Although very old, she still played the harp, and did it very well.
When she went away she left her mark in her cell.
Madame de Genlis was superstitious and a Latinist.
These two words furnish a tolerably good profile of her.
A few years ago, there were still to be seen, pasted in the inside of a little cupboard in her cell in which she locked up her silverware and her jewels, these five lines in Latin, written with her own hand in red ink on yellow paper, and which, in her opinion, possessed the property of frightening away robbers:--
Imparibus meritis pendent tria corpora ramis:[15]
Dismas et Gesmas, media est divina potestas;
Alta petit Dismas, infelix, infima, Gesmas;
Nos et res nostras conservet summa potestas.
Hos versus dicas, ne tu furto tua perdas.
[15] On the boughs hang three bodies of unequal merits: Dismas and Gesmas, between is the divine power.
Dismas seeks the heights, Gesmas, unhappy man, the lowest regions; the highest power will preserve us and our effects.
If you repeat this verse, you will not lose your things by theft.
These verses in sixth century Latin raise the question whether the two thieves of Calvary were named, as is commonly believed, Dismas and Gestas, or Dismas and Gesmas.
This orthography might have confounded the pretensions put forward in the last century by the Vicomte de Gestas, of a descent from the wicked thief. However, the useful virtue attached to these verses forms an article of faith in the order of the Hospitallers.
The church of the house, constructed in such a manner as to separate the Great Convent from the Boarding-school like a veritable intrenchment, was, of course, common to the Boarding-school, the Great Convent, and the Little Convent.
The public was even admitted by a sort of lazaretto entrance on the street.
But all was so arranged, that none of the inhabitants of the cloister could see a face from the outside world.
Suppose a church whose choir is grasped in a gigantic hand, and folded in such a manner as to form, not, as in ordinary churches, a prolongation behind the altar, but a sort of hall, or obscure cellar, to the right of the officiating priest; suppose this hall to be shut off by a curtain seven feet in height, of which we have already spoken; in the shadow of that curtain, pile up on wooden stalls the nuns in the choir on the left, the school-girls on the right, the lay-sisters and the novices at
the bottom, and you will have some idea of the nuns of the Petit-Picpus assisting at divine service.