ABSTRACT
Port-Royal des Champs, situated in Valley of Chevreuse south of Paris, formed a self-contained community with its gardens, its fishponds, its bakery, and its storehouses. It was peopled not only by nuns and novices but by pious lay families, by scholars desirous of living in retreat (among them was Pascal), and by children of sympathizers for whom a special school was maintained. The existence of community was continually threatened by its enemies, the Jesuits, and the history of Port-Royal through the seventeenth century is one of constant struggle against its more powerful, and finally triumphant, opponents. The relationship between the enlightened teachers of Port-Royal and their pupils would in any case have been close. It became all the more so when the masters were dependent in times of persecution on the very families of the children they taught. In the introductory ode Racine describes, as a good Port-Royalist must, the vanity of earthly palaces, “cemented with the blood of peoples”.
