The Chevalier's daughter

by Lucy Ellen Guernsey

This retreat and course of study were to be my final preparation for the public profession which I was to make. In the course of it, I secluded myself entirely in my room, which was so far darkened that I had only light enough to read. I fasted rigorously, saw no company, was allowed no recreation, and no employment save my rosary and my book of meditations. And such meditations—full of the grossest and most material images of death and its consequences—the decay of the senses, the desolation of the sick-room and the dying-bed, the corruption of the body, the flames and brimstone, the wheels and spits of purgatory and hell! In the midst of all this, the penitent is invited to pause and resolve seriously upon his or her vocation, just at the time and in the state when she is most incapable of judging reasonably of anything. No wonder the book has been instrumental in leading so many into the cloister.

I finished my month's retreat and was admitted into the fold of the Holy Catholic Church, as she dares to call herself, in the chapel of the king himself, who had taken a great interest in my story. I should like to give my reader an account of this important passage of my life, but in truth I remember very little about it. I have an indistinct recollection of knocking at a closed door and requesting admission to the church, of various chants and prayers, of censers and waxen tapers, but it is all like a confused dream. In fact, I was already very ill, though nobody suspected it. I recollect receiving a great many congratulations, and being saluted by the king himself, who, having been converted himself (save the mark), took a great interest in all converts.

The next morning found me in the stupor of such a fever as I had suffered in Jersey, and for two or three weeks I lay between life and death, unconscious of everything. At last, however, the disease took a turn, and I was pronounced out of danger.

For some time longer, I lay quietly in my bed, slowly gaining strength and the ability to think connectedly. I was indeed like one waking from a long dream, and I began to realize what I had done. All the instructions I had received in my youth—the very psalms I had learned from my foster-mother—returned upon me, and would not be put aside. My eyes were opened, and I was compelled to see and to own that I had deliberately sold myself to the world, and that unless I could find a place of repentance—which did not yet appear to me—I must reckon upon paying the price of the bargain, namely, my immortal soul.

Little did my aunt and my nurse guess, while I lay so quietly with closed eyes, what was going on within. I would have given worlds to weep, but I had no tears. Neither could I pray. My heart was dry as dust, and the unmeaning repetitions which had served me instead of prayers now inspired me with nothing but weariness and disgust. Oh, how I hated that image of the Virgin which stood opposite my bed, dressed in laces and satin, and wearing my own mother's pearl clasp! I had myself given it away for this purpose in one of my fits of devotion. If I had dared, I would have crushed the simpering waxen baby under my feet.

The stronger I grew, the more wretched I found myself. I was obliged to go to confession, but Father Martien's threats and cajoleries had no more effect upon me than to make me hate him, as the one who had led me into the snare from which I could see no escape, unless it were such a martyrdom as my father's, or the slower hidden agonies of a convent prison. For these I was by no means prepared, and I well knew they were what awaited me if I allowed my change of feeling to become known.

The king, as I have hinted, had been converted by the jubilee which had taken place some years before. He was still in the fervor of his first love, and as his spiritual guides could not succeed in making him give up Madame de Montespan and company, they compromised by urging him on to more and greater acts of severity against the so-called heretics. One might be an unbeliever even to denying the existence of a God at all, but to be a Huguenot, or even a Jansenist, was an unpardonable sin. Two or three great men, indeed, who were necessary to him by their talents as soldiers or statesmen, were allotted a sort of protection, but even these soon found their lives unbearable, and either conformed like Turenne afterward, or fled from the kingdom.

For a young girl like myself, away from all near friends, and, above all, one who had only lately conformed, there would be no hope. Even a suspicion of relapse would lead at once to a convent with all its possible horrors. No, there was no escape. I had left my Lord, and he had left me. I had denied him, and he would deny me. I must go on as I had begun, and that to the bitter end.

It was not one of the least of my troubles that I felt all my love for Andrew revive again. I began to doubt the truth of the stories I had heard, and to wonder whether they had not been invented for the very sake of entrapping me. Doubt soon grew into conviction, and, reasonably or unreasonably, I no more believed that Andrew was married than that I was. No, he would return in a year—return to claim me and to find that I was lost to him, to truth, and heaven forever.

It was in the church where I was kneeling for the first time since my illness that this thought came to me, and I cast myself on the ground and groaned almost aloud. My aunt observed the movement, as indeed nothing escaped her eyes, and when she returned she remarked upon it, saying that such a display of devotion, however commendable in private, was not in good taste in such a public place, and that I would do well to restrain myself.