CHAPTER X

ORIGIN OF THE PERPETUAL ADORATION


However, this almost sepulchral parlor, of which we have sought
to convey an idea, is a purely local trait which is not reproduced
with the same severity in other convents. At the convent of the Rue
du Temple, in particular, which belonged, in truth, to another order,
the black shutters were replaced by brown curtains, and the parlor
itself was a salon with a polished wood floor, whose windows were
draped in white muslin curtains and whose walls admitted all sorts
of frames, a portrait of a Benedictine nun with unveiled face,
painted bouquets, and even the head of a Turk.

It is in that garden of the Temple convent, that stood that famous
chestnut-tree which was renowned as the finest and the largest
in France, and which bore the reputation among the good people
of the eighteenth century of being the father of all the chestnut
trees of the realm.

As we have said, this convent of the Temple was occupied by Benedictines
of the Perpetual Adoration, Benedictines quite different from those
who depended on Citeaux. This 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-General 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 Chateauvieux. 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 woman 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 accorded letters-patent;
and all the rest, abbatial charter, and royal letters, was confirmed
in 1654 by the Chamber of Accounts and the Parliament.

Such is the origin of the legal consecration of the establishment
of the Benedictines of the Perpetual Adoration of the Holy Sacrament
at Paris. Their first convent was "a new building" in the Rue Cassette,
out of the contributions of Mesdames de Boucs and de Chateauvieux.

This order, as it will be seen, was not to be confounded with
the Benedictine nuns of Citeaux. It mounted back to the Abbe
of Saint-Germain des Pres, in the same manner that the ladies
of the Sacred Heart go back to the general of the Jesuits,
and the sisters of charity to the general of the Lazarists.

It was also totally different from the Bernardines of the Petit-Picpus,
whose interior we have just shown. In 1657, Pope Alexander VII.
had authorized, by a special brief, the Bernardines of the Rue
Petit-Picpus, to practise the Perpetual Adoration like the Benedictine
nuns of the Holy Sacrament. But the two orders remained distinct
none the less.