though she cannot obtain
liberation from her vows, the priest who conducts the ecclesiastical
part of the enquiry is a just man, and utterly repudiates the methods of
persecution, while he and her lay lawyer procure her transference to
another convent. Here her last trial (except those of the foolish
post-_scrap_, as we may call it) begins, as well as the most equivocal
and the greatest part of the book. Her new superior is in every respect
different from any she has known--of a luxurious temperament,
good-natured, though capricious, and inclined to be very much too
affectionate. Her temptation of the innocent Suzanne is defeated by this
very innocence, and by timely revelation, though the revealer does not
know what she reveals, to a "director"; and the wayward and corrupted
fancy turns by degrees to actual madness, which proves fatal, Suzanne
remaining unharmed, though a piece of not inexcusable eavesdropping
removes the ignorance of her innocence.

[Sidenote: A hardly missed, if missed, masterpiece.]

If the subject be not simply ruled out, and the book indexed for
silence, it is practically impossible to suggest that it could have been
treated better. Even the earlier parts, which could easily have been
made dull, are not so; and it is noteworthy that, anti-religionist as
Diderot was, and directly as the book is aimed at the conventual
system,[382] all the priests who are introduced are men of honour,
justice, and humanity. But the wonder is in the treatment of the
"scabrous" part of the matter by the author of Diderot's other books.
Whether Madame d'Holbach's[383] influence, as has been suggested, was
more widely and subtly extended than we know, or whatever else may be
the cause, there is not a coarse word, not even a coarsely drawn
situation, in the whole. Suzanne's innocence is, in the subtlest manner,
prevented from being in the least _bete_. The fluctuations and
ficklenesses of the abbess's passion, and in a less degree of that of
another young nun, whom Suzanne has partially ousted from her favour,
are marvellously and almost inoffensively drawn, and the stages by which
erotomania passes into mania general and mortal, are sketched slightly,
but with equal power. There is, I suppose, hardly a book which one ought
to discommend to the young person more than _La Religieuse_. There are
not many in which the powers required by the novelist, in delineating
morbid, and not only morbid, character, are more brilliant