NOTHING COULD have been more commonplace, half a century ago, than the porte-cochère of No. 62, Petite Rue Picpus. As a rule it stood invitingly half open, affording a view of two things, neither of them gloomy in themselves – a courtyard enclosed in vine-covered walls and the face of an indolent door-keeper. The tops of trees were to be seen beyond the further wall. When sunshine brightened the courtyard, or wine enlivened the door-keeper, it would have been hard for anyone passing this doorway not to derive from it a cheerful impression. Nevertheless the passer-by had had a glimpse of a most sombre place. The threshold might smile, but the house itself prayed and wept.
The visitor who succeeded in getting past the door-keeper (which was not easy and indeed for most people impossible, since there was a password which had to be known) was shown into a small vestibule affording access to a stairway so narrow that two persons could not pass on it. If, unintimidated by the wall-colouring of livid green above and chocolate below, one ventured up the stairs, one came, after passing two landings, still remorselessly accompanied by the green and chocolate, to a corridor. Stairway and corridor were lighted by two handsome windows, but the corridor turned a corner and was plunged into darkness. If, rounding this headland, one walked on a few paces, one came to a door which appeared the more mysterious in that it was not closed. Pushing it wide open, one found oneself in a very small room about six feet square, tiled, scrubbed, immaculate, and cold, with a wallpaper at fifteen sous the roll patterned with green flowers. Pallid daylight entered through a small-paned window occupying the whole of the lefthand wall. There was nothing to be seen or heard, not a footstep or a human sound. The walls were bare and the room was unfurnished, without even a chair.
In the wall facing the door there was a grille about a foot square composed of stout, intersecting iron bars forming squares – I had almost called them meshes – about an inch and a half across. The green flowers of the wallpaper clustered round this grille, their orderly tranquillity in no way disturbed by its forbidding aspect. Even supposing a human creature to have been thin enough to wriggle through the aperture, the bars would have prevented it. Not only did the grille prevent the passage of a body, it prevented even the passage of the eyes, that is to say, of the spirit. Someone had evidently provided against this, for the bars of the grille were supplemented by a sheet of metal pierced with innumerable minute holes smaller than those in a milk-skimmer. There was an aperture at the bottom of this sheet exactly like the opening of a letter-box.
A bell-cord hung to the right of the grille, and the tinkling of the bell was followed by the sound of a voice disconcertingly close at hand.
‘Who is there?’
It was a woman’s voice, muted to the point of sadness.
And here again there was a magic password that had to be known. If the visitor did not know it the voice said no more, and the wall was silent as though nothing lay beyond it but the darkness of the tomb. But if the word was spoken the voice said:
‘Turn to your right.’
In the wall facing the window there was a glass-paned door with a glass transom painted grey. Lifting the latch and passing through this doorway one had exactly the impression of entering a theatre-box protected by a metal grille, before the lights go up and the grille is lowered. It was indeed a kind of theatre-box, faintly illumined from behind by the light filtering through the panes of the door, a narrow place furnished with two old chairs and a worn straw mat – a theatre-box with a front at waist level on which was a sill of black wood. But unlike the gilded grilles at the Opéra this was a huge and hideous trellis of iron bars rigidly intertwined and fixed to the surrounding walls with fastenings as large as clenched fists.
As the eyes grew accustomed to the dim light and sought to peer beyond the grille, they found that they could penetrate no more than a few inches, their gaze being then arrested by a black shutter reinforced with crosspieces of yellow-painted wood. This shutter, composed of separate, narrow slats, covered the full extent of the grille. It was always closed.
After a few moments a woman’s voice spoke from behind the shutter.
‘I am here. What do you want of me?’
It was a known and loved voice, sometimes an adored voice. The sound of human breathing could scarcely be heard. It was as though a spirit were speaking from beyond the tomb.
If the visitor fulfilled certain conditions, which was rarely the case, a part of the shutter opened and the disembodied voice became an apparition. Insofar as the grille made it possible to see anything, a head appeared, of which only the mouth and chin were visible, the rest being covered by a black veil. One saw a black wimple and an indeterminate form enveloped in a black winding-sheet. The head spoke, but without looking directly at the visitor or ever smiling.
The light coming from behind the visitor was so disposed as faintly to illumine the figure beyond the grille, whereas the visitor remained in darkness. This was symbolical.
The draped figure was framed in a profound obscurity. One gazed intently, seeking to discern what else might lie beyond the aperture, but soon found that there was no more to be seen. There was nothing but darkness and shadow, a winter mist mingled with the vapours of the tomb, a sort of terrifying peace, silence that divulged nothing, not even a sigh, shadow that disclosed nothing, not even ghosts. One was gazing into the interior of a convent.
The melancholy and austere building was the Bernardine Convent of the Perpetual Adoration. The stage-box where the visitor was admitted was the parlour. The first voice which spoke was that of the sister in attendance, permanently seated, motionless and silent, on the other side of the wall at the square aperture, protected by the iron grille and the metal sheet with its countless holes, like a double vizor. The light filtering into the inner room came from the window looking out on to the world. None came from the convent itself. That sacred place was not to be viewed by profane eyes.*
Nevertheless things existed beyond that darkness. There were light and life within that semblance of death. Although the convent was the most strictly enclosed of all we shall seek to enter it, taking the reader with us, and, within the bounds of discretion, describe matters unseen by any chronicler and hitherto unrelated.
The convent, which by 1824 had existed for many years in the Petite Rue Picpus, was a Bernardine Community practising the discipline of Martin Verga. These Bernardine nuns were in consequence affiliated not to Clairvaux, like the Bernardine monks, but to Cîteaux, like the Benedictines. In other words, they were subject not to St Bernard but to St Benedict. As anyone will know who has looked into the archives, Martin Verga in 1425 founded a Bemardine-Benedictine congregation having its headquarters at. Salamanca and an allied establishment at Alcala.
This congregation had put out shoots in every Catholic country in Europe, the grafting of one order on to another being a common practice in the Church of Rome. To take the case solely of the Benedictine Order which is here in question, and apart from the Discipline of Martin Verga, four other communities are affiliated to this one: two in Italy, those of Monte Cassino and Santa Giustina of Padua, and two in France, Cluny and St Maur; together with nine orders – Vallombrosa, Grammont, Celestines, Camaldaules, Carthusians, the Humiliati, the Olivetans, and the Silvestrans; and finally Cîteaux itself, the trunk from which the rest sprang, which is no more than an offshoot of St Benedict. Cîteaux dates from St Robert, Abbot of Molesme in the diocese of Langres in 1098. It was in 529 that the Devil, having retreated to the Desert of Subiaco (he was old: had he become a hermit?) was driven out of the former Temple of Apollo by St Benedict, then aged seventeen.
With the exception of the Carmelites, who go barefoot, wear a twig of osier at their throats and are never seated, the most severe rule is that of the Bernardine-Benedictines founded by Martin Verga. The nuns are clad in black with a wimple which, by St Benedict’s express prescription, rises to the chin. A wide-sleeved robe of serge, a big woollen shawl, the wimple rising to the chin and cut square over the bosom, and a headband coming down to the eyes, such is their attire, all of it black except the headband, which is white. Novices wear the same garments, but in white. In addition the professing nuns have a rosary at their side.
The Bernardine-Benedictines of the Martin Verga order observe the practice of Perpetual Adoration, as do the Benedictine nuns known as the Dames du Saint-Sacrement, who at the beginning of this century had two houses in Paris, one in the Temple and the other in the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève. But in other respects the Petit-Picpus community was entirely separate. There were numerous differences of rule as of attire. The Bernardine-Benedictines in Petit-Picpus wore black wimples, whereas those of the other two communities were white; moreover, the nuns of the Temple and the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève wore a gilt or enamel crucifix some three inches long on their chests, while those of the Petit-Picpus did not. Their common observance of the Perpetual Adoration was the only link between the communities. It is not unknown for communities, similar in their approach to the mysteries of the childhood, life, and death of Jesus Christ and the Virgin, to be in other respects widely sundered from one another and even antagonistic, as was the case with the Oratoire d’Italie, founded in Florence by Philippe de Neri, and the Oratoire de France, founded in Paris by Pierre de Bérulle. The latter claimed precedence on the grounds that Philippe de Neri was merely a saint, whereas Bérulle was a cardinal.
To return to the harsh Spanish order of Martin Verga.
The nuns following this discipline practise austerity throughout the year, fasting in Lent and on numerous other days special to themselves; they rise from their first slumber at one in the morning to read their breviaries and chant matins until three, sleep between coarse woollen sheets on mattresses of straw, take no baths, light no fires, scourge themselves on Fridays, observe the rule of silence, only speaking among themselves during the recreation periods, which are very short, and wear hair shirts for six months of the year, from 14 September, the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, until Easter. These six months are indeed a modification of the original rule, which stipulated that hair shirts were to be worn throughout the year; but they were found to be intolerable in the heat of summer, causing fever and nervous spasms, and their use had to be restricted. Even so, when they resume the shirts on 14 September the nuns are feverish for several days. Obedience, poverty, chastity, permanent confinement within the walls: such are their vows, made more rigorous by the rules.
The prioress is elected for three years by the mothers of the order, called the Mères Vocales, the speaking mothers, because they have a voice on the chapter. She can only be twice re-elected, which limits her term of office to nine years.
The nuns never see the officiating priest, who is separated from them in the chapel by a curtain seven feet high. While he is in the pulpit they lower their veils. They are required always to talk in low voices and to walk with bowed heads and lowered eyes. Only one man is allowed to enter the convent, the archbishop of the diocese.
There is in fact one other man, the gardener. But he is always old, and in order that he may be always isolated in the garden, and the nuns have warning of his presence, a bell is fastened to his knee.
Their submission to the rule of the Prioress is absolute, canonical subjection in all its selflessness: as to the voice of Christ – ut voci Christi– at a gesture, the first sign – ad nutum, ad primum signum – instantly, with cheerfulness, with perseverance, with unquestioning blind obedience – prompte, hilariter, perseveranter et caeca quadam obedientia – like the file in the workman’s hands – quasi limam in manibus fabri – empowered neither to read nor write without express permission – legere vel scribere non addiscerit sine expressa superioris licentia.
Each in turn makes what they call atonement. Atonement is the prayer for all sins, all errors, all disorders, violations, iniquities – all the crimes committed on earth. For twelve hours in succession, from four o’clock in the afternoon until four in the morning, the sister performing the act of atonement remains kneeling on the stones before the High Altar, her hands clasped and a rope round her neck. When her fatigue becomes unendurable she prostrates herself with her face to the earth and her arms crossed. This is her only relief. In this posture she prays for all the sinners in the universe. The act is noble to the point of sublimity.
Since it takes place before a pillar on which a candle burns it is termed either ‘to make atonement’ or ‘to be on the block’. The nuns in their humility actually prefer the latter term, with its suggestion of castigation and abasement. This act of atonement is one demanding the whole spirit. The sister ‘on the block’ would not turn her head if the heavens were to fall.
In any event, there is always a sister on her knees before the High Altar. She kneels for an hour and is then relieved like a soldier on sentry-go. This is the Perpetual Adoration.
The prioresses and mothers nearly always bear names of a particular solemnity having to do not with saints and martyrs but with events in the life of Christ, such as Mother Nativity, Mother Conception, Mother Annunciation, Mother Passion. The names of saints, however, are not forbidden.
To anyone seeing them, only their mouths are visible. All have yellow teeth. No tooth-brush has ever entered the convent. The act of brushing the teeth is the topmost rung of a ladder of which the lowest rung is perdition.
They never say ‘my’ or ‘mine’. They own nothing and may cherish nothing. Everything is ‘ours’ – our veil, our chaplet; if they were to speak of their shift they would say ‘our shift’. Sometimes they become attached to some small object, a book of hours, a relic, a blessed medallion. When they find that they are beginning to cling to it they must give it up, recalling the words of St Theresa, to whom a great lady on the point of joining her order said: ‘May I be allowed, Reverend Mother, to send for a copy of the Holy Bible which I greatly cherish?’ … ‘Ah, you cherish something? In that case you cannot join us.’
None of them is allowed to shut herself away or to have any place or room of her own. They live in open cells. When two of them meet one will say, ‘Praise and worship to the Holy Sacrament of the altar!’, to which the other will reply, ‘For ever!’ The same words are spoken when one knocks at another’s door: scarcely has she touched it than a soft voice on the other side is heard to say, ‘For ever!’. Like all such practices, it becomes mechanical from force of habit, and sometimes the words ‘For ever!’ are spoken before there has been time to utter the preliminary sentence, which is after all rather long. The visitor upon entering says, ‘Hail Mary!’ and the other replies, ‘Full of grace!’ This is their form of good day, which is indeed ‘full of grace’.
At every hour during the day the chapel bell sounds three additional strokes, and at this signal all of them – prioress, mothers, sisters, novices, postulants – interrupt what they are saying or doing or thinking to say together, ‘At this hour of five’ (or eight, or whatever the hour may be) ‘– and at all hours praised and worshipped be the Holy Sacrament of the altar!’ This custom, which is designed to check the flow of thought and direct it back to God, is common to many communities, although the formula varies. In the community of the Infant Jesus, for example, they say: ‘At this present hour, and at all hours, may the love of Jesus Christ glow in my heart.’
The Benedictine-Bernardine order of Martin Verga, cloistered fifty years ago in the convent of Petit-Picpus, chanted the offices to a grave psalmody that was pure plain-chant, and always at full voice throughout the service. Where there was a break in the missal they paused and murmured in low voices, ‘Jesus-Mary-Joseph’. In the office for the dead the pitch was so low that women’s voices could scarcely reach it: The effect was impressive and tragic.
The Petit-Picpus community caused a vault to be constructed under the High Altar which was intended to serve as their communal sepulchre. But the Government, it seems, would not allow bodies to be interred there. The dead have to be removed from the convent, and this greatly afflicts them as an infraction of their rule. As a small consolation they secured the right to be buried at a particular hour and in a particular corner of the ancient Vaugirard Cemetery, which was formerly owned by their community.
On Thursdays, the nuns heard Grand Mass, vespers and all the offices, precisely as on a Sunday. They scrupulously observed all the minor feast-days, scarcely known to the lay world, which the Church at one time lavished upon France and still does upon Spain and Italy. Their chapel attendances were interminable. As to the number and length of their prayers, we can best give an idea of this by quoting the ingenuous utterance of one of them – ‘The prayers of the postulants are terrifying, those of the novices are worse, and those of the professed nuns are worst of all.’
Once a week the Chapter was convened, the prioress presiding and the mothers attending. Each sister in turn knelt on the stone and confessed aloud before them all the faults and sins she had committed during the week. The mothers conferred after each confession and prescribed the penance.
In addition to open confession, which was reserved for relatively serious matters, there was the practice known as ‘la coulpe’, derived from the Latin culpa, guilt. To perform ‘la coulpe’, was to prostrate oneself during the service at the feet of the prioress, and remain there until the latter (who was never referred to except as ‘our mother’) indicated by tapping on the wood of her stall that the sinner might rise to her feet. This act of penitence applied to very small matters – a broken glass, a torn veil, an instant’s tardiness, a false note in the singing, any of these was enough. It was a spontaneous act, the culprit being her own judge of whether to perform it. On Sundays and feast-days four chantry-mothers sang the office at a large lectern with four singing-desks. One day one of these, in a psalm beginning with the word Ecce, sang instead the three notes C, B and G. For this slip, she endured a ’coulpe’ lasting throughout the service. What made her fault so terrible was that the chapter had laughed.
When any nun was summoned to the parlour, even the prioress herself, she lowered her veil in the manner described, so that only her mouth was visible. The prioress alone could communicate with outsiders, the rest being allowed to see only their nearest relatives, and that very rarely. When a person from beyond the walls desired to see a sister whom she had known and loved in the past, this was a matter of negotiation. In the case of a woman permission might be granted and they might talk through the closed shutters, which were opened only for a mother or sister. It goes without saying that permission was never granted to a man.
Such was the rule of St Benedict, rendered more harsh by Martin Verga.
The period of probation, or postulancy, lasted at least two years and often four; novitiate lasted another four years. It was rare for the final vows to be taken before the age of twenty-three or four. The Martin Verga order did not accept widows. They practised in their cells many forms of self-castigation of which they might not speak.
On the day when a novice took her final vows, clad in her richest garments with a chaplet of white roses on her elaborately dressed hair, she lay prostrate on the ground. A large black veil was cast over her and the office for the dead was sung. The nuns were divided into two files, one passing close to her and exclaiming in doleful accents, ‘Our sister is dead!’ to which the other file replied, ‘Alive in Christ!’
At the time of our story a boarding-school formed part of the convent. It was a school for daughters of the nobility, most of them rich, bearing such names as Sainte-Aulaire and de Bélissen, and there was an English girl bearing the illustrious Catholic name of Talbot Instructed by the nuns, and isolated within those walls, these children were taught to abhor the world and the age in which they lived. One of them once said to the writer: ‘The very sight of the cobbles in the street caused me to shiver from head to foot.’ They were dressed in blue with a white coif and a bronze or enamel cross on their bosoms. On certain feast-days, in particular that of St Martha, they were allowed as a special favour to wear the dress of nuns and perform the offices and rites of St Benedict throughout the day. At first the nuns lent them their black garments, but this was held to be a profanation and the prioress forbade it, except in the case of novices. What is remarkable is that this practice, doubtless tolerated and encouraged in the convent in a secret spirit of proselytism, to give the children a foretaste of the religious life, was to them a real source of pleasure and recreation. They quite simply enjoyed it – ‘It was something new, it made a change.’ The innocence of childhood! – which, however, cannot make us worldlings understand the felicity of holding a sprinkler of holy water in the hand, or standing for hours on end chanting at a four-desk lectern.
Except in its most extreme practices, the pupils conformed to all the usages of the convent. There was one young lady who, even after leaving it and being married for several years, still had not broken herself of the habit of saying, ‘For ever!’ when someone knocked at her door. Like the nuns, the girls never saw their relations except in the parlour. Not even their mothers were allowed to embrace them. Indeed, strictness was carried so far that on one occasion, when a mother brought her three-year-old sister to visit one of the girls, the girl was reduced to tears because she was not allowed to kiss her. She begged that at least the child should be allowed to put a hand through the bars, but this, too, was refused, almost with indignation.
Nevertheless those girls brought a touch of brightness to that sombre establishment.
At certain times youth sparkled amid the cloisters. The recreation bell sounded, a door creaked on its hinges and the birds said, ‘Here come the children!’ A wave of youth flooded over that garden laid out in the pattern of a cross. Glowing faces, smooth foreheads, innocent eyes alight with gaiety, every kind of dawn spread among the shadows. After the psalm-singing, the offices, the tolling of bells, came this hubbub of little girls, sweeter than the humming of bees. They played and called to one another, ran and clustered in groups; white teeth laughed and chattered in corners, while at a distance the veiled forms watched over them, shadows overseeing sunbeams; but what did it matter? – the radiance and the laughter were unabashed. Those melancholy walls had their moments of enchantment as, faintly illumined by the reflection of so much happiness, they looked down upon that soft commotion, like a shower of roses cast upon a place of mourning. The children romped beneath the eye of the nuns, their innocence untroubled by their immaculate gaze. Thanks to them the long hours of austerity were relieved by lighthearted interludes, little girls skipping while the big ones danced. Play and piety mingled in the convent, and nothing could have been more ravishing or sublime than this unfolding of young, fresh wings. Homer might have joined with Perrault in the laughter. There was youth enough in that shadowed garden – health, hubbub, excitement, happiness – to wipe the wrinkles off the faces of all the ancestral figures, whether of epic or of fairy-tale, dwellers upon thrones or under thatch, from Hecuba to Mother Goose.
Perhaps more than in any other place childish utterances were cherished of the kind that evoke laughter and a reminiscent sigh. Amid its gloom a five-year-old once said: ‘Mother, a big girl has just told me that I shall only be here for another nine years and ten months. How lovely!’
And the following dialogue is recalled. A mother: ‘Why are you crying, child?’
The child (aged six): ‘I told Alix that I knew my French history. She says I don’t know it, but I do.’
Alix (aged nine): ‘No, she doesn’t.’
The mother: ‘What happened?’
Alix: ‘She said to open the book anywhere and ask her the first question I came across, and she’d answer it.’
‘Well?’
‘Well, she couldn’t answer it.’
‘But what did you ask?’
‘I opened the book anywhere, as she said, and I asked the first question I came to.’
‘The question was: What happened next?’
Then there was the remark concerning a rather greedy parakeet, the property of a paying-guest at the convent: ‘How well-mannered she is! She pecks at her food like a real lady.’
A confession was picked up off the floor, written in anticipation by a sinner aged seven: ‘Father, I confess to avarice. I confess to adultery. I confess to having looked at gentlemen.’
The following tale was told on a grassy bank by pink six-year-old lips to a pair of wide blue eyes aged five:
‘There were three little cocks who lived in a country full of flowers. They picked the flowers and put them in their pockets. Then they picked the leaves and they put those with their toys. There was a wolf in the country and a lot of woods. The wolf lived in the woods and he ate the little cocks.’
And then a poem:
A blow was struck with a wooden stick.
It was Punch beating the cat.
This did not do the cat any good, it only hurt her.
So a lady put Punch in prison.
The following is the heartrending utterance of a lost child, abandoned by her parents, who was being brought up in charity by the convent: ‘Me, my mother wasn’t there when I was born.’
There was a plump housekeeper who was to be seen bustling along the corridor with a bunch of keys. Her name was Sister Agatha. The really big girls (the ones over ten) called her Agathoclès – Agatha of the keys.
The refectory, a big rectangular room lighted by gothic windows on a level with the garden, was dark and damp and said by the children to be full of vermin. All the surroundings furnished their quota of small creatures, and each of its four corners had been given an appropriate name by the children – Spider Corner, Caterpillar Corner, Woodlouse Corner, and Cricket Corner. Cricket Corner was especially favoured because, being near the kitchen, it was warmer. These names had passed into general use, like the names of the four nations at the old Collège Mazarin, and the children belonged to the corner in which they sat. On one occasion the archbishop, on a pastoral visit, noticed a particularly pretty little fair-haired girl and asked another child who she was.
‘She’s a spider, Monseigneur.’
‘Indeed! And that one there?’
‘She’s a cricket.’
‘And that one?’
‘She’s a caterpillar.’
‘Upon my word! And what are you?’
‘I’m a woodlouse, Monseigneur.’
Every establishment of the kind has its particularities. The Château d’Écouen, for example, was converted under the Empire into a school for the orphan daughters of members of the Légion d’honneur. To determine the order of precedence in the procession of the Holy Sacrament they were divided into ‘virgins’ and ‘flower-bearers’. There were also ‘canopies’ and ‘censers’, the former holding the cords of the canopy and the latter swinging censers as they passed in front of the High Altar. The flowers were retained as of right by the flower-bearers. Four ‘virgins’ led the procession. It was not uncommon, on the morning of the great day, to hear someone in the dormitory ask, ‘Who are today’s virgins?’, and Madame Campan has quoted the words addressed by a seven-year-old, whose place was at the tail of the procession, to a big girl of sixteen who was at the front:
‘Well, you’re a virgin, but I’m not.’
Over the door of the refectory there was inscribed in bold black letters the following child’s prayer, known as the White Paternoster, of which the virtue was that it led the reader straight to Paradise.
‘Little white Paternoster, whom God made, whom God spoke, whom God placed in Paradise, at night when I go to bed I find three angels by my bed, one at the foot and two at the head, with the good Virgin Mary in the middle, and she tells me to lie down and fear nothing. God is my father, the Virgin is my mother, the three apostles are my brothers and the three virgins are my sisters. The garment in which God was born covers my body; the cross of St Margaret is written on my breast. Madame the Virgin walked through the fields weeping for God and she met St John. “Monsieur St John, where have you come from?” … “I come from Ave Salus” … “And did you see God? Where is He?” … “He is in the Tree of the Cross with his feet hanging, his hands nailed and a little hat of white thorn on his head.” He who repeats this three times at night and three times in the morning will gain Paradise in the end.’
In 1827 this characteristic prayer vanished under a triple-coating of whitewash. It must by now be fading from the memories of such of the children as are left, all of them old women today.
A big crucifix on the wall completed the decoration of the refectory, of which the only door opened on to the garden. Two narrow tables, with wooden benches on either side, extended in parallel the length of the room. The walls were white, the tables black, those two colours of mourning being the only contrast allowed in convents. The food was coarse, and even the children’s diet was scanty, being restricted to a single dish of meat or salt fish with vegetables. They ate in silence under the eyes of the mother of the week, who now and then, if a fly ventured to buzz in defiance of the rules, opened and noisily clapped-to a wooden book. The silence was relieved by lives of the saints, read aloud by one of the older girls doing duty for the week at a small lectern standing under the crucifix. Set at intervals on the bare tables were earthenware bowls in which the children washed their platters and cutlery and into which they sometimes threw morsels of gristle or stale fish which they were unable to eat; for this they were punished. The bowls were called ‘water puddles’.
Any child who broke silence was required to ‘make a cross’ with her tongue. And where did she do this? On the floor, by licking the stone flags. Dust, the end of all rejoicing, was the chastisement inflicted on the small pink tongue that had dared to wag.
There was a book in the convent of which only one copy had ever been printed and the reading of which was forbidden. It was the Rule of St Benedict, an arcanum which no profane eye might penetrate. The girls managed to get hold of it and read it avidly, in constant terror of being caught. They found little to reward them. A few incomprehensible pages on the sins of boys were what interested them most.
One of the garden paths was bordered by a few stunted fruit-trees. Despite strict supervision and severe penalties, they sometimes managed to pick up a windfall – a green apple, a rotting apricot, or a worm-eaten pear. And here I will quote a letter I have in front of me, written by a former pupil, now the Duchesse de – and one of the most elegant women in Paris.
‘You hid your apple or pear as best you could. When you went up to the dormitory to make your bed before supper you stuffed it under your pillow to eat when you were in bed. Or if you couldn’t do that you ate it in the lavatory.’ This was one of their greatest delights.
On the occasion of another visit by the archbishop, one of the girls, a Mademoiselle Bouchard who was related to the Montmorencys, wagered that she would ask his Grace for a day’s leave of absence, a monstrous request in that austere community. The wager was accepted although none of those who took part believed in it. When the chance came, as the archbishop was inspecting the row of children, Mlle Bouchard to the consternation of her schoolfellows, stepped forward and said, ‘Monseigneur, I beg for a day’s leave of absence.’ Mlle Bouchard was tall and pretty, with the most charming of round, flushed faces. The archbishop, Monsieur de Quélen, smiled and said: ‘Only one day, child? It is surely not enough. I grant you three days.’ His Grace had spoken and the prioress was powerless. It was an outrage to the convent but a triumph for the girls of which we can only guess at the subsequent effects.
But the walls of the establishment were not so impenetrable that echoes of the outside world, passion, drama and even romance, could not sometimes creep in. The following is an authentic incident which, although it has no bearing on our story, helps to complete the general picture of the convent.
At about this time there was a mysterious visitor stopping at the convent, not a nun but a lady who was treated with great respect and who was known as Madame Albertine. Nothing was known of her except that she was mad and was believed by the world to be dead. It was rumoured that her present situation was due to certain financial arrangements necessitated by a great marriage.
The lady, who was not more than thirty, dark-haired and handsome, was wont to gaze remotely about her with big, dark eyes. Did she in fact see anything? She seemed to glide rather than walk, she never spoke; it was doubtful if she even breathed, for her nostrils were pinched and white as though she had drawn her last breath. To touch her hand was like touching snow. She had a strange, spectral grace and a chill enveloped her wherever she went. Passing her one day in a corridor one of the sisters said to another: ‘She might be dead.’ The other replied: ‘Perhaps she is.’
Countless tales were told about Madame Albertine, who was an object of intense curiosity. There was an enclosed stall in the chapel known as the Oeil-de-Bœuf because of its single, round opening, and it was here that she attended service. As a rule she occupied it alone, because the stall was on a higher level than the rest, making it possible for its occupant to see the preacher or officiating priest, which the nuns were forbidden to do. One day the sermon was preached by a young priest of very high rank. He was the Duc de Rohan, a peer of France who, as Prince de Léon, had been an officer in the Red Musketeers in 1815, and who died in 1833, a cardinal and Archbishop of Besançon. It was the first time M. de Rohan had preached in the convent. Madame Albertine as a rule followed the sermon and the office with perfect calm; but on this occasion, at the sight of M. de Rohan she half-rose from her seat and exclaimed aloud, in the silence of the chapel, ‘What! Auguste!’ Every head in the startled congregation was turned to gaze at her and the preacher looked up; but Madame Albertine had sunk back into her customary immobility. A breath of the outside world, a flicker of life, had touched that withdrawn and frozen face; then it had passed and the crazed woman became again a figure of death.
But those two words were the subject of endless speculation. ‘What! Auguste!’ – how much they must conceal! M. de Rohan’s name was indeed Auguste. It was clear that Madame Albertine had moved in the highest circles and must herself be highly placed, since she had referred to so great a personage in such familiar terms. She must have some connection with him, perhaps a blood-relationship but certainly a close one, since she knew his childhood name.
Two very straitlaced duchesses, Mesdames de Choiseul and de Sérent, were regular visitors to the community, no doubt in virtue of their high social station, and they caused great alarm among the inmates. When the two old ladies swept past them the girls trembled and lowered their eyes.
M. de Rohan was also, without knowing it, an object of constant interest to the school-children. He had recently been made grand-vicar to the Archbishop of Paris, while awaiting his own bishopric, and he fell into the habit of coming quite frequently to officiate at the services in the Petit-Picpus chapel. The youthful recluses could not see him because of the curtains, but he had a soft, slightly hoarse voice which they learnt to recognize. He had been an army officer, and was said to be highly fastidious in his dress, his chestnut hair elaborately curled, a splendid silk sash about his waist, and his cassock most elegantly cut. He was particularly interesting to the sixteen-year-olds.
No sound from outside ordinarily reached the convent, but it happened one year that the notes of a flute were heard. This notable event is still remembered by that generation of boarders. The player was somewhere close at hand and the melody was always the same, a song now forgotten, ‘Ma Zétalbé, viens régner sur mon âme’ – ‘My Zétalbé, come reign in my heart!’ It was heard several times a day. The girls listened entranced, the mothers were outraged, minds were distracted, punishments were showered. This went on for several months, and the girls all fell more or less in love with the unknown musician, each thinking of herself as Zétalbé. The sound came from the direction of the Rue Droit-Mur, and they would have risked anything, sacrificed anything, for a single glimpse of the ‘young man with the flute’ who played so deliriously. Several of them slipped through a service door during a rest period and crept up to the third floor, on the Droit-Mur side, in a vain attempt to see him. One went so far as to reach above her head and wave a handkerchief through the barred window. But two were even bolder. They contrived to climb on to the roof itself and at the risk of disaster had a sight of the ‘young man’. He turned out to be an elderly gentleman, a former emigré now blind and destitute, playing in his attic to while away the time.
There were in the grounds of the Petit-Picpus three entirely separate buildings, the main convent, where the nuns lived, the boarding-house, and what was known as ‘the Little Convent’. This was a lodging-house with its own garden inhabited by a collection of old nuns from other orders, the survivors of convents destroyed by the Revolution, and containing every shade of black, grey, and white, every variety and singularity of costume – a sort of patchwork convent, if the term may be allowed.
These unhappy exiles had been permitted under the Empire to take refuge with the Benedictine-Bernardines; the Government allowed them a small pension and the ladies of the Petit-Picpus had gladly received them. They were a strange confusion, each obeying her own Rule. The schoolgirls were sometimes allowed as a great treat to visit them, and so the memory of Mère Saint-Basile, Mère Sainte-Scolastique, and Mère Jacob among others, was impressed on certain youthful minds.
There was one among them who might be said to have been at home. This was a sister of the Order of Sainte-Aure, the only member of that order who had survived. At the beginning of the eighteenth century the ladies of Sainte-Aure had occupied this same house in the Petit-Picpus. The old nun in question, being too poor to wear the splendid costume of her order, which consisted of a white habit with a scarlet scapula, had piously dressed a doll in these garments, which she delighted to display and bequeathed to the establishment at her death. In 1824 one member of the order remained; today there is only the doll.
In addition to these devout mothers a few elderly society women had obtained the permission of the prioress, as had Madame Albertine, to retire to the Little Convent. Among them were Madame de Beaufort d’Hautpoul and Madame la Marquise Dufresne. There was another who was known in the convent only by the tremendous noise she made when blowing her nose. The girls christened her ‘Madame Vacarmini’, which may be translated ‘thunderclap’.
Around the year 1820 Madame de Genlis, who was then editing a small periodical entitled l‘ Intrépide, asked leave to enter the convent as a resident guest, being recommended by the king’s brother, the Duc d’Orléans. This caused a great stir in the hive, a quiver of apprehension, for Madame de Genlis had written novels; but she declared that she now detested them, and in any case she had embarked on a phase of fanatical devoutness. But she left after a few months, saying that there was not enough shade in the garden. The nuns were greatly relieved. Although very old, she still played the harp, and extremely well.
The convent chapel, which stood between the main convent and the school boarding-house and was designed to separate them, was of course shared by the whole community. Even the public was admitted by a kind of lepers’ door from the street. But everything was done to ensure that the inmates would never set eyes on a face from outside. We have to imagine a church of which the main aisle has been bent by a giant hand, so that instead of extending beyond the altar it becomes a sort of gloomy cavern to the right of the priest, concealed behind the seven-foot curtains of which we have already spoken. Huddled together in the half-darkness on wooden stalls were the nuns of the choir on the left, schoolgirls and resident guests on the right, serving nuns and novices at the back – this is to give some impression of the community of the Petit-Picpus at divine service. The cavern, known as the choir, communicated with the cloisters by way of a passage. The chapel was lighted by windows on the garden side. At certain services which, by the rules of the order, were conducted in silence, the public was made aware of the presence of the nuns only by the creaking of stalls as they knelt or rose to their feet.
From 1819 to 1825 the prioress of Petit-Picpus was Mademoiselle de Blemeur, whose conventual name was Mère Innocente. She came of the family of Marguerite de Blemeur, who in the previous century had written a Life of the Saints of the Order of St Benedict. She was a woman in her sixties, short and plump, ‘who sang like a cracked pot’ according to the letter we have already quoted, but was in general an admirable person and the only cheerful member of the community, for which she was greatly loved. She inherited many of the qualities of her ancestress, being well-read, erudite, knowledgeable, widely versed in history and stuffed with Latin, Greek, and Hebrew – more like a monk than a nun.
The deputy-prioress was an aged and almost blind Spanish nun, Mère Cineres. There were sisters who had come from other orders, some who found the austerity intolerable, and one or two who were driven insane. There was a charmingly pretty girl of twenty-three, a descendant of the Chevalier Roze, whose conventual name was Mère Assomption. The sister in charge of the choir was Mère Sainte-Mechtilde, who liked to include in it a number of the schoolgirls. Ordinarily she selected a complete scale, that is to say, seven, aged from ten to sixteen. She made them sing standing, graded according to height, and the effect was like that of a reed pipe, a panpipe of angels. Among the serving sisters best loved by the girls were Sœur Sainte-Marthe, who was in her dotage, and Sœur Saint-Michel, whose long nose made them laugh.
All the nuns were indulgent to the children, reserving their severity for themselves. No fire was ever lit except in the girls’ boarding-house, and their fare was refined compared with that of the nuns. They were tenderly cared for; but if a child addressed a nun in passing, the nun did not reply.
The effect of this rule of silence was that the faculty of speech was denied to humans and transferred to inanimate objects. At one moment it was the chapel bell that spoke, at another the gardener’s bell. A particularly sonorous bell in the housekeeper’s room, which was audible throughout the building, served as a kind of telegraph summoning the inmates to the performance of their hourly duties or notifying one in particular that she was wanted in the parlour. Each individual had a distinctive signal. That of the prioress was two strokes – one and one; that of the deputy-prioress one and two. A call of six-five was the summons to class, so familiar that the girls never talked of going into class but of ‘going to six-five’. Four-four was the call of Madame de Genlis, which was very frequently heard – ‘the devil with four horns’, the more uncharitable said. Nineteen strokes heralded a great event, nothing less than the opening of the main door, a formidable, heavily-bolted sheet of metal which never turned on its hinges except to admit the archbishop.
Other than this dignitary and the gardener no man, as we have said, was allowed inside the convent proper. The schoolgirls, however, saw two others – the almoner, Abbé Banès, an old and ugly man whom they were able to observe through a grille in the choir, and the drawing-master, M. Ansiaux, who has been described as ‘a terrible old hunchback’. It will be seen that the males were carefully selected.
Such was this singular establishment.
Having outlined its moral countenance it may be not inappropriate to depict in a few words its material aspect, of which the reader has already been given some impression.
The Convent of the Petit-Picpus-Saint-Antoine almost entirely filled the large irregular quadrilateral formed by four streets – the Rue Polonceau, the Rue Droit-Mur, the Petite Rue Picpus, and a now vanished alleyway which in old maps is called the Rue Aumarais. Its walls enclosed the area like a moat. The convent consisted of a number of buildings and a garden. The main building, taken as a whole, was a hybrid block of houses of which the ground plan, seen from above, resembled a gibbet. The upright of the gibbet occupied the whole stretch of the Rue Droit-Mur between the Petite Rue Picpus and the Rue Polonceau, the arm being a high, stark building with a barred façade on the Petite Rue Picpus and a porte-cochère, No. 62, at its extreme end. At about the centre of the frontage was a low, arched, crumbling doorway, filled with cobwebs, which was only opened for an hour or two on Sundays, and on the rare occasions when the coffin of a nun was taken out of the convent. This was the public entrance to the chapel. The supporting strut of the gibbet was a square room used for general purposes and called by the nuns ‘the pantry’. The main building contained the cells of the mothers, the sisters, and the novices, and in the arm of the gibbet were the kitchen, the refectory, flanked by the cloister, and the chapel. The girls’ boarding-house, which was not visible from outside, was situated between the doorway, No. 62, and the corner of the blind alley, Rue Aumarais. The rest of the quadrilateral consisted of the garden, which was on a lower level than the Rue Polonceau, so that the walls seen from inside were considerably higher than they appeared from the street. The garden, which was slightly concave, had a central knoll on which was a tall, slender pine-tree with four broad walks running from it as though from the boss of a shield, and disposed in pairs between these were eight lesser paths which, if the general plan had been circular, would have made the pattern resemble a cross superimposed on a wheel. The paths, all leading to the very irregular walls of the garden, were of unequal length. They were bordered by fruit bushes. At the end of one of the walks, flanked by poplars, were the ruins of the old convent, between the Rue Droit-Mur and the Little Convent, at the angle of the blind-alley. In front of the Little Convent was what was known as the ‘little garden’. If we add to this a courtyard, a great many outcroppings and re-entrants formed by the internal irregularity of the buildings, and walls like those of a prison with nothing to be seen beyond them except the long black line of rooftops on the far side of the Rue Polonceau, we may form some idea of the Bernardine convent of Petit-Picpus as it existed forty-five years ago. It occupied the site of a tennis-court famous in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries which had been known as ‘the playground of eleven thousand devils’.
To conclude, those streets were among the oldest in Paris, even older than the names they then bore. The Rue Droit-Mur, for example, was once the Rue des Églantiers. God caused flowers to blossom before men shaped stone.
Since we are discussing in some detail the life of a vanished convent and have presumed to throw open the doors of that sanctuary, we may venture to ask the reader to permit a further small digression, unrelated to the matter of this book but nevertheless of interest inasmuch as it reveals that even a convent may contain original characters.
Among the residents in the Little Convent was a centenarian lady who had come from the Abbaye de Fontevrault and who, before the Revolution, had belonged to the fashionable world. She talked a great deal about Monsieur de Miromesnil, who had been Keeper of the Seal under Louis XVI, and about a certain Madame Duplat, a judge’s wife of whom she had been a close friend, neglecting no opportunity of bringing these names into her conversation. She told wonderful tales about Fontevrault, that it was like a small town and that there were streets within its walls.
She talked with a Picardy accent that charmed the schoolgirls. Every year she solemnly renewed her vows, saying to the priest, ‘St Francis handed them down to St Julien, St Julien passed them on to St Eusebius, St Eusebius passed them on to St Procopius, etc., and now, father, I pass them on to you’ – while the girls laughed, not up their sleeves but under their veils, stifled giggles of delight that caused the mothers to raise their eyebrows.
She told other tales. She said that when she was young the monks of St Bernard rivalled the Musketeers in the dissipated lives they led. The voice of a century spoke through her lips, but it was the eighteenth century. She described the custom in Champagne and Burgundy of the four wines. Before the Revolution, when a great personage, a Marshal of France, a prince or great lord, visited a town in either of these regions he was met by the town council bearing four goblets, each of which contained a different wine and bore a different inscription – vin de singe, vin de lion, vin de mouton, and vin de cochon. They represented the four stages of intoxication – gaiety, quarrelsomeness, dull-wittedness, and finally stupor.
She kept under lock and key a mysterious possession which she greatly valued. The Rule of Fontevrault allowed her to do so. She would shut herself in her room, which again was permitted by the Rule of her Order, and if she heard anyone approaching would lock the cupboard as quickly as her old hands could turn the key. When questioned about it she was silent, talkative though she was at other times, and proof against the most persistent curiosity. The matter was much discussed by idle tongues in the convent. What could the centenarian’s treasure be – a sacred book, perhaps? – a unique chaplet? – a proven relic? … When the old lady died the cupboard was opened with what was, perhaps, unseemly haste. The object was found wrapped in linen as though it were a communion salver. It was a faience platter with a design of putti being pursued by apprentice apothecaries with huge syringes, a picture abounding in grimaces and comical postures. One of the charming putti, already spitted, was still struggling to escape, spreading his small wings and attempting to fly, while his pursuer crowed with satanic laughter. The moral was: love defeated by colic. The platter, a rare one it must be said, and one which may have furnished Molière with an idea, was still to be obtained as recently as September, 1845; a copy was on sale in an antique-shop on the Boulevard Beaumarchais.
This old lady never received a visitor from outside, because, she said, the parlour was too gloomy.
That sepulchral parlour, which we have done our best to describe was unique in an austerity not to be found in other convents. In the parlour in the Rue du Temple, for example–admittedly the convent of another Order – the black shutters were replaced by a brown curtain and the room itself was a salon with a parquet floor, windows enclosed in muslin drapery, and walls hung with pictures, among them a Benedictine nun with her face uncovered, a flower-painting, and even a Turk’s head. The garden of that particular convent contained what was said to be the largest and finest Spanish chestnut tree in all France, believed by the simple folk of the eighteenth century to be ‘the father of all the chestnut trees in the kingdom’.
The Couvent du Temple, as we have said, was occupied by Benedictines of the Perpetual Adoration who were, however, quite different from those deriving from Cîteaux. The Order of the Perpetual Adoration is comparatively recent, having been founded only two centuries ago. In 1649 the Holy Sacrament was twice profaned within a few days in two separate Paris churches, those of Saint-Sulpice and Saint-Jean en Grève, an event as uncommon as it was outrageous, which shocked all the town. The Grand Prior and vicar of Saint-Germain-des-Près ordered a solemn procession of all his clergy at which the Papal Nuncio officiated. But this ceremony of expiation did not satisfy two worthy ladies, the Marquise de Boucs and the Countess de Chateauvieux. The outrage, although unrepeated, so preyed on their devout minds that they maintained that nothing less than a rule of ‘Perpetual Adoration’ in a woman’s monastery could make sufficient atonement. The two ladies, one in 1652 and the other in 1653, furnished Mère Catherine de Bar, a Benedictine nun styled ‘of the Holy Sacrament’, with handsome endowments with which to found a Benedictine nunnery for this pious purpose. Permission was granted in the first instance by Monsieur de Metz, Abbot of Saint-Germain, with the proviso that ‘no lady should be admitted to the order who did not bring with her a yearly income of 300 livres, entailing 6000 livres capital’. Thereafter letters patent were authorized by the king, and the whole, the abbatical charter and the royal licence, was registered at the Chamber of Accounts and with Parliament.
Such was the origin and legal basis of the establishment of the Benedictines of the Perpetual Adoration in Paris. Their first convent, ‘newly built’ by the endowments of Mesdames de Boucs and de Chateauvieux, was in the Rue Cassette.
As we see, this Order was quite distinct from the Benedictine Order known as the Cistercians. It was created by the Abbot of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, just as the Order of the Sacred Heart was created by the head of the Jesuit Order, and that of the Sisters of Charity by the head of the Order of St Lazarus.
It was also quite separate from the Bernardines of Petit-Picpus. In 1657 Pope Alexander VII had in a special bull authorized the Petit-Picpus Bernardines to practise Perpetual Adoration like the Benedictines of the Holy Sacrament. But the two orders were none the less distinct.
The dwindling of the Petit-Picpus convent began with the Restoration and was a part of the general decay of the order, which, like all religious orders, has been declining since the eighteenth century. Contemplation, like prayer, is a human necessity; but like everything touched by the Revolution it is destined to be transformed and, from being opposed to social progress, to become favourable to it.
The Petit-Picpus community rapidly shrank. By 1840 the Little Convent and the school had ceased to exist. There were no longer any very old women or young girls, the first being dead and the second fled away.
The discipline of the Perpetual Adoration is so harsh that it repels; vocations recoil from it and recruits are not forthcoming. In 1845 there were still a few groups of serving sisters but no chantry-nuns. Forty years ago the number was nearly a hundred, and fifteen years ago it was only twenty-eight. The prioress in 1847 was young, not yet forty, a sign that the choice was limited. As the number diminished the work of the community increased, the duties of each member becoming more arduous. The time was drawing near when there would be no more than a dozen bowed and labouring shoulders to sustain the heavy rule of St Benedict, a burden that grew no lighter, whether for the few or the many. A crushing burden, and so they died. Two, aged twenty-five and twenty-three, died while the author of this book was still living in Paris. It was because of this shrinkage that the convent was forced to give up the education of girls.
We could not have entered that extraordinary and little-known establishment except in the company of those who – to the profit of some, perhaps – are following the melancholy history of Jean Valjean. We have glanced at that community with its ancient practices that nowadays seem strangely novel. It was a walled garden. We have described it in detail but with respect, insofar as the detail and respect may be reconciled. If we have not understood everything, we have despised nothing. We are as far removed from the hosannas of Joseph de Maistre, who blessed the executioner, as from the gibes of Voltaire, who mocked the Crucifix: a lack of logic on Voltaire’s part, be it said, for he would have defended Jesus as he defended Calas. To those who reject the superhuman incarnate what does the Crucifix represent? – the murder of wisdom.
In our nineteenth century the religious idea is undergoing a crisis. Certain things have been unlearnt, and this is good, provided other things are learnt. There must be no void in the human heart. Edifices may be pulled down, but only on condition that others are put in their place.
And in the meantime we must scrutinize the things that have vanished, needing to know if only to avoid them. Counterfeits of the past, under new names, may easily be mistaken for the future. The past, that ghostly traveller, is liable to forge his papers. We must be wary of the trap. The past has a face which is superstition, and a mask, which is hypocrisy. We must expose the face and tear off the mask.
Convents in general present a complex problem: the problem of civilization, which condemns them, and of liberty, which defends them.
[Book Seven: A Parenthesis, will be found as Appendix A, page 702].