“Every morning you may see a hundred and fifty to two hundred ploughs issue from both establishments; these spread over the plain and till an immense expanse of land.  Carts drawn by bullocks, big mules, or superb horses are ceaselessly exporting the products of the fields, the meadows, or the orchards.  Innumerable cows cover the pastures, and legions of women and herds are employed to look after these estates.

“The aspect of Fontevrault gives an exact idea of the ancient homes of the Patriarchs, in their remote periods of early civilisation, which saw the great proprietors delighting in their natal hearth, and finding their glory, as well as their happiness, in fertilising or assisting nature.

“The abbess rules like a sovereign over her companion nuns, and over the monks, her neighbours.  She appoints their officers and their temporal prince.  It is she who admits postulants, who fixes the dates of ordinations, pronounces interdictions, graces, and penances.  They render her an account of their administration and the employment of their revenues, from which she subtracts carefully her third share, as the essential right of her crosier of authority.”

“Have you invited the Benedictine Fathers to your fete in the wood?” the King asked me, smiling.

“We had no power, Sire,” I answered.  “There are many young ladies being educated with the nuns of Fontevrault.  The parents of these young ladies respectful as they are to these monks, would have looked askance at the innovation.  The Fathers never go in there.  They are to be seen at the abbey church, where they sing and say their offices.  Only the three secular chaplains of the abbess penetrate into the house of the nuns; the youngest of the three cannot be less than fifty.

“The night of the feast the monks draw near our cloister by means of a wooden theatre, which forms a terrace, and from this elevation they participate by the eye and ear in our amusements; that is enough.”

“Has Madame de Mortemart ever related to you the origin of her abbey?” resumed the King.  “Perhaps she is ignorant of it.  I am going to tell you of it, for it is extremely curious; it is not as it is related in the books, and I take the facts from good authority.  You must hear of it, and you will see.

“There was once a Comtesse de Poitiers, named Honorinde, to whom fate had given for a husband the greatest hunter in the world.  This man would have willingly passed his life in the woods, where he hunted, night and day, what we call, in hunter’s parlance, ‘big game.’  Having won the victory over a monstrous boar, he cut off the head himself, and this quivering and bleeding mask he went to offer to his lady in a basin.  The young woman was in the first month of her pregnancy.  She was filled with repugnance and fright at the sight of this still-threatening head; it troubled her to the prejudice of her fruit.

“Eight, or seven and a half, months afterwards, she brought into the world a girl who was human in her whole body, but above had the horrible head of a wild boar!  Imagine what cries, what grief, what despair!  The cure of the place refused baptism, and the Count, broken down and desolate, ordered the child to be drowned.