"Eat,
drink, and be merry, for to-morrow you die," is the maxim of the
light-hearted, we must even say frivolous population. While the men
amuse themselves in the cafes, the women go to the confessional, and no
matter at what hour you enter a church, you are sure to find them thus
occupied. The Jesuits have established a large training-school here,
_une maison de noviciat_, so called; and conventual institutions abound,
as at Arbois. Just beyond the pleasant garden of the Presbytere is a
large building of cloistered nuns, wretched women, belonging to the
upper ranks of society, who have shut themselves up to mortify the flesh
and practise all kinds of puerilities for the glory of the church. All
the handsome municipal institutions, large hospitals, orphanages,
asylums for the aged, &c., are in the hands of the nuns and priests, and
woe betide the unfortunate Protestant who is driven to seek such
shelter!
The same battle occurs here over Protestant interments as in other parts
of Franche-Comte. In some cases it is necessary for the prefets to send
gendarmes, and have the law carried out by force; the village mayors
being generally uneducated men, mere tools of the cures.
After the idyllic pictures I have drawn of other parts of France, I am
reluctantly obliged to draw a very different picture of society here.
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