“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 Elise Gautier to desert her widowed father and dependent little brothers and sisters to bury herself in a convent.”

A more interesting story than Elise 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 hotel-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 Emile, with an expression savoring of paganism and pig-tails, squinted obliquely toward our doctor.

“Nous n’en savons rien” they answered me.