In this excitable city she remained only eight days; but in that short space some good was effected.  Now began a series of wanderings in search of a home.  Arriving at Nice, she felt acutely her desolate state.  “I saw myself without refuge or retreat, wandering and homeless.  All the artisans whom I saw in the shops appeared to me happy in having an abode and refuge.”  After a stormy voyage to Genoa, she reached Verceil, on the Sessia, and after a stay of a few months amongst kind friends, but precluded from public work by ill-health, she decided to return once more to Paris, and there pursue her labours.

Unaware of the king’s despotic intolerance, she arrived in the French capital on July 22, 1686, after an absence of five years, and soon became the centre of an enlightened circle of friends, of high rank, who were glad to listen to her teaching and to learn the way of the Lord more perfectly.  For a while all was quiet.  But her enemies—­among whom her half-brother, Pere La Mothe, was ever the most virulent—­were meantime very busy, and at length a charge was laid against her before the king.  She was seized by warrant of a lettre de cachet, and consigned to solitary imprisonment in the convent of Sainte Marie, in the suburb of St. Antoine.  Louis XIV. was now posing as a defender of the faith, and was glad to show his Catholic zeal in the punishment of a lady who was said to hold opinions similar to those of Molinos, whom he had recently induced the Pope to condemn.  Nearly four months previously her eloquent disciple, Father la Combe, had been committed to the Bastille for life.

VI.

IN PRISON.

On January 29, 1688—­the first month of a year specially dear to English lovers of civil and religious liberty—­Madame Guyon was taken to her cell in Sainte Marie.  It was a room in an upper story of the convent, with a barred door, and an opening for light and air on one side.  Here she was shut up from her friends; her gaoler, a crabbed, hard-hearted nun, who treated her with the greatest rigour, regarding her not only as a heretic, but as a hypocrite and out of her senses as well.  Feeble in body and in bad health, her mind was much troubled about her beloved daughter, whom interested persons were trying to force into a marriage of which Madame Guyon strongly disapproved.  But though, under harsh treatment, she became very ill, and was nigh unto death, her peace and joy proved their heavenly origin by unbroken continuance in this trying season.  As she recovered, she found occupation in writing her autobiography, and in composing hymns and sacred poems.  Amongst the latter is the charming cantique given at the end of her Life, and beginning—­

     “Grand Dieu! pour Ton plaisir
      Je suis dans une cage,”

which has been happily Englished as follows:—­

     “A little bird I am,
        Shut from the fields of air;
      And in my cage I sit and sing
        To Him who placed me there;
      Well pleased a prisoner to be,
      Because, my God, it pleases Thee.