The details of the poor girl’s sufferings in her new home are painful to read; but as Madame Guyon relates these early trials, she devoutly regards them as the means employed by her Heavenly Father to wean her affections from the world and turn them towards Himself.  Beset with sore afflictions, guarded and illtreated by a servant devoted to her mother-in-law, cut off from the innocent pleasures of friendly intercourse, perpetually thwarted and misrepresented, she bethought herself of the possibility of getting help from above, and once more turned her mind towards God and heavenly things, doing her best, according to her imperfect light, to propitiate the Divine favour.  She gave up entirely the reading of romances, of which formerly she had been passionately fond.  The penchant for them had already been deadened, some time before her marriage, by reading the Gospel, which she found “so beautiful,” and in which she discerned a character of truth which disgusted her with all other books.  She resumed the practice of private prayer; she had masses said, in order to obtain Divine grace to enable her to find favour with her husband and his mother, and to ascertain the Divine will; she consulted her looking-glass very seldom; she regularly studied books of devotion, such as The Initiation of Jesus Christ, and the works of St. Francis de Sales, and read them aloud, so that the servants might profit by them.  She endeavoured in all things not to offend God.

Her mind, shut off from all earthly comfort, was now driven in upon itself.  Her lengthy meditation, though it helped to give her some degree of resignation, did not produce true peace and joy Though quite natural under the circumstances, it was an unhealthy habit, and doubtless tended to foster the mystic dreaming which grew upon her in riper years.  Changes of circumstances now came to her relief.  Soon after the birth of her first child, a heavy loss of property called her husband to Paris, to look after his affairs; and she, after a while, was permitted to join him there.  This made a pleasant break in the dreary round of her married life.  She cared nothing for losses, so long as she could gain from her stern and surly mate some token of affection and acknowledgment; and this, though in very small fragments, she had now occasionally the satisfaction of getting.  While at Paris she had a severe illness, and the learned doctors of the city brought her to death’s door by draining her of “forty-eight pullets” of blood.

Sad to say, as she regained her health, her husband resumed his moroseness and violent tempers, and her feeble strength was tried to its utmost.  But she records, “This illness was of great use to me, for, besides teaching me patience under very severe pains, it enlightened me much as to the worthlessness of the things of this world.  While detaching me to a great extent from myself, it gave me fresh courage to bear suffering better than I had done in the past.”  When at last she regained her health, the loss of her mother and the crosses of every-day life served still further to solemnize her mind, and to turn her aspirations heavenwards.  She followed strictly her plan for private prayer twice a day; she kept watch over herself continually, and in almsgiving and other ways endeavoured to do as much good as she could.