Convent of Andoüillets

The Convent of Andouillets is the enclosed religious community that sends its abbess and the novice Margarita toward the Hot Baths of Bourbon in hopes of treating the abbess’s stiff knee. The convent’s life is rendered through devotions, remedies, and communal ritual; once its women venture beyond the gate, that ordered world gives way to an increasingly precarious journey. The contrast makes the convent more than a place of origin: it is the refuge the travelers fear they have lost.

Setting and Community

The convent is situated among the hills dividing Burgundy from Savoy. Its abbess has developed ankylosis, or a stiff joint, attributed to the hardening of the knee’s synovia after long Matins. Before turning to the baths, she has tried a succession of spiritual and physical remedies: prayers and thanksgiving, invocations to saints, the convent’s relics, oils and animal fat, poultices and fomentations, smoke from the woods, and herbal decoctions. When these efforts fail, she obtains the visitor-general’s permission to travel for her health.

The episode gives the community a material life as well as a devotional one. The convent’s old carriage is lined with green frieze; lay-sisters darn it and sew on strips of yellow binding, while the gardener prepares the two old mules and a tailor sorts four dozen harness bells. The carpenter and smith confer over the wheels. The preparations are humble and painstaking, presenting the convent not as an abstract religious institution but as a household whose members collectively arrange the difficult departure.

The Journey’s Departure

Margarita, about seventeen and still a novice, is chosen to accompany the abbess. Her connection to the abbess has grown through repeatedly sticking a whitlow on her middle finger into the abbess’s discarded poultices. The choice passes over an older nun suffering from sciatica, whose condition might also have benefited from the baths. The selection binds the journey to the convent’s small, particular social world: a young companion’s place is secured not by formal authority but by her close, practical involvement in the abbess’s treatment.

At the gate, the abbess and Margarita advance slowly together, both dressed in white, with black rosaries hanging at their breasts. The other nuns occupy the carriage windows in matching habits. As the travelers look up, the sisters stream their veils into the air, kiss the departing hand, and receive the abbess and Margarita’s blessing. The scene’s solemnity rests on the contrast between the black rosaries and white clothing, and between the travelers’ slow movement and the sisters’ coordinated farewell. The narrator openly expresses a wish to have witnessed it, underscoring the departure’s emotional pull even as the larger episode turns toward comedy.

The Convent Beyond the Gate

The convent’s gardener accompanies the travelers as muleteer. At an inn below a hill, he leaves the abbess and Margarita and enters to drink and talk. He describes himself as the convent’s chief gardener and recounts his friendship with the abbess and the novice, the abbess’s swelling, and the herbs he gathered to ease it. In telling their story, he becomes so absorbed that he forgets not only the women but also the two mules, whose unpredictable movements the narrator treats as a problem philosophers have failed to consider adequately.

This lapse overturns the careful order of the departure. A journey prepared through communal labor and marked by blessing is entrusted to a guide who loses himself in conversation and drink. The convent remains present in the muleteer’s account, but its care cannot protect the travelers once they are beyond its walls; their safety depends on a servant whose attention has wandered.

Danger and the Lost Refuge

The abbess eventually tells Margarita that they are ruined, will have to remain there all night, and may be plundered and ravished. Margarita answers that the threat of rape is certain. The abbess then laments that her stiff joint led her to leave the convent and asks why Margarita did not let her servant go unpolluted to her tomb. Her words turn the original medical purpose of the journey into a source of danger: the treatment sought for the abbess’s leg has carried both women away from the protection of the community.

The convent’s significance therefore lies in the distance between its ordered farewell and the peril that follows. Within its walls, care takes the form of remedies, shared work, and ritual leave-taking; on the road, the same travelers confront exposure and fear. The narrator’s digressive attention to carriage repairs, bells, the muleteer’s talk, and the mules stretches the passage between departure and danger, allowing the convent’s fragile security to emerge through the comic details of what fails to accompany the women.