be an Abbess"; and a little while after, "I'll make my nuns do their duty."

M. Marion had contrived to persuade the goodnatured, not over-scrupulous King Henri to grant him the succession to two Abbeys for the two little grand-daughters-Port Royal for the elder, and St Cyr for little Agnès.

The Abbess of Port Royal at that time was Jeanne de Boulehart. She made no objection to the reception of the little Jacqueline (Angélique) as a coadjutor Abbess; indeed we are told that the good Jeanne in a spirit of prophecy exclaimed to her nuns, “You don't know what an excellent arrangement I have made for you to-day."

Angélique said that there were three abuses in the way in which she had been established at Port Royal.

The first was her grandfather's (M. Marion's) ambition to have two of his grand-daughters Abbesses.

The second was that she was professed as Abbess at eleven, in defiance of Church rules.

The third was the deceit practised on the Pope; it was falsely stated that she was seventeen years old.

Angélique also blames the then Superior, the Abbot of Citeaux, in that he assented to these plans.

As for St Cyr, a certain nun was to hold it until Jeanne (Agnès) was old enough.

The little girls were clothed as novices in 1599 and 1600 respectively, having arrived at the mature ages of nine and eight. The two little novices were brought up together at St Cyr, and quarrelled and played much like ordinary children. Jacqueline, however, was soon removed to the Abbey of Maubuisson to be educated. On Michaelmas Day, 1600, she was confirmed, and took the name, one day to become so famous, of Angélique. The reason for this change was that difficulties had been made at Rome about granting Bulls to so youthful an Abbess; and a change of name was thought advisable on renewing the request. She was solemnly professed as a religious in October, 1600.

For the present we may say that Maubuisson was a

ANGÉLIQUE'S PROFESSION

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fair example of the worst side of the decay of Religous Life. Port Royal represented the cold, worldly, but decorous religious house. Maubuisson, on the other hand, presented the sight of a scandalous and corrupt establishment.

Into this scene strangely enough our little Angélique was plunged. Madame D'Estrées, the Abbess, was the sister of the famous Gabrielle D'Estrées, and had been foisted on Maubuisson simply to gratify Gabrielle. Henri IV. played a mean trick on the then Abbess, who had been elected on account of her purity and goodness. The King paid her a surprise visit, learned that the election had not been confirmed, and left the unsuspicious Superior in the complete conviction that her late Royal guest was minded to confirm her election, from which pleasant dream she was rudely roused; the King obtained a Bull from Rome, bestowed the place on Madame D'Estrées, on which the poor Abbess hastened back to her original Convent. The King promptly held a Chapter of the unfortunate nuns, who of course had but one choice. Madame D'Estrées was worthy of her Royal patron and of her sister.

Angélique always regarded her Profession as valid and binding. In early years, great as was her desire, for some time, to break with her Religious Life, she was always restrained, partly, no doubt, by the warm affection she had for her parents, but partly by a strong feeling that her vows had been made before God and were irrevocable. She said, many years afterwards, to her brother Antoine Arnauld: "Once I had taken my vows when I was nine, I could never get it out of my head that I was obliged in conscience to have no other spouse than Jesus Christ. For I regarded this vow, not as a gift which I had made to Him, and which I was not yet capable to give, on account of my age, but as an extreme honour which He had done me to take me as His daughter and His bride, and I considered that I should indeed deserve reproof if I withdrew from so honourable an estate. But in spite of all this I did not live like a true religious, for I was not converted until I was seventeen."

Angélique remained about two years in Maubuisson, of which Convent we shall have much to say later on. In 1602 Madame de Boulehart, Abbess of Port Royal, died, and her young coadjutor Abbess, who was then eleven years old, returned to her Convent and was warmly welcomed by her nuns.

M. de la Croix, head of the Cistercian Order, under whose jurisdiction the Abbey had been placed from its foundation, solemnly professed the new Abbess, as Abbess, on Michaelmas Day, 1602. She made on that day her first Communion.

For this, the most solemn day of a youthful life, there appears to have been absolutely no preparation. Some one slipped into Angélique's hands a little book of devotion, which she read with great attention, and she speaks of that day as one on which she did realise the presence of God.

We in England are sometimes shocked at the accounts of the hasty preparation, or the entire lack of preparation, bestowed on candidates for Confirmation in former generations. Our brethren of another Communion do not seem to have fared much better at times; coldness and absence of spiritual ideals were not confined to the English Church.

Poor little Abbess! She was compelled to assume the duties of her office, and she had already received into the novitiate a girl of seventeen, who became one of the two to whom she opened her heart on the projects of reform, when those projects had ripened. The same nun (Catherine de St Paul) gave much information about these early days to Angélique de St Jean, who compiled the Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire de Port Royal.

For some years the life at Port Royal went on in the old routine: calm, respectable, a little dull, perhaps, and certainly with no over-abundance of religious zeal. Agnès, who was at St Cyr, often paid visits to her sister; at that particular period of their lives the younger sister showed more fervour than did Angélique. When she was nine, she knew the Psalter by heart, and she

SYMPTOMS OF "ACCEDIA"

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was already careful to say the Offices at the right time. Angélique was by no means so exact. As far as possible she varied the monotony by reading Plutarch. (Plutarch was much in vogue then both in England and France, and romances of the kind which had so strongly influenced Shakespeare and other writers, for the seventeenth century was the age in which storytelling came into fashion.)

She also paid and received as many visits as she possibly could, and the pious soul of her mother was a good deal exercised by the free and easy and altogether unconventual life of the poor young Abbess. Her mother feared greatly that Angélique might be led into indiscretions, by no means uncommon in those days. And indeed the life of the young Abbess was extraordinarily free, and one can quite understand Mme. Arnauld's fears.

But Angélique's temptations were not of the sort which could lead to any sort of scandal, and the Abbot of Citeaux was quite satisfied when he made a visitation of the Convent in 1605. Port Royal was pre-eminently at that time a home of peace and quiet. Offices were said more or less punctually, and "convenable" amusements, chiefly games of cards and walks abroad, filled up the calm, uneventful days. A delightful life for an old lady of sixty, but for a healthy girl of fourteen what an existence! It is not wonderful that Angélique fell a prey to what, when one reads about it in the Mémoires, looks extremely like the particular disease of monasteries, "accedia.' She herself says that she only enjoyed playing, chattering, amusing herself, and that she was vexed to see that her elder sister Catherine (who used to pay visits to Port Royal before her marriage) was more devout than the Abbess herself.

The Religious Life grew daily more distasteful; she entered into correspondence with some Huguenot aunts (we remember that M. Arnauld the grandfather of "les nôtres" had in a temporary aberration embraced the Reformed Religion, and had found in the St Bartholomew a complete cure and antidote for the

poison of heresy). She had even some idea of taking refuge at La Rochelle, which was as yet the Huguenot "City of Refuge."

She fell ill in 1607, and her father and mother carried her off to their home in Paris. Here, the atmosphere of home restored her mental balance, as far as any inclination to the "Religion" was involved; but the pleasant comings and goings in her home, the uncles who were in the midst of all the excitement and interests of the life at Court, the intercourse with "mondaines,' the intoxicating air of Paris, doubled the longings for a life in the world, a life of action and enjoyment. The revolt was so natural, so healthy; it indicated the strength as yet stored up and lying dormant in the future Mère Angélique!

She would not have been the great woman she became had she not known what it is to renounce the world. A little feminine touch is naively related in the Mémoires -that our dear young Abbess contrived to get hold of and wore a corset for some little time, in order to improve her youthful figure!

M. Arnauld found out that at sixteen Angélique was not yet the devout or even the resigned religious that he wished her to become. As we shall see later, he did not want any extremes of piety, but he did want his daughter to accept the provision he had obtained for her. M. Arnauld is an excellent type of the "makethe-best-of-both-worlds sort of Christian," at least in this period of his life; as M. Sainte Beuve says in one of his inimitable phrases, both M. Arnauld and his father-in-law were "Chrétiens, mais des Chrétiens selon le monde; et le monde, sauf les modes et les apparences, se retrouve toujours et parle un peu le même." As he was slightly distrustful of his daughter's frame of mind, and as he knew perfectly well that she could, if she would, return to the world, M. Arnauld insisted one day on Angélique's signing a paper without reading it, which she did, her heart swelling with

1 Term always applied to the Reformed Faith in France by Huguenots.