“No, sir,” she replied; “I am incomparably more dismayed at what I see happening in our house.  For, indeed, I came hither to die here, but I did not come to see all that I now see, and I had no reason to expect the kind of treatment we are having.  Sir, sir, this is man’s day; God’s day will come, who will reveal many things and avenge everything.”  She died on the 6th of August, 1661, murmuring over and over again, “Good by; good by!” And, when she was asked why she said that, she replied simply, “Because I am going away, my children.”  She had given instructions to bury her in the preau (court-yard), and not to have any nonsense (badineries) after her death.  “I am your Jonas,” she said to the nuns; “when I am thrown into the whale’s belly the tempest will cease.”  She was mistaken; the tempest was scarcely beginning.

Cardinal de Retz was still titular Archbishop of Paris, and rather favorable to Jansenism.  It was, therefore, the grandvicars who prepared the exhortation to the faithful, calling upon them to accept the papal decision touching Jansen’s book.  There was drawn up a formula or formulary of adhesion, “turned with some skill,” says Madame Perier her biography of Jacqueline Pascal, and in such a way that subscription did not bind the conscience, as theologians most scrupulous about the truth affirmed; the nuns of Port-Royal, however, refused to subscribe.  “What hinders us,” said a letter to Mother Angelica de St. Jean from Jacqueline Pascal, Sister St. Euphemia in religion, “what hinders all the ecclesiastics who recognize the truth, to reply, when the formulary is presented to them to subscribe, ’I know the respect I owe the bishops, but my conscience does not permit me to subscribe that a thing is in a book in which I have not seen it,’ and after that wait for what will happen?  What have we to fear?  Banishment and dispersion for the nuns, seizure of temporalities, imprisonment and death, if you will; but is not that our glory, and should it not be our joy?  Let us renounce the gospel or follow the maxims of the gospel, and deem ourselves happy to suffer somewhat for righteousness’ sake.  I know that it is not for daughters to defend the truth, though one might say, unfortunately, that since the bishops have the courage of daughters, the daughters must have the courage of bishops; but, if it is not for us to defend the truth, it is for us to die for the truth, and suffer everything rather than abandon it.”

Jacqueline subscribed, divided between her instinctive repugnance and her desire to show herself a “humble daughter of the Catholic church.”  “It is all we can concede,” she said; “for the rest, come what may, poverty, dispersion, imprisonment, death, all this seems to me nothing in comparison with the anguish in which I should pass the remainder of my life if I had been wretch enough to make a covenant with death on so excellent an occasion of paying to God the vows of fidelity which our lips have pronounced.”