t refuse
to incur so heavy an outlay. Her piety, her many little charms of
soul, rendered her all-powerful. She was impassioned in her charity,
giving not alms only, but love as well. She longed to make Laugier
perfect, rejoiced to have her by her side, and often gave her half her
bed. The pair had been admitted among the _Daughters of Saint
Theresa_, the third order established by the Carmelites. Mdlle.
Cadiere was their model nun, and seemed at thirteen a Carmelite
complete. Already she devoured some books of mysticism borrowed from a
Visitandine. In marked contrast with herself seemed Laugier, now a
girl of fifteen, who would do nothing but eat and look handsome. So
indeed she was, and on that account had been made sextoness to the
chapel of Saint Theresa. This led her into great familiarities with
the priests, and so, when her conduct called for her expulsion from
the congregation, another authority, the vicar-general, flew into such
a rage as to declare that, if she were expelled, the chapel itself
would be interdicted.

Both these girls had the temperament of their country, suffering from
great excitement of the nerves, and from what was called flatulence of
the womb. But in each the result was entirely different; being very
carnal in the case of Laugier, who was gluttonous, lazy, passionate;
but wholly cerebral with regard to the pure and gentle Catherine, who
owing to her ailments or to a lively imagination that took everything
up into itself, had no ideas concerning sex. "At twenty she was like a
child of seven." For nothing cared she but praying and giving of alms;
she had no wish at all to marry. At the very word "marriage," she
would fall a-weeping, as if she had been asked to abandon God.

They had lent her the life of her patroness, Catherine of Genoa, and
she had bought for herself _The Castle of the Soul_, by St. Theresa.
Few confessors could follow her in these mystic flights. They who
spoke clumsily of such things gave her pain. She could not keep either
her mother's confessor, the cathedral-priest, or another, a Carmelite,
or even the old Jesuit Sabatier. At sixteen she found a priest of
Saint Louis, a highly spiritual person. She spent days in church, to
such a degree that her mother, by this time a widow and often in want
of her, had to punish her, for all her own piety, on her return home.
It was not the girl's fault, however: during her ecstasies she quite
forgot herself. So great a saint was sh