CHAPTER II

A PICTURE OF THE AGE

IF we are to understand rightly the life of a great man, we must know something of the age in which he lived. To evaluate the military genius of Hannibal we must have some conception of the geographical relations of Spain, Northern Africa and the Italian peninsula, and some realization of the daring and originality displayed by the great Carthaginian general in crossing the Alps with his cumbersome army and attacking Rome from the north. We could not well appreciate the achievements of Columbus if we were ignorant of social and religious conditions in Italy, Portugal and Spain at the time in which he carried on his explorations. We should get a wrong idea of Washington if we neglected to learn how the colonies broke away from England, how the Continental Army was organized and equipped and how France came to the aid of the struggling Revolutionists. We might well make this a principle to guide us in the study of biography: If we do not know the times, we do not know the man.

Now a saint, like every other great man, must be studied against the background of the time in which he lives. The saints in every age are much alike, because every saint loves God and his fellowman and is devoted to the Church and labors for the salvation of souls; but the saints in every age are different, too, because social conditions are different, and different times in the world’s history have different tendencies and different needs. Once there was a time in Europe when holy men used to go around collecting money to ransom captives; that is, to buy back men who had been taken away from their homes and made slaves. If those holy men were living in our country today they certainly would not be interested in ransoming captives, for there are no captives to ransom; but they might devote themselves to building hospitals and asylums or conducting clubs for workingmen or giving lectures to non-Catholics. The interior life of the saint is pretty much the same in every age, for it is a life of holiness and prayer; but the external life of the saint must differ according to the requirements of the age and the country in which he lives.

And so, before we take up the life of St. John Baptist de la Salle and see in what ways he grew in holiness and what things he did for God and the Church, we must glance at the seventeenth century in France, the age and the country in which he labored at the work of God; we must try to find out how the people lived and thought and in what ways they were different from the people of our day. This chapter must be like a moving picture which shows us another country and another time; and, if we use our imaginations as we read, we shall be able to see what France was like, in city and in country, in the days when King Louis XIV held court at Versailles and St. John Baptist de la Salle conducted schools at Reims.

The first thing that we notice is that the social system was very different from ours. At all times and in every place there are, of course, several classes of people, such as the rich, the fairly rich, and the poor; the learned, the moderately learned, and the ignorant; those who work with their brains, those who work with their hands, and those who do not work at all. Such classes of people were in France in the days of St. de la Salle, just as they are in the United States in our own time. But there was then a class distinction which is not found among us, the distinction between the nobles and the common people, the aristocrats and the artisans or workmen.

What was that distinction? Well, some men were born of noble families—their fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers had been called viscounts or marquises or dukes—and so they were for that reason aristocrats; and they were thought, and they thought themselves, better and more important persons just on that account. The aristocrats might study or write or command a regiment in the king’s army; but it was considered unworthy and undignified for them to do any manual work or engage in business; and they always wore a certain kind of dress to distinguish them from the common people. And the common people were common people just because their ancestors were butchers or bakers or candlestick makers. Their duty was to honor the aristocrats and work for them and pay their bills; it was considered most improper for them to want to wear the silk stockings of the nobility or to be dissatisfied with their own station in life. When we understand all this we are able to see that St. John Baptist de la Salle, who came of a noble family, did a brave and heroic thing when he devoted his life to the education of the children of the common people.

In two places only the nobles and the commoners met on relatively equal terms—in the church and in the street. The streets of the larger cities such as Paris or Reims or Rouen were winding and narrow, dusty in summer and muddy in winter, paved with irregular cobble-stones and lined by houses which often hung far out into the air. Modern ideas of supplying clean water and of disposing of dirty water were not known, and the visitor who insisted on walking about had need to be on his guard against cascades of soapsuds and showers of refuse from upper windows. The nearest approach to a sewer was an open trench dug along the middle of the street, in which dogs frisked and into which children slipped. Traffic policemen were not a seventeenth century institution, so the streets presented a confusing and exciting spectacle with rearing horses, gilded coaches, squabbling servants, fruit venders shouting their wares and monks in their somber habits picking their way through the throng. At night the streets were dark, and respectable people never ventured forth. A law provided for a candle in every window, but nobody paid any atten­tion to it; and though King Louis did something in Paris to widen, clean and light the streets, in other French cities the night was, in more ways than one, dedicated to the powers of darkness.

But in the daytime, along the streets and in the shops on either side, the city dwellers who were not of the nobility went about their daily tasks. And what did they do? And could any man who wished to, be a tailor or a baker or a locksmith? Not at all. The tradesmen were banded together into guilds which were something like our modem labor unions, one difference being that in the guilds there were only a limited number of members, and applicants had to wait until vacancies occurred. If a young man wished to become a carpenter, for instance, he must first be accepted as an apprentice and work for several years without pay. Then, were a vacancy available, he would become a journeyman, and after several years more, again if there happened to be a vacancy—and usually there was not—he was elevated to the rank of master carpenter. But there were not many master tradesmen; and as they controlled the market, they were not anxious to have their numbers increased. The consequence of it all was that many a man who would have been glad to learn a trade was obliged to remain an unskilled laborer; and as there were thousands of unskilled laborers and very little for them to do, the cities were infested with beggars and pickpockets and sneak thieves, and the roads leading into the country were never free from prowling robbers. We know of two occasions when robbers set upon St de la Salle, even though they knew him to be a priest.

Of course many poor men, no matter how much they needed food and money, had too much respect for God and His law to do anything wrong, but earned a few trifling coins by running errands or holding horses or carrying parcels. The families of such men were miserable in the extreme. Often they dwelt huddled together in one small and ill ventilated room; sometimes they could get no shelter but the arch of a bridge or the uncovered roof of a seven-story house. We know for a fact that a little before the death of Louis XIV, in Rouen, a city with a population of seven hundred thousand, some six hundred and fifty thousand people had only straw bundles for beds.

The common people in the country fared no better. The farmer did not own the ground he tilled. The farm was the property of the landed aristocrat who did not work but took a goodly share of the products. The king’s officers taxed the peasantry again and again, for money was needed for the state, and the king and his nobles must be amused at Versailles. The privilege of collecting the taxes in country districts was sold at auction to the highest bidders. The newly made officials paid the money out of their own pockets, and then, with a license from the king to collect in the royal name, proceeded to make themselves rich at the expense of the country folks. Should the poor people have no money to give, the king’s bailiffs seized the live stock and imprisoned the peasants. Then the women and children had to do the farm work; and even country priests were seen dragging the plow to keep their parishioners from starving. The peasants rarely tasted meat; and in famine years many of them subsisted on a bread made from ferns. To make matters worse, the king’s soldiers sometimes overran the country districts, commandeering whatever was worth the taking.

Meanwhile life was gay and luxurious in the royal palace at Versailles. Ladies in ample gowns of silk and embroidery, and nobles in bright-colored clothes with lace at sleeve and knee, danced and feasted and sang the praises of the Great King. Thither artists came to show their skill, and philosophers to unfold their wisdom. The king was the state, he was the absolute ruler of his land; and so it was his policy to draw the nobles to Versailles, keep them amused, and prevent them from taking undue interest in the affairs of their hereditary estates. His police had the power to arrest any man, common or noble, on mere suspicion, to keep him in confinement as long as they wished, and to prevent him from having any communication with his family and friends. Under such circumstances he was a brave man indeed who defied the will of the sovereign and his favorites.

And yet, that seventeenth century in which King Louis XIV reigned goes down in history as the Golden Age of France. Rarely, if ever, in the history of the world have so many great men lived at the same time. Lending radiance to the name of the Great King were military commanders like Condé, Turenne, and Vendome; architects like Mansard, Blondel and Perrault; painters like Poussin and Le Brun; dramatists like Corneille, Racine and Moliere; poets like Boileau; navigators like Duquesne and Trouville. Immortal names are these, names that France and the world will never willingly forget; and even before the Great King’s death they were recognized as immortal. The court of King Louis XIV was the one glittering point about which all Europe of the seventeenth century revolved, the center of refinement and elegance, of wit and wisdom, of fashion and art.

And—save for some Protestants in the south of France, the Huguenots—France, both in town and in country, at court and in the provinces, was a Catholic land. Every noble family prided itself on having a son a priest, and every peasant mother cherished the hope that her boy might someday dedicate himself to God. The Church received every outward mark of honor and esteem. Splendid religious processions, fragrant with incense, bright with tapers, and melodic with sacred chants, trailed their glittering length along the crooked streets of the cities, and from the tiny village churches in the provinces the priest went solemnly forth to bless the harvest fields. Few men and women, even in high places, sought exemption from the fast of Lent, and to miss Mass was not only a sin but a disgrace.

Nevertheless, both in town and country, many of the people were ignorant of the truths of salvation. Some of them went to church and said the public prayers without any very clear idea of what it all meant—just as an American boy might enjoy a holiday on the Fourth of July without much knowledge of the meaning of our national independence. The nobles in large numbers heard Mass, not on Sundays only, but every day, and in that they did well; but many of their afterhours were spent in sinful amusements. One lady, for a long time connected with the court of the king, was noted for her alms to the poor, for her visits to religious houses, for her acts of Christian mortification; and all the time she was living in open and shameless sin. The king himself had set the example of ignoring one of God’s Commandments; his courtiers were only too willing to follow suit.

But it must not be supposed that all the people, or even most of the people of France, were careless about their duties as Christians. On the contrary, there were many strong and fervent Catholics, many zealous priests, many prayerful monks and nuns, many women of noble birth distinguished for their boundless charity toward the poor. Two of the glories of the reign of Louis XIV are the learned and devoted bishops, Bossuet and Fénelon, the one among the world’s supreme orators, the other a writer whose fame will endure as long as the beau­tiful French language in which he wrote. Then, too, there was one of the most remarkable saints of the Catholic Church, St. Vincent de Paul, who labored so long and so faithfully among the poor in city and country, who founded an order of priests to give missions and an order of Sisters, the well known Daughters of Charity, to teach little children and to care for the sick. The Blessed Louise de Marillac, the co-foundress of the Daughters of Charity, placed her wealth and her talents at the service of the Church and labored for the poor and the unfortunate.

The Blessed John Eudes, a saintly priest, devoted his long life to giving missions throughout France, to guiding and encouraging repentant sinners and to organizing and training young priests for parish work.

And there was our own St. John Baptist de la Salle.