CONCERNING the fatness of abbesses ecclesiastical history has much to tell us, and legend has been busy with the same theme. Tertullian, in his melancholy treatise, 'De Jejuniis,' has a terrible description of the anguish endured by a saintly female of Philadelphia, whose girth was too great to permit her to pass the door of heaven until St Peter rolled back his sleeves and tugged her in as he would have hauled an overweighted net at Galilee; the learned and severe Aldhelm devotes a page of his 'De Laudibus Virginitatis' to the peculiar temptations that beset or are caused by plump persons, with examples that are unquotable; and the strange case of the prioress of the Tor de' Specchi oblates, who flew into a passion and stamped on VOL. CLXXXIX.-NO. MCXLVI. I. the floor, which straightway opened (either by act of God or because she was of prodigious bulk) and admitted her with great rapidity to the cellar, is well known to the wise. That her fall was broken and her death averted by the body of the cellarer, who had observed the feast of St Martin of Tours by eating the greater part of a goose and drinking much crude wine, has afforded argument to many jolly schoolmen and sophistical topers, from the grand Rabelais to the longwinded Redi, and it is rumoured that the curious and erudite author of 'The Path to Rome' has written a monograph on the affair. It were, indeed, a nice theme for the speculative, whether fatness in women have not some eternal co-relation with holiness. In 2 F stances to the contrary are not lacking, such as the wives of some Methodists and Calvinistic men, who are commonly gaunt and bleak, and a certain notable fat nun of Caen, who of pure malice and devilry did immure the present writer for the space of two hours in a nasty and filthy subterranean cell, whither he had descended to gaze on an antique sarcophagus. And it is true that no one can think of St Agnes or the Beatrice of Dante as gross in body, and that to the early painters lantern-jaws and attenuated shanks were the very symbols of virtue. Yet the holy women of Raphael were of a type that in middle age attains to an honourable and matronly plumpness, and the prophets and saints of Michelangelo were no barebones. But these latter, being for the most part men, are outside the argument, and so for the same reason are the bishops and certain other officers of the Church of England, whose costume is designed to cover that part whereof ample men are most ashamed, namely, the belly, and to display that part wherein they most find glory, namely, the calf of the leg. II. Pope Leo XIII. sent her an folk regarded her as a too, Now of all fat women who ever brought honour to a Holy Church and to a profane sex, atheistical and disputatious the abbess of Saint-Ernoul was the most enormous. She moved with the gestures of a hobbled elephant, and her nose and eyes were almost lost behind two vast and rosy cheeks. Yet she was an active woman, observant, and fond of snuff, and she gressive Government, the abbess worked with vigour and success of Saint-Ernoul was marked amongst the poor. She was down as one of the first victims. greatly beloved by the orthodox She was denounced as a danger. and also by many amiable sin- ously influential woman, a supners of the former, the Arch- porter of ancient ideas, a wily bishop of P- presented her schemer who could extract with a snuffbox, and of the lat- large sums of money from the ter, the Bishop of Csent her rich by methods and for pur tesse de N kept her sup- All of which was perfectly snuff, and Madame la Vicom- poses best known to herself. plied with perfumed essence for true: she had immense influ the bath, which essence all found ence, for her smile was more its way into the house of Master persuasive than fifty sermons; Peter the woodcutter, who had she supported the ideas of self sacrifice, which, as all the world for the sick, and she was merciless plunderer of the rich for the sake of the There was a large town near her convent with a lace-industry. The mayor of this town called himself an advanced free-thinker, but he was really a very ignorant and vulgar person who was suffering from a surfeit of the ideas of certain people cleverer than himself. He was a meagre man with a double chin (this is always a dangerous combination), and he hated the good abbess with all the capacity of his stupid soul. He accused her before various high officials of obtaining an influence over the girls in the lace-factories, and of persuading some of them to enter the convent as lay sisters and to continue their work within its walls, which was true. He also accused her of selling the lace which they made to certain establishments in Paris which supplied the less virtuous Parisians with extremely ornamental underclothing, and of thus encouraging immorality and the lusts of the flesh, which was a lie, as he knew right well. He succeeded in obtaining a writ of ejectment, or some such document, from the Minister of the Interior, and he made a speech in the city which alluded to the Rights of Man, to Liberty, and to several other abstract affairs, concluding it with an impassioned demand that all pure-minded reformers III. and moral progressivists should help him in the noble task of turning a colony of dangerous women neck and crop out of their lair. The pure-minded reformers obeyed him to a man. There were about three dozen of them. The mayor put on his tricolor scarf, added a few policemen to the band of disciples, and set off for the convent, amid the consternation of the honest market-women and the satirical ululations of many small boys. When the procession reached the convent gate it found the abbess waiting to receive it. The mayor struck a majestic attitude, inflated his chest, read the lucid prose of the Minister of the Interior, and wound up with some original remarks of a triumphant and hectoring nature. To this the abbess, whose blood was up to a height most dangerous for anyone of her habit of body, replied that he was a miserable liar, and that she intended to stay in the convent for as long as she chose to do so. The mayor indicated the policeman (who looked remarkably sheepish, for the abbess had known them all ever since they were born), and regretted that he should be compelled to use force. The abbess, with a magnificent gesture, invited him to do his worst. At the same moment the under-gar dener, a poor, fond peasant who cared nothing for the dignity of mayors but worshipped the abbess, directed a powerful jet of water from the convent fire-hose full against the mayor's tricolor scarf. The mayor collapsed abruptly, and lay struggling in the flood like a stranded Leviathan, and when the police advanced to arrest the undergardener he bowled them over like ninepins, shouting joyously as he performed this horrid act. He then turned his attention to the thirty odd pure-minded reformers, who withdrew in disorder. Meanwhile the abbess, with an agility that was certainly lent her by Heaven, waded gallantly forth, snatched up the document, which had fallen with the mayor, tore it in half, and sent the fragments sailing down the wind that blew coldly on the saturated moralists. Then she returned to the convent, and the gardener remained on the watch with his hose at the window. The infuriated and sodden mayor went back to the city and lay in bed for two days. During this period he was visited by the commandant of the garrison, and when he had recovered from his cold he set out for the convent acoompanied by twenty soldiers, half a dozen engineers, and a machinegun. In justice to the mayor, we must add that the last dreadful item of the expedition was intended for the undergardener. The soldiers were pelted by little boys with various missiles, both vegetable and mineral, and cheered by a vagrant imbecile, who was arrested. They approached the convent in good order, but when they had prepared the machine-gun for action they discovered that the front door was open and the abbess and nuns had disappeared, taking with them everything of any value. The soldiers smoked cigarettes in the chapel (by request of the mayor), broke IV. a few windows with their bayonets, and marched back to barracks. In this way, after five hundred of years error, the foundation of SaintErnoul was finally abolished by the intrepid pioneers of a new age. The abbess, knowing well that she would be forcibly driven from the convent after her defiance of the mayor, had contrived to place most of her nuns in various communities which had not yet been dispersed by the Government. She herself was the last to leave the convent, but when she had seen all its few valuable possessions safely packed and sent to a great ecclesiastic in Paris who was an old friend, she departed late one afternoon, accompanied by three sisters whose names were three sweet symphonies. She did not forget the under-gardener, but obtained employment for him in a place that was sufficiently distant from the revengeful |