“As he had for two years past been expecting imprisonment, he had got the epistles of St. Paul bound up together so as to always carry them about with him.  ’Let them do with me what they please,’ he was wont to say; ’wherever they put me, provided that I have my St. Paul with me, I fear nothing.’” On the 13th of May, 1666, the day of his arrest, M. de Saci had for once happened to forget his book.  He was put into the Bastille, after an examination “which revealed a man of much wit and worth,” said the king himself.  Fontaine remained separated from him for three months.  “Liberty, for me, is to be with M. de Saci,” said the faithful secretary; “open the door of his room and that of the Bastille, and you will see to which of the two I shall run.  Without him everything will be prison to me; I shall be free wherever I see him.”  At last he had the joy of recovering his well-beloved master, strictly watched and still deprived of the sacraments.  Like Luther at Wartburg, he was finishing the revisal of his translation of the Bible, when his cousins, MM. de Pomponne and Arnauld, entered his room on the 31st of October, 1668.  They chatted a while without any appearance of impatience on the part of M. de Saci.  “You are free,” said his friends at last, who had wanted to prove him; “and they showed him the king’s order, which he read,” says Abbe Arnauld, “without any change of countenance, and as little affected by joy as he had been a moment before by the longinquity of his release.”

He lived fifteen years longer, occupied, during the interval of rest which the Peace of the Church restored to Port-Royal, in directing and fortifying souls.  He published, one after another, the volumes of his translation of the Bible, with expositions (eclaircissements) which had been required by the examiners.  In 1679 the renewal of the king’s severities compelled him to retire completely to Pomponne.  On the 3d of January, 1684, at seventy-one years of age, he felt ill and went to bed; he died next day, without being taken by surprise, as regarded either his affairs or his soul, by so speedy an end.  “O blessed flames of purgatory!” he said, as he breathed his last.  He had requested to be buried at Port-Royal des Champs; he was borne thither at night; the cold was intense, and the roads were covered with snow; the carriages were escorted by men carrying torches.  The nuns looked a moment upon the face of the saintly director, whom they had not seen for so many years; and then he was lowered into his grave.  “Needs hide in earth what is but earth,” said Mother Angelica de St. Jean, in deep accents and a lowly voice, “and return to nothingness what in itself is but nothing.”  She was, nevertheless, heart-broken, and tarried only for this pious duty to pass away in her turn.  “It is time to give up my veil to him from whom I received it,” said she.  A fortnight after the death of M. de Saci, she expired at Port-Royal, just preceding to