The daughter of Ethan Allan, the founder of Vermont, died a member of this Order.
The Carmelites are the most rigid in their requirements of service. They are small numerically and live behind high walls, and renounce forever the sight of the outside world, never leaving their cloister, and being practically dead to home and friends, sleeping, it is said, in their own coffins.
Instances have been known of a sister's assuming vows of special severity, as in the case of Jean Le Ber, of the Congregation de Notre Dame, a daughter of a merchant in the town, who voluntarily lived in solitary confinement from the year 1695 to 1714—nineteen years of self-immolation, when her couch was a pallet of straw, and her prayers and fastings unceasing. She denied herself everything that to us would make life desirable or even endurable—sacrificed the dearest ties of kindred, and pursued with intense fervour the self-imposed rigours of her vocation. Yet, it was not that in her nature she had no love for beauty nor craving for pleasure, for in the sacristy of the Cathedral, carefully preserved in a receptacle in which are kept the vestments of the clergy, are robes ornamented by her needle that are simply marvels of colour, design and exquisite finish. The modern robes, though gorgeous in richly-piled velvet from the looms of Lyons, heavy with gold work and embroidered with angels and figures so exquisitely wrought as to look as if painted on ivory, yet do not compare with that done by the fingers that were worn by asceticism within the walls of her cell. In the spare form, clad in thread-bare garments, there must have been crushed down a gorgeously artistic nature which found visible expression in the beautifully adorned chasubles of the priests and altar cloths, which are solid masses of delicate silken work on a ground of fine silver threads, the colours and lustre of which seem unimpaired by time. Six generations of priests have performed the sacrifice of the mass in these marvellously beautiful robes, the incense from the swaying censors of two hundred years have floated around them in waves of perfume. The taste and skill with which high-born ladies of that time wrought tapestries to hang on their castle walls were consecrated by her to religion, in devoting to the Church, work which was fit to adorn the royal drapings of a Zenobia.
Without the magnificence which distinguishes the cathedrals, some of the rural shrines are full of interest. The church of Ste. Anne's, an old building near the western end of the island, and one of the oldest sacerdotal edifices in America, has around it a halo of romance and piety since the fur-trading days, being the last church visited by the voyageurs and their last glimpse of civilization before facing the dangers of the pathless wilderness of the West. At its altar these rough, half-wild men knelt to pray and put themselves under the protection of their titular Sainte Anne.
The Trappists, though rarely seen outside the walls of their retreat, look precisely as did mediæval monks of centuries ago, with whose appearance we are familiar in pictures of Peter the Hermit and other zealots, who with their fiery eloquence sent the Armies of Christendom to fight for the Holy Sepulchre. They dress in a coarse brown gown and cowl, with a girdle of rope, and are under vows of perpetual silence. They live on frugal meals of vegetables and fruit twice a day, have the head tonsured, and feet bare in sandals. The continued fasts, severe flagellations, labours and meditations of those anchorites make the regulations governing this order exceedingly strict, and recall the times when kings and emperors, in the same monkish garb, walked barefoot to knock humbly in penance at monastery gates.
Perhaps the most unique shrine in the province is that of Mount Rigaud, on the banks of the Ottawa, not far from the spot where Dollard and his band of Christian knights lay down their lives. The mountain is regarded with much superstition by the ignorant, on account of its peculiar and unaccountable natural phenomena, whose origin has puzzled the most learned scientists to account for. The wooded mountain is crowned by what is called "The Field of Stones," or "The Devil's Garden," from a deposit of almost spherical boulders, of so far unmeasured depth, which cover its surface. Encircled by trees and verdure, this strange formation of several acres in extent is composed mainly of rock different from the mass of the mountain, which belongs to the same family as the igneous mountains of the neighbouring region. What were the causes and conditions which carried this strange material to the top of this elevation will, when they are explained, be of intense interest. It is said that the only other deposit similar, though smaller in extent, is in Switzerland. Perhaps some ancient glacier, through eons of time, gradually melted here, and slowly deposited the drift it had borne from regions far away.
A bold spur of the hill has been converted into a shrine, adorned with images, while on the bare rough sides of the lichen-covered rocks have been inscribed in large white letters the words "Penitence—Penitence." At regular intervals on the stony road approaching it are what are called the "Stations of the Cross." They are fourteen in number, being little chapels made from the uncut stones of the "Devil's Garden." The floors of these, on which the penitents kneel before pictures of the "Passion," are covered with sand and coarse gravel.
The conquest of Canada in 1759 by the English differed from that of Britain by the Norman French in 1066, in that here the vanquished were allowed to retain their language, customs and full religious liberties, so that, after a lapse of one hundred and fifty years, the Papal service is solemnized with all the pomp and ceremonial of the Vatican, and in the courts, the Quebec Legislature and in Society is heard the euphonic French speech, and, outside of Rome, Canada is considered the chief bulwark of Papacy.
