and bid me cease. The Superior imagined this was not only a tribute to my talent, but an acknowledgement of the power of his party, and he applauded without measure or judgement. Till that moment, I had never conceived I could be the object of a party in the convent. The Superior was determined to make me a Jesuit, and therefore was pledged for my _sanity_. The monks wished for an exorcism, an _auto de fe_, or some such bagatelle, to diversify the dreariness of monasticism, and therefore were anxious I should be, or appear, deranged or possessed. Their pious wishes, however, failed. I had appeared when summoned, _behaved_ with scrupulous correctness, and the next day was appointed for my taking the vows. “That next day--Oh! that I could describe it!--but it is impossible--the profound stupefaction in which I was plunged prevented my noticing things which would have inspired the most uninterested spectator. I was so absorbed, that though I remember facts, I cannot paint the slightest trace of the feelings which they excited. During the night I slept profoundly, till I was awoke by a knock at my door.--“My dear child, how are you employed?” I knew the voice of the Superior, and I replied, “My father, I was sleeping.” “And I was macerating myself at the foot of the altar for you, my child,--the scourge is red with my blood.” I returned no answer, for I felt the maceration was better merited by the betrayer than the betrayed. Yet I was mistaken; for in fact, the Superior felt some compunction, and had undergone this penance on account of my repugnance and alienation of mind, more than for his own offences. But Oh! _how false is a treaty made with God, which we ratify with our own blood_, when he has declared there is but one sacrifice he will accept, even that of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world! Twice in the night, I was thus disturbed, and twice answered in the same language. The Superior, I make no doubt, was sincere. He thought he was doing all for God, and his bleeding shoulders testified his zeal. But I was in such a state of mental ossification, that I neither felt, heard, or understood; and when he knocked a second and third time at the door of my cell to announce the severity of his macerations, and the efficacy of his intercessions with God, I answered, “Are not criminals allowed to sleep the night before their execution?” At hearing these words, which must have made him shudder, the Superior fell prostrate before the door of my cell, and I turned to sleep again. But I could hear the voices of the monks as they raised the Superior, and bore him to his cell. They said, “He is incorrigible--you humiliate yourself in vain--when he is _ours_, you shall see him a different being--he shall then prostrate himself before you.” I heard this, and slept on. The morning came--I knew what it would bring--I dramatized the whole scene in my own mind. I imagined I witnessed the tears of my parents, the sympathy of the congregation.