De Rancé was born in 1626. He was of a ducal house, and the great Cardinal de Richelieu was his godfather. In his youth he was very sickly and scholastic. He was intended for the Church, held half a score of livings before he could speak--and when he _could_ express his will, resolved to live only by his sword. He remained for a while neither priest nor swordsman, but simply the gayest of libertines. He projected a plan of knight-errantry, in society with all the young cavaliers, and abandoned the project to study astrology. For a period of some duration, he was half-knight, half-priest. He then received full orders, dressed like the most frivolous of marquises, seduced the Duchess de Montbazon, and absolved in others the sins which he himself practised. “Where are you going?” said the Chevalier de Champvallon to him one day. “I have been preaching all the morning,” said De Rancé, “like an angel, and I am going this afternoon to hunt like the very devil.” He may be said to have been like those Mormons who describe their fervent selves as “Hell-bent on Heaven!” Nobody could ever tell whether he was soldier or priest, till death slew the Duchess de Montbazon. De Rancé unexpectedly beheld the corpse disfigured by the ravages of small-pox or measles, and he was so shocked, that it drove him from the world to the cloister, where, as the reconstructor, rather than the founder, of the order of Trappists, he spent thirty-seven years--exactly as many as he had passed in the “world.” The companions and followers of the chivalrous De Rancé claim a few words for themselves. The account will show in what strong contrasts the two portions of their lives consisted. They had learned obedience in their career of arms, but they submitted to a far more oppressive rule in their career as monks. Some century and a half ago there was published in Paris a dreadfully dreary series of volumes, entitled “Relations de la Vie et de la Mort de quelques Religieux de l’Abbaye de la Trappe.” They consist chiefly of tracts, partly biographical and partly theological, uninteresting in the main, but of interest as showing what noble soldiers or terrible freebooters asked for shelter in, and endured the austerities of, La Trappe. I have alluded to the unreserved submission required at the hands of the brothers. The latter, according to the volumes which I have just named, were sworn to impart even their _thoughts_ to the Abbot. They who thus delivered themselves with least reserve appear to have been commanded in very bad Latin; but their act of obedience was so dear to Heaven, that their persons became surrounded with a glory, which their less communicative brethren, says the author naïvely, could not possibly gaze at for any length of time:--the which I implicitly believe.