making my peace with her. She received me angrily enough. I told her I
had not come to justify myself, but to ask her pardon. If she granted
it, she would send me away happy. If she declined to be reconciled,
Providence would probably be satisfied with my submission, but certainly
not with her refusal. She felt the force of this argument; and we made
it up on the spot.

I left Versailles immediately afterwards, without taking anything to
eat; the act of humility which I had just performed being as good as a
meal to me.

Towards evening, I entered the house of the Community of Saint Perpetua
at Paris. I had ordered a little room to be furnished there for me,
until the inventory of my worldly effects was completed, and until I
could conclude my arrangements for entering a convent. On first
installing myself, I began to feel hungry at last, and begged the
Superior of the Community to give me for supper anything that remained
from the dinner of the house. They had nothing but a little stewed
carp, of which I eat with an excellent appetite. Marvellous to relate,
although I had been able to keep nothing on my stomach for the past
three months, although I had been dreadfully sick after a little rice
soup on the evening before, the stewed carp of the sisterhood of Saint
Perpetua, with some nuts afterwards for dessert, agreed with me
charmingly, and I slept all through the night afterwards as peacefully
as a child!

When the news of my retirement became public, it occasioned great talk
in Paris. Various people assigned various reasons for the strange
course that I had taken. Nobody, however, believed that I had quitted
the world in the prime of my life (I was then thirty-one years old),