No sound from outside ordinarily reached the convent, but it happened one year that the notes of a flute were heard. This notable event is still remembered by that generation of boarders. The player was somewhere close at hand and the melody was always the same, a song now forgotten, ‘Ma Zétalbé, viens régner sur mon âme’ – ‘My Zétalbé, come reign in my heart!’ It was heard several times a day. The girls listened entranced, the mothers were outraged, minds were distracted, punishments were showered. This went on for several months, and the girls all fell more or less in love with the unknown musician, each thinking of herself as Zétalbé. The sound came from the direction of the Rue Droit-Mur, and they would have risked anything, sacrificed anything, for a single glimpse of the ‘young man with the flute’ who played so deliriously. Several of them slipped through a service door during a rest period and crept up to the third floor, on the Droit-Mur side, in a vain attempt to see him. One went so far as to reach above her head and wave a handkerchief through the barred window. But two were even bolder. They contrived to climb on to the roof itself and at the risk of disaster had a sight of the ‘young man’. He turned out to be an elderly gentleman, a former emigré now blind and destitute, playing in his attic to while away the time.
VI
The Little Convent
There were in the grounds of the Petit-Picpus three entirely separate buildings, the main convent, where the nuns lived, the boarding-house, and what was known as ‘the Little Convent’. This was a lodging-house with its own garden inhabited by a collection of old nuns from other orders, the survivors of convents destroyed by the Revolution, and containing every shade of black, grey, and white, every variety and singularity of costume – a sort of patchwork convent, if the term may be allowed.
These unhappy exiles had been permitted under the Empire to take refuge with the Benedictine-Bernardines; the Government allowed them a small pension and the ladies of the Petit-Picpus had gladly received them. They were a strange confusion, each obeying her own Rule. The schoolgirls were sometimes allowed as a great treat to visit them, and so the memory of Mère Saint-Basile, Mère Sainte-Scolastique, and Mère Jacob among others, was impressed on certain youthful minds.
There was one among them who might be said to have been at home. This was a sister of the Order of Sainte-Aure, the only member of that order who had survived. At the beginning of the eighteenth century the ladies of Sainte-Aure had occupied this same house in the Petit-Picpus. The old nun in question, being too poor to wear the splendid costume of her order, which consisted of a white habit with a scarlet scapula, had piously dressed a doll in these garments, which she delighted to display and bequeathed to the establishment at her death. In 1824 one member of the order remained; today there is only the doll.
In addition to these devout mothers a few elderly society women had obtained the permission of the prioress, as had Madame Albertine, to retire to the Little Convent. Among them were Madame de Beaufort d’Hautpoul and Madame la Marquise Dufresne. There was another who was known in the convent only by the tremendous noise she made when blowing her nose. The girls christened her ‘Madame Vacarmini’, which may be translated ‘thunderclap’.
Around the year 1820 Madame de Genlis, who was then editing a small periodical entitled l‘ Intrépide, asked leave to enter the convent as a resident guest, being recommended by the king’s brother, the Duc d’Orléans. This caused a great stir in the hive, a quiver of apprehension, for Madame de Genlis had written novels; but she declared that she now detested them, and in any case she had embarked on a phase of fanatical devoutness. But she left after a few months, saying that there was not enough shade in the garden. The nuns were greatly relieved. Although very old, she still played the harp, and extremely well.
The convent chapel, which stood between the main convent and the school boarding-house and was designed to separate them, was of course shared by the whole community. Even the public was admitted by a kind of lepers’ door from the street. But everything was done to ensure that the inmates would never set eyes on a face from outside. We have to imagine a church of which the main aisle has been bent by a giant hand, so that instead of extending beyond the altar it becomes a sort of gloomy cavern to the right of the priest, concealed behind the seven-foot curtains of which we have already spoken. Huddled together in the half-darkness on wooden stalls were the nuns of the choir on the left, schoolgirls and resident guests on the right, serving nuns and novices at the back – this is to give some impression of the community of the Petit-Picpus at divine service. The cavern, known as the choir, communicated with the cloisters by way of a passage. The chapel was lighted by windows on the garden side. At certain services which, by the rules of the order, were conducted in silence, the public was made aware of the presence of the nuns only by the creaking of stalls as they knelt or rose to their feet.
VII
Figures in the shadow
From 1819 to 1825 the prioress of Petit-Picpus was Mademoiselle de Blemeur, whose conventual name was Mère Innocente. She came of the family of Marguerite de Blemeur, who in the previous century had written a Life of the Saints of the Order of St Benedict. She was a woman in her sixties, short and plump, ‘who sang like a cracked pot’ according to the letter we have already quoted, but was in general an admirable person and the only cheerful member of the community, for which she was greatly loved. She inherited many of the qualities of her ancestress, being well-read, erudite, knowledgeable, widely versed in history and stuffed with Latin, Greek, and Hebrew – more like a monk than a nun.
The deputy-prioress was an aged and almost blind Spanish nun, Mère Cineres. There were sisters who had come from other orders, some who found the austerity intolerable, and one or two who were driven insane. There was a charmingly pretty girl of twenty-three, a descendant of the Chevalier Roze, whose conventual name was Mère Assomption. The sister in charge of the choir was Mère Sainte-Mechtilde, who liked to include in it a number of the schoolgirls. Ordinarily she selected a complete scale, that is to say, seven, aged from ten to sixteen. She made them sing standing, graded according to height, and the effect was like that of a reed pipe, a panpipe of angels. Among the serving sisters best loved by the girls were Sœur Sainte-Marthe, who was in her dotage, and Sœur Saint-Michel, whose long nose made them laugh.
All the nuns were indulgent to the children, reserving their severity for themselves. No fire was ever lit except in the girls’ boarding-house, and their fare was refined compared with that of the nuns. They were tenderly cared for; but if a child addressed a nun in passing, the nun did not reply.
The effect of this rule of silence was that the faculty of speech was denied to humans and transferred to inanimate objects. At one moment it was the chapel bell that spoke, at another the gardener’s bell. A particularly sonorous bell in the housekeeper’s room, which was audible throughout the building, served as a kind of telegraph summoning the inmates to the performance of their hourly duties or notifying one in particular that she was wanted in the parlour. Each individual had a distinctive signal. That of the prioress was two strokes – one and one; that of the deputy-prioress one and two. A call of six-five was the summons to class, so familiar that the girls never talked of going into class but of ‘going to six-five’. Four-four was the call of Madame de Genlis, which was very frequently heard – ‘the devil with four horns’, the more uncharitable said. Nineteen strokes heralded a great event, nothing less than the opening of the main door, a formidable, heavily-bolted sheet of metal which never turned on its hinges except to admit the archbishop.
Other than this dignitary and the gardener no man, as we have said, was allowed inside the convent proper. The schoolgirls, however, saw two others – the almoner, Abbé Banès, an old and ugly man whom they were able to observe through a grille in the choir, and the drawing-master, M. Ansiaux, who has been described as ‘a terrible old hunchback’. It will be seen that the males were carefully selected.
Such was this singular establishme
nt.
VIII
Post corda lapides
Having outlined its moral countenance it may be not inappropriate to depict in a few words its material aspect, of which the reader has already been given some impression.
The Convent of the Petit-Picpus-Saint-Antoine almost entirely filled the large irregular quadrilateral formed by four streets – the Rue Polonceau, the Rue Droit-Mur, the Petite Rue Picpus, and a now vanished alleyway which in old maps is called the Rue Aumarais. Its walls enclosed the area like a moat. The convent consisted of a number of buildings and a garden. The main building, taken as a whole, was a hybrid block of houses of which the ground plan, seen from above, resembled a gibbet. The upright of the gibbet occupied the whole stretch of the Rue Droit-Mur between the Petite Rue Picpus and the Rue Polonceau, the arm being a high, stark building with a barred façade on the Petite Rue Picpus and a porte-cochère, No. 62, at its extreme end. At about the centre of the frontage was a low, arched, crumbling doorway, filled with cobwebs, which was only opened for an hour or two on Sundays, and on the rare occasions when the coffin of a nun was taken out of the convent. This was the public entrance to the chapel. The supporting strut of the gibbet was a square room used for general purposes and called by the nuns ‘the pantry’. The main building contained the cells of the mothers, the sisters, and the novices, and in the arm of the gibbet were the kitchen, the refectory, flanked by the cloister, and the chapel. The girls’ boarding-house, which was not visible from outside, was situated between the doorway, No. 62, and the corner of the blind alley, Rue Aumarais. The rest of the quadrilateral consisted of the garden, which was on a lower level than the Rue Polonceau, so that the walls seen from inside were considerably higher than they appeared from the street. The garden, which was slightly concave, had a central knoll on which was a tall, slender pine-tree with four broad walks running from it as though from the boss of a shield, and disposed in pairs between these were eight lesser paths which, if the general plan had been circular, would have made the pattern resemble a cross superimposed on a wheel. The paths, all leading to the very irregular walls of the garden, were of unequal length. They were bordered by fruit bushes. At the end of one of the walks, flanked by poplars, were the ruins of the old convent, between the Rue Droit-Mur and the Little Convent, at the angle of the blind-alley. In front of the Little Convent was what was known as the ‘little garden’. If we add to this a courtyard, a great many outcroppings and re-entrants formed by the internal irregularity of the buildings, and walls like those of a prison with nothing to be seen beyond them except the long black line of rooftops on the far side of the Rue Polonceau, we may form some idea of the Bernardine convent of Petit-Picpus as it existed forty-five years ago. It occupied the site of a tennis-court famous in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries which had been known as ‘the playground of eleven thousand devils’.
To conclude, those streets were among the oldest in Paris, even older than the names they then bore. The Rue Droit-Mur, for example, was once the Rue des Églantiers. God caused flowers to blossom before men shaped stone.
IX
A century under a wimple
Since we are discussing in some detail the life of a vanished convent and have presumed to throw open the doors of that sanctuary, we may venture to ask the reader to permit a further small digression, unrelated to the matter of this book but nevertheless of interest inasmuch as it reveals that even a convent may contain original characters.
Among the residents in the Little Convent was a centenarian lady who had come from the Abbaye de Fontevrault and who, before the Revolution, had belonged to the fashionable world. She talked a great deal about Monsieur de Miromesnil, who had been Keeper of the Seal under Louis XVI, and about a certain Madame Duplat, a judge’s wife of whom she had been a close friend, neglecting no opportunity of bringing these names into her conversation. She told wonderful tales about Fontevrault, that it was like a small town and that there were streets within its walls.
She talked with a Picardy accent that charmed the schoolgirls. Every year she solemnly renewed her vows, saying to the priest, ‘St Francis handed them down to St Julien, St Julien passed them on to St Eusebius, St Eusebius passed them on to St Procopius, etc., and now, father, I pass them on to you’ – while the girls laughed, not up their sleeves but under their veils, stifled giggles of delight that caused the mothers to raise their eyebrows.
She told other tales. She said that when she was young the monks of St Bernard rivalled the Musketeers in the dissipated lives they led. The voice of a century spoke through her lips, but it was the eighteenth century. She described the custom in Champagne and Burgundy of the four wines. Before the Revolution, when a great personage, a Marshal of France, a prince or great lord, visited a town in either of these regions he was met by the town council bearing four goblets, each of which contained a different wine and bore a different inscription – vin de singe, vin de lion, vin de mouton, and vin de cochon. They represented the four stages of intoxication – gaiety, quarrelsomeness, dull-wittedness, and finally stupor.
She kept under lock and key a mysterious possession which she greatly valued. The Rule of Fontevrault allowed her to do so. She would shut herself in her room, which again was permitted by the Rule of her Order, and if she heard anyone approaching would lock the cupboard as quickly as her old hands could turn the key. When questioned about it she was silent, talkative though she was at other times, and proof against the most persistent curiosity. The matter was much discussed by idle tongues in the convent. What could the centenarian’s treasure be – a sacred book, perhaps? – a unique chaplet? – a proven relic? … When the old lady died the cupboard was opened with what was, perhaps, unseemly haste. The object was found wrapped in linen as though it were a communion salver. It was a faience platter with a design of putti being pursued by apprentice apothecaries with huge syringes, a picture abounding in grimaces and comical postures. One of the charming putti, already spitted, was still struggling to escape, spreading his small wings and attempting to fly, while his pursuer crowed with satanic laughter. The moral was: love defeated by colic. The platter, a rare one it must be said, and one which may have furnished Molière with an idea, was still to be obtained as recently as September, 1845; a copy was on sale in an antique-shop on the Boulevard Beaumarchais.
This old lady never received a visitor from outside, because, she said, the parlour was too gloomy.
X
Origin of the Perpetual Adoration
That sepulchral parlour, which we have done our best to describe was unique in an austerity not to be found in other convents. In the parlour in the Rue du Temple, for example–admittedly the convent of another Order – the black shutters were replaced by a brown curtain and the room itself was a salon with a parquet floor, windows enclosed in muslin drapery, and walls hung with pictures, among them a Benedictine nun with her face uncovered, a flower-painting, and even a Turk’s head. The garden of that particular convent contained what was said to be the largest and finest Spanish chestnut tree in all France, believed by the simple folk of the eighteenth century to be ‘the father of all the chestnut trees in the kingdom’.
The Couvent du Temple, as we have said, was occupied by Benedictines of the Perpetual Adoration who were, however, quite different from those deriving from Cîteaux. The Order of the Perpetual Adoration is comparatively recent, having been founded only two centuries ago. In 1649 the Holy Sacrament was twice profaned within a few days in two separate Paris churches, those of Saint-Sulpice and Saint-Jean en Grève, an event as uncommon as it was outrageous, which shocked all the town. The Grand Prior and vicar of Saint-Germain-des-Près ordered a solemn procession of all his clergy at which the Papal Nuncio officiated. But this ceremony of expiation did not satisfy two worthy ladies, the Marquise de Boucs and the Countess de Chateauvieux. The outrage, although unrepeated, so preyed on their devout minds that they maintained that nothing less than a rule of ‘Perpetual Adoration’ in a woman’s monaste
ry could make sufficient atonement. The two ladies, one in 1652 and the other in 1653, furnished Mère Catherine de Bar, a Benedictine nun styled ‘of the Holy Sacrament’, with handsome endowments with which to found a Benedictine nunnery for this pious purpose. Permission was granted in the first instance by Monsieur de Metz, Abbot of Saint-Germain, with the proviso that ‘no lady should be admitted to the order who did not bring with her a yearly income of 300 livres, entailing 6000 livres capital’. Thereafter letters patent were authorized by the king, and the whole, the abbatical charter and the royal licence, was registered at the Chamber of Accounts and with Parliament.
Such was the origin and legal basis of the establishment of the Benedictines of the Perpetual Adoration in Paris. Their first convent, ‘newly built’ by the endowments of Mesdames de Boucs and de Chateauvieux, was in the Rue Cassette.
As we see, this Order was quite distinct from the Benedictine Order known as the Cistercians. It was created by the Abbot of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, just as the Order of the Sacred Heart was created by the head of the Jesuit Order, and that of the Sisters of Charity by the head of the Order of St Lazarus.
It was also quite separate from the Bernardines of Petit-Picpus. In 1657 Pope Alexander VII had in a special bull authorized the Petit-Picpus Bernardines to practise Perpetual Adoration like the Benedictines of the Holy Sacrament. But the two orders were none the less distinct.
XI
End of the Petit-Picpus
The dwindling of the Petit-Picpus convent began with the Restoration and was a part of the general decay of the order, which, like all religious orders, has been declining since the eighteenth century. Contemplation, like prayer, is a human necessity; but like everything touched by the Revolution it is destined to be transformed and, from being opposed to social progress, to become favourable to it.
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