themselves perfectly; but at
the same time they carried the war into the enemy's camp, especially by
the ingenious "Provincial Letters" of the famous Pascal.

The quarrel grew more hot between the Jesuits and Port Royal, and was
telling against the former, when the Pere Tellier brought all his
influence to bear, to change the current of success. He was, as I have
said, an ardent man, whose divinity was his Molinism, and the company to
which he belonged. Confessor to the King, he saw himself in a good
position to exercise unlimited authority. He saw that the King was very
ignorant, and prejudiced upon all religious matters; that he was
surrounded by people as ignorant and as prejudiced as himself, Madame de
Maintenon, M. de Beauvilliers, M. de Chevreuse, and others, and he
determined to take good advantage of this state of things.

Step by step he gained over the King to his views, and convinced him that
the destruction of the monastery of Port Royal des Champs was a duty
which he owed to his conscience, and the cause of religion. This point
gained, the means to destroy the establishment were soon resolved on.

There was another monastery called Port Royal, at Paws, in addition to
the one in question. It was now pretended that the latter had only been
allowed to exist by tolerance, and that it was necessary one should cease
to exist. Of the two, it was alleged that it was better to preserve the
one, at Paris. A decree in council was, therefore, rendered, in virtue
of which, on the night from the 28th to the 29th of October, the abbey of
Port Royal des Champs was secretly invested by troops, and, on the next
morning, the officer in command made all the inmates assemble, showed
them a 'lettre de cachet', and, without giving them more than a quarter
of an hour's warning, carried off everybody and everything. He had
brought with him many coaches, with an elderly woman in each; he put the
nuns in these coaches, and sent them away to their destinations, which
were different monasteries, at ten, twenty, thirty, forty, and even fifty
leagues distant, each coach accompanied by mounted archers, just as
public women are carried away from a house of ill-fame! I pass in
silence all the accompaniments of this scene, so touching and so
strangely new. There have been entire volumes written upon it.

The treatment that these nuns received in their various prisons, in order
to force them to sign a condemnation of themselves, is the mat