Life of St. Vincent de Paul

								

Jean de Paul listened and drank in their arguments. It would be a
fine thing to have a son a priest; perhaps, with luck, even a
Bishop--the family fortunes would be made forever.
With a good deal of difficulty the necessary money was scraped
together, and Vincent was sent to the Franciscans' school at Dax, the
nearest town. There the boy made such good use of his time that four
years later, when he was only sixteen, he was engaged as tutor to the
children of M. de Commet, a lawyer, who had taken a fancy to the
clever, hardworking young scholar. At M. de Commet's suggestion,
Vincent began to study for the priesthood, while continuing the
education of his young charges to the satisfaction of everybody
concerned.
Five years later he took minor Orders and, feeling the need of
further theological studies, set his heart on a university training
and a degree. But life at a university costs money, however thrifty
one may be, and although Jean de Paul sold a yoke of oxen to start
his son on his career at Toulouse, at the end of a year Vincent was
in difficulties. The only chance for a poor student like himself was
a tutorship during the summer vacation, and here Vincent was lucky.
The nobleman who engaged him was so delighted with the results that,
when the vacation was over, he insisted on the young tutor taking his
pupils back with him to Toulouse. There, while they attended the
college, Vincent continued to direct their studies, with such success
that several other noblemen confided their sons to him, and he was
soon at the head of a small school.
To carry on such an establishment and to devote oneself to study at
the same time was not the easiest of tasks; but Vincent was a hard
and conscientious worker, and he seems to have had, even then, a
strange gift of influencing others for good. For seven years he
continued this double task with thorough success, completed his
course of theology, took his degree, and was ordained priest in the
opening years of that seventeenth century which was to be so full of
consequences both for France and for himself.
Up to this time there had been nothing to distinguish Vincent from
any other young student of his day. Those who knew him well respected
him and loved him, and that was all. But with the priesthood came a
change. From thenceforward he was to strike out a definite line of
his own--a line that set him apart from the men of his time and
faintly foreshadowed the Vincent of later days.
The first Mass of a newly ordained priest was usually celebrated with
a certain amount of pomp and ceremony. If a cleric wanted to obtain a
good living it was well to let people know that he was eligible for
it; humility was not a fashionable virtue. People were therefore not
a little astonished when Vincent, flatly refusing to allow any
outsiders to be present, said his first Mass in a lonely little
chapel in a wood near Bajet, beloved by him on account of its
solitude and silence. There, entirely alone save for the acolyte and