The rotating night-watch duty for girls

The rotating night-watch duty for girls is the monastery’s monthly assignment of one girl to serve an individual monk as a personal attendant. The girl must remain available through the night and return to him during the day, with only brief intervals for food and rest. As Omphale explains the rule to Therese, it is not an isolated chore but a concentrated form of the institution’s control: the monks assign the girls, determine their routines, and punish resistance, while the girls are required to provide continuous service.

Assignment and Schedule

The duty is assigned on the first day of each month. Each monk adopts a girl for a term of service, and the selection binds her to him for that month: monks may not exchange girls midway through the term or assign the same girl for two consecutive months. The chamber superintendents are exempt because they are responsible for governing the girls’ quarters. The rotation therefore distributes the burden among the girls while preserving the authority of those who administer the system.

The girl’s day is arranged around the monk’s movements. At five o’clock she must go to the monk she serves and remain with him until the following day, at the hour he leaves for the monastery. When he returns, she must rejoin him. The interval between his departures and returns is used for eating and resting; through the night, however, she is expected to remain awake and close at hand. The schedule makes even those intervals conditional on the master’s routine rather than the girl’s own needs.

Duties and Enforcement

The assigned girl is expected to attend to the monk’s requests and withstand his caprices, including verbal and physical mistreatment. Omphale describes the girl as perpetually subject to blame and punishment, with hesitation or refusal bringing severe reprisals. The account makes clear that the assignment is coercive: formal rotation does not offer a genuine choice or a protected limit on what the girl may be ordered to do.

The girl’s duties extend beyond the private room. During the monks’ gatherings, she may be required to assist them, attend to their needs, and occupy assigned positions at the table. These tasks can be physically demanding and dangerous; Omphale reports that girls have fallen, suffered broken limbs, or died. The monks’ amusement and comfort thus depend on the girls’ enforced service, while the risks of that arrangement fall on the girls themselves.

Place in the Monastery’s System

The duty operates within a tightly managed institution. The girls are kept in two chambers, and their number is maintained at sixteen, eight to a chamber. Their clothing marks their assigned age class, while the superintendent oversees each chamber and the Officer of the Day gives orders, designates girls for evening assignments, hears complaints, and imposes punishments. The night-watch rotation adds a personal, month-long assignment to this broader system of classification and daily supervision.

The monastery’s physical isolation reinforces these rules. Its occupied pavilion is concealed behind multiple enclosures and linked to the church by a hidden underground passage; its internal rooms include dungeons, sleeping quarters, and two large chambers edged by cubicles. The girls cannot rely on ordinary contact with the outside world: outsiders are not admitted, and the serving friars are forbidden to communicate with them. The rotating duty therefore takes place within a space designed to keep the girls contained and their treatment beyond public scrutiny.

Consequences and Significance

The system’s rotation limits the term of an individual assignment but does not lessen its severity. A girl may not be assigned to the same monk for successive months, yet for the month in which she is selected her time, labor, and safety are subordinated to his demands. The rule turns the appearance of orderly scheduling into a mechanism of exploitation: rotation distributes access to the girls among the monks and makes their service administratively predictable.

Omphale’s explanation also gives the rule a narrative function. She is instructing Therese in the institution’s practices, not describing an exceptional episode; the night-watch duty is presented as an established procedure, repeated alongside inspections, meal assignments, and punishments. Its regularity exposes the gap between the monastery’s outward religious identity and the coercive regime hidden within it. The duty’s defining feature is not simply that a girl serves for a month, but that the institution controls the hours around that service and can enforce compliance through isolation and punishment.