In 1663 her father removed his household to Paris, and Jeanne Marie was transferred to a larger and more brilliant arena for the display of her beauty and accomplishments.  Louis XIV. was on the throne, and Paris was at the very height of its gaiety and celebrity.  The influence of its dissipation and distraction on the spirit of Mademoiselle de la Mothe was of course unfavourable to religion.  Her parents found themselves not merely in a fashionable circle, but in a highly-intellectual centre.  The grand monarque posed as the great patron of literature and the arts; and society presented splendid opportunities for the exercise of the young lady’s conversational powers.  She tells us that she began to entertain extravagant notions of herself, and that her vanity increased.  In such surroundings it could hardly be otherwise.  Her faith and love, such as they were, had died away, and her devotion had dwindled down to nothing.  The dazzling world before her was in her eyes something worth conquering; and she set herself to gain its acclamation, and was to a great extent successful.  From this high state of worldly gratification, and low state of religious principle and enjoyment, she was aroused and rescued in a very rough and painful manner.

II.

MARRIED LIFE.

Early in 1664, when not quite sixteen, Jeanne Marie de la Mothe was given in marriage to M. Jacques Guyon, a man of thirty-eight, possessed of great wealth, whom she had seen for the first time only a few days before the ceremony took place.  Many ladies no doubt envied her, but for her it was an unhappy change.  Several suitors had appeared, with whom she felt she could have been content and happy; but M. Guyon’s riches and perseverance had carried the day with her parents, and marriage, to which she had looked forward as the period of liberation from restraint, and of freer enjoyment of the gay Parisian life, proved but the commencement of a dreary spell of dulness and misery.  Her friends, who came to congratulate her the next day after the wedding, were surprised to find her weeping bitterly, and, in answer to their raillery, were told by her, “Alas!  I used to have such a desire to be a nun:  why, then, am I married now? and by what fatality has this happened to me?” She was overwhelmed with this regret, this longing to be a religieuse.  The sudden transition from being the admired of all beholders, “the cynosure of neighbouring eyes,” the witty belle whose every word and look were treasured up, to the hopeless condition of a bird pining in a gilded cage, was very hard to bear.