Besides, at this moment through which we are passing, a moment which luckily will not leave its imprint upon the nineteenth century, at this hour when so many men have the forehead low and the soul far from lofty, among so many beings whose code is selfish enjoyment, and who are taken up with material things, ephemeral and shapeless, he who exiles himself seems to us worthy of veneration. The monastery is a renunciation. Mistaken sacrifice is still sacrifice. To mistake for duty a serious error, this has its noble side. Taken by itself ideally, and looking on all sides of truth until we have exhausted impartially all its aspects, the monastery and still more the convent for women,--for in our society woman is the greatest sufferer, and her protest appears in this exile of the cloister,--the convent for women has undeniably a certain grandeur. This cloistered life so austere and so sad, some of whose features we have pointed out, is not life, for it is not liberty; it is not the tomb, for it is not lasting. It is the weird place from which is seen as from the crest of a high mountain on one side the abyss in which we now are, on the other, the abyss in which we shall be; it is a narrow and misty boundary which separates two worlds, cast into light and into shadow by both at a time, where the weak ray of life blends with the flickering ray of death; it is the penumbra of the tomb. While we do not believe as these women do, we live like them by faith; and we have never been able to think, without a kind of terror, religious and tender, without a sort of pity mixed with envy, of these devoted creatures, trembling and trusting, these souls humble and proud, who dare to live on the very border of mystery, waiting between the world which is closed, and heaven which is not yet open, faced toward the light which they do not see, having only the consolation of thinking that they know where it is, longing for the gulf and the unknown, with eyes fixed upon the motionless darkness, kneeling, distracted, stupefied, shuddering, half lifted at times by the deep breathing of eternity. BOOK VIII CEMETERIES TAKE WHAT IS GIVEN THEM. CHAPTER I. HOW TO GET INTO A CONVENT.