Les Misérables, page 134
CHAPTER VIII--POST CORDA LAPIDES
After having sketched its moral face, it will not prove unprofitableto point out, in a few words, its material configuration. The readeralready has some idea of it.
The convent of the Petit-Picpus-Sainte-Antoine filled almost the wholeof the vast trapezium which resulted from the intersection of the RuePolonceau, the Rue Droit-Mur, the Rue Petit-Picpus, and the unused lane,called Rue Aumarais on old plans. These four streets surrounded thistrapezium like a moat. The convent was composed of several buildingsand a garden. The principal building, taken in its entirety, was ajuxtaposition of hybrid constructions which, viewed from a bird's-eyeview, outlined, with considerable exactness, a gibbet laid flat on theground. The main arm of the gibbet occupied the whole of the fragmentof the Rue Droit-Mur comprised between the Rue Petit-Picpus and the RuePolonceau; the lesser arm was a lofty, gray, severe grated façade whichfaced the Rue Petit-Picpus; the carriage entrance No. 62 marked itsextremity. Towards the centre of this façade was a low, arched door,whitened with dust and ashes, where the spiders wove their webs,and which was open only for an hour or two on Sundays, and on rareoccasions, when the coffin of a nun left the convent. This was thepublic entrance of the church. The elbow of the gibbet was a square hallwhich was used as the servants' hall, and which the nuns called _thebuttery_. In the main arm were the cells of the mothers, the sisters,and the novices. In the lesser arm lay the kitchens, the refectory,backed up by the cloisters and the church. Between the door No. 62 andthe corner of the closed lane Aumarais, was the school, which was notvisible from without. The remainder of the trapezium formed the garden,which was much lower than the level of the Rue Polonceau, which causedthe walls to be very much higher on the inside than on the outside. Thegarden, which was slightly arched, had in its centre, on the summit ofa hillock, a fine pointed and conical fir-tree, whence ran, as fromthe peaked boss of a shield, four grand alleys, and, ranged by twosin between the branchings of these, eight small ones, so that, if theenclosure had been circular, the geometrical plan of the alleys wouldhave resembled a cross superposed on a wheel. As the alleys all endedin the very irregular walls of the garden, they were of unequal length.They were bordered with currant bushes. At the bottom, an alley of tallpoplars ran from the ruins of the old convent, which was at the angle ofthe Rue Droit-Mur to the house of the Little Convent, which was at theangle of the Aumarais lane. In front of the Little Convent was what wascalled the little garden. To this whole, let the reader add a courtyard,all sorts of varied angles formed by the interior buildings, prisonwalls, the long black line of roofs which bordered the other side of theRue Polonceau for its sole perspective and neighborhood, and he willbe able to form for himself a complete image of what the house of theBernardines of the Petit-Picpus was forty years ago. This holy househad been built on the precise site of a famous tennis-ground of thefourteenth to the sixteenth century, which was called the "tennis-groundof the eleven thousand devils."
All these streets, moreover, were more ancient than Paris. These names,Droit-Mur and Aumarais, are very ancient; the streets which bear themare very much more ancient still. Aumarais Lane was called Maugout Lane;the Rue Droit-Mur was called the Rue des Églantiers, for God openedflowers before man cut stones.
