eline was never
happy unless she was put first.

[Illustration: 'Go away! You have no business here.']

In the year 1599, madame Arnauld, though only twenty-five, had eight
children, and her father, monsieur Marion, who was already suffering
from the disease which afterwards killed him, began to be anxious about
their future. After talking the matter over with his son-in-law, they
decided that it was necessary that the second and third little girls,
Jacqueline and Jeanne, should become nuns, in order that Catherine, the
eldest, might have a larger fortune and make a more brilliant marriage.
Not that monsieur Marion intended that they should be common nuns. He
would do better than that for Jacqueline, and as his majesty Henry IV.
had honoured him with special marks of his favour, he had no doubt that
the king would grant an abbey to each of his granddaughters.

When the plan was told to madame Arnauld, she listened with dismay.

'But Jacqueline is hardly seven and a half,' she said, 'and Jeanne is
five;' but monsieur Marion only laughed and bade her not to trouble
herself, as he would see that their duties did not weigh upon them, and
that though he hoped they would behave better than many of the nuns, yet
they would lead pleasant lives, and their mother could visit them as
often as she liked.

Madame Arnauld was too much afraid of her father to raise any more
objections, but she had also heard too much of convents and their ways
to wish her daughters to enter them. Meanwhile the affair was carried
through by the help of the abbe of Citeaux, and as a rule existed by
which no child could be appointed abbess, the consent of the Pope was
obtained by declaring each of the girls many years older than she really
was. Both Arnauld and Marion considered themselves, and were considered
by others, to be unusually good men, yet their consciences never
troubled them about this wicked fraud.

However, by the aid of the false statement all went smoothly, and the
old and delicate abbess of Port Royal, an abbey situated in a marshy
hollow eighteen miles from Paris, agreed to take Jacqueline as helper or
coadjutrix, with the condition that on the death of the old lady the
little girl was to succeed her, while Jeanne was made abbess of
Saint-Cyr, six miles nearer Paris, where madame de Maintenon's famous
girls' school was to be founded a hundred years later. The duties of
the office were to be discharged by one of the elder nuns til