THE LITTLE CONVENT.
There were within the walls of Little Picpus three perfectly distinct buildings,—the great convent inhabited by the nuns, the schoolhouse in which the boarders were lodged, and, lastly, what was called the little convent. The latter was a house with a garden, in which all sorts of old nuns of various orders, the remains of convents broken up in the Revolution, dwelt in common; a reunion of all the black, white, and gray gowns of all the communities, and all the varieties possible; what might be called, were such a conjunction of words permissible, a hotch-potch convent. Under the Empire all these dispersed and homeless women were allowed to shelter themselves under the wings of the Bernardo-Benedictines; the Government paid them a small pension, and the ladies of Little Picpus eagerly received them. It was a strange pell-mell, in which each followed her rule. At times the boarders were allowed, as a great recreation, to pay them a visit, and it is from this that these young minds have retained a recollection of Holy Mother Bazile, Holy Mother Scholastica, and Mother Jacob.
One of these refugees was almost at home here; she was a nun of Sainte Aure, the only one of her order who survived. The old convent of the ladies of Sainte Aure occupied at the beginning of the 18th century the same house which at a later date belonged to the Benedictines of Martin Verga. This holy woman, who was too poor to wear the magnificent dress of her order, which was a white robe with a scarlet scapulary, had piously dressed up in it a small doll, which she was fond of showing, and left at her death to the house. In 1820 only one nun of this order remained; at the present day only a doll is left. In addition to these worthy mothers, a few old ladies of the world, like Madame Albertine, had gained permission from the prioress to retire into the little convent. Among them were Madame de Beaufort d'Hautpoul and the Marquise Dufresne; another was only known in the convent by the formidable noise she made in using her handkerchief, and hence the boarders called her Madame Vacarmini. About the year 1820 Madame de Genlis, who edited at that period a small periodical called L'Intrépide, asked leave to board at the Little Picpus, and the Duc d'Orleans recommended her. There was a commotion in the hive, and the vocal mothers were all of a tremor, for Madame de Genlis had written romances; but she declared that she was the first to detest them, and moreover she had reached her phase of savage devotion. By the help of Heaven and of the prince she entered, and went away again at the end of six or eight months, alleging as a reason that the garden had no shade. The nuns were delighted at it. Although very old, she still played the harp, and remarkably well too. When she went away she left her mark on her cell. Madame de Genlis was superstitious and a Latin scholar, and these two terms give a very fair idea of her. A few years ago there might still be seen, fixed in the inside of a small cupboard of her cell, in which she kept her money and jewelry, the following five Latin verses, written in her own hand with red ink on yellow paper, and which, in her opinion, had the virtue of frightening away robbers:—
"Imparibus meritis pendent tria corpora ramis:
Dismas et Gesmas, media est divina potestas:
Alta petit Dismas, infelix, infima, Gesmas:
Nos et res nostras conservet summa potestas.
Hos versus dicas, ne tu furto tua perdas."
These verses, in sixteenth-century Latin, raise the question whether the two thieves of Calvary were called, as is commonly believed, Demas and Gestas, or Dismas and Gesmas. The latter orthography would thwart the claims made in the last century by the Viscomte de Gestas to be descended from the wicked thief. However, the useful virtue attached to these verses is an article of faith in the order of the Hospitaler nuns. The church, so built as to separate the great convent from the boarding-school, was common to the school, and the great and little convents. The public were even admitted by a sort of quarantine entrance from the street: but everything was so arranged that not one of the inhabitants of the convent could see a single face from the outer world. Imagine a church whose choir was seized by a gigantic hand, and crushed so as no longer to form, as in ordinary chapels, a prolongation behind the altar, but a sort of obscure cavern on the side of the officiating priest; imagine this hall closed by the green baize curtain to which we have referred; pile up in the shadow of this curtain upon wooden seats the nuns on the left, the boarders on the right, and the lay sisters and novices at the end, and you will have some idea of the Little Picpus nuns attending divine service. This cavern, which was called the choir, communicated with the convent by a covered way, and the church obtained its light from the garden. When the nuns were present at those services at which their rule commanded silence, the public were only warned of their presence by the sound of the seats being noisily raised and dropped.
[CHAPTER VII.]
A FEW PROFILES FROM THE SHADOW.
During the six years between 1819 and 1825 the prioress of Little Picpus was Mademoiselle de Blémeur, called in religion Mother Innocent. She belonged to the family of that Marguerite de Blémeur who was authoress of the "Lives of the Saints of the Order of Saint Benedict." She was a lady of about sixty years, short, stout, and with a voice "like a cracked pot," says the letter from which we have already quoted; but she was an excellent creature, the only merry soul in the convent, and on that account adored. She followed in the footsteps of her ancestress Marguerite, the Dacier of the order; she was lettered, learned, competent, versed in the curiosities of history, stuffed with Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and more a monk than a nun. The sub-prioress was an old Spanish nun, almost blind, Mother Cineres. The most estimated among the "vocals" were—Mother Saint Honorine, the treasurer; Mother Saint Gertrude, first mistress of the novices; Mother Saint Ange, second mistress; Mother Annunciation, sacristan; Mother Saint Augustine, head of the infirmary, the only unkind person in the convent; then Mother Saint Mechtilde (Mlle. Gauvain), who was young, and had an admirable voice; Mother des Auges (Mlle. Drouet), who had been in the convent of the Filles Dieu, and that of the Treasury near Gisors; Mother Saint Joseph (Mlle. de Cogolludo); Mother Saint Adelaide (Mlle. D'Auverney); Mother Miséricorde (Mlle. de Cifuentes, who could not endure the privations); Mother Compassion (Mlle. de La Miltière, received at the age of sixty, contrary to the rule, but very rich); Mother Providence (Mlle. de Laudinière); Mother Presentation (Mlle. de Siguenza), who was prioress in 1847; and lastly, Mother Saint Céligne (sister of Cerachhi the sculptor), who went mad; and Mother Saint Chantal (Mlle. de Suzon), who also went mad. Among the prettiest was a charming girl of three-and-twenty, who belonged to the Bourbonnais, and was descended from the Chevalier Roze, who was called in the world Mlle. Roze, and in religion Mother Assumption.
Mother Saint Mechtilde, who had charge of the singing arrangements, was glad to make use of the boarders for this purpose; she generally selected a complete musical scale, that is to say, seven assorted voices, from ten to sixteen years inclusive, whom she drew up in a line, ranging from the shortest to the tallest. In this way she produced a species of living Pandean pipes, composed of angels. The lay sisters whom the boarders liked most were Sister Saint Euphrasie, Sister Saint Marguerite, Sister Saint Marthe, who was childish, and Sister Saint Michel, at whose long nose they laughed. All these nuns were kind to the children, and only stern to themselves; there were no fires lit except in the schoolhouse, and the food there was luxurious when compared with that of the convent. The only thing was that when a child passed a nun and spoke to her, the latter did not answer. This rule of silence produced the result that in the whole convent language was withdrawn from human creatures and given to inanimate objects. At one moment it was the church bell that spoke, at another the gardener's; and a very sonorous gong, placed by the side of the sister porter, and which could be heard all through the house, indicated by various raps, which were a sort of acoustic telegraphy, all the actions of natural life which had to be accomplished, and summoned a nun, if required, to the parlor. Each person and each thing had its raps: the prioress had one and one, the sub-prioress one and two; six-five announced school hour, so that the pupils talked of going to six-five; four-four was Madame Genlis' signal, and as it was heard very often, uncharitable persons said she was the "diable à quatre." Nineteen strokes announced a great event; it was the opening of the cloister door, a terrible iron plate all bristling with bolts, which only turned on its hinges before the archbishop. With the exception of that dignitary and the gardener, no other man entered the convent; but the boarders saw two others,—one was the chaplain, Abbé Banès, an old ugly man, whom they were allowed to contemplate through a grating; while the other was M. Ansiaux, the drawing-master, whom the letter which we have already quoted calls "M. Anciot," and describes as an odious old hunchback. So we see that all the men were picked.