her reproof with submission and humility — until cruel fate came, and the thunderbolt fell with its iron fingers upon their convent, and her path proved other than her elder sister's. For while Sister Angélique was suffering the crisis of her faith, asking why God had abandoned her in the hour of dis-tress, and why He did not deliver her pure and righteous convent from its tyrannical enemies, Sister Françoise was turning toward the cross to throw herself before it in supplication — and behold, grace filled her soul, and she felt a spiritual outpouring illuminating her... She confides this to Sister Angélique, who asks her:

— And how was your prayer? What words did you utter?

— I think I said: "My Lord and my God"...

— Nothing else?

— Nothing else...

— You said everything...

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This play was performed for the first time at the Comédie Française in December 1954, and was revived this year; up to the eleventh of last May it had been performed 208 times... The author says it is the last piece he will offer the theater, for after it he will write no play whatever — as though he wished to leave the modern theater his message of classicism, into which he has poured the distillation of his learning and his art; indeed, it is a mirror of his temperament, for he is a child of classicism, inclined by nature to seclusion and solitariness. He has often been accused of pride and of a feeling of scorn for his generation and his

contemporaries; for he belongs to that small company that lives in its ivory tower and refuses to enroll in any school or particular tendency. And although he has written much about himself, proclaiming his beliefs and his positions — and they are many — he still perplexes the critics and disturbs a great

many people. We do not think for a moment that he is one of the believers who carry the banner of the Church, for he values Christianity intellectually, not spiritually — but he commands by the breadth of his learning and the power of his eloquence...