No one was astonished by religious demonstrations of that kind. Custom did not oppose the admission of the public to the spectacle of intimate mental or spiritual crises which it is now considered proper to conceal. The only thing astonishing was that Mademoiselle had harboured the idea of forsaking the world. Her friends ridiculed her, and, stung by their raillery, she recanted. Speaking of it later, she said: "I wondered at my ideas; I scoffed at my infatuation. I made excuses because I had ever dreamed of such a project." Monsieur was more surprised than his neighbours, and his surprise assumed a more virulent form; when his daughter begged to be permitted to enter a convent, when she declared that she would "better love to serve God than to wear the royal crowns of all the world," he gave way to a violent outburst of fury. Mademoiselle did not repeat her petition; she begged him to let the subject drop; and thus ended the comedy. In any other quarter curiosity regarding details would have been the only sentiment aroused by such a project. The daughters of many noble families and the daughters of families beyond the pale of the nobility entered convents. In the spiritual slough in which France floundered toward the close of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century, the nun's veil and the monk's habit were the only suitable coverings for mental distress, and in many cases the convent and the monastery were the sole places of refuge in a world so lamentable that Bérulle[95] and Vincent de Paul contemplated it with anguish. The convent was the only safe shelter for souls in which the germs of religious life had resisted the inroads of spiritual disease. In certain parts of the country, the annihilation of the Christian principle had resulted in the degradation of the Sacred Office and in the increase of the number of skeptics in the higher classes.