“He had hardly begun his supper when mine was already half digested. . . . Of quick and warm disposition, I had seen the end of my portion almost as soon as the beginning; it rapidly disappeared; and as I was thinking of rising from the table, I saw my brother De Saci, with his usual coolness and gravity, take a little piece of apple, peel it quietly, cut it leisurely, and eat it slowly. Then, after having finished, he rose almost as light as he had sat down, leaving untouched nearly all his very moderate portion. He went away as if he were quite satisfied, and even appeared to grow fat upon fasts.” { 87}
Claude Lancelot was the schoolmaster of the community, and represents to us perhaps more fully than any other name its famous system of education. Fontaine was one of its chief memoir writers, from whom we derive so much of our knowledge of the society; while the younger Arnauld, of whom we shall afterwards speak, Nicole, and the subject of our present sketch, represent its philosophical and literary activity.
Such was the company to which Pascal joined himself in 1655. They had been settled in divers places,—at first, in 1637, when they were still only a few disciples gathered around St Cyran, in the immediate neighbourhood of Port Royal de Paris; and then, when driven from this after their great head’s imprisonment, for a short time at a place called Ferté Milon; and then, finally, in 1639, at Port Royal des Champs. Here they made a great change for the better by their assiduous industry. They drained the marshy valley, cleared it of its overgrowth of brushwood, and converted it into a comparatively smiling and salubrious abode. On the return of the sisterhood from Port Royal de Paris in 1648, the nuns found the place improved beyond their expectations. The conventual buildings had been repaired, and the church kept in good preservation. The bells of the church tower pealed a welcome; a large concourse of the neighbouring poor assembled in the courtyard to greet them; while the Solitaries—one of their number, a priest, bearing a cross—waited at the church door to enter with them, and swell with their voices the Te Deum with which they celebrated their return. After this they parted, a few of the brotherhood repairing to a house which had been taken for them in Paris, but others retiring to the well-known farm on the hill known as Les Granges. There was, of course, the strictest seclusion maintained in the nunnery, as before, and the inmates of Les Granges were wellnigh as completely severed from it as the brethren who retired to Paris.