Angélique Arnauld had been committed to the abbey at a very early age by her parents; and, although it shared the general laxity of convents at that time, she chafed for years against her fate. The abbey was in a wild, marshy, unhealthy valley, about eighteen miles from Paris. In the course of time Angélique was converted, and she became abbess of the convent, and devoted all her energy and talent to the purification of its life. It became a famous garden of conventual virtues, and, when the unhealthiness of the valley compelled the nuns to transfer their establishment to Paris in 1626, every pietist in the city was attracted to the abbey of Port Royal de Paris. St. Cyran fell into correspondence with Angélique, defended a book of hers which the Jesuits denounced, and in 1633 became the spiritual director of the community. The convent now had pretensions to be a school of fine taste in letters as well as of virtue, and numbers of the more sincerely religious writers and ladies of Paris looked to it as a kind of club. The Jesuits regarded this independent school of virtue and theology with some apprehension, and, when Jansen died in 1638, and whispers of a posthumous publication of his great work were intercepted, St. Cyran was imprisoned in Vincennes by order of Richelieu. We need not press the suspicion that the cardinal was instigated by the Jesuits. Jansen had satirically assailed the policy of Richelieu in a political work, and the cardinal may have thought it advisable to seize the papers of St. Cyran in order to find some clue to the mysterious work of Jansen which his admirers were secretly promising to the world. St. Cyran also had declined to oblige the cardinal, and he assailed doctrines which Richelieu had espoused in his early theological works. It is, however, to be noted that, when St. Cyran was released, at the death of Richelieu (1642), and his papers restored, it was found that the Jesuits had appropriated some of his letters.