"Well, blessed be the saints in heaven!" exclaimed the enlightened religieuse. "What do you think this place is, Fouchette?"
"It is"--she hesitated and changed the form of speech--"is it a--a prison?"
"Why, no! Holy Mother, no!--not a prison, child! You thought it----"
"You poor child! Not so bad as that; yet----"
"No, not that. At least, not--ah! if Sister Angélique had heard you call 'Le Bon Pasteur' a house of correction it would have been worth three days of bread and water!"
"Yes, my child. Didn't you really know----"
"Then why should you remain here?" pursued the curious child. "Can't you go away if you want to?"
"A retreat for the poor,--an orphan asylum,--where little girls who have neither father nor mother, and no home, are sent. And where they are brought up to be good and industrious young women."
"D-don't they ever get out again?" asked Fouchette, somewhat doubtfully.
"Oh, yes. They are set free at twenty-one years of age if they wish to go, and even sooner if their friends come for them. If they don't wish to go, they can remain and become members of the order, if they are suitable. I was brought here at ten years of age by my aunt and left temporarily, but my uncle died and she was too poor, or else did not want me, so I was compelled to remain. When I became twenty-one I owed the institution so much from failure to do my tasks and fines, and what my aunt had promised to pay and didn't pay, that I had to stay a long time and work it out, and by that time I had become so accustomed to living here that I was afraid to leave the institution and begged them to let me become one of the community.
"Sometimes girls are bad and so lazy they won't work, and then they are punished. And when they prove incorrigible they are put in the other building, which is a house of correction. But if a girl is good and obedient and industrious she has no trouble, and may save up money against the day when she is set at liberty, besides receives the good recommendation of the Supérieure, on which she may find honest employment."
While the good Sister Agnes spoke truly, she dared not tell this child the whole truth.
She dared not say that Le Bon Pasteur,--The Good Shepherd,--although ostensibly a charitable institution, under religious auspices and subsidized by the State, for the protection and education of orphan girls during their minority, was practically a great factory which did not come under the legal restrictions governing free labor in France, and where several hundred girls and young women, whose only offence against society had been to lose their natural protectors, were subjected to all the rigors of the most benighted penal institutions.