The Complete Symphonies of Adolf Hitler (16 page)

From Etienne Planteloup, Lieutenant General of Police to M. de Meaux 26th May 1702.

I am authorised to inform Monseigneur that the brother and sister Jacques and Solange de Montmorencey, formerly Sister Jeanne of the Ursuline convent at Montjouarre in your Diocese, have been imprisoned in the Castle of Valenciennes by sealed letters [
lettres de cachet
] of His Majesty for attempting to publish sedition. They are to be kept separate from all other prisoners, for an indefinite period on a diet of bread and water. No one, unless authorised, to speak to them on pain of death. You are required by His Majesty to say nothing of what you know of the said Sister Jeanne and to silence all rumours concerning the matter of the alleged prophesies which she sought to disseminate.

From M. de Meaux to Mme de Lonchat, Abbess of Montjouarre 29th May 1702.

Madame, since your last communication, I have suffered much anguish and trouble as a result of your carelessness in the matter of Sister Jeanne and Sister Angélique. You were so kind as to suggest that I bore some responsibility for the calamity that has occurred, but, I assure you, this is a burden of guilt you must bear alone. Had you followed my counsel and kept Sister Angélique well confined in the hands of some responsible person instead of this Sister Jeanne in whom your trust was most lamentably ill-placed, none of this would have occurred. I am now convinced that Sister Angélique is no longer safe in your keeping and that she has mistaken her vocation as a nun, a fact which greater attention and humility on your part should have recognised long since. I have spoken with her father, Monsieur Chanal, and we have agreed that she should receive a dispensation from her vows and be married as soon as convenient. There is a widower of M. Chanal’s acquaintance, a M. Lapige, who is prepared to waive the matter of a dowry on account of certain debts that he owes M. Chanal. He is some twenty years older than Sister Angélique, it is true, but in good health and, M. Chanal informs me, a worthy man. He owns several hectares of land and a farmhouse where he lives with his elderly mother. The house, though furnished in adequate comfort, is remote from populous habitation and there a life may be lived secluded from prying eyes and ears. In these surroundings Sister Angélique, or Mme Lapige as she soon will be, will find her time fully occupied with useful duties and cares, and, if M. Lapige does his duty, her monthly afflictions will cease when she finds herself with child. I will ensure that all these matters are expedited so that you will be relieved as soon as possible from a responsibility which, it would appear, you have found yourself ill-equipped to undertake.

[Evidently Sister Angélique sent Bossuet a letter some time in the July of 1702. Of this there is no trace, but we do have a copy of his reply.]

From M. de Meaux to Madeleine Chanal, formerly Sister Angélique July 14th 1702.

My child, I am by no means insensible to the pleas which you have laid before me with a sincerity and respect that does you credit. However, I must ask you in your turn to be assured that at all times I have been guided by your best interests in the sight of God. Do I presume too much on my sacred office? I assure you that I do not. Dear child let me make myself clear: though it is I who speaks to you; it is I who admonishes you; it is I who claims your attention; yet in secret the voice of Truth is speaking in my inmost being and equally to you. If this were not so all my words would be but a vain beating of the air. Outwardly I speak and you listen, but inwardly in the secret of our hearts you and I alike should be listening to the Truth which is speaking to us and teaching us. Follow then that Divine Truth to which I direct you and do not listen to the vanity of your heart. All will be made plain in due course; for Divine Providence, which speaks through me its humblest vessel, will always reveal itself to those who follow its sacred paths. You say that you have wept tears every day since your good father told you that you were to be taken from the Abbey and married; but let me, as your Father in Christ, assure you that in time that those tears that you shed out of wounded pride will be turned to tears of joy when you have abandoned all thought of self and given yourself to the path which wiser heads and Divine Guidance have laid down for you to tread.

[The final letter in this correspondence comes from the Abbess over nine months later, in 1703. By this time, Bossuet, a sick man, was no longer living in his diocese, but was being cared for in Paris.]

From Mme de Lonchat, Abbess of Montjouarre to M. de Meaux April 17th 1703.

Since your Grace has been so much in Paris of late, you doubtless will not have heard the news concerning Madeleine Lapige, formerly Sister Angélique. She was duly married according to your instructions to the man Lapige, quietly, soon after the dispensation from her vows was obtained, and went to live with him at his house which is situated some distance from the village of Bois-Oudry. No more than ten days after the marriage one of the sisters brought to me a poor girl who had been begging at our door for comfort and sanctuary. Her clothes were torn, her legs were caked with dried blood and she had been severely bruised about the face. She was quite incoherent, and it was some time before I recognised this poor wretch as Sister Angélique. From the very first, it would appear, this Lapige (who, we now discover, has a most evil name in the neighbourhood) had ill-treated her terribly. I will not shock you, Monseigneur, with a catalogue of the cruelties that this vile beast had inflicted upon her. Let it be sufficient to say that had I not been under the strictest instructions from your Grace, I would have had compassion on her and let her stay at the Abbey. Indeed she begged to stay, saying that she would have been happy to become the most menial of lay servants in the Abbey, to scrub floors and wash clothes, rather than return to Lapige and his devil of a mother who, if anything, appears to be more cruel than her son. It was with a heavy heart that I obeyed your Grace and sent for her father who took her back, weeping and protesting most piteously, to this Lapige. For some months no news of her reached me and I tried to put the poor girl out of my mind, having committed her to the Eternal Mercy of God. Then a few days ago the girl’s father came to see me, a wretched, weeping and most penitent man. He accused himself of having killed my poor Sister Angélique, but this was not the case. When she returned to Lapige and his mother she was treated worse than before, but in the course of time she became with child. Rather than softening the hearts of these two monsters, it hardened both Lapige and his mother, who would not have her sleep in the house, but made her sleep among the animals in the barn. When the time came for her to be delivered of the child they secured the services of an old wise woman from the village of Bois-Oudry. She came most reluctantly, being under some obligation to Lapige and his mother. And so, Madeleine Lapige, once Sister Angélique, was brought to birth of a child in a barn among the animals; but such was her loss of blood during the birth, and such was the ill-treatment which she had suffered through no fault of her own, that she expired soon after that birth. There were also rumours about the nature of the child, that it was an abomination of deformity. Some even said that it had been born with a tail and was the Antichrist, but this is the gossip of foolish and ignorant people. It is true that the old woman who had been charged with delivering the child and who, the child having been born dead—this much is almost certain—disposed of its remains, was seemingly much distressed by the events. It is true that shortly after the death of Madeleine Lapige and her child this same old crone hanged herself, but that means nothing. She was a woman of the lowest sort and any number of explanations may be found for her untimely death.

Such was the dreadful end of a child of God who least deserved such afflictions. Her father, M. Chanal, a man for whom I never had much regard, did, at least show a decent regret that, under your instructions, Monseigneur, he had chosen such an unworthy husband for her. He presented me with some papers which, he told me, Madeleine had written in the last months of her life and these I send to your Grace. I do not know what they contain, and have no desire to know. The matter is at an end, and what remains of it is now in your hands.

I understand that your grace has of late not been enjoying your customary good health. May I assure you that I and my small community are earnestly praying for your speedy and complete recovery.

**

Of the papers mentioned only one sheet appears to remain. It is written on very coarse paper and in writing that varies in size and legibility. Nothing is written in a straight line. It looks like examples I have seen of automatic writing in books on psychic phenomena. At the top of the page the following had been written in capitals:

NOVA APOCALYPSIS SORORIS ANGELICAE

[The New Apocalypse of Sister Angélique]

Of the storm-tossed sentences that followed this is what I could decipher:

Woe to the makers of war though they be princes.

The first blow shall be on Ister.

In the Time of Blood heads of kings and princes shall fall into the gutter. A king by his own falling knife felled. Woe to the mind that invented but did not see.

Gaul shall perish in the snows and her false king, alone, upon an island.

Then shall the nephew of the false king rise up and bring blood upon the nation from Rhenish Lords of War.

A black hand shall strike down a Prince and the whole world will shudder. Men will sink into mud to die and the Empire of Muscovy shall perish in a cellar.

Behold I saw beneath the storm clouds of a grey sky a new sea and that sea was a sea of blood. I walked between walls of wood and high hedges of sharp steel and my footfalls were in blood. Woe to you O Zion. Your people shall suffer and die in the years when the crooked cross [
la croix crochue
] shall reign.

Blood in the sky over a land of the rising sun. The sky blood will darken the whole world.

[There was then a space, and at the bottom of the paper in minute script was written:]

After the two towers have fallen the eagle and the lion shall capture Babylon and the wicked one shall be drawn from the tomb. Not long shall last their triumph, for weeping shall come upon them. Then comes the night time of our world when God shall sleep.

These last sentences have haunted me. When last night I dreamed again that a bloodstained woman came to me over the sea, I heard her speak for the first time, and those were the words she spoke.

**

This morning M. Hubertin called on me in my little room in the
mairie
. He seemed particularly cheerful and asked if I would like to hear what he had found out about the priest who had handled the documents before me. I did not want to know, but I could not prevent him from talking. There was something about Hubertin’s self-satisfied, almost exultant manner that I did not like. ‘I found the information in my grandfather’s memoirs,’ said Hubertin. ‘He wrote it purely for consumption by the family, but I must say it is a most fascinating document. Perhaps I shall have it published with an introduction by myself. Then I shall be a writer like you, Monsieur.’

‘You were going to tell me what happened to the priest.’

‘Ah, yes! To be sure. Poor M. le Curé! His housekeeper found him one morning lying at the foot of his bed. He looked as if he had had some sort of seizure; at any rate, he was dead. Two curious things were noted. Firstly, though it was a cold November, the windows of his chamber were wide open. The second was that his face and night-shirt appeared to be covered with curious brown stains. They were analysed by the pharmacist who pronounced them to be dried human blood; but no further investigations were made as there was little evidence that he had been attacked. It was curious, since he had not been cut or wounded in any way, and the blood did not appear to be his.’

M. Hubertin seemed delighted by his researches, but he did not leave me a very happy man.

I have with me a copy of Ledieu’s Journals which record, in journal form, the last years of Bossuet’s life and I have been searching them thoroughly for any mention of Sister Angélique or the Abbey of Montjouarre, but can find nothing. The only possible reference comes from almost the last entry in his journals. Bossuet was dying in the Rue St Anne in Paris in April 1704, almost a year after the Abbess’s last letter to him. He was attended by Ledieu, his faithful secretary, and the Abbé St André, one of the most trusted of the clergy in his diocese. By the evening of April 13th he was sinking fast. Ledieu writes:

Then the Abbé St André asked if he should pray with him, to which Monseigneur [i.e. Bossuet] replied: ‘Pray often, but only shortly, for I am in pain. Say the Lord’s Prayer with me.’ This the Abbé did, Monseigneur following him faintly, but when they came to the words ‘
adveniat voluntas tua
’ [‘Thy kingdom come’], I noticed that Monseigneur faltered and did not say those words, but spoke others of which I could not divine the meaning. Those words were: ‘
adveniet sanguinis aevum
’. Not ‘May thy kingdom come’ but ‘The Time of Blood shall come’. The good Abbé tried to correct Monseigneur gently, but Monseigneur continued to repeat the phrase ‘
adveniet sanguinis aevum
’. When the Abbé once more remonstrated, Monseigneur looked at him with great sorrow in his eyes and said: ‘
Quod dixi, dixi
.’ (‘I have said what I have said.’) Then my good master spoke no more.

Jacques-Benigne Bossuet, the great Bishop of Meaux, died in the early hours of April 14th 1704. In August of that year Marlborough inflicted the first of his four crushing defeats on the French at Blenheim. That is why some may interpret Sister Angelique’s Latin couplet as a prophesy of these events.

Ictibus flos Galliae quattuor verberabitur belli

Incipiet quarto, sanguinis aevum, anno.