Mother Angélique suddenly left the convent of the Sisters of the Annunciation in the archbishop’s carriage. That journey in the darkness of a July night, through deserted squares, brought verses rushing to her mind. She still believed “this poetry was indistinguishable from religion itself.”²⁴⁸ Here, once again, Sainte-Beuve paused for several lines to ponder his secret, which, as always, had gone unnoticed: “A girl from Smirne or Chios, traveling by night, would have found in her memory the verses of Homer; a girl of today would have had the verses of Byron or Lamartine: yet she has only verses that at every step bear witness to the God of the Hebrews and of the Gospel.²⁴⁹ The flower has no time to bloom and fall before these events that are too real and too serious not to be daunting: to believe too much, to believe too truly, is not a happy state for the game of the imagination. Alas! one must not even feel too much. Should we say that this flower and this golden fruit is never to be picked except by lightly separating it from its ground?” Modern man cannot believe too firmly, but not because he has no wish to believe. Another strict devotion requires him to adhere to a certain falsity, sufficient to give breathing space to the imagination, which would otherwise be stifled, akin to suffocation in a dense substance. All of modernity is in that light separation from its ground, in that minuscule disjunction, in that imperceptible aperture that allows the void to circulate, in that unreal cutting edge that now separates every faith, every passion from itself.

CHRISTINE BRIQUET: I was infatuated by a certain aristocracy of devotion and found Port-Royal to be the place in the world that best understood what Grace is. Thus I was admitted to a sect of refined, kindred spirits, scornful of those who did not speak their language. It was said we were as pure as Angels and proud as Demons.

During our period of reclusion we sometimes strolled in the garden, among the plants tended by Mr. Jenkins, accompanied by the quiet incandescence of the sexual organs of the fireflies. On certain clear, frosty nights we even approached the outer wall. Immediately beyond it, between the glistening boughs of a tree, we could see the black outline of Monsieur de Sainte-Marthe, who murmured devotional discourses to us.

For a long time, as our sterner sisters well know, we were anxious to find out what is le Vernis des Maîtres, the finish of the Old Masters. We sat in a circle around the stone ring that marked the edge of our lush garden. Finally we agreed on the solution offered by little Marceline, who saw in it, first of all, a transparent unity, a sort of fusion in which all things, losing their original appearance as things, are each arranged beside the others in a certain order, penetrated by one and the same light, each reflected in the others, without a single word remaining outside, immune to such assimilation. Until her high-pitched voice had intimated these cogent definitions, we had searched long for a Rule to which we ourselves could be bound. And we did not know that sometimes our own Augustine himself, in the contrivances of that mechanism of his that killed off the Pelagians in whatever disguise, had concealed clear indications that might enable us to approach that place that we abhorred and at the same time craved—namely le Vernis des Maîtres. Unswerving light: patina of Grace! It was there that we recognized you, where we least wanted to find you, in the subtle play of forms and in the exchange of semblances! It was a solemn moment for us—and it can be said that this was when the first silent rift appeared in the abbey of Port-Royal-des-Champs.