Règlement pour les enfants
Règlement pour les enfants de Port-Royal
A verified public-domain excerpt for this text is still being set. The folio is catalogued and linked below; an original Sub Rosa rendering will follow.
What it is
Jacqueline Pascal — younger sister of Blaise, nun at Port-Royal des Champs — composed this Rule for Children in 1657 when she held charge of the convent school, the same year she was named sub-prioress and mistress of novices. The text is a detailed formation manual for the Jansenist petites écoles, describing how the teaching nun functions as spiritual director for her pupils, leading them in communal prayer, scriptural commentary, the chapter of faults, and personal interviews. The school educated daughters of the devout Jansenist nobility and bourgeoisie, and the Règlement is the most direct document of how Port-Royal transmitted its spirituality to the next generation through structured formation.
Why it still matters
As a formation framework the Règlement is still instructive for anyone designing spiritual education for children: its integration of daily prayer, moral examination, and personal spiritual direction anticipates much of what modern catechetical research advocates.
Kept alongside
Abandonment to Divine Providence
L'Abandon à la Providence divine
A spiritual treatise assembled from letters and conference notes that Jean-Pierre de Caussade, SJ wrote to the Nuns of the Visitation at Nancy between 1733 and 1740, where he served as spiritual director. Mother Sophie de Rottembourg grouped passages from his correspondence into eleven thematic chapters; this manuscript circulated in Visitandine houses before Henri Ramière published a reworked version in 1861 under the title L'Abandon à la Providence divine. The text's governing idea is total surrender to what Caussade calls 'the sacrament of the present moment' — the conviction that God's will is encountered fully in each immediate circumstance. Though addressed to enclosed religious women, the letters were recognized from the outset as broadly applicable to devout laypeople navigating the anxieties of life, and they circulated among spiritually serious court and convent circles in France during the mid-Bourbon era.
The Secret of Mary (Le secret de Marie)
Le secret de Marie
Written around 1712 as a personal spiritual letter to a devout religious sister in Nantes, this short treatise presents the same doctrine of total consecration to Jesus through Mary as the longer Traité, but in condensed form accessible as a single sitting's reading; it also contains the distinctive section 'The Tree of Life,' a meditation on the soul's spiritual growth through Mary. It survived only in two handwritten copies held by Montfort's religious congregations and was not published until 1868; since then it has appeared in over 400 editions and 40 languages. Together with the Traité it forms the doctrinal core of Montfortian Marian spirituality.
Lettres à Charlotte de Roannez
A series of surviving spiritual direction letters from Pascal to Charlotte de Roannez (sister of Artus Gouffier, Duc de Roannez), written while she was resident at Port-Royal of Paris and discerning a vocation. Pascal served as her spiritual counsellor, and fragments from these letters were directly incorporated into the 1670 Port-Royal edition of the Pensées in the 'Miracles' section. The letters develop the Jansenist themes of divine hiddenness, the Eucharist as the 'most hidden' sacrament, and the soul's progressive detachment from worldly ties. They constitute a direct documented link between the Roannez family's Jansenist formation and Pascal's broader devotional project.