Kabanata Kabanata 127 · POST CORDA LAPIDES

After having sketched its moral face, it will not prove unprofitable to

point out, in a few words, its material configuration. The reader

already has some idea of it.

The convent of the Petit-Picpus-Sainte-Antoine filled almost the whole

of the vast trapezium which resulted from the intersection of the Rue

Polonceau, the Rue Droit-Mur, the Rue Petit-Picpus, and the unused

lane, called Rue Aumarais on old plans. These four streets surrounded

this trapezium like a moat. The convent was composed of several

buildings and a garden. The principal building, taken in its entirety,

was a juxtaposition of hybrid constructions which, viewed from a

bird’s-eye view, outlined, with considerable exactness, a gibbet laid

flat on the ground. The main arm of the gibbet occupied the whole of

the fragment of the Rue Droit-Mur comprised between the Rue

Petit-Picpus and the Rue Polonceau; the lesser arm was a lofty, gray,

severe grated façade which faced the Rue Petit-Picpus; the carriage

entrance No. 62 marked its extremity. Towards the centre of this façade

was a low, arched door, whitened with dust and ashes, where the spiders

wove their webs, and which was open only for an hour or two on Sundays,

and on rare occasions, when the coffin of a nun left the convent. This

was the public entrance of the church. The elbow of the gibbet was a

square hall which was used as the servants’ hall, and which the nuns

called _the buttery_. In the main arm were the cells of the mothers,

the sisters, and the novices. In the lesser arm lay the kitchens, the

refectory, backed up by the cloisters and the church. Between the door

No. 62 and the corner of the closed Aumarais Lane, was the school,

which was not visible from without. The remainder of the trapezium

formed the garden, which was much lower than the level of the Rue

Polonceau, which caused the walls to be very much higher on the inside

than on the outside. The garden, which was slightly arched, had in its

centre, on the summit of a hillock, a fine pointed and conical

fir-tree, whence ran, as from the peaked boss of a shield, four grand

alleys, and, ranged by twos in between the branchings of these, eight

small ones, so that, if the enclosure had been circular, the

geometrical plan of the alleys would have resembled a cross superposed

on a wheel. As the alleys all ended in the very irregular walls of the

garden, they were of unequal length. They were bordered with currant

bushes. At the bottom, an alley of tall poplars ran from the ruins of

the old convent, which was at the angle of the Rue Droit-Mur to the

house of the Little Convent, which was at the angle of the Aumarais

Lane. In front of the Little Convent was what was called the little

garden. To this whole, let the reader add a courtyard, all sorts of

varied angles formed by the interior buildings, prison walls, the long

black line of roofs which bordered the other side of the Rue Polonceau

for its sole perspective and neighborhood, and he will be able to form

for himself a complete image of what the house of the Bernardines of

the Petit-Picpus was forty years ago. This holy house had been built on

the precise site of a famous tennis-ground of the fourteenth to the

sixteenth century, which was called the “tennis-ground of the eleven

thousand devils.”

All these streets, moreover, were more ancient than Paris. These names,

Droit-Mur and Aumarais, are very ancient; the streets which bear them

are very much more ancient still. Aumarais Lane was called Maugout

Lane; the Rue Droit-Mur was called the Rue des Églantiers, for God

opened flowers before man cut stones.