The sisters rose at five in the morning; the diet was not restricted to Lenten fare excepting at the Paschal season, but one fast day was enjoined in the week, and even that was compulsory only to the Sisters who were strong enough to bear it.
Thus there is nothing to account for such persistent failure.
"And Jeanne de Matel was a saint endowed with remarkable energy and really moulded by the Saviour! In her writings she is an eloquent and subtle theologian, an ardent and rapturous mystic, dealing in metaphors and hyperbole, in tangible parallels, passionate questionings, and apostrophes; she resembles both Saint Denys the Areopagite and Saint Maddalena dei Pazzi; Saint Denys in matter, Saint Maddalena in manner.
As a writer, no doubt she is not supreme, and the poverty of her borrowed style is sometimes painful; still, considering that she lived in the seventeenth century, she was at any rate not a mere scribbler of vapid aspirations, like most of the prosy pietists of the time.
"And her works have met with the same fate as her foundations.

They remain for the most part unpublished.

Hello, who was familiar with them, only extracted a very mediocre _cento_; some others, as Prince Galitzin and the Abbe Penaud, have explored her writings with better results and printed some loftier and more impassioned passages.
"And this Abbess wrote some of genuine inspiration.
"Yes, but all this does not alter the fact that I do not see the book I could write about her," muttered Durtal.

"In spite of my wish to be agreeable to dear Madame Bavoil, no--I have no inclination to undertake the task.
"All things considered, if I did not so heartily hate a move, if I had energy enough to go back to Holland, I would try to do honour in loving and respectful terms to the worshipful Lidwina, who is of all the female saints one whose life I should best love to write; but merely to attempt to reconstruct the surroundings amid which she lived, I should have to settle in the town where she dwelt, _Schiedam_.
"If God grants me life, no doubt I shall one day do this; but the plan is not yet ripe.

Put that aside, then, and since on the other hand Jeanne de Matel does not captivate me, perhaps I had better think of another abbess even less known, and whose career was one of more tranquil endurance, less wandering and more concentrated, and at any rate more attractive.
"Besides, her life can now only be found in an octavo volume by an anonymous writer, whose incoherent chapters, in language as clogging as a linseed poultice, will for ever hinder the world from knowing her.