This _Convent des Anglaises_ was a British community, first established in the French capital in Cromwell's time. It has now been removed, and its site, the Rue St. Victor, has undergone complete transformation. In 1817, however, it was in high repute among conventual educational establishments. To this retreat Aurore was consigned and there spent more than two years, an untroubled time she has spoken of as in many respects the happiest of her life. There is certainly nothing more delightful in her memoirs than the vivid picture there drawn of the convent-school interior, drawn without flattery or malice, and with sympathy and animation. The nunnery was an extensive building of rambling construction--with parts disused and dilapidated--quite a little settlement, counting some 150 inmates, nuns, pupils and teachers; with cells and dormitories, long corridors, chapels, kitchens, distillery, spiral staircases and mysterious nooks and corners; a large garden planted with chestnut trees, a kitchen garden, and a little cemetery without gravestones, over-grown with evergreens and flowers. The sisters were all English, Irish, or Scotch, but the majority of the pupils and the secular mistresses were French. Of the nuns the ex-scholar speaks with respect and affection, but their religious exercises left them but the smaller share of their time and attention to devote to the pupils. The girls almost without exception were of high social rank, the _bourgeois_ element as yet having scarcely penetrated this exclusive seminary. Aurore formed warm friendships with many of her school-fellows, and seems to have been decidedly popular with the authorities as well, in spite of the high spirits which amid congenial company found vent in harmless mischief and a sort of organized playful insubordination. The school had two parties: the _sages_ or good girls, and the _diables_, their opposites. Among the latter Aurore conscientiously enrolled herself and became a leader in their escapades, acquiring the sobriquet of "Madcap." These outbreaks led to nothing more heinous than playing off tricks on a tyrannical mistress, or making raids on the forbidden ground of the kitchen garden. But the charm that held together the confraternity of _diables_ was a grand, long-cherished design, to which their best energy and ingenuity were devoted--a secret, heroic-sounding enterprise, set forth as "the deliverance of the victim." A tradition existed among them that a captive was kept languishing miserably in some remote cell, and they had set themselves the task of discovering and liberating this hapless wretch.