"Yes; I only replace manual labour by meditation in my cell; my position as oblate, however, dispenses me, if I so wish, from getting up at two o'clock to follow the night office, but it is a great joy to me to recite the magnificent Benedictine Psalter before daybreak—but you are listening to me, and eat nothing. Let me give you a little more rice."
"No, thank you, but I will take, if you will allow me, a spoonful of honey.
"The food is not bad," he said, "but I do not quite understand the same strange and identical taste in all the dishes; it smells, how shall I express it? like burnt fat or suet."
"That is the warm oil with which the vegetables are dressed, you will soon grow accustomed to it, in a couple of days you will cease to notice it."
"But in what consists, precisely, the part of an oblate?"
"His life is less austere, and more contemplative than that of a monk; he may travel if he will, and though he is not bound by vows, he shares in all the spiritual advantages of the order.
"In old times the rule admitted those whom it styled 'familiars.'
"Those were oblates who received the tonsure, wore a distinct costume, and pronounced the three greater vows; they led in fact a mitigated life, half layman, half monk. This rule, which still exists among the true Benedictines, has disappeared among the Trappists since the year 1293, the date at which it was suppressed by the Chapter General.
"At the present time, in the Cistercian abbeys are only the fathers, the lay brothers, the oblates, when there are any, and the peasants employed in field labour."
"The lay brothers, I suppose, are those whose heads are completely shaven, and who are clothed in a brown habit, like the monk who opened the door to me?"