Notre-Dame de Bellaise

There came a man by middle day,
He spied his sport and went away,
And brought the king that very night,
And brake my bower and slew my knight.
                        The Border Widow's Lament


*[footnote: Bellaise is not meant for a type of all nunneries, but
of the condition to which many of the lesser ones had come before
the general reaction and purification of the seventeenth century.]


That same Latin hymn which Cecily St. John daily chanted in her own
chamber was due from the choir of Cistercian sisters in the chapel
of the Convent of Our Lady at Bellaise, in the Bocage of Anjou; but
there was a convenient practice of lumping together the entire
night and forenoon hours at nine o'clock in the morning, and all
the evening ones at Compline, so that the sisters might have
undisturbed sleep at night and entertainment by day. 

Bellaise was a very comfortable little nunnery, which only received richly
dowered inmates, and was therefore able to maintain them in much
ease, though without giving occasion to a breath of scandal.
Founded by a daughter of the first Angevin Ribaumont, it had become
a sort of appanage for the superfluous daughters of the house, and
nothing would more have amazed its present head, Eustacie Barbe de
Ribaumont,--conventually known as La Mere Marie Seraphine de St.-
Louis, and to the world as Madame de Bellaise,--than to be accused
of not fulfilling the intentions of the Bienheureuse Barbe, the
foundress, or of her patron St. Bernard.

Madame de Bellaise was a fine-looking woman of forty, in a high
state of preservation, owing to the healthy life she had led.  Her
eyes were of brilliant, beautiful black her complexion had a glow,
her hair--for she wore it visibly--formed crisp rolls of jetty
ringlets on her temples, almost hiding her close white cap.  The
heavy thick veil was tucked back beneath the furred purple silk
hood that fastened under her chin.  The white robes of her order
were not of serge, but of the finest cloth, and were almost hidden
by a short purple cloak with sleeves, likewise lined and edged with
fur, and fastened on the bosom with a gold brooch.