When will we be able to make these consoling reflections together and encourage each other…
Letter to his father, C.A. de Mazenod, 7 July 1816, O.W. XV n. 137
Here Eugene repeats for the umpteenth time his desire to be reunited with his father. From Eugene’s return to France in 1802 until 1817, bringing his father back to France was his constant preoccupation. Father and son were close and Eugene had spent the 11 years of his exile with his father. I think it worthwhile to quote some of what Jozef Pielorz tells us about Eugene’s father:
Charles Anthony de Mazenod, father of Eugene, was born January 24, 1745… A very gifted student, at 16 years of age, he defended some theses in philosophy as a sort of general examination. As a student in law at the University of Aix, he obtained in 1764 a license “in utroque”. He was 19 years old at the time. As a barrister at the Court of Accounts, he became one of its presidents in 1771. Having obtained this brilliant position, he asked for the hand in marriage of the daughter of a rich professor of medicine at the University of Aix. So it was that on January 3, 1778, President de Mazenod took to wife Miss Marie-Rose-Eugénie Joannis. The young married couple owned a mansion on the Cours and lived in grand style. The furnishings of their home were first-class; they had twelve servants in fine livery; nothing, it seems, was lacking to them. Their salon was open to high society; receptions and feasts were frequent – but, alas, very costly and even ruinous. Expenses far exceed revenues and the de Mazenod family with its debts amounting to 280,000 livres became one of the most indebted of the noble families.
The French Revolution changed all this and the noble President de Mazenod had to escape the wrath of the revolutionaries by going into exile in 1791 for 26 years. His debts remained and Eugene tried by all means to pay them off so as to make his return to France possible. Pielorz continues on the situation of President de Mazenod:
To avoid starving to death, he was sometimes obliged to engage in business – a profession which had been lucrative for his ancestors, but not for him, since it led to his ultimate financial ruin – sometimes playing the role of school master, teaching French to Sicilian gentlemen, or nobly begging financial assistance from the “incomparable” queen of the Two Sicilies, Marie-Caroline, and even from the English government. Even after the Restoration, he refused to return to France. The grim specter of his innumerable creditors prevented him from doing so. It was only as a result of the vehement urgings, repeated a thousand times, of his son Eugene that he consented to “abandon himself to Providence” and return to his home country in 1817 where he died three years later.
J. Pielorz, “The Spiritual Life of Bishop Eugene de Mazenod 1782-1812,”
Association of Oblate Studies and Research, Rome 1998, p. 13-15