"They are pure as angels and proud as demons,"
repeated the archbishop angrily, as he left the convent. On the 25th of
August he returned to Port-Royal, accompanied by a numerous escort of
ecclesiastics and exons. "When I say a thing, so it must be," he said as
he entered; "I will not eat my words." He picked out twelve nuns, who
were immediately taken away and dispersed in different monasteries. M.
d'Andilly was at the gate, receiving in his carriage his sister, Mother
Agnes, aged and infirm, and his three daughters doomed to exile. "I had
borne up all day without weeping and without inclination thereto," writes
Mother Angelica de St. Jean on arrival at the _Annonciades bleues;_ "but
when night came, and, after finishing all my prayers, I thought to lay me
down and take some rest, I felt myself all in a moment bruised and
lacerated in every part by the separations I had just gone through; I
then found sensibly that, to escape weakness in the hour of deep
affliction, there must be no dropping of the eyes that have been lifted
to the mountains." Ten months later the exiled nuns returned, without
having subscribed, to Port-Royal des Champs, a little before the moment
when M. de Saci, who had become their secret director since the death of
M. Singlin, was arrested, together with his secretary, Fontaine, at six
in the morning, in front of the Bastille. "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 Arn