Au bout du nez

May 29, 2015

     Au bout du nez is a French expression meaning "right in front of you".  It comes to mind as I think about the day I spent trying to find a place I had visited on a previous visit to Paris which I thought lost to me, the Monastery of the Visitation at 69 avenue Denfert-Rochereau.

     The monastic life has always had its attractions for me, from the time, I was a teenager and read The Story of a Life, the autobiography of Therese of Lisieux.  Therese is revered by Catholics and has the status of "Doctor of the Church",  a title she shares with, among others, Saint Gregory, Saint John Chrysostom, Saint Ambrose and Saint Augustine.   She is an exemplar of "the little way", a heartfelt devotion free of intellectual complexities, but acknowledged by the Vatican as just as divinely inspired as anything an intellectual like Saint Thomas Aquinas ever thought.  Therese entered the Carmelite convent in Lisieux by special permission at the age of 15 and died there aged 24, a victim of tuberculosis.

     While I had no desire to end my life as Therese did, then and now, the idea of living apart from  the world and to be certain, at any hour of the day, of what I should be doing, has its appeal.  However, I think I would have made a very poor religious.  I am far too carnal and too rebellious to submit to the discipline any order, let alone that a monastic one, requires.  Nonetheless, I felt privileged to be able to attend the vespers at a convent I stumbled upon some years ago while walking behind the Observatory behind the Luxembourg Gardens.  The nuns were cloistered, spending their time praying through the days in accordance with the "hours", the schedule of prayers that govern the life of cloistered monks and nuns.   When they came out for vespers, the nuns were separated from the non-religious by an automated grill made of wood in the form of cross-ties, which came down as they entered.

     The vespers were attended by less then ten people, including me, everyone arriving some time before the beginning of the service.  The chapel where vespers were sung was inside a courtyard entered by ringing the bell of the door to the convent.  A nun whose designated work was to greet visitors (an exception to the rule of no contact with the outside world) pointed me to the chapel two doors down.

     I turned the latch and found myself in a chapel with a tall, circular, vaulted ceiling.  Right in front of me below the vault was a gilded heart topped by a small cross, the ensemble graced by what ought to be taken for rays of golden light.  At the top of the image, encircling it, were the words, VOILA CE COEUR, and below, QUI A TANT AIME LES HOMMES: HERE IS THE HEART WHICH SO LOVED MANKIND.

     The convent has always put me in mind of the Carmelite convent of Compiegne and its nuns, who were guillotined during the French Revolution for having a portrait of Louis XVI, and inspired Poulenc to compose his opera, Dialogues of the Carmelites.  I think the convent I visited is exactly the sort of place I think they would have lived in.  The silence inside the chapel is complete, notwithstanding that a few blocks away stand Le Closerie des Lilas, La Rotonde, Le Select, Le Dome and La Couple, the famous hangouts for writers and intellectuals in Montparnasse, all situated near busy boulevard Montparnasse. 

      I wanted to know that quiet again, although no matter where I looked on the Internet I could find no evidence of its existence.  Had it moved away?  Closed?  Been consigned to oblivion by a lack of contributions, or the death of its last nun?  My hotel wanted to send me to rue de Poissy, near Notre Dame, where the Cistercians run the College des Bernardins, but I was doubtful.  I was certain the place I was looking for was nearer the Observatory and the giant statue of a lion (a facsimile of the even larger one in Belfort, sculpted by Bartholdi) that dominates Place Denfert Rochereau.

     As I was having lunch at a restaurant not far from the vicinity of the Luxembourg Gardens, once the meal was complete, I set off.  The gardens were planted with borders of lilac color, a particularly beautiful effect, but I was set on my purpose.  I walked along the gardens at the center of the avenue de l'Observatoire, glancing briefly at the Moorish-style buildings on my right, and smiling at the collection of elementary school students scampering like kittens on my right.  I passed the Closerie des Lilas and felt my blood race: I felt I was in the right place.  I crossed boulevard Montparnasse and started along avenue de Denfert-Rochereau when, a few paces down, I found the convent.  It was called Le Monastere de la Visitation --I had not been able to find it because it was listed everywhere as a monastery, not a convent.  I rang the bell and was admitted.

     All was as it had been.  I walked into the chapel and felt again that other-worldly quiet.  The icon of the golden heart and the message were intact.  I stayed three hours.

     At six p.m., after vespers and the praying of le chaplet, a sort of short-form rosary, I left for my next stop, Le Theatre des Champs Elysees, where I had tickets to hear Magdalena Koczena and Mitsuko Uchida in a program of art songs.  I walked from my location in the fourteenth arrondissement with the intention of heading towards the Seine and westward until I reached the Pont d'Alma and the Tour Eiffel.  I reached Boulevard Raspail by the Alliance Francaise, knowing I had time to spare.  Shortly after I passed the Tour Montparnasse and the famously named rue de l'Enfer ("Hell Street"), I realized I was going in the wrong direction.  Truly, our beginnings never know our ends.

     I turned around and retraced my steps, flying to reach the concert hall before curtain.  I just made it, and the concert was wonderful.  But my visit to the Monastery of the Visitation has stayed with me, and not just because of my religious experience.  Place Denfert Rochereau, near the cloister, is the location of an underground ossuary created during the late 18th century, when Paris' cemeteries inside the city limits were overrun and had to be relocated.  The catacombs of Paris hold, it is estimated, six million people, centuries' worth.

     Place Denfert-Rochereau used to be called Place d'Enfer.  Although nothing I have read comes out and says it, the name of the square and the street in the vicinity where I realized I was lost may be derived from popular mythology about where the persons in the ossuary were doomed to spend eternity.  Notwithstanding, until the creation of the ossuary, most Parisians were thrown into "Holy Innocents" cemetery,  burial grounds lying cheek-by-jowl (if you'll forgive the phrase), with Les Halles market --and bursting with corpses.  The creation of the ossuary freed up space elsewhere that was used to give "proper burial" --specifically, interment of bodies in accordance with public health standards of the time-- to fresh dead, who were interred in new, suburban cemeteries.

  Near Denfert-Rocherau are the buildings that formed the Jansenist abbey of Port Royal, which was closed in  1790, along with all the more conventionally Catholic orders.  Today, the buildings form part of the Hopital Cochin, a public hospital and Paris' burn treatment center.  The Hotel Cochin is where George Orwell was treated for a pulmonary infection, and  figures in his essay, "How The Poor Die".  Jansenism was a movement within the Catholic Church which emphasized pre-destination and was an object of criticism by the Jesuits.

     The Monastery of the Visitation was re-established in 1807.