disliked Madame Guyon.  Breathing into the mind of the great lady—­who, though of Huguenot descent, was nothing if not “orthodox”—­doubts as to Madame Guyon’s correctness of belief, he caused Madame de Maintenon to withdraw her countenance from her protegee, and to discontinue her own visits to St. Cyr.  Now was the time for Madame Guyon’s enemies to attack her, when they saw the court favourite’s countenance withdrawn.  An attempt was made to poison her, and so far succeeded that her health was impaired for many years.

Then Bossuet appeared on the scene.  In September, 1693, he came to see her in Paris, feeling, doubtless, that he was the man to settle all these Pietistic commotions.  At Madame Guyon’s request he consented to examine her numerous writings; and when, in the course of some months, he had performed this task, and had also perused her MS. autobiography, he had another long conversation with her, which brought out fully the peculiarities of her doctrine.  In this interesting discussion he seems to have adopted a bullying tone somewhat incompatible with his remarkably mild Christian name, Jacques Benigne, and to have forgotten the courtesy due to a lady who, whatever her errors might be in his eyes, was one of the brightest lights and purest saints in the Roman Catholic Church of that day.  Finally, the matter became an affair of State, and the king appointed a commission to sit, at Issy, upon her orthodoxy—­Bossuet, De Noailles, and Tronson.  The two latter were charmed with her mild and teachable spirit.  But the fierce Bossuet was not yet satisfied; and as she put herself under his special direction for a time, he consigned her to a convent at Meaux, and at length required her to sign certain doctrinal articles, and a decree condemning her books.  To this last, however, a qualifying clause was appended, to the effect that she had never intended to say anything contrary to the spirit of the Church, not knowing that any other meaning could be given to her words.  In fact, while conceding to her Church the right to condemn whatever it did not approve in her tenets, she held much the same position as Galileo when his theory as to the movements of our planet was condemned as heretical, and he capped his enforced retractation with the quiet protest, “E pur si muove.”  In her letter to her three ecclesiastical judges, dated “in August, 1694,” she courageously tells them, “I pray you, my lords, to remember that I am an ignorant woman; that I have written my experiences in all good faith, and that if I have explained myself badly, it is the result of my ignorance.  As regards the experiences, they are real.” [1]

[Footnote 1:  La Vie, troisieme partie, ch. xvi., 6.]

Bossuet at length appeared to be satisfied, and gave her a certificate of her filial submissiveness to the Roman Catholic faith, and she thought herself free to return to Paris.  It was not perhaps the wisest step to take; the bishop was displeased at it, as was also the bigoted Madame de Maintenon.  Madame Guyon went to live in privacy in a small house in the Faubourg St. Antoine, where she hoped to be left in peace.  But her enemies got scent of her hiding-place, arrested her, and shut her up in the Castle of Vincennes, whence, after a few weeks at Vaugirard, she was transferred to the Bastille.