In 1654 Mother Lhulier died. She was succeeded[417] in the office of Superior, as might have been expected, by Mother de la Fayette, whose election was much desired by the Queens of both England and France. These royal ladies considerately abstained, from expressing any opinion on the subject that the nuns' choice might be free, but their wishes must have been well known, and they no doubt fell in with those of the religious. Louise de la Fayette fully justified the prophecy of Mother Chantal, and if Chaillot owed much to the force of character and strength of will of the first Superior, it owed even more to the sagacious rule of the second, who endeared herself to all, whether religious or visitors. The house was already sufficiently established, but the financial condition gave great cause for anxiety, and almost justified the ungracious forebodings of the Archbishop of Paris, though kind friends, among whom Madame de Motteville was one of the most generous, gave considerable gifts, and some of the religious, such as her sister, the first professed nun of the house, were able to bring dowries. Queen Henrietta, who had no money to give, exerted herself to procure high-born little pupils for the convent school, whose liberal pensions were indeed for some time the chief support of the house. She set the example by placing her own little daughter, Princess Henrietta, under the care of Mother de la Fayette, and, as was hoped, her presence attracted other children of equal rank, among whom was the daughter of the Duchess of Nemours, who was afterwards Queen of Portugal. No children could have had a more beautiful home or a more apt instructress; for the nun, in her long years of conventual life, had lost no whit of the graces and accomplishments of her courtly youth or of her natural kindliness of heart. Her charity, indeed, rose superior even to the acerbities of theological passion. To her care was confided one of the exiled nuns of Port Royal, and it is recorded that, in honourable contrast to the Superiors of other religious houses charged with a like burden, she treated her unwelcome guest with constant courtesy and kindness.
Chaillot was to Henrietta a peaceful retreat after all her sorrows, for the world was strictly excluded, and the convent never became, like Val de Grace, a centre of political intrigue. There, removed from the troubles of dangerous schemes, of jarring religions, and of perpetual disappointments, the Queen regained something of the brightness and more than the tranquillity of her earlier years. The quiet days, passed in a round of prayer, of conversation, and of reading, flowed on undisturbed; and as she grew older she pleased herself by talking of the time when she should take up her abode permanently with her dear nuns, only, she said, she feared the damp of the river-side house a little. The kindness of the nuns, who saw in her not only a royal foundress, but a much-tried and suffering woman, was very great. At one time they even permitted her to join them at their recreation; and when this was found to be undesirable, her particular friends among the community were still ready to cheer and amuse her by their agreeable conversation, while they in their turn were often much diverted by her witty talk and stories of the surprising adventures which had befallen her, and which assuredly lost nothing in the telling. She was too clear-sighted and humorous not to appreciate that a queen was of necessity a troublesome member of a religious household, and she set herself to mitigate the annoyance as far as possible. She kept a very small household, only one lady-in-waiting, two or three other attendants, and as many girls to do the cooking, and she was careful to select only such women as would conduct themselves with quietness and decorum. One of her chief objects in choosing a situation on the outskirts of Paris had been to avoid the flow of idle visitors who in the city itself were a real annoyance to religious houses, and she refused to receive those who came on idle and frivolous pretexts. No one, however high his rank or pressing his business, was permitted to enter the enclosure without the leave of the Superior; and once, when Henrietta herself was unable to walk and was carried out from Paris in a chair, she insisted upon waiting at the gate of the convent until permission for her bearers to enter had been obtained. On all ordinary occasions she came down to the parlour and interviewed her visitors through the grill, even when the matter in hand was so intimate as that of trying on new clothes. She was equally considerate in any question which might disturb the religious routine of the house; and this delicate woman of over fifty, a princess by birth and a queen by marriage, whose health had been ruined by her troubles and privations, dragged herself from her bed at an early hour in the cold winter mornings that the community Mass, at which she liked to assist, might not be delayed.
Perhaps the greatest pleasure of Henrietta's life at Chaillot was the long conversations which she held with Mother de la Fayette, whose attraction was as great for her as years before it had been for her brother. Into the nun's sympathizing ear she poured the tale of her sorrows, her fears, and her aspirations, and from her she received those instructions and counsels which made her in her latter years, in the words of Madame de Motteville, a dévote without the pretensions of one. Mother de la Fayette taught her the art of meditation, an art which must have been difficult to the Queen's vivacious and easily distracted mind, and it was probably under her advice, as well as that of her confessor, that she refused to interest herself in the various theories of grace which the controversies of Port Royal were making a fashionable subject of conversation, and confined her spiritual reading to a perusal and reperusal of a book which has brought consolation to thousands of weary spirits, the De Imitatione Christi. Her confidence in Mother de la Fayette, which probably was due in some measure to the isolation and independence which her position as a nun gave her, was very great. It extended even to her worldly affairs, which she would hardly have discussed with an ordinary friend. It was still more marked with regard to those inner matters of the spirit in which heart speaks to heart. It was to this chosen friend that Henrietta made the touching confession, which Bossuet, through Madame de Motteville, was able to proclaim to the world after her death, that every day on her knees she thanked God that He had made her two things, a Christian and an unhappy Queen (une reine malheureuse). But the pleasure of this friendship was not to be Henrietta's to the end. In 1664 the Queen was in England. She kept up a constant communication with the nuns at Chaillot, and she was much gratified to receive a letter telling her of the return of Mother de la Fayette to the convent, from which she had been absent on a reforming mission to another religious house, and of her re-election as Superior. Very shortly another letter followed telling of the nun's sudden and serious illness, and hardly had the Queen grasped this intelligence when the news came that Louise de la Fayette was dead. Though she had spent twenty-seven years in religion she was even now only forty-six years old, and the community mourned her as one who had been taken away in the midst of her age. It is not likely that she ever regretted her early decision, for the position of a highly born nun in those days, particularly if she resided in the capital, was dignified and important, and compared favourably with that of the worldly woman in all but variety and excitement. A convent parlour might be, and often was, the scene of conversations as interesting and influential as any held in a salon or boudoir; and if Louise de la Fayette did not wield a distinctly political influence, it was rather from choice than from inability. Her early and tragic experience had taught her a real contempt for the fleeting glitter of Court life, and she never lost the spirit which, in her early convent days, led her, when one of her former friends reproached her for the change which had come over her, and hinted that she was mad, to reply gently: "No, I think I have left you the madness in leaving you the world."
She had no truer mourner than the Queen of England, who hastened to associate herself with the sorrowing community. "One day you tell me," she wrote, "of the serious condition of Mother de la Fayette, and the next you announce to me her death, which grieves me deeply. It is a loss for the whole Order, and particularly for our house. I cannot express to you the grief which I feel; it is too great. I pray you to tell all our daughters that I sympathize with their sorrow, and to assure them that they will always find me ready to make proof of the friendship which I have for them, and which I had for the Mother they are mourning."[418]
The picture which is presented of Henrietta through the medium of the Chaillot Papers, though in no sense false, is necessarily one-sided. All persons are influenced by the surroundings in which they find themselves, and if the Queen of England appeared to the nuns as a woman of almost saintly piety, whose every thought was given to heaven, and whose sorrows had completely detached her from the world, it is because thus she really was in their gentle society within the charmed walls of their convent. They did not see her in the outside world, where thorny problems again beset her, and where her old faults of temper and judgment tended to reappear. She had ever been not only a woman of strong religious and moral principle, but one whose qualities of heart and head had gained her more affection than often falls to the lot of a royal lady, and the effect of Chaillot was to emphasize and develop every virtue and charm she possessed, and to throw completely into the background all that was harsh and discordant and unlovely. Among the many portraits which remain to show her "in her habit as she lived" is one which represents her as the recluse of Chaillot, and which brings strong corroboration to the loving pen-and-ink sketches of the good nuns. A woman, still comely and showing the remains of great beauty, looks out upon us from the canvas; the heavy mourning dress corresponds with the deep melancholy of the face, and if there are no tears in the eyes, it is only because the painter has caught that saddest of all moments, when
"The eyes are weary and give o'er, But still the soul weeps as before."[419]
Thus she must often have appeared as she sat in her quiet room at Chaillot, or knelt in the convent chapel; and if in later years she was able to take up life again with something of her old courage and cheerfulness, it was because her wounded spirit had met healing and peace in this beloved home, which had been founded, as the archives of the Order recorded, for the consolation of a suffering woman, and which, after sheltering the sorrows of one exiled Queen of England, was to extend a like welcome to another hardly less unfortunate, Mary Beatrice d'Este, the wife of Henrietta's second son, James II.[420]
[ [402]"Mon inclination est de me retirir dans les Carmelites ... car après ma perte je ne puis avoir un moment de aucune joye."—Lettres de Henriette Marie à sa soeur Christine, p. 71.