Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy

by Rumer Godden

  ‘Charity?’ the Sisters of Béthanie would have said in genuine surprise. ‘It’s a privilege. We’re only following Our Lady. Wasn’t she the first to do it for love of him? She, the Mother Immaculate, with Mary Magdalen.’

  ‘Yes. They did hobnob together,’ said Father Louis.

  ‘Hobnob? That’s a strange everyday way to put it.’

  ‘But exact. And I expect it was every day – and to the end.’

  ‘But the sisters … they must know which are which,’ insisted Marc.

  ‘They don’t know. They may guess, as I have guessed about Soeur Marie Lise, but even so, they do not know what any nun has done or has not done, except the Mother General. If there is someone who has been an alcoholic or drug addict, for her sake, her first Prioress will be warned – but, of course, the Prioress herself may once have been the same.’

  ‘The Prioress!’ Marc could not believe his ears.

  ‘They tell me that often the worst criminals make the best nuns.’ Louis was quite serene. ‘Because they have known the depths. “Out of the depths, I cried to Thee,”’ Father Louis repeated softly. ‘“Lord, hear my voice” – and He does.’

  ‘The depths?’

  ‘Go to Cadillac,’ said Louis, ‘that terrible once-upon-a-time Maison de Force. Go to Cadillac, and see.’

  Cadillac was a museum now. It had been a château, almost a fortress, of heavy rough stone, built for the Dukes of Epernon, and had needed hardly any conversion to become, in the nineteenth century, a prison for women. ‘All that was necessary was conveniently and horribly there,’ Louis had told Marc and, as Marc came in, he had seen the strong gatehouse which became a guard-house; the high walls; huge rooms that could be divided into twelve or twenty cells – the marks on the floors still showed where they had been. Marc walked through the guardrooms in the crypt which had been made into workrooms for the task then thought suitable for prisoners, sewing heavy sacks. No wonder hands grew coarse, thought Marc. He walked up the stone stairs, wide enough to take ten in a line of the four hundred prisoners. ‘There were already grilles at the windows,’ said Louis, ‘fortified doors, and the dungeons where the Duke’s captives used to be left to die forgotten, were conveniently useful for the prison. Women could be kept chained to the wall down there. Imagine it, Marc,’ Father Louis’ voice had been deep with emotion. ‘Just some straw thrown on the stone flags for a bed, a bucket seldom emptied, the stink of damp, stale air, their own excretion.’ Marc could see that, through the high-up slit openings of these ‘cachots’, daylight hardly reached them; the marks of the chains were still on the walls. He came out feeling sick.

  To him there was something more poignant still; kept for show in one room were scratchings on the wall where the prisoners had used their nails to get off the whitewash, ‘To use as face-powder, maquillage,’ said the curator. How ghastly it must have looked, thought Marc.

  He had come with a coach-load of tourists but had lingered behind the guide, imagining corridors lined with locked cell doors along which, Louis had told him, a trolley was pushed twice a day by a prisoner wearing the green girdle of good conduct; at every door, through the shutter a battered tin bowl would be held out for a ladle of soup – ‘I can guess it was more skilly than soup,’ said Father Louis, ‘and then a hand came out for the piece of prison bread, one piece, no more.

  Up on the airy first floor, though, in what had been the most splendid state room of all, the Salle des Gardes or King’s Room, there were different signs, signs Louis had told Marc to look for. Over the great carved chimneypiece with its white and coloured marble, a shield that had borne the arms of the Duke had been painted over with a cross in gold, and below where the shelf jutted over the hearth, the bust of the King, Henri III, had been taken away and marks on the marble showed where a tabernacle had stood while a table in front made an altar.

  ‘Who did this?’ Marc asked the curator, who had come back to him. ‘Who?’

  ‘It was Père Lataste.’

  ‘But … who gave him permission?’

  ‘No one. He did it. He wanted this room as a chapel.’ And what Père Lataste wanted he got, thought Marc.

  ‘You must know the history,’ Louis had said. ‘How Béthanie began.’

  Marc already knew that in 1864 Marie Jean Joseph Lataste, a young priest, had been sent to preach a retreat in this most terrible of all women’s prisons. ‘But you must know it vividly,’ said Louis. It was becoming too vivid now. ‘Once a woman is sent to Cadillac she is lost,’ said the tales. ‘She never comes out.’

  Some had thrown themselves from the top windows, managing, in their desperation, to force themselves through the bars; some had jumped into the courtyard-well as Soeur Noël, who was to be the first of Père Lataste’s ‘petites soeurs’, as he had called them, had decided to do on the very day of the retreat. ‘I don’t know what stayed me,’ she had said, and then, later, ‘Now I do know.’

  If only these walls could speak, thought Marc, standing in that improvised chapel, what they could tell. To Marie Jean Joseph Lataste they had spoken in a strange unmistakable way of something no one had ever expected to find in Cadillac – love. But he must have been afraid, thought Marc. ‘I would have been.’ The young father had been told, ‘Few will come,’ and, ‘they are brutalised. Take care never to be left alone with any of them.’ Perhaps he had been teased – ‘You’re so rosy and tender, they will eat you up.’ The retreat, too, had had to be held in the early hours of the morning or in the evening – ‘The Governor would not remit one hour of those poor creatures’ forced labour,’ said Louis, but it seemed word had gone round that this retreat was different – and Père Lataste was confronted by nearly four hundred women instead of the twenty or so he had expected. ‘He described them,’ said Louis, ‘as women who were scarcely women any more, dressed in heavy coarse dark clothes. The colour of their fichus showed the length of their sentence.’ ‘The French word “peine” – trouble – is more eloquent than our English word for it “sentence”,’ Lise had commented to Marc. A handkerchief – head-dress – was bound so low on their foreheads that it gave each a sullen malevolent look. ‘If they were suspicious of priests, I’m sure it was with reason,’ said Father Louis. ‘In those days the church did not spare its brimstone and I expect they had heard those words too often before: retribution, hell-fire, penitence, resignation.’

  Marc could imagine that scene in the chill of half-past four in the morning: the young Dominican standing waiting in his white habit, black cloak. His hair was tonsured – like mine, thought Marc – his dark eyes watchful – everyone who saw Marie Jean Joseph Lataste had remarked on his eyes.

  The women had waited for him to begin. Marc knew from his own talks and preachings, tame though those seemed in comparison, how tense a moment that opening always was. ‘Be not anxious how you are to speak, or what you are to say,’ Christ had told his disciples when he sent them out, ‘for what you are to say will be given you in that hour.’ Certainly it had been given to Père Lataste. Instead of the customarily distant ‘Mesdames, Mesdemoiselles,’ the women’s amazed ears had heard the opening that was to ring down the years and mean so much. ‘Mes soeurs, my sisters, my dear sisters. Yesterday I didn’t know you, but today …’ Père Lataste had begun. ‘He did not pretend or soften,’ said Louis. ‘You are women disgraced,’ said Père Lataste, but went on, ‘We can say these things because we are “en famille”.’ It was true he had found himself at home as never before.

  I was astonished at what I saw – he was to write – Not on the surface but in those souls; never has a retreat or mission in the best of parishes given me such joy. I was shown marvels.

  He talked to them of Mary Magdalen. ‘Isn’t she the most intimate, tender and surprising person of all in the gospel stories?’ asked Father Louis. Père Lataste reminded those poor women of how, when Jesus was invited to the feast of Simon, the rich Pharisee, she made her way to kneel at his feet.

  The Pharisee said to himself, ‘If t
his man were a prophet, he would have known who and what manner of woman is this who is touching him,’ and Jesus answered, ‘Simon, I have something to say to you … A certain creditor had two debtors: one owed five hundred denari, the other fifty. When they could not pay, he forgave them both. Now which of them will love him the more?’ Simon answered, ‘I suppose to whom he forgave more,’ and Jesus said, ‘You have judged rightly,’ and he turned to the woman. ‘Her sins, which are many, are forgiven for she loved much.’

  ‘And Père Lataste saw those handkerchiefed heads – bowed while he spoke, many trying to strangle sobs – begin to lift,’ said Louis. ‘He wrote they were like flowers after a storm when the sun touches them. Love … forgiveness. We know they were words they had not heard for a long time, perhaps had never heard,’ said Louis.

  The retreat had lasted four days and, on the last night, Père Lataste had suggested they hold an all-night Adoration of the Sacrament exposed in its monstrance on an altar made beautiful with flowers and candles, ‘Such as I expect they had not seen for years,’ said Louis. ‘Some of you might like to come, two-by-two for half an hour’s vigil,’ Père Lataste had told them. He thought that was quite enough sacrifice of their scanty hours of sleep. He himself spent the night in an improvised confessional, hearing one by one what poured out from hearts more imprisoned, one can guess, than the prisoners themselves, but towards midnight he heard a noise like a tide; the sound of feet on the stairs. He thought it was a riot and came terrified out of the confessional, then stood amazed. ‘No wonder he was amazed,’ said Louis. ‘He saw not two women taking the place of two, but almost two hundred changing over with two hundred. Those women had divided themselves, half watching until midnight, the other half from then till half-past four, when they knew Père Lataste would say the last Mass of the retreat.’

  Was it then, on that night, Marc wondered, that the idea had come? An idea that must have seemed as impossible when it was first put into words to Père Lataste’s superiors, the hierarchy, as it was to Marc when he first heard it; that there could be another Bethany, that house where Mary and Martha had lived as sisters; that among these souls at Cadillac, and other prisons, there might be true Magdalens ready to dedicate the rest of their lives to love of Our Lord; women who had a ‘call’, a vocation to the religious life … that an Order could be founded where they could follow it without question and in honour. Père Lataste was no optimist. ‘It’s not that many will,’ he said, ‘but that they can.’

  ‘How?’ was the inevitable question. At that time he did not know how, only that this would, indeed must be, and, mysteriously, he had found help.

  It was the Prioress, Soeur Marie Emmanuel, who had told Marc the story of Mère Henri Dominique. ‘She belonged to another Order where life was peaceful and safe – you could almost say comfortable – but she left it to join Père Lataste, against the advice – I can guess the scandalised advice – of everyone who knew her.’ Soeur Marie Emmanuel smiled, ‘I can guess many of us at Béthanie have had the same since.’

  Mère Henri Dominique had brought three other nuns with her. ‘Père Lataste leased a château for them,’ and Soeur Marie Emmanuel said, ‘That sounds rich but it was almost tumbling down, and there they established our Rule and the first home of Béthanie.’

  ‘They were so poor,’ she told Marc, ‘that they didn’t have beds, just palliasses stuffed with straw; no tables, but planks on bricks,’ but at Christmas there came the first of the ‘petites soeurs’. She was that same Soeur Noël who had wanted to kill herself at Cadillac. Marie Jean Joseph Lataste must have had something of the magnetism of Christ who only had to say the words ‘Follow me,’ and men, and women, left all that they had to obey; and, ‘You have a look of Père Lataste,’ Lise had said to Marc.

  ‘I?’ Marc had been startled. ‘I wish I had.’

  It was getting towards evening; all around was the light of the Gironde but it did not penetrate the château of Cadillac. Sounds, nostalgic in their homeliness, came up from the little town and, in the silence, Marc could hear the river, the Oeuil, that he had seen by the road, flowing under its old arched bridge; from the top windows of the château it might have been possible to see the vineyards and the hills; did the women, hanging on the bars, strain to see them?

  Cadillac was full of echoes; Marc seemed to hear that tide of feet on the empty stairs; they were moving perhaps towards hope, but there were other dreadful sounds; the clack-clack of wooden sabots on the stones of the back court as the prisoners took the prescribed treadmill exercises, ‘le cirque’ as they called it because, like animals in a circus, they were trained to walk round and round in silence, arms crossed on their chests to prevent touching – or punching. He seemed to hear the cries as a prisoner was dragged down to the ‘cachot’ for some trivial offence; there was the sound of that soup trolley.

  The rest of the tourists were coming back; the curator shouted and a bell rang. It was closing time.

  Marc put out a finger and touched the rough stone of the water stoup.

  4

  ‘Lise! At last! Welcome!’ The Prioress of Saint Etienne, Soeur Marie de la Croix, came forward to meet Lise, enveloping her in a hug, with a kiss on both cheeks. The kindliness and warm welcome, after the strain of the long day, brought tears to Lise’s eyes; she could not stop them running over, but Soeur Marie de la Croix seemed to understand; she kept Lise’s hand in both of hers.

  Saint Etienne was the pre-Béthanie of the Order, ‘a sort of clearing house,’ as eighteen years later Lise was to tell Marc. ‘It’s where aspirants come, those who want to try themselves in the life,’ aspirants, hopefuls.

  ‘In my young day we didn’t have them,’ Soeur Anne Colombe, the oldest sister in the Belle Source community, chimed in. ‘We went straight to the novitiate. We knew what we wanted.’

  ‘Some of us still do – the lucky ones,’ said Lise, ‘but it isn’t so simple for most. For one thing, there is such a gulf now between family life and the religious one.’

  ‘Family life should be religious.’ Soeur Anne Colombe was as adamant as she was old – ‘She’ll live to be a hundred,’ said the other sisters. ‘We were brought up to listen to our elders and do what we were told. Now girls are independent and hoity-toity.’

  ‘At least they think for themselves.’

  ‘And change their minds.’

  That was true. ‘Of all my “set”,’ Lise told Marc, ‘those who were at Saint Etienne with me, only I and Bella, Soeur Marie Isabelle, are left.’

  That first night of her coming, the Prioress had turned her over to a second white-habited figure. ‘This is Soeur Théodore who will be your Responsable.’

  Soeur Théodore, seen in the lamplight, was short, almost squat, a browned face under the black veil, but the eyes were piercing yet kind, as Soeur Marie Alcide’s had been. Were these Béthanie eyes, Lise wondered? She knew they had seen the tears but Soeur Théodore ignored them. There was only another kiss as she took Lise’s hand from the Prioress. ‘Come. You must be very tired.’

  ‘Yes indeed,’ said the Prioress. ‘Soeur Théodore will show you …’ but Lise felt a small desperate hand thrust into her free one.

  Soeur Justine had waited in the car, perhaps from tact, perhaps to take Lucette away.

  ‘Ma Mère,’ Lise spoke unwillingly. ‘This is Lucette. She has just been released, like me. I think she has nowhere to go.’

  ‘Welcome, Lucette.’ The deep voice of the Prioress was unfeignedly warm. She isn’t pretending, thought Lise as the Prioress called, ‘Soeur Justine!’

  The sister came from the car. ‘Take Lucette to the hôtellerie – that is our little guest house –’ the Prioress told Lucette. ‘Very modest, but Soeur Joséphine Magdaleine will look after you. Then tomorrow we shall talk, shall we?’ There was no response except terror and the words jerked out: ‘I want to stay with Madame Lise.’

  ‘Lise has things to do.’

  More than a hundred years ago when Soeur Noël had come fr
om Cadillac to that first Béthanie, Père Lataste had written to Mere Henri Dominique:

  Reading in the gospel of the welcome the father gave to his prodigal son, wouldn’t it be good if each time God lays at your feet, or rather into your arms, one of these prodigal daughters, you, too, made a feast?

  ‘We can only make a little one,’ Soeur Marie de la Croix, the Prioress, said now, but the tables were ready, laid with nosegays, and a few extras had been added to the supper – the Sub-Prioress herself had gone into the kitchen to make her famous crème brulée – no one else could make it like Soeur Irène – but first Soeur Théodore had to take Lise to her room, show her the enclosure and, most important of all, spend a few moments in the chapel. All this Lise knew, Soeur Marie Alcide had told her, but there was still the clinging of Lucette’s hand.

  ‘Ma Mère, could she …’ Lise had to say it. ‘Could she stay and see – just a little? Then she might understand and go away.’

  Or not go away. If that thought were in the Prioress’s mind, she did not say it. ‘But I have seen providence work in strange ways,’ she told Lise long afterwards. Now she hesitated. Then, ‘Ma petite,’ she said to Lucette. ‘You have been in a chapel before?’

  ‘No.’ That will end it, thought Lise, but, ‘What? Never?’ asked Soeur Marie de la Croix.

  ‘When I was small but …’

  The Prioress made up her mind. ‘You cannot go with Lise – she has to go into the enclosure – but you can watch. Come with me,’ and the small cold hand yielded itself up to the Prioress’s warm one.