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POST CORDA LAPIDES
After having sketched its moral face, it will not prove unprofitable
to point out, in a few words, its material configuration. The
reader already has some idea of it.
The convent of the Petit-Picpus-Sainte-Antoine filled almost
the whole of the vast trapezium which resulted from the intersection
of the Rue Polonceau, the Rue Droit-Mur, the Rue Petit-Picpus,
and the unused lane, called Rue Aumarais on old plans. These four
streets surrounded this trapezium like a moat. The convent was
composed of several buildings and a garden. The principal building,
taken in its entirety, was a juxtaposition of hybrid constructions
which, viewed from a bird's-eye view, outlined, with considerable
exactness, a gibbet laid flat on the ground. The main arm of the
gibbet occupied the whole of the fragment of the Rue Droit-Mur
comprised between the Rue Petit-Picpus and the Rue Polonceau;
the lesser arm was a lofty, gray, severe grated facade which faced
the Rue Petit-Picpus; the carriage entrance No. 62 marked its
extremity.
Towards the centre of this facade was a low, arched door,
whitened with dust and ashes, where the spiders wove their webs,
and which was open only for an hour or two on Sundays, and on
rare occasions, when the coffin of a nun left the convent. This
was the public entrance of the church.
The elbow of the gibbet was a square hall which was used as
the servants' hall, and which the nuns called the buttery.
In the main arm were the cells of the mothers, the sisters,
and the novices.
In the lesser arm lay the kitchens, the refectory, backed
up by the cloisters and the church.
Between the door No. 62 and the corner of the closed lane
Aumarais, was the school, which was not visible from without.
The remainder of the trapezium formed the garden, which was much
lower than the level of the Rue Polonceau, which caused the walls
to be very much higher on the inside than on the outside. The
garden, which was slightly arched, had in its centre, on the summit
of a hillock, a fine pointed and conical fir-tree, whence ran,
as from the peaked boss of a shield, four grand alleys, and, ranged
by twos in between the branchings of these, eight small ones,
so that, if the enclosure had been circular, the geometrical plan
of the alleys would have resembled a cross superposed on a wheel.
As the alleys all ended in the very irregular walls of the garden,
they were of unequal length.
They were bordered with currant bushes. At the bottom, an
alley of tall poplars ran from the ruins of the old convent, which
was at the angle of the Rue Droit-Mur to the house of the Little
Convent, which was at the angle of the Aumarais lane. In front
of the Little Convent was what was called the little garden. To
this whole, let the reader add a courtyard, all sorts of varied
angles formed by the interior buildings, prison walls, the long
black line of roofs which bordered the other side of the Rue Polonceau
for its sole perspective and neighborhood, and he will be able
to form for himself a complete image of what the house of the
Bernardines of the Petit-Picpus was forty years ago. This holy
house had been built on the precise site of a famous tennis-ground
of the fourteenth to the sixteenth century, which was called the
"tennis-ground of the eleven thousand devils."
All these streets, moreover, were more ancient than Paris.
These names, Droit-Mur and Aumarais, are very ancient; the
streets which bear them are very much more ancient still.
Aumarais Lane was called Maugout Lane; the Rue Droit-Mur was
called the Rue des Eglantiers, for God opened flowers before man
cut stones.
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