Abbess of Andouillets

The Abbess of Andouillets is the superior of a convent in the hills between Burgundy and Savoy. Her stiff knee sets the plot of an embedded comic tale in motion: after exhausting an elaborate succession of devotional and medical remedies, she leaves for the Hot Baths of Bourbon with the young novice Margarita. The journey, prepared with solemn care, ends in alarm when the travelers fear being stranded overnight and attacked.

Identity and Affliction

The abbess suffers from ankylosis, or a stiff joint, which the narrator attributes to the hardening of the synovia in her knee after long Matins. Her condition is presented not as a passing discomfort but as a persistent problem that has resisted repeated attempts at relief. The remedy she ultimately chooses requires permission from the visitor-general to attend to her health and a journey away from the convent.

Before that decision, the abbess has tried prayer and thanksgiving, invocations to the saints, and relics kept by the convent, including a thigh-bone associated with a man who had been impotent from youth. She has also wrapped the knee in her veil, crossed her rosary over it, sought the secular arm, applied oils and hot animal fat, and used fomentations and poultices. The account goes on through medicinal herbs, smoke from woods, and decoctions of wild plants. The sheer variety of treatments makes her eventual resort to the baths feel like the last step in a long, increasingly comic catalogue of failed hopes.

The Journey with Margarita

The abbess chooses Margarita, a novice of about seventeen, as her companion. The novice had gained her favor by repeatedly sticking a sore middle finger into the abbess’s discarded poultices; because of that connection, she is preferred over an older nun suffering from sciatica, whom the baths might have helped more. This small, practical bond shapes the journey’s party and gives the abbess a companion who shares its risks.

Preparation turns the departure into a communal undertaking. The abbess’s old carriage is brought into the sun and repaired: lay-sisters darn its green-frieze lining and sew on yellow binding, the gardener is appointed muleteer, and a tailor sorts four dozen harness bells. The carpenter and smith confer over the wheels. By seven the next morning, the carriage is ready at the convent gate, with two rows of onlookers already waiting there an hour earlier.

The abbess and Margarita approach the carriage slowly, supporting one another, both dressed in white with black rosaries at their breasts. As they enter, the nuns occupy the windows and stream their veils into the air; each kisses the hand that releases it. The two travelers lay their hands on their breasts, look toward heaven and then toward the sisters, and offer a blessing. The scene’s ritual tenderness gives their departure a solemn beauty, while the practical repairs and the abbess’s bodily affliction keep it grounded in comedy.

Crisis and Reversal

The journey’s devotional send-off is sharply reversed when the abbess and Margarita fear they will be left where they are for the night. The abbess imagines that they will be plundered and sexually assaulted; Margarita answers with blunt certainty that they will be assaulted. The threat transforms the planned therapeutic excursion into a scene of vulnerability, in which the two women’s religious purpose cannot protect them from the dangers they anticipate.

In her alarm, the abbess cries out to Saint Mary and asks why she had been governed by her “wicked stiff joint,” why she had left the convent, and why Margarita had not been allowed to go unpolluted to her tomb. The journey that began with an exhaustive search for bodily relief thus ends, in the surviving episode, with the abbess questioning its cost and fearing for her companion’s safety. Her condition propels her away from the convent; the danger of the road makes departure itself seem a mistake.