Mondonville, Jeanne Juliard, Dame Turles De

Mondonville, Jeanne Juliard, Dame Turles De a French Roman Catholic woman, noted as the foundress of a pious order, was born at Toulouse in 1626. The daughter of a president of the Parliament of Toulouse, Jeanne Juliard was distinguished for her mind and her beauty. In 1646 she married Turles, lord of Mondonville, who left her a widow while still young, but endowed with a considerable fortune. Refusing many honorable offers of marriage, she determined to devote herself to, the instruction of the poor and the relief of the sick. In order the more completely to effect her object, she founded in 1652, with the approbation of Marca, archbishop of Toulouse, the congregation called Les Filles de l'Enfance. This institution was authorized in 1663 by pope Alexander VII, and approved by letters patent of eighteen bishops and many doctors in theology. The congregation was progressing finely, and already counted many chapels, when it was suddenly and violently attacked by the Jesuits, on the ground that the constitution of the new congregation contained maxims' dangerous to religion and morals. They obtained the nomination of commissioners to examine the criminated points, and exerted themselves so effectively that the congregation of the Filles de l'Enfance was suppressed by a decree of council in 1686. Madame de Mondonville was imprisoned at the Hospitalieres of Coutances, where she died in 1703, after twenty years of the most rigorous confinement. The Jesuits did not wait for that event before they confiscated the. property of the dissolved congregation, and established in its stead seminaries and houses of their own order. An old Jesuit and lawyer, Reboulet, in his Histoire des Filles de la Congregation de l'Enfance (Avignon, 1734), accuses Madame de Mondonville, of having given an asylum to men of treasonable views towards the state, that she had furnished some of them with means of leaving the kingdom, and that she had printed in her house many libels on the conduct of the king and his council; and the Jesuits as an order fought these unfortunate women as if they had been redoubtable enemies, and very soon despoiled them of all their goods. But when, subsequently, circumstances changed, and the credit of the Jesuits declined rapidly, the Parliament of Toulouse, at the request of the abbe Juliard, a relation of Madame de Mondonville, condemned Reboulet's work to the flames as calumnious and false. See Necrologe des Amnis de la Verite.