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 façade which faced the Rue Petit-Picpus; the carriage
entrance No. 62 marked its extremity. Towards the centre of this façade
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 Aumarais Lane, 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 Églantiers, for God
opened flowers before man cut stones.