Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885

In fact, such of our shopping as is done in our ville is in the quaint marketplace, where black house-walls are beetling and bent, and Sainte-Cathérine's ancient wooden tower stands the whole width of the Place away from its Gothic church. Here we bargain and chaffer with towering bonnets blancs for peasant pottery and faïence, paintable half-worn stuffs, and delicious ancestral odds and ends of broken peasant households.

We have many streets over which wide eaves meet, and within which twilight dwells at noonday. Some of the hand-wide streets run straight up the côte, and are a succession of steep stairs climbing beside crouching, timber-skeletoned houses perforated by narrow windows opening upon vistas of shadow. Others seem only to run down from the côte to the sea as steeply as black planks set against a high building. Upon the very apex of the côte, visible miles away at sea, lives our richest citizen. His house smiles serenely modern even if only pseudo-classic contempt on all the quaint duskiness and irregularity below, and is pillared, corniced, entablatured, and friezed, with lines severely straight, although the building itself is as round as any mediæval campanile and surmounted with a Gothic bell-turret, while the entrance-gate is turreted, machicolated, castellated, like the fortress-castles of the Goths.

Lower down the côte, convent walls raise themselves above red-tiled and lichen-grown roofs. In one of these convents, behind eyeless grim walls, are hidden cloistered nuns; from others the Sisters go freely forth upon errands of both business and mercy. The convent of cloisters, Couvent des Augustines, is passing rich, and has houses and lands to let. Once upon a time an Américaine coveted one of these picturesque houses. She entered the convent and interviewed the business-manager, a veiled nun behind close bars.

"Madame may occupy the house," said ma Soeur, "by paying five hundred francs a year, by observing every fast and feast of the Church, by attending either matins or vespers every day, and by attending confession and partaking of the holy sacrament every month."

Madame is a zealous Catholic, therefore the terms, although peculiar, did not seem too severe. She was about to remove into the house, when, lo! she received word that, it having come to the knowledge of the convent that the husband of Madame was a heretic, he could not be allowed to occupy any tenement of the Communauté.

Although this cloistered sisterhood is vowed to perpetual seclusion, once a year even heretics may gaze upon their pale faces. This annual occasion is the prize-day of the school they teach, when the school-room is decorated with white cloth and paper roses, the curés of neighboring parishes and the Maire of our ville, with invited distinguished guests, occupy the platform, and the floor below is free to everybody furnished with invitation-cards.

I had always longed to enter these prison-like walls and gaze from my tempestuous distance upon those peaceful lives set apart from earth's rush and turmoil in a fair and blessed haven of the Lord. I longed to see those pure visionaries, pale spouses of Christ, and read upon illumined faces the unspeakable rapture of mystic union with the Lamb of God.

Monsieur le Docteur S–, our family physician, is also physician of the convent.

"You will see nobody," he said, remarking my sentimental curiosity concerning cloistered nuns,—"you will see nobody but a lot of lace-mending and stocking-knitting old maids who failed to get husbands."

I had already heard queer stories of our old doctor's forty years of attendance upon the convent, and I was not so easily discouraged. I was especially anxious to see the Mother Superior, having many times heard the story of her flight in slippers and dressing-gown from the breakfast-table to bury herself forever within the walls that have held her now these twenty-five years. In all these years her unforgiving father has never seen her face, nor she his, although they live within stone's throw of each other.

"Know about him? of course she does," answered Victoire to my question. "She knows all about him, and more too. Do you suppose there is an item of news in the whole town that those cloistered nuns do not hear? If you had been educated by them, as we were, and pumped dry every day as to what went on in our own and our neighbors' families, you would not ask that question."

Victoire and I penetrated into the convent that very same day. We followed a crowd of women, paysannes and citoyennes, into a sunny court paved with large stones and arched by the noontide sky, but unsoftened by tree or flower, and surrounded by the open windows of dormitories. Over the threshold we had just crossed the nuns pass but once after their vows,—pass outward, feet foremost, deaf and unseeing, to a closer, darker home than even their cloistered one. Some of them have seen nothing beyond their convent walls for forty years, while one has here worn away sixty years.

Sixty years without one single glimpse of sweet dawn or fair sunset, without one single vision of the sea in winter majesty of storm or summer glory! Sixty years without sound of lisping music running through tall grass, without one single whisper of the æolian pines, or glimpse of blooming orchards against pure skies! Sixty years!

Beside me in the school-room sat a buxom peasant-woman, who, as a little girl crowned with a gaudy tinsel wreath descended from the platform, confidentially informed me, "C'est ma fille. She has taken the prize for good conduct, and there isn't a worse coquine in our whole commune."

I saw the pale visionaries, a circle of black-robed figures, with dead-white bands, like coffin-cerements, across their brows. I saw them almost unanimously fat, with pendulous jowls and black and broken teeth, as remote from any expression of mystic fervors and spiritual espousals as could be well imagined, "Vieilles commères!" grunted my paysanne, who was evidently neither amiable nor saintly.

Mother Mary-of-the-Angels, once Elise Gautier, was short, fat, and bustling, with large round-eyed spectacles upon her nose, and the pasty complexion and premature flaccid wrinkles that come with long seclusion from sunshine and exercise. She marched about like one who had chosen Martha's rather than Mary's manner of serving her Lord, and we saw her chat a full half-hour with the wife of the Maire, bowing, smiling, gesticulating meantime with all the florid grace of a French woman of the world.

"The Maire's wife was her former intimate friend," whispered Victoire. "See how much younger and healthier she looks than the Mother Superior, and how much happier. On dit that it was chagrin at the marriage of this friend that caused Élise Gautier to desert her widowed father and dependent little brothers and sisters to bury herself in a convent."

A more interesting story than Élise Gautier's is told in our ville. Some years ago a nun left the Couvent des Augustines in open day, passing out from the central door in her nun's garb, and meeting there a foreign-looking man accompanied by a posse of gendarmes. The couple, followed by a half-hooting, half-cheering mob, drove directly to the hôtel-de-ville, where they were united in marriage. Then they went away from our ville, where both were born, to the husband's home in Spain. When those convent doors had closed upon her, a quarter of a century before, and the lovers believed themselves eternally separated, she was a lovely girl of twenty, he a bright youth of twenty-five. She passed away from his despairing sight, fair and fresh as a spring flower, with beautiful golden hair and violet eyes; she came out from that fatal portal a woman of forty-five, stout, spectacled, with faded, thin hair beneath her nun's cowl, to meet a portly gray-haired man of fifty, in whom not even love's eye could detect the faintest vestige of the slender bright-eyed lover of her youth.

The unhappy Laure had been forced to unwilling vows to keep her from this beggarly lover, and, when he fled to Spain, both became dead to our ville for long years. Twenty-two years after Laure became Soeur Angelica it was known in the convent that the machinery of the civil law, which had only lately forbidden eternal religious vows, had been set in motion to secure her release; but it remained a mystery who the spring of the movement was, her parents having long been dead. Soeur Angelica herself seemed almost more terrified than otherwise at the knowledge, for every conventual influence was brought to bear upon her morbid conscience to assure her that eternal damnation follows broken vows. It seems, however, that amid all her spiritual stress she never confessed, even to her spiritual director, what desecration had come upon that dovecote by her constant correspondence with the lover of her youth, now a wealthy wine-merchant in Spain. When she left the convent, some of these love-letters were left behind; and to this day those scandalized doves, to whom Soeur Angelica is forever a lost soul, wonder futilely how those emissaries of Satan penetrated their holy walls.

"How did they, do you suppose?" I asked.

Victoire and Clarice smiled curiously, while Émile, with an expression savoring of paganism and pig-tails, squinted obliquely toward our doctor.

"Nous n'en savons rien" they answered me.

The social amusements of our ville are few, as must naturally be the case in a provincial town ruled by the Draconian law that a jeune fille à marier must be no more than an animated puppet, while jeunes gens must have their coarse fling before they are fit for refined society. Occasionally an ambulant theatrical troupe gives an entertainment in our little theatre. Once a year Talbot comes, during vacation at the Francais, and gives us "L'Avare" or "Le Roi s'amuse;" but such are small events, to our provincial taste, compared with the vaulting and grimacing of the more frequent English and American circus troupes in our Place Thiers.

Perhaps the chief distraction of our young people is going to early mass, whither our young ladies go accompanied by bonnes, Maman having not yet emerged from the French mamma's chrysalis condition of morning crimping-pins, petticoat and short gown, and list slippers. The bonnes who thus serve as chaperons are often as young as or even younger than the demoiselles whose virginal modesty they are supposed to protect. That they are anything more than a mere form of guardian, a figment of the social fiction that a young French girl never leaves her mother's side till she goes to her husband's, it is unnecessary to observe. Human nature, especially French human nature, is human nature all the world over, and Romeo will woo and Juliet be won during early mass or twilight vespers as well as from a balcony, in spite of all the Montagues and Capulets. Girl-chaperons are oftener in sympathy with ardent daughters than with worldly mothers, while even the oldest and most sedate of French bonnes are malleable to other influences than those of their legitimate employers. It was across our river, yonder from whence the sound of the Angelus comes across the summer water like the music of dreams, that Balzac's Modest Mignon carried on her intrigues of hifalutin gush, by means of a facile bonne, with a man whom she had never seen, and who deceived her by personating the poet she wished him to be. Modest Mignons are not rare in our ville, and the Gothic vaults of Saint-Léonard and the pillared aisles of Sainte-Cathérine witness almost as many little intrigues, as many heart-beats and blushes, as does "evenin' meetin'" in our own bucolic regions.

Désirée, our femme-de-chambre, before she came to us, lived in a wealthy roturier family.

"It was a good place, and I was sorry to lose it when Mademoiselle Eugénie was married," said she. "The little gifts the jeunes gens slipped into my panier as I came with mademoiselle from mass almost equalled my wages. Mademoiselle had a good dot as well as beauty, and ces jeunes gens expected to lose nothing by what they gave me. Mademoiselle herself often said, 'Désirée, walk a few steps behind me, and, while I keep my eyes upon the pavement, tell me all the young men who turn to look after me. If you hear any of them say, "Comme elle est jolie!" (How pretty she is!) you shall have my batiste mouchoirs.'"

On Sunday afternoons all the bourgeois world of our ville disports itself upon the jetty. Not only then do all the mothers of the town with daughters "to marry" bring those daughters to the weekly matrimonial mart, but many of the mothers and chaperons of the near country round about come in from rural propriété and rustic chalet to exhibit their candidates. The method of procedure is eminently French, of course, and eminently naïve, as even the intrigues and machinations of Balzac's bourgeoisie, although intended as marvels of finesse, seem so often naïveté itself to our blunter and less-plotting minds. The mothers and daughters, or chaperons and charges, walk slowly arm in arm up and down one side the jetty, facing the counter-current of young men and men not young who have not lost interest in feminine attractions. Back and forth, back and forth, for hours, move the two separate streams, never for one instant commingling, each discussing the other's prospects, characters, appearance, and, above all, dots and rentes, till twilight falls and all the world goes home to dinner.

Once upon a time a retired man of business came to our ville, accompanied by his son. He was one of the class known in England as "Commys," and so obnoxious in France as commis-voyageurs. He stopped at the Cheval Blanc, and in conversation with mine host inquired if it might chance that some café-keeper in the town desired to sell his café and marry his daughter. Monsieur Brissom mentioned to him our café-keepers blessed with marriageable daughters, and "Commy" made the rounds among them, announcing that he had a son whom he wished to marry to some charming demoiselle doted with a café. One of the café-keepers had "précisément votre affaire." It was arranged that Mademoiselle Clothilde should be promenaded by her mother the next Sunday on the jetty, where the young man should join the counter-current, and thus each take observations of the other.

As said, so done. Monsieur Henri and Mademoiselle Clothilde declared themselves enchanted with each other.

"Très-bien," said the reflective parents. "Now fall in love as fast as ever you please."

Monsieur and mademoiselle not only "fell," but plunged.

Two weeks afterward, however, the papas fell out. Cafétier exacted more than Commis could promise, and Commis declared Mademoiselle Clothilde pas grand' chose: her eyebrows were too white, and her toes turned in.

The marriage was declared "off," and the young people were ordered to fall out of love the quickest possible.

"Too late!" they cried.

"You have seen each other but four times."

"Quite enough," declared the lovers.

"You shall not marry," shouted the parents.

"We will!" screamed their offspring.

Nevertheless they could not, for the French law gives almost absolute power to parents. Mademoiselle would have no dot unless her father chose to give her one, and no French marriage is legal without paternal consent or the almost disgraceful expedient of sommations respectueuses. Mademoiselle threatened to enter a convent. Cafétier assured her that no convent opens cordial doors to dotless girls.

Juliet was ready to defy all the Capulets when she had seen Romeo but once; Corinne was ready to fling all her laurels at Oswald's feet at their second interview; Rosamond Vincy planned her house-furnishing during her second meeting with Lydgate; even Dorothea Brooke felt a "trembling hope" the very next day after her first sight of Mr. Casaubon. How, then, could one expect poor Clothilde to yield up her undersized, thin-moustached, and very unheroic-looking Henri, having seen him four times?

There was one way out of her troubles,—that to which Alphonse Daudet's and André Theuriet's people gravitate as needles to their pole. She walked one dark midnight upon the jetty alone. Nobody saw the end; but the next Sunday, three weeks to a day from the one when the two had countermarched in matrimonial procession, Mademoiselle Clothilde was laid in her grave.

The whole French social system revolves around the dot.

"How dare you speak to my father so!" I once heard a daughter reproach her mother. "How dare you, who brought him no dot!"

"It is a pity Madame Marais has no more influence in her family," I heard remarked in a social company. "It is a pity, for she is a good woman, and her husband and sons are all going to the bad."

"Yes, it is a pity," answered another; "but, then, what else can she expect? She brought no dot into the family."

Once upon a time a young man made a friendly call upon a family in our ville, he a distant relative of the family. He sat in the salon with mother and daughter, when suddenly the mother was called away a moment. When she returned, not more than two minutes later,—horror! she could not enter the room! In closing the door she had somehow disarranged the handles; screws had dropped out and could not be found; the knob would not turn. What a situation! A young girl shut up in a locked room with a young man! What a scandal if the story got out in the town! and what could the poor, distracted mamma do to release her daughter from that damning situation without the knowledge of the servants? She dared not even summon a locksmith, for locksmith tongues are free; and who would not shoot out the lip at poor Jeanne, hearing the miserable story at breakfast-tables to-morrow?

"You must marry Jeanne, mon cousin," cried mamma through the keyhole.

"Impossible, ma cousine. You know I am fiancé," laughed he.

Nevertheless he did!

For when papa heard that Jeanne had remained two whole hours shut up with Cousin Pierre in a brilliantly-lighted salon, with a frantic mother at the keyhole and all the servants grinning upon their knees searching for the missing screws, he added twenty thousand francs to her dot on the spot, and Pierre wrote to his other fiancée that he had "changed his intentions."