human
I laugh, because having had some business to transact with my nun aunt of whom I was speaking, only visible like your abbess through a trellis, I found out how to read her thoughts a little.
gpt
Ah! how was that?
human
In this way. Since I could not see her face, which was hidden behind the lattice of her cage, and disappeared behind her veil, and if she should answer me, having nothing to guide me but the inflexions of her voice, always circumspect and always calm, I ended by trusting only to her great glasses, round, with buff frames, which almost all nuns wear. Well, all the repressed vivacity of this woman burst out there; suddenly in a corner of her glasses, there was a glimmer, and I then understood that her eye had lighted up, and gave the lie to the indifference of her voice, the determined quietness of her tone.
gpt
Do you know the Superior of the Benedictines, in the Rue Monsieur?
human
I have spoken with her once or twice; there the parlour is monastic, there is not the provincial and middle-class side of the Rue Tournefort, it is composed of a sombre room, of which all the breadth at the end is taken up by an iron grating, and behind the grating are again wooden bars, and a shutter painted black. You are quite in the dark, and the abbess, scarcely in the light, appears to you like a phantom.
gpt
The abbess is, I suppose, the nun, elderly, fragile and very short, to whom Dom Etienne committed the novice?
human
Yes. She is a remarkable shepherdess of souls, and what is more, a very well educated woman of most distinguished manners.
gpt
Oh, thought Durtal:
human
I can imagine that these abbesses are charming, but also terrible women. Saint Teresa was goodness itself, but when she speaks in her 'Way of Perfection' of nuns who band themselves together to discuss the will of their mother, she shows herself inexorable, for she declares that perpetual imprisonment should be inflicted on them as soon as possible and without flinching, and in fact she is right, for every disorderly sister infects the flock, and gives the rot to souls.
gpt
Ah, he said, as if speaking to himself,
human
True, said Durtal,
gpt
La Trappe is one of the great branches of the tree of Saint Benedict, but how is it that its ordinances do not differ from those which the Patriarch left?