The Convent of Andouillets is a religious house among the hills dividing Burgundy from Savoy, and the point of departure for an abbess’s journey to the Hot Baths of Bourbon. Its community is presented through both devotional ceremony and practical labor: prayers, relics, medicines, repairs, and the arrangements for travel all become part of the same effort to address the abbess’s stiff knee. The resulting episode makes the convent more than a backdrop. It is a small, organized world whose solemn forms are soon tested by the unruly circumstances of the road.

Setting and the abbess’s condition

The convent is located, the narrator says, in the hills between Burgundy and Savoy. The abbess is threatened with ankylosis, or a stiff joint, which the passage associates with the hardening of the knee’s synovia after long periods at matins. The account treats her condition as a concrete difficulty requiring care, while its accumulation of remedies gives the episode a comic, deliberately winding pace.

Before choosing a journey, the abbess and her community have tried prayers and thanksgiving, appeals to the saints, and relics of the convent, especially a thigh-bone associated with a man of Lystra. They have also wrapped the knee in the abbess’s veil, applied a rosary crosswise, sought secular assistance, used oils and animal fat, and tried fomentations and poultices. The remedies include marsh-mallows, mallows, bonus Henricus, white lilies, and fenugreek; the abbess has also tried the smoke of burning wood and decoctions made from wild chicory, water-cresses, chervil, sweet cecily, and cochlearia. None has answered the problem, and the narrator’s long catalogue places devotional, domestic, and medical measures side by side.

The journey prepared by the convent

At last the abbess obtains permission from the visitor-general to take care of her existence and orders preparations for a journey to the Hot Baths of Bourbon. Margarita, a novice of about seventeen, is chosen to accompany her. The narrator explains the choice by recalling that Margarita had suffered from a whitlow in her middle finger after repeatedly sticking it into the abbess’s discarded poultices. Although an older nun with sciatic trouble might also have benefited from the baths, Margarita is selected instead. The detail ties her place in the expedition to a small act of service and gives the journey a companion whose own experience is bound up with the abbess’s attempts at treatment.

The convent’s preparations are collective and painstaking. An old calash, lined with green frieze, is brought into the sun; the gardener is assigned to act as muleteer and leads out the two old mules. Two lay sisters repair the carriage lining and sew on yellow binding whose shreds have come loose with time. The under-gardener dresses the muleteer’s hat with hot wine-lees, while a tailor sorts four dozen harness bells, whistling to each as he ties it on. The carpenter and smith hold what the narrator calls a council of wheels. By seven the following morning the carriage is ready at the convent gate, where two rows of the unfortunate have already waited for an hour.

Ceremony at the gate

The abbess and Margarita approach the calash slowly, supporting one another. Both are dressed in white, with black rosaries hanging at their breasts. The nuns occupy the carriage windows in the same uniform, and the passage makes the departure a carefully composed communal ceremony: as the abbess and novice look up, the nuns stream out the ends of their veils, kiss the hands that release them, and receive the travelers’ answering gesture. The abbess and Margarita lay their hands on their breasts, look toward heaven, and then look back at their companions with a blessing.

The ceremony joins separation to mutual care. The narrator emphasizes its simple solemnity and the contrast between the white clothing and black rosaries, but also pauses to say that the story has caught his interest and that he wishes he had been present. That interruption makes the leave-taking feel at once ritualized and personal: the convent sends its two travelers away with a shared gesture of devotion, while the narrator draws attention to his own desire to witness the scene.

The muleteer and the mules

The gardener, now called the muleteer, is described as hearty, broad-set, good-natured, talkative, and fond of drink. He has mortgaged a month of his convent wages for a leathern wine cask, which he hides behind the calash under a russet riding-coat. Because the day is hot and he walks much more than he rides, he repeatedly falls behind the carriage to drink; before half the journey is over, the wine has leaked away through the cask’s opening.

The narrator pauses over the muleteer’s habitual, immediate way of living: the evening is pleasant after a sultry day, the wine is generous, and a cottage at the foot of a steep Burgundian hill offers a place to stop. The muleteer gives each mule a sharp lash and looks toward the abbess and Margarita before striking again to urge the animals onward. He then slips behind the carriage and enters the inn. As he chats there about his post as chief gardener, his friendship with the abbess and Margarita, and the novice’s swelling and the herbs gathered for it, he becomes so absorbed in his own account that he forgets the travelers and the two mules.

The narrator leaves the drinker at the inn and turns attention to the animals, presenting their behavior as a neglected problem in human moral reflection. Without the muleteer behind them, the mules continue up the hill under their own judgment until they have covered about half of it. At a bend, the older mule glances aside and resolves not to go farther; the other answers that, if it does, its hide will be made into a drum. This interruption exposes the limits of the convent’s elaborate preparations: the carriage, bells, repairs, and ceremony cannot ensure that the travelers reach their destination when the person responsible for the animals has abandoned his post.

Narrative significance

The convent episode moves from an extensive catalogue of treatment to a carefully staged departure, then shifts attention away from the people in the carriage to the muleteer and finally to the mules. Its changes of focus are part of the subject: ordered religious life is shown through shared work and ritual, but the journey is governed by appetite, distraction, and the animals’ refusal to proceed. The convent’s care is sincere and practical, yet it cannot control every circumstance beyond its gate.

The episode also demonstrates the narrator’s digressive method. A description of the abbess’s knee expands into remedies, travel preparations, the muleteer’s drinking, and a reflection on animal conduct. Rather than advance directly toward the baths, the narrative repeatedly changes its object of attention; the road becomes an occasion to notice how habit and circumstance redirect intended action. The convent remains the point of origin throughout, its solemn departure set against the comic uncertainty of what happens once its travelers are on the way.