a man who became so
penitent during the last years of his life as Paul de Gondi should not
have been forced by his confessor to destroy his book of revelations.
But one must remember that the confessors of his period--the period of
the founding of the French Academy--had a great respect for mere
literature. His father was Philip Emanuel de Gondi, Count de Joigni,
General of the Gallies of France, and Knight of the Order of the Holy
Ghost; who retired in the year 1640, to live among the Fathers of the
Oratory. There he entered into holy orders, and there he died, with the
reputation of a mightily pious man, on June 29, 1662, aged eighty-one.

Give me leave, madame [Cardinal de Retz says] to reflect a little
here upon the nature of the mind of man. I believe that there was
not in the world a man of an uprighter heart than my father, and I
may say that he was stampt in the very mold of virtue. Yet my duels
and love-intrigues did not hinder the good man from doing all he
could to tye to the Church, the soul in the world perhaps the least
ecclesiastical. His predilection for his eldest son, and the view
of the archbishoprick of Paris for me, were the true causes of his
acting thus; though he neither believed it, nor felt it. I dare say
that he thought, nay would have sworn, that he was led in all this
by no other motive than the spiritual good of my soul, and the fear
of the danger to which it might be exposed in another profession.
So true it is that nothing is more subject to delusion than piety.
All manner of errors creep and hide themselves under that vail.
Piety takes for sacred all her imaginations, of what sort soever;
but the best intention in the world is not enough to keep it in
that respect free from irregularity. In fine, after all that I have
related I remained a churchman; but certainly I had not long
continued so, if an accident had not happened which I am now to
acquaint you with.

This is not at all what is called "edifying," but, from the moral point
of view, it shows what Saint Vincent de Paul had to struggle against in
the Church of France; and the position of Paul de Gondi in relation to
an established church was just as common in contemporary England, where
"livings" were matters of barter and sale but where the methods of the
clergymen highly placed were neither so intellectual nor so romantic.

It mus