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FISH ON FRIDAY And Other Sketches Leonard Feeney (Sheed and Ward, 1934) The Sisters of Saint Pancratius (you may be sure I am
inventing them a name) at Rue de la Petitepantoufle in Paris, had the
distinction of having me as their chaplain for a six weeks’ spell last
summer. I was really not a full-fledged chaplain (my French was very much too
bad for that); but it was my privilege to say Mass for them every morning,
and to go twice a week in the late afternoon for Benediction of the Blessed
Sacrament, which they call by the succinct and majestic name of Le Salut. Saying Mass in a convent is a consolation and a joy,
first because of the attention and inspiration of the worshippers, and second
because of the flawlessness of the altar appointments. Vestments are
loveliest, amices are whitest, cinctures most delicately braided, chalices
most cuplike and golden, in a convent. Mass-cards are most artistically
scrolled, linens are smoothest and most immaculate, carpets are plushiest and
cleanest, marble is shiniest, lavabos glisten, flowers are most fragrant, in
a convent. Albs fit you in a convent. The book ribbons of the
missal are most colorful, bells give their most ethereal tinkle, candles burn
straightest and most purely, Mass-breads are baked nearest to the shade of
snow, the texture and odor of wine is closest to perfection, even incense is
faintest and most spicesome in a convent. The consummate order of a nun’s
life and the spotless purity of her heart find their completest outward
expression in her chapel, where wood and fabric and foliage and metal and
stone are raised to their utmost grandeur, and made as fit as material
substances can ever be, to associate with the Sacramental Body of Our Lord,
which His love has forged for our sacrifice, our worship, and our food. And
nobody but her Guardian Angel knows the hours upon hours little Sister
Sacristan puts in every day with her feathers, her wax, her soap and her
rags, cleaning and scouring and scrubbing and airing and making God’s House
beaming and bright, and driving the dust and the Devil out the window. There is something exquisite about every nun, no matter
how physically unbeautiful or shriveled or sick or old or feeble she may be,
because her expression and her movements are bound to assume, in some way or
other, the elegance of her aspiration and her desire. But I hope I am not
disloyal to the wimpled friends of my childhood, and the best-beloved sisters
of my school days, when I say that a French nun has a rare and almost piquant
exquisiteness all her own. Margaret Mary Alacoque of Lhautcour, Teresa Martin
of Lisieux, Jane Frances Mary de Chantal of Dijon, Madeleine-Sophie Barat of
Joigny, Bernadette Soubirous of Lourdes, from the loam of such a garden does
she spring, from the pattern of such a spindle is she spun. She is not as
versatile in a human and sisterly way as are our American nuns, and I doubt
(though let me be subject to correction) if she is quite as serviceable as
they are in the hospital, the asylum, or in the classroom. But she is
exquisite, continually eager and nervous and alert, elusive as a squirrel and
sudden as a shadow, more naturally adapted to mystery and the heights of
mystic contemplation, always on the point of bursting her bonds and exploding
into an angel. And her quality of other-worldliness is most revealed
when she prays out loud. The sound of a French community of nuns singing or
reciting their prayers is a low wind of melody, compact and perfect, with a
rhythmic roundness and softness that outrivals all music and tests the ear’s
capacity for esthetic pleasure. There is a common fallacy that the French
voice is nasal, because a series of sounds called “nasals” are recorded in
French grammars. It is completely not nasal. It is, if anything,
“roof-of-the-mouthal,” performed with the best parts of the oral structure
(parts which we Americans never bring into use) and approximating a state of
pure vowelism, wherein consonants are ever so lightly touched, tail syllables
often left unpronounced, and negligible c’s muted, in order to give the
throat a full fling at tonal beauty pure and undefiled. But French is decidedly not a language spoken through
the nose. And what are called “nasals” have really been devised because the
Gallic ear does not relish the abruptness of an open tone quenched and closed
by the lips or tongue. It is for this reason that they have put a-e-i-o-u
effects into terminal m and n. And the French voice is loveliest when it is feminine.
And it is most feminine when it is virginal. And most virginal when it is
cloistered. And most cloistral when it is praising God. You may have your stringed
symphony, your operatic ensemble, your extravagant choral society with an
Italian maestro beating it into excellence with a baton, but for music give
me Les Religieuses of Little Slipper Street in Paris when they are
saying farewell to Jesus after Le Salut, and I am lifting Him in His
gold lunette and putting Him in His silver cradle behind the tabernacle door,
and the sweet chant of Dieu soit beni; beni soit son Saint Nom, in
seraphic unison and breathful adoration, thanks Him and bids Him good-night. Besides the consolations of saying Mass in Little
Slipper Street, there were difficulties and humiliations as well. Especially
when one had to read (with an American voice) prayers in French for the First
Friday devotions; and especially when one had to say a few words of enquiry
to Sister Sacristan (who trembled like a divine butterfly) and that at a time
when one is extremely nervous, as I always am before Mass. For if there is
one inch of you not at ease, it is impossible to set your body at the proper
angle for speaking French correctly. I can do it moderately well if I am not
hurried, but if I am hurried I do it slitheringly, as on a banana peel. And
Sister Sacristan spoke her native tongue with such celerity and elegance,
that I forgot my simplest grammar rules in trying to give swift (S’il n’y
a pas de vitesse ce n’est pas français) answers to her easiest questions. I remember distinctly the evening when I had to recite
the long Prayer to the Sacred Heart at the First Friday devotions. I wanted to
ask Sister Sacristan how many hymns were to be sung at Benediction, and where
I was to insert the prayer. Endeavoring to gather speed as I spoke, I
bombarded her delicate ear with the following barbarism: “Ma sœur, est-ce que
les révérendes dames chanteront trios chansons pendant le Salut? Et après
lequel, faut-il, parlet la priére?”) Which, translated from broken French
into broken English, would go (and must have sounded to her) something like
this: “Sister, is it that the holy girls will sing three songs during the
Benediction? And after which one ought I to talk the prayer?” But my holy memories of six weeks at Little Slipper
Street and its consecrated ladies who sing and sigh and suffer and pray for
the salvation of the world, are most focused, not on the nuns themselves, but
on Peter, their inimitable and exotic altar boy. As everyone knows, a nun is not allowed to serve Mass.
No woman is. She may, in an emergency, answer the prayers from the other side
of the altar rail; but the ritual of the sanctuary and everything connected
with it in public worship is hopelessly masculine. There is no such thing as
a “priestess” in the Catholic Church, and no such person as an “altar maid.”
In this usage there is absolutely no question of the superiority of my sex
over the other. There is question merely of a liturgical function to be
performed according to the prescriptions of Christ, and He, for His own
reasons, has assigned the rôle of levite and clerk to us. Women are probably
God’s best saints, and certainly the Blessed Virgin Mary is His greatest
human achievement. But for all that we are runaways at a Crucifixion, the
sacerdotal prerogative is one with the sex of Peter, and the keeper of the
Holy of Holies must bear the physiognomy of the fisherman. It was fitting
therefore that the Sisters at Little Slipper Street, anxious to have their
Holy Mass rubrically (and therefore masculinely) perfect, should have scoured
the neighboring streets and lanes and supplied themselves with a Peter for
their daily altar boy In choosing Peter (the nuns called him “Pierre,” but I
called him Peter because it amused him) to be Little Slipper Mass-boy, it was
obvious that Reverend Mother Superior and her Council (who are always
discreet) outdid themselves in discretion. For of all the wheezy,
one-cylindered, shop-worn and moth-eaten human beings I have ever witnessed,
little Paris Peter of Petitepantoufle takes the golden apple. He had the construction of a ventriloquist’s doll, the
expression of a snowman, and the individuality of a suit of clothes on a coat
hanger. He smiled as though something were continually hurting him, and
walked as though he were riding a bicycle. His hair was the color of dry hay,
his eyes the color of canned salmon, and his face the shade of butterbeans.
His voice was something terrible and eerie to listen to. It was bass and
unnatural beyond his years. He spoke as though he were gargling the low notes
of a xylophone. He was fourteen years of age, five grades behind schedule in
school, had flat cheek-bones and wide ears and was possessed of that awful
accoutrement of an overgrown boy, a pre-razor mustache. Mother Superior, when Peter was made “warden of the
cruets” in Little Slipper Chapel, specified that he should come to Mass every
morning with a clean shirt, his shoes shined, and his hands and face washed.
Peter observed these regulations scrupulously. But anything Mother Superior
left unsaid he left undone. And it seems she had made no direct mention of a
tooth-brush, or of that other extreme of personal fastidiousness,
soap-and-water behind the ears. He also left his hair uncombed until he
arrived in the sacristy. Sister Sacristan was sure to rearrange it to
her own satisfaction anyhow when he came in (always a minute late) and she
greeted him with her usual “Bonjour. “Tsuh, tsuh, tsuh, Pierre! Toujours
en retard!” so what was the use of a fellow going to a lot of extra bother? It was a small pageant to see Peter, abetted by pullings
and twistings on the part of Sister Sacristan, getting into his altar
clothes. First, a big yawn. Then, a lurch with your right hand. Then, a lurch
with your left hand. And, presto! you were inside the gorgeous white cassock
which the champion needle-worker at Petitepantoufle had made for the
priest’s attendant. Then came the buttoning of interminable buttons. There
were thirty-two down the front, all the way from Peter’s chin to Peter’s shoe
shine. Peter began at the top, and Sister Sacristan began at the bottom.
Theoretically they should have bumped thumbs at Peter’s middle, but Peter
wasn’t as fast a buttoner as Sister Sacristan. His record was ten buttons to
her twenty-two. When he was fairly spry and awake, he did about eight or nine
of his share. When he was extra tired (as he usually was), he let her do
thirty. I remember distinctly a certain morning when Peter did only one; and
that eventually came unbuttoned and had to be rebuttoned by Sister Sacristan,
which gave her the score of thirty-two love, the world’s record in a button
contest. After Peter’s cassock came his investiture in the
surplice. This meant another disheveling of hair, and was an added reason why
Peter should comb his with his fingers on the way to Mass. The surplice was a
bit of dream work in lace, done by a tubercular nun in the convent infirmary
before she coughed herself to eternal sleep. It was riotous with chalices and
wheat stems and grapes, with a full figure of Our Lord in the front center,
and twelve tiny apostles fringing the edges, a masterpiece of daintiness and
devotion. When Peter had surrounded himself with this garment, one almost
expected to hear him bark, he looked so much like the wolf playing at Little
Red Ridinghood. But he was not through yet. Next came a gorgeous cape
with white ribbons and golden hooks-and-eyes, and fitting Peter (as far as
anything could ever fit him) with regal perfection. And last of all, white
gloves! (Foolish to wash your hands, but Mother Superior said . . .
) And so appareled, half urchin and half angel, Peter squiddled the
uncomfortable parts of him, looked seraphically at me, and said silently with
his eyes: “Allez-oop! Hey? Let’s go! Huh?” We bowed to one another and
walked out of the sacristy. At the Mass proper, Peter was adequate, but no more. He
enunciated properly about one-tenth of the Latin, and had not the slightest
notion why I should wait for him to finish his part in the spoken prayer. He
folded his hands unevenly and seemed fascinated at times by the wavering of a
candle, so fascinated that he invariably came late to move the book, and
always slipped and juggled it when making the genuflection. At Offertory time he sometimes (not often) gave me the
water for the wine; and sometimes (very often) went back to the credence
table without the lavabo cloth. But one thing Peter could do magnificently
and that was ring the bell. A good, solid, substantial jingle came out of the
hand-chime whenever Peter operated it. And his bell work was always
timely and decisive and suited to my word or movement at the altar. If Mass seemed long to him (invariably it did), Peter
went over to the side of the sanctuary and sat down. Mother Superior, for all
her meticulosity never seemed to object to this. I believe the reason was
because when Peter sat down, a pillar hid him from the view of the community.
In that way the sanctuary was well rid of him while still possessing him
rubrically. When Mass was over, Peter gave me a low bow and a nod of
approval, whisked off his vestments, dropped them on a chair before Sister
Sacristan could come in from clearing the sanctuary and scooted out of Little
Slipper sacristy before the smoke had left the quenched candle tops on the
high altar. You see there was and could forever be only one Peter. I
hope I have done him full justice and no injury. And now let me crown him with
a single laurel and grace him with one encomium. Peter was master of one
accomplishment, he was radiant with one divine quality, he had one supreme
title to his office: he was innocent. There was in his expression that
heavenly sheepishness that smolders in the eyes of the stupid who know no sin.
He was the cow who looked at little Jesus in the stall and borrowed enough
intelligence to love him. My
blessing on you, Peter, so blithe and baptismal, so dear and dumb. Not I to
oust you from your grandeur and your glory. I would I were as little God’s
enemy as you are. I would I were as worthy as you to walk into a sanctuary.
It was fitting that you should lead me thither mornings when we had Holy Mass
at Little Slipper Chapel. It was fitting that you should tell me at the foot
of the stairs to go to the altar of God, “to God Who giveth joy to your
youth.” It was fitting that you should answer “Misereatur” to my “Confiteor.” Now it so happened (and this is where my story hopes to
beguile you) that during my term at Little Slipper Convent, Peter, my curious
clerk, took desperately sick. It was, if I remember rightly, the twentieth
day of my tenure of office at that institution. Altar boys have taken
desperately sick before and stories have not been written to commemorate the
sad affair, but oddly enough it was precisely the occasion of Peter’s illness
that made his mystic significance at Maison de la Petitepantoufle
fully manifest to me. I heard later that Peter’s malady was a combination of
fever and colic, caused by eating seven green apples (including skins and
seeds) at the Cirque d’ Hiver where he went one afternoon with a
street companion to see Les Dario, the funniest clowns in
Paris. But whatever was the extent of his indiscretion, Peter came home that
night dizzy and in a panic. It did not help matters any either, when, in his
mother’s absence, he went to the wrong bottle in the pantry (not the essence
of rhubarb which his mother always administered for sick headache or pains in
the stomach) and blithely swallowed a tablespoonful of furniture polish. At six o’clock that night he was writhing and in agony.
At seven o’clock he had a chill. At eight he had a chill, a fever and the
gripes. At nine o’clock he had the doctor, and that in the life of a poor
French family is an event disparate by a hair’s breadth from a summons to the
undertaker. Next morning, fully vested, I stood in Little Slipper
sacristy and waited and waited for Peter to come. It was time for Mass, the
bell had rung, the nuns had long since assembled, the organ was playing (for
oh! the irony of it, it was a feast day), the candles were lit,
Peter’s altar garments were all fluffed and waiting for him on the vestment
case. But the bridegroom tarried, and we listened in vain for the sound of
his shuffle on the stair. Sister Sacristan kept circulating like a bat from the
door to the vestment case, trying to control her disappointment and her
desperation. When fully five minutes had passed, we realized that Peter was
not coming to play his important rôle in the Holy Sacrifice that day. At this point, Reverend Mother Superior protruded her
wimpled head through the vestry door, to see whether it was I or Peter who
was missing. The two nuns exchanged little silent shrugs of perplexity.
Sister Sacristan pointed to Peter’s empty clothes on the table; and Mother
Superior gave me the signal to go on with the Mass alone. Sister Sacristan
went speedily ahead of me, transferred the cruets, the dish and the
handcloth, from the credence stand to the altar, so that I might serve them
to myself, carried the Mass bell to the other side of the altar rail, and
when I launched out on my solitary way into the beautiful liturgy of the Holy
Sacrifice, it was a strange and feminine voice, soft and indefinite and in
the distance, that proclaimed how God, to Whose altar I desired to go, was a
God “Who gaveth joy to her youth.” When Mass was over and I was back in the sacristy,
Sister Sacristan was very much constrained to reveal to me the extent of her
anxiety concerning the mysterious defection of her enfant terrible.
“Mais vous croyez bien, n’est-ce pas, mon Père,” she said, “qu’il soit tombe
malade?” “Nonsense, Sister,” I replied (and I do forget what word I used for
“nonsense”), “he has merely overslept this morning, that is all. It is a
common affliction with altar boys.” “But no, mon Père,” she insisted, “he never
oversleeps. When we first got him he used to oversleep, yes. But I taught him
to say a prayer every night before he goes to sleep to his Guardian Angel, a
prayer to be wakened on time in the morning. It has never failed. He has not
been late, more than a minute or two, ever since that day.” “Very true, sister,” I rejoined with skeptical
persistency, “but is it not possible that Peter, before retiring last night,
forgot his prayer to the Guardian Angel, and so exempted that celestial
gentleman of his morning obligation?” “Even so,” she replied, “our community also says a
prayer every night to Peter’s Guardian Angel. We also remind him to wake
Peter in time for our Holy Mass. And we did not forget it last night.” There was no gainsaying this argument. And so I was
forced to admit that Peter’s absence must be due to some more serious cause
than a mere refusal to get out of bed this morning when his faithful Angel
shook him, called in his ear, and tickled his toes with a feather. The loyal and solicitous nuns were not long in finding
out what ailed Peter and why he had deserted them. After breakfast Reverend
Mother Bursar, or somebody equally august and important in the hierarchy of
nundom, was deputed to go with her companion to Peter’s home and investigate
the matter. It was she who brought back the story of the circus, the seven
green apples, and the furniture polish. And it was through her that I was
informed next morning of Peter’s serious predicament. During the next few days, when Peter’s fever hovered
between one hundred and one hundred and three degrees (the greatest amount of
vital activity that had ever taken place within him), Little Slipper Convent
was a place sad to visit and pitiful to behold. Big nuns and little nuns,
fervent nuns and tepid nuns, nuns ecstatic and nuns matter-of-fact, old nuns
in their wheel-chairs and radiant young postulants were, one and all alike,
cast into the depths of unconsolable gloom. Their solitary knight, their one virile possession,
their lonely Lazarus, their Peter, their rock, was trembling on the verge of
another life, and was about to leave them stranded in a dismal world of
monotonous femininity. And out of the secret corners of their chaste heart,
the slumbering love they bore their little comrade was discovering itself for
the first time, and rising up to plead for him, and asking God to give him
pity and protection. For stupid Peter, slovenly Peter, Peter
the mule-eyed, Peter of the horrid grin and the unkempt hair, was linked in
their imaginations with the tabernacle. He was part of the furniture of their
altar. He was God’s little pate-boy who walked in the penumbra of Divine
Light. He moved in their memories like a small moth that played and gyrated
around the Flame of the Sacred Heart. In his absence everything symbolic and
beautiful and ideal about him was remembered, everything unlovely and ugly
and uncouth was forgotten. In two or three short days Peter began to take on the
wonder of a legend in Little Slipper household. Tales were being told of him
that never happened. Secrets were being whispered in convent cell and
corridor about his prowess in holiness, his gallantry, his sweet expression,
even (God save the mark) his “nice eyes.” Sister Beatrice of Our Lady’s Coronation, whose ailment
had hitherto been analyzed by the charitable as “simple-mindedness,” and by
the literal as “out and out softening of the brain,” was beginning to be half
believed when she declared that she had been told in a vision that Peter was
a heavenly messenger sent to the world in disguise, a Raphael parading as
Toby, one of the Seraphim masquerading as a buffoon. At any rate, it was
“little brother, the ragamuffin,” who got tangled up in woman’s love, and was
eddied and whirled about in its crystal stream as it left its pure source in
Little Slipper Convent and started its long journey to the stars. The longer Peter remained sick abed, the more mythical
and alluring became his souvenir. Sister Eloise, the convent artist, was
already making a draft of him for a holy card, and had already schemed him
out in her mind as sprouting with wings and aureoled with a halo. Sister Rita
Celeste, expert at knitting and embroidery, was threading her needles with
yarns of many colors, and preparing to do him in a tapestry for the relics
chamber. Each morning on top of my vestments I found a note of
memento from the community. Monday it was: “Le Révérend Père, voudra
bien recommander au bon Dieu le etit servant qui souffre.” Tuesday: “Prière
de ne pas oublier l’enfant gentil qui ne vient plus pour la messe.” Each day
it was the same plaint, the supplication of Mary and Martha: “Lord, he whom Thou
lovest is sick!” One morning there was an envelope with a ten franc note in
it and a message (nicely phrased and calculated to relieve me of any
simoniacal scruple) begging that I should offer up the whole Mass on that day
for Peter’s recovery. It happened that on the same day the ordo allowed
me to say a votive — and therefore, if I chose, a requiem — Mass. Only I
noticed how scared Sister Sacristan looked when I made a false motion in the
direction of the black vestments. The very thought of them made her shudder.
She rolled them up fearsomely and with dispatch and hid them out of sight.
And so we had a Mass in white for little Peter, a Missa pro Infirmo,
and when I came to the special prayer in the Collect, I enunciated the words
“Pro famulo tuo Petro” with special feeling and emphasis, because I knew that
seventy pairs of ears were, with awful attention, listening under their
linens. But I shall keep you in suspense no longer. Peter did
not die. Prayer prevailed over the colic. Novenas, votive candles, hours of
watching before the Blessed Sacrament, aspirations, promises of greater
fidelity to religious discipline, and all that holy artillery that nuns train
on the rampart of Heaven when they seek to sway the mighty Will of God, were
once more successful. The doorpost was sprinkled with the blood of the lamb.
The avenging angel menaced, but did not smite. Peter got better and better.
And finally he got all better. And Little Slipper Convent was spared its most
woeful tragedy. As luck would have it (and I was very restless and in
suspense in the meantime), Peter made his reappearance in Little Slipper
sanctuary the very last day of my assignment there. To have been obliged to
leave and not to have seen him again is such a withering thought that I shall
dismiss it at once with a cold shiver. Precisely at twenty minutes past six on the last day of
my incumbency, the old familiar shoes came shuffling up the pebbled walk. We
heard his twist on the door-knob. And in walked our Peter, a little thinner
perhaps, and a little paler, but sound and substantial and ready for work
once more. Sister Sacristan swooped upon him like a mother bird who
has found her stray fledgling under a hedge. She fairly cackled and cooed
with delight as she shook him and felt of him and devoured him with her eyes.
Mother Superior and her Council had to troop in to see him too and be
witnesses to his resurrection. Never did the summons bell for Mass toll so vigorous1y
as on the day of Peter’s revival. And indeed it had no need to toll at all,
for rumor went like wild-fire through the convent that he was seen coming up
the gravel walk, and every nun was in her place in chapel a twentieth of an
hour ahead of time. Mother Superior and her whole Council had to assist him
to get into his altar clothes. Each one had a little tug at him in her own
way. Sister Sacristan buttoned all his buttons, Mother Bursar tied his
ribbons, and Reverend Mother Superior herself fastened his golden
hooks-and-eyes. Then came a solemn order from Mother
Superior that he was not to kneel at all during the Mass, except for the few
moments of Consecration. The bishop’s throne and prie-dieu were arranged for
him near the credence table. He must be weaned back to the altar little by
little, and with no strain on the progress of his convalescence. It was
sufficient for that day that he should just be there. The sanctuarv must
reassimilate him gradually. His physical reality was enough to begin with
again, after the weeks of loneliness without him. Just Peter and his cassock
and his surplice and his cape and his white g1oves. On that foundation love
would build again, and fancy would rest her slender ladder reaching to the
sky. When Mass was over (which Peter seemed to weather
without any indications of a relapse) he was invited (and this was an
unheard-of privilege) to take his petit déjeuner with me in the
chaplain’s dining room. As you know, the French petit déjeuner is very
petit indeed. It consists of coffee and a bun. There is sometimes a
little butter and a little jam. On this eventful morning Sister Refectorian
made it as fulsome as a petit déjeuner is ever allowed to be and still
retain its identity. There was a lot of butter and a lot of jam. There were
reams of bread and dozens of buns, and the coffee was extravagantly hot. During the breakfast I had many things to say to Peter.
I said I was awfully glad to see him again. He grinned. I said we were so
afraid he would die. He grinned at this too. I said we missed him very much
when he was sick, and all the nuns prayed very hard for him. This remark made
Peter grin once more. I told him it was lucky he got back on that very
morning because I was leaving Paris in the afternoon, and I would have hated
to go and not to have seen him again. Peter gave me another grin and went on
eating. Then I told him an American kiddie joke. Peter grinned at it. I
proceeded to tell him about the American Indians and Wild West and Buffalo
Bill. This set him grinning again. It was time for me to be up and off, so I
shook hands with Peter and bade him farewell. He nodded and grinned me a nice
good-bye. I caught his face grinning in the mirror as I went out the door. I left him in the chaplain’s refectory dropping his
fifth lump of sugar into his third bowl of coffee, and putting his ninth
knifeful of butter on his fourth slice of bread. And if it will not be
indecorous to mention it, during the course of our petit déjeuner,
a certain salivary teaspoon made thirteen separate journeys from Peter’s open
mouth to a bottle of orange jam. I
shall be forgiven for having counted such things accurate1y. For nothing
Peter ever did seemed to me unimportant. And in my memories of Little Slipper
Convent I wish no shred or part of him ever to be forgotten. |