The Mirror of Simple Souls by Aline Kiner

Author:Aline Kiner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pushkin Press
Published: 2023-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

4

As humbert departs the rue des Beguines, he leaves a number of worried souls behind him.

The mistress racks her brains as to the true purpose of the Franciscan’s visit. She scarcely believes the explanation he gave. That he came to bring greetings from the old Valenciennes scholar whom she has never had the occasion to meet. As for his search for the lost redhead in the habit of a beguine, she does not know what to think. The man is intelligent. Difficult to read. Did he have another mission—one he was less keen to reveal?

Meanwhile Agnes is overcome with surprise and indignation. She clearly heard Ysabel proffer a falsehood. To a monk’s face! Without batting an eyelid! Should she speak to the mistress? To Geoffroy? But what would she say? Maheut left the Beguinage more than a year ago and Agnes does not know where she is. Ysabel told her only that she had found another community to welcome her, far from Paris.

Perhaps it is better to keep quiet. Ysabel’s condition has undeniably declined these last few months. More and more often, Agnes finds her asleep at a patient’s bedside. There is also the exaggerated concern she shows for some patients. One evening, while the sick were sleeping and all the sisters had retired to their quarters—and she herself was making sure everything was in order before going back to her room—she saw Ysabel slip into the dormitory and, by the light of an oil-lamp, smear with ointment the sex of a girl who had been brought in half-dead, her belly torn by the assaults of men. A prostitute.

Her cousin Geoffroy thinks the care the beguines show the sick and the dead is dangerous, bringing as it does very young girls into perilous proximity with the flesh. Now that they know each other better, he has expressed his concern about the excessive freedom left in the mistress’s hands by the Jacobin prior on more than one occasion, even suggesting to Agnes that she should retire to another less permissive community. There are some in Paris, like the Haudriettes or the good women of Sainte-Avoye, where she might be accepted despite her having been married. But Agnes has other plans. Even so, she promises him she will be vigilant.

Clémence is worried, too, though she could not say why. That man, so tall, with such broad shoulders. The way he approached Ade, like a tree casting its shadow over a meadow. Ade, whom she would so like as a friend. When she first saw her, Ade was applying a cloth soaked with burdock to her mother’s inflamed skin. At the time Clémence had understood only Ade’s gentleness. Never would she have imagined that her heart’s path would be so fraught with difficulty.

Ysabel, who should have been the most troubled of them all, has simply returned to the patient Margot, whose breath is slowly fading. Neither the father nor mother of the child has been to visit her since her arrival in the infirmary.

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