The superior at Issy, during my stay there, was M. Gosselin, one of the most amiable and polite men I have ever known.  He was a member of one of those old bourgeois families which, without being affiliated to the Jansenists, were not less deeply attached than the latter to religion.  His mother, to whom he bore a great likeness, was still alive, and he was most devoted in his respectful regard for her.  He was very fond of recalling the first lessons in politeness which she gave him somewhere about 1796.  He had accustomed himself in his childhood to adopt a usage which it was at that time dangerous to repudiate, and to use the word citizen instead of monsieur.  As soon as mass began to be celebrated after the Revolution, his mother took him with her to church.  They were nearly the only persons in the church, and his mother bade him go and offer to act as acolyte to the priest.  The boy went up timidly to the priest, and with a blush said, “Citizen, will you allow me to serve mass for you?” “What are you saying!” exclaimed his mother; “you should never use the word citizen to a priest.”  His affability and kindness were beyond all praise.  He was very delicate, and only attained an advanced age by exercising the strictest care over himself.  His engaging features, wan and delicate, his slender body, which did not half fill the folds of his cassock, his exquisite cleanliness, the result of habits contracted in childhood, his hollow temples, the outlines of which were so clearly marked behind the loose silk skull-cap which he always wore, made up a very taking picture.

M. Gosselin was more remarkable for his erudition than his theology.  He was a safe critic within the limits of an orthodoxy which he never thought of questioning, and he was placid to a degree.  His Histoire Litteraire de Fenelon is a much esteemed work, and his treatise on the power of the Pope over the sovereign in the Middle Ages[2] is full of research.  It was written at a time when the works of Voigt and Hurter revealed to the Catholics the greatness of the Roman pontiffs in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.  This greatness was rather an awkward obstacle for the Gallicans, as there could be no doubt that the conduct of Gregory VII. and Innocent III. was not at all in conformity with the maxims of 1682.  M. Gosselin thought that by means of a principle of public law, accepted in the Middle Ages, he had solved all the difficulties which these imposing narratives place in the way of theologians.  M. Carriere was rather inclined to laugh at his sanguine ideas, and compared his efforts to those of an old woman who tries to thread her needle by holding it tight between the lamp and her spectacles.  At last the cotton passes so close to the eye of the needle that she says “I have done it now!”—­’Not so, though she was scarcely a hairsbreadth off; but still she must begin again.