Still very agreeable, she wished to close her worldly and volatile career
with some brilliant and final triumph, as a great actress knows the
proper time to withdraw from the stage so as to leave regrets behind.
Desirous of offering up this final incense to her own vanity, the
princess skillfully selected her victims. She spied out in the world a
young couple who idolized each other; and, by dint of cunning and
address, she succeeded in taking away the lover from his mistress, a
charming woman of eighteen, by whom he was adored. This triumph being
achieved, Madame Saint-Dizier retired from the fashionable world in the
full blaze of her exploit. After many long conversations with the Abbe
Marquis d'Aigrigny, who had become a renowned preacher, she departed
suddenly from Paris, and spent two years upon her estate near Dunkirk, to
which she took only one of her female attendants, viz., Mrs. Grivois.

When the princess afterwards returned to Paris, it was impossible to
recognize the frivolous, intriguing, and dissipated woman she had
formerly been. The metamorphosis was as complete as it was extraordinary
and even startling. Saint-Dizier House, heretofore open to the banquets
and festivals of every kind of pleasure, became gloomily silent and
austere. Instead of the world of elegance and fashion, the princess now
received in her mansion only women of ostentatious piety, and men of
consequence, who were remarkably exemplary by the extravagant rigor of
their religious and monarchial principles. Above all, she drew around her
several noted members of the higher orders of the clergy. She was
appointed patroness of a body of religious females. She had her own
confessor, chaplin, almoner, and even spiritual director; but this last
performed his functions in partibus. The Marquis-Abbe d'Aigrigny
continued in reality to be her spiritual guide; and it is almost
unnecessary to say that for a long time past their mutual relations as to