s. No more lazy and opulent monks, occupied,
like the Carthusians of Val Saint-Pierre, in overeating, stupefied
by digestion and routine, or, like the Bernardines of Granselve[5305]
turning their building into a worldly rendezvous for jovial hospitality
and themselves taking part, foremost in rank, in prolonged and
frequent parties, balls, plays and hunting-parties; in diversions and
gallantries which the annual fete of Saint Bernard, through a singular
dissonance, excited and consecrated. No more over-wealthy superiors,
usufructuaries of a vast abbatial revenue, suzerain and landlord
seigniors, with the train, luxury and customs of their condition,
with four-horse carriages, liveries, officials, antechamber, court,
chancellorship and ministers of justice, obliging their monks to address
them as "my lord," as lax as any ordinary layman, well fitted to cause
scandal in their order by their liberties and to set an example of
depravity. No more lay intrusions, commendatory abbes or priors,
interlopers, and imposed from above; no more legislative and
administrative interferences[5306] in order to bind monks and nuns
down to their vows, to disqualify them and deprive them almost of
citizenship, to exclude them from common rights, to withhold from them
rights of inheritance and testamentary rights, from receiving or making
donations, depriving them in advance of the means of subsistence, to
confine them by force in their convents and set the patrol on their
track, and, on trying to escape, to furnish their superior with secular
help and keep down insubordination by physical constraint. Nothing of
this subsists after the great destruction of 1790. Under the modern
regime, if any one enters and remains in a convent it is because the
convent is more agreeable to him than the world outside; there is no
other motive no pressure or hindrance of an inferior or different kind,
no direct or indirect, no domestic or legal constraint, no ambition,
vanity and innate or acquired indolence, no certainty of finding
satisfaction for a coarse and concentrated sensuality. That which now
operates is the awakened and persistent vocation; the man or the woman
who takes vows and keeps them, enters upon and adheres to his or her
engagement only through a spontaneous act deliberately and constantly
renewed through their own free will.

Thus purified, the monastic institution recovers its normal form, which
is the republican and democratic form, whil