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Updated: June 24, 2025
And to-day which was Tuesday he had seen Charlie Thesiger. He had found him lying dangerously wounded in the British Hospital at Antwerp. That, he said, was what had kept him there. And he had brought him back with him to Ghent. He was in the Couvent de Saint Pierre. He thought, perhaps, it would be better not to tell Viola just yet. Charlie didn't know, he said, that she was here.
To a countenance which otherwise would have been calm, and perhaps pensive, they gave an expression of extreme vivacity and unusual animation, and perhaps of restlessness and arrogance: it might have been courage. The lady was dressed in the costume of a Chanoinesse??? of a Couvent des dames nobles; an institution to which Protestant and Catholic ladles are alike admitted.
The tedium of a journey under such circumstances is something dreadful, and in the hot months one has to stop five or six hours in the middle of the day to avoid falling ill. My coachman said he did not want to go beyond St. Quirico, where there was an excellent inn, that night, so he proposed waiting at Bon Couvent till four o'clock. We had therefore six hours wherein to rest.
Of it Madame de Sévigné wrote: "It is the Palais d'Armide; you know the manner of Le Notre; here he has done his best." The Couvent des Recollettes, just across the Bois de Satory, was built by Louis XIV out of regard for the religieux whom he displaced from an edifice which stood upon a plot which was actually needed for the palace gardens.
Never had Damaris admired the "man with the blue eyes" more, never felt a more perfect trust in him, than when beholding him as Mousquetaire au Couvent thus!
In the chapel is the following inscription: "Soeur Bourgeoise, Fondatrice du Couvent" Sister Bourgeoise, Founder of the Convent. Nothing was more common than for the Superior to step hastily into our community-rooms, while numbers of us were assembled there, and hastily communicate her wishes in words like these:
Her only education seemed to have been supplied by two years at the "Couvent des Dames Anglaises" at St.-Omer, and all that she had retained from it was a small stock of French idioms, most of which she had forgotten how to use, though she did use them frequently, with a certain timid pretension. Of that habit Fountain, the fastidious, thought that he should break her.
"She never had any as a child, and I'm glad you have given her none." "We love her too much," said the spectacled sister with dignity. "And as for faults, how can we give what we have not? Le couvent n'est pas comme le monde, monsieur. She's our daughter, as you may say. We've had her since she was so small."
And he said nothing about sending Viola away. He did better than that. He told her he had brought Charlie Thesiger from Antwerp yesterday, and that her cousin was dying in the Couvent de Saint Pierre, and that perhaps it would be a bit easier for him if she were with him. We took her to the convent that morning. On the way there she asked Jimmy why he hadn't told her about Charlie yesterday.
"Faith, they're so low, that there's not light left for the experiment; besides, French life spoils one for matrimony here, at least so poor Alice used to say 'no galling bonds on this side of the Channel' the peaceful couvent grille, or a light mariage de convenance among the pleasant southerns; not that they are so pleasant as they were formerly either."
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