Les Misérables
square hall which was used as the servants’ hall, and which the nuns
called _the buttery_. In the main arm were the cells of the mothers,
the sisters, and the novices. In the lesser arm lay the kitchens, the
refectory, backed up by the cloisters and the church. Between the door
No. 62 and the corner of the closed Aumarais Lane, was the school,
which was not visible from without. The remainder of the trapezium
formed the garden, which was much lower than the level of the Rue
Polonceau, which caused the walls to be very much higher on the inside
than on the outside. The garden, which was slightly arched, had in its
centre, on the summit of a hillock, a fine pointed and conical
fir-tree, whence ran, as from the peaked boss of a shield, four grand
alleys, and, ranged by twos in between the branchings of these, eight
small ones, so that, if the enclosure had been circular, the
geometrical plan of the alleys would have resembled a cross superposed
on a wheel. As the alleys all ended in the very irregular walls of the
garden, they were of unequal length. They were bordered with currant
bushes. At the bottom, an alley of tall poplars ran from the ruins of
the old convent, which was at the angle of the Rue Droit-Mur to the
house of the Little Convent, which was at the angle of the Aumarais
Lane. In front of the Little Convent was what was called the little
garden. To this whole, let the reader add a courtyard, all sorts of
varied angles formed by the interior buildings, prison walls, the long
black line of roofs which bordered the other side of the Rue Polonceau
for its sole perspective and neighborhood, and he will be able to form
for himself a complete image of what the house of the Bernardines of
the Petit-Picpus was forty years ago. This holy house had been built on
the precise site of a famous tennis-ground of the fourteenth to the
sixteenth century, which was called the “tennis-ground of the eleven
thousand devils.”
All these streets, moreover, were more ancient than Paris. These names,
Droit-Mur and Aumarais, are very ancient; the streets which bear them
are very much more ancient still. Aumarais Lane was called Maugout
Lane; the Rue Droit-Mur was called the Rue des Églantiers, for God
opened flowers before man cut stones.
CHAPTER IX—A CENTURY UNDER A GUIMPE
Since we are engaged in giving details as to what the convent of the
Petit-Picpus was in former times, and since we have ventured to open a
window on that discreet retreat, the reader will permit us one other
little digression, utterly foreign to this book, but characteristic and
useful, since it shows that the cloister even has its original figures.
In the Little Convent there was a centenarian who came from the Abbey
of Fontevrault. She had even been in society before the Revolution. She
talked a great deal of M. de Miromesnil, Keeper of the Seals under
Louis XVI. and of a Presidentess Duplat, with whom she had been very
intimate. It was her pleasure and her vanity to drag in these names on
every pretext. She told wonders of the Abbey of Fontevrault,—that it
was like a city, and that there were streets in the monastery.
She talked with a Picard accent which amused the pupils. Every year,
she solemnly renewed her vows, and at the moment of taking the oath,
she said to the priest, “Monseigneur Saint-François gave it to
Monseigneur Saint-Julien, Monseigneur Saint-Julien gave it to
Monseigneur Saint-Eusebius, Monseigneur Saint-Eusebius gave it to
Monseigneur Saint-Procopius, etc., etc.; and thus I give it to you,
father.” And the school-girls would begin to laugh, not in their
sleeves, but under their veils; charming little stifled laughs which
made the vocal mothers frown.
On another occasion, the centenarian was telling stories. She said that
_in her youth the Bernardine monks were every whit as good as the
mousquetaires_. It was a century which spoke through her, but it was
the eighteenth century. She told about the custom of the four wines,
which existed before the Revolution in Champagne and Bourgogne. When a
great personage, a marshal of France, a prince, a duke, and a peer,
traversed a town in Burgundy or Champagne, the city fathers came out to
harangue him and presented him with four silver gondolas into which
they had poured four different sorts of wine. On the first goblet this
inscription could be read, _monkey wine_; on the second, _lion wine_;
on the third, _sheep wine_; on the fourth, _hog wine_. These four
legends express the four stages descended by the drunkard; the first,
intoxication, which enlivens; the second, that which irritates; the
third, that which dulls; and the fourth, that which brutalizes.
In a cupboard, under lock and key, she kept a mysterious object of
which she thought a great deal. The rule of Fontevrault did not forbid
this. She would not show this object to anyone. She shut herself up,
which her rule allowed her to do, and hid herself, every time that she
desired to contemplate it. If she heard a footstep in the corridor, she
closed the cupboard again as hastily as it was possible with her aged
hands. As soon as it was mentioned to her, she became silent, she who
was so fond of talking. The most curious were baffled by her silence
and the most tenacious by her obstinacy. Thus it furnished a subject of
comment for all those who were unoccupied or bored in the convent. What
could that treasure of the centenarian be, which was so precious and so
secret? Some holy book, no doubt? Some unique chaplet? Some authentic
relic? They lost themselves in conjectures. When the poor old woman
died, they rushed to her cupboard more hastily than was fitting,
perhaps, and opened it. They found the object beneath a triple linen
cloth, like some consecrated paten. It was a Faenza platter
representing little Loves flitting away pursued by apothecary lads
armed with enormous syringes. The chase abounds in grimaces and in
comical postures. One of the charming little Loves is already fairly
spitted. He is resisting, fluttering his tiny wings, and still making
an effort to fly, but the dancer is laughing with a satanical air.
Moral: Love conquered by the colic. This platter, which is very
curious, and which had, possibly, the honor of furnishing Molière with
an idea, was still in existence in September, 1845; it was for sale by
a bric-à-brac merchant in the Boulevard Beaumarchais.
This good old woman would not receive any visits from outside
_because_, said she, the _parlor is too gloomy_.
CHAPTER X—ORIGIN OF THE PERPETUAL ADORATION
However, this almost sepulchral parlor, of which we have sought to
convey an idea, is a purely local trait which is not reproduced with
the same severity in other convents. At the convent of the Rue du
Temple, in particular, which belonged, in truth, to another order, the
black shutters were replaced by brown curtains, and the parlor itself
was a salon with a polished wood floor, whose windows were draped in
white muslin curtains and whose walls admitted all sorts of frames, a
portrait of a Benedictine nun with unveiled face, painted bouquets, and
even the head of a Turk.
It is in that garden of the Temple convent, that stood that famous
chestnut-tree which was renowned as the finest and the largest in
France, and which bore the reputation among the good people of the
eighteenth century of being _the father of all the chestnut trees of
the realm_.
As we have said, this convent of the Temple was occupied by
Benedictines of the Perpetual Adoration, Benedictines quite different
from those who depended on Cîteaux. This order of the Perpetual
Adoration is not very ancient and does not go back more than two
hundred years. In 1649 the holy sacrament was profaned on two occasions
a few days apart, in two churches in Paris, at Saint-Sulpice and at
Saint-Jean en Grève, a rare and frightful sacrilege which set the whole
town in an uproar. M. the Prior and Vicar-General of Saint-Germain des
Prés ordered a solemn procession of all his clergy, in which the Pope’s
Nuncio officiated. But this expiation did not satisfy two sainted
women, Madame Courtin, Marquise de Boucs, and the Comtesse de
Châteauvieux. This outrage committed on “the most holy sacrament of the
altar,” though but temporary, would not depart from these holy souls,
and it seemed to them that it could only be extenuated by a “Perpetual
Adoration” in some female monastery. Both of them, one in 1652, the
other in 1653, made donations of notable sums to Mother Catherine de
Bar, called of the Holy Sacrament, a Benedictine nun, for the purpose
of founding, to this pious end, a monastery of the order of
Saint-Benoît; the first permission for this foundation was given to
Mother Catherine de Bar by M. de Metz, Abbé of Saint-Germain, “on
condition that no woman could be received unless she contributed three
hundred livres income, which amounts to six thousand livres, to the
principal.” After the Abbé of Saint-Germain, the king accorded
letters-patent; and all the rest, abbatial charter, and royal letters,
was confirmed in 1654 by the Chamber of Accounts and the Parliament.
Such is the origin of the legal consecration of the establishment of
the Benedictines of the Perpetual Adoration of the Holy Sacrament at
Paris. Their first convent was “a new building” in the Rue Cassette,
out of the contributions of Mesdames de Boucs and de Châteauvieux.
This order, as it will be seen, was not to be confounded with the
Benedictine nuns of Cîteaux. It mounted back to the Abbé of
Saint-Germain des Prés, in the same manner that the ladies of the
Sacred Heart go back to the general of the Jesuits, and the sisters of
charity to the general of the Lazarists.
It was also totally different from the Bernardines of the Petit-Picpus,
whose interior we have just shown. In 1657, Pope Alexander VII. had
authorized, by a special brief, the Bernardines of the Rue
Petit-Picpus, to practise the Perpetual Adoration like the Benedictine
nuns of the Holy Sacrament. But the two orders remained distinct
nonetheless.
CHAPTER XI—END OF THE PETIT-PICPUS
At the beginning of the Restoration, the convent of the Petit-Picpus
was in its decay; this forms a part of the general death of the order,
which, after the eighteenth century, has been disappearing like all the
religious orders. Contemplation is, like prayer, one of humanity’s
needs; but, like everything which the Revolution touched, it will be
transformed, and from being hostile to social progress, it will become
favorable to it.
The house of the Petit-Picpus was becoming rapidly depopulated. In
1840, the Little Convent had disappeared, the school had disappeared.
There were no longer any old women, nor young girls; the first were
dead, the latter had taken their departure. _Volaverunt_.
The rule of the Perpetual Adoration is so rigid in its nature that it
alarms, vocations recoil before it, the order receives no recruits. In
1845, it still obtained lay-sisters here and there. But of professed
nuns, none at all. Forty years ago, the nuns numbered nearly a hundred;
fifteen years ago there were not more than twenty-eight of them. How
many are there to-day? In 1847, the prioress was young, a sign that the
circle of choice was restricted. She was not forty years old. In
proportion as the number diminishes, the fatigue increases, the service
of each becomes more painful; the moment could then be seen drawing
near when there would be but a dozen bent and aching shoulders to bear
the heavy rule of Saint-Benoît. The burden is implacable, and remains
the same for the few as for the many. It weighs down, it crushes. Thus
they die. At the period when the author of this book still lived in
Paris, two died. One was twenty-five years old, the other twenty-three.