Les Misérables, v. 2/5: Cosette

by Victor Hugo

  CHAPTER VIII.

  POST CORDA LAPIDES.

  After sketching the moral figure, it may not be time lost to indicatein a few words the material configuration, of which the reader alreadypossesses some idea.

  The convent of the Little Picpus occupied a large trapeze, formedby the four streets to which we have so frequently alluded, andwhich surrounded it like a moat. The convent was composed of severalbuildings and a garden. The main building, regarded in its entirety,was a juxtaposition of hybrid constructions, which, looked at from aballoon, would very exactly form a gallows laid on the ground. The longarm of the gallows occupied the whole of the Rue Droit-mur, comprisedbetween the Little Rue Picpus and the Rue Polonceau; while the shorterarm was a tall, gray, stern, grated façade, looking on the Little RuePicpus, of which the carriage-entrance, No. 62, was the extremity.Toward the centre of this façade dust and ashes whitened an old,low-arched gate, where the spiders made their webs, and which was onlyopened for an hour or two on Sundays, and on the rare occasions whenthe coffin of a nun left the convent; this was the public entranceto the church. The elbow of the gallows was a square room, used as anoffice, and which the nuns called the "buttery." In the long arm werethe cells of the mothers, sisters, and novices; in the short one thekitchens, the refectory, along which a cloister ran, and the church.Between No. 62 and the corner of Aumarais Lane was the school, whichcould not be seen from the exterior. The rest of the trapeze formed thegarden, which was much lower than the level of the Rue Polonceau, andthis caused the walls to be much loftier inside than out. The garden,which was slightly arched, had at its centre and on the top of a mounda fine-pointed and conical fir-tree, from which ran, as from the bossof a shield, four large walks, with eight smaller ones arranged two andtwo, so that, had the enclosure been circular, the geometrical plan ofthe walks would have resembled a cross laid upon a wheel. The walks,which all ran to the extremely irregular walls of the garden, were ofunequal length, and were bordered by gooseberry-bushes. At the end apoplar walk ran from the ruins of the old convent, which was at theangle of the Rue Droit-mur, to the little convent, which was at thecorner of Aumarais Lane. In front of the little convent was what wascalled the small garden. If we add to this _ensemble_ a court-yard, allsorts of varying angles formed by the inside buildings, prison walls,and the long black line of roofs that ran along the other side of theRue Polonceau, as the sole prospect, we can form an exact idea of whatthe house of the Bernardines of Little Picpus was five-and-forty yearsago. This sacred house was built on the site of a famous racket-courtin the 16th century, which was called the "Tripot des onze millediables." All these streets, indeed, were the oldest in Paris; thenames Droit-mur and Aumarais are very old, but the streets that bearthem are far older. Aumarais Lane was before called Maugout Lane; theRue Droit-mur was called the Rue des Eglantines, for God opened theflowers before man cut building-stones.