ege 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.

CHAPTER XI--END OF THE PETIT-PICPUS

At the beginning of the Restoration, the convent of the Petit-Picpus
was in its decay; this forms a part of the general death of the order,
which, after the eighteenth century, has been disappearing like all
the religious orders. Co