[Illustration:  The Abbot of St. Cyran——­234]

Victories gained over souls are from their very nature of a silent sort:  but M. de St. Cyran was not content with them.  He wrote also, and his book “Petrus Aurelius,” published under the veil of the anonymous, excited a great stir by its defence of the rights of the bishops against the monks, and even against the pope.  The Gallican bishops welcomed at that time with lively satisfaction, its eloquent pleadings in favor of their cause.  But, at a later period, the French clergy discovered in St. Cyran’s book free-thinking concealed under dogmatic forms.  “In case of heresy any Christian may become judge,” said Petrus Aurelius.  Who, then, should be commissioned to define heresy?  So M. de St. Cyran was condemned.

He had been already by an enemy more formidable than the assemblies of the clergy of France.  Cardinal Richelieu, naturally attracted towards greatness as he was at a later period towards the infant prodigy of the Pascals, had been desirous of attaching St. Cyran to himself.  “Gentlemen,” said he one day, as he led back the simple priest into the midst of a throng of his courtiers, “here you see the most learned man in Europe.”  But the Abbot of St. Cyran would accept no yoke but God’s:  he remained independent, and perhaps hostile, pursuing, without troubling himself about the cardinal, the great task he had undertaken.  Having had, for two years past, the spiritual direction of the convent of Port Royal, he had found in Mother Angelica Arnauld, the superior and reformer of the monastery, in her sister, Mother Agnes, and in the nuns of their order, souls worthy of him and capable of tolerating his austere instructions.

Before long he had seen forming, beside Port Royal and in the solitude of the fields, a nucleus of penitents, emulous of the hermits of the desert.  M. Le Maitre, Mother Angelica’s nephew, a celebrated advocate in the Parliament of Paris, had quitted all “to have no speech but with God.”  A howling (rugissant) penitent, he had drawn after him his brothers, MM. de Sacy and de Sericourt, and, ere long, young Lancelot, the learned author of Greek roots:  all steeped in the rigors of penitential life, all blindly submissive to M. de St. Cyran and his saintly requirements.  The director’s power over so many eminent minds became too great.  Richelieu had comprehended better than the bishops the tendency of M. de St. Cyran’s ideas and writings.  “He continued to publish many opinions, new and leading to dangerous conclusions,” says Father Joseph in his Memoires,” in such sort that the king, being advertised, commanded him to be kept a prisoner in the Bois de Vincennes.”  “That man is worse than six armies,” said Cardinal Richelieu; “if Luther and, Calvin had been shut up when they began to dogmatize, states would have been spared a great deal of trouble.”