CHAPTER II--THE CONVENT AS AN HISTORICAL FACT

  From the point of view of history, of reason, and of truth, monasticismis condemned. Monasteries, when they abound in a nation, are clogs inits circulation, cumbrous establishments, centres of idleness wherecentres of labor should exist. Monastic communities are to the greatsocial community what the mistletoe is to the oak, what the wart isto the human body. Their prosperity and their fatness mean theimpoverishment of the country. The monastic regime, good at thebeginning of civilization, useful in the reduction of the brutal by thespiritual, is bad when peoples have reached their manhood. Moreover,when it becomes relaxed, and when it enters into its period of disorder,it becomes bad for the very reasons which rendered it salutary in itsperiod of purity, because it still continues to set the example.

  Claustration has had its day. Cloisters, useful in the early educationof modern civilization, have embarrassed its growth, and are injuriousto its development. So far as institution and formation with relationto man are concerned, monasteries, which were good in the tenth century,questionable in the fifteenth, are detestable in the nineteenth. Theleprosy of monasticism has gnawed nearly to a skeleton two wonderfulnations, Italy and Spain; the one the light, the other the splendor ofEurope for centuries; and, at the present day, these two illustriouspeoples are but just beginning to convalesce, thanks to the healthy andvigorous hygiene of 1789 alone.

  The convent--the ancient female convent in particular, such as it stillpresents itself on the threshold of this century, in Italy, in Austria,in Spain--is one of the most sombre concretions of the Middle Ages. Thecloister, that cloister, is the point of intersection of horrors. TheCatholic cloister, properly speaking, is wholly filled with the blackradiance of death.

  The Spanish convent is the most funereal of all. There rise, inobscurity, beneath vaults filled with gloom, beneath domes vague withshadow, massive altars of Babel, as high as cathedrals; there immensewhite crucifixes hang from chains in the dark; there are extended, allnude on the ebony, great Christs of ivory; more than bleeding,--bloody;hideous and magnificent, with their elbows displaying the bones, theirknee-pans showing their integuments, their wounds showing their flesh,crowned with silver thorns, nailed with nails of gold, with blood dropsof rubies on their brows, and diamond tears in their eyes. The diamondsand rubies seem wet, and make veiled beings in the shadow below weep,their sides bruised with the hair shirt and their iron-tipped scourges,their breasts crushed with wicker hurdles, their knees excoriated withprayer; women who think themselves wives, spectres who think themselvesseraphim. Do these women think? No. Have they any will? No. Do theylove? No. Do they live? No. Their nerves have turned to bone; theirbones have turned to stone. Their veil is of woven night. Their breathunder their veil resembles the indescribably tragic respiration ofdeath. The abbess, a spectre, sanctifies them and terrifies them.The immaculate one is there, and very fierce. Such are the ancientmonasteries of Spain. Liars of terrible devotion, caverns of virgins,ferocious places.

  Catholic Spain is more Roman than Rome herself. The Spanish convent was,above all others, the Catholic convent. There was a flavor of the Orientabout it. The archbishop, the kislar-aga of heaven, locked up and keptwatch over this seraglio of souls reserved for God. The nun was theodalisque, the priest was the eunuch. The fervent were chosen in dreamsand possessed Christ. At night, the beautiful, nude young man descendedfrom the cross and became the ecstasy of the cloistered one. Lofty wallsguarded the mystic sultana, who had the crucified for her sultan, fromall living distraction. A glance on the outer world was infidelity. The_in pace_ replaced the leather sack. That which was cast into the sea inthe East was thrown into the ground in the West. In both quarters, womenwrung their hands; the waves for the first, the grave for the last; herethe drowned, there the buried. Monstrous parallel.

  To-day the upholders of the past, unable to deny these things, haveadopted the expedient of smiling at them. There has come into fashiona strange and easy manner of suppressing the revelations of history, ofinvalidating the commentaries of philosophy, of eliding all embarrassingfacts and all gloomy questions. _A matter for declamations_, say theclever. Declamations, repeat the foolish. Jean-Jacques a declaimer;Diderot a declaimer; Voltaire on Calas, Labarre, and Sirven, declaimers.I know not who has recently discovered that Tacitus was a declaimer,that Nero was a victim, and that pity is decidedly due to "that poorHolofernes."

  Facts, however, are awkward things to disconcert, and they areobstinate. The author of this book has seen, with his own eyes, eightleagues distant from Brussels,--there are relics of the Middle Agesthere which are attainable for everybody,--at the Abbey of Villers, thehole of the oubliettes, in the middle of the field which was formerlythe courtyard of the cloister, and on the banks of the Thil, four stonedungeons, half under ground, half under the water. They were _in pace_.Each of these dungeons has the remains of an iron door, a vault, and agrated opening which, on the outside, is two feet above the level of theriver, and on the inside, six feet above the level of the ground. Fourfeet of river flow past along the outside wall. The ground is alwayssoaked. The occupant of the _in pace_ had this wet soil for his bed. Inone of these dungeons, there is a fragment of an iron necklet riveted tothe wall; in another, there can be seen a square box made of four slabsof granite, too short for a person to lie down in, too low for him tostand upright in. A human being was put inside, with a coverlid of stoneon top. This exists. It can be seen. It can be touched. These _in pace_,these dungeons, these iron hinges, these necklets, that lofty peep-holeon a level with the river's current, that box of stone closed with a lidof granite like a tomb, with this difference, that the dead man herewas a living being, that soil which is but mud, that vault hole, thoseoozing walls,--what declaimers!