"Know about him? of course she does," answered Victoire to my question. "She knows all about him, and more too. Do you suppose there is an item of news in the whole town that those cloistered nuns do not hear? If you had been educated by them, as we were, and pumped dry every day as to what went on in our own and our neighbors' families, you would not ask that question."
Victoire and I penetrated into the convent that very same day. We followed a crowd of women, paysannes and citoyennes, into a sunny court paved with large stones and arched by the noontide sky, but unsoftened by tree or flower, and surrounded by the open windows of dormitories. Over the threshold we had just crossed the nuns pass but once after their vows,—pass outward, feet foremost, deaf and unseeing, to a closer, darker home than even their cloistered one. Some of them have seen nothing beyond their convent walls for forty years, while one has here worn away sixty years.
Sixty years without one single glimpse of sweet dawn or fair sunset, without one single vision of the sea in winter majesty of storm or summer glory! Sixty years without sound of lisping music running through tall grass, without one single whisper of the æolian pines, or glimpse of blooming orchards against pure skies! Sixty years!
Beside me in the school-room sat a buxom peasant-woman, who, as a little girl crowned with a gaudy tinsel wreath descended from the platform, confidentially informed me, "C'est ma fille. She has taken the prize for good conduct, and there isn't a worse coquine in our whole commune."
I saw the pale visionaries, a circle of black-robed figures, with dead-white bands, like coffin-cerements, across their brows. I saw them almost unanimously fat, with pendulous jowls and black and broken teeth, as remote from any expression of mystic fervors and spiritual espousals as could be well imagined, "Vieilles commères!" grunted my paysanne, who was evidently neither amiable nor saintly.
Mother Mary-of-the-Angels, once Elise Gautier, was short, fat, and bustling, with large round-eyed spectacles upon her nose, and the pasty complexion and premature flaccid wrinkles that come with long seclusion from sunshine and exercise. She marched about like one who had chosen Martha's rather than Mary's manner of serving her Lord, and we saw her chat a full half-hour with the wife of the Maire, bowing, smiling, gesticulating meantime with all the florid grace of a French woman of the world.
"The Maire's wife was her former intimate friend," whispered Victoire. "See how much younger and healthier she looks than the Mother Superior, and how much happier. On dit that it was chagrin at the marriage of this friend that caused Élise Gautier to desert her widowed father and dependent little brothers and sisters to bury herself in a convent."
A more interesting story than Élise Gautier's is told in our ville. Some years ago a nun left the Couvent des Augustines in open day, passing out from the central door in her nun's garb, and meeting there a foreign-looking man accompanied by a posse of gendarmes. The couple, followed by a half-hooting, half-cheering mob, drove directly to the hôtel-de-ville, where they were united in marriage. Then they went away from our ville, where both were born, to the husband's home in Spain. When those convent doors had closed upon her, a quarter of a century before, and the lovers believed themselves eternally separated, she was a lovely girl of twenty, he a bright youth of twenty-five. She passed away from his despairing sight, fair and fresh as a spring flower, with beautiful golden hair and violet eyes; she came out from that fatal portal a woman of forty-five, stout, spectacled, with faded, thin hair beneath her nun's cowl, to meet a portly gray-haired man of fifty, in whom not even love's eye could detect the faintest vestige of the slender bright-eyed lover of her youth.
The unhappy Laure had been forced to unwilling vows to keep her from this beggarly lover, and, when he fled to Spain, both became dead to our ville for long years. Twenty-two years after Laure became Soeur Angelica it was known in the convent that the machinery of the civil law, which had only lately forbidden eternal religious vows, had been set in motion to secure her release; but it remained a mystery who the spring of the movement was, her parents having long been dead. Soeur Angelica herself seemed almost more terrified than otherwise at the knowledge, for every conventual influence was brought to bear upon her morbid conscience to assure her that eternal damnation follows broken vows. It seems, however, that amid all her spiritual stress she never confessed, even to her spiritual director, what desecration had come upon that dovecote by her constant correspondence with the lover of her youth, now a wealthy wine-merchant in Spain. When she left the convent, some of these love-letters were left behind; and to this day those scandalized doves, to whom Soeur Angelica is forever a lost soul, wonder futilely how those emissaries of Satan penetrated their holy walls.
"How did they, do you suppose?" I asked.