Mariette in Ecstasy Read Online Free PDF

troubled by gossip from friends and patients about trances, hallucinations, unnatural piety, great extremes of temperament, and, as he put it, ‘inner wrenchings.’ I have laid all that aside, of course, or you wouldn’t be here, but I would like to hear what you have to say about his qualms and hesitations.”
    Mariette suddenly seems slow and dull and oddly abstract, like a wrong sum at the tail end of a child’s arithmetic. She says, “I have forgiven him for them.”
    “Was he dishonest in his description?”
    “I have no opinion, Reverend Mother.”
    “Was he duped then?”
    She just stares.
    “We won’t be, Mariette. Secrets are impossible here. Your mistress, Mother Saint-Raphaël, will be watching you closely these next few months. You’ll be put to test many times. We have wonderful plans and expectations for you, but you will have to prove worthy of them. Don’t try to be exceptional; simply be a good nun. Saint Ignatius Loyola gives us the right prescription: Work as if everything depended on you, but pray as if everything depended on God.”
    “I shall.”
    “I’ll take you to the oratory now.”
     
    —Were you surprised by the tone?
    —She did seem cold.
    —Were you hurt?
    —Oh no! I was so pleased to see our dear God using my sister for my own holiness and good. Everything seemed to be saying to me, She will be a grace for you .
     
    Mother Céline rises up and holds open the door for the postulant before preceding her down the hallway. She grazes the stone with her knuckles as she says, “We try to walk these halls as silently as the Holy Ghost. And we stay close to the walls here in humility and in graciousness to our sisters who may be talking with God.”
    Sisters Honoré, Saint-Denis, Véronique, and Philomène are gaily leaving the haustus room with their violins and viola and bows tucked underneath their arms. Sister Saint-Denis sees the prioress and gravely curtsies, and then the choirmistress and the others do, too.
    Mother Céline half raises her hand in blessing and asks, “What was that you were practicing?”
    “Franz Schubert,” Sister Honoré says. “‘Death and the Maiden.’ Was it good, Reverend Mother?”
    “Oh indeed. Wonderful. You resurrected her.”
    Wild, high-strung, deferential laughter follows, and Mother Céline frowningly turns from it.
     
    Troughs of sunlight angle into the oratory like green and blue and pink bolts of cloth grandly flung down from the high, painted windows. Still present are the wood oil smells and habit starch and an incense of styrax and cascarilla bark. Mother Céline and her postulant genuflect together and Mariette’s right knee touches down on a great red Persian carpet that seems as warm as a sleeping cat. She sees faint gyres of dust in the hot upper air.
    The prioress says, “We praise God in song here seven times a day. At two a.m. for Matins and Lauds, and then for the first, third, sixth, and ninth hours of the day: Prime, Terce, Sext, and Nones. We then have Vespers at sunset, and Compline after collation and just before bed. Every week we go through the whole Psalter. Sister Honoré plans to teach you the rudiments of plainchant next week.”
    Mother Céline walks forward to the right-hand choir while she tells her sister, “Externs, novices, and postulants are the first to enter. You all kneel in the first rows.” She puts her hand on the second stall in from the upper end. “You’ll be here, Mariette.”
    Mariette exultantly walks around to her stall, sitting testingly in it and skidding both hands along its shined rail. She kneels and prays for greater religious fervor and that the joy she feels now will comfort her in the difficult times ahead. And then she feels the prioress kneel beside her and finds only kindness in Annie’s eyes.
    She asks Mariette, “Were you called just recently?”
    “Early,” she says. “Continually. Ever since my confirmation God has been persuading me.”
    Mother Céline fondly