Austerities — Les Misérables

One is a postulant for two years at least, often for four, a novice for four. It is rare that the definitive vows can be pronounced earlier than the age of twenty-three or twenty-four years. The Bernardines-Benedictines of Martin Verga do not admit widows to their order. In their cells, they deliver themselves up to many unknown macerations, of which they must never speak. On the day when a novice makes her profession, she is dressed in her handsomest attire, she is crowned with white roses, her hair is brushed until it shines, and curled. Then she prostrates herself. A great black veil is thrown over her, and the office for the dead is sung. Then the nuns separate into two files. One file passes close to her, saying in plaintive accents, Our sister is dead. The other file responds in a voice of ecstasy, Our sister is alive in Jesus Christ.

At the epoch when this story takes place, a boarding-school is attached to the convent, a boarding-school for young girls of noble and mostly wealthy families. These young girls, reared by these nuns between four walls, grow up with a horror of the world and of the age. One of them said to us one day, The sight of the street pavement made me shudder from head to foot. They are dressed in blue, with a white cap and a Holy Spirit of silver gilt or of copper on their breast. On certain grand festival days, particularly Saint Martha's day, they are permitted, as a high favour and a supreme happiness, to dress themselves as nuns and to carry out the offices and practice of Saint-Benoit for a whole day. In the early days the nuns were in the habit of lending them their black garments. This seemed profane, and the prioress forbade it. Only the novices were permitted to lend. These performances, tolerated and encouraged, no doubt, in the convent out of a secret spirit of proselytism and in order to give these children a foretaste of the holy habit, are a genuine happiness and a real recreation for the scholars. They simply amuse themselves with it. It is new. It gives them a change. Candid reasons of childhood, which do not, however, succeed in making us worldlings comprehend the felicity of holding a holy water sprinkler in one's hand and standing for hours together singing hard enough for four in front of a reading-desk.

The pupils conform, with the exception of the austerities, to all the practices of the convent. There was a certain young woman who entered the world, and who after many years of married life had not succeeded in breaking herself of the habit of saying in great haste whenever anyone knocked at her door, forever. Like the nuns, the pupils see their relatives only in the parlor. Their very mothers do not obtain permission to embrace them. One day a young girl received a visit from her mother, who was accompanied by a little sister three years of age. The young girl wept, for she wished greatly to embrace her sister. Impossible. She begged that, at least, the child might be permitted to pass her little hand through the bars so that she could kiss it. This was almost indignantly refused.