- AN EX-BENEDICTINE NUN,*
Hrxturrrs CARACOIOLO is a Neapolitan lady, daughter of Caracciolo, and belonging to one of the four princely houses of Naples, who having been forced when a mere girl into the convent, fought pope, and cardinal, and priest to obtain her liberty ; was sentenced to seclusion for life ; raised up while. sentenced friends so powerful that Cardinal Riario Sforza retired from the contest in mortified displeasure ; beat the police of Naples in their own stronghold, and during the height of their reign of terror, and finally, laying aside her veil, was married by a Pro- testant clergyman to an Italian citizen, and lives at Castellamare a living witness that the power of the Papacy has received a. shock in Southern Italy. She has now published a sketch of her conventual life, which has been received in Italy with a kind of enthusiasm-28,000 copies, says the correspondent of the Times, having been sold in a few weeks to a public which has no habit of book-buying. It will have little influence in any other Catholic country, the prejudice against the apostate nun being too deeply rooted, but in Italy, where she and her life, and her enemies and their lives, are all alike known, her autobiography is cdn- sidered a deadly blow levelled against the traditional charm of the monastic career, and is circulating with a rapidity which. excites the highest disgust among the priests. We do not wonder at their alarm. Henrietta Caracciolo writes like a lady, and with a kind of English reticence of phrase, but it is clear from every page that she does not accept the view of the author of "La. Religieuse," but believes that in Italy at least the morbid dreamy attachment which grows up between the nuns and their confessor, that dangerous intimacy of souls which women who have never tried it are so apt to believe possible without offence, often ceases to be Platonic. Italy, however, did not need to be told that. She is rather in danger of running into the opposite extreme, and believing exaggerations which, once detected, discredit the truth which they distort. What she requires is to be taught that the convent life, in idea so. pare and lofty, is in reality exactly like life outside, but with pettier interests, jealousies, and aspirations ; that the selfish effort to guard one's soul by seclusion from the great world ends by increasing the pressure which a little world can exercise with such crushing effect ; that a monastery is to the world what a. village is to a town, a ship's company to general society—a greatly reduced photograph without the charm of colour. Timis is the first lesson of Henrietta Caracciolo's book, as of every other honest sketch of the interior of convent life, from Monk Joscolin's account of Abbot Samson—" Norfolk barrator " and efficient person—to the last letter in which_ a nun has appealed t3 Rome for protection against her abbess. The " secret of the tomb," which Cardinal Riario Sforza held it so dangerous to reveal, is not vice but pettiness, is the truth that the tomb is filled with ants, who scramble, and fight, and intrigue like larger insects. but do all on a scale which seams to all who view them from the outside ludicrous or contemptible.
The authoress, as we said, was forced when a girl into the con- vent, not indeed by physical torture, but by that gentler and more irresistible compulsion which drives people into a workhouse,— the impossibility of going anywhere else. Her father was dead, her mother, a despotic . woman, had a prejudice against her, heartily reciprocated, her brother-in-law was compelled by the police to refuse her a home, her family wore unwilling to brave the priesthood, and her aunt, abbess of the convent which sheltered her as a novice, besought her with tears and embraces to choose the monastic life. The girl, a thorough Italian, educated. with a view to a good alliance, in love with a man who n her mother in a fit . of petulance dismissed, full of ideas of the, pleasant life outside, and with, we imagine, the innate scepticism. which seems in some Italian minds to grow as superstition does in others without culture, detested the idea of the convent, but homeless, friendless, and disappointed, yielded, and attended by duchesses and princesses entered the tomb, a solitary English,.
• Henrietta Carat:rink. By Herself. London: Bentley.
man crying during the ceremonial, " Do not cut that girl's hair ! it is a barbarity," to the momentary horror of the sisterhood. The convent founded by the Caraccioli was one of the better order, wealthy and comfortable :—
" The external dress, it is true, is one of coarse woollen serge; • but they wear beneath this the finest linen, as they use handkerchiefs of the finest cambric also. On feast-days they wear rosaries mounted in silver, and frequently gilt. It is true the dress does not make the monk. The vow of humility forbids them to have bedsteads with iron heads, but that of poverty permits them three mattresses of the softest wool, and feather pillows bordered with antique lace. The curtains, sometimes superb, are suspended from a ring in the ceiling. They cannot openly display objects of luxury upon their wardrobes, but in a cupboard attached to the wall they keep the most antique and costly porcelain. They are not permitted to keep much money in their own rooms, but there is a place in the convent call the &Spot,' where that of each person is kept separately. As to food, their abstinence does not yield to that of San Giovanni the Faster.' They eat of four dishes at dinner, one of which invariably is pastry ; and of one dish at supper. The bread is of the finest quality. It is forbidden to eat fresh fruit on Fridays. This does not, however, prevent them from eating preserves, jellies, dm., ad libitum. They have the power to make a present of four ducats in the month ; this, however, the superior can grant leave to increase to eight, the vicar to twelve, and if it is desired to make it hundreds, the permission is applied for and granted in Rome."
Entrance was limited to nobles, and the nuns quarrelled over questions of pedigree as if they had been great dames of the outer world. The discussions were carried on, however, without much knowledge of history, one abbess asserting that Pompeii bad been " formerly inhabited by a sect of heretics, who hammered to pieces in the middle of their forum the miraculous statue of San Gennaro. The over-hanging volcano, indignant at the sight of such profanity, belched forth instantaneously that deluge of burning ashes which buried for ever the heretical city !" while another, hearing that Henrietta read 'profane literature, caught her with the book in her hand, and publicly declared that she was culumniated, for the work was " The Memoirs of St. Helena." She had never heard of Napoleon! The rule of such women in such a convent seems rarely to have been bard, on the contrary, it was rather too lax, the abbesses winking at disorders provided only they could be concealed. One distinctly warned her that without a little hypocrisy she would never got on, and another sanctioned the costly display which the wealthy nuns made of their affection for particular priests, by sending them plate and carriages and rich food. The cause of misery in this con- vent was not the strictness of the rule, but the bard inhu- manity the life engendered—one novice in a consumption being compelled, for example, to smother her coughs under her pillow till she died—and the excessive character which in a convent, as in a ship, all loves and hatreds assume. The author seems to think this morbidness confined to the monastery, but it is per- ceptible in every community forced by circumstances into in- cessant companionship, breaks out occasionally in families as virulently as in monasteries. The difference is that, the com- panionship lasting for life, the rancour once engendered can never die. The nuns as a body detested this particular one partly because of her "strictness,"—i. e., her peremptory refusal to have any relations, Platonic or otherwise, with any priest, and love for solitude, partly, as we suspect, because they felt the annoyance of her quiet but very persistent scorn. They tried, with the Italian genius for intrigue, to make an acolyte believe that she was in lore with him; and when this failed, Henrietta telling him calmly that lie was a fool, they endeavoured to make her life burdensome by petty insults and isolation. At last, not on their account, but because she panted for the life of the world, she resolved to make a great effort —no less than to pray the Pope to absolve her from her vows, an extreme step which has occasionally been taken. In any other nun such a design would have been madness, but Rome has an ingrained liking for the great Houses of Italy which for centuries has affected her secret history. Henrietta was a Caracciolo, and an Italian of Italians in heart, intellect, and constitution, with a cardinal's capacity for intrigue and that strange persistence which under- lies the surface weakness of the national character, and which, as Metteruich said, renders the foreign government of Italy one long struggle with the inevitable. She beat the Cardinal. In- stead of wasting time in argument she contrived to interest an uncle powerful at Rome in her fate, and obtained first permission to reside in a conseruatorio—con vent of lighter rules—then per- mission to go out every day for a walk, and then admission into the order of Canonesses of Bavaria, who, though nuns, may reside at home. The Cardinal fought. her at every point, forbade her to go out except in a carriage, and then took away her money, offered her an abbeseship if she would but yield, and finally ob- tained a royal order for her arrest. She fled to Caprera, where
Cardinal Cassano placed her in the Annunziata, a kind of religious foundling hospital.
" The Annunziata at Capna is a magnificent building, and the church most beautiful. The religieuses have each their separate room, but the foundlings sleep crowded together in long dark corridors, which one cannot enter without disgust. At that time there were nearly three hundred of these girls. I was shocked by the squalor, dirt, and wretched appearance of these poor creatures ; deprived of the influence of domestic virtue and of the requisites which ennoble the weaker sex —destitute of all instruction, rude, load-talking, petulant, dissembling —they lived as it were chained together in one large common room. They appeared rather a herd of brute beasts than a family of rational creatures living in a Christian land, and brought together there under the auspices of the Church with the object of moral reformation. To these disagreeable qualities they added manners of the most disgusting familiarity, which they used with the soldiers of the garrison. The Abbess of the religieuses, who was also Superior of the foundlings, was quite unable to bridle their depravity. The poor woman, rendered cross and irritable by infirmity and by the continual worry and vexa- tion such a community caused her, had entirely abandoned the prudence and command of temper required for the management of such a community."
These girls attempted the life of the abbess, and, as they con- fessed, were deliberately bad because the worse they were the sooner they would be married. A certain number were annually selected in marriage by men of the lower class, and the abbess sent the most disorderly to be chosen first. There the nun lived at least in peace, but Cardinal Cassano died, and Cardinal Riario Sforza procured a sentence dooming her for life to a " retreat" well known as the house of correction for nuns. Here she at- tempted suicide but failed, and her native courage and ability re- viving, she contrived once more, through missives sent out with her linen, to communicate with Rome. She implored an aunt to interfere, and this relative, a woman of energy and patience, contrived to convince several cardinals that Sforza's hostility was personal, and the Pope at last relieved her from his juris- diction. This was sufficient. The Bishop of Castellamare was a milder man,—perhaps did not wish to offend a Caracciolo with such powerful friends,—and the nun, laying aside her robe, contrived to live in Naples itself and yet baffle the police. The attempt was difficult, but she changed her residence six-and-thirty times, and just as escape seemed impos- sible and she felt sure that she should receive the bastinado, the whole fabric of tyranny, secular and ecclesiastical, fell to pieces, for Garibaldi entered Naples. The story is briefly told, almost too briefly, but every page is full of the evidence of the minute, and so to speak malicious, tyranny with which the Church of Rome under Ferdinand II. invoked the assistance of the secular arrn, of the degradation to which the convent life in a Southern climate tends, and of the meanness which all confined life necessarily begets, and which is as present in the cloister as in the ship or the prison. It is in this fact, and not in dia- tribes which have only local application, that the doom of mon- astic establishments is contained. They need not be hotbeds of vice,—they usually are not,—but they do not answer the ends of their existence, and therefore must, as the world grows more com- petent to perceive their failure, disappear.
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