The next day ended it. The nuns, as the girls learned afterwards, were very much embarrassed, and to put an end to this intolerable state of things, some of them even advocated calling in the watch. But Madame de Rochechouart, with her usual good sense, pointed out that this would be the very means of creating a scandal—the thing which it was their best policy to avoid. She advocated sending for the mothers of the ringleaders, and accordingly the Duchesses de Chatellon and de Mortemart arrived on the scene, together with the Marquise du Châtelet and some other ladies. They carried off their own daughters and nieces from the rebels’ citadel, and the rest of the troop being thus left without leaders, soon capitulated on the terms of peace brought them presently by a lay sister. The message was: “The classes are open, it is ten o’clock, and those who shall be back in their places before twelve shall have a general amnesty for the past.” They kept Madame de Saint Jérôme in her post a month longer, for the sake of the principle of the thing, and then quietly removed her. In spite of all the trouble Hélène gave Mère Quatre-Temps, one is glad to find that they parted good friends when the time came for Hélène to be promoted to the “Whites.” “I went and asked pardon of Mère Quatre-Temps,” she says prettily, “for all the trouble I had caused her, and thanked her for her kindness. She told me she was really sorry not to have such intimate relations with me in future. She said, too, that although I had often driven her nearly wild, I had moments when I made up to her for all that. I kissed her.” In effect, Hélène had her moments of goodness, and in order that we may part with her on as good terms as Mère Quatre-Temps, I am going to show her in one of them. It was the night of her First Confession. “Sœur Bichon[16] had come to see my nurse, and while Mademoiselle Gioul, my maid, was undressing me, Sœur Bichon said to me that she recommended herself to my prayers (for although I said them in common with the class downstairs, they made me say them again before putting me to bed). I said to Sœur Bichon: ‘What do you want me to ask God for you?’ She said: ‘Pray to Him to make my soul as pure as yours is at this moment.’ I said then, aloud, at the end of my prayers: ‘Oh! my God, grant to Sœur Bichon that her soul may be as white as mine ought to be at my age, if I had profited by all the good lessons that have been given me.’ My nurse was delighted with the way I had arranged this prayer, and hugged me, as did Sœur Bichon and Mademoiselle Gioul. When I was in bed, I asked was it a sin to pray for la grise (a gray cat which, like Mère Quatre-Temps, sometimes suffered from the attentions of Hélène and little Choiseul, if one had only space to tell the tale). My nurse and Sœur Bichon said it would be, and that I should not talk of la grise to the good God.