The sprightly Henrietta of England, d.u.c.h.ess of Orleans, seems to have conceived the idea of bringing the rivalry between the old dramatic poet and his young successor to a decisive test. She proposed to each, without the other's knowledge, a subject for a tragedy--the parting, for reasons of State policy, of two royal lovers, t.i.tus, Emperor of Rome, and Berenice, Queen of Palestine. Perhaps Henrietta mischievously thought of the relations of her friend Marie de Mancini with Louis XIV. The plays appeared almost simultaneously in November 1670; Corneille's was before long withdrawn; Racine's _Berenice_, in which the penetrating voice of La Champmesle interpreted the sorrows of the heroine, obtained a triumph. Yet the elegiac subject is hardly suited to tragedy; a situation rather than an action is presented; it needed all the poet's resources to prevent the scenes from being stationary. In Berenice there is a suavity in grief which gives a grace to her pa.s.sion; the play, if not a drama of power, is the most charming of elegiac tragedies.

_Bajazet_ (1672), a tragedy of the seraglio, although the role of the hero is feeble, has virile qualities. The fury of Eastern pa.s.sion, a love resembling hate, is represented in the Sultana Roxane. In the Vizier Acomat, deliberate in craft, intrepid in danger, Racine proved, as he proved by his Nero and his Joad, that he was not always doomed to fail in his characters of men. The historical events were comparatively recent; but in the perspective of the theatre, distance may produce the idealising effect of time. The story was perhaps found by Racine in _Floridon_, a tale by Segrais. The heroine of _Mithridate_ (1673), the n.o.ble daughter of Ephesus, Monime, queen and slave, is an ideal of womanly love, chast.i.ty, fidelity, sacrifice; gentle, submissive, and yet capable of lofty courage. The play unites the pa.s.sions of romance with a study of large political interests hardly surpa.s.sed by Corneille. The cabal which gathered head against _Bajazet_ could only whisper its malignities when _Mithridate_ appeared.

_Iphigenie_, which is freely imitated from Euripides, was given at the fetes of Versailles in the summer of 1674. The French Iphigenia is enamoured of Achilles, and death means for her not only departure from the joy of youth and the light of the sun, but the loss of love.

Here, as elsewhere, Racine complicates the moral situation with cross and counter loves: eriphile is created to be the jealous rival of Iphigenie, and to be her subst.i.tute in the sacrifice of death. The ingenious transpositions, which were necessary to adapt a Greek play to Versailles in the second half of the seventeenth century, called forth hostile criticisms. Through miserable intrigues a competing _Iphigenie_, the work of Le Clerc and Coras, was produced in the spring of 1675; it was born dead, and five days later it was buried.

The hostilities culminated two years later. It is commonly said that Racine wrote in the conventional and courtly taste of his own day.

In reality his presentation of tragic pa.s.sions in their terror and their truth shocked the aristocratic proprieties which were the mode.

He was an innovator, and his audacity at once conquered and repelled.

It was known that Racine was engaged on _Phedre_. The d.u.c.h.esse de Bouillon and her brother the Duc de Nevers were arbiters of elegance in literature, and decreed that it should fail. A rival play on the same subject was ordered from Pradon; and to insure her victory the d.u.c.h.ess, at a cost of fifteen thousand livres, as Boileau declares, engaged the front seats of two theatres for six successive evenings--the one to be packed with applauding spectators, the other to exhibit empty benches, diversified with creatures who could hiss.

Nothing could dignify Pradon's play, as nothing could really degrade that of Racine. But Racine was in the highest degree sensitive, and such a desperate plot against his fame might well make him pause and reflect.

_Phedre_, like _Iphigenie_, is a new creation from Euripides. Its singular beauty has been accurately defined as a mingling of horror and compa.s.sion, of terror and curiosity. It is less a drama than one great part, and that part consists of a diseased state of the soul, a morbid conflict of emotions, so that the play becomes overmuch a study in the pathology of pa.s.sion. The greatness of the role of the heroine const.i.tutes the infirmity of the play as a whole; the other characters seem to exist only for the sake of deploying the inward struggle of which Phedre is the victim. Love and jealousy rage within her; remorse follows, for something of Christian sentiment is conveyed by Racine into his cla.s.sical fable. Never had his power as a psychologist in art been so wonderfully exhibited; yet he had elsewhere attained more completely the ideal of the drama. In the succession of his profane masterpieces we may say of the last that it is lesser than the first and greater. _Phedre_ lacks the balance and proportion of _Andromaque_; but never had Racine exhibited the tempest and ravage of pa.s.sion in a woman's soul on so great a scale or with force so terrible.

The cabal might make him pause; his own play, profoundly moralised as it was, might cause him to consider. Events of the day, crimes of pa.s.sion, adulteries, poisonings, nameless horrors, might agitate his spirit. Had he not fed the full-blown pa.s.sions of the time? What if Nicole's word that playwrights were public poisoners should be true? Probably various causes operated on the mobile spirit of Racine; certainly the Christian, of Jansenist education, who had slumbered within him, now awakened. He resolved to quit the world and adopt the Carthusian habit. The advice of his confessor was that he should regulate his life by marriage. Racine yielded, and found his contentment in a wife who was ignorant of his plays, and in children whose inclinations and training were religious. The penitent was happy in his household, happy also in his reconciliation with Nicole and Arnauld. To Boileau he remained attached. And he did not renounce the court. Was not the King the anointed vicegerent of G.o.d, who could not be too much honoured? He accepted, with Boileau as fellow-labourer, the position of the King's historiographer, and endeavoured to fulfil its duties.

Twelve years after his withdrawal from the theatre, Racine, at the request of Madame de Maintenon, composed his Biblical tragedy of _Esther_ (1688-89) for her cherished schoolgirls at Saint-Cyr. The subject was not unaptly chosen--a prudent and devout Esther now helped to guide the fortunes of France, and she was surrounded at Saint-Cyr by her chorus of young daughters of Sion. _Esther_ was rendered by the pupils, with graceful splendours, before the King, and the delight was great. The confidante of the Persian Queen indeed forgot her words; at Racine's hasty complaint the young actress wept, and the poet, weeping with her, wiped away her tears.

_Esther_ is a melodious play, exquisite in its refined style and delicate versification; but the characters are faintly drawn. Its novelty lay in its lyrical movements and in the poetical uses of its finely-imagined spectacle. Madame de Maintenon or her directors feared that the excitement and ambitions of another play in costume might derange the spirits of her girls, and when _Athalie_ was recited at Versailles, in January 1691, it was little of an event; the play pa.s.sed almost unnoticed. A noisy reception, indeed, would have been no fitting tribute to its solemn beauty. All Racine's religious feeling, all his domestic tenderness are united in _Athalie_ with his matured feeling for Greek art. The great protagonist is the Divine Being; Providence replaces the fate of the ancient drama. A child (for Racine was still an innovator in the French theatre) was the centre of the action; the interests were political, or rather national, in the highest sense; the events were, as formerly, the developments of inward character; but events and characters were under the presiding care of G.o.d. The tragedy is lyrical, not merely through the chorus, which expresses common emotions of devout joy and fear, indignation, praise, and rapture. The chorus is less developed here, and its chants are less impressive than in _Esther_. There is, however, a lyrism, personal and modern, in the prophetic inspiration of the High Priest, and Racine antic.i.p.ated that his boldness in presenting this might be censured by his contemporaries. The unity of place, which had been disregarded in _Esther_, is here preserved; the scene is the temple at Jerusalem; and by its impressive grandeur, and the awful a.s.sociations of the place, the spectacle may be said to take part in the action of the play. Perhaps it would be no exaggeration to a.s.sert that grandeur and beauty are nowhere else so united in French dramatic art as in _Athalie_; perhaps it might truly be described as flawless in majesty and grace.

A light disfavour of the King saddened, and perhaps hastened, the close of Racine's life. Port-Royal was regarded as a centre of rebellious heresy; and Racine's piety to his early masters was humble and devout. He had further offended by drawing up a memorandum on the sufferings of the French people resulting from the wars. Madame de Maintenon a.s.sured him that the cloud would pa.s.s; but the favour of death, accepted with tranquillity, came before the returning favour of the poet's master. He died in April 1699, soon after he had entered his sixtieth year.

The highest distinction of the drama of Racine is its truth to nature--truth, that is, in its interpretation and rendering of human pa.s.sion. Historical accuracy and local colour concerned him as far as they were needful with his courtly spectators for verisimilitude.

The fluctuations of pa.s.sion he studies to most advantage in his characters of women. Love, in all its varieties, from the pa.s.sion of Roxane or Phedre to the pure devotion of Berenice, Iphigenie, or Monime; maternal tenderness or the tenderness of the foster-mother (Andromaque, Clytemnestre, Josabeth); female ambition (Agrippine, Athalie)--these are the themes of his exposition. His style has been justly characterised as a continual creation; its audacity underlies its suavity; its miracles are accomplished with the simplest means.

His vocabulary is singularly small, yet with such a vocabulary he can attain the rarest effects. From sustained dignity he can pa.s.s suddenly, when the need arises, to the most direct familiarity. The music of his verse is seldom rich or sonorous; it is at once a pure vehicle for the idea and a delicate caress to the senses.

CHAPTER VII BOSSUET AND THE PREACHERS--FeNELON

I

"A man set under authority"--these words, better than any other, define Bossuet. Above him was G.o.d, represented in things spiritual by the Catholic Church, in things temporal by the French monarchy; below him were the faithful confided to his charge, and those who would lead the faithful astray from the path of obedience and tradition. Duty to what was above him, duty to those placed under him, made up the whole of Bossuet's life. To maintain, to defend, to extend the tradition he had received, was the first of duties.

All his powers as an orator, a controversialist, an educator were directed to this object. He wrote and spoke to dominate the intellects of men and to subdue their wills, not for the sake of personal power, but for the truth as he had received it from the Church and from the monarchy.

JACQUES-BeNIGNE BOSSUET was born in 1627, at Dijon, of a middle-cla.s.s family, distinguished in the magistracy. In his education, pursued with resolute ardour, the two traditions of h.e.l.lenism and Hebraism were fused together: Homer and Virgil were much to him; but the Bible, above all, nourished his imagination, his conscience, and his will.

The celebrity of his scholarship and the flatteries of Parisian _salons_ did not divert him from his course. At twenty-five he was a priest and a doctor of the Sorbonne. Six years were spent at Metz, a city afflicted by the presence of Protestants and Jews, where Bossuet fortified himself with theological studies, preached, panegyrised the saints, and confuted heretics. His fame drew him to Paris, where, during ten years, his sermons were among the great events of the time. In 1669 he was named Bishop of Condom, but, being appointed preceptor to the Dauphin, he resigned his bishopric, and devoted himself to forming the mind of a pupil, indolent and dull, who might one day be the vicegerent of G.o.d for his country. Bishop of Meaux in 1681, he opened the a.s.sembly of French clergy next year with his memorable sermon on the unity of the Church, and by his authority carried, in a form decisive for freedom while respectful towards Rome, the four articles which formulated the liberties of the Gallican Church. The duties of his diocese, controversy against Protestantism, the controversy against Quietism, in which Fenelon was his antagonist, devotional writings, strictures upon the stage, controversy against the enlightened Biblical criticism of Richard Simon, filled his energetic elder years. He ceased from a life of glorious labour and resolute combat in April 1704.

The works of Bossuet, setting aside his commentaries on Holy Scripture, devotional treatises, and letters, fall into three chief groups: the eloquence of the pulpit, controversial writings, and writings designed for the instruction of the Dauphin.

Political eloquence could not exist where power was grasped by the hands of one great ruler. Judicial eloquence lacked the breadth and elevation which come with political freedom; it contented itself with subtleties of argument, decked with artificial flowers of style. The pulpit was the school of oratory. St. Vincent de Paul had preached with unction and a grave simplicity, and Bossuet, his disciple, felt his influence. But the offering which Bossuet laid upon the altar must needs be costly, an offering of all his powers. While an unalterable good sense regulates all he wrote, the sweep of his intellect demanded plenitude of expression; his imagination, if it dealt with life and death, must needs deal with them at times in the way of magnificence, which was natural to it; and his lyrical enthusiasm, fed by the prophetic poetry of the Old Testament, could not but find an escape in words. He sought no literary fame; his sermons were acts of faith, acts of duty. Out of the vast ma.s.s of his discourses he printed one, a sermon of public importance--that on the unity of the Church.

At the request of friends, some of the Funeral Orations were published.

These, with his address on the profession of Louise de La Valliere, were all that could be read of Bossuet's pulpit oratory by his contemporaries. His sermons were carefully meditated and prepared, but he would not check his power of lofty improvisation by following the words of a ma.n.u.script. After his death his papers had perilous adventures. By the devotion of his first editor, Deforis, nearly two hundred sermons were after many years recovered; later students have presented them with as close an approximation as is possible to their original form. Bossuet's first manner--that of the years at Metz--is sometimes marred by scholastic subtleties, a pomp of quotations, too curious imagery, and a temper rather aggressive than conciliating.

During the period when he preached in Paris he was master of all his powers, which move with freedom and at the same time with a majestic order; his grandeur grows out of simplicity. As Bishop of Meaux he exhorted his flock out of the abundance of his heart, often without the intermediary of written preparation.

He is primarily a doctor of the faith: dogma first, determined by authority, and commending itself to human reason; morality, not independent, but proceeding from or connected with dogma, and while truly human yet resting upon divine foundations. But neither dogma nor morals are presented in the manner of the schools; both are made living powers by the preacher's awe, adoration, joy, charity, indignation, pity; in the large ordonnance of his discourse each pa.s.sion finds its natural place. His eloquence grows out of his theme; his logic is the logic of clear and natural ideas; he is lucid, rapid, energetic; then suddenly some aspect of his subject awakens a lyrical emotion, and the preacher rises into the prophet.

Bossuet's panegyrics of the saints are sermons in which doctrine and morals are enforced by great examples. His _Oraisons Funebres_ preach, for the uses of the living, the doctrine of death. Nowhere else does he so fill the mind with a sense of the greatness and the glory of life as when he stands beside the bier and reviews the achievements or presents the characters of the ill.u.s.trious deceased. Observing as he did all the decorum of the occasion, his discourses do not degenerate into mere adulation; some are historic surveys, magnificent in their breadth of view and mastery of events. He presents things as he saw them, and he did not always see aright.

Cromwell is a hypocrite and an impostor; the revocation of the edict of Nantes is the laudable act of a king who is a defender of the faith.

The intolerance of Bossuet proceeds not so much from his heart as from the logic of his orthodoxy. His heart had a tenderness which breaks forth in many places, and signally in the discourse occasioned by the death of the d.u.c.h.ess of Orleans. This, and the eloquent memorials of her mother, Henrietta, Queen of England, and of the Prince de Conde, touch the heights and depths of the pa.s.sions proper to the grave.

Bossuet's polemic against Protestantism is sufficiently represented by his _Exposition de la Doctrine Catholique_ (published 1671) and the _Histoire des Variations des eglises Protestantes_ (1688). The latter, in its fifteen books, is an attempt to overwhelm the contending Protestant communions by one irresistible attack. Their diversities of error are contrasted with the one, unchanging faith of the infallible Church. Lutherans, Calvinists, Anglicans, the Albigenses, the Hussites, the Wicliffites are routed and slain, as opponents are slain in theological warfare--to rise again. History and theology co-operate in the result. The characters of the Protestant Reformers are studied with a remorseless scrutiny, and an art which can bring into relief what the work of art requires.

Why the children of the infallible Church rose up in disobedience against their mother is left unexplained. The great heresy, Bossuet was persuaded, had almost reached its term; the intellectual chaos would soon be restored to universal order under the successors of Innocent XI.

In the embittered controversy with his brother-Bishop of Cambrai, on the significance of which the singular autobiography of Madame Guyon[1] throws much light, Bossuet remained the victor. It was a contention between dogmatic rect.i.tude and the temper of emotional religion. Bossuet was at first unversed in the writings of the Catholic mystics. Being himself a fully-formed will, watchful and armed for obedience and command--the "man under authority"--he rightly divined the dangers to dogmatic faith arising from self-abandonment to G.o.d within the heart. The elaborate structure of orthodoxy seemed to dissolve in the ardour of a personal emotion; it seemed to him another form of the individualism which he condemned.

The Church was a great objective reality; it had laid down a system of belief. A love of G.o.d which ignored the method of G.o.d, was but a spurious love, leading to destruction.

[Footnote 1: Translated into English for the first time in full, 1897, by T. T. Allen.]

Protestant self-will, mystical private emotion--these were in turn met by the champion of tradition, and, as he trusted, were subdued.

Another danger he perceived, not in the unregenerate will or wandering heart, but in the critical intelligence. Bossuet again was right in viewing with alarm the Biblical studies of Richard Simon. But his scholarship was here defective. He succeeded in suppressing an edition of the _Histoire Critique du Vieux Testament_. There were printers in Holland beyond the reach of Bossuet's arm; and Simon continued the work which others have carried further with the aids of more exact science.

To doubt the government of His world by the Divine Ruler, who a.s.signs us our duty and our place, is to sap the principles of authority and of obedience. The doctrine of G.o.d's providence is at the centre of all Bossuet's system of thought, at the heart of his loyal pa.s.sions.

On earth, the powers that be; in France, the monarch; in heaven, a greater Monarch (we will not say a magnified Louis XIV.) presiding over all the affairs of this globe. When Bossuet tried to educate his indocile pupil the Dauphin, he taught him how G.o.d is above man, as man is above the brute. Monarchy--as he showed in his _Politique Tiree de l'ecriture Sainte_--is hereditary and absolute; but absolute power is not arbitrary power; the King is G.o.d's subject, and his laws must conform to those of his Divine Ruler. The _Discours sur l'Histoire Universelle_ (1681) was written in the first instance for the Dauphin; but its purpose was partly apologetic, and Bossuet, especially in the second part of the book, had the errors of free-thinkers--Spinoza and Simon--before his mind.

The seventeenth century had not contributed largely to historical literature, save in the form of memoirs. Mezeray, in the first half of the century, Fleury, in the second, cannot be ranked among those writers who illuminate with profound and just ideas. The Cartesian philosophy viewed historical studies with haughty indifference.

Bossuet's _Discours_ is a vindication of the ways of G.o.d in history, a theology of human progress. He would exhibit the nations and generations of human-kind bound each to each under the Providential government. The life of humanity, from Adam to Charlemagne, is mapped into epochs, ages, periods--the periods of nature, of the law, and of grace. In religion is found the unity of human history. By religion is meant Judaism and Christianity; by Christianity is meant the Catholicism of Rome.

Having expounded the Divine policy in the government of the world, Bossuet is free to study those secondary causes which have determined the rise and fall of empires. With magisterial authority, and with majestic skill, he presents the movements of races and peoples. His sympathy with the genius of ancient Rome proceeds not only from his comprehensive grasp of facts, but from a kinship between his own and the Roman type of character. The magnificent design of Bossuet was magnificently accomplished. He hoped to extend his studies, and apply his method to other parts of his vast subject, but the hope was not to be fulfilled. A disinterested student of the philosophy of history he is not; he is the theologian who marshals facts under an accepted dogma. A conception of Providence may indeed emerge from the researches of a devout investigator of the life of humanity as their last result; but towards that conception the secular life and the various religions of the world will contribute; the ways of the Divine Spirit will appear other than those of the anthropomorphic Ruler of Bossuet's imagination. He was not an original thinker; he would have scorned such a distinction--"l'heretique est celui qui a une opinion"; he had received the truth, and only gave it extended applications. He is "le sublime orateur des idees communes."

More than an orator, before all else he was a combatant. Falling at his post as the eighteenth century opened, he is like some majestic, white-haired paladin of old romances which tell of the strife between French chivalry and the Saracenic hordes. Bossuet fell; the age of growing incredulity and novel faiths was inaugurated; the infidels pa.s.sed over the body of the champion of conservative tradition.

II

Bossuet's contemporaries esteemed him as a preacher less highly than they esteemed the Jesuit Bourdaloue. The life of LOUIS BOURDALOUE (1632-1704) is told in the words of Vinet: "He preached, confessed, consoled, and then he died." It does credit to his hearers that they valued him aright--a modest man of simple probity. He spoke, with downcast eyes and full harmonious voice, as a soul to souls; his eloquence was not that of the rhetorician; his words were grave and plain and living, and were pressed home with the force of their reality.

He aimed never at display, but always at conviction. When the crowd at St. Sulpice was moved as he entered the church and ascended the pulpit, "Silence!" cried the Prince de Conde, "there is our enemy!"

Bourdaloue marshalled his arguments and expositions with the elaborate skill of a tactician; he sought to capture the judgment; he reached the heart through a wise director's knowledge of its inmost processes. When his words were touched with emotion, it was the involuntary manifestation of the life within him. His studies of character sometimes tended to the form of portraits of moral types, features in which could be identified with actual persons; but in these he was the moralist, not the satirist. During four-and-thirty years Bourdaloue distributed, to those who would take it, the bread of life--plain, wholesome, prepared skilfully and with clean hands, never varying from the evenness and excellence of its quality. He does not startle or dazzle a reader; he does what is better--he nourishes.

Bourdaloue p.r.o.nounced only two _Oraisons Funebres_, and those under the constraint of duty. He thought the Christian pulpit was meant for less worldly uses than the eulogy of mortal men. The _Oraison Funebre_ was more to the taste of Mascaron (1634-1703), whose unequal rhetoric was at its best in his panegyric of Turenne; more to the taste of the elegant FLeCHIER, Bishop of Nimes. All the literary graces were cultivated by Flechier (1632-1710), and his eloquence is unquestionable; but it was not the eloquence proper to the pulpit.

He was a man of letters, a man of the world, formed in the school of preciosity, a haunter of the Hotel de Rambouillet; knowing the surface of society, he knew as a moralist how to depict its manners and the evil that lay in them. He did not apply doctrine to life like Bossuet, nor search the heart with Bourdaloue's serious zeal; to save souls was indeed important; to exhibit his talents before the King was also important. But the true eloquence of the pulpit has deeper springs than lay in Flechier's mundane spirit. Already the decadence has begun.

Protestantism had its preacher in JACQUES SAURIN (1677-1730), clear, logical, energetic, with negligences of style and sudden flashes of genius. But he belongs to London, to Geneva, to the Hague more perhaps than to France. An autumnal colouring, bright and abundant, yet indicative of the decline, is displayed in the discourses of the latest of the great pulpit orators, JEAN-BAPTISTE Ma.s.sILLON (1663-1742), who belongs more to the eighteenth than to the seventeenth century. "He must increase," said Bourdaloue, "but I must decrease." Ma.s.sillon, with gifts of person and of natural grace, sensitive, tender, a student and professor of the rhetorical art, sincerely devout, yet with waverings towards the world, had something in his genius that resembled Racine. A pathetic sentiment, a feeling for human pa.s.sions, give his sermons qualities which contrast with the severer manner of Bourdaloue. They are simple in plan; the preacher's art lay in deploying and developing a few ideas, and infusing into them an imaginative sensibility; he is facile and abundant; faultless in amenity, but deficient in force and fire. Yet the opening words of the Funeral Oration on Louis XIV.--"G.o.d alone is great, my brethren"--are n.o.ble in their simplicity; and the thought of Jesus suddenly appearing in "the most august a.s.sembly of the world"--in the chapel at Versailles--startled the hearers of the sermon on the "small number of the elect." "There is an orator!" cried the actor Baron, "we are only comedians;" but no actor would have inst.i.tuted a comparison between himself and Bourdaloue. "When one enters the avenue at Versailles," said Ma.s.sillon, "one feels an enervating air."

He was aware of the rising tide of luxury and vice around him; he tried to meet it, tracing the scepticism of the time to its ill-regulated pa.s.sions; but he met scepticism by morality detached from dogma. The _Pet.i.t Careme_, preached before Louis XV. when a child of eight, expresses the sanguine temper of the moment: the young King would grow into the father of his people; the days of peace would return. Great and beneficent kings are not effeminately amiable; it were better if Ma.s.sillon had preached "Be strong" than "Be tender."

Voltaire kept on his desk the sermons of Ma.s.sillon, and loved to hear the musical periods of the _Pet.i.t Careme_ read aloud at meal-time.

To be the favourite preacher of eighteenth-century philosophers is a distinction somewhat compromising to an exponent of the faith.

III

Bossuet's great antagonist in the controversy concerning Quietism might have found the approval of the philosophers for some of his political opinions. His religious writings would have spoken to them in an unknown tongue.

FRANcOIS DE SALIGNAC DE LA MOTHE-FeNELON was born in Perigord (1651), of an ancient and ill.u.s.trious family. Of one whose intellect and character were infinitely subtle and complex, the blending of all opposites, it is possible to sustain the most conflicting opinions, and perhaps in the end no critic can seize this Proteus. Saint-Simon noticed how in his n.o.ble countenance every contrary quality was expressed, and how all were harmonised: "Il fallait faire effort pour cesser de le regarder." During the early years of his clerical career he acted as superior to female converts from Protestantism, and as missionary among the unconverted Calvinists. In 1689 he was appointed tutor to the King's grandson, the Duc de Bourgogne, and from a pa.s.sionate boy he transformed his pupil into a youth too blindly docile. Fenelon's nomination to the Archbishopric of Cambrai (1695), which removed him from the court, was in fact a check to his ambition.

His religious and his political views were regarded by Louis XIV.

as dangerous for the Church and the monarchy.