never suspected where
this friendship was to lead. Even when Madame Guyon slipped into his
simple, little household as a servant under an assumed name, he was
inwardly guileless. This proud woman with the domineering personality
now wore wooden shoes and the garb of a scullion. She scrubbed the
floors, did laundry-work, cooked, even worked in the garden looking
after the vegetables and the flowers, that she might be near him.

Fenelon accepted this servile devotion, regarding it as a part of the
woman's penance for sins done in the past. Most certainly love is blind,
at least myopic, for Fenelon of the strong and subtle mind could not see
that service for the beloved is the highest joy, and the more menial the
service the better. Madame sought to deceive herself by making her
person unsightly to her lord, and so she wore coarse and ragged dresses,
calloused her hands, and allowed the sun to tan and freckle her face.

Of course then the inevitable happened: the intimacy slipped off into
the most divine of human loves--or the most human of divine loves, if
you prefer to express it so.

To prevent the scandal, the other servants were sent away. Nothing can
be kept secret except for a day.

A person of Madame Guyon's worth could not be lost or secreted. For
Fenelon to defend her and then secrete her was unpardonable to the
arrogant Bossuet.

Fenelon had now to defend himself. How much of political rivalry as well
as ecclesiastic has been made by the favor of women, who shall say!

Of her intimate relationship with Fenelon, Madame Guyon says nothing.
The bond was of too sacred a nature to discuss, and here her frankness
falters, as it should. She does not even defend it.

Fenelon and Madame Guyon were plotting against the Church and State--how
very natural! The Madame was fifty; Fenelon was forty-seven--they
certainly were old enough to know better, but they did not.

They parted of their own accord, solemnly and in tearful prayer, for
parting is such sweet sorrow. And then, in a few weeks, they met again
to consult as to the future.

Soon Bossuet stepped in and induced the Vatican to do for them what they
could not do alone. Fenelon was stripped of his official robes, reduced
to the rank of a parish priest, and sent to minister to an obscure and
stricken church in the south of France. The country was battle-scarred,
and poverty, ignorance and want stalked through the streets of the
little village. Here Fenelon li