Page:Twelve Years in a Monastery (1897).djvu/155

 Belgium, visited Waterloo, &c., as comfortably as a tourist, without touching a centime from one end of the year to the other.

Their monasteries, too, bear the visible stamp of their voluntary poverty. Linen is never seen in them, on tables, or beds, or on the persons of the friars; and another point in which they imitate the holy apostle St. James is that they entirely deny themselves the luxury of a bath—for the reason which the pious French nun gave to the English girl who asked why she was not allowed to take a bath at the pensionnat: ‘Le bon Dieu vous verrait!’ Gas is not admitted; and, worst of all, they think it necessary to reproduce in their large monasteries the primitive sanitary arrangements of the neighbouring cottages. Our lavatory, too, was fitted up with archaic severity: a battered zinc trough ran along under a row of carefully assorted taps, into which the water had to be pumped every three minutes. There were no hand-basins, there was no hot water, neither comb nor brush, and only a tub of black soft soap was provided for our ablutions.

The fasts were rigorously observed, though, as it is a wide-spread custom both in France and Belgium not to breakfast before midday, most of the friars suffered little inconvenience. At the same time the feasts were celebrated with a proportionate zeal. On an ordinary feast-day, which occurs once or twice every month, the friars would sit for three hours or