ANGÉLIQUE'S CONVERSION

11

rebellion. It was a ratification of her vows. Little did he know to what he was devoting her.

She speaks with extreme tenderness of her mother's care for her at this time. But Angélique returned after her illness to her Convent, still somewhat of an invalid. The winter of 1607 passed away, and the Lent of 1608 drew on, the Lent which was to change her whole life. The child of sixteen, who was in germ already a saint, who was already showing by her obedience and submission the possibilities of saintliness to be hereafter developed, languidly asked for a book of devotions, and a simple little book was put into her hands which seemed to have comforted her.

At last the day of awakening arrived. A Capuchin monk, who was by no means a saintly person, arrived one day in March and asked permission to preach. That sermon struck an answering note in the young Abbess's heart. She says herself in touching words: "God spoke to me, and from that instant I realised the blessedness of the Religious Life. My happiness in it was in proportion to my former unhappiness.'

It is very striking and suggestive to note by what apparently unworthy instruments Angélique was brought to the life of complete self-surrender. Her father forced her, from worldly motives, to a life which affords possibilities of as great happiness or of as great misery as does the vocation of marriage. The monk who awoke her slumbering soul was a bad man, who afterwards abandoned his religious profession. In all ages souls who are destined for great vocations are often drawn upwards in strange and contradictory

ways.

Now began a period of fervour, and, as was only natural, of uneasiness. The life of a religious ought to be one of austerity, of obedience to rule, of poverty. Where was the mark of the Cross on Port Royal?

Angélique was a true convert. She sought to reform herself, and with as little outward help as any fervent youthful disciple ever received, she began those inward

struggles, those stern dealings with herself which distinguish most learners in the school of the Cross.

And there was the shrinking from observation, the shyness, which are so characteristic of holy souls in their first beginnings. She used to get up at night and steal to a barn that she might pray alone. "I began to feel also," she says, "a passionate horror for my own office, for the authority with which I had been invested; I longed to leave it." Angélique was much shocked at the time by reading in a book of casuistry that an Abbess could use a third part of the revenues of the Abbey for her own private pleasure. She longed to enter some other order, and become a lay sister, to take the lowest place, rather than to reform her own convent.

At Whitsuntide, a certain Père Bernard, another Capuchin monk, dissuaded her from leaving. She confided to him her desire to reform Port Royal, and the good Father much preferred that the young Abbess should stay where she was, and proceeded to preach a discourse sufficiently severe to alarm the nuns, who thought that, as they led a decorous life, and discharged their religious duties with regularity (and also with a due regard to convenience, Matins being said at 4 P.M., not A. M.), they had no need for this sort of plain speaking.

Père Bernard, in all the zeal of a new reformer, hastened to inform the authorities at Citeaux; this was extremely simple of him, for the then Abbot was given rather to relaxing the rule than to enforcing it.

It was notified to M. Arnauld that Angélique had become inconveniently religious. He hastened to Port Royal and found her unwell and sad. He told her with an amusing naïveté that he would not stand Capuchin monks in his Monastery, and strongly objected to any unrestrained display of religious zeal.

He carried her off to his country house, but this year was very different from the last. One idea alone possessed the ardent loyal soul-the passionate wish to put God's service first. As is very often the case in a true vocation, the words were fulfilled, "a man's foes

CONVERSION OF THE COMMUNITY 13

shall be they of his own household." As she herself says, she was dedicated to the Religious Life without any choice; and when God in His mercy had bestowed on her a true vocation, her own people did their uttermost to prevent her from leading the life of a religious.

Back to Port Royal she returned, not knowing what to do, how to reconcile her duty and her affection. All Saints' Day came, and with it came another religious; not a Capuchin monk, but one selected by the authorities at Citeaux themselves. He preached from the Gospel of the day, on the seventh Beatitude. A girl who waited on the Abbess, and who afterwards became a nun, said to her quite simply: "You might be one of the blessed who are persecuted for righteousness' sake. The words went home like a dart. Advent came, and with it Angélique took her next decisive step. She made a general confession to this same monk, who was known afterwards as the Abbé Vauclair. He confirmed her in her resolutions, and her promisemade as before God-to live the life of a true religious.

But what between attacks of ague and religious struggles, Angélique brought herself to such a pass that the Prioress, who was next in authority to herself, came to her and implored her to say what was grieving her. "Madam," said the Prioress, "if you will only tell us what we are to do, we will do it; anything to make you happy."

Angélique took the good Prioress at her word. The first thing to do was to restore the practice of having all things in common; in fact, to keep the vow of poverty. The enthusiasm of the young Abbess for the true Religious Life had kindled something of a like spirit in the others, and everything was brought into the common stock.

There is a quaint little story of one aged nun who could not bring herself to sacrifice a little garden which she had acquired, and which she kept pretty well to herself. For some time she held out, but at last she

yielded, and sent the key of her garden, much in the spirit of one who surrenders the last tower of a besieged fortress-it was indeed the key of her heart.

Angélique herself practised all sorts of austerities, slightly absurd ones, but as she said in after years, Que voulez vous? tout étoit bon en ce tems-la.

Somehow or other the news of the girl Abbess of seventeen who had begun the work of reforming her Monastery was noised abroad in the neighbouring Religious Houses, the inmates of which naturally took a good deal of interest in one another's affairs; and two nuns, fired with the desire of becoming Mère Angélique's children, obtained permission to leave their own Convent and enter Port Royal.

But there was another point to be gained; and this time the fight was harder, for it was not with nuns, all more or less ready to yield, and some of whom were already devoted to the Abbess, but it was with her father, the astute man of law, whose strong will would be surely able to overpower the girlish reformer.

Seclusion, that is, absolute withdrawal from the world, such was the Port Royal rule, in common with other Religious Houses. The rule might be inconvenient, or harsh, or unnatural, but it was the rule; and the question was, Would Angélique be able to convince her father and her family, who regarded Port Royal as the peculiar property of the Arnaulds, that the rule must be obeyed even to the exclusion of the relations of the Abbess?

M. Arnauld had forced his daughter into a life which involved a very real forsaking of her father's house. He had completely forgotten the original purpose and the ideal of the Religious Life; he had profaned that ideal by compelling two children to take vows at an age when they knew nothing of what they were forsaking. Angélique disconcerted him by taking her vows seriously, by making the discovery that

Christians often make-that words have meanings, and that the world, even in its most amiable guise, is at the last the enemy of the Christian. The resistance Angélique offered was right. Her own father had given her to the cloister just as he might have given her in marriage. She was compelled to resist her nearest and dearest if she would live a life of truth, not a living lie. This devotion to truth is perhaps that which characterises all Port Royalists. Austere, they were uncompromising, perhaps a little harsh and hard, but always with their eyes on Truth, their hearts fixed on the Eternal. "Paratum cor meum, Deus,"

they might have said.

Of course, for those who consider that the "Religious Life"1 has no place in the Church, and that there are no calls to "forsake all," Mère Angélique, and all other religious, are merely mistaken and unfortunate people. But the revival of the Religious Life in all its forms in our branch of the Church, and also of the perception that, whether in the world or in the cloister, God must come first, which is experienced in our own and in other branches of the Church of God, is among the great marks of life which, amid all the storms of controversy, gladden the hearts of those who "pray for the peace of Jerusalem."

But, to return: Angélique knew that the crisis must come. It is, by the way, amusing to note that M. Arnauld, who was doing his best to get Angélique's election properly confirmed at Rome, sent in an account of the reform which his daughter was establishing at Port Royal: "ce cher" M. Arnauld he had a very large share of the wisdom of the serpent.

But the "Parlement "2 of Paris was about to suspend its sittings; M. Arnauld would be able to resume his visits to the Abbey.

1 This phrase is merely used for convenience sake.

2 It is scarcely needful to remind our readers that the Parlement was "a court of law, which had grown into a corporation of lawyers and judges, and which claimed an indirect veto on the Royal legislation." -Wakeman, Ascendancy of France, p. 5.