Above the door of the refectory this prayer, which was called the white Paternoster, and which possessed the property of bearing people straight to paradise, was inscribed in large black letters. Little white Paternoster, which God made, which God said, which God placed in paradise. In the evening, when I went to bed, I found three angels sitting on my bed. Whoever shall say this thrice at eventide, thrice in the morning, shall win paradise at the last. In 1827 this characteristic orison had disappeared from the wall under a triple coating of daubing paint. At the present time it is finally disappearing from the memories of several who were young girls then, and who are old women now. A large crucifix fastened to the wall completed the decoration of this refectory, whose only door opened on the garden. Two narrow tables, each flanked by two wooden benches, formed two long parallel lines. The walls were white, the tables were black. These two mourning colours constitute the only variety in convents. The meals were plain, and the food of the children themselves severe. A single dish of meat and vegetables combined, or salt fish: such was their luxury. The children ate in silence, under the eye of the mother whose turn it was, who, if a fly took a notion to fly or to hum against the rule, opened and shut a wooden book from time to time. This silence was seasoned with the lives of the saints, read aloud from a little pulpit at the foot of the crucifix. The child who broke the silence made a cross with her tongue. Where? On the ground. She licked the pavement. The dust, that end of all joys, was charged with the chastisement of those poor little rose-leaves which had been guilty of chirping.
There was in the convent a book which has never been printed except as a unique copy, and which it is forbidden to read. It is the rule of Saint-Benoit. The pupils one day succeeded in getting possession of this book, and set to reading it with avidity, a reading often interrupted by the fear of being caught. From the great danger they derived but a very moderate amount of pleasure. The most interesting thing they found were some unintelligible pages about the sins of young boys. They played in an alley of the garden bordered with a few shabby fruit-trees. In spite of the extreme surveillance, when the wind had shaken the trees, they sometimes succeeded in picking up a green apple or a spoiled apricot or an inhabited pear on the sly. One hides one's pear or one's apple as best one may. When one goes upstairs to put the veil on the bed before supper, one stuffs them under one's pillow and at night one eats them in bed, and when one cannot do that, one eats them in the closet. That was one of their greatest luxuries. Once, at the epoch of the visit from the archbishop, Mademoiselle Bouchard laid a wager that she would ask for a day's leave of absence, an enormity in so austere a community. When the moment came she stepped out of the ranks and said, Monseigneur, a day's leave of absence. He smiled and granted her three days. The prioress could do nothing. Horror of the convent, but joy of the pupil.
This stern cloister was not so well walled off but that the life of the passions of the outside world made its way in. About this time there was in the convent a mysterious person who was not a nun, who was treated with great respect, and who was addressed as Madame Albertine. Nothing was known about her, save that she was mad, and that in the world she passed for dead. She was hardly thirty, of dark complexion and tolerably pretty, with a vague look in her large black eyes. She glided rather than walked. She never spoke. To touch her hand was like touching snow. Wherever she entered, people felt cold. One day, as soon as she caught sight of a young priest of high rank in the pulpit, she half rose, and said, in a loud voice, amid the silence of the chapel, Ah, Auguste. The whole community turned their heads. The preacher raised his eyes. Madame Albertine had relapsed into her immobility. A breath from the outer world, a flash of life, had passed for an instant across that cold and lifeless face and had then vanished, and the mad woman had become a corpse again. Those two words set everyone who had the privilege of speech to chattering. Not a sound from without made its way into the convent. But there was one year when the sound of a flute penetrated thither. It always played the same air, My Zetulbe, come reign o'er my soul, two or three times a day. The young girls passed hours in listening to it. The vocal mothers were upset. Punishments descended in showers. This lasted for several months. Each one dreamed that she was Zetulbe. They would have given anything for a glance, if only for a second, of the young man who played that flute so deliciously. Some escaped by a back door. One thrust her arm through the grating and waved her white handkerchief. Two climbed on a roof and risked their lives, and succeeded at last in seeing the young man. He was an old emigre gentleman, blind and penniless, who was playing his flute in his attic, in order to pass the time.
