THE SILENT NUNS.

Waikato Times, Volume XXX, Issue 2459, 14 April 1888, Page 1 (Supplement)

THE SILENT NUNS.

A corkkspondent of the Daily News in the south of France semis a description of a visit he lias made to the convent of the Bernardines at the village of Anglet, near Bayonne. After first calling at the neighbouring convent of the Sister Servants of Mary—a community whose life is spent in labour in their own fields, or in attending the sick and indigent—the visitor passed through a dark grove of pines to the gate of the Bernardines. A notice, begging him not to speak above a whisper, meets him, and he passes down a long-deserted, but well-kept frarden to the long low range of buildings inhabited by the fifty nuns vowed to silence. Arrived at the entrance, after soaie two or three sot to voce attempts to be heard, with the result like the burlesque song of " Shout boys, shout but in a whisper," a Sister Servant of Mary in her family uniform appears, whispering that it is her lot to act as guide. From twelve o'clock each day she is on duty, and as the Bernardines are not permitted by their vows to speak, and become of necessity, shy, timorous, and strange without some such conductor little could be known of these sad lives. What their crimes are no one can say. Fifty human creatures—one at least of whom is only twenty years of age, and cannot take the full vows till June—share the allotted portion of silence and solitude. Some few of the nuns are living still who began their conventual life nearly half a century ago in straw huts on the bare sand. A story is told of the Empress Eugenie, who, having parted many years before from a school friend in Madrid, learned that the girl had taken refuge among the Bernardines. People say that she had been extremely beautiful, and it is added that she had, when both were young, crossed the Empress's path and became her rival. The costume worn by the Bernardines is designed to hide the face and figure ; a funnel-sbnped hood of coarse whice flannel is drawn over the head and eyes, and a short mantle and full skirt of the eame material conceals the figure. The Empress obtained a dispensation from the Pope to speak to her friend face to face ; but it is said that when the nun threw off her hood her loyal visitor fainted at the fight that met her eyes. People hint that life-long" soars and fearful mutilations lurk under these shroud-like evils, which are assume! as much in mercy to the passers-by as a mortification to the wearer. Two English children, who gazed with awestruck faces on the figures in grave clothes, which move stealthily about the gardens on their errands of mercy to the plants and flowers were heard to raise the question whether the nuns nre dead before they are buried, or buried before they are dead—a point which it would truly be hard to solve. There is in the niov. nient of walking so much character that from the dejected, listless, and heavy steps of these uuhappy creatures it is ea-y to gather the state of their minds; which, if not altogether despnndont. *n Ist bo utterly motionless and daz?d. When the Order was first founded by the good Canon of Bayonne who established the whole community, a handful of sisters slept in rough cabins on the ground, and worshipped in a stunted chapel made of u sort of trellis of sticks stuffed with straw. As the community grew richer, the cells improved till they took their present not ambitious form of a low range of stable buildings, each cell being but little larger than a horse's stall. Here the words "God only" meet the eye, coarsely printed on white, and in every cell tenanted by these poor anchorites in the little codin-likc chapel in which they pray, these words stamp themselves on the mind. The parlour—which hears the same legend —is a square wooden box - , as large, perhaps, as two cells ; and here once a year the sister vowed to silence may hold intercourse with bet father and mother, but with no relation. Speech is also occasionally permitted with the Superior, but never between the nuns. Their needlework, which is exposed for sale, is painful to see, because it betrays the dwarfed and crippled soul within. Some wretched cardboard needlcbooks bear a dumb and piteous prayer for the solitary ; others are tortured into the shape of coffins rilled witli little paper (lowers. Even the vigorous green plants standing in a chapel so narrow that the walls seemed to close upon tht! intruder, arc strung with a kind of coral in red wool, as if all natural taste and healthy admiration had vanished. To these solitary beings who never set foot beyond the shadowy plantations closing in their meagre world, it may be that the walls do not fit so tightly, and that, by dint of gazing at them and at nothing else, they vanish, and only the nions inscription " Dimt sail " remains. If this be so, the lonely nuns are indeed not without hope; but, if only for an instant they were possessed by the caged and crushed spirit that tortures the straneer, they must burst their bonds and be free.