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CHAPTER XXII....concluded
Shortly after the destruction of the Charlestown Convent by fire, there was perpetrated perhaps the most daring as well as the most infamous swindle upon public credulity ever recorded in the history of fraud; namely, the 'Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk'---the result of a foul conspiracy, of which a dissolute preacher and his miserable tool were among the chief actors. Although that 'damnable invention' was exposed in all its naked vileness; though Maria Monk's mother made solemn oath that the abandoned preacher, her daughter's paramour, had, with another of the conspirators, unavailingly endeavoured to bribe her to support the imposture; though the sect to which the preacher belonged, and whom he had cheated in some money transactions, flung him off with public expressions of loathing; though the conspirators after-wards wrangled about their infamous spoils, and more than one of them admitted the falsehood of the whole story: though, in fact, it was proved that the 'Awful Disclosures' were a verbal copy of a Spanish or Portuguese work which had been translated half a century before;* though the monstrous lie was disproved in every form and manner in which a lie could be disproved--still the influence of that lie is felt to this very hour, not only in Canada and in the States, but in Europe. While in Canada, in the autumn of 1866, I read, to my profound astonishment, even more than to my disgust, an article in a Canadian paper said to have influence with a certain class, written in reference to education in convents, and in which article the literary lunatic described those institutions as 'sinks of iniquity.' I might have supposed--did I not know that Maria Monk died in the Tombs of New York, to which prison she had been committed for theft--that the conspiracy was still in full swing, and that the writer--to judge him in the most charitable manner--was one of its besotted dupes. We shall hereafter see how this atrocious book, sworn to by the unscrupulous and believed in by the prejudiced, has poisoned the minds of a generous but credulous people.
We may dismiss this revolting case with a few lines from the statement of Colonel Stone, of New York, who, in company with some half dozen other persons, all of them Protestants, visited and inspected the Hotel Dieu, of Montreal, the scene of the alleged iniquities, which included child massacre scarcely less wholesale than Herod's slaughter of the innocents. It may be remarked that several parties, many of whom were not without faith in the 'Awful Disclosures,' returned from their investigation with the same conviction as that expressed by Colonel Stone, who says:--
I have rarely seen so many ladies together possessing in so great a degree the charm of manner. They were all affability and kindness. Cheerfulness was universal, and very unlike the notions commonly entertained of the gloom of the cloister. Their faces were too often wreathed in smiles to allow us to suppose that they were soon to assist in smothering their own children, or that those sweet spirits were soon to be trodden out of their bodies by the rough-shod priests of the Seminary. .... Indeed, I have never witnessed in any community or family more unaffected cheerfulness and good humour, nor more satisfactory evidence of entire confidence, esteem, and harmony among each other.
Having tested every wall in the building, examined every receptacle for potatoes and turnips, every dungeon devoted to the incarceration of soap and candles or loaf sugar, poked at mortar with an iron-shod stick, peeped into every corner and crevice of the whole establishment, and elaborately traced his progress and its results, the Colonel thus pronounces the judgment of an intelligent and rational mind:--
Thus ended this examination, in which we were most actively engaged for about three hours. The result is the most thorough conviction that Maria Monk is an arrant impostor--that she never was a nun, and was never within the walls of the Hotel Dieu--and consequently that her disclosures are wholly and unequivocally, from beginning to end, untrue--either the vagaries of a distempered brain, or a series of calumnies unequalled in the depravity of their invention, and unsurpassed in their enormity. There are those, I am well aware, who will not adopt this conclusion, though one should arise from the dead and attest it--even though 'Noah, Daniel, and Job,' were to speak from the slumber of ages and confirm it.
END OF CHAPTER XXII.
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NOTE:-
* The Boston Pilot thus exposed the daring imposture:--
'We are ready and willing to declare upon oath, that the extracts which we have seen in the New York Transcript, Boston Morning Post, Salem Gazette, and other respectable periodicals, purporting to be extracts from the disclosures of Maria Monk, &c.. are to be found, word for word, and letter for letter (proper names only being altered), in a book translated from the Spanish or Portuguese language, in 1781, called "The Gates of Hell Opened, or a Development of the Secrets of Nunneries," and that we, at present, are the owner of a copy of the said book, which was loaned by us, a year or two since, to some person in Marblehead or Salem, who has not returned it.'
The excommunication from Tristram Shandy, palmed off on the American public as the genuine Roman article, was something in the same spirit--just as ingenious a fraud upon public credulity.