"Who is there?" the voice asked.
It was a female voice, a gentle voice, so gentle that it was melancholy. Here, again, there was a magic word which it was necessary to know; if you did not know it, the voice ceased, and the wall became silent again, as if the terrifying darkness of the tomb were on the other side. If you knew the word, the voice continued,—"Turn to the right." You then noticed, facing the window, a door, the upper part of which was of gray painted glass. You raised the latch, walked in, and experienced precisely the same expression as when you enter a box at the theatre, before the gilt grating has been lowered and the chandelier lighted. You were in fact in a species of box, scarce lighted by the faint light that came through the glass door, narrow, furnished with two old chairs and a ragged sofa,—a real box with a black entablature to represent the front. This box had a grating; but it was not made of gilt wood as at the opera, but was a monstrous trellis-work of frightfully interlaced iron bars, fastened to the wall by enormous clamps that resembled clenched fists. When the first few moments were past, and your eye began to grow accustomed to this cellar-like gloom, you tried to look through the grating, but could not see more than six inches beyond it; there it met a barrier of black shutters, connected and strengthened by cross-beams, and painted of a ginger-bread yellow. These shutters were jointed, divided into long thin planks, and covered the whole width of the grating; they were always closed. At the expiration of a few minutes you heard a voice calling to you from behind the shutters, and saying to you,—
"I am here; what do you want with me?"
It was a loved voice, sometimes an adored voice, but you saw nobody, and could scarce hear the sound of breathing. It seemed as it were an evocation addressing you through the wall of a tomb. If you fulfilled certain required and very rare conditions, the narrow plank of one of the shutters opened opposite to you, and the evocation became an apparition. Behind the grating, behind the shutter, you perceived, as far as the grating would allow, a head, of which you only saw the mouth and chin, for the rest was covered by a black veil. You caught a glimpse of a black wimple, and of a scarce distinct form covered by a black pall. This head spoke to you, but did not look at you, and never smiled. The light that came from behind you was so arranged that you saw her in brightness and she saw you in darkness; this light was a symbol. Still, your eyes plunged eagerly through the opening into this place, closed against all looks; a profound vacuum surrounded this form clothed in mourning. Your eyes investigated this vacuum and tried to distinguish what there was around the apparition, but in a very little time you perceived that you could see nothing. What you saw was night, emptiness, gloom, a winter fog mingled with the vapor from a tomb; a sort of terrifying peace; a silence in which nothing could be heard, not even sighs; a shadow in which nothing could be distinguished, not even phantoms. What you saw was the interior of a nunnery, the interior of that gloomy and stern house which was called the Convent of the Perpetual Adoration. The box in which you found yourself was the parlor, and the first voice that addressed you was that of a lay sister who always sat, silent and motionless, on the other side of the wall, near the square opening which was defended by the iron grating and the tin plate with the thousand holes like a double visor.
The obscurity in which the grated box was plunged, resulted from the fact that the parlor, which had a window on the side of the world, had none on the side of the convent; profane eyes must not see any portion of this sacred spot. Still, there was something beyond the shadow; there was a light and life amid this death. Although this convent was the most strictly immured of all, we will try to enter it and take the reader in with us, and describe, with due regard to decorum, things which novelists have never seen, and consequently never recorded.
[CHAPTER II.]
THE OBEDIENCE OF MARTIN VERGA.
This convent, which had existed for many years prior to 1824 in the Rue Picpus, was a community of Bernardines belonging to the obedience of Martin Verga. These Bernardines, consequently, were not attached to Clairvaux, like the Bernardine brothers, but to Citeaux, like the Benedictines. In other words, they were subjects, not of Saint Bernard, but of Saint Benedict. Any one who has at all turned over folios knows that Martin Verga founded, in 1425, a congregation of Bernardo-Benedictines, whose headquarters were Salamanca, and which had Alcala as an offshoot. Such a grafting of one order upon another is not at all unusual in the Latin Church. If we confine our attention merely to the Order of St. Benedict, we find four congregations attached to it, beside the obedience of Martin Verga; in Italy two, Monte Cassino and St. Justina of Padua; two in France, Cluny and St. Marco, and nine orders,—Valombrosa, Grammont, the Celestins, the Calmalduli, the Chartreux, the Humiliated, the Olivateurs, and the Silvestrines, and lastly, Citeaux; for Citeaux itself, while trunk for other orders, is only a branch with Saint Benedict. Citeaux dates from Saint Robert, Abbot of Molesmes, in the diocese of Langres, in 1098. Now it was in 529 that the devil, who had retired to the desert of Subiaco (he was old, did he turn hermit?), was expelled from the temple of Apollo in which he resided, by Saint Benedict, a youth of seventeen years of age.
Next to the rule of the Carmelites, who walk barefoot, wear a piece of wicker-work on their throat, and never sit down, the hardest rule is that of the Bernardo-Benedictines of Martin Verga. They are dressed in black with a wimple, which, by the express order of Saint Benedict, comes up to the chin; a serge gown with wide sleeves, a large woollen veil, the wimple cut square on the chest, and the coif, which comes down to their eyes,—such is their dress. All is black, excepting the coif, which is white. Novices wear the same garb, but all white, while the professed nuns also wear a rosary by their side. The Bernardo-Benedictines of Martin Verga practise the Perpetual Adoration, in the same way as those Benedictines called the ladies of the Holy Sacrament, who, at the beginning of this century, had two houses in Paris, one in the Temple, the other in the Rue Neuve St. Geneviève. In other respects, the nuns of the Little Picpus to whom we are referring entirely differed from the ladies of the Holy Sacrament; there were several distinctions in the rule as well as in the dress. The nuns of Little Picpus wore a black wimple, the former a white one, and had also on their chest a Holy Sacrament, about three inches in length, of plate or gilt brass. The nuns of the Little Picpus did not wear this decoration. The Perpetual Adoration, while common in Little Picpus and the Temple house, leaves the two orders perfectly distinct. This practice is the only resemblance between the ladies of the Holy Sacrament and the Bernardines of Martin Verga, in the same way as there was a similitude, for the study and glorification of all the mysteries attaching to the infancy, life, and death of the Saviour, between two orders which were greatly separated and at times hostile,—the oratory of Italy, established at Florence by Philippe de Neri, and the oratory of France, established in Paris by Pierre de Bérulle. The Paris oratory claimed precedence because Philippe de Neri was only a saint, while Bérulle was a cardinal. But to return to the harsh Spanish rule of Martin Verga.