her;
we have now to see her utterly forsaken. He owed her a grudge for
being of greater worth than those other degraded women. He owed her a
grudge for having unwittingly tempted him and brought him into danger.
Above all, he could not forgive her for keeping her soul in safety. He
sought only to tame her down, but caught hopefully at her oft-renewed
assurance, "I feel that I shall not live." Villanous profligate that
he was, bestowing his shameful kisses on that poor shattered body
whose death he longed to see!

How did he account to her for this shocking antagonism of cruelty and
caresses? Was it meant to try her patience and obedience, or did he
boldly pass on to the true depths of Molinos' teaching, that "only by
dint of sinning can sin be quelled"? Did she take it all in full
earnest, never perceiving that all this show of justice, penitence,
expiation, was downright profligacy and nothing else?

She did not care to understand him in the strange moral crash that
befell her after that 23rd May, under the influence of a mild warm
June. She submitted to her master, of whom she was rather afraid, and
with a singularly servile passion carried on the farce of undergoing
small penances day by day. So little regard did Girard show for her
feelings that he never hid from her his relations with other women.
All he wanted was to get her into a convent. Meanwhile she was his
plaything: she saw him, let him have his way. Weak, and yet further
weakened by the shame that unnerved her, growing sadder and more sad
at heart, she had now but little hold on life, and would keep on
saying, in words that brought no sorrow to Girard's soul, "I feel that
I shall soon be dead."

CHAPTER XI.

CADIERE IN THE CONVENT: 1730.

The Abbess of the Ollioules Convent was young for an abbess, being
only thirty-eight years old. She was not wanting in mind. She was
lively, swift alike in love and in hatred, hurried away by her heart
and her senses also, endowed with very little of the tact and the
moderation needed for the governing of such a body.

This nunnery drew its livelihood from two sources. On the one side,
there came to it from Toulon two or three nuns of consular families,
who brought good dowers with them, and therefore did what they
pleased. They lived with the Observantine monks who had the ghostly
direction of the convent. On the other hand, these monks, whose order
had spread to Marseilles and many other places, picked