One day, when we went to do the work, we found in one of the rooms, some men who were engaged in painting.  They asked us if we were contented.  We did not dare to reply, lest they should betray us.  They then began to make remarks about us, some of which I well remember.  One of them said, “I don’t believe they are used very well; they look as though they were half starved.”  Another replied, “I know they do; there is certainly something wrong about these convents, or the nuns would not all look so pale and thin.”  I suspect the man little thought how much truth there was in his remarks.

Soon after the painters left we were all taken suddenly ill.  Some were worse than others, but all were unwell except one nun.  As all exhibited the same symptoms, we were supposed to have taken poison, and suspicion fastened on that nun.  She was put upon the rack, and when she saw that her guilt could not be concealed, she confessed that she poisoned the water in the well, but she would not tell what she put into it, nor where she got it.  She said she did not do it to injure the nuns, for she thought they were allowed so little drink with their food, they would not be affected by it, while those who drank more, she hoped to kill.  She disliked all the priests, and the Superior, and would gladly have murdered them all.  But for one priest in particular, she felt all the hatred that a naturally malignant spirit, excited by repeated acts of cruelty, is capable of.  He had punished her repeatedly, and as she thought, unjustly, and she resolved to avenge herself and destroy her enemy, even though the innocent should suffer with the guilty.  This was all wrong, fearfully wrong we must admit.  But while we look with horror at the enormity of her crime let us remember that she had great provocation.  I hope there are few who could have sought revenge in the way she did; yet I cannot believe that any one would endure from another what she was compelled to suffer from that man, without some feelings of resentment.  Let us not judge too harshly this erring sister, for if her crime was great, her wrongs were neither small nor few, and her punishment was terrible.

They tortured her a long time to make her tell what kind of poison she put in the well, and where she obtained it.  They supposed she must have got it from the painters, but she would never tell where she procured it.  This fact proves that she had some generous feelings left.  Under any other circumstances such magnanimity would have been highly applauded, and in my secret soul I could not but admire the firmness with which she bore her sufferings.  She was kept upon the rack until all her joints were dislocated, and the flesh around them mortified.  They then carried her to her room, removed the bed, and laid her upon the bedcord.  The nuns were all assembled to look at her, and take warning by her sad fate.  Such a picture of misery I never saw before.  She seemed to have suffered even more than the old lady I saw in the cellar.  It was but a moment, however, that we were allowed to gaze upon her shrunken ghastly features, and then she was hid from our sight forever.  The nuns, except two or three, were sent from the room, and thus the murder was consummated.  What else can we call it?