Look to your left at the rough stone facade of the church, easily spotted by its large pointed-arch window with delicate stone tracery and the simple cross crowning its steep peak. This is the Convent of the Benedictine Nuns of Calvaire. It is an exceptionally rare piece of urban preservation, a fully intact medieval religious estate sitting right inside a modern city. High schist walls enclose cloisters, massive gardens, and historically, a working farm that allowed the nuns to live in total self-sufficiency.
Check your screen for a clear shot of this stone exterior. Prince Pierre de Rohan laid that very cornerstone in sixteen twenty. The nuns moved to this massive plot because their first location in Angers was too distracting for a strict contemplative lifestyle. They demanded absolute peace.
Naturally, that did not last.
During the French Revolution, the government seized the estate and transformed it into a prison. It became a grim staging ground for women and children condemned to the firing squads. One inmate was a loyal servant to the wealthy d'Armaillé family. She knew exactly where her masters had hidden their fortune. To break her silence, revolutionary guards took away the three-year-old d'Armaillé daughter she was caring for. The child died of starvation right here in the former convent, but the servant took the secret of the treasure to her grave.
Another inmate, Victoire Bauduceau, was imprisoned for hosting clandestine midnight masses, which the revolutionary court claimed had fanaticized half her town.
The government chopped up the entire estate and sold it off in lots in seventeen ninety-five. You would assume the convent was gone forever.
Do not underestimate a group of patient nuns.
Returning in the early nineteenth century, the sisters successfully executed a staggering real estate operation. They quietly and systematically bought back every single parcel, piece by piece, until they had perfectly reconstituted their original medieval domain.
Since this is the final stop on our tour, I will leave you here to admire their iron will. Thank you for exploring Angers with me.
