I fell into conversation with two nuns belonging to the Order of St.
Charles, and I wish I could delineate the hideousness of their costumes,
and the unmitigated ugliness of their general appearance. Their dress
consisted of a plain black gown with round cape and close fitting hood,
on each side of which projected black gauze flaps extended on wires,
shading their withered, ill-favoured countenances, and making them look
indeed more like female inquisitors, ogres, or Witches of Endor than
human beings. I never saw human nature made so uninviting, and I could
fancy the terror inspired by these awful figures, with their bat-like
flaps, in the tender minds of the little children entrusted to their
care. It was edifying to hear these holy women discourse upon the Paris
Exhibition, which it is hardly necessary to say the clerical party
throughout France was bound to consider a failure. Alike the highest and
the lowest, bishop and parish priest, were determined in their own minds
that the Exhibition, as a display of rehabilitated France under a
Republican Government, should fail altogether, and come to some
conspicuously bad end. The very reverse had happened, yet here were two
women of age, experience, and some intelligence coolly talking of this
terrible failure of the Exhibition, financially and otherwise, the bad
effect upon trade generally, and so forth.
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