“I knew as well as if he had told me,” she said, “that he was gone to see if there was a vacant cell to put me in. I did not feel terrified—God gives such strong graces in moments
like that!—but I felt the same kind of internal voice saying to me: Now is your time; take the others and fly!
“We hurried down the stairs just as we were and went out. We turned to the left, and walked on as fast as we could, without running, toward the Gare du Nord. We could hardly have turned the corner of the street when the director was in pursuit of us. Les Détenues, who saw us leave the house and take to the left, called out to him: To the right, citoyen! They are not forty yards ahead! He followed the direction, and this saved us. We reached the station just as the train was about to move. The guards saw us coming, and cried out to us to make haste and jump in. ‘But our tickets! We have not taken them!’ I said.
“‘Never mind, jump in! You will pay at the other end,’ and they hustled us into the nearest carriage. We had not seated ourselves when the director appeared on the platform pistol in hand, and crying out frantically to the train to stop. But it moved on, and landed us safely at Argenteuil.”
A few days after the Sœurs Marie-Joseph had cleared out from St. Lazare, the nuns of Picpus were taken there. This the superioress thought was one reason why the officials were anxious to get them out of their way; they meant to put the others there, and they did not want any inconvenient witnesses of their own proceedings.
When we had seen all that was to be seen in the vast building, the superioress took us to the private chapel of the community. It was formerly the cell of St. Vincent of Paul, that is to say, the space occupied by the sanctuary; the altar stands where his little bed used to be, and the window step is worn away by the pressure of his feet, when his increasing infirmities
obliged him to have recourse to the solace of a footstool. The prison itself was formerly a Lazarist monastery; the refectory is exactly as it was in the time of St. Vincent, unchanged in all except its occupants; and the great, sombre corridors echoed for twenty years to the footsteps of the sweet apostle of charity. His memory is held in great veneration throughout the prison, and the population speak of him with a sort of rough, filial affectionateness that, the nuns told us, is often very touching; they seem to look on him as a friend who ought to stand by them.
I had nearly forgotten one incident in our visit that had a peculiar beauty of its own. We were passing by the open door of what seemed an infirmary; all the beds were occupied, and there were several nuns sitting in the room, when one of them ran out and said:
“Oh! ma mère, you will not pass without coming to say bonjour to our old women. Ever since they heard you were showing the house, they have been watching for you.”
The superioress said it was late, and she really had not time just now, but the nuns begged harder, and said that the old women knew she was going into retreat that evening, so they would not see her for eight days, and the old women, seeing they were in danger of being refused, began to cry out so piteously that the mother, asking us if we would not mind walking down the ward, yielded, and we went in. These old women are all infirm and incurable, and have been sent as such from one hospital or another to St. Lazare. Their delight when the superioress came in and spoke a word to each was almost rapturous. I stood to speak to one old soul, but instead of detailing her own aches and pains after the usual manner of those dear, blessed,