Page 860 - les-miserables

order of the Perpetual Adoration is not very ancient and
does not go back more than two hundred years. In 1649
the holy sacrament was profaned on two occasions a few
days apart, in two churches in Paris, at Saint-Sulpice and at
Saint-Jean en Greve, a rare and frightful sacrilege which set
the whole town in an uproar. M. the Prior and Vicar-Gen-
eral of Saint-Germain des Pres ordered a solemn procession
of all his clergy, in which the Pope’s Nuncio officiated. But
this expiation did not satisfy two sainted women, Madame
Courtin, Marquise de Boucs, and the Comtesse de Chateau-
vieux. This outrage committed on ‘the most holy sacrament
of the altar,’ though but temporary, would not depart from
these holy souls, and it seemed to them that it could only
be extenuated by a ‘Perpetual Adoration’ in some female
monastery. Both of them, one in 1652, the other in 1653,
made donations of notable sums to Mother Catherine de
Bar, called of the Holy Sacrament, a Benedictine nun, for
the purpose of founding, to this pious end, a monastery
of the order of Saint-Benoit; the first permission for this
foundation was given to Mother Catherine de Bar by M. de
Metz, Abbe of Saint-Germain, ‘on condition that no wom-
an could be received unless she contributed three hundred
livres income, which amounts to six thousand livres, to the
principal.’ After the Abbe of Saint-Germain, the king ac-
corded letters-patent; and all the rest, abbatial charter, and
royal letters, was confirmed in 1654 by the Chamber of Ac-
counts and the Parliament.
Such is the origin of the legal consecration of the estab-
lishment of the Benedictines of the Perpetual Adoration of

860 Les Miserables