Her sensibility remains imbued with those ideals of individualism and ambition which reigned in France throughout the nineties: she was born under the Consulate of Nietzsche and of Ibsen; but experience and reflection have shown her the disasters of a moral anarchy which still engages her sympathy though she augurs no happy issue for it. On the frontispiece of her first book, _Les Affranchis_, she has written a couplet from Racine’s _Titus et Bérénice_, expressing this antagonism between the individual and his environment: two lines in which the Jewish Queen, sacrificed by her royal lover to reasons of state (_invitus invitam_), reminds him of his duty to himself--and to her:-- ‘Rome a ses droits, Seigneur, n’avez-vous pas les vôtres? Ses intérêts sont-ils plus sacrés que les nôtres?’ And this question resumes a theme which never ceases to occupy her tragic sense of passion and her strong intellectual curiosity. Her first play is the history of a grand passion in two undisciplined yet superior natures--two super-mortals--despite society, and law, and order. Philippe and Hélène are (as Gobineau would say) ‘Children of the King,’ morally and intellectually a head and shoulders above the people. By what process of reflection are they induced to sacrifice a miraculous possibility of happiness, a draught such as they alone might quaff, to rights and duties which they do not acknowledge? Why, being giants, do they submit to the bonds of the pygmies? Are they right, are they wrong in the renunciation? Is there only _one_ right and _one_ wrong? Such are the questions raised by the history of her _Affranchis_--her Free Souls, thus most ironically named, since, in fact, none of us is free, and we act, not as we would, nor as we should, but as we can. Philippe Alquier is a philosopher, a great professor, a pioneer of ideas, an idol of the young: in fact, a sort of Bergson, a sort of Barrès--the Barrès of yesterday. He believes neither in duty, nor in the moral law, nor in any Absolute, nor in any certitude; and he discerns, in the floating relativity of things, but one obligation, that of augmenting to its utmost his personality. He is married to a pleasant, pretty wife, whose irritating mediocrity is, so to speak, the hall-mark of her virtue: it is impossible to be more respectable than Marthe. In the early Twentieth Century, at the dissolution of French monasteries, Alquier, the philosophic anarchist, receives under his roof his wife’s sister, Mother-General of the order of Reformed Cistercians, Abbess of Fontevrault.