his insanity Fenelon was accorded the honors of a
bishopric which was exile. Mme. Guyon received the compliment of a _lettre
de cachet_ which was prison. The Roman Inquisition cloistered Molinos.
That was fame. The doctrine became notorious. Moreover, there was in it
something so old that it seemed quite new. Society, always avid of
novelties, adopted it. But presently fresher fashions supervened. In
France these were originated by the Regent, in England by Germany.

At the accession of Louis XIV, Germany, for nearly thirty years, had been
a battlefield. The war waged there was in the interests of religion. The
Holy Office was not unique in its pastimes. There was fiendishness
everywhere, cruelty married to mania, in which Germany joined. Germany
employed the serviceable rack, the thumbscrew, the wheel, vats of vitriol,
burning oil, drawing and quartering. Occasionally there were iron cages in
which the wicked were hung on church steeples with food suspended a little
higher, just out of reach. Occasionally also criminals were respited and
released when, through some miracle of love there were those that agreed
to marry them.[70]

That indulgence occurred after the Peace of Westphalia. Germany, then,
decimated and desolate, was so depopulated that the Franconian Estates
legalized bigamy. Every man was permitted two wives. Meanwhile barbarism
had returned. Domestic life had ceased. Respect for women had gone. Love
had died with religion. From the nervous strain recovery was slow. It was
a century before the pulse of the people was normal. Previously love,
better idealized by the Minnesaenger than by the minstrel, had been put on
a pedestal from which convulsive conditions shook it. Later, when it arose
again, it was in two forms which, while distinct, were not opposed. In one
was the influence of France, in the other the native Schwaermerei. The
former affected kings, the latter appealed to urbaner folk among whom it
induced an attitude that was maudlin when not anarchistic. The
anarchistic attitude was represented by artists generally. For these love
had no laws and its one approach was the swift current running from New
Friendship to Tenderness-on-Inclination. Similarly the conservatives
landed at a village that Clelie overlooked, Tenderness-on-Sympathy, a spot
where, through sheer contagion, everybody engaged in duels of emotion
during which principals and seconds fell on each other's neck, wept,
embraced, swore affect