He died after forty years of service to the sisters. On his tomb, overgrown with weeds, where long grass snakes slither, you can still read the epitaph that Monsieur Dodart had written for him: “Always at work, outdoors, always silent, always alone before God, to whom he turned in frequent prayer; never inactive, except during divine service, never hasty except to be among the first there, kind to all, smiling and at peace, familiar only with God.”

Flavie Passart

When she was a novice, she kept as holy relics the fleas she found on Mother Geneviève Le Tardif, because they had sucked her blood. She had grown up among visions, ghosts, and necromancy, which she sometimes described to the girls in her charge. She applied the Holy Thorn to the tear duct of little Margot, who was cured after a few hours. News of the miracle brought a stop to the impending persecution. When she was shown the Formulary of the Five Propositions, no one was at first more fervent in refusing to yield. For three years, holy visions told her constantly she should not sign. Meanwhile she was also humiliated by certain other sisters for her thoughtlessness. In the end she signed—and it was she who gave Monsieur Chamillard the list of nuns who would be forcibly carried away from the monastery.

Angélique de Saint-Jean d’Arnauld d’Andilly

To the officers of justice and the bowmen who had come to take her away, she gave her name with the pride of one who sees in every conflict the traces of that struggle between the Arnauld family, ambassadors of God, and the world, represented by the Jesuits. She pursued an ideal of quiet heroism and haughty restraint, but she was obsessed by a constant dread that her lamp might go out. In an all-too-vivid dream, the detested Flavie Passart, avid collector of holy relics, appeared to her, taking the place of the Mother Superior and sending off the sisters. Off where? As for her, she was sent to a tiny cell at the convent of the Sisters of the Annunciation. Behind her were three locked doors that were opened three times a day. She felt she was in an unknown land, in a place from which she had no possibility of escaping along any path shorter than the whole of her remaining life. To prevent herself hearing the word of the Jesuits, she celebrated the divine services alone in her prison, singing and turning around the room in procession. With holy water, she sprinkled the bed to drive away the spirit of sloth; the table where she ate, to drive away luxury; the space between the bed and the wall that she used as an oratory, to drive away distraction; the place where she worked, to drive away curiosity and attachment to her work, which consisted of decorating reliquaries; and most of all the door of the cell, fearing that the spirit of seduction might enter. Her hours of happiness were at night: “I wish it could be seen how beautiful and pious all this is: to be alone like this, in the middle of the night, blessing God in a prison and singing his praises, being heard only by him, and hearing nothing except a deep silence in the midst of that great city, whose noise can still be heard at that hour, since the carriages still pass until well past eleven o’clock.²⁴⁶ In all this there is something more beautiful and irresistible than anything that can be described …” In the face of such words, Sainte-Beuve had to admit what it was he had spent many years searching for at Port-Royal: “If I, a layman and once a poet, who searches for poetry in everything, and also (need it be said?) in religion, am sometimes able to find it at Port-Royal, it is in this very place, it is that which I have just seen, and none other, a poetry with no sun and with no flower, which is all in intimacy and in fragrance.”²⁴⁷