Towards the end of the seventeenth century, the quarrel between Jansenists and Jesuits concerning subtle doctrinal differences had grown acute through the publication of Pascal's immortal _Lettres Provinciales_, and by Quesnel's _Reflexions Morales_ which the Jesuits had succeeded in subjecting to papal condemnation. In 1709, Le Tellier induced his royal penitent to decree the destruction of one of the two Jansenist establishments, and Port Royal des Champs, between Versailles and Chevreuse, rendered famous by the piety and learning of Arnault, Pascal and Nicolle, was doomed. On the night of 28th October 1709, the convent was surrounded by Gardes Francaises and Suisses, and on the following morning the chief of the police, with a posse of archers of the watch entered, produced a _lettre de cachet_, and gave the nuns a quarter of an hour to prepare for deportation. The whole of the sisters were then brutally expelled, "_comme on enleve les creatures prostituees d'un lieu infame_," says St. Simon, and scattered among other religious houses in all directions. The friends of the buried were bidden to exhume their dead, and all unclaimed bodies were flung into a neighbouring cemetery, where dogs fought for them as for carrion. The church was profaned, all the conventual buildings were razed and sold in lots, not one stone being left on another; the very ground was ploughed up and sown, "not, it is true with salt," adds St. Simon, and that was the only favour shown. Two years after the scene at Port Royal, amid the heartless gaiety of the court, the Angel of Death was busy in Louis' household. On 14th April 1711, the old king's only lawful son, the Grand Dauphin, expired; on 12th February 1712, the second Dauphiness, the sweet and gentle Adelaide of Savoy, Louis' darling, died of a malignant fever; six days later the Duke of Burgundy, her husband, was struck down; on 8th March, the Duke of Brittany, their eldest child, followed them. Three Dauphins had gone to the vaults of St. Denis in less than a year; mother, father, son, had died in twenty-four days--a sweep of Death's scythe, enough to touch even the hearts of courtiers. In a few days the king gave orders for the usual play to begin at Marly, and the dice rattled while the bodies of the Dauphin and Dauphiness lay yet unburied.