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Updated: May 29, 2025
"'This wretched creature has gone mad, said my father, pulling the bell-rope. "But Saint-Jean is deaf, and he did not come. So we had to sit in unspeakable agony and listen to the strange talk of the man who calls himself a Trappist and declares that he had come to give himself up to justice in expiation of his transgressions.
Calixtus, informed him that he of whom he was in search had left half an hour before. "You will find him at the Basilica of Saint Neree and Saint Achilles," added the Trappist; "it is the fete of those two saints, and at five o'clock there will be a procession in their catacombs.... It is a fifteen minutes' ride from here, near the tower Marancia, on the Via Ardeatina."
There was a sigh of relief when the priests and bridesmaids led away the bride, looking strange in her train, with her head discrowned and her neck bare. The procession returned almost immediately. There was no longer a bride in a white skirt, but a nun in a black robe. She bowed before the Trappist, and again knelt between her mother and sister.
The sensation they caused was disagreeable, a sensation of choking, of suffocation, without one's really getting any impression of grandeur. The place seemed like an abandoned ant-hill. The wide spaces that opened out at the sides of the passage were chapels, the monk said. The Trappist cicerone contributed to removing any serious feelings with his chatter and his jokes.
At evening as he undressed he sighed: "To-morrow I shall lie down in a cell, amazing when I think of it! I should have considered anyone mad, who, a few years ago, had prophesied that I should take refuge in a Trappist monastery; yet now I am going there of my own accord, and yet no, I am going driven by an unknown power, I am going as a whipped cur. "After all, what a symptom of the time it is!
At last he made a desperate effort, stammered the beginning of the Confiteor, and said, "I have not confessed, since my childhood; since then I have led a shameful life, I have ..." The words would not come. The Trappist remained silent, and did not assist him at all. "I have committed every kind of debauch, I have done everything ... everything ..."
"You see," repeated the Trappist, "all those things are shown there; and remember that none of the paintings was specially prepared: they are absolutely authentic." At a question from Pierre, whose astonishment was increasing, he admitted that the catacombs had been mere cemeteries at the outset, when no religious ceremonies had been celebrated in them.
In all probability neither mother nor daughter was devout, for both glanced askance at their new companion's cassock, and suddenly became serious. Then they all went down and found themselves in a narrow subterranean corridor. "Take care, mesdames," repeated the Trappist, lighting the ground with his candle. "Walk slowly, for there are projections and slopes."
The people are a little nervous about having him come back, and they may well be, for Zulu kings have been terrible people sometimes like Tchaka, Dingaan, and Cetewayo. There is a large Trappist monastery two hours from Durban, over the country roads, and in company with Mr. Milligan and Mr. Hunter, general manager of the Natal government railways, who knew the heads of it, we went out to see it.
The Substitut informed me one day that he was making a "retreat" for three days at the Monastery of La Trappe d'Aiguebelle, and asked me if I would care to accompany him. To pass three days in a Trappist Monastery certainly promised a novel experience, but I pointed out that I was a Protestant, and that I could hardly expect the monks to welcome me with open arms.
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