Obscurity, The Seventeenth Chapter

In which we learn the history of three nuns named Marie, and perceive a threat to their future.

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e last read The Sixteenth Chapter, in which the couturier discovered a door in the philanthropist’s quarters, and it revealed a defect in his character.

We have not spoken of the three nuns named Marie at any great depth, for until now we have been preoccupied by other stories. But the first Marie comes to our attention now with great urgency. For as the town was ravaged by malice, she became its next victim.

If we remember correctly, Marie the first, second, and third happened upon the widow in a port town on the brink of the French Revolution. How they got there was a matter of some consequence. The convents had been largely turned out by that point, l’Assemblée Nationale having determined another use for the Church’s most lucrative real estate. Unfortunately, there was a particularly rebellious convent in a suburb of Paris who had decided to evade those orders.

The convent at Saint-Denis was a teaching establishment—one that taught the poor children of its community and could not see a viable reason for the cessation of that teaching. The priest of that convent was a determined scholar, set upon the belief that as followers of the Ursulines, their focus was on education, not renunciation. He had thus resolved himself not to give up that spiritual vocation for the greed of his fellow countrymen.

At the same time, there was a young boy named Ignace who attended the convent for school. He was a bright child, yet impoverished—exactly the sort the priest did not wish to forsake. Ignace dreamed of being an explorer and a discoverer—of charting new territories and discovering their secrets. But though the priest prayed the child might one day meet those dreams, that through education he might rise above his station and have every opportunity to succeed, the child made one crucial and fatal error.

Obscurity, The Seventeenth Chapter

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