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Page 16
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 �lise Gautier to desert her widowed father
and dependent little brothers and sisters to bury herself in a convent."
A more interesting story than �lise 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
h�tel-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 �mile, 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 � 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-L�onard and the pillared aisles of
Sainte-Cath�rine witness almost as many little intrigues, as many
heart-beats and blushes, as does "evenin' meetin'" in our own bucolic
regions.
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