“Her health was so shaken by the shock which all this business caused her,” writes Madame Prier, “that she fell dangerously ill, and died soon after.”  “Think not, I beg of you, my father,” she wrote to M. Arnauld, “firm as I may appear, that nature does not greatly apprehend all the consequences of this; but I hope that grace will sustain me, and it seems to me as if I feel it.”  “The king does all he wills,” Madame de Guemenee had said to M. Le Tellier, whom she was trying to soften towards Port-Royal; “he makes princes of the blood, he makes archbishops and bishops, and he will make martyrs likewise.”  Jacqueline Pascal was “the first victim” of the formulary.

She was not the only one.  “It will not stop there,” said the king, to whom it was announced that the daughters of Port-Royal consented to sign the formulary on condition only of giving an explanation of their conduct.  Cardinal de Retz had at last sent in his resignation.  M. du Marca, archbishop designate in succession to him, died three days after receiving the bulls from Rome; Hardouin de Porefix had just been nominated in his place.  He repaired to Port-Royal.  The days of grace were over, the nuns remained indomitable.

“What is the use of all your prayers?” said he to Sister Christine Brisquet; “what ground for God to listen to you?  You go to Him and say, ’My God, give me Thy spirit and Thy grace; but, my God, I do not mean to subscribe; I will take good care not to do that for all that may be said.’  After that, what ground for God to hearken to you?” He forbade the nuns the sacraments.  “They are pure as angels and proud as demons,” repeated the archbishop angrily, as he left the convent.  On the 25th of August he returned to Port-Royal, accompanied by a numerous escort of ecclesiastics and exons.  “When I say a thing, so it must be,” he said as he entered; “I will not eat my words.”  He picked out twelve nuns, who were immediately taken away and dispersed in different monasteries.  M. d’Andilly was at the gate, receiving in his carriage his sister, Mother Agnes, aged and infirm, and his three daughters doomed to exile.  “I had borne up all day without weeping and without inclination thereto,” writes Mother Angelica de St. Jean on arrival at the Annonciades bleues; “but when night came, and, after finishing all my prayers, I thought to lay me down and take some rest, I felt myself all in a moment bruised and lacerated in every part by the separations I had just gone through; I then found sensibly that, to escape weakness in the hour of deep affliction, there must be no dropping of the eyes that have been lifted to the mountains.”  Ten months later the exiled nuns returned, without having subscribed, to Port-Royal des Champs, a little before the moment when M. de Saci, who had become their secret director since the death of M. Singlin, was arrested, together with his secretary, Fontaine, at six in the morning, in front of the Bastille.