文档介绍：The Duchesse de
Langeais
by Honore de Balzac
In a Spanish city on an island in the Mediterranean, there stands a
convent of the Order of Barefoot Carmelites, where the rule instituted by
St. Theresa is still preserved with all the first rigour of the reformation
brought about by that illustrious woman. Extraordinary as this may seem,
it is none the less true.
Almost every religious house in the Peninsula, or in Europe for that
matter, was either destroyed or anised by the outbreak of the French
Revolution and the Napoleonic wars; but as this island was protected
through those times by the English fleet, its wealthy convent and
peaceable inhabitants were secure from the general trouble and spoliation.
The storms of many kinds which shook the first fifteen years of the
eenth century spent their force before they reached those cliffs at so
short a distance from the coast of Andalusia.
If the rumour of the Emperor's name so much as reached the shore of
the island, it is doubtful whether the holy women kneeling in the cloisters
grasped the reality of his dream-like progress of glory, or the majesty that
blazed in flame across kingdom after kingdom during his meteor life.
In the minds of the Roman Catholic world, the convent stood out pre-
eminent for a stern discipline which nothing had changed; the purity of its
rule had attracted unhappy women from the furthest parts of Europe,
women deprived of all human ties, sighing after the long suicide
plished in the breast of God. No convent, indeed, was so well
fitted for plete detachment of the soul from all earthly things,
which is demanded by the religious life, albeit on the continent of Europe
there are many convents magnificently adapted to the purpose of their
existence. Buried away in the loneliest valleys, hanging in mid-air on the
steepest mountainsides, set down on the brink of precipices, in every place
man has sought for the poetry of the Infinite, the solemn awe of Silence; in
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