Tenebroso-Cavernoso

GREY EMINENCE -- Aldous Huxley --Harper ($3.50).

In the 17th Century when "even the act of excretion was often performed in public" and "kings and princesses . . . made conversation while seated on the chaise percee," the news of Cardinal Richelieu's piles had penetrated into every corner of the kingdom of France. To rally the Cardinal during his hemorrhoidal depressions, there used to pad into his room one of the most mysterious, potent and least known of Europe's great power politicians. He was His Grey Eminence, the barefoot Capuchin friar. Father Joseph--for some 20 years Richelieu's second brain.

Of this strange Frenchman, whose psychic moods, personal habits, political methods and achievements strangely resembled Adolf Hitler's, Novelist Aldous Huxley this week published the first biography to be written in English. Father Joseph is an almost perfect subject for Aldous Huxley. The amoral novelist (Antic Hay, Point Counter Point) has become increasingly preoccupied with moral dilemmas (Eyeless in Gaza, Ends & Means) and increasingly a mystic.

What fascinates Huxley in Father Joseph is the moral dilemma of a mystic who is also a power politician, and whose whole active life is an illustration of Author Huxley's (and many other people's) pessimism about politics and history: "To all but the saints, who anyhow have no need of them, the lessons of history are totally unavailing." Huxley also finds Father Joseph very timely. "The road trodden by those bare horny feet led [through the Thirty Years War] to August 1914 and September 1939."

Religious Nationalist. Father Joseph was baptized Franc,ois (Leclerc du Tremblay). At the age of eight, he begged to be sent away to boarding school "on the ground that he was being spoilt by his mother, qui en voulut faire un delicat." At ten he spoke Greek and Latin fluently, discussed "the deepest problems of metaphysics and religion" with a friend, aged twelve. When Franc,ois's father died, the boy felt "a haunting sense of the vanity, the transience, the hopeless precariousness of merely human happiness. . . . While the religious wars lasted, France had to endure all the horrors of massacre and depredation, of plague and famine, of lawlessness and political anarchy. ... It was in these years . . . that Franc,ois Leclerc became ... a firm believer in absolute monarchy and an ardent nationalist."

At 14, appalled by his own concupiscence, he was driven to religion. "I do not care to see the sex," he said later, "except shut up and curtained from sight, like so many mysteries not to be regarded save with a kind of horror." As a Capuchin, his "Spartan taste for the uncomfortable," made him prefer to pray standing, barefoot, on the stone floor. When he became sleepy and tired, he stood on one leg.

As he rose in church politics, Father Joseph met the youthful Bishop of Luc,on, Armand Jean du Plessis de Richelieu, who was soon fondly calling his new friend "Tenebroso-Cavernoso"--the Dark and Deep One. When Richelieu became prime minister, he wrote that "next to God, Father Joseph had been the principal instrument of his present fortune." He begged His Grey Eminence to come to Paris and take the job he held until he died in 1638--"unofficial chief of staff for foreign affairs."

Holy Fifth Column. Richelieu's foreign policy had two interlocking parts: 1) to unify France under an absolute monarchy; 2) to break the power of the Austrian and Spanish Habsburgs and exalt the Bourbons. Up & down the rutted roads and cow paths of Europe padded barefoot Father Joseph. He visited kings, the Pope, rebellious nobles, foreign agents. The Pope made him Apostolic Commissary of Missions.

"His friars were in every part of the world, from Persia to England, from Abyssinia to Canada. In the midst of his wearisome and questionable political activities, the thought that he was helping to spread the gospel of Christ must often have been a source of strength and consolation. True, his enemies in Spain and Austria and at the Roman Curia accused him of using his missionaries as French agents and anti-Habsburg fifth columnists. And, alas, the charge was not entirely baseless."

He became an ardent imperialist, wrote "an epoch-making memorandum on colonization and sea power." As anonymous as the Nazi emissaries of the pre-war days, von Ribbentrop or Otto Abetz, Father Joseph wandered about Europe, apparently a poor itinerant, actually the center of a power government, whose designs on its neighbors he furthered through countless contacts and intrigues.

During the year-long siege of La Rochelle, which broke the rebellious Huguenots, Father Joseph was offered quarters in Richelieu's house. Instead he chose "a deserted summerhouse standing beside a broad ditch at the end of the garden. . . . When the wind blew hard from offshore and the tides were high, the ditch overflowed, ankle deep, into the friar's bedroom."

But the garden house had "one inestimable advantage: it was private. . . ." In the damp and windy solitude of his gazebo he could meditate in peace. And visitors could come & go unnoticed. "For, as in Paris, so here before La Rochelle, the friar acted as chief of Richelieu's secret service." With Catholic secret agents and Huguenot traitors, in the flooded summerhouse, the friar would sit "into the small hours, listening to their reports and giving them instructions. Then, dismissing them with their wages, he would lie down to sleep. Before daybreak he was up again and on his knees."

Hair-Shirt Politics. Among his resources were the Calvarian nuns, of whose order he was head. "These communities of cloistered contemplatives he regarded a (among other things) powerful praying machines, capable, if put into high gear and worked for 24 hours a day, seven days a week, of precipitating, so to speak, out of the ether, very considerable quantities of the divine favour. . . . And what a host of things there were to be prayed for!"--from the conversion of the Protestant Duke of La Tremoille (which came off) to "Father Joseph's pet plan for entering the town by night through an underground sewer" (it failed).

Meanwhile Cardinal Richelieu had been trying to bribe the Protestant Swedes under Gustavus Adolphus to stir up more trouble for Catholic Austria. He sent Father Joseph to the Austrian Emperor's Diet of Ratisbon--"just an observer, nothing more." Padding on his bare feet up one private staircase after another, Father Joseph soon turned the Diet into a 17th-Century Munich, brought the smoldering Thirty Years War to a new combustion point. Ruefully the Emperor told his ministers that "a poor Capuchin had beaten them with his rosary. ..."

Soon from the security of Paris, Richelieu and Father Joseph could watch German Catholics and Protestants exterminating each other with the same zeal they had formerly shown in France. Whenever the danger of a peace of exhaustion loomed, the Eminences, Red & Grey, found a way to keep the war going.

Father Joseph's diet at this time was of "claustral simplicity." His bed was a thin, hard, sheetless mattress, laid on planks. He slept in the hair shirt he wore all day. "Penitential scourgings kept the broad back and shoulders almost permanently covered with unhealed wounds."

He rose every morning at 4, spent the first half hour of the day in "mental prayer." Then with Father Angelus, his secretary, he read his breviary before reading and decoding the day's dispatches. Returning from midday mass, Father Joseph would find his anteroom crowded with "courtiers who had come to beg a favour, friars bearing reports of their missionary labours among the Huguenots, officials in disgrace, distraught ladies with husbands in the Bastille." "When supper was over, the friar slipped down the private staircase into Richelieu's apartments" where until bedtime the two churchmen discussed affairs of state.

"This austere and busy life was lived out against a background of ever deepening popular misery. In France, the huge sums required to finance the foreign policy were being extorted sou by sou. . . . 'Money,' Richelieu remarked . . . 'money is nothing, if we accomplish our ends.'

In Germany, the population decreased from 21,000,000 to 13,000,000. "Father Joseph's policy at Ratisbon bore its fruit in a famine that killed its tens of thousands. . . . Executed malefactors were cut down from the gibbets to serve as butchers' meat. . . . After [the battle of] Noerd-ingen, many thousands of the defeated Protestants' camp-followers went wandering in great troops, like foraging baboons, desperately looking for something to eat. Unprotected villages were overrun and looted. . . . Soldiers amused themselves by taking pot shots at passing civilians; by trying, experimentally, how often and how deeply a man could be cut without dying; by lashing people to trestles and sawing them apart as though they were logs."

Piles by Rubens. When the war rolled close to Paris,' "Richelieu's sense of the saving power of God began to leave him." Curtly, Father Joseph bucked him up. But he would not cure the Cardinal's piles. "A deputation of the clergy proceeded to the Cathedral of Meaux and returned with the relics of the 7th-Century Irish hermit, who is the patron saint of Brie and has left his name to the hackney cab, St. Fiacre. The relics were applied "

In a passage reminiscent of Antic Hay, Author Huxley imagines the canvas which Court Painter Peter Paul Rubens would have painted had the cure succeeded: ". . . the enormous composition by Rubens, that would have been a thing of unqualified beauty and magnificence.

"Robed in great cataracts of red silk, Richelieu kneels in the right foreground and rolls up his dark impassive eyes towards a heaven in which, in the top left-hand corner and at an altitude of about two hundred and fifty feet, the Holy Trinity and the Virgin look down from their soft cloud, considerably foreshortened, but with an expression of the liveliest benevolence. Poised only a foot or two above the Cardinal's head, St. Fiacre descends, much bearded and in the ragged homespun appropriate to anchorites. One hand is raised in benediction and in the crook of his other arm, he carries his emblems -- a slice of Brie cheese, a shillelagh, and a miniature four-wheeler. From aloft, he is followed by a squadron of cherubs, nose-diving and banking above a delightful landscape where, in the distance, the siege of La Rochelle is in full swing. Immediately above and behind the

Cardinal, Louis XIII stands at the head of a flight of steps, his left hand on his hip, his right supported by a long malacca cane. Trailing pink draperies, Victory hovers over him, while the livid form of Heresy grovels in the middle distance. At the bottom of the canvas, immediately below the Trinity and a plane or two behind the nearest foreground, we see a group consisting of Father Joseph at prayer, Sacred Theology in blue and white satin and, representing Literae Humaniores, a young woman from Antwerp, with no clothes on, pointing at a marble slab, upon which we read a Latin inscription alluding to the founding of the Academic Franchise. . . . But, alas, this splendid work was never painted; the bones of St. Fiacre were taken back to Meaux and the unhappy Cardinal continued to suffer the tortures of the damned."

Nevertheless, he managed to outlive by four years the friar who was to have succeeded him. Father Joseph's death snatched Richelieu away from the theater. "Ou est mon appui?" cried Richelieu, "j'ai perdu mon appui."

The memorable comment on the Cardinal's own death came from an even higher dignitary and was even more cryptic. "When the news of [Richelieu's] passing was brought to Urban VIII, the old Pope sat for a moment in pensive silence. 'Well,' he said at last, 'if there is a God, Cardinal Richelieu will have much to answer for. If not, he has done very well.' "

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