The monks, being numerous and proud, as men specially sent forth to make converts, kept the pick of the pavement against the Protestants, and were confessing the Catholic ladies, when there arrived from Bordeaux a young vicar, brought up by the Jesuits, a man of letters, of pleasing manners, who wrote well and spoke better. He made a noise in the pulpit, and ere long in the world. By birth a townsman of Mantes, of a wrangling turn, he was Southern by education, with all the readiness of a Bordelais, boastful and frivolous as a Gascon. He soon managed to set the whole town by the ears, drawing the women to his side, while the men were mostly against him. He became lofty, insolent, unbearable, devoid of respect for everything. The Carmelites he overwhelmed with jibes; he would rail away from his pulpit against monks in general. They choked with rage at his sermons. Proud and stately, he went along the streets of Loudun like a Father of the Church; but by night he would steal, with less of bluster, down the byeways and through back-doors. They all surrendered themselves to his pleasure. The wife of the Crown Counsel was aware of his charms; still more so the daughter of the Public Prosecutor, who had a child by him. This did not satisfy him. Master of the ladies, this conqueror pushed his advantage until he had gained the nuns. By that time the Ursulines abounded everywhere, sisters devoted to education, feminine missionaries in a Protestant land, who courted and pleased the mothers, while they won over the little girls. The nuns of Loudun formed a small convent of young ladies, poor and well-born. The convent in itself was poor, the nuns for whom it was founded, having been granted nothing but their house, an old Huguenot college. The prioress, a lady of good birth and high connections, burned to exalt her nunnery, to enlarge it, make it wealthier and wider known. Perhaps she would have chosen Grandier, as being then the fashion, had she not already gotten for her director a priest with very different rootage in the country, a near kinsman of the two chief magistrates. The Canon Mignon, as he was called, held the prioress fast. These two were enraged at learning through the confessional--the “Ladies Superior” might confess their nuns--that the young nuns dreamed of nothing but this Grandier, of whom there was so much talk. Thereupon three parties, the threatened director, the cheated husband, the outraged father, joined together by a common jealousy, swore together the destruction of Grandier. To ensure success, they only needed to let him go on. He was ruining himself quite fast enough. An incident that came to light made noise enough almost to bring down the town. * * * * *