My Teenage Years in a Convent: "The Convent of the English Sisters" from "The Story of My Life"

From age thirteen to fifteen, female French novelist George Sand lived in a convent in Paris. In her autobiography, “The Story of My Life,” she gives us a picture of her days spent within its walls. The text (in English, translated from the French) of this Kindle edition (equivalent in length to a physical book of approximately 16 pages) originally appeared in 1896 in “Library of the World’s Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Volume 32.”

Sample passage:
From the attic where I was supposed to be playing scales, I could see a labyrinth of roofs, sheds, lofts, and slopes, all covered with moss-grown tiles and decorated with broken chimneys, offering a vast field for new explorations. So onto the roof we went. It was not hard to jump out the window. Six feet below us there was a gutter joining two gables. It was more imprudent than difficult to scale these gables, meet others, jump from slope to slope, and run about like cats; and danger, far from restraining, only seemed to stimulate us. There was something exceedingly foolish, but at the same time heroic, in this mania of “seeking the victim”; foolish, because we had to suppose that the nuns, whose gentleness and kindness we worshipped, were practicing horrible tortures upon someone; heroic, because we risked our lives every day to deliver an imaginary creature, who was the object of our most generous thoughts and most chivalrous undertakings.

About the author:
George Sand (1804–1876) was a female French novelist who had a ten-year affair with composer Frederic Chopin. Other works include the novels “Consuelo,” “The Haunted Pool,” and “Elle et Lui.”