Introduction to Ourika Summary

A few months after finishing medical studies at Montpellier and beginning to practice in Paris, a doctor is called to visit an ill, young nun at the convent in Faubourg Saint Jacques. Part of the building had been destroyed during the Revolution, leaving the cloisters open on one side, and a nun conducts the doctor past the cloisters into the garden where the sick nun sits at the end of a path, nearly hidden by her large, black veil. The anticlerical prejudices of her early years causes the doctor to be concerned for the nun who she supposed to have suffered many injustices, but when the nun turns to face her, the doctor is shocked to find that the nun is a negress; however, she is even more surprised by the nun's "welcoming grace of manner and the elegant...