where they still continue to teach them to read and work: Madame Gautier
had desired us to go and see it, and to it we walked: rang at the bell,
were told that the nuns were all in the refectory, and were asked to
wait. The nuns' repast was soon finished, and one came with a very
agreeable, open countenance and fresh, brown complexion, well fed and
happy-looking, becomingly dressed in snow-white hood and pelerine and
brown gown. Bowing courteously, she by signs--for she could speak
neither French nor English--invited us to follow her, and led us through
cloister and passage to the room of the boarders; not nuns, only there
for their education. A pretty Italian girl, with corkscrew ringlets of
dark hair, rose from her pianoforte to receive us, and spoke with much
grace and self-complacency Italian-French, and accompanied by way of
interpreter our own conductress, who _motioned_ us to the sitting-room,
where nuns and pensioners were embroidering, with silk, cotton,
chenille, and beads, various pretty, ugly, and fantastical, useless
things. Luckily, none were finished at that moment, and their empty
basket saved our purses and our taste from danger or disgrace.

I had spied in the corner of the Italian interpreter's apartment a daub
of a print of the King and Queen of France taking leave of their family,
with a German inscription; and thinking the Abbe Edgeworth had a good
right to be in it, and as a kind of German notion of an Abbe appeared in
the print, and something like Edgewatz in the German words, I put my
finger on the spot, and bade the interpreter tell the nuns and the
abbess, who now appeared, that we were nearly related to the Abbe
Edgeworth, Louis XVI.'s confessor. This with some difficulty was put
into the Italian's head, and through her into the nuns', and through
them, in German, into the abbess' superior head. I heard a mistake in
the first repetition, which ran, no doubt, through all the editions,
viz. that we were _proches parents_, not to the King's confessor, but to