Therese’s imprisonment at Saint Mary Monastery is a betrayal that converts her search for religious refuge into captivity. On August 7, after leaving Auxerre, she follows a shepherdess’s assurances toward Saint Mary-in-the-Wood, believing its secluded monks and miraculous Virgin offer a haven for prayer. Instead, Dom Severino exploits her confession and isolation to deliver her into the monastery’s hidden abuse. The scene exposes the distance between the institution’s public image of sanctity and the coercive system concealed behind its walls.

The search for a religious refuge

The episode belongs to Therese’s first-person account, which she tells to Madame de Lorsange and Monsieur de Corville after they encounter her under guard at Montargis. She begins the relevant part of her history by explaining that religious feeling had remained with her despite the hardships of her life. On August 7, after leaving Auxerre, she rests beneath an oak in the midday heat. From her resting place she notices a distant bell tower and imagines the religious community there as a refuge from the crimes and dangers that have marked her experience.

A shepherdess tells her that the building is a Benedictine monastery inhabited by four exceptionally devout monks. She also describes an annual pilgrimage to a miraculous Virgin whose help, she says, answers the faithful’s wishes. The superior, Dom Severino, is presented as gentle, respectable, and generous to visitors. Therese gives the shepherdess a crown despite her own need for money, then sets off, hoping to pray and make up for duties she has been unable to observe.

The apparent accessibility of the refuge gives way to physical isolation. After losing sight of the tower, Therese follows a path through the forest, walking at least five leagues before hearing a bell after dark. The monastery lies in a hollow, surrounded by dense woods; the nearest other dwelling is six leagues away. Visitors must first approach through a gardener’s cabin beside its walls. These details, initially part of the difficulty of reaching a secluded holy place, also establish how far Therese is from possible help.

The welcome and the confession

At the gate, Therese describes her purpose as a religious duty and asks to visit the Virgin. Because the monks are at supper, the gardener brings Dom Clement, the monastery’s steward, to assess her request. Clement’s stern manner alarms her. He questions the propriety of arriving at that hour and suggests she looks like an adventuress, but then asks where she will spend the night, noting that the monastery has no hospice. Therese explains why she could not come earlier. Clement reports to the superior, and the church is opened for her.

Dom Severino’s appearance and manners initially reassure her. At fifty-five, he is described as vigorous and courteous, with an elegant bearing and an Italian accent. He agrees to hear her confession despite the late hour and says they can then discuss a decent place for her to spend the night; she will be able to visit the sacred image the next day. In the church, with its doors closed and a lamp beside the confessional, Therese trusts him enough to disclose her past, her hardships, and the brand inflicted by Rodin.

In her later account, Therese recognizes that the confession was also an assessment of her vulnerability. Severino asks whether she is truly an orphan born in Paris, whether she has relatives, friends, or anyone she could write to, and whether she told anyone besides the shepherdess about her destination or arranged to meet anyone on her return. He also probes her past abuse and whether anyone might have followed her or seen her enter the monastery. These questions establish that the superior is not simply hearing a penitent: he is checking whether she has connections who might search for or protect her.

From hospitality to captivity

After Therese answers candidly, Severino takes her by the hand and says he will provide for her needs. He leads her deeper into the church, toward the sacristy. When she asks why they are going inside, he mocks her concern and reveals that she is expected to serve the monks’ desires. His manner changes from gracious hospitality to threat: he orders her to keep moving and makes clear that resistance will be useless.

The route through dark passages further separates Therese from the entrance. Severino leads her up a staircase of thirty or forty steps, through a door, and into a brightly illuminated room. There she sees three monks and seven girls, with four other women serving the table. Severino presents her to the group as a newcomer whose apparent reputation contrasts with the innocence he claims to see in her. The scene ends with the threat of Clement approaching her, while Therese suspends her account to explain that she must first describe the people gathered there.

The setting makes the deception legible in retrospect. The monastery’s reputation, the shepherdess’s recommendation, the promised miraculous image, the confessional, and Severino’s offer of lodging all help draw Therese inward. The journey’s remoteness and the monastery’s concealed interior then limit her ability to leave or appeal for help. The episode thus makes the violation of trust not an incidental turn but the method by which the captivity is accomplished.

The monks’ system of coercion

Once Therese is brought before the assembled group, Severino tells her that the retreat is inaccessible and that no outsider has ever entered its premises. He claims the monks are beyond the reach of family, judges, or other authorities and insists that pleas, tears, and appeals to religion will not move them. He shows her instruments used to punish girls who do not comply and demands submission. The speech defines the immediate stakes: the apparent religious house is presented by its superior as a closed system in which the captors make the rules and the captive has no recognized recourse.

Therese tries to appeal to Severino, but he rejects compassion and orders Clement to seize her. The monks then subject her to a prolonged inspection in the presence of the others. She later withholds some of its details from her listeners, while making clear that this initial ritual prepares her for worse treatment. Her account emphasizes both the captors’ collective control and the way the other women’s presence is used to impose a pattern of expected submission.

Severino’s actions also turn religious space into an instrument of profanation. In the course of the assault, he attacks the altar when frustrated, treating a place of prayer as an object of violence. The detail reverses the sanctuary Therese had imagined: the church does not protect her, and its sacred objects do not restrain the man who presides over the house. Her faith remains part of how she understands what has happened, but the monks use the authority and setting associated with religion to disguise and enact their abuse.

Aftermath and narrative significance

At the end of the episode, Therese collapses in pain and tears, overcome by the contrast between the virtue she had relied on and the treatment she has received from people she had expected to offer spiritual comfort. Her distress does not prompt the monks to show mercy; Severino treats it as entertainment. This reversal establishes the coercive logic that will govern her captivity and marks the beginning of a further sequence of suffering inside the monastery.

The framing of the incident shapes how readers receive it. Therese recounts the episode as testimony to Madame de Lorsange and Monsieur de Corville, rather than as detached narration. Her listeners’ interest had begun when they encountered her being transported to Paris after a Lyon conviction for murder, theft, and arson. At Montargis they release her from her restraints, provide food, and ask her to tell the story of her troubles. Therese hesitates because recounting them seems to challenge the will of Heaven, then speaks as someone presenting a history of innocence oppressed.

That testimony also helps expose the limits of official justice. In a later part of her account, Therese describes her wrongful conviction after a diamond was planted in her mattress and her employer’s accusation was accepted over her defense. In the frame narrative, Madame de Lorsange recognizes Therese as her sister, Justine, and Monsieur de Corville assumes responsibility for her case, secures her release into his protection, and writes to seek official reconsideration. The monastery episode therefore forms part of the accumulated evidence behind the prisoner’s testimony: her apparent criminality is set against a history in which institutions and powerful people repeatedly turn vulnerability into a reason to disbelieve her. The promised refuge at Saint Mary-in-the-Wood is one of the starkest reversals, because the very signs that invite trust lead her away from protection.