‘The king kisses the hands of my lady Abbess’, rang the cry across the convent walls. The year, 1602, and the occasion, a hunting trip made by Henri IV in the neighbourhood of the Cistercian foundation of Port-Royal. The abbess in question was just eleven years old, and pattens had to be found for her to stand on to receive the king properly. It was not the abbess he came to see, though, but her father, Antoine Amauld, who to all intents and purposes controlled the abbey of Port Royal. His daughter, Jacqueline, was only nine when she took her vows in October, 1600, though the request addressed to Rome for her to be made at once coadjutrix of the abbess described her as seventeen. Under these inauspicious circumstances of flagrant royal patronage and deception of the papal authority began the startling career of Angélique Arnauld and the two institutions of Port-Royal which were the most significant phenomena in the religious history of the ‘great century’ in France.

It is useful to be reminded how this purest of all the religious movements of the seventeenth century began in an atmosphere of simony and corruption, because it goes some way to explain the lazy monastic ideal against which Mère Angélique, a very vigorous, shrewd and forthright French version of St Teresa of Avila, later rebelled, and it also gives us some inkling of the family strength of the Arnaulds and their connections, which enabled Port-Royal to stand up to the Archbishop of Paris and the royal incursions under Louis XIV as long as it did.