There was another monastery called Port Royal, at Paws, in addition to the one in question.  It was now pretended that the latter had only been allowed to exist by tolerance, and that it was necessary one should cease to exist.  Of the two, it was alleged that it was better to preserve the one, at Paris.  A decree in council was, therefore, rendered, in virtue of which, on the night from the 28th to the 29th of October, the abbey of Port Royal des Champs was secretly invested by troops, and, on the next morning, the officer in command made all the inmates assemble, showed them a ‘lettre de cachet’, and, without giving them more than a quarter of an hour’s warning, carried off everybody and everything.  He had brought with him many coaches, with an elderly woman in each; he put the nuns in these coaches, and sent them away to their destinations, which were different monasteries, at ten, twenty, thirty, forty, and even fifty leagues distant, each coach accompanied by mounted archers, just as public women are carried away from a house of ill-fame!  I pass in silence all the accompaniments of this scene, so touching and so strangely new.  There have been entire volumes written upon it.

The treatment that these nuns received in their various prisons, in order to force them to sign a condemnation of themselves, is the matter of other volumes, which, in spite of the vigilance of the oppressors, were soon in everybody’s hands; public indignation so burst out, that the Court and the Jesuits even were embarrassed with it.  But the Pere Tellier was not a man to stop half-way anywhere.  He finished this matter directly; decree followed decree, ‘Lettres de cachet’ followed ’lettres de cachet’.  The families who had relatives buried in the cemetery of Port Royal des Champs were ordered to exhume and carry them elsewhere.  All the others were thrown into the cemetery of an adjoining parish, with the indecency that may:  be imagined.  Afterwards, the house, the church, and all the buildings were razed to the ground, so that not one stone was left upon another.  All the materials were sold, the ground was ploughed up, and sown—­not with salt, it is true, but that was all the favour it received!  The scandal at this reached even to Rome.  I have restricted myself to this simple and short recital of an expedition so military and so odious.

ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS: 

Compelled to pay, who would have preferred giving voluntarily
Conjugal impatience of the Duc de Bourgogne
Desmarets no longer knew of what wood to make a crutch
He was so good that I sometimes reproached him for it
Indiscreet and tyrannical charity
Jesuits:  all means were good that furthered his designs
Said that if they were good, they were sure to be hated