Convent Life of George Sand Author:George Sand General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1893 Original Publisher: Roberts brothers Subjects: History / General Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to M... more »illion-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: II. ' I HE English Augustinian Convent was -- a conglomeration of courts, buildings, and gardens, a sort of village instead of one house ; but there was nothing in its aspect to interest an architect or an antiquary. During the two hundred years and more of its existence there had been so many changes, additions, and adaptations, that it was hard to detect the original design. This very heterogeneousness, however, became its principal characteristic. It was mysterious and labyrinthine, -- in all its ugliness not devoid of a certain poetic charm with which these recluses knew how to invest the most ordinary objects. It was a whole month before I could find my way about alone, and after all our exploring expeditions I never knew all the winding passages or visited all the recesses of the place. The front on the street was wholly uninteresting; a great, bare, ugly building, with a low, arched doorway that gave accessto a wide, steep flight of steps. After mounting these stone stairs (there were seventeen if I remember rightly), you found yourself in a court paved with flagstones and surrounded by low buildings with blank walls, -- on one side the church, on the other the cloisters. Adjoining these last was the lodge of a porter, whose duty it was to open and shut the entrance of a vaulted passage communicating with the interior of the convent by a turning-box for parcels, and also opening into four grated parlors where visitors were received, -- the first used by the nuns themselves, the second for lessons, and the third, the largest, reser...« less