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BY BRIGITTE LOZEREC’H
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Now I wonder if having to get up at six o’clock in a building with no heat and being made immediately to wash ourselves quickly in cold water—by dampening our ardent desire to just let things go, be comfortable, not to mention all sorts of other lascivious temptations—didn’t have the opposite effect from the one intended, in the long run . . . In the end, convents often return girls to their families entirely depraved. All their frustrations during the years they were pent up have fed their desire for luxury, for wild extravagance, and those pleasures of the flesh. Some women try to realize these dreams when they’re returned to a worldly life, while others remain immured in themselves, as obsessed as the nuns who brought them up. The marriage of my mother to wild Frank Lewly stands as an example of the first scenario, and my life among bohemian artists as another instance of the same. I hope it doesn’t take an entire lifetime to expurgate one’s soul of the perversions with which it’s been impregnated during one’s youth. How many times, as an adult, in the midst of delirious ecstasy, have I had visions of Frédéric and myself locked in an embrace on the tiled floor between the font and the confessional of a chapel lit by stained-glass windows . . . I’ve tried and tried each time this happened to get rid of the image, because I still have the notion that some things are sacred, but back it comes, against my will, as if I still needed the place that had first inspired my secret passions in order to reach the heights of pleasure as an adult.
When finally I ended up dissolving into the mentality of that establishment, it was the workings of the outside world that came to alarm me. I would have liked to stay shut up inside, hidden beneath the veil, and when I was twelve I thought I’d made the mother superior like me when I confided to her that I wanted to become a nun when I was older. “Continue to pray, my child, and we’ll talk about it later,” she said, looking me in the eye with her hand on my shoulder. It was almost pleasant. I was moved for a moment. I felt I really existed.
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