Jewels from Jane, May 5

Carondelet May 5, 1839

Your Blessing

Monsignor

Having learned that you leave tomorrow, I hasten to write you, in order to ask if you judge it appropriate if we would make our retreat which is indicated for our institution from the Ascension to Pentecost, or if you prefer that we delay it until our vacation time that the gentlemen of the corporation will give us from July 15 to August 15, when we will be a little more free. I leave everything to your will and we shall do as you desire. We will appreciate your answer and the honor of a visit from you as soon as possible. We would like, all of us, to see you, and our little dumb girls do not desire it less than we. Everyday they look in the direction of St. Louis hoping to see you coming. Waiting for this honor, I pray you to accept my respect and I am

Your humble and obedient daughter,

Sister Marie Delphine [Fontbonne]

Letter to Bishop Rosati

Translated from the French

In reference to the "gentlemen of the corporation" Sister Lucida Savage has this to say in her book, The Congregation of St. Joseph of Carondelet:

"The state school [for the deaf] did not become a reality until 1847; but on February 13, 1839, an appropriation of two thousand dollars was granted by the legislature 'for the annual tuition of such deaf and dumb children now or hereafter received in the deaf and dumb asylum at the town of Carondelet in the county of St. Louis.' This fund, which did not become available until the end of 1839, was to be administered pro rata, for such pupils only as were residents of Missouri and after they had spent six months in school. Only three of the mutes who were in the convent at this time belonged to the State, Emily Johnson, and Mary Musdach of St. Louis, and Teresa Bernard of Florisssant. A fourth, Mary Jane Hurley, was an orphan, dependent on the charity of the Sisters.

"Before any part of the appropriation materialized, financial assistance came from another quarter, and with it a practical recognition of the services which the Sisters were rendering to the village. For two years they had been teaching almost gratuitously all the children who came to them. This number did not at any time exceed thirty-eight, exclusive of mutes and orphans. Early in April, the school commissioners, Messers N. Paupe and Joseph Le Blond, called at the convent and made an agreement with the Sisters which was unanimously adopted by the Board of Trustees at their meeting on April 23. This agreement stipulated for a salary to be paid the Sisters 'by the Corporation of Carondelet to educate in the ordinary branches of the English and French languages the female children of the town of Carondelet, from six to eighteen years old.'

"The salary so opportunely offered seemed a fortune to the struggling community, as indeed it must have been, with markets providing eggs three for a penny, butter six cents a pound and other commodities in proportion. Besides, their own carefully tended garden was a summer-long source of supply; and an orchard of six pear trees, planted by the pioneers in 1836 and dedicated with mock ceremony to themselves--a tree to each--was beginning to bear the luscious fruit which it continued to produce for over fifty years. [The last of these trees was destroyed by a storm in the summer of 1889.] Had they been worldly wise they would have followed the suggestion of a practical-minded Sister and opened a bank account; but theirs was the wisdom of the Gospel, and their surplus capital was invested in small luxuries for the poor and sick whom they met on their daily rounds of charity."