Les Misérables, v. 2/5: Cosette

  CHAPTER VI.

  THE LITTLE CONVENT.

  There were within the walls of Little Picpus three perfectly distinctbuildings,--the great convent inhabited by the nuns, the schoolhousein which the boarders were lodged, and, lastly, what was called thelittle convent. The latter was a house with a garden, in which allsorts of old nuns of various orders, the remains of convents broken upin 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, ahotch-potch convent. Under the Empire all these dispersed and homelesswomen were allowed to shelter themselves under the wings of theBernardo-Benedictines; the Government paid them a small pension, andthe ladies of Little Picpus eagerly received them. It was a strangepell-mell, in which each followed her rule. At times the boarders wereallowed, as a great recreation, to pay them a visit, and it is fromthis that these young minds have retained a recollection of Holy MotherBazile, Holy Mother Scholastica, and Mother Jacob.

  One of these refugees was almost at home here; she was a nun of SainteAure, the only one of her order who survived. The old convent of theladies of Sainte Aure occupied at the beginning of the 18th century thesame house which at a later date belonged to the Benedictines of MartinVerga. This holy woman, who was too poor to wear the magnificent dressof her order, which was a white robe with a scarlet scapulary, hadpiously 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 orderremained; at the present day only a doll is left. In addition to theseworthy mothers, a few old ladies of the world, like Madame Albertine,had gained permission from the prioress to retire into the littleconvent. Among them were Madame de Beaufort d'Hautpoul and the MarquiseDufresne; another was only known in the convent by the formidable noiseshe made in using her handkerchief, and hence the boarders called herMadame Vacarmini. About the year 1820 Madame de Genlis, who edited atthat period a small periodical called _L'Intrépide_, asked leave toboard at the Little Picpus, and the Duc d'Orleans recommended her.There was a commotion in the hive, and the vocal mothers were all ofa tremor, for Madame de Genlis had written romances; but she declaredthat she was the first to detest them, and moreover she had reachedher phase of savage devotion. By the help of Heaven and of the princeshe 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 weredelighted at it. Although very old, she still played the harp, andremarkably well too. When she went away she left her mark on her cell.Madame de Genlis was superstitious and a Latin scholar, and thesetwo terms give a very fair idea of her. A few years ago there mightstill be seen, fixed in the inside of a small cupboard of her cell, inwhich 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 heropinion, 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 whetherthe two thieves of Calvary were called, as is commonly believed, Demasand Gestas, or Dismas and Gesmas. The latter orthography would thwartthe claims made in the last century by the Viscomte de Gestas to bedescended from the wicked thief. However, the useful virtue attachedto these verses is an article of faith in the order of the Hospitalernuns. The church, so built as to separate the great convent from theboarding-school, was common to the school, and the great and littleconvents. The public were even admitted by a sort of quarantineentrance from the street: but everything was so arranged that not oneof the inhabitants of the convent could see a single face from theouter world. Imagine a church whose choir was seized by a gigantichand, and crushed so as no longer to form, as in ordinary chapels, aprolongation behind the altar, but a sort of obscure cavern on theside of the officiating priest; imagine this hall closed by the greenbaize curtain to which we have referred; pile up in the shadow of thiscurtain upon wooden seats the nuns on the left, the boarders on theright, and the lay sisters and novices at the end, and you will havesome idea of the Little Picpus nuns attending divine service. Thiscavern, which was called the choir, communicated with the convent by acovered way, and the church obtained its light from the garden. Whenthe nuns were present at those services at which their rule commandedsilence, the public were only warned of their presence by the sound ofthe seats being noisily raised and dropped.