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Updated: June 28, 2025
Rumor was often busy with the affairs of the Carmelite Convent; and the grandams and gossips of Florence would huddle together around their domestic hearths, on the cold winter's evenings, and venture mysterious hints and whispers of strange deeds committed within the walls of that sacred institution; how from time to time some young and beautiful nun had suddenly disappeared, to the surprise and alarm of her companions; how piercing shrieks had been heard to issue from the interior of the building, by those who passed near it at night, and how the inmates themselves were often aroused from their slumbers by strange noises resembling the rattling of chains, the working of ponderous machinery, and the revolution of huge wheels.
Nothing could possibly be more grotesque than to see groups of the native women, from the wrinkled old grandams to the girls of a dozen years, bathing at all hours of the day in the warm, steaming pools. It is their daily, almost hourly resort. As a rule, a blanket forms their only covering; and if they are cold, day or night, casting this aside, they at once resort to the hot springs for warmth.
''Tis nothing at all, said Landsmath; 'you must laugh at it; we shall hunt a stag together in four days. 'But suppose the blade was poisoned, said the King. 'Old grandams' tales, replied Landsmath; 'if it had been so, the waistcoats and flannels would have rubbed the poison off. The King was pacified, and passed a very good night. "His Majesty one day asked M. de Landsmath how old he was.
Flamboyantly smoking cigars they sat in a box at the burlesque show, their feet up on the rail, while a chorus of twenty daubed, worried, and inextinguishably respectable grandams swung their legs in the more elementary chorus-evolutions, and a Jewish comedian made vicious fun of Jews. In the entr'actes they met other lone delegates.
"Go to the grandams and the children!" she would say, with a shrug of her shoulders, to a priest, whenever one in Algiers or Paris attempted to reclaim her; and a son of the Order of Jesus, famed for persuasiveness and eloquence, had been fairly beaten once when, in the ardor of an African missionary, he had sought to argue with the little Bohemian of the Tricolor, and had had his logic rent in twain, and his rhetoric scattered like dust, under the merciless home-thrusts and the sarcastic artillery of Cigarette's replies and inquiries.
Rows of white cabins were the homes of the colored citizens of the community. An infirmary stood apart for the sick. The old grandams cared for the children.
As to the really old folks, the grandams and maiden aunts of the community, these are, at all moments, in a condition to play with effect the characters of Macbeth's witches; and when, as not unfrequently happens, they judge it expedient to go about bareheaded, the resemblance which they bear to the respectable individuals just alluded to, is complete.
And I dare say Nurse, that you'l go nigh to perceive that its a very hard time, and mony mighty scarce: because formerly the women used to put their hands more liberally in their purses, and one gave a crown, another half a crown; but the times are now so strangely altered, that they keep little mild-shillings only for that use, nay some of them rub it off with a couple of their Grandams gray groats.
''Tis nothing at all, said Landsmath; 'you must laugh at it; we shall hunt a stag together in four days. 'But suppose the blade was poisoned, said the King. 'Old grandams' tales, replied Landsmath; 'if it had been so, the waistcoats and flannels would have rubbed the poison off. The King was pacified, and passed a very good night. "His Majesty one day asked M. de Landsmath how old he was.
They smiled indulgently at our attempts to reap and make girdles for the sheaves, the sickles seemed to grow dull and back-handed at our touch, chatting with the dignified ease which characterizes the Russian peasant. The small children had been left behind in the village, in charge of the grandams and the women unfit for field labor.
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