e most austere and
self-denying orders I have met with. In this gloomy retreat, it gave
me pain to observe the infatuation of men, who have devoutly reduced
themselves to a much worse condition than that of the beasts. Folly,
you see, is the lot of humanity, whether it arises in the flowery
paths of pleasure, or the thorny ones of an ill-judged devotion. But
of the two sorts of fools, I shall always think that the merry one
has the most eligible fate; and I cannot well form a notion of that
spiritual and ecstatic joy, that is mixed with sighs, groans, hunger
and thirst, and the other complicated miseries of monastic
discipline. It is a strange way of going to work for happiness, to
excite an enmity between soul and body, which nature and providence
have designed to live together in an union and friendship, and which
we cannot separate like man and wife, when they happen to disagree.
The profound silence that is enjoined upon the monks of La Trappe, is
a singular circumstance of their unsociable and unnatural discipline;
and were this injunction never to be dispensed with, it would be
needless to visit them in any other character than as a collection of
statues; but the superior of the convent suspended, in our favour,
that rigorous law, and allowed one of the mutes to converse with me,
and answer a few discreet questions. He told me, that the monks of
this order in France are still more austere than those of Italy, as
they never taste wine, flesh, fish, or eggs; but live entirely upon
vegetables. The story that is told of the institution of this order
is remarkable, and is well attested, if my information be good. Its
founder was a French nobleman, whose name was Bouthillier da (sic)
Rance, a man of pleasure and gallantry, which were converted into the
deepest gloom of devotion, by the following incident. His affairs
obliged him to absent himself for some time, from a lady with whom he
had lived in the most intimate and tender connections of successful
love. At his return to Paris, he proposed to surprise her agreeably;
and, at the same time, to satisfy his own impatient desire of seeing
her, by going directly, and without ceremony, to her apartment by a
back stair, which he was well acquainted with.--But think of the
spectacle that presented itself to him at his entrance into the
chamber that had so often been the scene of love's highest raptures!
His mistress dead--dead of the small-pox--disfigured beyond
exp