“When the lady and the bishop were here just now,” said he, “I dared to raise my eyes, and they rested upon the face—”
“Not of the lady, thou reprobate!” exclaimed the Abbot.
“Oh no,” calmly rejoined the monk, “but of the old bishop!” A course of bread and water was needed to work expiation for the crime.
Some of the brethren illustrated what they meant by obedience and humility, after a strange fashion. For example, there was one who having expressed an inclination to return to the world, was detained against his will. His place was in the kitchen, and the devastation he committed among the crockery was something stupendous—and probably not altogether unintentional. He was not only continually fracturing the delf earthenware dishes, but was incessantly running from the kitchen to the Abbot, from the Abbot to the Prior, from the Prior to the Sub-Prior, and from the Sub-Prior to the Master of the Novices to confess his fault. Thence he returned to the kitchen again, once more to smash whole crates of plates, following up the act with abundant confessions, and deriving evident enjoyment, alike in destroying the property, and assailing with noisy apologies the governing powers whom he was resolved to inspire with a desire of getting rid of him.
In spite of forced detention there was a mock appearance of liberty at monthly assemblies. The brethren were asked if there was anything in the arrangement of the institution and its rules which they desired to see changed. As an affirmative reply, however, would have brought “penance” and “discipline” on him who made it, the encouraging phrase that “They had only to speak,” by no means rendered them loquacious, and every brother, by his silence, expressed his content.
If death was the suicidal object of many, the end appears to have been generally attained with a speedy certainty. The superiors and a few monks reached an advanced age; only a few of the brethren died old men. Consumption, inflammation of the lungs, and abscess (at memory of the minute description of which the very heart turns sick), carried off the victims with terrible rapidity. Men entered, voluntarily or otherwise, in good health. If they did so, determined to achieve suicide, or were driven in by the government with a view of putting them to death, the end soon came, and was, if we may believe what we read, welcomed with alacrity. After rapid, painful, and unresisted decay, the sufferer saw as his last hour approached, the cinders strewn on the ground in the shape of a cross; a thin scattering of straw was made upon the cinders, and that was the death-bed upon which every Trappist expired. The body was buried in the habit of the order, as some knights have been in panoply, without coffin or shroud, and was borne to the grave in a cloth upheld by a few brothers. If it fell into its last receptacle with huddled-up limbs, De Rancé would leap into the grave and dispose the unconscious members, so as to make them assume an attitude of repose.
A good deal of confusion appears to have distinguished the rules of nomenclature. In many instances, where the original names had impure or ridiculous significations, the change was advisable. But I can not see how a brother became more cognisable as a Christian, by assuming the names of Palemon, Achilles, Moses, or even Dorothy. Theodore, I can understand; but Dorothy, though it bears the same meaning, seems to me but an indifferent name for a monk, even in a century when the male Montmorencies delighted in the name of “Anne.”
None of the monks were distinguished by superfluous flesh. Some of these ex-soldiers were so thin-skinned, that when sitting on hard chairs, their bones fairly rubbed through their very slight epidermis. They who so suffered, and joyfully, were held up as bright examples of godliness.
There is matter for many a sigh in these saffron-leaved and worm-eaten tomes, whose opened pages are now before me. I find a monk who has passed a sleepless night through excess of pain. To test his obedience, he is ordered to confess that he has slept well and suffered nothing. The submissive soldier obeys his general’s command. Another confesses his readiness, as Dr. Newman has done, to surrender any of his own deliberately-made convictions at the bidding of his superior. “I am wax,” he says, “for you to mould me as you will and his unreserved surrender of himself is commended with much windiness of phrase. A third, inadvertently remarking that his scalding broth is over-salted, bursts into tears at the enormity of the crime he has committed by thus complaining; whereupon praise falls upon him more thickly than the salt did into his broth: “Yes,” says the once knight, now abbot, “it is not praying, nor watching, nor repentance, that is alone asked of you by God, but humility and obedience therewith; and first obedience.”
To test the fidelity of those professing to have this humility and obedience, the most outrageous insults were inflicted on such as in the world had been reckoned the most high-spirited. It is averred that these never failed. The once testy soldier, now passionless monk, kissed the sandal raised to kick, and blessed the hand lifted to smite him. A proud young officer of mousquetaires, of whom I have strong suspicions that he had embezzled a good deal of his majesty’s money, acknowledged that he was the greatest criminal that ever lived; but he stoutly denied the same when the officers of the law visited the monastery and accused him of fraudulent practices. This erst young warrior had no greater delight than in being permitted to clean the spittoons in the chapel, and provide them with fresh sawdust. Another, a young marquis and chevalier, performed with ecstacy servile offices of a more disgusting character. This monk was the flower of the fraternity. He was for ever accusing himself of the most heinous crimes, not one of which he had committed, or was capable of committing. “He represented matters so ingeniously,” says De Rancé, who on this occasion is the biographer, “that without lying, he made himself pass for the vile wretch which in truth he was not.” He must have been like that other clever individual who “lied like truth.”