s. She desired to take the conventual vows; but
he restrained her a long time. In the name of his mother, he gave her
his young sister to educate.

This occupation tranquillized her mind; but the beloved child soon
died at her house, in her arms. She prayed God "to take her own life,
or one of her children, in place of her dear pupil." Saint Francis
now consented that she should withdraw from the world. Her household
presented a piteous scene-her old father and father-in-law in tears;
her son, afterwards the father of Madame de Sevigne, prostrating
himself on the threshold to prevent her departure. But the passionate
response in her to the supposed call of Heaven broke all lower ties;
and she passed over the body of her son, and said farewell for ever
to her home. Saint Francis intrusted her with the formation of a new
religious order--the celebrated Order of the Visitation. In nurturing
this order, writing, travelling, praying in its interests, with
intervals of silent retreat, she spent the rest of her days. Her
intense temperament, her absolute faith and submission, her
systematic attention to business, her mystical ecstasies, her heroic
sacrifice, form a most original combination. Her life seems an
alternation of sober processes, stormy raptures, and stifling calms.
Her restless sensibility, girdled by fixed principle, gives us the
picture of a sea of fire breaking on a shore of frost. Her essay on
"Desire and the Agony of Disappointment" is a gush forced from the
bottom of a heart full of baffled feeling, under the pressure of a
mountain of pain. The constancy and power of her attachment to Saint
Francis, through all, are marvellous. On the day of his mother's
death, he writes, "I have given you the place of my mother in my
memorial at the mass: now you hold in my heart both her place and
your own." She writes to him, "Pray that I may not survive you."
Twenty years did she outlive him; finding, to the last, her greatest
pleasure in remembering him, carrying out his wishes, and
corresponding about him with his friends. Ten years after the death
of Saint Francis, Madame de Chantal had his tomb opened in the
presence of her community, and made an address before the embalmed
body. A testimony to the deep impression their friendship had made is
found in the myth, that, when on this occasion she reverently lifted
to her head the dead hand of the saint, it acknowledged her devotion
by an answering caress. The winning qua