1620-38.] A MYSTICAL MARRIAGE. 175 



tlie Jesuits had made her their choice, as Supe- 

 rior of the new convent. She was born, forty 

 years before, at Tours, of a good bourgeois family. 

 As she grew up towards maturity, her qualities 

 soon declared themselves. She had uncommon 

 talents and strong religious susceptibilities, joined 

 to a vivid imagination, — an alliance not always 

 desirable under a form of faith where both are 

 excited by stimulants so many and so powerful. 

 Like Madame de la Peltrie, she married, at the 

 desire of her parents, in her eighteenth year. The 

 marriage was not happy. Her biographers say 

 that there was no fault on either side. Apparently, 

 it was a severe case of "incompatibility." She 

 sought her consolation in the churches ; and, kneel- 

 ing in dim chapels, held communings with Christ 

 and the angels. At the end of two years her hus- 

 band died, leaving her with an infant son. She 

 gave him to the charge of her sister, abandoned 

 herself to solitude and meditation, and became a 

 mystic of the intense and passional school. Yet 

 a strong maternal instinct battled painfully in her 

 breast with a sense of religious vocation. Dreams, 

 visions, interior voices, ecstasies, revulsions, periods 

 of rapture and periods of deep dejection, made up 

 the agitated tissue of her life. She fasted, wore 

 hair-cloth, scourged herself, washed dishes among 

 the servants, and did then' most menial work. She 

 heard, in a trance, a miraculous voice. It was 

 that of Christ, promising to become her spouse. 

 Months and years passed, full of troubled hopes 

 and fears, when again the voice sounded in her 



