In the late summer of 1806 Eugénie de L’Écart entered the Academy of the Sisters of the Most Precious Charity of our Lady of the Sorrows, near the village of Hurttstown, Kentucky. The small and élite order had originated in southern Wallonia in the waning years of the Counter-Reformation. It was known for its industry and thrift, as well as for its effectiveness at spiritually molding young women of means. When the Directoire’s gendarmes targeted the order in 1797, the nuns dissolved the convent, fleeing first to the Netherlands and then on to Spain, where they established a new foundation. A handful of members, however, envisioned great potential in the young American republic, with its guarantees of religious liberty against the ravages of reason, and after a brief sojourn in the city of New Orleans, established a convent and school in the far western corner of Kentucky in 1800.
The convent consisted of six nuns and novices, with eleven girls living as boarders at the school, and a trio of enslaved people, a young woman, Rochelle who attended to the nun’s needs, and two older men, Hubert and Moor, who served as groundsmen, guards, grooms, and general factotums. The convent’s estate comprised what had once been a large whitewashed mansion, in a rough version of the new Federal style, with a similarly designed carriage house and outlying buildings, as well as the extensive grounds — all partly constructed on the site of an Indian burial mound — of one of the region’s first white settlers, the farmer, soldier and land speculator Joseph Hurtt, a native of Maryland who had fought against the Shawnees in the final battles of the Revolutionary War. When he succumbed to pleurisy at the turn of the century, his childless widow, whose mother had studied with the nuns on the continent, promptly donated what remained of the estate south of the creek to them before repairing to the federal capital.
The Tennessee River separated the convent’s spur of one hundred and twenty-two acres from Chickasaw territory to the south and west; a steep hill and valley, interlaced with woodlands and traversed by a rocky road which abutted a wide, bridged creek, the grounds enclosed the entire length of their perimeter by a high, stiled fence, separated them from the miniscule, hardscrabble town of Gethsemane, which was also known as Hurttstown, to the north and east. There were no Roman Catholics among the townspeople. They consisted primarily of migrating Virginians from the Piedmont region who had intermarried with a small band of pioneers from the lower Ohio River and Big Sandy River valleys. Less than a handful held slaves; there were no free Negroes in the town. Most of the Gethsemane residents, touched by the religious revivals racing like wildfire from the Atlantic, were quite suspicious of the brown-habited, French-speaking nuns, who now not only occupied the largest share of what remained of the one great estate in the area — the rest having become Hurttstown itself — but also ran a school that did not admit the locals, though none of the elders of Hurttstown believed, in any case, in the education of girls. The Reverend Job White, pastor of the United Church in the town and variously mayor, vice mayor, councilor, and sheriff, was known to inveigh regularly against the advances of the Popish virus, which had given Indians airs and the false promise of equality. The nuns lived and functioned, then, in a low-grade state of siege.
The first Catholic evangelization attempts in the area near Gethsemane, to the indigenous people and the whites, around 1797, by a French-speaking missionary priest from St. Genevieve, Missouri, had been rebuffed with violence. An effort two years later by two Dominican friars from New York to raise a chapel along the creek had ended in their flight from the town at dawn. The nuns, aware of this history, proceeded with great care, taking every opportunity to maintain a provisional truce they had established with the townspeople, and refraining from any direct outreach to the Chickasaw. The sisters in fact did not themselves visit the town without the accompaniment of at least one local who periodically worked on the convent’s grounds, and one of their black manservants.
The convent’s Mother Superior, Sr. Louis Marie, a formidably tall woman whose habit always smelled of lye, was of the mind that the greater threat lay not in the gospels of finance, freemasonry and Protestantism, which were preponderant in America, but in that other dangerous product of the post-Reformation age, excessive liberty, poisoned by rationality: what, after all, had provoked the savagery that had clotted the streets of Paris with royal blood? What had brought nearly all of the great European kings and queens, divined by God, so low, and elevated the sons of merchants, with their abstract doctrines of progress, and the new, utterly alien secular order? All of the girls were required to develop the Christian aspects of their character by living austerely and working in rotation in the convent’s workrooms, kitchens, and on its small farm and printing press, which produced pamphlets to spread the Word, and the world it might help to maintain, far and wide.
They were instructed in deportment: modesty, charity, gentility. The nuns usually accomplished this through positive reinforcement and penance, though they turned to more forceful methods when needed, for not only sunlight gilds the marigold. The curriculum consisted of the practical arts, as well as courses in basic theology, introductory mathematics, and French and Latin grammar. Only amongst themselves did the girls speak English. They were taught to sew, weave and darn; appraise the quality of materials and goods and be judicious; to bake, cook simple meals and supervise more elaborate ones; to conserve household resources for times of need; clean and oversee workers to ensure a proper home; preserve produce and meats; and propagate a sustaining and decorative garden. Like Eugénie, several of the girls were from border or Southern states and had brought a slave girl or woman. The nuns permitted these bondswomen to receive a minimal instruction, in French, in order to follow along in the recitation of the Bible and prayers, during the thirty minutes of repose after the Sunday Mass.
SELECTED RULES (printed and bound at the Convent of Our Lady of the Sorrows)
7. Girls shall not take the Lord’s name in vain or utter any blasphemy, nor repeat any calumny against or concerning the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church.
8. Girls shall not dishonor or disrespect the Blessed Sisters or their fellow students.
9. Girls shall not gossip or engage in idle or slanderous discourse.
10. Girls shall not promenade around the Convent or its grounds as if on display, nor journey about the Convent or its grounds unsupervised except in groups of three (servants shall not count toward the total).
11. Girls shall not under any circumstances venture into the village of Hurttstown without the escort of a nun and a townsperson.
12. Girls shall not send notes or communicate with or enter into any written intercourse with residents of the town.
13. Girls shall avoid all license and provocation, in thought and deed.
14. Girls shall treat all of God’s creatures, even those of the lowest station or caste, or of the smallest size, with love and respect, for whatsoever they do to the least of His brothers, that they render undo Him.
After only several weeks Eugénie found the routine intolerable. She bridled at the endless carousel of classes, courses in domestic arts and etiquette, prayers in the chapel, and labor. As in all convents, the greatest practical evil, after apostasy, was idleness. She had been neither pious nor obedient under more favorable circumstances, and she lacked any foundation for managing the conditions at the convent, which offered her no means for fostering personal happiness. She was inattentive in class, insolent to her superiors, indifferent in chapel, and at all times indolent, in the manner she’d witnessed since childhood among women of her class and which would have been suitable under the dictates of a different and vanished social order, which is to say, normal circumstances. Under her requisite mud-brown frock, which covered her wrists and boots, she sometimes secretly wore a lace shift pilfered from her late mother. Although the nuns forbade any forms of physical adornment, she would sometimes apply carmine blush, which she hid in a tin box below a loose paving stone in the dormitory floor, to her white cheeks after sundown.