics was driven to the Azores. Here the Jesuits, who had been so grossly ill-treated, had but a few words to say to be avenged. The captain of the vessel was not without uneasiness, and entreated the priests to remain in concealment when the vessel was visited by the authorities. This visit over, the English purchased all they needed, and weighed anchor for England. Arrived there, a new difficulty occurred;for there was no commission to show. The captain was treated as a pirate, thrown into prison, and released only on the testimony of the Jesuit Fathers, who thus returned good for evil.