MARIA SELLS HER SOUL.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXVIII, Issue 9, 1 March 1900, Page 3

MARIA SELLS HER SOUL.

Despite her depraved character, Maria Monk, as we have seen, long resisted the wiles and entreaties of the reprobate Hoyte, and refused to take the final and fatal Btep of passing herself off as an

' escaped nun.' Her resolution, however, at last (rave way, and Mrs. Monk tells how, a few days after Hoyte's interview, her daughter wag staying with Hoyte at the house of a joiner named Johnson in Griffin-town (a suburb of Montreal), and how Hoyte had represented her as a nun who had escaped from the Hotel Dieu Convent On Bubsequent inquiry Mrs. Monk found that her daughter had disappeared with tfoyte. Maria's half-crazed brain was no match for the fox-like cunning and dog-like pernistency of Hoyte and his pair of fellow-reprobates. Such poor scruples as the unhappy creature had were overcome at last. She lent herself, though evidently after a long struggle, to the spread of the savage anti-convent romance which was 'to make her a lady for c /er.' And thus, for the sake of the wretched ' bawbees,' she became a professional shum nun — the evil prototype of some scores of impostors of the type of the woman Slattery. Her impresario and his guilty confrere* licked into shape The Gates of Hell Reopened by the alteration of a few proper names and other details. It was reprinted under a new title — The Air fit I Disclosures of Maria Monli. The scene of the revised story was placed in the Hotel Dieu nunnery in Montreal. Maria Monk posed at the same time as its author and as a nun who had escaped from the Hotel Dieu, Thig was in October, 1835. And thus was set afloat that remarkable imposture which finds credulous believers down to the present time.