As a monk remarked, 'when you have heard the Sisters of Solesmes, those of Paris sound provincial.'" "And you saw the Abbess of Saint Cecilia.

Why, when I think of it, is not she the writer of a Treatise on Prayer (_Traite de l'Oraison_) which I read when I was at La Trappe, and which was not, I believe, regarded with favour at the Vatican ?" "Yes, she it is.

But you are making the greatest mistake in imagining that her book was not approved at Rome.

It was examined there, like every book of the kind, through a magnifying glass, strained through a sieve, picked over line by line, turned inside out and upside down; but the theologians employed in this pious custom-house service acknowledged and certified that this work, based on the soundest principles of mysticism, was learnedly, impeccably, desperately orthodox.
"I may add that the volume was printed privately by the Abbess herself, helped by some of the nuns, in a little hand-press belonging to the convent, and has never been in circulation.

It is, in fact, an epitome of doctrine, the essential extract of her teaching, and was more especially intended for those of her daughters who are unable to have the benefit of her instruction and lectures, because they live away from Solesmes, in other convents that she has founded.
"Why in these days, when for ten years past the Benedictine Sisters have made a study of Latin, when many of them translate from Hebrew and Greek and are skilled in exegesis, when others draw and paint the pages of missals, reviving the art of the illuminators of the Middle Ages, when others again--as, for instance, Mother Hildegarde--are organists of the highest attainment, you may easily understand that the woman who directs them all, the woman who has created in her Sisterhoods a school of practical mysticism and of religious art, is a very remarkable person; nay, in these days of frivolous devotions and ignorant piety, quite unique." "Why, she is one of the great Abbesses of the Middle Ages," cried Durtal.
"She is the crowning work of Dom Gueranger, who took her in hand almost as a child and kneaded and mollified her soul with long patience; then he transplanted her into a special greenhouse, watching her growth in the Lord day after day; and you see the result of this forcing and high culture." "Yes, and even this does not hinder some persons from regarding convents as the homes of idleness and reservoirs of folly.