But the death of her favorite son--a young man distinguished for graces of person, mind, heart, and character, who lost his life in one of the battles of his friend and comrade, the Prince de Conde--together with the loss of her fortune and the fading of her beauty, turned the thoughts of the Marquise to spiritual things. We find many traces of the state of mind which led her first into a mild form of devotion, serious but not too ascetic, and later into pronounced Jansenism. In a note to a friend who had neglected her, she dwells upon "the misery and nothingness of the world," recalls the strength of their long friendship, the depth of her own affection, and tries to account for the disloyalty to herself, by the inherent weakness and emptiness of human nature, which renders it impossible for even the most perfect to do anything that is not defective. All this is very charitable, to say the least, as well as a little abstract. Time has given a strange humility and forgivingness to the woman who broke with her dearest friend, the unfortunate Duc de Montmorency, because he presumed to lift his eyes to the Queen, saying that she "could not receive pleasantly the regards which she had to share with the greatest princess in the world."
The fashion of the period furnished a peaceful and dignified refuge for women, when their beauty waned and the "terrible forties" ended their illusions. To go into brief retreat for penitence and prayer was at all times a graceful thing to do, besides making for safety. It was only a step further to retire altogether from the scenes of pleasure which had begun to pall.
The convent offered a haven of repose to the bruised heart, a fresh aim for drooping energies, a needed outlet for devouring emotions, and a comfortable sense of security, not only for this world, but for the next. It was the next world which was beginning to trouble Mme. de Sable. She had great fear of death, and after many penitential retreats to Port Royal, she finally obtained permission to build a suite of apartments within its precincts, and retired there about 1655 to prepare for that unpleasant event which she put off as long as possible by the most assiduous care of her health. "If she was not devoted, she had the idea of becoming so," said Mademoiselle. But her devotion was in quite a mundane fashion. Her pleasant rooms were separate and independent, thus enabling her to give herself not only to the care of her health and her soul, but to a select society, to literature, and to conversation. She never practiced the severe asceticism of her friend, Mme. de Longueville. With a great deal of abstract piety, the iron girdle and the hair shirt were not included. She did not even forego her delicate and fastidious tastes. Her elegant dinners and her dainty comfitures were as famous as ever. "Will the anger of the Marquise go so far, in your opinion, as to refuse me her recipe for salad?" writes Mme. de Choisy at the close of a letter to the Comtesse de Maure, in which she has ridiculed her friend's Jansenist tendencies; "If so, it will be a great inhumanity, for which she will be punished in this world and the other." She had great skill in delicate cooking, and was in the habit of sending cakes, jellies, and other dainties, prepared by herself, to her intimate friends. La Rochefoucauld says, "If I could hope for two dishes of those preserves, which I did not deserve to eat before, I should be indebted to you all my life." Mme. de Longueville, who is about to visit her, begs her not to give a feast as she has "scruples about such indulgence."
This spice of worldliness very much tempered the austerity of her retreat, and lent an added luster to its intellectual attractions. But the Marquise had many conflicts between her luxurious tastes and her desire to be devout. Her dainty and epicurean habits, her extraordinary anxiety about her health, and her capricious humors were the subject of much light badinage among her friends. The Grande Mademoiselle sketches these traits with a satiric touch in the "Princesse de Paphlagonie," where she introduces her with the Comtesse de Maure. "There are no hours when they do not confer together upon the means of preventing themselves from dying, and upon the art of rendering themselves immortal," she writes. "Their conferences are not like those of other people; the fear of breathing an air too cold or too hot, the apprehension that the wind may be too dry or too damp, a fancy that the weather is not as moderate as they judge necessary for the preservation of their health--these are sufficient reasons for writing from one room to another . . . . If one could find this correspondence, one might derive great advantages in every way; for they were princesses who had nothing mortal, except the knowledge of being so . . . Of Mme. de Sable she adds: "The Princess Parthenie had a taste as dainty as her mind; nothing equaled the magnificence of her entertainments; all the viands were exquisite, and her elegance was beyond anything that one could imagine." The fastidious Marquise suffered, with all the world, from the defects of her qualities. Her extreme delicacy and sensibility appear under many forms and verge often upon weakness; but it is an amiable weakness that does not detract greatly from her fascination. She was not cast in a heroic mold, and her faults are those which the world is pleased to call essentially feminine.
