Chapter 128 behind eight people is a stone

Having sketched the spiritual aspect of the monastery initially, it would not be unhelpful to say a few words about its physical appearance.Readers already have an idea of ​​this. The Petit Piccubus Saint-Antoine Abbey occupies almost all of that broad trapezoid formed by the Rue Polonceau, the Rue di Stembi, the little Rue Piccubus, and the already clogged It is formed by the intersection of dead-end streets known as O'Malley Street.The four streets surrounded the trapezoid like a moat.The monastery consisted of several houses and a garden.The main house, taken as a whole, is made up of several buildings of different styles. When viewed from the air, the series of buildings looks like a curved ruler on the ground.The long arm of the curved ruler extends from Piccubs Street to Polonceau Street, occupying the entire Zhibi Street; the short arm faces Piccubs Street, and the houses on that side are tall and gray, with a serious image. The doors and windows in the front are all equipped with iron bars, and the large car door of No. 62 marks the end of the house in that area.In the middle of the houses in that neighborhood, there is an old-fashioned low round archway, covered with white dust and cobwebs in the doorway, which is only open for an hour or two on Sunday, or when a nun's coffin is about to be carried. It happened only once when I left the seminary.That is where the public enters the chapel.At the corner of the curved ruler, there was a square hall used as a storage room, but the nuns called it "the counting room".Along the long arm, there are quiet rooms for nuns and beginners at all levels.Along the short arm there are the kitchen, the refectory with a corridor and the chapel.Between Gate No. 62 and the closed entrance to O'Malley Lane was the boarding school, which was not visible from the outside.The rest of the trapezoid is the garden, which is much lower than the level of the Rue Polonceau, so that the wall is higher on the inside than on the outside.The ground of the garden is slightly raised, and in the middle there is a slightly higher part, on which a beautiful conical fir tree rises like a spike in the center of a round shield. From the center, four broad avenues extend in all directions, each A wide road has two small roads, each branching out to the left and right, and each connecting. Therefore, if the garden is round, the geometric figure formed by those roads is like a cross on the wheel.All the roads reached the wall, and because the walls of the garden were very irregular, the lengths of the roads were not uniform.Gooseberry trees were planted on both sides of the road.At the corner of Zhibi Street, there are the remains of the old courtyard. There is a small path, under two rows of tall birches, extending from there to the small courtyard at the corner of O'Malley Lane.In front of the small courtyard, there is the so-called small garden.To this whole we add a patio, the various corners formed by the houses of the inner courts, the walls of the prison, a long series of buildings that can be seen along the Via Polonceau at a short distance. With the black roof on one side, we can imagine the entire appearance of the Bernard convent that existed in Petit Picbus forty-five years ago.From the fourteenth century to the sixteenth century, there was a famous stadium called "The Club of Eleven Thousand Devils", which was the base for the construction of the holy monastery in the future.

All those streets are, for Paris, the oldest.Names such as Zhibi and O'Malley are old enough, and the streets named after them are even older.Omalai Lane was originally called Mogu Lane, and Zhibi Street was originally called Wild Rose Street, because God made flowers bloom long before humans dug stones.