بخش 2 کتاب 6

BOOK SIX

PETIT-PICPUS

PETITE RUE PICPUS, NO. 62

NO PORTE COCHÈRE COULD have been more ordinary, half a century ago, than the porte cochère of no. 62, petite rue Picpus. This door was normally half-open in the most inviting way, revealing two things that had nothing especially gloomy about them—a courtyard surrounded by vine-covered walls and the face of a porter lounging there. Over the back wall, great trees could be seen. When a ray of sunshine brightened up the courtyard or when a glass of wine brightened up the porter, it was difficult to pass by no. 62 petite rue Picpus without carrying away a cheery idea of it. And yet it was a grim place when you first caught a glimpse of it.

The threshold grinned; the house prayed and wept.

You had to get past the porter, which was not easy, which was even impossible for almost everyone, for there was an open sesame that you had to know; but if you did manage to get past the porter, you walked straight into a little vestibule that led to a staircase squeezed in between two walls and so narrow that only one person at a time could pass; if you did not let yourself be frightened off by the canary yellow distemper on the upper part of the stair wall and the chocolate colour on the base, if you ventured to go up, you passed one landing, then a second, and you reached the upper floor in a hall where the yellow distemper and the chocolate base followed you with quiet relentlessness. Stairs and hall were lit by two beautiful windows. The hall then veered like a dog’s leg and became dark. If you jumped that hurdle, after a few feet you came to a door all the more mysterious for not being shut. You pushed it and you found yourself in a small room about six feet square, tiled, washed and scrubbed, clean and neat, cold, and hung with nankeen wallpaper with little green flowers at fifteen sous a roll. Dull white light came from a big window with little panes on the left and ran the whole length of the room. You looked, but you did not see anyone; you listened, but you did not hear a footstep or the faintest murmur of a human voice. The wall was bare; the room was unfurnished, with not a single chair.

You looked again and you saw that, on the wall opposite the door, a quadrangular opening about a foot square had a grate over it, a grate of crisscrossing iron bars, black, knotted, solid, that formed squares—I nearly said mesh—less than an inch across. The little green flowers of the nankeen wallpaper went calmly and neatly right up to these iron bars, without being frightened off by such dismal contact and sent into a tizzy. Supposing that some living being had been so fabulously thin as to even be able to think about getting in or out through the square hole, the grate would have prevented them from doing so. It would not let a body through, but it let your eyes through, that is, your mind. It seems they had thought of that, for it had been lined with a sheet of tin inserted into the wall a bit to the back and punched with a thousand holes tinier than the holes of a colander. At the bottom of this tin plate an opening had been punched that was exactly like the mouth of a letter box. A cord attached to a bell hung to the right of the grate.

If you pulled this cord, a little bell tinkled and you would hear a voice right next to you, which made you jump.

“Who’s there?” the voice asked.

It was a woman’s voice, a sweet voice, so sweet it was spooky.

Here again there was a magic word that you had to know. If you did not know what it was, the voice shut up and the wall became silent again as though the bewildered darkness of the tomb had been on the other side.

If you did know the word, the voice went on: “Enter at the right.”

You then noticed on your right, opposite the window, a glass door surmounted by a glass window painted grey. You lifted the latch, you walked through the door, and you had exactly the same impression as when you go to a show at the theatre and enter a ground floor box protected by a grille, before the grille is lowered and the lights go up. You were in fact in a sort of theatre box, barely lit by the dim daylight from the glass door, tiny, furnished with two old chairs and a frayed straw mat, a veritable box with a front just the right height to lean on and a black sill. This box had a grille, too, only it was not a grille of gilded wood as at the Opéra, it was a monstrous trellis of iron bars hideously enmeshed and fixed to the wall with enormous bolts that looked like clenched fists.

After the first few minutes, when your eyes began to adjust to the crepuscular half-light of this cave, you tried to look through the grille but could not see more than six inches in front of you. There, you saw a barrier of black shutters, secured and reinforced by wooden crossbars painted a gingerbread yellow. These shutters were jointed and divided into long thin slats and they masked the entire length of the grate. They were always shut.

After a few minutes, you heard a voice calling you from behind these shutters and saying to you: “I am here. What do you want of me?”

It was a loved voice, sometimes an adored voice. You saw no one. You scarcely heard the sound of breathing. It seemed that it was a disembodied evocation speaking to you from across the barrier of the grave.

If you met certain essential requirements—this was extremely rare—the narrow slat of one of the shutters opened directly in front of you and the evocation became an apparition. Behind the grille, behind the shutter, you saw, as far as the grille allowed you to see, a head, of which only the mouth and the chin were visible; the rest was covered in a black veil. You caught a glimpse of a black wimple and a shapeless form covered in a black shroud. This head spoke to you but did not look at you and never smiled at you.

The light that came in behind you was slanted in such a way that you saw the head as white and it saw you as black. This daylight was symbolic.

Yet your eyes plunged avidly through this aperture that had opened up, into this space shut off from all eyes. A profound vagueness enveloped this form dressed in mourning. Your eyes searched the vagueness and sought to fathom what surrounded the apparition. In a very short while you realized you saw nothing. What you saw was night, emptiness, the dark, a winter fog mingled with vapour from the grave, a sort of terrifying peace, a silence in which you took in nothing, not even a sigh, a shadowland where you could make out nothing, not even a phantom.

What you saw was the interior of a cloister.

It was the interior of that mournful and severe house known as the convent of the Bernadines of Perpetual Adoration. The box you were in was the visitors’ parlour. The voice, the one that first spoke to you, was the voice of the sister in charge of external relations who was always seated, motionless and silent, on the other side of the wall, next to the square opening, defended by a grate of iron and by the tin plate with a thousand holes as though by a double visor.

The darkness in which the grated box was plunged came from the fact that the visitors’ room, which had a window onto the outside world, had none on the convent side. Profane eyes were not supposed to see anything of this holy place.

And yet there was something beyond this darkness, there was a light; there was a life amid all this death. Even though this convent was the most walled-in of all, we are going to try to get in and to get the reader in, and, all restraint aside, tell things that storytellers have never seen and consequently have never told.

THE RULE OF MARTIN VERGA

THIS CONVENT THAT, in 1824, had already existed for many long years in the petite rue Picpus was a community of Bernardines of the rule of Martin Verga.1

These Bernardines2 were, consequently, not linked to Clairvaux, like the Bernadine monks, but to Cîteaux, like the Benedictine monks. In other words, they were subjects not of Saint Bernard but of Saint Benedict.

Anyone who has leafed through old folios knows that in 1425, Martin Verga founded a Bernardine-Benedictine congregation, with the headquarters of the order at Salamanca and a branch church at Alcala. This congregation had grown sub-branches in all the Catholic countries of Europe.

Such grafts of one order onto another are not at all unusual in the Latin Church. To take only the order of Saint Benedict that we are dealing with here as an example, and without counting the rule of Martin Verga, four congregations are connected to this order: two in Italy, Monte Cassino and Santa Giustina of Padua, and two in France, Cluny and Saint-Maur; as well as nine orders, Vallombrosa, Grammont, the Celestines, the Camaldolese, the Carthusians, the Humiliati, the Olivetans, the Sylvestrines, and lastly Cîteaux, for Cîteaux itself, the trunk of other orders, is just an offshoot of Saint Benedict. Cîteaux was founded by Saint Robert, abbé de Molesme, in the diocese of Langres in 1098. Now, it was in 529 that the devil, who had retired to the desert of Subiaco—he was old and had perhaps become a hermit3—was driven out of the temple of Apollo, where he dwelt, by Saint Benedict, then seventeen years old.

After the rule of the Carmelites, who go barefoot, wear a bit of willow at their throats, and never sit down, the harshest rule is that of the Bernardine-Benedictines of Martin Verga. They are dressed in black and wear a wimple that, according to the express command of Saint Benedict, comes right up under the chin. A robe of serge with wide sleeves, a big woolen veil, the wimple worn right up to the chin and cut square across the chest, with the band coming down over the forehead to the eyes—this is their habit. Everything is black except the band, which is white. Novices wear the same habit, but all in white. Professed nuns also have a rosary at the side.

The Bernardine-Benedictines of Martin Verga practise Perpetual Adoration, as do the Benedictines known as Ladies of the Blessed Sacrament,4 who, at the turn of the century, had two houses in Paris, one at the Temple and the other in the rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève. But the Bernardine-Benedictines of Petit-Picpus that we are concerned with were a completely different order from the Ladies of the Blessed Sacrament cloistered in the rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève and the Temple. There were numerous differences in their rule as well as in their attire. The Bernardine-Benedictines of Petit-Picpus wore the black wimple and the Benedictines of the Blessed Sacrament and the rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève wore the white wimple and also wore a blessed crucifix about three inches long in gilded silver or gilded copper at their breasts. The Petit-Picpus nuns did not wear this crucifix. Though the Perpetual Adoration was common to the Petit-Picpus house and the Temple house, the two orders remained perfectly distinct. Their only resemblance lies in this shared practice of the Ladies of the Blessed Sacrament and the Bernardines of Martin Verga, just as there was a similarity in the study and glorification of all the mysteries concerning the infancy, life, and death of Jesus Christ and the Blessed Virgin Mary, between another pair of orders that were very distinct and on occasion even hostile: the Oratory of Italy, set up in Florence by Philip di Neri, and the Oratory of France, set up in Paris by Pierre de Bérulle.5 The Oratory in Paris claimed precedence, Philippe di Neri being only a saint, whereas Bérulle was a cardinal.

Let’s get back to the harsh Spanish rule of Martin Verga. The Bernardine-Benedictines of this order abstain from meat all year round, fast during Lent and on plenty of other days that have special meaning for them, get up out of their first sleep to say the breviary and chant matins from one o’clock till three o’clock in the morning, sleep in serge sheets and on beds of straw whatever the season, do not have baths, never light fires, scourge themselves every Friday, observe the rule of silence, only talking to each other during recreation periods, which are extremely short, and wear hair shirts for six months of the year, from September 14, which is the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, to Easter. These six months are pretty moderate—the rule says all year, but hair shirts are unbearable at the height of summer and produce fevers and nervous spasms, so their use had to be restricted. Even with this softening of the rule, on September 14, when the nuns first put on the shirts, they have three or four days of fever. Obedience, poverty, chastity, perseverance in their seclusion—those are their vows, made considerably more rigorous by the rule.

The prioress is elected for three years by the mother superiors, who are called “vocal mothers” because they have a say in the matter. A prioress can be reelected only twice, which means the longest possible reign for a prioress is fixed at nine years.

They never see the officiating priest, who is always hidden from them by a serge curtain nine feet high. During the sermon, when the priest is in the chapel, they lower their veils over their faces. They must always speak softly and walk with their eyes on the ground and the head bowed. Only one man may ever enter the convent and that is the archbishop of the diocese.

There is actually one other man, and that is the gardener; but he is always an old man, and to ensure that he is perpetually alone in the garden and the nuns can be warned to avoid him, a bell is attached to his knee.

They are subject to the prioress with a submissiveness that is absolute and passive. This is canonical enslavement in all its self-abnegation. As at the voice of Christ, ut voci Christi, at the movement, at the first sign, ad nutum, ad primum signum, right away, with joy, with perseverance, with a certain blind obedience, prompte, hilariter, perseveranter et caeca quadam obedientia, like a file in the hand of a labourer, quasi limam in manibus fabri, not being able to read or write anything whatsoever without express permission, legere vel scribere non addiscerit sine expressa superioris licentia.

Taking turns, each nun makes what they call atonement. Atonement is prayer for all the sins, all the faults, all the disturbances, all the violations, all the iniquities, all the crimes that are committed on this earth. For twelve consecutive hours, from four o’clock in the late afternoon to four o’clock in the morning, or from four o’clock in the morning to four o’clock in the late afternoon, the sister making atonement remains on her knees on the stone floor before the Blessed Sacrament, her hands joined in prayer and a rope around her neck. When fatigue becomes unbearable, she prostrates herself flat on her stomach, her face to the floor, her arms out in a cross. That is the only relief she gets. In this attitude she prays for all the guilty of the universe. This is greatness that achieves the sublime.

As this act is accomplished in front of a pole with a burning candle on top of it, they call it, indiscriminately, “to make atonement” or “to be at the pole.” Out of humility, the nuns even prefer the latter expression, which contains the idea of torture and abasement.

To make atonement is a process in which the whole soul is absorbed. The sister at the pole would not turn round even if a bolt of lightning were to strike right behind her.

Moreover, there is always a nun on her knees before the Holy Sacrament. This station lasts an hour. They relieve each other like soldiers on guard duty. This is Perpetual Adoration.

Prioresses and mother superiors almost always bear names impregnated with a particular gravity, recalling not the saints and martyrs but moments in the life of Jesus Christ, like Mother Nativity, Mother Conception, Mother Presentation, Mother Passion. Yet the names of saints are not prohibited.

When you see them, you only ever see their mouths. They all have yellow teeth. Never has a toothbrush entered the convent. To brush your teeth lies at the top of a slippery slope at the bottom of which lies: losing your soul.

They never say of anything “my” or “mine.” They have nothing of their own and are supposed not to be attached to anything. They say of everything “our,” so: our veil, our rosary; if they were referring to their shirt they would say “our shirt.” Sometimes they become attached to some little object, to a book of hours, a relic, a holy medal. As soon as they realize that they are starting to become attached to this object, they must give it away. They recall what Saint Theresa replied when a grande dame who was about to enter into her order said, “Allow me, Mother, to send for a Holy Bible I’m very attached to.” “Ah! You’re attached to something! In that case, do not enter our house.” No one is allowed to shut herself away and have a home of her own, a room. They live in open cells. When they approach one another, one of them says: “Praised and adored be the most Blessed Sacrament of the altar!” The other one answers: “Forever.” Same ceremony when one knocks on another’s door. The door has hardly been touched before a sweet voice on the other side is heard to blurt out: “Forever!” Like all practices, this becomes mechanical through habit; and one of them will sometimes say “Forever” before the other one has the time to say “Praised and adored be the most Blessed Sacrament of the altar!” It is a bit of a mouthful after all.

Among the Visitandines, the nun entering says “Ave Maria” and the nun whose place is being entered says “Gratia plena.” That is their greeting and it is, indeed, “full of grace.”

At every hour of the day, three additional strokes ring out from the chapel bell of the convent. At this signal, the prioress, vocal mothers, professed nuns, converts, novices, postulants, interrupt what they are saying, what they are doing, what they are thinking, and they all say in unison, if it is five o’clock, for example: “At five o’clock and at any hour, praised and adored be the most Blessed Sacrament of the altar!” If it is eight o’clock: “At eight o’clock and at any hour,” etc., according to whatever hour it is.

This custom, which aims to break the chain of thought and bring the mind back to focus always on God, exists in many communities; only the formula varies. Thus, at the Infant Jesus, they say: “At this hour and at any hour may the love of Jesus inflame my heart!” The Benedictine-Bernardines of Martin Verga, cloistered fifty years ago in Petit-Picpus, sang the services to a solemn psalmody, pure plainchant, and always at full voice for the whole length of the service. Wherever there was an asterisk in the missal, they would pause and say in a low voice: “Jesus-Mary-Joseph.” For the Service of the Dead they adopted such a low register, it was hard for women’s voices to reach it. The effect produced was thrilling and tragic.

The nuns of Petit-Picpus had had a burial chamber made beneath the main altar for the burial of their community. The government, as they called it, did not allow this burial chamber to receive coffins, did not allow corpses to be put there. So they had to leave the convent when they died. This upset them and appalled them as a violation of the rules.

As a mediocre consolation, they had obtained the right to be buried at a special hour and in a special corner of the old Vaugirard Cemetery, in ground that once belonged to their community.

On Thursdays, the nuns heard high mass, vespers, and all the offices the same as on Sundays. They also scrupulously observed all the little feast days almost unknown to people in the outside world, feast days the Church was once very big on in France and still is in Spain and Italy. Their attendance in the chapel was interminable. As for the number and length of their prayers, the best we can do to give some idea of this is to cite the guileless words of one of the nuns: “The prayers of the postulants are frightening, the prayers of the novices are even worse, and the prayers of the professed nuns are worse still.” The chapter assembled once a week; the prioress presided, the vocal mothers attended. Each sister took a turn kneeling on the stone floor and confessing out loud, before all, the faults and sins she had committed that week. The vocal mothers conferred together after each confession and inflicted the penance out loud.

Apart from this loud and clear public confession, for which all remotely serious sins were stored up, they had what they called la coulpe, from mea culpa, for venial sins. To do your culp you prostrated yourself flat on your face in front of the prioress until she, who was never referred to as anything other than “our mother,” alerted the culprit, by a little rap on the wood of her stall, that she could get up. You did your culp for pretty trivial things. Breaking a glass, tearing a veil, being a few seconds late unintentionally for a service, singing a wrong note in church, and so on, was enough for you to have to do your culp. The culp is completely spontaneous; it is the culprit herself (the word is here etymologically in its place) who judges herself and inflicts it on herself. On feast days and Sundays, four cantor mothers sang the offices before a great rostrum with four lecterns. One day a cantor mother intoned a psalm that began with the word Ecce and, instead of Ecce, she said out loud these three notes: do, si, sol; for this bit of absentmindedness she underwent a culp that lasted for the rest of the service. What made the fault so enormous was the fact that the chapter had laughed.

When a nun was called to the visitors’ parlour, even if she was the prioress, she dropped her veil in such a way that, as you will recall, only her mouth could be seen.

The prioress alone could communicate with strangers. The others could only see their immediate family, and that very rarely. If by chance someone from outside turned up to see a nun they once knew or loved in the outside world, it was a matter for serious negotiation and a whole round of talks was required. If this person was a woman, authorization would sometimes be granted; the nun would come and talk to her through the shutters, which were only opened for a mother or a sister. It goes without saying that permission was never granted to men.

Such is the rule of Saint Benedict, aggravated by Martin Verga.

These nuns are not lighthearted, rosy, fresh girls the way the daughters of other orders often are. They are pale and serious. Between 1825 and 1830, three of them went mad.

THE AUSTERITIES

YOU ARE A postulant for at least two years, often four; a novice for four years. It is rare that the final vows can be taken before you reach the age of twenty-three or twenty-four. The Bernardine-Benedictines of Martin Verga do not admit widows into their order.

They deliver themselves up in their cells to secret mortifications of the flesh that they must never talk about.

The day a novice makes her profession she is decked out in all her finery, her head adorned with white roses and her hair washed and brushed till it shines and then curled, and after this, she prostrates herself; a great black veil is spread over her and the service of the dead is sung. Then the nuns split into two lines; one line files past her, saying in a plaintive tone, “Our sister is dead!” and the other file responds in a resounding voice, “Alive in Jesus Christ!” At the time this story takes place, a boarding school was attached to the convent. A boarding school for young girls from the nobility, most of them rich, among whom the mademoiselles de Sainte-Aulaire and de Bélissen1 and an English girl bearing the illustrious Catholic name of Talbot2 stood out. These young girls, brought up by the nuns between four walls, grew up in horror of the outside world and of the age in which they lived. One of them told us one day: “To see the cobblestones on the street made me shiver from head to toe.” They were dressed in blue with a white bonnet and wore a Holy Spirit medal in gilded silver or copper pinned to their breasts. On certain major feast days, particularly on the feast day of Saint Martha, they were allowed, as a special favour and supreme thrill, to dress up as nuns and to perform the offices and rituals of Saint Benedict for the entire day. In the early days, the nuns lent them their black habits. But this seemed profane and the prioress eventually banned it. Such a loan was only allowed on the part of novices. It is remarkable that these shows, tolerated no doubt and encouraged in the convent due to a secret spirit of proselytism and to give the girls a foretaste of the holy habit, were a real joy and a true recreation for the boarders. Quite simply, they had fun. “It was new, it was a change.” A frankly childish rationale that can’t quite explain to us men and women of the world, in a way that we can understand, the felicity of holding an aspergillum, or a sprinkler for holy water, in our hand and standing for hours at a stretch singing in a quartet in front of a whopping great rostrum.

The pupils conformed to all the practices of the convent, the austerities excepted. There are young women who, having entered the world and after several years of marriage, never quite managed to shed the habit of saying swiftly whenever anyone knocked on the door: “Forever!” Like the nuns, the boarders only saw their families in the visitors’ room. Even their mothers were not allowed to hug or kiss them. Listen to just how far severity on this point could go: One day a young girl had a visit from her mother, accompanied by a little sister three years old. The young girl cried, for she really would have liked to give her sister a kiss and a hug. Not a chance. She begged for the child to at least be allowed to put her little hand through the bars so that she could kiss it. This was refused as virtually scandalous.

FUN

THESE YOUNG GIRLS managed to fill this grave house with delightful memories in spite of everything.

At certain times, childhood sparkled in this cloister. The bell would ring for recreation. A door would turn on its hinges. The birds chirped: “Good! Here come the girls!” An eruption of young life flooded this garden that had a cross cut into it like a shroud. Radiant faces, white foreheads, innocent eyes full of happy light, all kinds of auroras would scatter into the shadows. After chanting, bell ringing, chime ringing, the knells, the services, the noise of little girls would suddenly burst out, sweeter than the humming of bees. The hive of joy opened and each one of them brought their honey. They played, they yelled at each other, they formed huddles, they ran around; pretty little white teeth chattered away in corners; the veils, from afar, surveyed the laughter, the shadows spied on the rays of sunshine, but what did it matter! They shone on and they laughed. These four gloomy walls had their dazzling moments. They stood there, vaguely brightened up by the reflection of so much joy, by this sweet whirling of swarms. It was like a shower of roses pelting down through the mourning. The young girls frolicked under the eyes of the nuns; the gaze of flawlessness does not bother innocence. Thanks to these children, there was an hour of simple fun among so many austere hours. The little girls leaped about, the big ones danced. In the cloister, games were heavenly. Nothing could be more ravishing and noble than all these fresh souls blossoming. Homer would have dropped in there for a laugh with Perrault, and there was enough youth, health, noise, yelling and screaming, giddiness, pleasure, happiness in that dark garden, to bring a smile to the lips of all the grandmothers, those of the epics every bit as much as those of the fairy tales, those on the throne every bit as much as those in the thatch-roofed hovel, from Hecuba to Mother Goose.

In this house, perhaps more than anywhere else, those children’s sayings that are always so delightful and that always make people laugh with a laughter full of reverie, were said to each other. It is between these four gloomy walls that a little girl of five cried one day: “Mother, a big girl just told me I only have nine years and ten months to go here. Isn’t that wonderful!” It is also here that this memorable conversation took place:

A vocal mother: “Why are you crying, my child?”

The child (six), sobbing: “I told Alix I knew my history of France. She said I don’t, and I do.”

Alix (the big girl, nine): “No, she doesn’t.”

The mother: “How so, my child?”

Alix: “She told me to open the book anywhere and to ask her any question that was there in the book and she’d answer.”

“Well?”

“She didn’t answer.”

“Let’s have a look. What did you ask her?”

“I opened the book anywhere, just like she said, and I asked her the first question I found.”

“And what was the question?”

“It was: ‘What happens next?’”

It was at that juncture that the profound observation about a rather greedy parrot who belonged to a lady boarder was made: “Isn’t it cute! She licks the jam off her toast just like a person!”

It is on one of the flagstones of this cloister that this confession was put together, written ahead of time so as not to be forgotten by a sinner seven years old: “Father, I confess I have been avaricious. Father, I confess I have been adulterous. Father, I confess I have raised my eyes to the gentlemen.” It is on one of the lawns of the garden that this tale was improvised by a rosy mouth of six and told to blue eyes of four or five: “Once upon a time there were three little chickens who lived in the countryside where there were lots of flowers. They picked the flowers and put them in their pockets. After that, they picked the leaves and put them in their toys. There was a wolf in the countryside and there were lots of woods; and the wolf was in the woods; and he ate the little chickens.” And again, this poem:

There was a blow with a stick.

It was Punchinello who hit the cat.

That didn’t do him any good, it hurt him.

So a lady put Punchinello in prison.1

It was there that these sweet and heartrending words were spoken by a little abandoned girl, a foundling that the convent was bringing up out of charity. She heard the others talking about their mothers and she murmured in her corner: “My mother wasn’t there when I was born!” There was a fat sister there in charge of external relations who was always seen running down hallways with her bunch of keys and whose name was Sister Agatha. The big big girls—those over ten—called her Agathokeys.

The refectory, a big squared-off oblong that received light only from cloister arches on a level with the garden, was dark and damp and, as the children say, full of creepy-crawlies. All the neighbouring rooms provided their contingent of insects. Each of the four corners had its own particular and expressive name bestowed upon it accordingly, in the language of the boarders. There was Spider Corner, Caterpillar Corner, Woodlouse Corner, and Cricket Corner. Cricket Corner was next to the kitchen and highly prized. You weren’t as cold there as elsewhere. From the refectory the names had passed to the boarding school in general and served to distinguish four nations there, as at the old Mazarin College. Every pupil was from one of these four nations according to the corner of the refectory where she sat for meals. One day, the archbishop, on his pastoral rounds, saw a pretty little girl, all rosy-cheeked and with fabulous blond hair, skip into the classroom as he was passing, and he asked another boarder, a charming fresh-faced brunette, standing nearby: “What is that little girl?” “She’s a spider, Monseigneur.”

“Bah! And that other one?”

“She is a cricket.”

“And this one?”

“She is a caterpillar.”

“Really, and what are you?”

“I’m a woodlouse, Monseigneur.”

Each house of this kind has its peculiarities. At the beginning of this century, Écouen was one of these lovely yet strict places where young girls spent their childhoods in shade almost august. At Écouen, to join the procession of the Blessed Sacrament in the proper rank, they distinguished between “virgins” and “florists.” There were also “canopies” and “censers,” the former carrying the cords of the canopy and the latter swinging censers around during the Blessed Sacrament. The flowers fell to the florists as of right. Four “virgins” walked out in front. The morning of the big day, it was not rare to hear someone in the dormitory asking: “Who’s a virgin?” Madame Campan quotes what a little girl of seven had to say to a big girl of sixteen, who took the head of the procession while she, the little girl, remained at the back: “You may be a virgin, but I’m not.” ENTERTAINMENT

OVER THE REFECTORY door was written in big black letters this prayer that they called the White Paternoster, whose virtue was to lead people straight to paradise:

“Little white Paternoster, that God made, that God said, that God put in paradise. At night, going to bed, I finded [sic] three angels lying on my bed, one at the foot, two at the head, the good Virgin Mary in the middle, who said to me to be going to bed, and don’t worry about nothing. The good Lord is my father, the good Virgin is my mother, the three apostles are my brothers, the three virgins are my sisters. The shirt where Christ was born, my body is wrapped in; the cross of Saint Marguerite is written on my breast! Madame Virgin ranned away over the fields, God crying, ranned into Monsieur Saint John. Monsieur Saint John, where’ve you been? I’ve been at Ave Salus. You haven’t seen the good Lord, have you? He’s in the tree of the cross, his feet is dangling, his hands is nailed, a little hat of white thorns is on his head. Whoever says this three times at night, three times in the morning, will get to paradise in the end.” In 1827, this typical prayer had disappeared from the wall under three layers of paper. It is fading as we speak from the memory of a few women who were young girls back then, old ladies now.

A big crucifix stuck on the wall completed the décor of the refectory, whose only door, as I think I might have said, opened onto the garden. Two narrow tables, both flanked by wooden benches, made two long parallel lines from one end of the refectory to the other. The walls were white, the tables were black; these two colours of mourning are the only choices convents have. The meals were sour and even the children’s food was strict. A single dish, meat mixed with vegetables, or salty fish, this was luxury. This limited everyday fare, reserved for the boarders alone, was, however, the exception rather than the rule. The children ate in silence under the watchful eye of the mother for the week, who, from time to time, if a fly got it into its head to buzz around in contravention of the rule, would noisily open and shut a wooden book. This silence was seasoned with the Lives of the Saints,1 read aloud from a rostrum placed at the foot of the crucifix. The reader was one of the big girls, chosen for the week. All along the bare table at intervals there were enamel basins in which the pupils themselves washed their metal cups and their plates, sometimes chucking out scraps, a tough bit of meat or rotten fish—an act that was punished. These basins were known as “water bowls.” Any child who broke the silence had to make a “cross” with her tongue. Where? On the floor. She licked the tiles. Dust, that end of all delight, was meant to chastise these poor little rosebuds of girls, guilty of chattering.

There was in the convent a book that is the only copy ever printed and which it was forbidden to read. This is the Rule of Saint Benedict—illicit material that no profane eye must ever dip into. Nemo regulas, seu constitutiones nostras, externis communicabit.2 One day the boarders managed to steal this book and began to race through it avidly, their reading often interrupted by fear of being caught, which made them keep swiftly banging the volume shut. They did not get much pleasure from this exciting danger, though. A few unintelligible pages on the sins of young boys was what was “most interesting” for them.

They played on one of the allées in the garden, lined with a few skinny fruit trees. Despite the extreme surveillance and the severity of the punishments meted out, when the wind shook the trees they sometimes managed to furtively grab a green apple or a half-rotten apricot or a worm-riddled pear. I will let a letter take over at this point, a letter I have before me, written twenty-five years ago by a former boarder, today a duchess and one of the most elegant women of Paris. I quote verbatim: “You hide your pear or your apple as best you can. When you go up to put the coverlet on the bed while waiting for supper, you stuff them under your pillow and you eat them in bed at night, and if you can’t do that, you eat them in the toilets.” This was one of their most intense pleasures.

Once, on the occasion of another visit to the convent by the same archbishop, one of the young girls, Mademoiselle Bouchard, who was related to the Montmorencys,3 bet that she would ask him for a day off, an outrage in a community so austere. The bet was accepted but none of the girls betting believed she would do it. When the moment came, as the archbishop was walking past the boarders, Mademoiselle Bouchard, to the unutterable horror of her companions, broke rank and said: “Monseigneur, a day off.” Mademoiselle Bouchard was tall and delectably fresh, with the prettiest little rosy face in the world. Monseigneur de Quélen4 smiled and said: “What do you mean, my dear child, a day off! Three days, please. I grant you three days.” The prioress was powerless, the archbishop had spoken. Scandal for the convent but joy for the boarding school. Just imagine the effect.

This tough, gruff cloister was not so immured, however, that the life of the outside world, with its passions, its drama, and even its novels, did not penetrate. For proof, we will limit ourselves to briefly noting here a real and incontestable fact, though it is one that bears no relation in itself to our story and is not connected to it in any way, not by even a thread. We only mention this fact to complete the picture of the convent in the reader’s mind.

Around this time there was a mysterious person in the convent who was not a nun, who was treated with great respect and who was known as Madame Albertine. Nothing was known about her except that she was mad and that in the world she had been given up for dead. Behind this story, it was said, there were makeshift arrangements that had been made for a magnificent marriage.

This woman, a rather beautiful brunette barely thirty years old, gazed out vaguely from big black eyes. Did she see anything? It was doubtful. She glided rather than walked; she never spoke; you couldn’t be entirely sure that she breathed. Her nostrils were pinched and as pale as if she had heaved her last sigh. Touching her hand was like touching snow. She had a strange spectral grace. Wherever she went, you felt the chill. One day a sister, seeing her go by, said to another sister: “She looks dead.” “Maybe she is,” the other replied.

Any number of stories made the rounds about Madame Albertine. She was the object of the boarders’ endless curiosity. There was a gallery in the chapel that was known as the Bull’s-Eye. It was in this gallery, which only had a circular opening, a bull’s-eye, that Madame Albertine would attend services. She was usually on her own there, because from this gallery, which was up some stairs, you could see the priest or the officiant and that was prohibited to the nuns. One day the pulpit was occupied by a high-ranking young priest, Monsieur le duc de Rohan,5 peer of France, who had been an officer of the Red Musketeers in 1815, when he was prince de Léon, and who died later in 1830, a cardinal and archbishop of Besançon. It was the first time Monsieur de Rohan had preached in the convent of Petit-Picpus. Madame Albertine normally attended sermons and services in a state of profound calm and complete immobility. That particular day, as soon as she spotted Monsieur de Rohan, she half-rose and called out loudly in the silence of the chapel: “Lord! Auguste!” The whole community turned their heads, stunned, the priest looked up, but Madame Albertine had sunk into immobility once more. A breath of fresh air from the outside world, a glimmer of life had for a moment passed over that dead and frozen figure, then everything vanished and the madwoman became a cadaver again.

Those two words, though, set the tongues wagging in the convent—of those who were allowed to speak, at least. So much was packed into that Lord! Auguste! So many revelations! Monsieur de Rohan’s name was, in fact, Auguste. It was obvious that Madame Albertine came from high society, since she knew Monsieur de Rohan, that she was herself from the upper echelons even, since she was on such intimate terms with such a great lord, and that she had some connection to him, was perhaps related, but in any case was close to him, since she knew his first name.

Two very severe duchesses, mesdames de Choiseul and de Sérent, often visited the community, where they gained access no doubt by virtue of the privilege of their status as grandes dames, to the great terror of the boarders. Whenever the two old ladies went by, all the poor young girls would tremble and lower their gaze.

Monsieur de Rohan was, in any case, unbeknownst to him, an object of interest for the boarders. At the time he had just been made grand-vicar of the archbishop of Paris, while biding his time waiting for the episcopacy. He was in the habit of coming often to sing the offices in the chapel of the nuns of Petit-Picpus. None of the young recluses could get a look at him because of the serge curtain, but he had a soft and slightly reedy voice that they had come to recognize and distinguish. He had been a musketeer and, then again, he was said to be extremely good-looking, with a fine head of beautiful chestnut hair arranged in a roll around his head, and with a magnificent wide black belt and a black cassock cut in the most elegant style in the world. He took up a lot of space in sixteen-year-old imaginations.

No sound from outside penetrated the convent. Yet there was one year when the sound of a flute made it through. This was an event, and the boarders of the day still talk about it.

It was a flute someone in the neighbourhood was playing. This flute always played the same tune, a tune long since forgotten: “My Zétulbé, come and rule over my soul,” and you heard it two or three times a day.

The young girls spent hours listening to it, the vocal mothers were incensed, brains became overwrought, punishments rained down. This went on for several months. The boarders were all more or less in love with the unknown musician. Every one of them dreamed they were Zétulbé. The sound of the flute came from the direction of the rue Droit-Mur; they would have given anything to see, to catch a mere glimpse, if only for a second, of the “young man” who played the flute so deliciously and who, without a shadow of a doubt, was playing at the same time with all those hearts. A few girls escaped by the service door and climbed up to the third floor on the rue Droit-Mur to try to get a look on delivery days when the door was left open. It could not be done. One girl went as far as sticking her arm above her head through the grate and waving her white hankie. Two were bolder still. They found a way to climb up onto the roof and took the risk and finally managed to sight “the young man.” He turned out to be an old émigré gentleman, blind and ruined, who played the flute in his garret to while away the time.

THE LITTLE CONVENT

WITHIN THE PETIT-PICPUS enclosure, there were three perfectly distinct buildings, the big convent where the nuns lived, the boarding school where the schoolgirls lodged, and lastly what was known as the little convent. This was a separate building with a garden where all kinds of old nuns of different orders lived together, remnants of cloisters destroyed by the Revolution; a gathering of every shade of black, grey, and white, of every possible community and every possible stripe and that we might call, if such a coupling of words is permissible, a sort of harlequin convent.

From the days of the Empire, all these poor scattered and disoriented old maids had been allowed to take refuge under the wings of the Benedictine-Bernardines. The government paid them a small pension; the ladies of Petit-Picpus had rushed to take them in. It was a bizarre assortment. Each one followed her own rule. Sometimes the boarders were allowed, as a major excursion, to go and visit them, which means that those young minds have retained, among other memories, the memory of Mother Saint Basil, Mother Saint Scolastique, and Mother Jacob.

One of these refugees virtually found herself at home. This was a nun from Sainte-Aure, the only one of her order to have survived. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, what was the convent of the Ladies of Sainte-Aure1 had occupied precisely the house in Petit-Picpus that later belonged to the Benedictines of Martin Verga. This holy old maid, too poor to wear the magnificent habit of her order, which was a white robe with a scarlet scapular, had piously decked out a little doll in it, and she showed this doll off smugly and bequeathed it to the house at her death. In 1824, there was only one nun left of the whole order; today, the only thing left is a doll.

Apart from these worthy mothers, a few old women of the world had obtained the prioress’s permission, as had Madame Albertine, to withdraw to the little convent. This number included Madame de Beaufort d’Hautpoul and Madame la marquise Dufresne.2 Another was only ever known in the convent by the alarming noise she made when she blew her nose. The schoolgirls called her Madame Racketini.

Around 1820 or 1821, Madame de Genlis,3 who was editing a little periodical at the time called the Intrépide, asked if she could enter as an independent lady and have a room at the Petit-Picpus convent. Monsieur le duc d’Orléans gave her good references. Buzzing in the hive; the vocal mothers were all atremble; Madame de Genlis had produced novels. But she declared that she was the first to detest them, and then again, she had reached her ferociously devout phase. With God’s help, and the prince’s too, she entered. But she only stayed six or eight months, giving as the reason for leaving that the garden had no shade. The nuns were in raptures having her there. For although she was very old, she still played the harp and very well at that.

When she left, she left her mark on her cell. Madame de Genlis was superstitious and a Latin scholar. Those two words give a pretty good image of her. Up until a few years ago, you could still see, stuck on the inside of a small cupboard in her cell where she locked up her money and her jewels, these five lines of Latin written in her handwriting in red ink on yellow paper and which, in her opinion, had the virtue of warding off thieves: Imparibus meritis pendent tria corpora ramis:

Dismas et Gesmas, media est divina potestas;

Alta petit Dismas, infelix, infima, Gesmas;

Nos et res nostras conservet summa potestas.

Hos versus dicas, ne tu furto tua perdas.4

These lines, in the Latin of the sixth century, raise the question of whether the two robbers of Calvary were called Dismas and Gestas,5 as is commonly thought, or Dismas and Gesmas. The latter spelling would put paid to the pretensions entertained, last century, by the vicomte de Gestas6 of being a descendant of the unrepentant robber. Whatever the case, the practical virtue attached to these lines was gospel in the Hospitaller order.7 The house chapel, built in such a way as to separate the convent from the boarding school, splitting them as though actually sundering them, was, naturally, common to the school, the big convent, and the little convent. Even the public were admitted through a sort of quarantine entrance provided on the street. But everything was arranged in such a fashion that none of the inhabitants of the cloister could see a face from the outside world. Imagine a church whose choir was seized by a gigantic hand and twisted so as to form, not, as in ordinary churches, an extension behind the altar, but a sort of hall or dark cavern to the right of the officiant; imagine this hall shut off by the nine-foot-high curtain we mentioned earlier; heap together, in the shadow of this curtain, on wooden stalls, the nuns of the choir on the left, the boarders on the right, the lay sisters and the novices at the back, and you will have some idea of the nuns of Petit-Picpus attending divine service. This cavern, which was known as the choir, was connected to the cloister by a corridor. The church received light from the garden. When the nuns attended services where the rule of their order commanded silence from them, the public was alerted to their presence only by the crack of the stalls’ hinged seats, or miséricordes, noisily going up or down.

A FEW SILHOUETTES IN THE SHADOWS

DURING THE SIX years that separated 1819 from 1825, the prioress of Petit-Picpus was Mademoiselle de Blemeur, whose religious name was Mother Innocent. She was from the family of Marguerite de Blemeur,1 the author of Lives of the Saints of the Order of Saint Benedict. She had been reelected to a second term. She was a woman of sixty or so, short and fat, who sang “like a cracked pot,” according to the letter we have already quoted; otherwise excellent, the sole cheery soul in the whole convent, and for that, adored.

Mother Innocent took after her ancestor Marguerite, the Dacier of the Order.2 She was well-read, erudite, learned, competent, a historian out of curiosity, stuffed with Latin, crammed with Greek, full of Hebrew and rather more Benedictine monk than Bernardine nun.

The deputy prioress was an old Spanish nun who was almost blind, Mother Cineres.

The most esteemed among the vocal mothers were Mother Saint Honorine, treasurer, Mother Saint Gertrude, first mistress of the novices, Mother Saint Ange, second mistress, Mother Annunciation, sacristan, Mother Saint Augustin, nurse, and the only one in the whole convent who was mean; then Mother Saint Mechthilde (Mademoiselle Gauvin), quite young, with a wonderful voice; Mother of the Angels (Mademoiselle Drouet, who had been in the Filles-Dieu convent and in the Trésor convent between Gisors and Magny); Mother Saint Joseph (Mademoiselle de Cogolludo); Mother Saint Adelaide (Mademoiselle d’Auverney); Mother Miséricorde (Mademoiselle de Cifuentes, who could not resist the austerities); Mother Compassion (Mademoiselle de la Miltière, admitted at sixty, in spite of the rule, very rich); Mother Providence (Mademoiselle de Laudinière); Mother Presentation (Mademoiselle de Siguenza),3 who was prioress in 1847; and, lastly, Mother Saint Célinge (the sister of the sculptor Ceracchi), who has since gone mad; and Mother Saint Chantal (Mademoiselle de Suzon), who has since gone mad.

There was also among the prettiest a charming girl of twenty-three who was from the Isle of Bourbon and a descendant of the chevalier Roze,4 whom the world knew as Mademoiselle Roze and who was known inside as Mother Assumption.

Mother Saint Mechthilde, in charge of singing and the choir, was only too happy to use the boarders. She usually grabbed a whole array of them, meaning, seven girls, from ten to sixteen years old, with graded voices and sizes, and made them sing standing side by side in a row, ranged according to age from the smallest to the biggest. This presented onlookers with a vision not unlike a pipe of young girls, a sort of living Pan’s pipe made up of angels.

Those of the lay sisters that the boarders liked the most were Sister Saint Euphrasia, Sister Saint Marguerite, Sister Saint Martha, who was in her second childhood, and Sister Saint Michel, whose long nose made them hoot with laughter.

All these women were as sweet as pie to all those children. The nuns were hard only on themselves. Fires were lit only in the boarding school and the food there, compared to that of the convent, was choice. And there were all kinds of little treats on top of that. Only, when a child passed near a nun and spoke to her, the nun never replied.

This rule of silence had had the result that, throughout the entire convent, speech had been withdrawn from human creatures and given to inanimate objects. Sometimes it was the church bell that spoke, sometimes the gardener’s bell. A very sonorous bell, placed next to the sister in charge of external relations, could be heard everywhere in the house, indicating by different rings, which were a kind of acoustic telegraph, all the actions of material life to be accomplished and calling to the visitors’ room, if need be, this or that inhabitant of the house. Each person and each thing had its special ring. The prioress was one and one; the deputy prioress was one and two. Six-five announced classes, so that the students never said they were going back to their classes but going to six-five. Four-four was the ring for Madame de Genlis. It was heard very often. “There goes that devil of a four,” as those who were not charitable would say. Nineteen rings announced a great event. It meant the opening of the main gate, a ghastly iron plate bristling with bolts that only turned on its hinges before the archbishop.

POST CORDA LAPIDES1

HAVING SKETCHED THE moral design of the place, it might not be pointless to indicate in a few words its material configuration. The reader already has some idea of this.

The convent of Petit-Picpus-Saint-Antoine almost entirely filled the vast trapezoid created by the intersection of the rue Polonceau, the rue Droit-Mur, the petite rue Picpus, and the condemned alley listed in old maps as the rue Aumarais. These four streets surrounded this area like a moat. The convent was composed of several buildings and a garden. The main building, taken as a whole, was a jumble of hybrid structures that, seen in bird’s-eye view, outlined fairly exactly an L-shaped gallows laid on the ground. The long arm of the gallows occupied the entire slice of the rue Droit-Mur between the petite rue Picpus and the rue Polonceau; the small arm was a high, grey, grim grated façade that looked out on the petite rue Picpus; the porte cochère at no. 62 marked one end of it. Around the middle of this façade the dust and ash had bleached white an old low arched door where spiders spun their webs and which only opened for one or two hours on Sundays and on rare occasions when the coffin of a nun left the convent. This was the public entrance to the church. The elbow of the gallows was a square room that served as a pantry and that the nuns called the dispensary. In the long arm were the cells of the mothers and sisters and the novices; in the short arm the kitchens, the refectory backed by the cloister, and the church. Between the door at no. 62 and the corner of the closed-off Aumarais alleyway was the boarding school, which you could not see from the outside. The rest of the trapezoid formed the garden, which was much lower than the rue Polonceau level, and this made the walls a lot higher inside than outside. In the middle of the slightly convex garden, on top of a grassy knoll, there was a beautiful fir tree, pointed and conical, from which four great allées radiated, as from the pointed hub of a shield; arranged in pairs between the spokes of the broader walkways, eight small paths radiated, so that if the enclosure had been circular, the geometric plan of the garden paths would have looked like a cross laid on a wheel. The paths all ended at the extremely irregular walls of the garden and so were of uneven lengths. They were bordered by gooseberry bushes. At the bottom of the garden, an avenue of great poplars ran from the ruins of the old convent at the corner of the rue Droit-Mur to the house of the little convent at the corner of Aumarais lane. Just in front of the little convent was what was known as the little garden. Add to this array a courtyard, all sorts of nooks and crannies made by detached buildings inside, prison walls, no real views and no real neighbourhood except for the long black line of roofs that bordered the other side of the rue Polonceau, and you can form a complete picture of what was, forty-five years ago, the house of the Bernardines of Petit-Picpus. This holy house had been built precisely on the site of a jeu de paume, a royal tennis court that was famous from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries and that had been known as the “den of the eleven thousand devils.”2 All of these streets, furthermore, were the oldest in Paris. The names Droit-Mur and Aumarais are very old, the streets that bear them much older still. Aumarais lane was once called Maugout lane; the rue Droit-Mur was once called the rue des Églantiers—of dog roses—for God opened flowers before mankind cut stones.

A CENTURY UNDER A WIMPLE

SINCE WE ARE in the process of giving details about what was once the convent of Petit-Picpus and have dared to open a window on this discreet refuge, we hope the reader will allow us a further small digression, one basically foreign to this book but typical and useful in showing us that even the cloister has its original characters.

There was in the little convent a centenarian who came from the abbey of Fontevrault.1 Before the Revolution, she had even been in society. She talked a lot about Monsieur de Miromesnil,2 keeper of the seals under Louis XVI, and about the wife of some presiding judge, a Duplat, whom she had known very well. It was her delight and her vanity to trot out those two names at every opportunity. She went on and on about the wonders of the abbey of Fontevrault, how it was like a town, and how there were streets within the monastery.

She spoke in Picardy dialect, to the great delight of the boarders. Every year she solemnly renewed her vows and, at the moment of taking the oath, she would say to the priest: “Monseigneur Saint Francis chucked it to Monseigneur Saint Julien, Monseigneur Saint Julien chucked it to Monseigneur Saint Eusebius, Monseigneur Saint Eusebius chucked it to Monseigneur Saint Procopius, etc., etc., just as I chuck it to you, father.” And the boarders all chuckled, not up their sleeves, but under their veils; delightful little smothered chuckles that made the vocal mothers frown.

Another time, the centenarian was telling stories. She reckoned that when she was young, the Bernardines were right up there3 with the Musketeers. That was a century talking, but it was the eighteenth century. She told about the custom of the four wines in Burgundy and Champagne. Before the Revolution, when an important personage, a maréchal de France, a prince, a duke, or a peer, passed through a town in Champagne or Burgundy, the city fathers would come and make him a speech and present him with four silver goblets, in which four different wines had been poured. On the first goblet you could read the inscription monkey wine; on the second, lion wine; on the third, sheep wine; on the fourth, pig wine. These four inscriptions expressed the four degrees of the drunk’s descent: initial intoxication, which makes you merry; the second stage, which makes you irritated; the third, which stuns you; finally, the last, which turns you into a brute.

In a cupboard, under lock and key, she kept a mysterious object that she was very attached to. The rule at Fontevrault did not ban her from keeping it. She would not show this object to anyone. She shut herself away, which her rule allowed her to do, and hid every time she wanted to contemplate it. If she heard someone coming along the corridor, she would shut the cupboard again as fast as her old hands would let her. As soon as anyone spoke to her about it, she would shut up, though she was a real talker. The most curious faltered in the face of her silence and the most tenacious in the face of her obstinacy. This was also a topic of conversation for all the idle and bored in the convent. What on earth could this thing be that was so precious and so secret, what was the centenarian’s treasure? Doubtless some holy book? Some unique rosary beads? Some certified relic? They would be lost in conjectures. On the poor old maid’s death, they ran to the cupboard faster, perhaps, than was seemly and opened it. They found the object under three layers of linen, like a blessed communion plate. It was a faience plate representing cupids flying off pursued by apothecary boys armed with enormous syringes. The pursuit abounds with grimaces and comical postures. One of the charming little cupids is already completely run through. He struggles, flaps his little wings and goes on trying to fly, but the lad swaggering about laughs a satanic laugh. Moral of the story: love defeated by colic. This plate, a most curious piece in any case and one that, perhaps, had the honour of giving Molière an idea,4 still existed in September 1845; it was for sale at a secondhand dealer’s in the boulevard Beaumarchais.

This good old soul would not receive any visitors from outside, because, she said, the visitors’ parlour was too “dreary.”

ORIGINS OF PERPETUAL ADORATION

IN ANY CASE, this virtually sepulchral visitors’ parlour we have tried to give some idea of is a perfectly local feature not reproduced with the same strictness in other convents. In the convent of the rue du Temple, most notably—though it belonged, to be honest, to another order—the black shutters were replaced by brown curtains and the visitors’ room itself was a salon with a parquetry floor and windows framed in bonnes-grâces drapes of white muslin and walls adorned with all kinds of framed pictures, including a portrait of a Benedictine nun with an unveiled face, painted flowers, and even a Turk’s head.

It was in the garden of the convent of the rue du Temple that a chestnut tree from India, said to be the most beautiful and the tallest in France, stood; among the good folk of the eighteenth century it had the reputation of being “the father of all the chestnut trees in the realm.” As we said, the Temple convent was occupied by the Benedictines of Perpetual Adoration, Benedictines quite different from those that came from Cîteaux. This order of Perpetual Adoration is not all that old, going back no further than two hundred years. In 1649, the Blessed Sacrament was profaned twice, a few days apart, in two Paris churches, at Saint-Sulpice and at Saint-Jean en Grève, a frightening and rare sacrilege that shocked the whole town. Monsieur the prior—grand-vicar of Saint-Germain-des-Prés—ordered a solemn procession of all his clergy in which the papal nuncio officiated. But this expiation was not enough for two worthy women, Madame Courtin, marquise de Boucs, and the comtesse de Châteauvieux. This outrage done to the “most august sacrament of the altar,” though short-lived, so troubled these two holy souls that it seemed to them the only possible atonement was through a “Perpetual Adoration” in some monastery for maidens. Both of them, one in 1652, the other in 1653, made sizeable donations to Mother Catherine de Bar, a Benedictine nun called “of the Blessed Sacrament,” to found a convent of the order of Saint Benedict with this pious aim;1 initial permission was granted mother Catherine de Bar by Monsieur de Metz, abbé of Saint-Germain, “with the stipulation that no maiden can be admitted unless she brings three hundred livres in board which equals six thousand livres in principal.” After the abbé of Saint-Germain, the king granted letters patent and the rest, the abbatial charter and royal license, was ratified in 1654 in the Chamber of Accounts and in parliament.

This is the origin and legal consecration of the establishment of the Benedictines of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament of Paris. Their first convent was “built new” in the rue Cassette with the funds provided by Mesdames de Boucs and de Châteauvieux.

This order, as we see, was nothing like the Benedictines from Cîteaux, known as the Cistercians. It derived from the abbé of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the same way that the Ladies of the Sacred Heart derived from the general body of the Jesuits and the Sisters of Charity from the general body of the Lazarists.

It was also completely different from the Bernardines of Petit-Picpus, the interior of which we have just revealed. In 1657, Pope Alexander VII had issued a special bull authorizing the Bernardines of Petit-Picpus to practise Perpetual Adoration like the Benedictines of the Blessed Sacrament. But the two orders remained no less distinct.

END OF THE PETIT-PICPUS

THE MOMENT THE Restoration began, the convent of Petit-Picpus went into decline, which is part and parcel of the general death of an order that went the way of all religious orders after the eighteenth century. Contemplation, like prayer, is a need of humanity; but like everything the Revolution has touched, it will transform itself and, though once hostile to social progress, it will become favourable to it.

The Petit-Picpus house rapidly emptied. By 1840, the little convent had disappeared, the boarding school had disappeared. The old women were no longer there and neither were the young girls; the former had died, the latter had gone on their way. Volaverunt.1 The rule of Perpetual Adoration is so very rigid that it alarms; vocations are in decline, the order is not taking on any new recruits. Forty years ago, the nuns numbered almost a hundred; fifteen years ago, there were no more than twenty-eight. How many are there today? In 1847, the prioress was young, a sure sign that the field of choice was shrinking. She was under forty. As the number went down, the fatigue increased, and the duty of each nun became more arduous; from that moment, you could see that the day was coming when there would be only a dozen shoulders left, sore and rounded, to bear the heavy burden of the rule of Saint Benedict. The burden is implacable and remains the same for the few as for the many. It weighs down, it crushes. So they die. Since the days when the author of this book still lived in Paris, two have died. One was twenty-five, the other twenty-three. This latter would agree with Julia Alpinula:2 Hic jaceo, vixi annos viginti et tres. It is because of this decline that the convent gave up educating girls.

We could not pass by this extraordinary house, unknown and dark as it is, without going in and letting in the souls accompanying us on our journey and listening to us narrate, for the good of a few perhaps, the melancholy story of Jean Valjean. We have cast an eye over this community riddled with these old rites, which seem so novel today. It is a secret garden. Hortus conclusus. We have gone on about this singular place in some detail, but with respect, at least insofar as respect and detail are reconcilable. We do not understand everything, but we do not insult anything, either. We are equally distant from the hosanna of Joseph de Maistre, who winds up crowning and championing the executioner, and from the sneering of Voltaire,3 who goes so far as to rail against the crucifix.

Lack of logic on Voltaire’s part, by the way; for Voltaire would have defended Jesus as he defended Calas;4 and, for the very people who deny superhuman incarnations, what does the crucifix represent? The sage assassinated.

In the nineteenth century, religious notions are in turmoil. We are unlearning certain things and that is all to the good, as long as in unlearning this, you learn that. No vacuum in the human heart. Certain things are being torn down, and so they should be, but only on condition that all the demolition be followed by reconstruction.

Meanwhile, let’s take a closer look at things that are no more. We need to know about them, if only to avoid them. The counterfeits of the past assume false identities and happily call themselves the future. That ghost, the past, tends to fake his passport. Let us be alert to such a trick. Let us be on our guard. The past has a face—superstition; and a mask—hypocrisy. Let us denounce that face and tear off the mask.

As for convents, they are a complex matter. A matter of civilization, which condemns them; a matter of liberty, which protects them.