1.C.6.10. ORIGIN OF THE PERPETUAL ADORATION
HOWEVER, this almost sepulchral parlor, of which we have
sought to convey an idea, is a purely local trait which is not reproduced
with the same severity in other convents. At the
convent of the Rue du Temple, in particular, which belonged,
in truth, to another order, the black shutters were replaced by
brown curtains, and the parlor itself was a salon with a polished
wood floor, whose windows were draped in white muslin
curtains and whose walls admitted all sorts of frames, a portrait
of a Benedictine nun with unveiled face, painted bouquets,
and even the head of a Turk.
It is in that garden of the Temple convent, that stood that
famous chestnut-tree which was renowned as the finest and the
largest in France, and which bore the reputation among the
good people of the eighteenth century of being the father of all
the chestnut trees of the realm.
As we have said, this convent of the Temple was occupied
by Benedictines of the Perpetual Adoration, Benedictines
quite different from those who depended on Citeaux. This
order of the Perpetual Adoration is not very ancient and does
not go back more than two hundred years. In 1649 the holy
sacrament was profaned on two occasions a few days apart, in
two churches in Paris, at Saint-Sulpice and at Saint-Jean en
Greve, a rare and frightful sacrilege which set the whole town
in an uproar. M. the Prior and Vicar-General of Saint-Germain
des Pres ordered a solemn procession of all his clergy,
in which the Pope's Nuncio officiated. But this expiation did
not satisfy two sainted women, Madame Courtin, Marquise de
Boucs, and the Comtesse de Chateauvieux. This outrage committed
on "the most holy sacrament of the altar," though but
temporary, would not depart from these holy souls, and it
seemed to them that it could only be extenuated by a "Perpetual
Adoration" in some female monastery. Both of them, one
in 1652, the other in 1653, made donations of notable sums to
Mother Catherine de Bar, called of the Holy Sacrament, a
Benedictine nun, for the purpose of founding, to this pious
end, a monastery of the order of Saint-Benoit; the first permission
for this foundation was given to Mother Catherine de
Bar by M. de Metz, Abbe of Saint-Germain, "on condition
that no woman could be received unless she contributed three
hundred livres income, which amounts to six thousand livres,
to the principal." After the Abbe of Saint-Germain, the king
accorded letters-patent; and all the rest, abbatial charter, and
royal letters, was confirmed in 1654 by the Chamber of Accounts
and the Parliament.
Such is the origin of the legal consecration of the establishment
of the Benedictines of the Perpetual Adoration of the
Holy Sacrament at Paris. Their first convent was "a new
building" in the Rue Cassette, out of the contributions of
Mesdames de Boucs and de Chateauvieux.
This order, as it will be seen, was not to be confounded with
the Benedictine nuns of Citeaux. It mounted back to the
Abbe of Saint-Germain des Pres, in the same manner that the
ladies of the Sacred Heart go back to the general of the
Jesuits, and the sisters of charity to the general of the Lazarists.
It
was also totally different from the Bernardines of the
Petit-Picpus, whose interior we have just shown. In 1657,
Pope Alexander VII. had authorized, by a special brief, the
Bernardines of the Rue Petit-Picpus, to practise the Perpetual
Adoration like the Benedictine nuns of the Holy Sacrament.
But the two orders remained distinct none the less.