With his dying breath M. de St. Cyran had said to M. Gudrin, physician to the college of Jesuits, “Sir, tell your Fathers, when I am dead, not to triumph, and that I leave behind me a dozen stronger than I.”  With all his penetration the director of consciences was mistaken; none of those he left behind him would have done his work; he had inspired with the same ardor and the same constancy the strong and the weak, the violent and the pacific; he had breathed his mighty faith into the most diverse souls, fired with the same zeal penitents and nuns, men rescued from the scorching furnace of life in the world, and women brought up from infancy in the shade of the cloister.  M. Arnauld was a great theologian, an indefatigable controversialist, the oracle and guide of his friends in their struggle against the Jesuits; M. de Sacy and M. Singlin were wise and able directors, as austere as M. de St. Cyran in their requirements, less domineering and less rough than he; but M. de St. Cyran alone was and could be the head of Jansenism; he alone could have inspired that idea of immolation of the whole being to the sovereign will of God, as to the truth which resides in Him alone.  Once assured of this point, M. de St. Cyran became immovable.  Mother Angelica pressed him to appear before the archbishop’s council, which was to pronounce upon his book Theologie familiere.  “It is always good to humble one’s self,” she said.  “As for you,” he replied, “who are in that disposition, and would not in any respect compromise the honor of the truth, you could do it; but as for me, I should break down before the eyes of God if I consented thereto; the weak are more to be feared sometimes than the wicked.”

Mother Angelica Arnauld, to whom these lines were addressed, was the most perfect image and the most accomplished disciple of M. de St. Cyran.  More gentle and more human than he, she was quite as strong and quite as zealous.  “It is necessary to be dead to everything, and after that to await everything; such was the motto of her inward life and of the constant effort made by this impassioned soul, susceptible of all tender affections, to detach herself violently and irrevocably from earth.  The instinct of command, loftiness and breadth of views, find their place with the holy priest and with the nun; the mind of M. de St. Cyran was less practical and his judgment less simple than that of the abbess, habituated as she had been from childhood to govern the lives of her nuns as their conscience.  A reformer of more than one convent since the day when she had closed the gates of Port-Royal against her father, M. Arnauld, in order to restore the strictness of the cloister, Mother Angelica carried rule along with her, for she carried within herself the government, rigid, no doubt, for it was life in a convent, but characterized by generous largeness of heart, which caused the yoke to be easily borne.