lour. After a girl has taken the veil, she is
allowed to receive one visit from her friends and relations, and then
she says good-bye to them for ever.

* * * * *

But if you had been living in Paris towards the end of the sixteenth
century, when Catherine de Medicis was queen-mother, and into the days
when Henry IV. was king, and his son Louis succeeded him, you would have
found this picture of a convent very far from the truth. Convents were
comfortable and even luxurious houses, richly endowed, where poor
noblemen and gentlemen sent their daughters for life, paying on their
entrance what money they could spare, but keeping enough to portion one
or two girls--generally the prettiest of the family--or to help the son
to live in state. If, as often happened, the father did not offer
enough, the abbess would try to get more from him, or else refuse his
daughter altogether. If she was accepted, he bade her farewell for the
time, knowing that he could see her whenever he chose, and that she
would lead quite as pleasant and as amusing an existence as her married
sister. Perhaps, too, she might even be allowed to wear coloured
clothes, for there was one order in which the habit of the nuns was
white and scarlet; but even if the archbishop, or the abbot, or the
king, or whoever had supreme power over the convent, insisted on black
and white being worn, why, it would be easy to model the cap and sleeves
near enough to the fashion to look picturesque; and could not the dress
be of satin and velvet and lace, and yet be black and white still?

As to food, no one was more particular about it than the abbess of a
large convent, or else the fine gentlemen and elegant ladies would not
come from Paris or the country round to her suppers and private
theatricals, where the nuns acted the chief parts, or to the balls for
which she was famous. How pleasant it was in the summer evenings to sit
with their friends and listen to music from hidden performers; and could
anything be so amusing as to walk a little way along the road to Paris
till the nuns reached a stretch of smooth green turf, where the monks
from a neighbouring monastery were waiting to dance with them in the
moonlight?

No, decidedly, nuns were not to be pitied when Henry IV. was king.

Yet soon all these joys were to be things of the past, and it was a girl
of sixteen who set her hand to the work.

* * * * *