-vicar of the Archbishop of Paris went to Port-Royal to make
sure that the pensioners had gone. He sat down beside Mother Angelica's
bed. "So you are ill, mother," said he; "pray, what is your complaint?"
"I am dropsical, sir," she replied. "Jesus! my dear mother, you say that
as if it were nothing at all.--Does not such a complaint dismay you?"

"No, sir," she replied; "I am incomparably more dismayed at what I see
happening in our house. For, indeed, I came hither to die here, but I
did not come to see all that I now see, and I had no reason to expect the
kind of treatment we are having. Sir, sir, this is man's day; God's day
will come, who will reveal many things and avenge everything." She died
on the 6th of August, 1661, murmuring over and over again, "Good by; good
by!" And, when she was asked why she said that, she replied simply,
"Because I am going away, my children." She had given instructions to
bury her in the preau (court-yard), and not to have any nonsense
(_badineries_) after her death. "I am your Jonas," she said to the nuns;
"when I am thrown into the whale's belly the tempest will cease." She
was mistaken; the tempest was scarcely beginning.

Cardinal de Retz was still titular Archbishop of Paris, and rather
favorable to Jansenism. It was, therefore, the grandvicars who prepared
the exhortation to the faithful, calling upon them to accept the papal
decision touching Jansen's book. There was drawn up a formula or
formulary of adhesion, "turned with some skill," says Madame Perier her
biography of Jacqueline Pascal, and in such a way that subscription did
not bind the conscience, as theologians most scrupulous about the truth
affirmed; the nuns of Port-Royal, however, refused to subscribe. "What
hinders us," said a letter to Mother Angelica de St. Jean from Jacqueline
Pascal, Sister St. Euphemia in religion, "what hinders all the
ecclesiastics who recognize the truth, to reply, when the formulary is
presented to them to subscribe, 'I know the respect I owe the bishops,
but my conscience does not permit me to subscribe that a thing is in a
book in which I have not seen it,' and after that wait for what will
happen? What have we to fear? Banishment and dispersion for the nuns,
seizure of temporalities, imprisonment and death, if you will; but is not
that our glory, and should it not be our joy? Let us renounce the gospel
or follow the maxims of the gospel, and deem ourselves happy to suffer