as Mme. de Longueville.

In 1644, the nuns were dispersed by order of Louis XIV., against whose
despotic caprices two Jansenist bishops had fought in support of the
rights of the pope. The Paris convent remained closed until 1669, when
it and the one at Chevreuse, near Versailles were made independent
of each other, a proceeding which resulted in the two institutions
becoming opponents. In 1708 the Convent of Port-Royal des Champs
was suppressed, and, a year later, the beautiful and once prosperous
community was destroyed, the buildings being levelled to the ground.
In 1780 the Paris convent was abolished; five years later the
structure was converted into a hospital, and in 1814 it became the
lying-in asylum of _La Maternite_.

In those two convents, which were practically one, was fomented and
developed the entire religious movement of the seventeenth century,
to which period belong the general study and development of theology,
metaphysics, and morality. Such great, good, and brilliant women as
the Countess of Maure, Mlle. de Vandy, Anne de Rohan, Mme. de Bregy,
Mme. de Hautefort, Mme. de Longueville, Mme. de Sevigne, Mme. de La
Fayette, and Mme. de Sable were inmates of Port-Royal, or its friends
and constant visitors.

Port-Royal may have been the cause of the civil war waged by the
Frondists against the government. It did bring on the struggle between
the Jesuits, who were all-powerful in the Church, and the Jansenists.
The latter denied the doctrine of free will, and taught the absolutism
of religion, the "terrible God," the powerlessness of kings and
princes before God--a doctrine which brought down upon them the wrath
of Louis XIV., for whom their notion of virtue was too severe, their
use of the Gospel too excessive, and their Christianity impossible.

In its purest form, Port-Royalism was a return to the sanctity of the
primitive church--an attempt at the use, in French, of the whole body
of Scriptures and the writings of the Church Fathers; it aimed to
maintain a vigorous religious reaction in the shape of a reform, and
that reform was vigorously opposed by the Catholic Church.

One family that is associated with Port-Royal gave to its cause no
less than six sisters; the latter all belonged to the Convent of
Port-Royal and were attached to the Jansenist party; of them, the
Archbishop of Paris said that they were "as pure as angels, but as
proud as devils." They were related to the one great Arnauld fami