fore to lose courage? No, I will hope in God though he should destroy me for ever. My soul was like iron so rusted with sin that it needed that fire of Divine Justice to purify it a little." All that she had suffered during those forty years was nothing to the martyrdom which she endured for the last nine years of her life. The Face of God seemed to be hidden from her; every spiritual exercise, even the very mention of the name of of God, pierced her with agony; the direction of souls, for which in all her previous sufferings she had always preserved a singular gift of illumination, now became a source of fearful temptation. She could not hear of a suffering without enduring it, nor of a sin without imagining that she had committed it. To one who spoke to her of some interior suffering, "Oh, my Mother," she exclaimed, with clasped hands and tears in her eyes, have mercy on me, I shall be overwhelmed by this temptation; I see it coming, it is upon me now!" Her one guide throughout this dark night was obedience. She placed herself in the hands of the Mère de Châtel, then Superioress of Annecy, who used in her behalf all the spiritual wisdom which both had learnt from S. Francis of Sales. It was summed up in a few words: "Never speak of these things even to God or to yourself, and never make any examination upon them; hide your sufferings from yourself, as if you felt it not. Fix your eyes upon God, and if you can speak to Him, speak to Him of Himself." But she was soon to lose all human consolation; the Mère de Châtel, who had so long been her support, was taken from her. One after another, her first companions went before her to heaven, and upon the death of the Mère de Châtel she was once more compelled to accept the superiorship of Annecy. Her long agony was now nearly at an end. It passed away three months before her death, our Lord being pleased to make use of the ministry of S. Vincent of Paul to give peace to her soul. She opened her heart to him at Paris for the last time. she lay on her dying bed at Moulins, some one said to her: "Do you not hope that your blessed Father will come to meet you?" "Assuredly," she replied, "I expect him, for he promised me he would."

As she was dying with the name of Jesus on her lips, a priest, who had heard that she was in her agony, knelt down to make an act of contrition for all the sins which she had committed during her life, when there appeared to him a globe of fire which, as it rose in the air, was met by another; and then the two ascended together towards heaven, where they were united to a third, far greater and more luminous. It was revealed to him by an interior voice that the two globes

which he first saw were the souls of S. Francis of Sales and S. Jane Frances de Chantal, and that the greater and more glorious orb was the Divine Essence, to which they were now united. As soon as he heard of the decease of the blessed Mother, this priest, who had been her spiritual guide ever since the death of S. Francis, said Mass for her repose. When he came to the memento for the dead, he again witnessed the same vision, by which he was assured that she stood in no need of prayer or sacrifice.

S. Francis had kept his promise-and the eternal reunion of these two blessed souls was thus witnessed and attested by S. Vincent of Paul.*

In no country has the influence of woman been greater for good or for evil than in France, and in no period of its history has that influence been more apparent than in the Not a few of the great historic names seventeenth century. which fill the first annals of the Visitation were borne by women who had been distinguished in the most brilliant court in Christendom for their beauty, their talents, or their political influence, before they laid all these things aside for the humble habit of religion. A late distinguished philosopher,† wearied of seeking the true, the beautiful, and the good, amidst the shadows of pantheism, ecclecticism, and spiritualism, caught a reflection of their rays from the noble hearts of that great century, which made him almost, if not altogether a Christian. In his fervent invocation of these friends of his soul, whose society had in his later years in some measure filled the aching void of his lonely heart and baffled intellect, he names Marie Louise de Lafayette, the high-souled and single-minded maiden, who loved and was beloved by Louis XIII. with a pure and holy affection, and who at last extricated his weak though virtuous will from the bondage of Richelieu, and reconciled him with his neglected wife. It was the victory obtained by seeking to do right, rather than to do good. Louise obeyed her vocation to religion, leaving her vast but perilous means of usefulness behind her, and within the cloister of the Visitation she obtained that mastery over the king's irresolute will, which she had failed to win by all the fascination of her presence.

By the side of Mdlle. de Lafayette appears the beautiful and intellectual Mdlle. de Martignat, who left the Court of Mary de Medici to receive the veil of the Visitation from the hand of S. Jane Frances, and whose long life in religion was

passed in continual intercession for souls suffering in purgatory or in danger of sin. Her charity was especially directed to the relief of those with whose perils she was so familiar, the kings and great ones of the earth. The revelation made to her of the salvation of the Duke de Némours, who had been killed on the spot in a duel with his brother-in-law, the Duke de Beaufort, sheds a ray of hope on many a seemingly hopeless death-bed. It was revealed to the Mère de Martignat that in the very twinkling of an eye, in which he felt the sword's stroke, he had had time to raise his heart to God, and to obtain His pardon. She flew to ask permission of the Superioress to offer herself as a sacrifice for that poor soul. "Oh! my mother, I have seen that soul in purgatory, but so low down, and for so long a time, that my heart fainted within me at the sight. Alas! who shall deliver him? Perhaps no one, till the great day of judgment." The Superioress, seeming to doubt the salvation of this soul, "Ah!" said she, "a thousand souls would have been lost, in such circumstances. He had but a moment to co-operate with the grace of God, and he used it. He had not lost faith; it was like a match ready to take fire. The divine spark touched it. Never, perhaps, since the devil has been a devil, was he more disappointed than to see this prey escape him." The intense sufferings which fell upon Marie Dénise de Martignat, and never left her till the day of her death, proved that her heroic sacrifice had been accepted.

As the Sisters of S. Vincent were sent chiefly to the poor, so the Visitation of that day seems to have had a special mission of healing for broken hearts, in that order of society to which its first members chiefly belonged. It was the nobility of France whose sins were to be so fearfully visited and so nobly atoned, for, by the hideous crimes and heroic virtues of the Revolution, whose daughters now offered this pure oblation to God; and here they found sympathy and solace for their sorrows, and, more than all, a nursery and a training for their children, which formed the wives and mothers of the next generation upon the model of the foundress of the Visitation. There was scarcely an illustrious sufferer in those days but sought shelter or sympathy from her daughters. Henrietta Maria, the woeful widow of our Charles I., chose to shelter her grief in the cloisters of the Visitation at Chaillot, rather than in the stately halls of the Louvre; Mary of Modena, the discrowned queen of James II., found such peace there as she had rarely enjoyed upon the throne; and Elizabeth de Vendome, the unhappy Duchess de Nemours, widowed by the hand of her own brother

triumphed over lax confessors and refractory nuns."* With an energy and a power like that of S. Teresa herself, she had done a work like hers for her Order against the current of the wills, both of her subjects and her superiors; and she had begun that work at an age when S. Teresa was yet deep in romances of chivalry; but unlike her, she had not, alas! begun her victories by the conquest of herself, and when she first met S. Francis of Sales that work was still to be done. Conscious of her spiritual needs, and earnestly desirous of a remedy, she laid them open to him and besought his direction, being attracted less (it would seem) by his winning sweetness, than by the inflexible firmness which accompanied it, and which promised her a protection against herself. In S. Jane Frances she found a spirit in many respects congenial with her own, and she passionately implored both the Saints to accede to her desire of laying aside the crozier which her young hands had so gloriously wielded, for a cell in the Visitation. S. Jane Frances warmly seconded her prayer; but the holy founder hesitated to receive into his new Institute a spirit which he probably foresaw might endanger its humility and its peace. He died while the matter was still in abeyance. S. Jane Frances had left Paris, and Marie Angélique fell under the ill-omened influence of the Abbé de Saint-Cyran. She became his disciple and his tool; and unhappily brought not only her own community, but every member of her influential and strong-minded family under the sway of his over-mastering and baneful genius. family of Frémyot belonged to the noblesse de la robe, who had hereditary possession of the bar and the judicature. It was a race marked, moreover, by stern inflexibility of aim and lawyer-like subtilty in the use of means. By the agency chiefly of such men Jansenism gained and maintained its hold upon the parliaments of France, and through them upon the nation at large. And thus it was that this noblehearted woman, who had done such great things and who might have done still greater for the Church of France, became the instrument to foster within its pale that unlovely and unloving heresy which at that time infested her pale. We may hope that she was blinded by her guide as to the judgment of the Church upon his system, for she died of a broken heart when it was unequivocally made known to her, leaving her niece (another Angélique) with a harder heart

The

See Father Dalgairns's "Introduction to the Devotion to the Sacred Heart."