The Exiles | Page 9

not read, this discovery told her nothing. A woman's instinct then
took her into the young man's room, and from thence she descried her
two lodgers crossing the river in the ferry boat.
"They stand like two statues," said she to herself. "Ah, ha! They are
landing at the Rue du Fouarre. How nimble he is, the sweet youth! He
jumped out like a bird. By him the old man looks like some stone saint
in the Cathedral.--They are going to the old School of the Four Nations.
Presto! they are out of sight.--And this is where he lives, poor cherub!"
she went on, looking about the room. "How smart and winning he is!
Ah! your fine gentry are made of other stuff than we are."
And Jacqueline went down again after smoothing down the
bed-coverlet, dusting the chest, and wondering for the hundredth time
in six months:
"What in the world does he do all the blessed day? He cannot always be
staring at the blue sky and the stars that God has hung up there like
lanterns. That dear boy has known trouble. But why do he and the old
man hardly ever speak to each other?"
Then she lost herself in wonderment and in thoughts which, in her
woman's brain, were tangled like a skein of thread.
The old man and his young companion had gone into one of the
schools for which the Rue du Fouarre was at that time famous
throughout Europe. At the moment when Jacqueline's two lodgers
arrived at the old School des Quatre Nations, the celebrated Sigier, the
most noted Doctor of Mystical Theology of the University of Paris, was
mounting his pulpit in a spacious low room on a level with the street.
The cold stones were strewn with clean straw, on which several of his
disciples knelt on one knee, writing on the other, to enable them to take
notes from the Master's improvised discourse, in the shorthand
abbreviations which are the despair of modern decipherers.
The hall was full, not of students only, but of the most distinguished
men belonging to the clergy, the court, and the legal faculty. There
were some learned foreigners, too--soldiers and rich citizens. The broad
faces were there, with prominent brows and venerable beards, which
fill us with a sort of pious respect for our ancestors when we see their
portraits from the Middle Ages. Lean faces, too, with burning, sunken
eyes, under bald heads yellow from the labors of futile scholasticism,

contrasted with young and eager countenances, grave faces, warlike
faces, and the ruddy cheeks of the financial class.
These lectures, dissertations, theses, sustained by the brightest geniuses
of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, roused our forefathers to
enthusiasm. They were to them their bull-fights, their Italian opera,
their tragedy, their dancers; in short, all their drama. The performance
of Mysteries was a later thing than these spiritual disputations, to which,
perhaps, we owe the French stage. Inspired eloquence, combining the
attractions of the human voice skilfully used, with daring inquisition
into the secrets of God, sufficed to satisfy every form of curiosity,
appealed to the soul, and constituted the fashionable entertainment of
the time. Not only did Theology include the other sciences, it was
science itself, as grammar was science to the Ancient Greeks; and those
who distinguished themselves in these duels, in which the orators, like
Jacob, wrestled with the Spirit of God, had a promising future before
them. Embassies, arbitrations between sovereigns, chancellorships, and
ecclesiastical dignities were the meed of men whose rhetoric had been
schooled in theological controversy. The professor's chair was the
tribune of the period.
This system lasted till the day when Rabelais gibbeted dialectics by his
merciless satire, as Cervantes demolished chivalry by a narrative
comedy.
To understand this amazing period and the spirit which dictated its
voluminous, though now forgotten, masterpieces, to analyze it, even to
its barbarisms, we need only examine the Constitutions of the
University of Paris and the extraordinary scheme of instruction that
then obtained. Theology was taught under two faculties--that of
Theology properly so called, and that of Canon Law. The faculty of
Theology, again, had three sections--Scholastic, Canonical, and Mystic.
It would be wearisome to give an account of the attributes of each
section of the science, since one only, namely, Mystic, is the subject of
this /Etude/.
Mystical Theology included the whole of Divine Revelation and the
elucidation of the Mysteries. And this branch of ancient theology has
been secretly preserved with reverence even to our own day; Jacob
Boehm, Swendenborg, Martinez Pasqualis, Saint-Martin, Molinos,
Madame Guyon, Madame Bourignon, and Madame Krudener, the

extensive sect of the Ecstatics, and that of the Illuminati, have at
different periods duly treasured the doctrines of this science, of which
the aim is indeed truly