The Abbess Xavière de Ferrette, a woman of resolution and energy, as one can easily see by the high forehead and long jaw, becoming alarmed at the increasing expenses of the Chapter and the equally decreasing revenues, decided on some radical remedies. Through the Middle Ages, down to her time, the _chanoinesses_ had lived under one roof, and, according to the holy rule, ate together. But with them fared so many outsiders, their friends and their friends’ friends, with their domestics, that they found themselves being literally eaten out of house and home. The abbess called a solemn meeting wherein they arranged for the building of separate houses, whose construction was given into the hands of Kléber, then architect and inspector of the royal buildings at Belfort. Pictures of Kléber, known rather impersonally to Americans by the Parisian avenue that bears his name, abound in Alsace, and show a sensitive, artistic face, with a pleasure-loving mouth above a short chin, and a halo of light, curly hair. He met an early death in Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign. “_Il avait six pieds en tout_,” his contemporaries were wont admiringly to say of him. In these separate houses, with garden attached, each _chanoinesse_ was to live alone with her _demoiselle_, who at her death would step into her very comfortable shoes, and the abbess only was to receive guests in the name of the Chapter. The house I lodged in was that of the Chanoinesse von Reutner. These dames had to make their titles very clear to their earthly mansions, each having to possess sixteen quarterings evenly balanced, eight on her father’s side and eight on her mother’s side. Gentlemen were chosen to give their word on this somewhat elusive subject, and methought ’twas well they didn’t have to put their hand in the fire at the same time, for what can be sworn to with certainty of those things which have their origin on the mysterious borderland of the emotions? However.... The _chanoinesses_ belonged mostly to the great families of Alsace, the Masevaux, the Ferrettes, though the records show many German names like Furstenburg and Seckingen, or French like Beauffrémont and Fontenoy. Sometimes the Abbey and Chapter were under French domination, sometimes under Austrian, sometimes they would be ceded to noble families like those of the Counts of Bollwiller and of Fugger, and in many ways their history had been checkered since their foundation in the eighth century.