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Catholic name of Talbot. These young girls, reared by these
nuns between four walls, grew up with a horror of the world
and of the age. One of them said to us one day, ‘The sight of
the street pavement made me shudder from head to foot.’
They were dressed in blue, with a white cap and a Holy Spir-
it of silver gilt or of copper on their breast. On certain grand
festival days, particularly Saint Martha’s day, they were per-
mitted, as a high favor and a supreme happiness, to dress
themselves as nuns and to carry out the offices and practice
of Saint-Benoit for a whole day. In the early days the nuns
were in the habit of lending them their black garments.
This seemed profane, and the prioress forbade it. Only the
novices were permitted to lend. It is remarkable that these
performances, tolerated and encouraged, no doubt, in the
convent out of a secret spirit of proselytism and in order to
give these children a foretaste of the holy habit, were a gen-
uine happiness and a real recreation for the scholars. They
simply amused themselves with it. It was new; it gave them a
change. Candid reasons of childhood, which do not, howev-
er, succeed in making us worldlings comprehend the felicity
of holding a holy water sprinkler in one’s hand and standing
for hours together singing hard enough for four in front of
a reading-desk.
The pupils conformed, with the exception of the austeri-
ties, to all the practices of the convent. There was a certain
young woman who entered the world, and who after many
years of married life had not succeeded in breaking her-
self of the habit of saying in great haste whenever any one
knocked at her door, ‘forever!’ Like the nuns, the pupils saw

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