Fatigued with my long journey, you can imagine I was very glad when I reached this city. I hastened to find the Rue du Prieuré, a narrow, gloomy street, paved with cobble-stones, cheerless and uninviting. But about half-way down, I saw a statue of Mary Most Pure, in a niche over a large doorway, with her all-embracing arms extended in welcome. That was a sursum corda which reassured me. The place where Mary is honored is always a home for her children. The sight of her image brings peace and repose to the soul, and I turned aside to rest under her shadow. It was the grand portal of St. Oren's Priory, an arched passage through the very building, wide enough to admit a carriage. I stopped before the ponderous door that was to open for me a new life. This was the door I had so often heard compared with another portal which bears the inscription:
"All ye who enter here, leave hope behind."
But above my head was the Madonna which meant love and peace. Peace; yes, that was what I sought, like the Tuscan poet at the Italian monastery:
"And as he asks what there the stranger seeks,
My voice along the cloister whispers, Peace!"
The door opened just wide enough to admit me, and, passing through the arch, I found myself in a small paved court, enclosed by the monastery on all sides, where the sun only comes for a short time at midday—a grateful refuge from its heat. In it is a fine large linden-tree, under whose wide-spreading branches I found a group of nuns—it being the hour of daily reunion. I felt bewildered by the sight of so many strange faces, but my first impression was one of general kindness and cordiality. I could not have asked for a kinder welcome, and surely hope and peace were on every face. One of the mothers, seeing my fatigue, took me to the chapel for a moment, and then, through long corridors, to a small cell; thus giving me a general glance at my foreign home. I found thick stone walls, long passages, paved floors, a dim old chapel, and narrow cells. You will think this fearful; on the contrary, it is charming because monastic. One of the narrow cells is mine; furnished with a table, chair, bed, and prie-dieu. On the latter stands a crucifix, and on the wall hangs a print of Notre Dame de Bon Secours. There is one window in it,
"Looking toward the golden Eastern air."
It opens in the middle, longitudinally, like all the windows here; each part swinging back like a folding-door. Looking through it upon the convent garden, the first thing I saw was a lay-sister, bearing on her head an antique-looking jar, which she had just filled from a huge well. There are two of these immense wells in the garden, dug by the monks of old! Yes, monks, for our monastery was once a Benedictine abbey, and dates from the tenth century. There's hoary antiquity for you, which has such a charm for us people of the new world. These first days, while resting from my fatigue, I have been looking over the annals of this old establishment, and must give you an outline of them.
Do you remember reading, in the Chronicles of Sir John Froissart, of the Armagnacs, so long at enmity with the house of Foix? The first Count of Armagnac, was the founder of St. Oren's Priory. He was known by the name of Bernard le Louche. He made this city the capital of his comté; and one of his first acts, after his establishment here, was to build this monastery. The old parchment in the archives of the priory, quite in accordance with the spirit of the times, runs thus:
"Bernardus Luscus, mindful of his sins, unable to fulfil a vow he had made to visit the Holy Places at Jerusalem, and desirous of liquidating his debts to Divine Justice, resolved, by the counsel of his wife, the Domina Emerina, and the advice of the magnates, his lieges, to found a monastery in honorem Sanctorum Joannis Baptistae et Evangelistae et Beati Orentii, that therein prayer might be daily offered for his sins and for those of his posterity."