WALLED IN ALIVE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 17 October 1938, Page 9

WALLED IN ALIVE

FORMER WOMAN RECLUSE. During excavations for the enlarging of the Halles Centrales, the Paris central market, workmen came across an inscription extolling the virtues of one Pernette, a woman recluse of the tenth century who lived in a cell adjoining the church of the Innocents, long since demolished. . Pernette was one of many women recluses of the Middle Ages, traces ofwhose cells are occasionally dug up always close to churches. Their cells were against the church wall, with a small opening on the church side through which they could follow the service, and a grating on the street side through the bars of which they could beg for food. Ancient records of France contain many mentions of these women recluses who had themselves walled up in their narrow cells. Candidates were numerous and as soon as a recluse died another was immediately ready to leave the active world and take her place in the narrow confines of the cell where little light and air penetrated and from which she could could emerge only when death brought release. When a candidate went to take up her new abode a religious service was held, and she walked between priests holding lighted candles, and as soon as she had entered the breach of the cell it was walled up to within a short distance from the top, where the grating was placed in position. Here through the iron bars the recluse would stretch out her hands and implore the passer-by to give her food, and here women would come to ask the recluse to remember them in her prayers.

Strange to say, many of these recluses, in spite of the terrible conditions, lived to a great age. It is recorded that one of them, Philippe Thibaudot, who had induced her parents to allow her to be walled up at the age of eighteen, lived to her ninety-ninth year. The cells were always very small and one was made inside a pillar. One of the last of these women recluses lived in the days of Louis XI, in 1466, and the king so admired her piety that when at last death released her he had a bronze effigy of her set up in the church of St Merry next to which her cell had been.