PORT-ROYAL. Antoine LE MAISTRE (1608-1658), Jansenist and man of letters, first solitary of Port-Royal des Champs, brother of Lemaistre de Sacy. L.A., December 8, 1657, [to Antoine Singlin (1607-1664), Jansenist, spiritual director of Port-Royal and Blaise Pascal]; 3 1/2 pages in-4 filled with a small handwriting with some corrections. Rare and very beautiful letter from this Port-Royal recluse. "My dearest father, finally it has pleased God to bless the reproaches which you made to me in your penultimate journey of my coldness & of my constraint with my brother who by the temptation of the Devil which seems to me now all clear, had passed in a kind of distance. You would not believe how much I had to pray to attract the spirit of God into my soul and to make an effective renewal by changing a coldness and indifference of 20 years into a more than fraternal friendship and into a tenderness full of charity. I would never have succeeded if I had not called upon the help of our Mothers and my own brother, to whom I had asked about it. Their exhortations to do me violence were useless. For I knew from several experiences that old evils which the Devil still envenoms, are only cured in me by the infusion of the spirit of God which changes my heart and not by human efforts which never change my heart even though they stir my mind. I have really & noticeably experienced this in this meeting. And I have not felt more sensibly the first & most ardent movements of penitence that God gave me 20 years ago than I have felt these last ones of an affection & of a cordiality which spread in my soul in the middle of my prayer & of many tears which still flow. But what made me see even more clearly that the spirit of God was changing me and warming me up was that, hearing Mass and being before God, I suddenly felt a new affection for you, my dear father, even though I was not thinking about it at the time. Otherwise I would have doubted the truth of this gift of God because God never destroys a good to destroy an evil. I confess that this testimony of his goodness and mercy towards me confounds me and touches me deeply. For it is a prodigious thing that He who made heaven and earth should allow Himself to be fleshed out by the prayers of miserable creatures & should come at present & appreciably imprint in the heart of a person the tender and ardent friendship that He asks of Him prostrate on the ground for a person whom He must love more than Himself & whom He loved almost not at all in fact & with a merely human affection. It is in these encounters where I see that nothing makes us more aware of the infinite greatness of God than the infinity of his goodness and his love towards men & that he only asks for a deep humility & an absolute recognition of our impotence & weaknesses to make us feel the power of his grace & the sweetness of his Holy Spirit who tenderizes us in such a long-lasting hardness of heart without us doing ourselves any human violence for this change, which we feel is impossible because we are not stronger than ourselves. He wants us to do violence to Him by the importunity and violence of the prayers we offer Him. I have no doubt, my dear father, that your own heartfelt desire, which you have shown me in so many encounters on this subject, has strengthened those of our mothers and of my brother. For being poor as I am, I need to be assisted by all of you. .... Etc.