sts crushed with wicker hurdles, their knees excoriated with
prayer; women who think themselves wives, spectres who think themselves
seraphim. Do these women think? No. Have they any will? No. Do they
love? No. Do they live? No. Their nerves have turned to bone; their
bones have turned to stone. Their veil is of woven night. Their breath
under their veil resembles the indescribably tragic respiration of
death. The abbess, a spectre, sanctifies them and terrifies them.
The immaculate one is there, and very fierce. Such are the ancient
monasteries of Spain. Lairs of terrible devotion, caverns of virgins,
ferocious places.

Catholic Spain is more Roman than Rome herself. The Spanish convent was,
above all others, the Catholic convent. There was a flavor of the Orient
about it. The archbishop, the kislar-aga of heaven, locked up and kept
watch over this seraglio of souls reserved for God. The nun was the
odalisque, the priest was the eunuch. The fervent were chosen in dreams
and possessed Christ. At night, the beautiful, nude young man descended
from the cross and became the ecstasy of the cloistered one. Lofty walls
guarded the mystic sultana, who had the crucified for her sultan, from
all living distraction. A glance on the outer world was infidelity. The
in pace replaced the leather sack. That which was cast into the sea in
the East was thrown into the ground in the West. In both quarters, women
wrung their hands; the waves for the first, the grave for the last; here
the drowned, there the buried. Monstrous parallel.

To-day the upholders of the past, unable to deny these things, have
adopted the expedient of smiling at them. There has come into fashion
a strange and easy manner of suppressing the revelations of history, of
invalidating the commentaries of philosophy, of eliding all embarrassing
facts and all gloomy questions. A matter for declamations, say the
clever. Declamations, repeat the foolish. Jean-Jacques a declaimer;
Diderot a declaimer; Voltaire on Calas, Labarre, and Sirven, declaimers.
I know not who has recently discovered that Tacitus was a declaimer,
that Nero was a victim, and that pity is decidedly due to "that poor
Holofernes."

Facts, however, are awkward things to disconcert, and they are
obstinate. The author of this book has seen, with his own eyes, eight
leagues distant from Brussels,--there are relics of the Middle Ages
there which are attainable for everybody,--at the Abbey of Villers, the
h