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Updated: September 16, 2025
In the very thickness of the walls of the basement were cells for penitents and recluses, long since abandoned, and rooms for the menials and slaves, of whom hundreds were employed in the precincts; under ground spread the mystical array of halls, grottoes, galleries and catacombs dedicated to the practice of the Mysteries and the initiation of neophytes; on the roof stood various observatories among them one erected for the study of the heavens by Eratosthenes, where Claudius Ptolemaeus had watched and worked.
"That is excellent; that will be relished," said the recluses of Port- Royal, in spite of the misgivings of M. Singlin. Good heavens, how charming! And how my son reads them! I always think of my daughter, and how that excess of correctness of reasoning would suit her; but your brother says that you consider that it is always the same thing over again. Ah! My goodness, so much the better!
Or if they must needs not live as recluses, why follow they not that other holy text of the Gospel: Christ began to do and to teach? Let them practise first, and school us with their precepts afterwards. A thousand such have I seen in my day, admirers, lovers, philanderers, not of ladies of the world alone, but of nuns; ay, and they too such as made the most noise in the pulpits.
They entered the house and seated themselves in the library, with the large, solemn Family Bible, and the empty inkstand, and the clean pen-wiper, and the paper knife, and the melancholy recluses of books locked into their cells. Presently some one would come to the door and beckon with his finger to some figure sitting in the silent library.
There are not a few recluses in the parish, who come to listen to their teacher and to the familiar prayers, read with touching earnestness and simplicity, as one seldom hears the prayers read anywhere. This Easter morning dawned clear and bright, as Easter morning should. The fresh-bloomed roses and lilies were put in their places.
The children went dancing through the wood, and Philippa, desiring Lena and Oliver to await her pleasure, shut the door of the cell. "Mother," she began for recluses were addressed as professed nuns, and were indeed regarded as the holiest of all celibates "I desire your help." "For body or soul?" was the reply. "For the soul for the life," said Philippa.
Flaubert, the novelist, could never understand that, as Sainte-Beuve relates, the recluses of Port Royal lived for years in the same house and addressed each other as Monsieur to the day of their death. The fact of the matter is that Flaubert had no sort of idea as to what abstract natures are.
How many heavy-hearted recluses have stood in that secluded nook, and been tempted by the sweet, lulling sound of the waves below; how many have paced along this narrow terrace, and felt like prisoners who wore paths in the stone floor where they trod; and how many stupid louts have walked there, insensible to all the charm of it!
Wade from them, and she pitied her loneliness, as she pitied Susan's when Georgie was at school. "Odd, isn't it, dear?" she asked in her soft deliberate voice: she had lost or nearly lost the slightly foreign way of speaking she had had at first. "Odd, isn't it, that those two natural recluses should have found each other?
To contemplate is to labor, to think is to act. Folded arms toil, clasped hands work. A gaze fixed on heaven is a work. Thales remained motionless for four years. He founded philosophy. In our opinion, cenobites are not lazy men, and recluses are not idlers. To meditate on the Shadow is a serious thing.
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