Inside of a Convent

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Sep 19, 1871

Inside of a Convent.

WHEN the savage Reds of Paris pillaged the convents, they brought to light some things which disclose the secrets of those prison-houses. A correspondent of the London Times reports that in the Convent of Picpus were found instruments of torture, and three cages in which three idiot women of advanced years were confined. He says that he himself went into the garden of the convent, where there were three conical huts, side by side, resembling white ants’ nests, which have been the prime cause of so much excitement and judicial inquiry. When the convent was occupied by the National Guards, these little huts were tenanted each by an old woman, enclosed in a wooden cage, like a chicken’s pen, the three buildings being similar in size and construction, six feet square by seven in height, with a slate roof, through which daylight was visible, while the three old women were all of them hopeless idiots. The Lady Superior has kept her lips resolutely closed up to the present time; but admitted, when first questioned, that the three sufferers had lived in their hideous prison for nine years, in an atmosphere of stifling heat throughout the summer and half frozen with cold throughout the winter; “but,” she added, “they were idiots when they came.”

At another end of the same garden stands an isolated building, in which were found mattresses furnished with straps and buckles, also two iron corsets, an iron skull-cap, and a species of rack turned by a cog-wheel, evidently intended for bending back the body with force.

These disclosures ought to open the eyes of our people to the nature of these religious prisons. If such things can be done in the city of Paris, under a strong government, and in the midst of a jealous population, how much greater the probability that worse things are done in a country like ours, where no supervision is taken of the establishments secretly conducted by Romish priests, with no responsibility whatever to any authority competent to redress a wrong, rescue a sufferer, or prescribe a regulation for the protection of the inmates.—Methodist Protestant.