Amidst the ‘agonies of death’ in December 1650, the princesse de Condé held the hand of the comtesse de Brienne and uttered some final chilling words for her daughter, the duchesse de Longueville: ‘My dear friend, send word to that miserable woman at Stenay the state in which you see me that she may learn to die’.

From her deathbed, the princess – whose beauty and saintliness had once made her the artistic muse for her daughter – used her own mortality in an attempt to inspire her conversion and implored her to ‘learn to die’. In the middle decades of the seventeenth century, Longueville and a number of her friends from the Hôtel de Condé did just that. Experiencing different, and sometimes epiphanic, moments of conversion they became penitents who vowed to devote the remainder of their lives to God. Occurring within a twenty-year period, between around 1638 and 1656, each conversion marked the beginning of a life of penitence which was to thwart the earlier existence from which penitents' had turned. In order to effect the transition from worldliness to holiness longer term pious resolutions were implemented via rigorous penitential regimes, detailed within their spiritual autobiographical writings and correspondence, and also revealed retrospectively by the penitential statements contained within their testaments.

The earliest of these conversions came well before the Fronde had even begun. In 1638, the duchesse de Liancourt survived a bout of illness which prompted the first among the group.