In the aftermath of her conversion, the princesse de Conti wrote to one of her female correspondents seeking to unburden herself of the demands with which the newly converted were encumbered. In a vivid epistolary account, she described feeling a heavy heart and cried as she contemplated the crucified Jesus Christ's suffering, before prostrating herself before him. Here, Conti mobilized the image of the penitent female sinner and her ‘sacred tears’ to share the effects of her interior mortification with her female friend. Conti's letter represents only one of many exchanged between these new aristocratic penitents in the decades after their conversions, where correspondence functioned to alleviate the anxiety roused by penitence for both author and recipient.

The penitents who had circulated in the pious salon at the Hôtel de Condé were part of a broad network, which spanned several families and had numerous external connections. Yet, as this chapter will show, their group began to contract in the middle decades of the century, as they took greater interest in their spiritual friends and eloigned themselves further from the world. Epistolary examinations of conscience began to be routinely disclosed as their bonds were strengthened by a shared experience of penitence and a new commitment to piety.

A Pious Network

The rigorist women who became devoted ‘spiritual friends’ were not strangers.