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180 Explanatory Notes
Alep may be a mistake for the French medieval town of Alet, on the
banks of the Aude in the Languedoc-Roussillon, which did have a bishop.
6 that day it was one of the saddest ever: Suzanne s account of her physical
and mental distress at being forced to become a nun might be an ironic
echo of Julie s ecstatic account of her religious conversion during her
wedding ceremony in part III of Rousseau s Julie or The New Eloise
( Julie ou La Nouvelle Héloïse), first published in 1761, though Diderot was
able to read parts of it as early as 1757. Like Suzanne, Julie finds herself
trembling and about to faint , but for her, this is because of the transcen-
dental quality of the liturgy; Suzanne suffers the same physical
symptoms for (ironically) different reasons.
7 like being given a lesson by Marcel: an allusion to the famous eighteenth-
century dancing master who gave lessons to the young Louis XV in 1726;
he died in 1759. Marcel is reputed to have said: In other countries people
jump; it s only in Paris that people dance.
8 doing it earns the convent some thousand écus: an allusion to the fact that
new nuns brought dowries with them. This practice was forbidden by the
Lateran Council of 1215 and the Council of Trent, but it was authorized
in France by royal decree in 1693. Dowries provided the basic wealth
upon which religious communities were built, and the amounts paid
varied, not least according to the social status of the postulants. The
reference here is to a sum of 6,000 livres, since the value of an écu (a silver
coin) was fixed in 1726 at 6 livres (or francs). In 1764 the statesman and
economist Jacques Turgot drew up a table of upper levels of wealth, in
which he indicated that an annual income of 6,000 livres (in the outside
world) was decent, but by no means rich; in the provinces, 12,000 livres
was the minimum income with which one could be considered rich, in
Paris, 15,000. At the other end of the spectrum, a manual labourer could
expect to earn 1 livre a day. While payment was a burden to some fam-
ilies, paying a dowry to a convent was far cheaper than providing a dowry
for a suitable marriage: sending a daughter to a convent was an excellent
money-saving device for parents (cf. the reference to the considerable
dowries given to Suzanne s half-sisters on their marriage, p. 4).
mad, weak-minded, or delirious: the spectacle of nuns madness in the
novel may be informed by Diderot s own experience of the deleterious
effects of convent life. One of his sisters, Angélique, became a nun in
Langres and went mad and died in 1748.
9 at a critical time of her life: a possible allusion to the menopause. The
original French, dans un temps critique , is echoed in the modern
French euphemism for the menopause, l âge critique .
her mind had been quite disturbed: possibly an allusion to Jansenists, follow-
ers in the Roman Catholic Church of the doctrine of Cornelis Jansen
(1585 1638), a Dutch theologian who defended the teachings of
St Augustine, especially on free will, grace, and predestination. The
idea that the mad nun may have lost her mind through fear of divine
Explanatory Notes 181
judgement could point to the effect of Jansenism s emphasis on eternal
damnation for those whom God has not predestined for eternal life.
Though Jansenism was declared a heresy in the Papal Bull Unigenitus in
1713, it nevertheless took hold in some convents, only to be repressed by
the authorities. Interestingly, there is an account in 1758 in the Jansenist
periodical Nouvelles ecclésiastiques of a Jansenist nun at a convent of the
Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Paris being driven mad, not by
Jansenist teachings, but by the persecutions of her Mother Superior.
12 would preside when I took my vows: Diderot inserted these names when he
was revising the text for publication in 1780 2. Sornin has hitherto not
been identified, but Thierry was a contemporary chancellor of the
University of Paris.
the doorkeeper: doorkeepers were salaried employees who, since they took
no solemn vows, were free to come and go between the community and
the world outside.
13 pressed themselves against the grille: a grille separated the nuns from
outside visitors.
16 the Feuillants monastery: a Cistercian monastery in Paris in the rue Saint-
Honoré, near the Tuileries, established in 1587. The Cistercians took the
name Feuillants from the name they gave in the twelfth century to their
abbey in a leafy valley near Toulouse. From the late sixteenth century
onwards the Feuillants grew significantly, and by 1791, at the time of the
suppression of the religious orders, they possessed twenty-four abbeys in
France.
23 The convent at Longchamp: situated in the Bois de Boulogne (near the
present-day racetrack), the royal abbey at Longchamp, founded in 1256
by Isabelle of France, daughter of Blanche of Castile and sister of King
Louis IX, was a prestigious convent belonging to the Order of St Clare. It
had become known by the eighteenth century for the musical ability of its
nuns, who were instructed by the famous opera singer Mlle Le Maure,
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