He appeared at Port-Royal with a commissary and two exons.  He asked for the prioress; she was at church:  when service was over, he summoned all the nuns; one, old and very paralytic, was missing.  “Let her be brought,” said M. d’Argenson.  “His Majesty’s orders are,” he continued, “that you break up this assemblage, never to meet again.  It is your general dispersal that I announce to you; you are allowed but three hours to break up.”  “We are ready to obey, sir,” said the mother-prioress; “half an hour is more than sufficient for us to say our last good by, and take with us a breviary, a Bible, and our regulations.”  And when he asked her whither she meant to go, “Sir, the moment our community is broken up and dispersed, it is indifferent to me in what place I may be personally, since I hope to find God wherever I shall be.”  They got into carriages, receiving one after another the farewell and blessing of the mother-prioress, who was the last to depart, remaining firm to the end there were two and twenty, the youngest fifty years old; they all died in the convents to which they were taken.  A seizure was at once made of all papers and books left in the cells; Cardinal Noailles did not interfere.  M. de St. Cyran had depicted him by anticipation, when he said that the weak were more to be feared than the wicked.  He was complaining one day of his differences with his bishops.  “What can you expect, Monsignor?” laughingly said a lady well disposed to the Jansenists; “God is just; it is the stones of Port-Royal tumbling upon your head.”  The tombs were destroyed; some coffins were carried to a distance, others left and profaned; the plough passed over the ruins; the hatred of the enemies of Port-Royal was satiated.  A few of the faithful, preserving in their hearts the ardent faith of M. de St. Cyran, narrowed, however, and absorbed by obstinate resistance, a few theologians dying in exile, and leaving in Holland a succession of bishops detached from the Roman church,—­this was all that remained of one of the noblest attempts ever made by the human soul to rise, here below, above that which is permitted by human nature.  Virtues of the utmost force, Christianity zealously pushed to its extremest limits, and the most invincible courage, sustained the Jansenists in a conscientious struggle against spiritual oppression; its life died out, little by little, amongst the dispersed members.  The Catholic church suffered therefrom in its innermost sanctuary.  “The Catholic religion would only be more neglected if there were no more religionists,” said Vauban, in his Memoire in favor of the Protestants.  It was the same as regarded the Jansenists.  The Jesuits and Louis XIV., in their ignorant passion, for unity and uniformity, had not comprehended that great principle of healthy freedom and sound justice of which the scientific soldier had a glimmering.