Certainly, after such trials, the postulant is fully informed; nevertheless, his superiors contribute what they know.

They have watched him day after day; deep down under his superficial, actual and declared disposition they define his profound, latent, and future intention; if they deem this insufficient or doubtful, they adjourn or prevent the final profession: "My child, wait-your vocation is not yet determined," or "My friend, you were not made for the convent, return to the world!"-- Never was a social contract signed more knowingly, after greater reflection on what choice to make, after such deliberate study: the conditions of human association demanded by the revolutionary theory are all fulfilled and the dream of the Jacobins is realized.

But not where they planned it: through a strange contrast, and which seems ironical in history, this day-dream of speculative reason has produced nothing in the lay order of things but elaborate plans on paper, a deceptive and dangerous Declaration of (human) Rights, appeals to insurrection or to a dictatorship: incoherent or still-born organizations, in short, abortions or monsters; in the religious order of things, it adds to the living world thousands of living creatures of indefinite viability.

So that, among the effects of the French revolution, one of the principal and most enduring is the restoration of monastic institutions....
From the Consulate down to the present day they can everywhere be seen sprouting and growing.

Early, new sprouts shoot out and cover the old trunks of which the revolutionary axe had cut off the branches.