nful sharer of her
griefs, doubts, and regrets, and her depression reacts upon you; her
sorrow makes your melancholy return. Privation conjures up countless
illusions and every chimera imaginable, so that the peaceful retreat of
virgins of the Lord becomes a veritable hell, peopled by phantoms that
groan in torture!"

"Oh, madame!" exclaimed the King. "What a picture is this! What a
spectacle you present to our view!"

"Fortunately," continued Mademoiselle de Mortemart, "in convents girls of
intelligence are all too rare. The greater number of them are colourless
persons, devoid of imagination or fire. To exiles like these, any
country, any climate would seem good; to flaccid, crushed natures of this
type, every belief would seem authoritative, every religion holy and
divine. Fifteen hundred years ago these nuns would have made excellent
vestal virgins, watchful and resigned. What they need is abstinence,
prohibitions, thwartings, things contrary to nature. By conforming to
most rigorous rules, they consider themselves suffering beings who
deserve heavy recompense; and the Carmelite or Trappist sister, who
macerates herself by the hair-shirt or the cilex, would look upon God as
a false or wicked Being, if, after such cruel torment, He did not
promptly open to her the gates of Paradise.

"Sire," added the Abbess de Fontevrault, "I have three nuns in my convent
who take the Holy Communion every other day, and whom my predecessor
could never bring herself to absolve for some old piece of nonsense of
twenty years back."

"Do you think you will be able to manage them, madame?" asked the King,
laughing.

"I am afraid not," replied my sister. "Those are three whom one could
never manage, and your Majesty on the throne may possibly have fewer
difficulties to deal with than the abbess or the prior of a convent."

The King was obliged to quit us to go and see one of the ministers, but
he honoured the Abbess by telling her that she was excellent company, of
which he could never have too much.

My sister wished to see Madame de Maintenon and the Duc du Maine; so we
visited that lady, who took a great liking to the Abbess, which was
reciprocated.

When my sister saw the young Duc du Maine, she exclaimed, "How handsome
he is! Oh, sister, how fond I shall be of such a nephew!"

"Then," said I, "you will forgive me, won't you, for having given birth
to him?"

"When I reproached you," she answered, "I had not yet