Page:Madame Rolland (Blind 1886).djvu/81

Rh "the use of the globes," and a little feeble music to half a dozen pupils—provided always that she could get them in her rather anomalous position. Young and unprotected, there seemed no course open but refuge in a nunnery. To a nunnery she went, therefore, the same where she had passed such moments of religious ecstasy in her childhood, but now in how different a mood and mental attitude! Permitted to become an inmate without sharing in the conventual life, she, for twenty écus a year, hired a small apartment, which was perched under the roof like a swallow's nest.

In the beginning of November 1779 she took possession of this dwelling-place, and her poverty was so great that some potatoes, a dish of rice, or a few haricot beans, prepared by herself with a little butter and a pinch of salt, were her sole fare. Insufficiently nourished, poorly clad, and solitary, she neither lost her courage, nor her gaiety, and, curled up on a high school desk to look out over the snow-covered roofs of Paris, she, from her lofty perch, could see the people moving like midges through the white, narrow thoroughfares, or at times would seem very near to the beatified calm when the great, still, winter moon flooded her little garret with a solemn splendour. The narrow street in which she lived, the Rue Neuve Saint Étienne, was canonised by the memories of such men as Pascal, Rollin, and Bernardin de St. Pierre, and here, with the clear chant of the young novices, and the loud-resounding organ-peals, sometimes floating up to her, she passed the short bleak days and long cold nights, "armed with her pen, surrounded by scattered papers, in the company of a Jean Jacques and a grand Xenophon," and knew such thoughts as are only given to strong souls fearlessly breasting adversity.