Notre-Dame de l’Abbaye aux Bois
If I say that the little church and cloister, which are all that remain of a monastery of Cistercian nuns, built in 1718, are situated in the Rue de Sèvres, hard by the Bon Marché, my readers will immediately picture their whereabouts. At the beginning of this century, the Abbaye became a genteel boarding-house for fashionable ladies who played at being weary of the world; but, although they retired into a monastic building, their monde followed them; and thus we find Madame Recamier receiving her admirers in her cloistered salon, and listening to their philosophical sophistries while she elegantly reclines upon a satin sofa with straight legs and curling arms.