Hamish Runcet's account of an angel finishing his church cleaning was told in his letter to this woman, known as the Man Nun of Ouvrage [St. Fidgeta and Other Parodies, 104]. For more, see Letters to an Astigmatic Stigmatic, published by Gasogene Books.
It's fairly safe to say that there is no historic Clotilde, the Mad Nun - but you'll hear about her here first if something turns up. The name brings to mind another Bellairs creation, Stefan Schimpf, the Mad Monk.
Definition of ouvrage: French for work (labor, book, volume).
A few words on the book: Astigmatism is a vision defect of the refractive system of the eye. A stigmatic is one of such unusual virtue that God marks his hands and feet with the wounds Christ suffered on the cross. (Bellairs probably enjoyed the vast difference in definitions by the addition of the letter a.) A gasogene (or gazogene) is "an apparatus for impregnating a liquid with a gas, esp. carbon dioxide;" "A soda siphon of the type common in silent film comedies would presumably qualify," adds Bowen.
Otherwise, as Myers, notes, "the passage is just typical Bellairsian bullshit." |
