Forty years ago, the nuns numbered nearly a hundred; fifteen years ago there were not more than twenty-eight of them.
How many are there to-day?
In 1847, the prioress was young, a sign that the circle of choice was restricted.
She was not forty years old.
In proportion as the number diminishes, the fatigue increases, the service of each becomes more painful; the moment could then be seen drawing near when there would be but a dozen bent and aching shoulders to bear the heavy rule of Saint-Benoit.
The burden is implacable, and remains the same for the few as for the many.
It weighs down, it crushes.
Thus they die.
At the period when the author of this book still lived in Paris, two died.
One was twenty-five years old, the other twenty-three.
This latter can say, like Julia Alpinula: “Hic jaceo. Vixi annos viginti et tres.”
It is in consequence of this decay that the convent gave up the education of girls.
We have not felt able to pass before this extraordinary house without entering it, and without introducing the minds which accompany us, and which are listening to our tale, to the profit of some, perchance, of the melancholy history of Jean Valjean.
We have penetrated into this community, full of those old practices which seem so novel to-day.
It is the closed garden, hortus conclusus.
We have spoken of this singular place in detail, but with respect, in so far, at least, as detail and respect are compatible.
We do not understand all, but we insult nothing.
We are equally far removed from the hosanna of Joseph de Maistre, who wound up by anointing the executioner, and from the sneer of Voltaire, who even goes so far as to ridicule the cross.
An illogical act on Voltaire’s part, we may remark, by the way; for Voltaire would have defended Jesus as he defended Calas; and even for those who deny superhuman incarnations, what does the crucifix represent?
The assassinated sage.
In this nineteenth century, the religious idea is undergoing a crisis.
People are unlearning certain things, and they do well, provided that, while unlearning them they learn this: There is no vacuum in the human heart.
Certain demolitions take place, and it is well that they do, but on condition that they are followed by reconstructions.
In the meantime, let us study things which are no more.
It is necessary to know them, if only for the purpose of avoiding them.
The counterfeits of the past assume false names, and gladly call themselves the future.
This spectre, this past, is given to falsifying its own passport.
Let us inform ourselves of the trap.
Let us be on our guard.
The past has a visage, superstition, and a mask, hypocrisy.
Let us denounce the visage and let us tear off the mask.
As for convents, they present a complex problem,—a question of civilization, which condemns them; a question of liberty, which protects them.
BOOK SEVENTH.—PARENTHESIS
CHAPTER I—THE CONVENT AS AN ABSTRACT IDEA
This book is a drama, whose leading personage is the Infinite.
Man is the second.
Such being the case, and a convent having happened to be on our road, it has been our duty to enter it.
Why?
Because the convent, which is common to the Orient as well as to the Occident, to antiquity as well as to modern times, to paganism, to Buddhism, to Mahometanism, as well as to Christianity, is one of the optical apparatuses applied by man to the Infinite.
This is not the place for enlarging disproportionately on certain ideas; nevertheless, while absolutely maintaining our reserves, our restrictions, and even our indignations, we must say that every time we encounter man in the Infinite, either well or ill understood, we feel ourselves overpowered with respect.
There is, in the synagogue, in the mosque, in the pagoda, in the wigwam, a hideous side which we execrate, and a sublime side, which we adore.
What a contemplation for the mind, and what endless food for thought, is the reverberation of God upon the human wall!
CHAPTER II—THE CONVENT AS AN HISTORICAL FACT
From the point of view of history, of reason, and of truth, monasticism is condemned.
Monasteries, when they abound in a nation, are clogs in its circulation, cumbrous establishments, centres of idleness where centres of labor should exist.
Monastic communities are to the great social community what the mistletoe is to the oak, what the wart is to the human body.
Their prosperity and their fatness mean the impoverishment of the country.
The monastic regime, good at the beginning of civilization, useful in the reduction of the brutal by the spiritual, is bad when peoples have reached their manhood.
Moreover, when it becomes relaxed, and when it enters into its period of disorder, it becomes bad for the very reasons which rendered it salutary in its period of purity, because it still continues to set the example.
Claustration has had its day.