The convent’s age-grouping and clothing rules

The convent’s age-grouping and clothing rules divide its sixteen captive girls into four classes, each identified by age and a prescribed color of clothing. The scheme gives the institution an appearance of regular order, but it also makes the girls legible to their captors as assigned groups, organizing their accommodation, inspection, and use within a closed system of coercion.

The Four Classes

Omphale explains that the first class, called the children’s class, includes girls from the youngest ages through sixteen and wears white. The youthful class covers ages sixteen to twenty-one and is marked by green. The third class, the age of reason, covers ages twenty-one to thirty and wears blue; Omphale and Therese belong to it. The fourth class is for anyone over thirty and wears reddish brown. These categories translate age into a visible uniform, so that class membership can be read from clothing as well as known from age.

The colors persist across the day’s changes of dress. The girls wear light costumes in their class colors during the day and gowns of the same colors in the evening, when they also dress their hair carefully. The superintendent is responsible for inspecting them before the monks’ evening gatherings; if their appearance does not meet the required standard, both the girls and the superintendent may be punished. Clothing thus serves not just as a marker of age but as a regulated aspect of the institution’s discipline.

Class Membership and Routine

The classes do not permanently determine who shares meals or sleeping space. The girls may be mixed indiscriminately at the monks’ suppers or assembled by class, according to the monks’ preference. In the dormitories, too, girls from different classes are mixed. The classifications therefore coexist with flexible reassignment: the scheme preserves visible categories while allowing those in authority to rearrange the girls as circumstances or preferences dictate.

The institution keeps its total number fixed at sixteen, with eight girls in each chamber. Each girl wears the uniform of her class, and a newcomer is given the appropriate habit on the day she enters it. The stable headcount and repeated issue of class clothing make the categories part of a managed population, rather than a loose description of age. Girls are placed within a defined system from arrival, while the number of people held in the two chambers remains constant.

A System of Institutional Control

The rules operate within an architecture built to hide the pavilion and obstruct escape. A concealed door behind the altar opens onto a long underground passage leading to the pavilion; thick walls, tree palisades, a moat, and a roof planted with evergreens further screen it from view. Within this enclosed setting, age and colored clothing help distinguish and administer the girls, while inspection and punishment make compliance enforceable. Classification is one element of a broader regime that controls both where the girls can go and how they must present themselves.

The same orderly procedures extend to the daily inspection: the Officer of the Day assigns girls for the evening, hears the superintendent’s report, and imposes punishments. The age classes do not protect girls from arbitrary decisions by the monks; the rules expressly allow them to be mixed by class or without regard to class. Their function is therefore less to provide stable communities than to make the captive population easy to identify, sort, and manage. The apparent precision of the system underscores the gap between institutional order and the girls’ lack of agency.