The Hot Baths of Bourbon are the hoped-for remedy at the center of a comic and ceremonious journey: the Abbess of Andouillets, after exhausting an extravagant range of treatments for her stiff knee, resolves to travel there. The baths themselves remain offstage. Instead, the narrative makes their pull visible through the abbess’s preparations, the convent’s bustle, and the moving farewell of the nuns gathered to watch her depart.

The journey’s medical purpose

The abbess’s knee is in danger of becoming fixed by ankylosis, which the narrator associates with the long matins of her religious life. Before turning to the baths, she has tried prayer and thanksgiving, broad and then more selective invocations of saints, and the convent’s relics, especially a thigh-bone associated with the man of Lystra. She has wrapped the knee in her veil and laid a rosary across it; sought help from the secular arm; applied oils, hot animal fat, fomentations, and poultices; tried smoke from burning wood; and taken herbal decoctions. The accumulated remedies have answered nothing. The baths thus enter the story not as a proven cure but as the next recourse after a detailed catalogue of failure.

The abbess first obtains the visitor-general’s permission to take care of her existence, then orders the journey prepared. This small administrative step gives the expedition a practical frame: a religious superior’s attempt to preserve her health requires authorization as well as transport. Bourbon is named as the destination and as a place whose hot baths might help, but the text does not report the treatment or its outcome.

Choosing a travelling companion

A novice of about seventeen is chosen to accompany the abbess. The narrator identifies her as Margarita and explains her advancement through the convent’s domestic detail: she had suffered a whitlow on her middle finger and had repeatedly thrust it into the abbess’s discarded poultices. That service has gained her enough standing to be selected over an old nun suffering from sciatica, although the older woman, the narrator remarks, might have been permanently restored by the same baths.

The contrast makes the choice comic without reducing the journey to a mere medical errand. The novice’s unlikely route to favor—persistent proximity to used poultices—sits beside the overlooked older nun’s more obvious need. The baths promise relief to both, but only the abbess and Margarita set out together; the sciatical nun is explicitly excepted from the farewell that follows.

The convent prepares to depart

The preparations give the journey its own small procession of work. The abbess’s old calesh, lined with green frieze, is brought into the sun. The convent gardener becomes muleteer and leads out the two old mules, whose tail ends are clipped. Two lay-sisters repair the carriage lining and sew on scraps of yellow binding that time has loosened. The under-gardener dresses the muleteer’s hat with hot wine-lees, while a tailor sorts four dozen harness bells, whistling as he ties each one on with a thong.

The carpenter and smith hold what the narrator calls a “council of wheels.” By seven the following morning, the carriage and its equipment are ready at the convent gate. The scale of the preparations is deliberately disproportionate to the modest vehicle: aged mules, a mended lining, frayed binding, and an abundance of bells make the departure at once practical and ceremonially dressed. The destination gains narrative presence through all this work, even though the baths themselves never appear.

Farewell at the gate

Two rows of the unfortunate have been waiting at the gate for an hour before the carriage is ready. The abbess advances slowly toward it, supported by Margarita; both wear white, with black rosaries hanging at their breasts. The convent’s nuns occupy the windows in the same uniform. As the travellers look up, the sisters—except for the sciatical nun—stream the ends of their veils into the air and kiss the lily hand that releases them.

The abbess and Margarita lay their hands saint-wise upon their breasts, look toward heaven, and then turn to the sisters with a blessing. That carefully staged farewell joins the physical vulnerability behind the trip to the convent’s collective devotion: the journey to the Hot Baths of Bourbon is both a bid for relief and a departure witnessed by the community. The scene ends at the threshold, with the carriage ready and the sisters’ blessing offered; it gives no account of what awaits at the baths.