ours after noon when all was in
uproar against me."

In this excitable city she remained only eight days; but in that short
space some good was effected. Now began a series of wanderings in search
of a home. Arriving at Nice, she felt acutely her desolate state. "I saw
myself without refuge or retreat, wandering and homeless. All the
artisans whom I saw in the shops appeared to me happy in having an abode
and refuge." After a stormy voyage to Genoa, she reached Verceil, on the
Sessia, and after a stay of a few months amongst kind friends, but
precluded from public work by ill-health, she decided to return once
more to Paris, and there pursue her labours.

Unaware of the king's despotic intolerance, she arrived in the French
capital on July 22, 1686, after an absence of five years, and soon
became the centre of an enlightened circle of friends, of high rank, who
were glad to listen to her teaching and to learn the way of the Lord
more perfectly. For a while all was quiet. But her enemies--among whom
her half-brother, Pere La Mothe, was ever the most virulent--were
meantime very busy, and at length a charge was laid against her before
the king. She was seized by warrant of a _lettre de cachet_, and
consigned to solitary imprisonment in the convent of Sainte Marie, in
the suburb of St. Antoine. Louis XIV. was now posing as a defender of
the faith, and was glad to show his Catholic zeal in the punishment of a
lady who was said to hold opinions similar to those of Molinos, whom he
had recently induced the Pope to condemn. Nearly four months previously
her eloquent disciple, Father la Combe, had been committed to the
Bastille for life.

VI.

IN PRISON.

On January 29, 1688--the first month of a year specially dear to English
lovers of civil and religious liberty--Madame Guyon was taken to her
cell in Sainte Marie. It was a room in an upper story of the convent,
with a barred door, and an opening for light and air on one side. Here
she was shut up from her friends; her gaoler, a crabbed, hard-hearted
nun, who treated her with the greatest rigour, regarding her not only as
a heretic, but as a hypocrite and out of her senses as well. Feeble in
body and in bad health, her mind was much troubled about her beloved
daughter, whom interested persons were trying to force into a marriage
of which Madame Guyon strongly disapproved. But though, under harsh
treatment, she became very ill, and was nigh unto death, her peace and