“It really seems as though no sooner had she built up a monastic wall than it split and fell; nothing would hold.  In short, the Order of the Incarnate Word was born rickety and died a dwarf.  It lingered in the midst of universal apathy, and survived till 1790, when it was buried.  In 1811 one Abbe Denis revived it at Azerables in la Creuse, and since then it has struggled on for better for worse, scattered through about fifteen houses, one of these at Texas in the New World.

“There is no doubt of it,” Durtal concluded; “we are far enough from the strong sap which Saint Theresa and Saint Clare could infuse into the centennial growth of their mighty trees!

“To say nothing of the fact that Jeanne de Matel, who has never been canonized like her two sisters, and whose name remains unknown to most Catholics, intended to found an order of men as well as women; she did not succeed, and the attempts since made in our day by the Abbe Combalot to carry her plan into effect have been equally vain!

“Now, what is the reason?  Is it because there are too many and various communities in the Church?  Why, new foundations are set on foot and flourish every day!  Is it by reason of the poverty of the monasteries?  Nay, for indigence is the great test of success, and experience shows that God only blesses the most destitute convents and abandons the others!  Is it, then, the austerity of the rule?  But this was very mild; it was that of Saint Augustine, which yields to every compromise, and at need accepts every shade of practice.  The sisters rose at five in the morning; the diet was not restricted to Lenten fare excepting at the Paschal season, but one fast day was enjoined in the week, and even that was compulsory only to the Sisters who were strong enough to bear it.  Thus there is nothing to account for such persistent failure.

“And Jeanne de Matel was a saint endowed with remarkable energy and really moulded by the Saviour!  In her writings she is an eloquent and subtle theologian, an ardent and rapturous mystic, dealing in metaphors and hyperbole, in tangible parallels, passionate questionings, and apostrophes; she resembles both Saint Denys the Areopagite and Saint Maddalena dei Pazzi; Saint Denys in matter, Saint Maddalena in manner.  As a writer, no doubt she is not supreme, and the poverty of her borrowed style is sometimes painful; still, considering that she lived in the seventeenth century, she was at any rate not a mere scribbler of vapid aspirations, like most of the prosy pietists of the time.

“And her works have met with the same fate as her foundations.  They remain for the most part unpublished.  Hello, who was familiar with them, only extracted a very mediocre cento; some others, as Prince Galitzin and the Abbe Penaud, have explored her writings with better results and printed some loftier and more impassioned passages.

“And this Abbess wrote some of genuine inspiration.