Barefooted Nuns | AdventAI

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · May 8, 1884

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 10, No. 18.

Barefooted Nuns.

Baron Palet contributes to the Paris Figaro a strange history, under the title of “An hour among the dead.” The dead in this case are living women who regard themselves as “dead to the world.” They are, in fact, the little known order of the Barefooted Clares. These ladies possess a cloister in Paris, in which there are eighteen nuns and a few lay sisters who act as their servants. Fourteen of the present staff of nuns are under twenty-three years of age. The reason of this, according to Baron Palet, is terrible enough to justify the intervention of the State. The rule of the Clares is so excessively severe that nearly all the professed inmates die young. They wear a rough woolen dress, with a rope as a girdle; they go barefoot on the cold stone flooring; they never warm themselves at a fire,—even the kitchen fire is placed beyond their access; they eat meat only once a year; they sleep on a narrow board; they must spend ten hours every day upon their knees; they live entirely upon alms; they are only allowed to speak to one another upon rare occasions. The Abbess, through a grating, assured him that more than one of her nuns, through cultivation of this grace of silence, had actually lost the power of forming a sentence. We doubt if Mr. Carlyle himself would have approved so prodigious a development of the axiom that “speech is silver, silence is gold.”

—Christian Reflector.