The shafts, impotent as they were, of Madame Deshoulières had an evil effect on Racine. Ninon, warmly seconded by St Evrémond especially, endeavoured to win the great tragic poet from his exclusive associations with the Court; but he turned a deaf ear to every argument. It is possible that the atmosphere of Versailles, as it prevailed under the ordering of Madame de Maintenon, tainted and unhealthy as it was with pharisaical “piety,” assorted with the sentiments of gloom ill-health had fostered, for Racine suffered cruelly, long before his death, from an abscess on the liver. Moreover, by education and rearing he was a Port Royalist, and the tenets of Jansenism could but have run in his blood. In her earlier time Madame de Maintenon had looked favourably on these Calvinistic sectaries of the Catholic Church; only at a later date it was that the rupture occurred with the Abbé Fénelon and Madame Guyon, the notable advocate of the doctrines of the Quietest, Michael Molinos the Spanish monk. Madame Guyon, whose maiden name was de la Motte, evinced mystic tendencies even as a child. As she grew up, it was her wish to enter a convent; but her parents prevented this, and she was married at sixteen. At eight-and-twenty she became a widow, and then the old mystic sentiments began to rule her more dominantly than ever. This was further fostered in her by her confessor and other ecclesiastics about her, who persuaded her that she was destined by Heaven to be a powerful agent for the advancement of religion. “Still young,” says Voltaire, “with beauty, riches, and a mind fitted for society, she became infatuated with what is called _spiritualism_. Her confessor whose name was Lacombe, a man of a nature at once passionate and devout, and who died mad, plunged the mind of his penitent deeper into the mystic reveries by which it was already affected. Her doctrine,” Voltaire goes on to say, “was a complete renunciation of self, the silence of the soul, the annihilation of all its faculties, internal worship, and the pure and disinterested love of God, which is neither degraded by fear nor animated by the hope of reward.” There were times, however, that religious enthusiasm, following its customary tendency, betrayed her into extravagance, and absurdities of speech in her efforts to explain her views.