Cousin maintained that the avowed principle of the Port-Royalists was the withdrawal from all worldly pleasure and attachment. “’Marriage is a homicide; absolute renunciation is the true regime of a Christian.’  Jacqueline Pascal is an exaggeration of Port-Royal, and Port-Royal is an exaggeration of the religious spirit of the seventeenth century.  Man is too little considered; all movement of the physical world comes from God; all our acts and thoughts, except those of crime and error, come from and belong to Him.  Nothing is our own; there is no free will; will and reason have no power.  The theory of grace is the source of all truth, virtue, and merit—­and for this doctrine Jacqueline Pascal gives up her life.”

Among the great spirits of Port-Royal, the women especially were strong in their convictions and high in their ideals.  They naturally followed the ideas of man and naturally fell into religious errors; but their firmness, constancy, and heroism were striking indeed.  Their aspiration was the imitation of Christ, and they approached their model as near as ever was done by man.  In an age of courtesans, when convictions were subservient to the pleasure of power, they set a worthy example of strength of mind, firmness of will, purity, and womanliness.  M. du Bled says: 

“Port-Royal was the enterprise of the middle-class aristocracy of France; you can see here an anticipated attempt of a sort of superior third estate to govern for itself in the Church and to establish a religion not Roman, not aristocratic and of the court, not devout in the manner of the simple people, but freer from vain images and ceremonies, and freer, also, as to the temporal in the face of worldly authority—­a sober, austere, independent religion which would have truly founded a Gallican reform.  The illusion was in thinking that they could continue to exist in Rome—­that Richelieu and Louis XIV. would tolerate the boldness of this attempt.”

A celebrated woman of the seventeenth century, one who really belongs to the circle of Mme. de Longueville and Mme. de La Fayette, but who early in life, like Mme. de Longueville, devoted herself to religion and retired to live at Port-Royal, and is therefore more intimately associated with the religious movement, was Mme. de Sable, a type of the social-religious woman.

Mme. de Sable is a heroine of Cousin, whom we closely follow in this account of her career.  According to that writer, she is a type of the purely social woman, a woman who did less for herself than for others, in aiding whom she took delight, a woman who was the inspiration of many writers and many works.

Mlle. de Souvre married the wealthy Marquis of Sable, of the house of Montmorency, of whom little is known.  He soon abandoned her; and she, most unhappy over unworthy rivals, fell very ill, retired from society for a time, and then reappeared; her career as a society woman then began.  At an early age, by force of her decided taste for the high form of Spanish gallantry, then so much in vogue, and her inclination to all things intellectual, she became one of the leaders of the Hotel de Rambouillet.  She, Mmes. de Sevigne, de Longueville, and de La Fayette formed that circle of women who idealized friendship.