Passing through Pope Pius’s gallery, we came into a long, clean, lofty passage, with many little doors on each side; and here I confess my heart began to thump again. These were the doors of the cells of the Sisters. Bon Dieu! and is it possible that I shall see a nun’s cell? Do I not recollect the nun’s cell in The Monk, or in The Romance of the Forest? or, if not there, at any rate in a thousand noble romances, read in early days of half-holiday perhaps—romances at twopence a volume.
Come in, in the name of the saints! Here is the cell. I took off my hat and examined the little room with much curious wonder and reverence. There was an iron bed, with comfortable curtains of green serge. There was a little clothes-chest of yellow wood, neatly cleaned, and a wooden chair beside it, and a desk on the chest, and about six pictures on the wall,—little religious pictures: a saint with gilt paper round him; the Virgin showing on her breast a bleeding heart, with a sword run through it; and other sad little subjects, calculated to make the inmate of the cell think of the sufferings of the saints and martyrs of the Church. Then there was a little crucifix, and a wax candle on a ledge; and here was the place where the poor black-veiled things were to pass their lives for ever!
After having seen a couple of these little cells, we left the corridors in which they were, and were conducted, with a sort of pride on the nun’s part, I thought, into the grand room of the convent—a parlour with pictures of saints and a gay paper, and a series of small fineries, such only as women very idle know how to make. There were some portraits in the room, one an atrocious daub of an ugly old woman, surrounded by children still more hideous. Somebody had told the poor nun that this was a fine thing, and she believed it—Heaven bless her!—quite implicitly; nor is the picture of the ugly old Canadian woman the first reputation that has been made this way.
Then from the fine parlour we went to the museum. I don’t know how we should be curious of such trifles; but the chronicling of small-beer is the main business of life—people only differing, as Tom Moore wisely says in one of his best poems, about their own peculiar tap. The poor nuns’ little collection of gimcracks was displayed in great state; there were spars in one drawer; and I think a Chinese shoe and some Indian wares in another; and some medals of the Popes, and a couple of score of coins; and a clean glass case, full of antique works of French theology of the distant period of Louis XV., to judge by the bindings—and this formed the main part of the museum. ‘The chief objects were gathered together by a single nun,’ said the sister with a look of wonder, and she went prattling on, and leading us hither and thither, like a child showing her toys.
What strange mixture of pity and pleasure is it which comes over you sometimes when a child takes you by the hand, and leads you up solemnly to some little treasure of its own—a feather, or a string of glass beads? I declare I have often looked at such with more delight than at diamonds; and felt the same sort of soft wonder examining the nuns’ little treasure-chamber. There was something touching in the very poverty of it;—had it been finer it would not have been half so good.
And now we had seen all the wonders of the house but the chapel, and thither we were conducted; all the ladies of our party kneeling down as they entered the building, and saying a short prayer.
This, as I am on sentimental confessions, I must own affected me too. It was a very pretty and tender sight. I should have liked to kneel down too, but was ashamed; our northern usages not encouraging—among men at least—that sort of abandonment of dignity. Do any of us dare to sing psalms at church? and don’t we look with rather a sneer at a man who does?
The chapel had nothing remarkable in it except a very good organ, as I was told; for we were allowed only to see the exterior of that instrument, our pious guide with much pleasure removing an oil-cloth which covered the mahogany. At one side of the altar is a long high grille, through which you see a hall, where the nuns have their stalls, and sit in chapel time; and beyond this hall is another small chapel, with a couple of altars, and one beautiful print in one of them—a German Holy Family—a prim, mystical, tender piece, just befitting the place.
In the grille is a little wicket and a ledge before it. It is to this wicket that women are brought to kneel; and a bishop is in the chapel on the other side, and takes their hands in his, and receives their vows. I had never seen the like before, and own that I felt a sort of shudder at looking at the place. There rest the girl’s knees as she offers herself up, and forswears the sacred affections which God gave her; there she kneels and denies for ever the beautiful duties of her being:—no tender maternal yearnings, no gentle attachments are to be had for her or from her—there she kneels and commits suicide upon her heart. O honest Martin Luther! thank God, you came to pull that infernal, wicked, unnatural altar down—that cursed Paganism! Let people, solitary, worn out by sorrow or oppressed with extreme remorse, retire to such places: fly and beat your breasts in caverns and wildernesses, O women, if you will, but be Magdalens first. It is shameful that any young girl, with any vocation however seemingly strong, should be allowed to bury herself in this small tomb of a few acres. Look at yonder nun—pretty, smiling, graceful, and young—what has God’s world done to her, that she should run from it, or she done to the world, that she should avoid it? What call has she to give up all her duties and affections; and would she not be best serving God with a husband at her side, and a child on her knee?
The sights in the house having been seen, the nun led us through the grounds and gardens. There was the hay in front, a fine yellow cornfield at the back of the house, and a large, melancholy-looking kitchen-garden; in all of which places the nuns, for certain hours in the day, are allowed to take recreation. ‘The nuns here are allowed to amuse themselves more than ours at New Hall,’ said a little girl who is educated at that English Convent: ‘do you know that here the nuns may make hay?’ What a privilege is this! We saw none of the black sisterhood availing themselves of it, however: the hay was neatly piled into cocks and ready for housing; so the poor souls must wait until next year before they can enjoy this blessed sport once more.