But this true and gentle note was precisely that which was sounded for them by St. François. They had only to play after his method to make the false appear a little less discordant. The amiable qualities of his writings, nay, their pleasing errors, were skilfully made the most of. His taste for the minute and humble, which made him bestow a partial regard upon the lesser beings of the creation, such as little children, lambs, birds, and bees, became a precedent among the Jesuits for whatever is finical and narrow-minded, for a meanness of style and littleness of heart. The bold but innocent language of an angel, pure as light itself, who incessantly points out God in his sweetest revelation, woman suckling, and the divine mysteries of love, emboldened his imitators to make the most perilous equivocations, and was the occasion of their carrying their ambiguous terms to such a pitch, that the line of demarcation between gallantry and devotion, the lover and the spiritual father, became at length invisible.
The friend of St. François de Sales, good bishop Camus, with all his little romances, contributed much to this. There was nothing now but pious sheep-folds, devout Astreas, and ecclesiastical Amyntases. Conversion sanctifies everything in these novels; I am aware of it. The lovers at the end of the story enter a convent or seminary, but they arrive there by a long roundabout road, which enables them to dream by the way.
A taste for the romantic and insipid, the benignant and paternal style, thus gained ground rapidly. The event showed that the innocent had worked for the benefit of the cunning. A St. François and a Camus prepared the way for Father Douillet.
The essential point for the Jesuits was to reduce and to lessen, to make minds weak and false, to make the little very little, and turn the simple into idiots: a mind nourished with trifles and amused with toys must be easy to govern. Emblems, rebuses, and puns, the delight of the Jesuits, were very fit for that purpose. Among the class of silly emblems, few books can vie with the _Imago primi Soeculi Societatis Jesu_.
All this paltry nonsense succeeded admirably with women who had no sort of occupation, and whose minds had been for a long time corrupted by an unintellectual gallantry. It has been proved by experience, in every age, that to please the sex only two things are requisite; first, to amuse them, to participate in their taste for everything that is trifling, romantic, and false; secondly, to flatter them, and spoil them in their weaknesses, by making one's self weaker, more effeminate, and womanish than they.