Earlier in these columns (January, 2004), we discussed the forced closings of the houses in France in the first decade of the 20th century. In July 1904, according to the Annual Letters, Paris, Pensionnat, “the iniquitous law struck the Sacred Heart of the rue de Varenne,” the famous Hôtel Biron, 77, rue de Varenne. This was the house Madeleine Sophie purchased after the Council of 1820 decided that the Society needed a Paris residence that could house the school and the novitiate as well as the central administration. It was an enormous investment, acquired with difficulty. It belonged to a certain duchess, who was asking way too high a price for it, and besides the king intended to house the family of the Duke de Berry there. But the intervention of the Countess de Marbeuf, then a novice in the Society, and the Gramont family caused the king to change his mind and even give a donation. This, with the help of several loans, enabled the Society to buy this splendid residence in the section of Paris where the nobility clustered. In the view of the public the Hôtel Biron became a kind of symbol of the Society; and its brilliant boarding school, headed so long by Eugénie de Gramont, came to be regarded as the model of all the others. It may have been because of the reputation of the boarding school that Madeleine Sophie decided to separate the motherhouse from the school; after 1835 the school alone occupied the Hôtel Biron. It continued to flourish and in 1904 numbered 146 boarders.

The sad account in the Annual Letters relates that on July 23, the students had a last meeting with Mother Digby, superior general, who spoke to them about fidelity to duty, prayer and self-abnegation. Two days later they were all invited to the motherhouse for Benediction; there was a reunion with all the nuns to say good-bye, ending with a hymn, the last lines of which prayed that when life's voyage was over there would be no one missing at the heavenly rendezvous. The cardinal archbishop of Paris came himself to preside at the prizes; the children promised to remember him and his goodness to them, after which they left for good. Retreat for the community followed and then the departures began for most of the sixty members of the community.

Little by little the circle grew smaller…the rooms became too large…the voices at Office tried to become more sonorous…Soon there were only six or seven religious left at #77, fulfilling a mission hitherto unheard of in the catalog of the Society: that of 'Guardians' of the Lord's house.

Soon even these few had to leave; the Blessed Sacrament was removed.

It was a day of anguish, March 29, 1905, that the house was emptied of the Divine Guest, who had never ceased to reside there, even in the worst days [of revolution and internal strife]….Our task at #77 was finished; on June 6 the last religious went to live at the motherhouse. From then on one of them went daily to spend a few hours at the portry of the empty house, then guarded only by two of the former servants.

The account ends with a prayer of gratitude for the graces received and the good done in that house and a plea that the exiled religious will be, wherever they are sent, “living stones of the dear closed houses: stones of humility, of primitive spirit and of limitless devotedness to our beloved Society.”

At the same time that Mother Digby and her council and staff were arranging for the reassignment of the 1000 living French RSCJ, they had to see to transferring the remains of the dead who were buried at Conflans. We know that Madeleine Sophie's body and those of most of the others were taken to Belgium. For Aloysia Hardey, who in her turn had been buried at Conflans after her death on June 17, 1886, it seemed the moment to go home; Kenwood's scribe records:

An immense grace has been given to this vicariate and especially to this novitiate house of the Society in the United States. On December 12, 1905, Reverend Mother Mahony and Reverend Mother Tommasini brought the venerable remains of our Reverend Mother Hardey here to Kenwood. Bishop Burke [of Albany] showed his respect for his erstwhile benefactress by going himself to receive the body at the railway station. A solemn Requiem Mass had been celebrated in the morning at Manhattanville; the funeral procession arrived at two o'clock in the afternoon. After Vespers of the Dead, the bishop spoke of the venerated mother to whom the house owed its existence and of the good done here for the glory of the Sacred Heart during the last fifty years. If the daughters of this holy mother have continued to regret her passing, now they have the consolation of praying at her tomb and of begging her to obtain blessings…on all [for whom we pray]. Thus Mother Aloysia Hardey continues in heaven her mission here below of fortifying the bonds of the Cor unum.