Mother Prudentia said that most of the younger nuns fell into these new ways easily enough, and were as enthusiastic as the abbess herself, so that they had to be checked, rather than urged; but the elder women were not so pliant. They liked their amusements, their good dinners and suppers, and their gossip with visitors from outside; and the abbess ran some risk of being murdered in her own house. Indeed, it was believed that a severe illness which befell the lady about that time was the effect of poison administered by a certain Italian nun who was the most bitterly opposed to the new state of things. For a while everything prospered. The Abbess was determined, and seemed to have a real genius for government. She lived to see all her measures carried out, and was succeeded by a spiritual daughter of Mother Angelique's, who had been sent, with two or three others, to assist in the work of reformation. The great revenues were used in maintaining schools, in assisting the poor, and in establishing and endowing a second house of our order in Toulon, to which daughters of trades-people and the like were admitted; for none but ladies of noble birth were allowed to renounce the world at our house. From all I can hear, the abbess and her successor were true Christian women according to their lights, and so, I am sure, were our own dear lady and most of the family in my day. But troublous times were at hand. The Port Royalists, or Jansenists, as they came to be called, got into difficulty with the government and with the Jesuits, who carried things with a high hand in France, as, indeed, they do still, by all accounts. The whole family of the Mother Angelique, with all who adhered to them, were pronounced heretical, disobedient to the Pope, and altogether reprobate, and various bulls and proclamations were issued against them by Pope and archbishop, king and council. Our house suffered with the rest, for the sake of the opinions which they refused to renounce. Their revenues were pillaged, their lands confiscated, their old priest and confessor was thrown into prison, where he died; and though the sisters were allowed to retain possession of their house and garden and enough land to raise a little corn and oil and to pasture a few cows and sheep, it was rather on sufferance and because they were under the protection of that same noble family of Crequi, which happened to be in high favor at court.