“No, sir,” she replied; “I am incomparably more dismayed at what I see happening in our house. For, indeed, I came hither to die here, but I did not come to see all that I now see, and I had no reason to expect the kind of treatment we are having. Sir, sir, this is man’s day; God’s day will come, who will reveal many things and avenge everything.” She died on the 6th of August, 1661, murmuring over and over again, “Good by; good by!” And, when she was asked why she said that, she replied simply, “Because I am going away, my children.” She had given instructions to bury her in the preau (court-yard), and not to have any nonsense (badineries) after her death. “I am your Jonas,” she said to the nuns; “when I am thrown into the whale’s belly the tempest will cease.” She was mistaken; the tempest was scarcely beginning.
Cardinal de Retz was still titular Archbishop of Paris, and rather favorable to Jansenism. It was, therefore, the grandvicars who prepared the exhortation to the faithful, calling upon them to accept the papal decision touching Jansen’s book. There was drawn up a formula or formulary of adhesion, “turned with some skill,” says Madame Perier her biography of Jacqueline Pascal, and in such a way that subscription did not bind the conscience, as theologians most scrupulous about the truth affirmed; the nuns of Port-Royal, however, refused to subscribe. “What hinders us,” said a letter to Mother Angelica de St. Jean from Jacqueline Pascal, Sister St. Euphemia in religion, “what hinders all the ecclesiastics who recognize the truth, to reply, when the formulary is presented to them to subscribe, ‘I know the respect I owe the bishops, but my conscience does not permit me to subscribe that a thing is in a book in which I have not seen it,’ and after that wait for what will happen? What have we to fear? Banishment and dispersion for the nuns, seizure of temporalities, imprisonment and death, if you will; but is not that our glory, and should it not be our joy? Let us renounce the gospel or follow the maxims of the gospel, and deem ourselves happy to suffer somewhat for righteousness’ sake. I know that it is not for daughters to defend the truth, though one might say, unfortunately, that since the bishops have the courage of daughters, the daughters must have the courage of bishops; but, if it is not for us to defend the truth, it is for us to die for the truth, and suffer everything rather than abandon it.”
Jacqueline subscribed, divided between her instinctive repugnance and her desire to show herself a “humble daughter of the Catholic church.” “It is all we can concede,” she said; “for the rest, come what may, poverty, dispersion, imprisonment, death, all this seems to me nothing in comparison with the anguish in which I should pass the remainder of my life if I had been wretch enough to make a covenant with death on so excellent an occasion of paying to God the vows of fidelity which our lips have pronounced.” “Her health was so shaken by the shock which all this business caused her,” writes Madame Prier, “that she fell dangerously ill, and died soon after.” “Think not, I beg of you, my father,” she wrote to M. Arnauld, “firm as I may appear, that nature does not greatly apprehend all the consequences of this; but I hope that grace will sustain me, and it seems to me as if I feel it.” “The king does all he wills,” Madame de Guemenee had said to M. Le Tellier, whom she was trying to soften towards Port-Royal; “he makes princes of the blood, he makes archbishops and bishops, and he will make martyrs likewise.” Jacqueline Pascal was “the first victim” of the formulary.
She was not the only one. “It will not stop there,” said the king, to whom it was announced that the daughters of Port-Royal consented to sign the formulary on condition only of giving an explanation of their conduct. Cardinal de Retz had at last sent in his resignation. M. du Marca, archbishop designate in succession to him, died three days after receiving the bulls from Rome; Hardouin de Porefix had just been nominated in his place. He repaired to Port-Royal. The days of grace were over, the nuns remained indomitable.
“What is the use of all your prayers?” said he to Sister Christine Brisquet; “what ground for God to listen to you? You go to Him and say, ‘My God, give me Thy spirit and Thy grace; but, my God, I do not mean to subscribe; I will take good care not to do that for all that may be said.’ After that, what ground for God to hearken to you?” He forbade the nuns the sacraments. “They are pure as angels and proud as demons,” repeated the archbishop angrily, as he left the convent. On the 25th of August he returned to Port-Royal, accompanied by a numerous escort of ecclesiastics and exons. “When I say a thing, so it must be,” he said as he entered; “I will not eat my words.” He picked out twelve nuns, who were immediately taken away and dispersed in different monasteries. M. d’Andilly was at the gate, receiving in his carriage his sister, Mother Agnes, aged and infirm, and his three daughters doomed to exile. “I had borne up all day without weeping and without inclination thereto,” writes Mother Angelica de St. Jean on arrival at the Annonciades bleues; “but when night came, and, after finishing all my prayers, I thought to lay me down and take some rest, I felt myself all in a moment bruised and lacerated in every part by the separations I had just gone through; I then found sensibly that, to escape weakness in the hour of deep affliction, there must be no dropping of the eyes that have been lifted to the mountains.” Ten months later the exiled nuns returned, without having subscribed, to Port-Royal des Champs, a little before the moment when M. de Saci, who had become their secret director since the death of M. Singlin, was arrested, together with his secretary, Fontaine, at six in the morning, in front of the Bastille. “As he had for two years past been expecting imprisonment, he had got the epistles of St. Paul bound up together so as to always carry them about with him. ‘Let them do with me what they please,’ he was wont to say; ‘wherever they put me, provided that I have my St. Paul with me, I fear nothing.’” On the 13th of May, 1666, the day of his arrest, M. de Saci had for once happened to forget his book. He was put into the Bastille, after an examination “which revealed a man of much wit and worth,” said the king himself. Fontaine remained separated from him for three months. “Liberty, for me, is to be with M. de Saci,” said the faithful secretary; “open the door of his room and that of the Bastille, and you will see to which of the two I shall run. Without him everything will be prison to me; I shall be free wherever I see him.” At last he had the joy of recovering his well-beloved master, strictly watched and still deprived of the sacraments. Like Luther at Wartburg, he was finishing the revisal of his translation of the Bible, when his cousins, MM. de Pomponne and Arnauld, entered his room on the 31st of October, 1668. They chatted a while without any appearance of impatience on the part of M. de Saci. “You are free,” said his friends at last, who had wanted to prove him; “and they showed him the king’s order, which he read,” says Abbe Arnauld, “without any change of countenance, and as little affected by joy as he had been a moment before by the longinquity of his release.”
He lived fifteen years longer, occupied, during the interval of rest which the Peace of the Church restored to Port-Royal, in directing and fortifying souls. He published, one after another, the volumes of his translation of the Bible, with expositions (eclaircissements) which had been required by the examiners. In 1679 the renewal of the king’s severities compelled him to retire completely to Pomponne. On the 3d of January, 1684, at seventy-one years of age, he felt ill and went to bed; he died next day, without being taken by surprise, as regarded either his affairs or his soul, by so speedy an end. “O blessed flames of purgatory!” he said, as he breathed his last. He had requested to be buried at Port-Royal des Champs; he was borne thither at night; the cold was intense, and the roads were covered with snow; the carriages were escorted by men carrying torches. The nuns looked a moment upon the face of the saintly director, whom they had not seen for so many years; and then he was lowered into his grave. “Needs hide in earth what is but earth,” said Mother Angelica de St. Jean, in deep accents and a lowly voice, “and return to nothingness what in itself is but nothing.” She was, nevertheless, heart-broken, and tarried only for this pious duty to pass away in her turn. “It is time to give up my veil to him from whom I received it,” said she. A fortnight after the death of M. de Saci, she expired at Port-Royal, just preceding to the tomb her brother M. de Luzancy, who breathed his last at Pomponne, where he had lived with M. de Saci. “I confess,” said the inconsolable Fontaine, “that when I saw this brother and sister stricken with death by that of M. de Saci, I blushed— I who thought I had always loved him—not to follow him like them; and I became, consequently, exasperated with myself for loving so little in comparison with those persons, whose love had been strong as death.” The human heart avenges itself for the tortures men pretentiously inflict upon it: the disciples of St. Cyran thought to stifle in their souls all earthly affections, and they died of grief on losing those they loved. “Their life ebbed away in those depths of tears,” as M. Vinet has said.
The great Port-Royal was dead with M. de Saci and Mother Angelica de St. Jean, faithful and modest imitators of their illustrious predecessors. The austere virtue and the pious severance from the world existed still in the house in the Fields, under the direction of Duguet; the persecution too continued, persistent and noiseless; the king had given the direction of his conscience to the Jesuits; from Father La Chaise, moderate and prudent, he had passed to Father Letellier, violent and perfidious; furthermore, the long persistence of the Jansenists in their obstinacy, their freedom of thought which infringed the unity so dear to Louis XIV., displeased the monarch, absolute even in his hour of humiliation and defeat. The property of Port-Royal was seized, and Cardinal de Noailles, well disposed at bottom towards the Jansenists, but so feeble in character that determination, disgusted him as if it were a personal insult, ended by once more forbidding the nuns the sacraments; the house in the Fields was surpressed, and its title merged in that of Port-Royal in Paris, for some time past replenished with submissive nuns. Madame de Chateau-Renaud, “the new abbess, went to take possession; the daughters of Mother Angelica protested, but without violence, as she would have done in their place.” On the 29th of October, 1709, after prime, Father Letellier having told the king that “Madame de Chateau-Renaud dared not to go to Port-Royal des Champs, being convinced that those headstrong, disobedient, and rebellious daughters would laugh at the king’s decree, and that, unless his Majesty would be pleased to give precise orders to disperse them, it would never be possible to carry it out,” the king, being pressed in this way, sent his orders to M. d’Argenson, lieutenant of police.