in a house belonging to the latter, in order to consult about the dangers
which threatened them. Mignon had, however, already begun to weave the
threads of a new intrigue, which he explained in full to the others; they
lent a favourable ear, and his plan was adopted. We shall see it unfold
itself by degrees, for it is the basis of our narrative.

We have already said that Mignon was the director of the convent of
Ursulines at Loudun: Now the Ursuline order was quite modern, for the
historic controversies to which the slightest mention of the martyrdom of
St. Ursula and her eleven thousand virgins gave rise, had long hindered
the foundation of an order in the saint's honour. However, in 1560 Madame
Angele de Bresse established such an order in Italy, with the same rules
as the Augustinian order. This gained the approbation of Pope Gregory
XIII in 1572. In 1614, Madeleine Lhuillier, with the approval of Pope
Paul V, introduced this order into France, by founding a convent at
Paris, whence it rapidly spread over the whole kingdom, so-that in 1626,
only six years before the time when the events just related took place, a
sisterhood was founded in the little town of Loudun.

Although this community at first consisted entirely of ladies of good
family, daughters of nobles, officers, judges, and the better class of
citizens, and numbered amongst its founders Jeanne de Belfield, daughter
of the late Marquis of Cose, and relative of M. de Laubardemont,
Mademoiselle de Fazili, cousin of the cardinal-duke, two ladies of the
house of Barbenis de Nogaret, Madame de Lamothe, daughter of the Marquis
Lamothe-Barace of Anjou, and Madame d'Escoubleau de Sourdis, of the same
family as the Archbishop of Bordeaux, yet as these nuns had almost all
entered the convent because of their want of fortune, the community found
itself at the time of its establishment richer in blood than in money,
and was obliged instead of building to purchase a private house. The