Mariette in Ecstasy Read Online Free PDF Page A

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    She hears horses pass the convent at a trot. She hears under that four or five stringed instruments being practiced down the hallway. Schubert, she thinks. She gets up and opens The Ethics of Belief and abstractly turns pages until Mother Céline hurries in like a regal woman of property, going over what are apparently a kitchen inventory and some sisters’ notes that she’s just been passed. Without irritation she says, “I have entered the room.”
    Mariette smiles uncertainly.
    “Curtsy.”
    Mariette does.
    “We say ‘ Benedicite Dominus ’ in greeting. The Lord bless you. You’ll say ‘ Benedicite ,’ and the superior nun will say, ‘ Dominus .’ Upon leaving one’s company or classroom, you’ll hear the superior nun pronounce, ‘ Adjutorium nostrum in nomine Domini .’ Our help is in the name of the Lord. And you’ll reply, ‘ Qui fecit coelum et terram .’ Who made heaven and earth.”
    “Yes, Reverend Mother.”
    “Sit down, please,” the prioress says, and Mariette complies.
    Mother Céline seems a glamorous actress playing a nun, or one of the grand ladies of inheritance that Mariette has seen in paintings of English society. Without her black veil and gray habit, the prioress would seem a genteel and handsome mother of less than forty, blond and lithe and Continental, but tense and initiating, too, with green eyes that seem to strike what they see. She was Annette Baptiste and a junior at Vassar when Mariette was born, Sister Céline and a novice when their mother died, the prioress of Our Lady of Sorrows since Mariette was twelve. She arranges and grooms her papers on the green felt of the desktop and then she briskly sits opposite Mariette and puts her hands on her knees as she asks, “Are you happy?”
    “Oh yes.”
    She smiles. “We’re happy, too. Every new postulant affirms our own vocations and gives efficacy to our prayers.”
    “Everyone has been very nice.”
    “We must seem to talk and feast all the time.”
    Mariette shakes her head. “I presumed today was an exception.”
    “We aren’t meant to pine away and die here. We’re meant to live in the heartening fullness of God. Who is life and love and happiness.”
    “I know.”
    “We seem to mystify people who are slaves to their pleasures. We often work too hard and rest too little, our food is plain, our days are without variety, we have no possessions nor much privacy, we live uncomfortably with our vows of chastity and obedience; but God is present here and that makes this our heaven on earth. We hope you’ll find the same welcome and peace here that we have, and that you’ll soon develop a genuine and reverent affection for our priory and for your sisters. We pray, too, that soon it will seem you’ve given up very little and, as always with our good God, gained a hundredfold.”
    Everything seems practiced, as if she has said just this to a half-dozen other postulants, but Mariette pleasantly listens and says, “Oh, already I feel that! This is paradise!”
    Mother Céline smiles but stares discerningly at her sister for half a minute. And she asks, “Are you and Father still on good terms?”
    “Yes.”
    “Is there a reason why he wasn’t present for the ceremonies?”
    Mariette pauses before saying, “Papa is a good man, I think, but he has been against my religious vocation since I first began talking about it. He said he’d given the sisters his first daughter and he thought that was enough.”
    The prioress seems to be trying for sympathy, but her stare is tenacious and penetrates like a nail. “That must have been disappointing for you.”
    Mariette shrugs. “God isn’t finished with him yet.”
    Mother Céline sits back in the assessing way of a jurist. She says, “I have a letter from Father that accuses you of being too high-strung for our convent. And he is