Our novitiate is a large apartment with five immense windows in it. (When you are taxed for windows, you may as well have large ones, and the French love the air and live in it.) No matter how cold it is, the windows are always open--and when I say _open_, I mean the _whole_ window; for, as I have already remarked, they swing open like folding doors. On cold days a few _mottes_ are burning in the fireplace, around which a folding screen is drawn. These mottes are mostly of tan, pressed into flat round cakes like a small cheese. They give out strong heat. Wood is very scarce here, and consequently dear, and I have never seen coal. As for lights, we burn linseed-oil, which gives a clear yellow light, and the odor is not offensive like whale-oil. Each sister has a little coil of yellow wax-taper to light when she wishes to go about the monastery in the evening. The floor is paved with square red tiles, as in all the houses here, but we have little mats to protect our feet from the chill. Each novice has her table and writing-desk, at which she studies or sews. At one end of the room is an altar, and the walls are adorned with engravings of a religious character. Leading from the novitiate is the _chambrette_ of the mistress of novices, in which is the novices' library. It is always open to us, and we like an excuse for entering it. Our manner of spending the day is nearly unvaried. We rise at half-past four, and, after completing our toilettes, (for even nuns have toilettes; one's garments must be put together somehow,) we descend to the chapel. The choir is impenetrably dark most of the year at this early hour. Only the little lamp is twinkling near the tabernacle! One by one the nuns come noiselessly in, like so many shadows. This hour of morning meditation is delicious. The perfect stillness, in which you can hear your own heart beat, disposes you to reflection. The soul becomes steeped in the spirit of the place and the hour passes too quickly away. Then we say the hours. The morning sacrifice follows with its awful mysteries, which are ever fresh and wonderful. When we issue from the chapel, after our exercises of more than two hours, we go one by one, when we choose, to the refectory, for there is no breakfast, properly speaking. The nuns take a piece of dry bread, with perchance some fruit, and eat it, as the children of Israel ate the passover, standing and ready girded for the labors of the day, for which we are all ready at eight. That would be called a fast in America. But when a sister is delicate, she can have some coffee or chocolate. The world used to cry out against the good living of monastic orders; now it says their austerities are fatal to the health. It is always the way with the world--now, as in the days when John the Baptist came "neither eating nor drinking."