Above all, Jansenism seemed made for Madeleine in that it promised a remedy for man’s ‘sick will,’ a remedy which perhaps would be more efficacious than steel and white wine for the lassitude, the moral leakage, the truly ‘sick will’ from which she had suffered so long. The Jansenist remedy was a complete abandonment to God, ‘an oarless drifting on the full sea of Grace,’ and at first this brought to her a sense of very great peace.
Her favourite of the Port-Royal books was La Fréquente Communion, in which the Père Arnauld brought to bear on Theology in full force his great inheritance, the Arnauld legal mind, crushing to powder the treatise of a certain Jesuit priest who maintained that a Christian can benefit from the Eucharist without Penitence.
Influenced by this book, very few Jansenists felt that they had reached the state of grace necessary for making a good Communion.
So, what with self-examination, self-congratulation, and abstaining from the Eucharist, for a time Jansenism kept Madeleine as happy and occupied as a new diet keeps a malade imaginaire. Her emotions when she danced became more articulate. She saw herself the new abbess of Port-Royal, the wise, tender adviser of the ‘Solitaires,’ Mère Angélique with a beautiful humility having abdicated in her favour, ‘for here is one greater than I.’ She went through her farewell address to her nuns, an address of infinite beauty and pathos. She saw herself laid out still and cold in the Chapel, covered with flowers culled by royal fingers in the gardens of Fontainebleau, with the heart-broken nuns sobbing around her. Finally the real Madeleine flung herself on her bed, the tears streaming from her eyes. Her subtle enemy, amour-propre, had taken the veil.
She had started a diary of her spiritual life, in which she recorded the illuminations, the temptations, the failures, the reflections, the triumphs, of each day. The idea suddenly occurred to her of sending the whole to Mère Agnès Arnauld, who was head of the Paris Port-Royal. She wrote her also a letter in which she told her of certain difficulties that had troubled her in the Jansenist doctrine, suggested by the Five Propositions. These were conclusions of an heretical nature, drawn from Jansen’s book and submitted to the Pope. The Jansenists denied that they were fair conclusions, but in their attempt to prove this, they certainly laid themselves open to the charge of obscurantism. She included in her letter the following énigme she had written on amour-propre, on the model of those of the Abbé Cotin, whose fertile imagination was only equalled by his fine disregard of the laws of prosody.
Je brûle, comme Narcisse, de ma propre flamme,
Quoique je n’aie pas
L’excuse des doux appas
De ce jeune conquérant des cœurs de dames.