f
Port Royal des Champs was secretly invested by troops, and, on the next
morning, the officer in command made all the inmates assemble, showed
them a 'lettre de cachet', and, without giving them more than a quarter
of an hour's warning, carried off everybody and everything. He had
brought with him many coaches, with an elderly woman in each; he put the
nuns in these coaches, and sent them away to their destinations, which
were different monasteries, at ten, twenty, thirty, forty, and even fifty
leagues distant, each coach accompanied by mounted archers, just as
public women are carried away from a house of ill-fame! I pass in
silence all the accompaniments of this scene, so touching and so
strangely new. There have been entire volumes written upon it.

The treatment that these nuns received in their various prisons, in order
to force them to sign a condemnation of themselves, is the matter of
other volumes, which, in spite of the vigilance of the oppressors, were
soon in everybody's hands; public indignation so burst out, that the
Court and the Jesuits even were embarrassed with it. But the Pere
Tellier was not a man to stop half-way anywhere. He finished this matter
directly; decree followed decree, 'Lettres de cachet' followed 'lettres
de cachet'. The families who had relatives buried in the cemetery of
Port Royal des Champs were ordered to exhume and carry them elsewhere.
All the others were thrown into the cemetery of an adjoining parish, with
the indecency that may: be imagined. Afterwards, the house, the church,
and all the buildings were razed to the ground, so that not one stone was
left upon another. All the materials were sold, the ground was ploughed
up, and sown--not with salt, it is true, but that was all the favour it
received! The scandal at this reached even to Rome. I have restricted
myself to this simple and short recital of an expedition so military and
so odious.

VOLUME 7.

CHAPTER XLVII

The death of D'Avaux, who had formerly been our ambassador in Holland,
occurred in the early part of this year (1709). D'Avaux was one of the
first to hear of the project of William of Orange upon England, when that
project was still only in embryo, and kept profoundly secret. He
apprised the King (Louis XIV.) of it, but was laughed at. Barillon, then
our ambassador in England, was listened to in preference. He, deceived
by Sunderland and the other perfidious ministers of James II