"There are harder ones, believe me, and I think they would suit you better. Would you like to imitate Suso, who, to subdue his passions, bore on his naked shoulders, for eighteen years, an enormous cross set with nails, whose points pierced his flesh? More than that, he imprisoned his hands in leather gloves which also bristled with nails, lest he should be tempted to dress his wounds. Saint Rose of Lima treated herself no better, she bound a chain so tightly round her body that it penetrated the skin, and hid itself under the bleeding pad of flesh, she wore also a horsehair girdle set with pins, and lay on shards of glass; but all these trials are nothing in comparison of those inflicted on herself by a Capuchin nun, the venerable Mother Pasidée of Siena.
"She scourged herself with branches of juniper and holly, then poured vinegar into her wounds, and sprinkled them with salt, she slept in winter on the snow, in summer on bunches of nettles, or pebbles, or brushes, put drops of hot lead in her shoes, knelt upon thistles, thorns and sticks. In January she broke the ice in a cask and plunged into it, and she even half-stifled herself by hanging head downwards in a chimney in which damp straw was lighted, but that is enough; indeed," said the abbé laughing, "if you had to choose, you would like best the mortifications which Benedict Labre imposed on himself."
"I would rather have none at all," answered Durtal.
There was a moment's pause.
Durtal's thoughts went back to the Benedictine nuns: "But," said he, "why do they put in the 'Semaine religieuse,' after their title Benedictine Nuns of the Blessed Sacrament, this further name, 'Convent of Saint Louis du Temple?'"
"Because," said the abbé, "their first convent was founded on the actual ruins of the Temple prison, given them by royal warrant, when Louis XVIII. returned to France.
"Their foundress and superior was Louise Adélaïde de Bourbon Condé, an unfortunate princess of many wanderings, almost the whole of whose life was spent in exile. Expelled from France by the Revolution and the Empire, hunted in almost every country in Europe, she wandered by chance among convents seeking shelter, now among the nuns of the Annunciation at Turin and the Capuchins in Piedmont, now among the Trappistines in Switzerland and the Sisters of the Visitation at Vienna, now among the Benedictines of Lithuania and Poland. At last she found shelter among the Benedictines in Norfolk, till she could again enter France.
"She was a woman singularly trained in monastic science and experienced in the direction of souls.
"She desired that in her abbey every sister should offer herself to heaven in reparation for crimes committed; and that she should accept the most painful privations to make up for those which might be committed; she instituted there the perpetual adoration, and introduced the plain chant, in all its purity, to the exclusion of all others.
"It is, as you have been able to hear, there preserved intact; it is true that since her time, her nuns have had lessons from Dom Schmitt, one of the most learned monks in that matter.