“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 aeolian 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 commeres!” 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.