The Streets of Paris

The Carmelites: Picpus Cemetery

“PERMISSION TO DIE, MOTHER?”: SISTER CONSTANCE AND THE DIALOGUES OF THE CARMELITES

LOCATION: Place de la Nation
35, rue de Picpus, Picpus Cemetery: The Walled Garden of Memory

HOURS: Weekdays, winter, 2–8; weekdays, summer, 2–4

MÉTRO: Nation

Eyewitnesses told afterward of the mob’s counterrevolutionary tears, the cups of water offered to the nuns by the usually ferocious spectators. It seemed not to care about the women’s guilt: expelled from their monastery on September 14, 1792, their convent dissolved, they’d refused to sign the new separatist oath of submission to the “the King, the Law, and the Nation.” In secret, they had united in an “act of consecration” whereby the community vowed to offer itself to God as a sacrifice that “the ills afflicting the Church and the unhappy kingdom of France might cease.” They were arrested on June 21, 1794, charged with counterterrorism and for assembling illegally in a small prison in Compiègne where they’d been confined by the men in charge. In a courtroom of the Palais de Justice, the Revolutionary Tribunal, finding the women guilty as “enemies of the Nation,” had sentenced them to death by guillotine.

For the Traveler

Late in the afternoon of July 17, 1794, two wooden carts without springs set out over the cobblestones of the Île de la Cité. Their two-mile journey from the Conciergerie prison to the Place du Trône-Renversé (Place of the Toppled Throne) in eastern Paris, now the Place de la Nation, was joined by the usual jeering mob. The carts—tumbrils—carried many prisoners, including the sixteen nuns from the town of Compiègne, about fifty-two miles northeast of Paris.

At some point along rue Saint-Antoine, the main east/west artery of ancient Paris, the mob following that day’s batch of condemned fell silent. What silenced them was the Carmelites themselves. Had they gone mad? The women were neither weeping or crying out or tearing at their white cloaks. As the carts clip-clopped over the cobblestones, headed toward a collective decapitation, the nuns had begun to sing.

First, the Miserere. Then the Divine Office that they chanted every day in their convent chapel at Compiègne. “Have mercy upon me, O God, after thy great goodness … Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.…” So serene were their faces, it was as if they were back in Compiègne praying in their convent choir stalls, intoning and kneeling and bowing through Vespers and Compline, the canonical hours sung at the end of the day.

The eyewitness accounts, preserved in diaries and referenced in histories of the French Revolution, all tell the same story.

The journey to the scaffold along rue Saint-Antoine took about five hours. Today the walk takes about three: from the Conciergerie across the Pont au Change, passing the Tour Saint-Jacques, then, farther along, past Hôtel de Sully and Place des Vosges into Place de la Bastille. Its prison had been destroyed by the mob on July 14, 1789, a guillotine set up in its place; now, five years into the Revolution, the housewives and mothers of the Bastille/Saint-Antoine district, sickened by the stench from the guillotine, had recently protested to have it relocated to Place du Trône, another mile to the east. The walk today, from Bastille, along the final stretch of rue Saint-Antoine is without charm.

Following the chanting of Vespers and Compline, the nuns, whose hair had already been cut short in preparation, sang the ancient Salve Regina, the hymn to the Virgin Mary. “Mater misericordiae, vita, dulcedo et spes nostra salve … O clemens, O pia, O dulcis Virgo Maria.”

In early evening, the tumbrils reached their destination. At the center of the large open space of Place du Trône-Renversé, framed by the tall Vincennes pillars (which still tower above avenue du Trône), the scaffold and guillotine were in place. Beneath the huge naked blade, the executioner’s blood-stiffened leather bag was open, ready to receive that day’s severed heads. On sight of the blade, mounted on the high scaffold, the Mother Superior of the Carmelites, Mother Teresa of Saint Augustine, or Madame Lidoine in the world, sang forth the words of the Te Deum: “It is Thee whom we praise, O God!” The nuns answered: “It is Thee whom we acknowledge to be the Lord!” Hearing the Latin words, perhaps composed by Saint Ambrose as he baptized Saint Augustine, the mob that gathered every day to enjoy the spectacle of executions, was again stunned to silence.

At the end of Saint-Antoine, at Place de la Nation (Place du Trône), you are facing the large circle that surrounds the monumental statuary in the center of the Place. From any angle you can stand here and imagine the scene of 223 years ago. Inside the circle, you feel an unmistakable bleakness.

In 1794 the air over the Place du Trône was thick with the stink of putrefying flesh and blood that evening. The Reign of Terror (1793–1794) in 421 days murdered 2,800 people by order of Robespierre. The corpses were dumped into open pits throughout the city and piled high in public squares.

The nuns continued singing. “It is Thee, the Father everlasting, whom all the earth does worship.… It is in Thee, O Lord, that I have put my trust: O never let me be confounded!” The tumbrils came closer to the platform; the singing became louder as they stopped at the scaffold. The condemned women seemed oblivious to the stench of the open pits as well as to the smell caught on the wind from the nearby Picpus Cemetery. In the last month, one thousand corpses and heads had been thrown into the pits at Picpus. (The Terror, according to Simon Schama, “was merely 1789 with a higher body count.”) No amount of lime could cleanse the air blowing west from Picpus, a neighborhood where, before the Revolution, religious communities had built convents and the well-heeled their summer mansions to escape the heat of the inner city. (Ninon de l’Enclos had had her summer retreat here—see here)

Standing at the foot of the scaffold, Mother Teresa intoned the Veni Creator Spiritus as each nun placed her hands between her own and renewed her vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Bystanders taking notes mentioned their “loud and intelligible voices,” their faces très calmes.

Then Sister Constance, the youngest nun, knelt first before Mother Teresa, kissing the tiny clay image of the Virgin and Child she held in her hand. Her head bowed, she called out:

“Permission to die, Mother?”

“Go, my daughter.”

Climbing the steps of the scaffold, Sister Constance called out for the last time: “Laudate Dominum omnes gentes!” It was the first line of the psalm sung by Saint Teresa of Avila at the founding of her Carmelite Order in Spain in the sixteenth century.

Waiting at the foot of the scaffold, Sister Constance’s fifteen sisters took up the chant.

Praise the Lord, all ye nations!

Praise Him all ye people!

For His mercy is confirmed upon us,

And the truth of the Lord endureth forever!

Praise the Lord!

They kept chanting as they heard the thud of each head as it fell and hit the chopping block of the scaffold. Mother Teresa/Madame Lidoine had been sentenced to be the last to die.

In silence the bodies and heads, thrown into carts painted red, were taken away in the direction of the cemetery.

* * *

Today, Place de la Nation is dominated by a huge triumphant statue of Marianne, symbol of the Revolution, encircled by fierce lions and, presumably, male and female revolutionaries bearing weapons and babies. If you start from where Marianne’s left hand is pointing and leave the Place de la Nation following in that direction, you will find the shortest route to the cemetery: follow rue Fabre-d’Églantine (named for an aristocrat who was slaughtered just across the way in Place du Trône), a long block that bends left into rue de Picpus. The entrance to the grounds of the cemetery, less than a ten-minute walk from Nation, is on the left, at no. 35. Stop at the gatehouse inside the entrance for a sheet of information in English. (Admission, 2 euros.)

You will find the cemetery grounds through a blue gate to the left of the chapel. At the end of a long expanse of garden plots, deathly bare in February, bright green in spring, along the narrow paths lined with poplars, you will come to the cemetery entrance. On its far rear wall, you will find the memorial plaques to the Carmelites and other victims of the Terror—1,306 of them between June 14 and July 27, the date of Robespierre’s execution and the end of the Terror. You are facing the gate at the entrance to the space where open pits or mass graves received the dead bodies and decapitated heads on the night of July 17, 1794. The names of the nuns are incised on the wall on either side of the entrance to the pits. Sister Constance, less than thirty years old, grew up in the quartier of Saint-Denis in Paris. Her worldly name was M. J. Meunier.

This is a place of silence and severe solemnity. I have never heard visitors speak as they look through the bars of the locked iron gate leading to the pits. There is more than death on the air at Picpus. The place seems to hold the memory of an unearthly courage and faith as if it is a living thing. In spring, the garden walls are covered with climbing roses; in winter the walls and garden plots are naked as corpses.

A look into the chapel that stands at the entrance of the Picpus Cemetery is a fitting end to your visit. Because there had been no religious ceremony at the time of the burial of the Place du Trône’s 1,306 victims, their families built a chapel on the grounds of the cemetery and invited a religious order of nuns to offer perpetual prayer here, on their behalf. The order is still in residence. The Carmelites’ names are incised on both left and right marble walls of the chapel’s sanctuary.

* * *

Picpus has the atonal austerity of some of Francis Poulenc’s choruses of women’s voices confessing the starkness of belief in the face of death. It brings back the spell cast over the house of the Metropolitan Opera at the end of his opera, Dialogues of the Carmelites (1957). A strange hush. No one in the audience moved or made a sound. It took some time before the applause broke out.

Poulenc’s sacred music expresses his own faith in the significance of the nuns’ martyrdom. After a pilgrimage to Rocamadour in southwest France in 1935, he told of a mystical experience—in the church of Notre-Dame, he saw the Black Madonna carved by Saint Amadour—an event that inspired his return to Catholicism (see here). Much of the sacred music he composed after 1936 had Marian themes: the Litanies à la Vierge Noire; the Stabat Mater. His Gloria carries the spirit of joy he found at the heart of Catholic mysticism.

The mass graves of Picpus, dug in gardens belonging to an order of Augustinian nuns and requisitioned by the Revolution, were closed and filled in in 1795; a few years later, they were bought by the families of the victims buried here. The tombstones record the presence of many aristocratic families prominent in French history, many of whom, as members of the Resistance, were deported and murdered by the Nazis. Lafayette is buried here because several women in his wife’s family were guillotined during the Terror.

For a long time, the slaughtered Carmelities were forgotten. But as scholars continued to research the story into the twentieth century when the nuns were beatified (1906), a cult developed. Then, in the 1930s, reminded of the Terror by the rise of Hitler, a German writer, Gertrud von le Fort, wrote a novel about the event, The Song of the Scaffold. Georges Bernanos, the French Catholic novelist (The Diary of a Country Priest) wrote his Dialogues of the Carmelites as a screenplay in 1952, as he was dying.

Francis Poulenc was inspired to use Bernanos’s text as the libretto for the opera he composed in 1953–1955 about the death of the Carmelites. All three writers fictionalized the story to include a main character, Blanche de la Force, who never existed. Sister Constance, however, the youngest nun, did exist. She was, in fact, the first to die.

Nearby

L’ÉGLANTINE 21, rue Fabre d’Églantine. The terrace, full of local people, faces Place de la Nation where Fabre d’Églantine was executed. Friendly service. Peaceful in the late afternoon, with good desserts.

LE BISTROT PAUL BERT 18, rue Paul Bert. Tel: 01.43.72.24.01. Reservations suggested. Métro: Faidherbe-Chaligny. Open Tues–Thurs for lunch and dinner. Fri and Sat dinner only. A popular and lively bistro with excellent simple food.

MEDIATHÈQUE HÉLÈNE BERR 70, rue de Picpus, on the corner of rue de Picpus and rue Santerre. Named for the martyr and Résistante who left behind her Journal (see here), the library is a quiet, well-lit space with a garden and a music room upstairs in memory of Berr’s love of music. There is a photo of her on the left in the entrance lobby.

FONDATION DE ROTHSCHILD 76–80, rue de Picpus and rue Lamblardie, about a block southeast from Picpus Cemetery. Rothschild Orphanage, where Résistante Hélène Berr volunteered to help with the abandoned Jewish children during the Occupation, was on 19, rue Lamblardie. The plaque affixed to the building commemorates the members of the foundation’s staff who saved the lives of many children and adults during the war and were themselves deported and murdered in the years 1941–1944.