Letter tells Madame de Gondi: St. Vincent de Paul will not return

PARIS, September 14, 1617 AD — The letter reached Madame de Gondi in Paris on the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. Her husband had sent it from Provence, and it told her that Saint Vincent de Paul had left their household for a village parish in the Bresse and did not mean to come back. Since then she has asked his own spiritual director for permission to fight it, and has written to St. Vincent de Paul.

He had lived in that house for four years. Philippe-Emmanuel de Gondi, Count de Joigny and General of the Galleys of France, took him on in 1613 AD as tutor to his three sons. St. Vincent de Paul was also Madame de Gondi’s spiritual director, and since January he had been preaching in the villages on the family’s estates at her request. The Gondi are among the greatest families in the kingdom, with at least 100,000 livres a year from their lands.

The Count wants him back in the house, Madame de Gondi wants her spiritual director, and St. Vincent de Paul wants the parish he has gone to. He has a director of his own, Pierre de Bérulle, founder of the French Oratory. He put himself under Bérulle’s direction about 1610 AD. He called Bérulle “his visible angel”. Bérulle had placed him in the Gondi household in the first place.

In July St. Vincent de Paul decided to leave the house and give himself to parish work. He told the family nothing. He said his goodbyes as if he were going on a short journey. At Bérulle’s suggestion he went to Châtillon-les-Dombes, in the Bresse. He was installed there as curé on August 1.

Châtillon was a poor village in the diocese of Lyons, where Calvinist teaching had spread from Savoy and Geneva. The parish had no presbytery, so he lodged in the house of a rich young Protestant, M. Beynier. Six priests served its two or three thousand people.

St. Vincent de Paul wrote to the Count only after he was installed. The Count was away with the royal galleys off Provence. The letter told him what the priest had done, that he was not coming back, and that his reason was that he was not fit to teach the boys.

Instead of answering St. Vincent de Paul, the Count wrote at once to his wife and sent the priest’s letter on with his own. Madame de Gondi opened it in Paris six weeks after the installation at Châtillon.

The Count wrote that he was in despair: “I am in despair at a letter which M. Vincent has written to me, and which I am sending you to see if there is any way of avoiding the misfortune of losing him… I beg of you to do everything that we may not lose him, for even if what he says of his incapacity were true, it would not prevail with me.” Then he set his terms. If St. Vincent de Paul was not fitted to teach youth he could have an assistant under him, “but in any case I must have him back in my house, where he can live as he pleases, and I perhaps as I ought to live, if he is with me.”

Madame de Gondi wept for days, and could not eat or sleep. She told a friend: “I should never have thought it. M. Vincent was so charitable to my soul that I could not think he would abandon me in this way. However, God be praised! I will not accuse him — far from it; I believe he does nothing but by the special providence of God, and urged by His holy love. But, in truth, his departure is very strange, and I confess I cannot understand it.”

Then she showed the same friend her husband’s letter, and said what the loss of St. Vincent de Paul would cost the house: “I know my children will grow worse daily, and all the good he was accomplishing in the house, and to the seven or eight thousand on our estates is now at an end. What! Are not these souls as dearly bought with the precious blood of our Lord as those of Bresse?”

Then she went to Bérulle. She was afraid that in working to bring St. Vincent de Paul back she would be working against the will of God. Bérulle told her she was free to use every means in her power, promised to write to St. Vincent de Paul, and told her to write as well.

Madame de Gondi has written. She told St. Vincent de Paul that she could not face the rest of her life, or her death, without his direction, and that Bérulle’s letter would follow her own. Then she warned him: “If after this you refuse me, I will accuse you before God of whatever evil happens to me, and of the omission of the good I shall be unable to do for want of assistance.”