Page:Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk (Truslove & Bray).djvu/76

Rh were not living, and the impression they made on my feelings was powerful. I was often shown the place where nuns go who break their vows, as a warning. It is the hottest place in hell, and worse than that to which Protestants are assigned; because they are not so much to be blamed, as we were assured, as their ministers and the Bible, by which they are perverted. Whenever I was shut in that room, as I was several times, I prayed for "les Ames des fideles trespasses;" the souls of those faithful ones who have long been in purgatory, and have no relation living to pray for them. My feelings were of the most painful description, while I was alone with those frightful pictures.

Jane Ray was once put in and uttered the most dreadful shrieks. Some of the old nuns proposed to the Superior to have her gagged; "No," she replied, "go and let out that devil, she makes me sin more than all the rest." Jane could not endure the place; and she gave names to many of the worst figures in the pictures. On catechism days she took a seat behind a cupboard door where the priest could not see her, while she faced the nuns, and would make us laugh.

"You are not so attentive to your lesson as you used to be," he would say, while we tried to suppress our laughter.

Jane would then hold up the first letter of some priest's name whom she had before compared with one of the faces in "hell," and so look that we could hardly preserve our gravity. I remember she named the wretch who was biting at the bars of hell, with a serpent gnawing his head, with chains and padlocks on, Father Dufresne; and she would say —

"Does he not look like him, when he comes in to catechism with his long solemn face, and begins his speeches with, 'My children, my hope is that you have lived very devout lives?'"

The first time I went to confession after taking the