There was a pause, and then with a very tender light in her eyes, Mère Agnès said: ‘I wish you could become acquainted with one of our young sisters—Sœur Jacqueline de Sainte-Euphémie Pascal—but she is at Port-Royal des Champs. She was born with every grace of the understanding, and affections most sensible to earthly joys and vanities, but in her sacrifice she has been as unflinching as Abraham. Hers is a rare spirit.’
Madeleine felt a sudden wave of jealousy pass over her for this paragon.
‘What is her age?’ she asked resentfully.
‘Sœur Jacqueline de Sainte-Euphémie? She must be in her twenty-eighth year, I should say. Courage, you have yet many years in which to overtake her,’ and she looked at Madeleine with considerable amusement. With the intuitive insight, which from time to time flashed across her habitual abstractedness, she had divined the motive of Madeleine’s question.
‘When she was twelve years old,’ she went on, ‘she was smitten by the smallpox, which shore her of all her comeliness. On her recovery she wrote some little verses wherein she thanked God that He had spared her life and taken her beauty. Could you have done that? Alas, when I was young I came exceeding short of it in grace. I mind me, when I was some ten years old, being deeply incensed against God, in that He had not made me “Madame de France”! My soul was a veritable well of vanity and amour-propre.’
‘So is mine!’ cried Madeleine, with eager pride.
Again Mère Agnès looked much amused.
‘My child, ’tis a strange cause for pride! And bear in mind, I am the last creature to take as your pattern. No one more grievously than I did ever fall away from the Grace of Baptism. Since when, notwithstanding all the privileges and opportunities of religion afforded by a cloistered life and the conversation of the greatest divines of our day, I have not weaned myself from the habit of sinning. But one thing I have attained by the instrument of Grace, and that is a “hunger and thirst after righteousness” that springs from the very depths of my soul. I tell you this, that you may be of good courage, for, believe me, my soul was of an exceeding froward and inductile complexion.’
‘Did you always love Our Lord with a direct and particular love?’ Madeleine asked.
‘I cannot call to mind the time when I did not. Do you love Him thus?’