The wealthy burgher’s home had, owing to his daughter’s renunciation of the world and its pleasures, acquired a peculiar sanctity in the eyes of his co-religionists. She, the richest heiress of New France, had in the bloom of her youth taken a vow of perpetual seclusion, poverty and chastity, in order to devote herself to a life of contemplation. The god-child of Chomody de Maisonneuve and Marguerite Bourgeois, brought up in an atmosphere of visions and miracles, the halo of saintship glittered before her young eyes like a diamond crown, and she entertained a firm determination to scale the steepest heights of virtue and self-sacrifice. Looking down with spiritual pride upon the common herd of Christians, busied with the ordinary duties of life, she eschewed the visible and present, aspiring only to live for the heaven beyond. Lost in the vagaries of an absorbing mysticism, Jeanne Le Ber was unrelenting in the practice of humiliation and self-abnegation. Wonderful stories of her superior sanctity were whispered abroad. She wore a horse-hair skirt and belt, allowed herself scarcely any sleep, and confined her diet to the coarsest and meanest of food. She held no communication with those nearest to her by ties of blood. Two years after her retirement from the world her mother was attacked by fatal illness, and though the sound of the poor woman’s groans penetrated to her daughter’s chamber, the would-be saint denied herself the privilege of attending her parent’s death-bed. Though Jeanne Le Ber’s face was never seen except by the one person who waited upon her, nor her voice ever heard by those most closely connected with her, yet from the secluded chamber which for several years she had never quitted, that voiceless presence exercised a potent ascendency.