Nun Exhumed

MERE MARIE or THE URSULINES -- Agnes Repplier -- Doubleday, Doran ($2.50).

You will be not only on the side of the angels but of two book-of-the-month clubs (Catholic and nonsectarian) if you like this book. In short, it is edifying as well as informative. If you want to be amused or entertained, try something else.

The Ursulines, as every good Catholic knows, are a teaching order of nuns (established 1572). Mere Marie de l'Incarnation (1599-1670) was born in Tours, named plain Marie Guyard. At 17 she married a M. Martin and bore him a son. Not till her husband was dead and Marie was 32 did she enter the Ursuline convent. There her mysticism and executive ability marked her for a super-nunnish career. When the call came for volunteers to go to Quebec, Mere Marie heard it and went.

Quebec in those days was not an old-world city. Wrote Marie: "We see our selves here under the necessity of becoming saints. We must consent to this change, or perish." Her daily business, however, was to turn little Indian girls into good Catholics, and she went at her job with a will. Smallpox, fire, sub-zero weather, the little Indian girls themselves were obstacles but no more. Mere Marie indomitably toiled on; before she died saw the Ursuline school an integral part of Quebec. (Its present buildings, with seven acres, 600 inmates, still stand on the same site.) Agnes Repplier does her best to humanize this factual account of missionary activity but admits finally: "Mere Marie was fundamentally humorless."

The Author (who pronounces her name Reppliay) has more than the ordinary good Catholic's interest in Mere Marie, for she was educated at the Ursuline Sa cred Heart Convent at Torresdale, Pa., be fore she submitted herself to the non-sectarian influences of the Universities of Pennsylvania, Yale and Columbia. Many a spring freshet has gurgled under the bridge since she published her first book of essays in 1888, but she is still one of the mainstays of Boston's august Atlantic Monthly. With Princeton's equally down right Katharine Fullerton Gerould, Agnes Repplier shares first place among present-day U. S. women essayists. Unmarried, 73, she lives in Philadelphia. Some of her books: Essays in Idleness, Counter Currents, Points of Friction, Life of Pere Marquette.

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