"The mode of life at Port-Royal was distinguished for austerity. The inmates rose at three o'clock in the morning, and, after the common prayer, kissed the ground as a sign of their self-humiliation before God. Then, kneeling, they read a chapter from the Gospels and one from the Epistles, concluding with another prayer. Two hours in the morning and a like number in the afternoon were devoted to manual labor in the gardens adjoining the convent; they observed, with great strictness, the season of Lent." Their theories and practices, and especially their sympathy with Jansenius, whose work _Mars Gallicus_ attacked the French government and people, aroused the suspicions of Richelieu. When in 1640 the Port-Royalists openly and enthusiastically received the famous work, _Augustinus_, of Jansenius, the government became the declared opponent of the convent. Saint-Cyran had been imprisoned in 1638, and not until after the death of Richelieu, in 1642, was he liberated. After the appearance, in 1643, of Arnauld's _De la Fréquente Communion_, in which he attacked the Jesuits for admitting the people to the Lord's Supper without due preparation, two parties formed--the Jesuits, supported by the Sorbonne and the government, and the Port-Royalists, supported by Parliament and illustrious persons, such as Mme. de Longueville.
In 1644, the nuns were dispersed by order of Louis XIV., against whose despotic caprices two Jansenist bishops had fought in support of the rights of the pope. The Paris convent remained closed until 1669, when it and the one at Chevreuse, near Versailles were made independent of each other, a proceeding which resulted in the two institutions becoming opponents. In 1708 the Convent of Port-Royal des Champs was suppressed, and, a year later, the beautiful and once prosperous community was destroyed, the buildings being levelled to the ground. In 1780 the Paris convent was abolished; five years later the structure was converted into a hospital, and in 1814 it became the lying-in asylum of _La Maternité_.
In those two convents, which were practically one, was fomented and developed the entire religious movement of the seventeenth century, to which period belong the general study and development of theology, metaphysics, and morality. Such great, good, and brilliant women as the Countess of Maure, Mlle. de Vandy, Anne de Rohan, Mme. de Brégy, Mme. de Hautefort, Mme. de Longueville, Mme. de Sévigné, Mme. de La Fayette, and Mme. de Sablé were inmates of Port-Royal, or its friends and constant visitors.