Chapter Chapter 129 · 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 Cîteaux. 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 Grève, a rare and frightful sacrilege which set the whole

town in an uproar. M. the Prior and Vicar-General of Saint-Germain des

Prés 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

Châteauvieux. 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-Benoît; the first permission for this foundation was given to

Mother Catherine de Bar by M. de Metz, Abbé 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 Abbé 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 Châteauvieux.

This order, as it will be seen, was not to be confounded with the

Benedictine nuns of Cîteaux. It mounted back to the Abbé of

Saint-Germain des Prés, 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

nonetheless.