&c. provided out of the savings
of their pensions, (understood to be at their own disposal,) have been
seized, and sold, without making them the smallest compensation.

Thus deprived of every thing, they are sent into the world with a
prohibition either to live several of them together, wear their habits,*
or practise their religion; yet their pensions** are too small for them
to live upon, except in society, or to pay the usual expence of boarding:
many of them have no other means of procuring secular dresses, and still
more will imagine themselves criminal in abstaining from the mode of
worship they have been taught to think salutary.

* Two religious, who boarded with a lady I had occasion to see
sometimes, told me, that they had been strictly enjoined not to
dress like each other in any way.

** The pensions are from about seventeen to twenty-five pounds
sterling per annum.--At the time I am writing, the necessaries of
life are increased in price nearly two-fifths of what they bore
formerly, and are daily becoming dearer. The Convention are not
always insensible to this--the pay of the foot soldier is more than
doubled.

It is also to be remembered, that women of small fortune in France often
embraced the monastic life as a frugal retirement, and, by sinking the
whole they were possessed of in this way, they expected to secure a
certain provision, and to place themselves beyond the reach of future
vicissitudes: yet, though the sums paid on these occasions can be easily
ascertained, no indemnity has been made; and many will be obliged to
violate their principles, in order to receive a trifling pension, perhaps
much less than the interest of their money would have produced without
loss of the principal.

But the views of these legislating philosophers are too sublimely
extensive to take in the wrongs or sufferings of contemporary
individuals; and not being able to disguise, even to themselves, that
they create much misery at present, they promise incalculable advantages
to those who shall happen to be alive some centuries hence! Most of
these poor nuns are, however, of an age to preclude them from the hope of
enjoying this Millennium; and they would have been content en attendant
these glorious times, not to be deprived of the necessaries of life, or
marked out as objects of persecution.

The private distresses occasioned by the dissolution of the convents are
not