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Les Misérables - Origin of the Perpetual Adoration

1. M. Myriel

2. M. Myriel becomes M. Welcome

3. A Hard Bishopric for a Good Bishop

4. Works corresponding to Words

5. Monseigneur Bienvenu made his Cassocks last too long

6. Who guarded his House for him

7. Cravatte

8. Philosophy after Drinking

9. The Brother as depicted by the Sister

10. The Bishop in the Presence of an Unknown Light

11. A Restriction

12. The Solitude of Monseigneur Welcome

13. What he believed

14. What he thought

15. The Evening of a Day of Walking

16. Prudence counselled to Wisdom

17. The Heroism of Passive Obedience

18. Details concerning the Cheese-Dairies of Pontarlier

19. Tranquillity

20. Jean Valjean

21. The Interior of Despair

22. Billows and Shadows

23. New Troubles

24. The Man aroused

25. What he does

26. The Bishop works

27. Little Gervais

28. The Year 1817

29. A Double Quartette

30. Four and Four

31. Tholomyes is so Merry that he sings a Spanish Ditty

32. At Bombardas

33. A Chapter in which they adore Each Other

34. The Wisdom of Tholomyes

35. The Death of a Horse

36. A Merry End to Mirth

37. One Mother meets Another Mother

38. First Sketch of Two Unprepossessing Figures

39. The Lark

40. The History of a Progress in Black Glass Trinkets

41. Madeleine

42. Sums deposited with Laffitte

43. M. Madeleine in Mourning

44. Vague Flashes on the Horizon

45. Father Fauchelevent

46. Fauchelevent becomes a Gardener in Paris

47. Madame Victurnien expends Thirty Francs on Morality

48. Madame Victurnien's Success

49. Result of the Success

50. Christus nos Liberavit

51. M. Bamatabois's Inactivity

52. The Solution of Some Questions connected with the Municipal Police

53. The Beginning of Repose

54. How Jean may become Champ

55. Sister Simplice

56. The Perspicacity of Master Scaufflaire

57. A Tempest in a Skull

58. Forms assumed by Suffering during Sleep

59. Hindrances

60. Sister Simplice put to the Proof

61. The Traveller on his Arrival takes Precautions for Departure

62. An Entrance by Favor

63. A Place where Convictions are in Process of Formation

64. The System of Denials

65. Champmathieu more and more Astonished

66. In what Mirror M. Madeleine contemplates his Hair

67. Fantine Happy

68. Javert Satisfied

69. Authority reasserts its Rights

70. A Suitable Tomb

71. What is met with on the Way from Nivelles

72. Hougomont

73. The Eighteenth of June, 1815

74. A

75. The Quid Obscurum of Battles

76. Four o'clock in the Afternoon

77. Napoleon in a Good Humor

78. The Emperor puts a Question to the Guide Lacoste

79. The Unexpected

80. The Plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean

81. A Bad Guide to Napoleon; a Good Guide to Bulow

82. The Guard

83. The Catastrophe

84. The Last Square

85. Cambronne

86. Quot Libras in Duce?

87. Is Waterloo to be considered Good?

88. A Recrudescence of Divine Right

89. The Battle-Field at Night

90. Number 24,601 becomes Number 9,430

91. In which the reader will peruse Two Verses which are of the Devil's Composition possibly

92. The Ankle-Chain must have undergone a Certain Preparatory Manipulation to be thus broken with a Blow from a Hammer

93. The Water Question at Montfermeil

94. Two Complete Portraits

95. Men must have Wine, and Horses must have Water

96. Entrance on the Scene of a Doll

97. The Little One All Alone

98. Which possibly proves Boulatruelle's Intelligence

99. Cosette Side by Side with the Stranger in the Dark

100. The Unpleasantness of receiving into One's House a Poor Man who may be a Rich Man

101. Thenardier at his Manoeuvres

102. He who seeks to better himself may render his Situation Worse

103. Number 9,430 reappears, and Cosette wins it in the Lottery

104. Master Gorbeau

105. A Nest for Owl and a Warbler

106. Two Misfortunes Make One Piece of Good Fortune

107. The Remarks of the Principal Tenant

108. A Five-Franc Piece Falls on the Ground and Produces a Tumult

109. The Zigzags of Strategy

110. It Is Lucky That the Pont D'Austerlitz Bears Carriages

111. To Wit, the Plan of Paris in 1727

112. The Gropings of Flight

113. Which Would be Impossible With Gas Lanterns

114. The Beginning of an Enigma

115. Continuation of the Enigma

116. The Enigma Becomes Doubly Mysterious

117. The Man with the Bell

118. Which Explains How Javert Got on the Scent

119. Number 62 Rue Petit-Picpus

120. The Obedience of Martin Verga

121. Austerities

122. Gayeties

123. Distractions

124. The Little Convent

125. Some Silhouettes of this Darkness

126. Post Corda Lapides

127. A Century under a Guimpe

128. Origin of the Perpetual Adoration

129. End of the Petit-Picpus

130. The Convent as an Abstract Idea

131. The Convent as an Historical Fact

132. On What Conditions One can respect the Past

133. The Convent from the Point of View of Principles

134. Prayer

135. The Absolute Goodness of Prayer

136. Precautions to be observed in Blame

137. Faith, Law

138. Which treats of the Manner of entering a Convent

139. Fauchelevent in the Presence of a Difficulty

140. Mother Innocente

141. In which Jean Valjean has quite the Air of having read Austin Castillejo

142. It is not Necessary to be Drunk in order to be Immortal

143. Between Four Planks

144. In which will be found the Origin of the Saying: Don't lose the Card

145. A Successful Interrogatory

146. Cloistered







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.




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