It would require volumes to relate all the persecutions to which the inhabitants of Port-Royal were subjected. Hardly had Louis assumed the reins of government than, at the instigation of the Jesuits, he convened an assembly of bishops, and declared his intention to extirpate the Jansenists. The crafty and unscrupulous De Marca, Archbishop of Toulouse, prepared a formula to the following effect:— “I sincerely submit to the Constitution of Pope Innocent X., of May 31, 1653, according to its true sense, as defined by the Constitution of our holy Father, Pope Alexander VII., of October 16, 1656.[257] I acknowledge myself bound in conscience to obey this Constitution, and I condemn, from my heart and with my mouth, the doctrine of the five propositions of Cornelius Jansenius, which are contained in the book of Augustinus, which both the popes and the bishops have condemned; and the doctrine of St Augustine is not that which Jansenius has falsely set forth, and contrary to the true sense of the holy doctor.” All the clergy, and all persons who were in any way engaged in the tuition of youth, were required to subscribe this formula, and the most severe persecution awaited those who refused to do so. Neither the pure and uncontaminated life of those nuns of whom Bossuet himself said that they were “as pure as angels,” nor the learning, the piety, the austere and exemplary conduct of De Lacy, Arnauld, Nicole, and a hundred others, were a sufficient protection against the persecuting spirit of the Jesuits. Those noble and magnanimous men were dragged from their peaceable retreat, and sent to pine away their lives either in foreign lands or in the dungeons of the Bastille, of which the very passages were crowded with prisoners. Yet the noble resistance of the nuns could not be overcome, and the persecutors could only have amends of Port-Royal by levelling it to the ground. [Illustration: _Père La Chaise._ _Hinchliff._]