Madame de Maintenon, till now his friend, with perfectly frigid facility separated herself from the side of the accused. The controversy was carried to Rome, where at length Fénelon's book was condemned,--condemned mildly, but condemned. The pope is said to have made the remark that Fénelon erred by loving God too much, and Fénelon's antagonists by loving their fellow-man too little. Fénelon bowed to the authority of the Church, and meekly in his own cathedral confessed his error. It was a logical thing for him, as loyal Catholic, to do; and he did it with a beautiful grace of humility. The Protestant spirit, however, rebels on his behalf, and finds it difficult even to admire the manner in which was done by him a thing that seems so unfit to have been done by him at all. Bossuet did not long survive his inglorious triumph over so much sanctity of personal character, over so much difficult and beautiful height of doctrinal and practical instruction to virtue. Fénelon seems to have been reported as preaching a funeral sermon on the dead prelate. "I have wept and prayed," he wrote to a friend, "for this old instructor of my youth; but it is not true that I celebrated his obsequies in my cathedral, and preached his funeral sermon. Such affectation, you know, is foreign to my nature." The iron must have gone deep, to wring from that gentle bosom even so much cry as this of wounded feeling. It is hard to tell what might now have befallen Fénelon, in the way of good fortune,--he might even have been recalled to court, and re-installed in his office of tutor to the prince,--had not a sinister incident, not to have been looked for, at an inopportune moment occurred. The "Telemachus" appeared in print, and kindled a sudden flame of popular feeling which instantly spread in universal conflagration over the face of Europe. This composition of Fénelon's the author had written to convey, under a form of quasi-poetical fiction, lessons of wisdom in government to the mind of his royal pupil. The existence of the manuscript book would seem to have been intended to be a secret from the king,--indeed, from almost every one, except the pupil himself for whose use it was made. But a copyist proved false to his trust, and furnished a copy of "Telemachus" to a printer in Holland, who lost no time in publishing a book so likely to sell. But the sale of the book surpassed all expectation. Holland not only, but Belgium, Germany, France, and England multiplied copies, as fast as they could; still, Europe could not get copies as fast as it wanted them.