MADAME, whose maiden name was Jeanne Bouverie de la Motte, was born at Montargis in 1648. She was educated successively in two of the convents of her native city. On leaving school in her twelfth year, she displayed a strong disposition to that quietism which she afterwards brought into fame and for a time into fashion. In her sixteenth year she was married to M. Guyon, a man of wealth, by whom she had five children, and who left her a widow at the age of twenty-eight. Disengaging herself from the care of her children, and thus snapping all her home-ties, she began a sort of proselytizing journey through the country, in the course of which she composed her Moyen Court et très-facile pour l'Oraison; Le Cantique des Cantiques, interprété selon le sens Mystique; and Les Torrents; works that have now indeed ceased to excite much interest, but which were at first praised and abused alternately, in terms so strong as to make their author known if not famous. Madame Guyon, having completed her "mission," returned to Paris in 1680, but her views were coldly received by the dignitaries of the church, who even thought it expedient to confine her in a convent, while her confessor, La Combe, was sent to the Bastille. The influence of Madame de Maintenon soon procured the release of the innocent and pious mystic. The first convert of note to the new gospel was Fénelon, then an abbé; but it soon came to number disciples even at the court of Louis the Great. It was vigorously opposed by Bossuet, who saw in it nothing but a revival of the gnostic heresy condemned by the church some thirteen centuries before. But it was as resolutely defended by Fénelon, who showed that Madame Guyon's views differed but little from those of St Thérèse, St François de Sales, and other mystics whom the church approved. But Bossuet had no sympathy with anything that he could not clearly and readily understand; and the beatific contemplations and holy raptures of Fénelon and Madame Guyon were in his eyes no better than flat heresy. Some extravagances committed by the more zealous of the sect determined him to crush them and their doctrines by force. Madame Guyon was arrested; and the bishops were ordered to forbid the reading of her works, which Bossuet set himself to expose and refute. Fénelon's defence of his friend in his Maximes des Saintes, merely aggravated her disgrace and involved himself in it. The good bishop was banished from the court, and his book sent to Rome for condemnation by the head of the church. «But Bossuet's zeal overshot the Many persons were disgusted with his fierce intolerance, and took part with his opponents, whom they called his victims; while the Pope himself, instead of putting the Maximes on the Index, merely passed upon them a censure so gentle as to be almost equivalent to an approval. On her release from the Bastille in 1701 or 1703, Madame Guyon seems to have gone into retirement with one of her sons at Diziers near Blois, where she spent the remainder of her days in the exercise of every pious and charitable act. She died June 9, 1717, at the age of sixty-nine.

Had Madame Guyon been a little more worldly-wise, she might have escaped many of the sorrows and misfortunes she had to undergo. But she often allowed her zeal to get the better of her discretion, and used language which some people called that of a fanatic, others of a madwoman. Her mental structure was singularly ill-balanced, the emotional part being developed at the expense of the purely intellectual. Her capacity of intense feeling was great, and sometimes bore her up in poetic flights of no mean aim. Witness her Recueil de Poésies Spirituelles, the best of which are familiar to most English readers in the exquisite translations of Cowper. This collection, however, which shows the author's strength, shows no less clearly the author's weakness. And one does not know whether to laugh or be angry, when he meets such stanzas as these:

Grand Dieu, pour te servir, Je suis dans une cage; Ecoute mon ramage, &c. Dieu possédant notre fond, Rien ici-bas ne nous touche; Je suis comme une souche; C'est lui qui vous répond!

Had the Catholic Church exhibited in Madame Guyon's case the wisdom which it generally shows in absorbing the influence of its more erratic votaries, the mystic might have been soon forgotten. But she was not only a mystic but a persecuted one, and has thus continued to enjoy a consideration greater perhaps than she deserves. There is no great harm in her writings, and her life was confessedly stainless and unimpeachable. She often in her ecstacies gives expression to ideas which might be defined as heresy, if they could be defined at all, but she never either openly attacked any dogma of the church, or proved by her daily life that she was an unworthy member of it. None of her works have any value but those already mentioned.

It is by no means proved that the Vie de Madame Guyon, écrite par elle-même, which was printed after her death, is entirely of her composition. It seems indeed to have been composed from different memoirs furnished by herself, first, to the official or judge of the bishop's court, Chéron, and then to the Bishop of Meaux at the time of the conferences of Issy. These materials, collected by a redacteur still more mystical than herself, appeared at Cologne, 1720, in three vols. 12mo. The verses of Madame Guyon, or at least those which are ascribed to her, were collected and published at Amsterdam, 1689, in five volumes under the title of Recueil de Poésies Spirituelles. This lady is also believed to have been the author of Cantiques Spirituels, ou Emblèmes sur l'Amour divin, in five volumes; and La Bible traduite en Français, avec des Explications et des Réflexions qui regardent la Vie intérieure, Cologne, 1715, in twenty vols. 8vo. Her treatise on Spiritual Torrents, after having been long circulated in manuscript, was printed, for the first time, in her Opuscules Spirituels, Cologne, 1704, in 12mo, with a preface describing her person. Besides these, her Lettres Spirituelles form four vols. in 8vo; so that her works extend in all to thirty-nine volumes, which, however, are scarcely read nowadays. (See Pénelon.)