255 



SALES, DE, FRANCIS, SAINT. 



SALIERI, ANTONIO. 



256 



effect by a strikingly handsome person and a mild and modest 

 demeanour. In the fulfilment of his pastoral duties he was not less 

 remarkable: he united the most untiring activity in visiting his flock 

 and in relieving the wants of the sick and poor with an unaffected 

 solicitude and evangelical patience, and he was repaid by a most 

 remarkable amount of esteem and affection. 



We must now present him exercising these qualities in a larger 

 sphere, and applying them to the conversion of those who differed 

 from him in religious faith. The better to understand the peculiarly 

 difficult nature of the mission with which he was intrusted, it will be 

 necessary to give some account of the scene of his labours. The city 

 of Geneva had long renounced the authority of its bishop and that of 

 the Duke of Savoy ; it was an independent republic, and the strong- 

 hold of the Calviuistic party. It had become possessed of the ancient 

 duchy of Chablais, together with the territories of Gex, Terni, and 

 Gaillard : coincident with these changes was a substitution among the 

 inhabitants of the creed of Calvin for the faith of Rome. In 1590, 

 Charles Emmanuel, duke of Savoy, had wrested from the Genoese 

 this ancient portion of his duchy, and his first care was to attempt to 

 bring back the inhabitants to their former religion. (De Thou, ' Hist. 

 Univ.,' 1. xcix.) For this purpose he applied to the~titular bishop of 

 Geneva, Claude de Granier, to send missionaries over the conquered 

 country. Francis de Sales, and his relation Louis, the canon of 

 Geneva, were among the first to undertake an enterprise in the prose- 

 cution of which much opposition and some personal danger were to be 

 apprehended. 



On the 9th of September 1594 the two missionaries arrived at the 

 frontiers of Chablais, where they dismissed their servants and equi- 

 pages and determined to travel on foot, in order more nearly to con- 

 form to the example of the Apostles. The town of Tonon, the capital 

 of the Chablais, which contained only seven Roman Catholics, was the 

 first place in which they exercised their mission ; the fruit of it may 

 be judged of from the fact that on the Christmas-eve of 1 597 eight 

 'hundred persons were admitted to the communion of the Eucharist in 

 the church of St. Hippolytus in that town. But the most important 

 object Francis had in view was the conversion of the leaders of the 

 Calvinistic party. To effect it he first solicited an interview with 

 Theodore de Beza [BEZA], who was then fast sinking under the weight 

 of age and infirmities. Several conferences took place between them 

 at Geneva, and the result of them is very differently related according 

 to the religious persuasions of the narrators. If any change however 

 took place in the mind of Beza through his intercourse with Francis, 

 which is extremely improbable, it is certain that it was accompanied 

 by no public profession. Miohelet, without however citing his 

 authority, remarks, that the Roman Catholic missionary added to 

 his spiritual inducements the weight of temporal advantages, and 

 made him an offer of a pension of 4000 crowns if he would conform 

 to his church. 



On the return of Francis to Annecy, in 1596, he was appointed 

 coadjutor to Claude Granier, the bishop of Geneva, with the title of 

 Bishop of Nicopolis 'in partibus infidelium;' this dignity he for a 

 long time refused to accept, and only yielded on the earnest solici- 

 tation of the pope, Innocent IX. In 1 602 he visited the court of 

 France for the purpose of obtaining permission from the king, 

 Henri IV., to pursue hia missionary labours in the territory of Gex, 

 which had been given up to France by a treaty of peace concluded 

 between Henri and the Duke of Savoy. A course of Lent sermons, 

 which he preached in the chapel of the Louvre, is said to have created 

 considerable sensation, and to have become the means of recalling 

 several of the most influential of the Calviuistic nobility to a belief in 

 their ancient faith. The king, desirous of retaining him in France, 

 made him the offer of the first bishopric which might become vacant, 

 and the immediate enjoyment of a considerable pension. These offers 

 however he declined, declaring that his chief wish was to be permitted 

 to live and die among those whom Providence had intrusted to 

 his care. 



On his return to his native country, after a residence of nine months 

 in Paris, he was, by the death of De Granier, appointed to the bishop- 

 ric of Geneva. He prepared himself by a close retirement of twenty 

 days at the castle of Sales, for his consecration to this important office. 

 In this retirement he framed for himself a rule of life by which he 

 was in future to be guided ; the details of it are given with elaborate 

 minuteness by his biographers. On the 8th of December 1602 ho 

 was consecrated bishop of Geneva. His first care was to introduce a 

 uniformity of usage among the clergy of his diocese, and to reform 

 various abuses which time had gradually introduced ; these measures 

 he chiefly effected by the issue of mandates, in which judicious advice 

 was conveyed in the language of Christian charity. In short, he 

 showed himself a worthy disciple of St. Charles Borromeo, whom he 

 professed to take as his model in the discharge of his episcopal duties. 

 [BORROMEO, ST. CHARLES.] In 1605 he devoted himself effectually to 

 the task of reforming the monasteries in his diocese. The following 

 year he preached during Lent at Dijou in Franco, where he was again 

 successful in making several converts from Calvinism. On this occa- 

 sion likewise he refused the repeated offers of advancement from the 

 French king, while at the time he gave proof of his consistency in 

 declining the proffered honour of a cardinal's hat from the pope, 

 Leo XI. In 1607 he was applied to by the reigning pontiff, Paul V., 



to express his opinions on the extent of the efficacy of Divine Grace on 

 the free will of man. It was principally on this question that the 

 Dominicans and Jesuits were divided. His answer is expressed with 

 so much caution that it is difficult to discover from it his real senti- 

 ments ; they are however more clearly shown in his other writings, 

 especially in his treatise on the Love of God. About this period was 

 published his ' Introduction to a Religious Life,' a book which still 

 maintains a merited popularity. The style, though perhaps too full 

 of metaphor for modern taste, is devoid of affectation, and breathes 

 throughout the genuine spirit of Christian simplicity. 



In 1609, Jean Pierre Camus was named Bishop of Bellay, and ho 

 wrote to the Bishop of Geneva to request him to perform the cere- 

 mony of his consecration. Between these two remarkable men, whose 

 habits and dispositions were very dissimilar, the closest friendship 

 ever after subsisted. It is to Camus that we are indebted for a most 

 interesting work, ' The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales,' which, more 

 than any other, developes the private excellences of the saint The 

 following year Francis founded a religious order for females, called the 

 Order of the Visitation, and placed it under the superintendence of a 

 pious lady, Madame de Chantal, sister of the Archbishop of Bourges, 

 with whom he bad become acquainted on his visit to Dijon. The 

 fervent admiration of this lady for the qualities of the Bishop of 

 Geneva, to whom she had intrusted the guidance of her spiritual life, 

 the letters of perhaps too impassioned piety which she so frequently 

 addressed to him, and which may be seen in the collection published 

 at Paris in 1660, have been malignly dwelt upon by some writers. The 

 increasing infirmities of the Bishop of Geneva, arising from the con- 

 stant application to the duties of his office, obliged him, in 1618, to 

 seek for the assistance of a coadjutor bishop ; and, at the suggestion, 

 of Cardinal Frederick Borromeo, his brother, John Francis de Sales, 

 was consecrated to that charge with the title of Bishop of Chalcedon. 

 In 1619 he accompanied to Paris the Cardinal de Savoy, to whom the 

 mission had been intrusted of soliciting for the Prince of Piedmont 

 the hand of Christina, sister of Louis XIII. On the marriage of this 

 princess he was appointed her almoner, an office which he at first 

 declined, and only accepted on condition that it should not be allowed 

 to interfere with the discharge of his other duties. But the uudi- 

 minished energy of such a spirit was too overpowering for so feeble a 

 frame. In 1622 he foresaw his approaching end, and prepared himself 

 for it by severer mortifications and a closer communion with God. 

 He preached for the last time on the Christmas-eve of that year ; the 

 next day he was seized with a paralytic attack, under which he suc- 

 cumbed on the 28th of December, 1622. He was buried in the 

 Church of the Visitation at Lyon, but his remains were afterwards 

 transferred to Annecy. In 1665, his memory was canonised by the 

 pope, Alexander VII., who appointed the 29th of January, the day on 

 which his body was conveyed to Annecy, as his festival in the Roman 

 calendar. 



The claims of St. Francis de Sales as a devoted servant of the Roman 

 Catholic Church have never been disputed, though they have been 

 diffei-ently esteemed and represented. Humility and zeal were the 

 two prominent virtues by which he was distinguished; the former 

 taught him to forget himself, the latter to be ever mindful of the 

 wants of others. Between him and Fenelon a closer comparison 

 might perhaps be made than with any other name celebrated in the 

 annals of sanctity. They possessed in common noble birth and a high 

 station, with the tone and manner which these advantages are calcu- 

 lated to produce ; the same talent in captivating the attention and 

 winning the sympathies of those among whom they laboured; in the 

 discharge of their pastoral duties they were alike successful, and by 

 the use of the same means, a careful adaptation of advice to the 

 temper and disposition of the advised. While however it must be 

 admitted that Feuelon was superior to De Sales as a writer and a 

 theologian, he was probably inferior to him in genuine disinterested- 

 ness and the practice of self-denial : he loved rather to labour among 

 the rich and great than, like De Sales, to abandon the court in order 

 to mingle with the crowd of the poor and suffering. Fenelon, it is 

 true, performed with zeal those essential duties of a pastor when he 

 was banished to his diocese ; De Sales was continually separating him- 

 self from the court in order to perform them. [FENELON.] 



The most known of his writings, which are not very numerous, 

 have been noticed in this article ; the best edition of them is that of 

 Paris, 1641, 2 vols. folio. 



His principal biographers arc his nephew, Charles Augustus Da 

 Sales, Henri De Maupas, Bishop of Kvreux, Le Pere Goulu, Mad. De 

 Bussy Rabutiu, and the Jansenist Biuet. See also Alban Butler's 

 Lives of the Saints; Moreri, Diet. Historique; and the Biographic 

 Universelle. 



SALIE'RI, ANTONIO, a composer of great eminence in his day, 

 was born at Legnano, in the Venetian territory, in 1750. When only 

 fifteen years of age he lost his father, a respectable merchant, and then 

 immediately determined to make music, which he had studied only 

 as an accomplishment, his profession. His first master was Giovanni 

 Pescetti, and his next Leopold Gasuiaun. The latter took his pupil 

 to Vienna, where he made the acquaintance of Gluck, who, at that 

 time declining in health, intrusted Salieri with the charge of composing 

 ' Les Danaides,' which the great German master had engaged to produce 

 for the Acaddmie Royale de Musique. It was performed with the most 



