to confess in French.

CHAPTER XV.

Pere de la Chaise.--The Jesuits.--The Pavilion of Belleville.--The
Handkerchief.

Pere de la Chaise has never done me good or ill; I have no motives for
conciliating him, no reason to slander him. I am ignorant if he were the
least in the world concerned, at the epoch of the Grand Jubilee, with
those ecclesiastical attempts of which Bossuet had constituted himself
spokesman. Pere de la Chaise has in his favour a great evenness of
temper and character; an excellent tone, which comes to him from his
birth; a conciliatory philosophy, which renders him always master of his
condition and of his metier. He is, in a single individual, the happy
combination of several men, that is to say, he is by turns, and as it may
be needful, a man indulgent or severe in his preaching; a man of
abstinence, or a good feeder; a man of the world, or a cenobite; a man of
his breviary, or a courtier. He knows that the sins of woodcutters and
the sins of kings are not of the same family, and that copper and gold
are not weighed in the same scales.

He is a Jesuit by his garb; he is much more so than they are by his
'savoir-vivre'. His companions love the King because he is the King; he
loves him, and pities him because he sees his weakness. He shows for his
penitent the circumspection and tenderness of a father, and in the long
run he has made of him a spoiled child.

This Pere de la Chaise fell suddenly ill, and with symptoms so alarming
that the cabals each wished to appropriate this essential post of
confessor.

The Jansenists would have been quite willing to lay hold of it. The
Jesuits, and principally the cordons bleus, did not quit the pillow of
the sick man for an instant.

The King had himself informed of his condition every half-hour. There
was a bulletin, as there is for potentates. One evening, when the
doctors were grave on his account, I saw anxiety and affliction painted
on the visage of his Majesty.

"Where shall I find his like?" said he to me. "Where shall I find such
knowledge, such indulgence, such kindness? The Pere de la Chaise knew
the bottom of my heart; he knew, as an intelligent man, how to reconcile
religion with nature; and when duty brings me to the foot of his
tribunal, as a humble Christian, he never forgets that royalty, cannot be
long on its knees, and he accompanies with his attentions and with
deference the religious commands which he is bound to i