Spirit of St. Francis de Sales | Page 9

abuses which he wished to reform, in so ridiculous and contemptible a light, as to provoke and irritate his enemies, perhaps unnecessarily.
Yet, if in this he showed the lack of judgment which he had years before lamented in himself, can anyone who knows what those times were, and who is as jealous for the honour of God as he was, blame him? There was another evil of the day which the good Bishop witnessed with grief and indignation, and set himself zealously to reform. This was the publishing of romances, or novels, which, as then written, could only poison the minds of their readers, inflame their passions, and weaken their sense of right and wrong. He pondered the matter, and having made up his mind that it would be absolutely useless to endeavour to hinder their being read, as this would only increase the obstinacy and perversity of those who took pleasure in them, he decided on adopting another method altogether, as he himself said, he "tried to make these poor diseased folk, with their depraved taste and morbid cravings, swallow his medicine under the disguise of sweetmeats."
That is to say, he himself began to write novels and romances for them; romances which, indeed, depicted the profligacy of the age, but in such odious colours as to inspire aversion and contempt. Vice, if described, was held up to ridicule and loathing. The interest of the story was so well kept up as to carry the reader on to the end, and that end often showed the hero or heroine so entirely disabused of the world's enchantment as to retire voluntarily into convents, in order, by an absolute devotion of the heart to God, to repair the injury done to Him, by giving to the creature the love due to Him alone.
These books passed from hand to hand in the gay world, were read, were enjoyed, and the fruit gathered from them by the reader was the conviction that God being Himself the Sovereign God, all other love but that of which He is the object and the end, is as contrary to the happiness of man as it is opposed to all the rules of justice.
Let us hear what Camus himself says as to his motive and conduct in the matter of novel writing.[1]
"The enterprise on which I have embarked of wrestling with, or rather contending against those idle or dangerous books, which cloak themselves under the title of novels, would surely demand the hands of Briareus to wield as many pens, and the strength of Hercules to support such a burden! But what cannot courage, zeal, charity, and confidence in God accomplish?"
He goes on to say that though he sees all the difficulties ahead, his courage will not fail, for he holds his commission from a Saint, the holy Bishop of Geneva, in whose intercessions, and in the assistance of the God of Saints, he trusts, and is confident of victory.
He tells us in several of his works, and especially in his "Unknown Traveller," that it was St. Francis de Sales who first advised him to use his pen in this manner, and that for twenty-five years the Saint had been cogitating and developing this design in his brain.
In the same little pamphlet Camus points out the methods he followed as a novel writer.
"It consists," he says, "in saying only good things, dealing only with good subjects, the single aim of which is to deter from vice, and to lead on to virtue."
He was an extraordinarily prolific and rapid writer, scarcely ever correcting or polishing up anything that he had put on paper. This was a defect, but it was the natural outcome of his temperament, which was a curious combination of lightness and solidity, gaiety and severity.
Few people really understood him. He was often taken for a mere man of the world, when in truth he was one of the stoutest champions of the Church, and in his inner life, grave and ascetic, macerating his flesh like a monk of the desert. He wrote in all about 200 volumes, 50 of these being romances.
In the latter, which drew down upon him such storms of bitter invective, owing to his freedom of language in treating of the vices against which he was warning his readers, we do not pretend to admire his work, but must remind readers that his style was that of the age in which he lived, and that Camus was essentially a Parisian. We have said that he wrote at least fifty novels; we may add that each was cleverer than that which had preceded it. Forgotten now, they were at the time of their appearance eagerly devoured, and it is morally impossible but that some good should have resulted from their production.
And now old age