The clever Capuchin had a troublesome affair on hand: the management of a woman who, though “illustre religieuse et grande servante de Dieu,” was resolved to follow her own way and not that which director, Pope and King had marked out for her. Père Joseph was a crusader by nature, and a reformer to the backbone, with a fiery obstinacy and positive, autocratic will. He had already reformed several convents in Poitou, in which the civil war, the invasion of an outside world, had strangely travestied the religious life. Some of these convents belonged to the great Benedictine Order of Fontevrault; and even in the Mother House itself, under the gentle and charitable guidance of Madame Eléonore de Bourbon, the strictness of the old Rule was half forgotten. Madame Antoinette d’Orléans, of the Longueville family, the young widow of the Marquis de Belle-Isle, had become a nun at Toulouse, at a convent of the Feuillantines, and asked nothing better than to spend her remaining days there. But she was known to Père Joseph as a woman like-minded with himself, an enthusiast and a saint; and when, in 1604, a bull of Pope Paul V. appointed her Coadjutrix of her aunt the Abbess of Fontevrault, the young reformer welcomed her as an ally in his work. And as far as outside convents were concerned, she did not disappoint him. But though she loyally helped and supported the old Abbess in the government of the Order, her heart was never at Fontevrault. Her religious ideals were totally different from those of the two hundred or more Sisters who marched with such stately dignity through the venerable cloisters and took their high place in the choir where Plantagenets slept. Their rich possessions, their amusements--innocent enough, for Fontevrault, owing to the character of its long and regal line of abbesses, was never seriously touched by scandal; their little parties and cabals and gossip--good women, simple in faith and practice, but not lofty-minded or mystical: all this fell far below the standard of Madame d’Orléans, and her one desire was to escape from her dignity, to return to her “dear solitude.” As she had never formally accepted the office of Coadjutrix, with the prospect of succession, this did not seem impossible. The difficulty was that Père Joseph would not let her go. In her authority and influence he saw the only means by which the reform of the great Abbey might be carried through. There were divisions in the community; some of the nuns being ready to welcome a change, others strongly opposed to it. Père Joseph and Madame de Bourbon both saw that no unanimity was to be hoped for, as long as the future was known to be uncertain.