Some forty years earlier the wise and gentle spirit of S. Francis de Sales had conceived the idea of a religious foundation in which women, delicately nurtured and well educated, might live in greater freedom of spirit and less austerity of body than in the older Orders. He was fortunate enough to find a woman[403] capable of translating his ideas into fact, and the Order of the Visitation flourished exceedingly, and by the middle of the seventeenth century had spread all over France. Paris was naturally one of the first places to which the new Order came. The community, which boasted that it had once been ruled over by Mother Chantal herself, after some wanderings finally settled down in the Rue S. Antoine, within a stone's-throw of the grim fortress of the Bastille. Though the tide of fashion had set definitely westward since the final abandonment of the Place Royal by Louis XIII, the position was still a good one. Next door was the fine Hôtel de Mayence, which still stands as a witness of departed glories, but of the convent nothing remains except the church, which, though but small, was considered in the seventeenth century "one of the neatest in all Paris."[404] Madame de Motteville was the means of introducing this convent to Henrietta's notice. Her own young sister, to whom she was tenderly attached, had lately entered the house as a novice, greatly against her wishes; but in her visits to the girl she had been so won by the piety and kindness of the nuns that she begged the Queen of England to make their acquaintance. Henrietta was not without solicitation to go elsewhere. "Messieurs de Port Royal," those remarkable men whose doings were causing such a stir in the religious world of France, were anxious that she should come to Port Royal, thinking perhaps to strengthen their position by so direct a connection with royalty. They offered her apartments, and, what must have been more tempting, some much-needed money. But the invitation was not accepted, though the reasons for its refusal are unknown. They may, however, be conjectured, for it is difficult to imagine Henrietta, the true daughter of Henry IV, in the repressive atmosphere of Jansenism, and it may be surmised that had she entered Port Royal she would not have remained there long.