In the general management of the pecuniary affairs of the community, Mother Sainte-Perpetue would have been a match for the most cunning attorney.  When women are possessed of what is called a talent for business, and apply to it their keen penetration, their indefatigable perseverance, their prudent dissimulation, and, above all, that quick and exact insight, which is natural to them, the results are often prodigious.  To Mother Sainte-Perpetue, a woman of the coolest and strongest intellect, the management of the vast transactions of the community was mere child’s play.  No one knew better how to purchase a depreciated property, to restore it to its former value, and then sell it with advantage; the price of stock, the rate of exchange, the current value of the shares in the different companies, were all familiar to her; she had yet never been known to make bad speculation, when the question was to invest any of the funds which were given by pious souls for the purposes of the convent.  She had established in the house the utmost order and discipline, and, above all, an extreme economy.  The constant aim of all her efforts was to enrich, not herself, but the community she directed; for the spirit of association, when become a collective egotism, gives to corporations the faults and vices of an individual.  Thus a congregation may dote upon power and money, just as a miser loves them for their own sake.  But it is chiefly with regard to estates that congregations act like a single man.  They dream of landed property; it is their fixed idea, their fruitful monomania.  They pursue it with their most sincere, and warm, and tender wishes.

The first estate is to a rising little community what the wedding trousseau is to a young bride, his first horse to a youth, his first success to a poet, to a gay girl her first fifty-guinea shawl; because, after all, in this material age, an estate gives a certain rank to a society on the Religious Exchange, and has so much the more effect upon the simple-minded, that all these partnerships in the work of salvation, which end by becoming immensely rich, begin with modest poverty as social stock-in-trade, and charity towards their neighbors as security reserve fund.  We may therefore imagine what bitter and ardent rivalry must exist between the different congregations with regard to the various estates that each can lay claim to; with what ineffable satisfaction the richer society crushes the poorer beneath its inventory of houses, and farms and paper securities!  Envy and hateful jealousy, rendered still more irritable by the leisure of a cloistered life, are the necessary consequences of such a comparison; and yet nothing is less Christian—­in the adorable acceptation of that divine word—­nothing has less in common with the true, essential, and religiously social spirit of the gospel, than this insatiable ardor to acquire wealth by every possible means—­this dangerous avidity, which is far from being atoned for, in the eyes of public opinion, by a few paltry alms, bestowed in the narrow spirit of exclusion and intolerance.