Other heroines went into convents, joined the Carmelites, or those nuns of
Port-Royal of whom the Archbishop of Paris said that they lived in the
purity of angels and the pride of devils. Thither went Madame de Sable
herself, finally,--"the late Madame," as the dashing young abbes called
her when she renounced the world. Thither she drew the beautiful
Longueville also, and Heaven smiled on one repentance that seemed sincere.
There they found peace in the home of Angelique Arnould and Jacqueline
Pascal. And thence those heroic women came forth again, when religious war
threatened to take the place of civil: again they put to shame their more
timid male companions, and by their labors Jesuit and Jansenist found
peace.
But not such was to be the career of our Mademoiselle, who, at twenty, had
tried the part of devotee for one week and renounced it forever. No doubt,
at thirty-five, she "began to understand that it is part of the duty of a
Christian to attend High Mass on Sundays and holy days"; and her
description of the deathbed of Anne of Austria is a most extraordinary
jumble of the next world and this. But thus much of devotion was to her
only a part of the proprieties of life, and before the altar of those
proprieties she served, for the rest of her existence, with exemplary
zeal.
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