At the time of the French expedition into Spain for the purpose of re-establishing the authority of Ferdinand VII., and after the fall of Cadiz, a French general who was sent to the island to obtain its recognition of the royal government prolonged his stay upon it that he might reconnoitre the convent and gain, if possible, admittance there.  The enterprise was a delicate one.  But a man of passion,—­a man whose life had been, so to speak, a series of poems in action, who had lived romances instead of writing them; above all a man of deeds,—­might well be tempted by a project apparently so impossible.  To open for himself legally the gates of a convent of women!  The Pope and the Metropolitan Archbishop would scarcely sanction it.  Should he use force or artifice?  In case of failure was he not certain to lose his station and his military future, besides missing his aim?  The Duc d’Angouleme was still in Spain; and of all the indiscretions which an officer in favor with the commander-in-chief could commit, this alone would be punished without pity.  The general had solicited his present mission for the purpose of following up a secret hope, albeit no hope was ever so despairing.  This last effort, however, was a matter of conscience.  The house of these Barefooted Carmelites was the only Spanish convent which had escaped his search.  While crossing from the mainland, a voyage which took less than an hour, a strong presentiment of success had seized his heart.  Since then, although he had seen nothing of the convent but its walls, nothing of the nuns, not so much as their brown habit; though he had heard only the echoes of their chanted liturgies,—­he had gathered from those walls and from these chants faint indications that seemed to justify his fragile hope.  Slight as the auguries thus capriciously awakened might be, no human passion was ever more violently roused than the curiosity of this French general.  To the heart there are no insignificant events; it magnifies all things; it puts in the same balance the fall of an empire and the fall of a woman’s glove,—­and oftentimes the glove outweighs the empire.  But let us give the facts in their actual simplicity:  after the facts will come the feelings.

An hour after the expedition had landed on the island the royal authority was re-established.  A few Spaniards who had taken refuge there after the fall of Cadiz embarked on a vessel which the general allowed them to charter for their voyage to London.  There was thus neither resistance nor reaction.  This little insular restoration could not, however, be accomplished without a Mass, at which both companies of the troops were ordered to be present.  Not knowing the rigor of the Carmelite rule, the general hoped to gain in the church some information about the nuns who were immured in the convent, one of whom might be a being dearer to him than life, more precious even than honor.  His hopes were at first cruelly disappointed.  Mass was celebrated with the utmost pomp.  In honor of this solemn occasion the curtains which habitually hid the choir were drawn aside, and gave to view the rich ornaments, the priceless pictures, and the shrines incrusted with jewels whose brilliancy surpassed that of the votive offerings fastened by the mariners of the port to the pillars of the great nave.  The nuns, however, had retired to the seclusion of the organ gallery.