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A CENTURY UNDER A GUIMPE
Since we are engaged in giving details as to what the convent
of the Petit-Picpus was in former times, and since we have ventured
to open a window on that discreet retreat, the reader will permit
us one other little digression, utterly foreign to this book,
but characteristic and useful, since it shows that the cloister
even has its original figures.
In the Little Convent there was a centenarian who came from
the Abbey of Fontevrault.
She had even been in society before the Revolution. She talked
a great deal of M. de Miromesnil, Keeper of the Seals under Louis
XVI.
and of a Presidentess Duplat, with whom she had been very
intimate.
It was her pleasure and her vanity to drag in these names
on every pretext.
She told wonders of the Abbey of Fontevrault,-- that it was
like a city, and that there were streets in the monastery.
She talked with a Picard accent which amused the pupils.
Every year, she solemnly renewed her vows, and at the moment
of taking the oath, she said to the priest, "Monseigneur
Saint-Francois gave it to Monseigneur Saint-Julien, Monseigneur
Saint-Julien gave it to Monseigneur Saint-Eusebius, Monseigneur
Saint-Eusebius gave it to Monseigneur Saint-Procopius, etc., etc.;
and thus I give it to you, father."
And the school-girls would begin to laugh, not in their sleeves,
but under their veils; charming little stifled laughs which made
the vocal mothers frown.
On another occasion, the centenarian was telling stories.
She said that in her youth the Bernardine monks were every
whit as good as the mousquetaires.
It was a century which spoke through her, but it was the eighteenth
century.
She told about the custom of the four wines, which existed
before the Revolution in Champagne and Bourgogne. When a great
personage, a marshal of France, a prince, a duke, and a peer,
traversed a town in Burgundy or Champagne, the city fathers came
out to harangue him and presented him with four silver gondolas
into which they had poured four different sorts of wine. On the
first goblet this inscription could be read, monkey wine; on the
second, lion wine; on the third, sheep wine; on the fourth, hog
wine.
These four legends express the four stages descended by the
drunkard; the first, intoxication, which enlivens; the second,
that which irritates; the third, that which dulls; and the fourth,
that which brutalizes.
In a cupboard, under lock and key, she kept a mysterious object
of which she thought a great deal.
The rule of Fontevrault did not forbid this.
She would not show this object to anyone. She shut herself
up, which her rule allowed her to do, and hid herself, every time
that she desired to contemplate it. If she heard a footstep in
the corridor, she closed the cupboard again as hastily as it was
possible with her aged hands.
As soon as it was mentioned to her, she became silent, she
who was so fond of talking.
The most curious were baffled by her silence and the most
tenacious by her obstinacy.
Thus it furnished a subject of comment for all those who were
unoccupied or bored in the convent. What could that treasure of
the centenarian be, which was so precious and so secret?
Some holy book, no doubt?
Some unique chaplet? Some authentic relic?
They lost themselves in conjectures. When the poor old woman
died, they rushed to her cupboard more hastily than was fitting,
perhaps, and opened it.
They found the object beneath a triple linen cloth, like some
consecrated paten. It was a Faenza platter representing little
Loves flitting away pursued by apothecary lads armed with enormous
syringes. The chase abounds in grimaces and in comical postures.
One of the charming little Loves is already fairly spitted.
He is resisting, fluttering his tiny wings, and still making
an effort to fly, but the dancer is laughing with a satanical
air.
Moral:
Love conquered by the colic.
This platter, which is very curious, and which had, possibly,
the honor of furnishing Moliere with an idea, was still in existence
in September, 1845; it was for sale by a bric-a-brac merchant
in the Boulevard Beaumarchais.
This good old woman would not receive any visits from outside
because, said she, the parlor is too gloomy.
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