. The
least exceptionable pupil was the poor little Sylvie I have mentioned
once before. Sylvie was gentle in manners, intelligent in mind; she was
even sincere, as far as her religion would permit her to be so, but her
physical organization was defective; weak health stunted her growth and
chilled her spirits, and then, destined as she was for the cloister,
her whole soul was warped to a conventual bias, and in the tame, trained
subjection of her manner, one read that she had already prepared herself
for her future course of life, by giving up her independence of thought
and action into the hands of some despotic confessor. She permitted
herself no original opinion, no preference of companion or employment;
in everything she was guided by another. With a pale, passive, automaton
air, she went about all day long doing what she was bid; never what she
liked, or what, from innate conviction, she thought it right to do. The
poor little future religieuse had been early taught to make the dictates
of her own reason and conscience quite subordinate to the will of
her spiritual director. She was the model pupil of Mdlle. Reuter's
establishment; pale, blighted image, where life lingered feebly, but
whence the soul had been conjured by Romish wizard-craft!

A few English pupils there were in this school, and these might be
divided into two classes. 1st. The continental English--the daughters
chiefly of broken adventurers, whom debt or dishonour had driven from
their own country. These poor girls had never known the advantages
of settled homes, decorous example, or honest Protestant education;
resident a few months now in one Catholic school, now in another, as
their parents wandered from land to land--from France to Germany, from
Germany to Belgium--they had picked up some scanty instruction, many bad
habits, losing every notion even of the first elements of religion and
morals, and acquiring an imbecile indifference to every sentiment that
can elevate humanity; they were distinguishable by an habitual look
of sullen dejection, the result of crushed self-respect and constant
browbeating from their Popish fellow-pupils, who hated them as English,
and scorned them as heretics.

The second class were British English. Of these I did not encounter half
a dozen during the whole time of my attendance at the seminary; their
characteristics were clean but careless dress, ill-arranged hair
(compared with the tight and trim foreigners), e