A Fair Penitent

A Fair Penitent by Wilkie Collins is a story that first appeared in Charles Dickens’ magazine, Household Words, on July 18, 1857. The text introduces Charles Pineau Duclos as a French writer of biographies and novels who lived and worked during the first half of the eighteenth century.

A brief memoir tells of a Frenchwoman named Mademoiselle Gautier, who began life as an actress and who ended it as a Carmelite nun. A second manuscript is described as the lady’s own account of the process of her conversion, and of the circumstances which attended her moral passage from the state of a sinner to the state of a saint. A first-person passage tells of a sojourn of ten months at Pondevaux, of going to Lyons, and of entering the House of Anticaille still as parlour-boarder only, occupied by the nuns of the Order of Saint Mary. The text says this singular confession ends, and that besides the little vanities and levities which appear here and there on its surface there is surely a strong under-current of sincerity and frankness.