orders I have met with. In this gloomy retreat
it gave me pain to observe the infatuation of men, who have devoutly
reduced themselves to a much worse condition than that of the beasts.
Folly, you see, is the lot of humanity, whether it arises in the flowery
paths of pleasure, or the thorny ones of an ill-judged devotion. But of
the two sorts of fools, I shall always think that the merry one has the
most eligible fate; and I cannot well form a notion of that spiritual
and ecstatic joy, that is mixed with sighs, groans, hunger, and thirst,
and the other complicated miseries of monastic discipline. It is a
strange way of going to work for happiness to excite an enmity between
soul and body, which Nature and Providence have designed to live
together in union and friendship, and which we cannot separate like man
and wife when they happen to disagree. The profound silence that is
enjoined upon the monks of La Trappe is a singular circumstance of their
unsociable and unnatural discipline, and were this injunction never to
be dispensed with, it would be needless to visit them in any other
character than as a collection of statues; but the superior of the
convent suspended in our favour that rigorous law, and allowed one of
the mutes to converse with me, and answer a few discreet questions. He
told me that the monks of this order in France are still more austere
than those of Italy, as they never taste wine, flesh, fish, or eggs; but
live entirely upon vegetables. The story that is told of the institution
of this order is remarkable, and is well attested, if my information is
good. Its founder was a French nobleman whose name was Bouthillior de
Rance, a man of pleasure and gallantry, which were converted into the
deepest gloom of devotion by the following incident. His affairs obliged
him to absent himself, for some time, from a lady with whom he had lived
in the most intimate and tender connexions of successful love. At his
return to Paris he proposed to surprise her agreeably, and, at the same
time, to satisfy his own impatient desire of seeing her, by going
directly and without ceremony to her apartment by a back stair, which he
was well acquainted with--but think of the spectacle that presented
itself to him at his entrance into the chamber that had so often been
the scene of love's highest raptures! his mistress dead--dead of the
small-pox--disfigured beyond expression--a loathsome mass of putrified
matter--and the surgeon s