Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays

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 death-bed 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. At forty she was still the wealthiest unmarried princess in Europe; fastidious in toilet, stainless in reputation, not lovely in temper, rigid in etiquette, learned in precedence, an oracle in court traditions, a terror to the young maids-of-honor, and always quarrelling with her own sisters, younger, fairer, poorer than herself. Her mind and will were as active as in