Page 365 - les-miserables

are utilized for the rough work of devotion. The transition
from a drover to a Carmelite is not in the least violent; the
one turns into the other without much effort; the fund of
ignorance common to the village and the cloister is a prep-
aration ready at hand, and places the boor at once on the
same footing as the monk: a little more amplitude in the
smock, and it becomes a frock. Sister Perpetue was a robust
nun from Marines near Pontoise, who chattered her patois,
droned, grumbled, sugared the potion according to the big-
otry or the hypocrisy of the invalid, treated her patients
abruptly, roughly, was crabbed with the dying, almost flung
God in their faces, stoned their death agony with prayers
mumbled in a rage; was bold, honest, and ruddy.
Sister Simplice was white, with a waxen pallor. Beside
Sister Perpetue, she was the taper beside the candle. Vin-
cent de Paul has divinely traced the features of the Sister of
Charity in these admirable words, in which he mingles as
much freedom as servitude: ‘They shall have for their con-
vent only the house of the sick; for cell only a hired room;
for chapel only their parish church; for cloister only the
streets of the town and the wards of the hospitals; for en-
closure only obedience; for gratings only the fear of God;
for veil only modesty.’ This ideal was realized in the living
person of Sister Simplice: she had never been young, and it
seemed as though she would never grow old. No one could
have told Sister Simplice’s age. She was a person— we dare
not say a woman—who was gentle, austere, well-bred, cold,
and who had never lied. She was so gentle that she appeared
fragile; but she was more solid than granite. She touched

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