From Montargis to the Bastille

Many are the afflictions of the righteous: but the LORD delivereth him out of them all. PSALM 34:19

A devout and restless childhood. Jeanne-Marie Bouvier de la Mothe was born on the thirteenth of April, 1648, at Montargis, a small town south of Paris, into a prosperous Catholic family. Her father was a royal official of good standing. She was a delicate child, often ill, passed between her parents’ house and the schools of several religious communities, and her own account of those years in her Life is a mixture of genuine piety and frank vanity. She read the writings of Francis de Sales and the life of Jane Frances de Chantal and longed to become a nun; she also, by her own admission, liked to be admired. Both inclinations would be tested hard.

A marriage she did not choose. In 1664, at fifteen, she was married to Jacques Guyon, a wealthy man some twenty-two years older than she. The match was made for her, not by her, and it brought her into a household ruled by a mother-in-law who, on her own telling, treated her harshly, and a husband who was by turns affectionate and irritable, and often unwell. She had been a clever girl in a cultivated home; now she was expected to be silent and useful. Her Life records the misery of these years at length, and some readers have thought she dwelt on it too much. But it is plain that the marriage taught her early what it is to have no will of one’s own, and that lesson, turned towards God, became the centre of her teaching.

The word that opened her heart. For several years she prayed as she had been taught, by effort and method, and found little in it. The turning point came in 1668, when she was nineteen or twenty. A Franciscan friar, recently returned from solitude, told her in effect that she had been seeking outside herself what she already had within: let her seek God in her heart, and she would find Him there. She describes the effect as immediate. Prayer, which had been labour, became a simple and loving attention to a God who was present. Everything she later taught about the prayer of the heart goes back to that conversation.

Sorrow upon sorrow. The following years were heavy. In 1670 smallpox marked the face that had been so admired, and she took the loss, after a struggle, as God’s deliverance from her vanity. She bore five children and lost some of them young. Her father died, and her husband’s health failed. She passed, too, through a long inward darkness, which she describes in her Life as a kind of death: the sweetness of her early prayer withdrawn, a sense of being abandoned by God, a conviction of her own wretchedness. It lasted for years, and she later understood it as the fire in which God was purifying her love.

Widowhood and a new calling. Jacques Guyon died in 1676, leaving her at twenty-eight a rich widow with young children. She could have remarried, or retired into comfortable piety. Instead, after some years of uncertainty, and with the inward darkness lifting around 1680, she became convinced that God was calling her to serve Him abroad. In 1681 she left Paris for Gex, near Geneva, in the diocese of the Catholic bishop of Geneva, taking her small daughter with her and leaving her sons in the care of family. It was a costly decision, and critics then and since have questioned it.

Savoy and Grenoble. The next five years were spent in the region of Savoy and beyond: at Gex, at Thonon on Lake Geneva, at Turin, and at Grenoble. Her spiritual director through much of this time was a Barnabite priest, François La Combe. She taught prayer to anyone who came — nuns, servants, working people, clergy — and many found in her counsel a new life of prayer. But her independence, her influence and her closeness to La Combe unsettled the authorities, and she was asked more than once to move on. At Grenoble in 1685 a friend arranged for the printing of the little manual she had written for those she taught, A Short and Easy Method of Prayer. Around the same years she wrote Spiritual Torrents and began her long commentaries on the books of Scripture, including the Song of Songs.

Paris and suspicion. She returned to Paris in 1686. The climate had changed. In 1687 Miguel de Molinos was condemned at Rome for teachings on passive prayer, and in France anything that sounded like his quietness was suspect. La Combe was arrested that year and spent the rest of his life in confinement. Early in 1688 she herself was shut up for some months in a Paris convent, and her writings were examined. She was released through the intervention of Madame de Maintenon, the King’s wife in all but public title, who for a time admired her.

Fénelon. In 1688 she met François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon, a gifted young priest who would become tutor to the King’s grandson and Archbishop of Cambrai. The friendship that followed was one of the most consequential in the history of French religion. Fénelon found in her conversation and letters a living example of the pure love of God he had read of in the old spiritual writers, and he became her defender. For a few years her teaching spread among the devout of the court and at Saint-Cyr, Madame de Maintenon’s school for girls.

Issy and the storm. The favour did not last. Complaints multiplied, Madame de Maintenon turned against her, and Madame Guyon herself asked that her writings be judged. Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, Bishop of Meaux and the most formidable churchman in France, examined them. At Issy, near Paris, in 1694 and 1695, Bossuet and two other churchmen, later joined by Fénelon, drew up articles setting out sound teaching on prayer and the spiritual life. She submitted, signed what was asked of her, and for a time lived under Bossuet’s oversight. But the dispute had become a quarrel between Bossuet and Fénelon, and she was its occasion. At the end of 1695 she was arrested.

Vincennes and the Bastille. She was held first at Vincennes, then in a house at Vaugirard, and in 1698 she was taken to the Bastille, where she remained until 1703. She was questioned repeatedly. Her enemies spread rumours of impropriety with La Combe that no inquiry ever proved. Meanwhile, in 1697, Fénelon published his Maxims of the Saints, defending a doctrine of disinterested love, and Bossuet answered with a public account of her life and errors. In 1699 Pope Innocent XII censured a number of propositions from Fénelon’s book. Fénelon submitted at once and publicly, and never saw her again. Through it all she prayed, and wrote verse, and by every account she bore her confinement with remarkable peace.

Blois. Released in 1703, broken in health, she was sent to live under supervision near Blois with her son. She spent her last years there quietly, writing letters, receiving visitors — among them Protestants from abroad who had read her books — and completing her Life. She died at Blois on the ninth of June, 1717, aged sixty-nine, in communion with the church that had imprisoned her. Her Protestant admirer Pierre Poiret had already begun to publish her writings in Holland, and within a few years of her death they filled many volumes. The long second life of her books had begun.

She left no order, no institution and no school of disciples she could call her own. She left a small book on prayer that the authorities of her day tried hard to bury, and that has outlived them all.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. She spent years praying by effort before learning to seek God within. Where have you been looking for Him outside yourself — in methods, moods or places?

2. Her marriage taught her the loss of her own will before God did. What circumstance you did not choose might God be using to teach you surrender?

3. Consider a loss or disfigurement, of body or reputation, that you have resented. Can you bring it to God as she learned to do?

4. Pray for believers imprisoned today for their faith, that they may know the peace she knew.

5. Read the Author’s Preface to A Short and Easy Method of Prayer, and notice the spirit in which she offers her book.

A PRAYER

Lord, You met a young wife in an unhappy house and taught her to find You in her heart.

You are as near to me as You were to her, and I have looked for You everywhere but within.

In the circumstances I did not choose, teach me to give up my own will and to find Your will good.

And when trouble comes, whether sorrow, slander or loss, keep my heart turned towards You in peace. Amen.