1.C.6.8. POST CORDA LAPIDES
AFTER having sketched its moral face, it will not prove
unprofitable to point out, in a few words, its material configuration.
The reader already has some idea of it.
The convent of the Petit-Picpus-Sainte-Antoine filled almost
the whole of the vast trapezium which resulted from the
intersection of the Rue Polonceau, the Rue Droit-Mur, the Rue
Petit-Picpus, and the unused lane, called Rue Aumarais on old
plans. These four streets surrounded this trapezium like a
moat. The convent was composed of several buildings and a
garden. The principal building, taken in its entirety, was
a juxtaposition of hybrid constructions which, viewed from a
bird's-eye view, outlined, with considerable exactness, a gibbet
laid flat on the ground. The main arm of the gibbet occupied
the whole of the fragment of the Rue Droit-Mur comprised
between the Rue Petit-Picpus and the Rue Polonceau; the
lesser arm was a lofty, gray, severe grated facade which faced
the Rue Petit-Picpus; the carriage entrance No. 62 marked its
extremity. Towards the centre of this facade was a low,
arched door, whitened with dust and ashes, where the spiders
wove their webs, and which was open only for an hour or two
on Sundays, and on rare occasions, when the coffin of a nun
left the convent. This was the public entrance of the church.
The elbow of the gibbet was a square hall which was used as the
servants' hall, and which the nuns called
the buttery. In the
main arm were the cells of the mothers, the sisters, and the
novices. In the lesser arm lay the kitchens, the refectory,
backed up by the cloisters and the church. Between the door
No. 62 and the corner of the closed lane Aumarais, was the
school, which was not visible from without. The remainder
of the trapezium formed the garden, which was much lower
than the level of the Rue Polonceau, which caused the walls
to be very much higher on the inside than on the outside. The
garden, which was slightly arched, had in its centre, on the
summit of a hillock, a fine pointed and conical fir-tree, whence
ran, as from the peaked boss of a shield, four grand alleys, and,
ranged by twos in between the branchings of these, eight small
ones, so that, if the enclosure had been circular, the geometrical
plan of the alleys would have resembled a cross superposed
on a wheel. As the alleys all ended in the very irregular walls
of the garden, they were of unequal length. They were bordered
with currant bushes. At the bottom, an alley of tall
poplars ran from the ruins of the old convent, which was at
the angle of the Rue Droit-Mur to the house of the Little Convent,
which was at the angle of the Aumarais lane. In front
of the Little Convent was what was called the little garden.
To this whole, let the reader add a courtyard, all sorts of varied-angles
formed by the interior buildings, prison walls, the long
black line of roofs which bordered the other side of the
Rue Polonceau for its sole perspective and neighborhood, and
he will be able to form for himself a complete image of what
the house of the Bernardines of the Petit-Picpus was forty
years ago. This holy house had been built on the precise site
of a famous tennis-ground of the fourteenth to the sixteenth
century, which was called the "tennis-ground of the eleven
thousand devils."
All these streets, moreover, were more ancient than Paris.
These names, Droit-Mur and Aumarais, are very ancient; the
streets which bear them are very much more ancient still.
Aumarais Lane was called Maugout Lane; the Rue Droit-Mur
was called the Rue des Eglantiers, for God opened flowers
before man cut stones.