Note A — XXXII. To Mother Jeanne Charlotte de Bréchard, Superior at Moulins.

The lady so charitably recommended to Mother de Bréchard was Mademoiselle de Morville (Madame du Tertre). Left a widow at twenty-two, she had long before given herself up to a life of vanity and worldly pleasure. Her parents, anxious to safeguard her honour and the future of her children, procured for her an introduction to St. Francis de Sales, who was then in Paris. The result of this acquaintance was that Madame du Tertre quickly renounced her unedifying life and asked to be admitted into a Visitation Monastery, not as an aspirant to religious life but as a secular benefactress.

Thinking it desirable to remove her to a distance from Paris, where the temptations to return to her former life might prove too strong for one so weak and so recently converted, St. Francis arranged with her family and with Mother de Chantal to ask Mother de Bréchard to give her a home in her convent. His solicitude was ill repaid. This volatile and mischievous young woman brought endless bitterness to his heart, and to that of St. Jane Frances, while she was the source of misery and contention in the community in which she lived. In due time, acting upon the advice of their holy Founder, who was ever too hopeful in his views about Madame du Tertre, she was allowed to make her profession, but she soon relapsed into her former disedifying and uncontrolled manner of living, thereby becoming the cause of great suffering to the Institute. A letter of St. Jane Frances' shows that her repentance at the end was genuine, and that she died happily in peace with God.