Every age marked by a distinct historical style is an age of faith. The object of faith may change, but the impulse to define and live life in terms of a system of belief is constant. Great acts have been done in the name of many different beliefs. To understand any such act and the individual who gave it interest for us, it is necessary to take as a given element, regardless of our own relation to what we see as reality, the absolute and sometimes glorious significance of the faith which moved him.
The Catholic form of this view in Lamy’s time lay at the foundation of the state, the town, the family, and the person. It was as naturally expressed by believers as life through the act of breathing. Believed in, its formalisms were not burdens but aids to a divine end, through a culture both intensely local and fervently strong because it was by definition universal. Familiarly but awesomely, a life given to the Church brought anyone, whatever his original lot, to take his vocation with a sense of immense privilege and with it a calm assumptiveness of power whose duties embraced all terms of life, death, and eternity. Nothing long-lasting was done without religious conviction. Piety was an energizing force, and a clear gaze into the mystery showed forth in early Auvergne fresco paintings of the saints drawn in formalized conventions which called on the manners of the old Roman, the Byzantine, the Iberian, the Arabic, the Mozarabic, in resemblances not entirely accounted for by historical linkages. Who in the presence of such silent witnesses staring from a painted apse, seeing them from his earliest life, would not retain in imagination something of their suggestive power?
With the turn of the eighteenth century, the age of piety seemed for many to be ended, in the name of reason. But still, for vastly many more, the motive of Christian belief survived, and for them the offering of self in its behalf remained an act of unquestioned reasonableness. Without that, much in any chronicle of a religious life might seem implausible and unmeaningful. With it, achievements in its name could be recognized, taking for granted that spiritual conviction lay behind them.
It need not be further explained to the broadly skeptical taste of a later time why men and women in religious commitment thought it worthwhile to bring the works of faith, hope, and charity to strange lands and changing societies. Once they have recognized their gods, men have always served them.
From childhood, Jean Baptiste Lamy, gazing from the tilled fields well to the north of Lempdes, across bluing hills, to the farthest line of the land where the solitary profile of the Puy-de-Dôme rose in the distance, could see between near and far the hazy cluster of the city of Clermont-Ferrand. The only constant and distinguishable features which he could pick out were the two spires of the cathedral side by side, there, at the end of the country road leading from Lempdes to the city and the world. At that angle, in certain airs and lights, they might fancifully suggest the twin spires of a mitre, such as worn by a bishop, a lord and teacher.
vi.
The Two Friends
LAMY’S VOCATION came alive in his childhood. Equipped with the simple learning of his family, he was enrolled before the age of nine in the Jesuit collège at Billom, a short distance from Clermont-Ferrand. Billom, like all the regional towns, was ancient, and its school, older than any in Clermont, was the first which the Jesuits administered in Auvergne. After their order was suppressed in 1773, the school was conducted by secular teachers. In 1814 Jesuits again took charge.
Nine years later, now with study for the priesthood his clear purpose, Lamy was entered at the preparatory seminary of Clermont, where he took the usual classical curriculum and presently, for the long course of theology, he was admitted to the diocesan seminary of Mont-Ferrand, which, administered by the Sulpicians, occupied a mass of seventeenth-century buildings on the outskirts of the city. Later used in turn by the gendarmerie as a barracks, and finally by Clermont’s Ecole Supérieure de Commerce, the seminary in 1832 was still a closed world of studies and devotions, under strict discipline. In its long echoing corridors, under its mansard roof, and within its high interiors and general institutional darkness, the seminarian on entering could look forward to six years of separation from the open life to which he would one day be returned as a leader, fixed in purpose and sure of his means. In such an institution, the opportunity for personal affinity remained formal; but in a class two years ahead of Lamy was the seminarian who became his closest friend, then, and for life.
Outwardly, the two could not have been less alike. Lamy was taller than average, with a long-boned frame and a large head with dark hair, a tall wide brow, and a strongly modelled square-jawed face. Photographs later showed him as a gravely handsome man. His temperament reflected the country life he came from—orderly if not rapid in thought, mild in expression, strong and patient in a mind made up. He was so gentle with his early school companions that they nicknamed him “the Lamb.” If he generally looked serious, he could be robustly humorous. Behind his eyes lay emotions which could be powerfully stirred and at times become exhausting. He knew what hard physical work was, and when necessary he expended reserves in effort which sometimes left him ill. Strong as he looked, he was peculiarly subject to periodic bad health, which was not always entirely physical in origin, but arose from a nervous fragility which he came to ignore through hard work. He seemed all simplicity, but he was woven of many strands—warm intelligence, charm, modesty, with a certain hardnesss veiled by habitual patience. Slow-moving, he went about his days with long strides at the pace of a countryman who thought in seasons rather than in days or hours.
By contrast, his fellow seminarian, Machebeuf, born in Riom south of Vichy on 11 August 1812, the elder by two years, was conspicuous for his small size, his pale hair and eyelashes (his nickname was “Whitey”), and his liveliness. His mind darted from notion to notion. Mischief played about in his gaiety; his small, plain, clever face was animated by a venturesome spirit; his little body hated to be still. He had come to his priestly studies despite early distractions—at one time, seeing a grand military review, he was all for a soldier’s life; but ever after his mother’s death during his ninth year, the priesthood held a powerful call, and despite the trials of his youth, “pleins de chasmes et illusions” as someone wrote of him, it took him all the way to Mont-Ferrand. But even there, the confining regimen soon threatened his health and he was forced to spend a brief time away from the seminary to restore himself in free action. His resolve held, he returned, and like Lamy after him, completed his course.
It was a time of the religious revival under Louis Philippe, after the iconoclasms of the first Revolution, followed by Napoleon’s self-serving rapprochement with the Roman Church. Religious orders and education had been secularized, the Papacy had been bent to the parvenu emperor’s will, and the energy of the new politics was still animated by doctrinaire idealism. Alexis de Tocqueville was examining for the Old World how democracy was working in the New. America was becoming a world factor, calling to the religious mind as well as to the political hopes of the increasing tide of colonists who went to be free and rich—partners to the open promise of the new republic overseas.
Taking his “course of philosophy and theology” at Mont-Ferrand, where he distinguished himself “by his talents and above all by his exemplary life,” Lamy spent much time reading of the missioners abroad in the “Lettres Edifiantes” of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, and the