I am distressed because of your sickness because I do not want you to die yet. I hope that that will not happen and that God will preserve you for his religious community. If you are sick, fear nothing, you have no indication that you belong to any others except God.
Illnesses are themselves the main penitence for faults we make because of weakness and God sends them to us so we can purge ourselves of them. Great sufferings do more in a little time than other penitences do in many years.
I care only for those who need you when I fear the success of your illness. For what touches you, regarding God and his sacred will, healthy and sick you have no reason to fear his force. You are his, and everything that has happened bears witness that he loved you before your birth. I am not flattering you but encouraging you with a truth that I try to follow everywhere.
If we are God’s during life no matter what weakness we have, we cannot be badly off dying.
I pray to God to console this good Mother who is dying. I recommend her to God every day and I pray to the Saints to do it also, without whose aid our prayers are nothing, like the efforts of little children without efforts of grown-ups who help them.
I recommend to you this seven-year-old girl whom God gave to me at the same time that he took my niece. He obliged me to take care of her like a pauper. We must bear witness to God by actions proportional in some way to the grace that he has given us that we consider him great and that if we can make happy some person on earth, we should do it with a good heart to recognize the grace that he gave to our little girl who resisted every attempt of her mother to make her leave Port-Royal.
We must search for every sort of way to practice gratitude. The good earth that receives a good seeding gives a plowman back a hundredfold who would complain about it with reason as an ungrateful earth if it gave back in season only the same seeding. I beg you with all my heart, you have a part in the work and you will be doubly compensated by God for the trouble you have had to settle and raise well these two little girls, one in heaven, the other on earth. God asks from you and I do also only that you apply yourself a little to the matter leaving the outcome to providence. For, as Saint Paul says, the Lord knows those who are his and it is only those that he aids thoroughly and makes succeed. I will pray to him about it, and may he make this gift to your religious community as the first part of a blessing for the whole year as I offered it to him the first day in your name in particular and in the name of Mother. I salute her with the whole community.
Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill
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