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.
III
Severities
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.
IV
Gaiety
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.’
‘And what was it?’
‘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, an
d 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.’
V
Distractions
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 ha
d 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.
Les Miserables (Movie Tie-in) (9781101612774) Page 52
