Page 854 - les-miserables

open only for an hour or two on Sundays, and on rare oc-
casions, when the coffin of a nun left the convent. This was
the public entrance of the church. The elbow of the gibbet
was a square hall which was used as the servants’ hall, and
which the nuns called the buttery. In the main arm were
the cells of the mothers, the sisters, and the novices. In the
lesser arm lay the kitchens, the refectory, backed up by the
cloisters and the church. Between the door No. 62 and the
corner of the closed lane Aumarais, was the school, which
was not visible from without. The remainder of the trape-
zium formed the garden, which was much lower than the
level of the Rue Polonceau, which caused the walls to be very
much higher on the inside than on the outside. The garden,
which was slightly arched, had in its centre, on the summit
of a hillock, a fine pointed and conical fir-tree, whence ran,
as from the peaked boss of a shield, four grand alleys, and,
ranged by twos in between the branchings of these, eight
small ones, so that, if the enclosure had been circular, the
geometrical plan of the alleys would have resembled a cross
superposed on a wheel. As the alleys all ended in the very
irregular walls of the garden, they were of unequal length.
They were bordered with currant bushes. At the bottom, an
alley of tall poplars ran from the ruins of the old convent,
which was at the angle of the Rue Droit-Mur to the house of
the Little Convent, which was at the angle of the Aumarais
lane. In front of the Little Convent was what was called the
little garden. To this whole, let the reader add a courtyard,
all sorts of varied angles formed by the interior buildings,
prison walls, the long black line of roofs which bordered

854 Les Miserables