The Awakening of Miss Prim

Awakening of Miss Prim

Everyone in San Ireneo de Arnois remarked on Miss Prim’s arrival.

On the afternoon they saw her walking through the village she was just another job applicant on her way to an interview, but the inhabitants knew the place well enough to realize that a vacancy there was a rare and precious thing.

Many still remembered what had happened a few years earlier when they were looking for a new primary school teacher: eight applicants had showed up, but only three had been given the opportunity to set out their talents.

This did not reveal a lack of interest in education—educational standards in San Ireneo de Arnois were excellent—but rather the inhabitants’ conviction that greater choice did not increase the likelihood of getting it right.

The proprietor of the stationer’s, a woman quite capable of devoting an entire afternoon to decorating a single sheet of paper, described the idea of spending longer than a morning selecting a teacher as extravagant.

Everyone agreed. In that community, it was the families themselves, each according to their background, ambition, and means, who were in charge of their children’s intellectual development.

School was considered supplementary—undesirable but necessary—though certainly many households relied on it.

Many, but by no means all. So why devote so much time to it?

To visitors, San Ireneo de Arnois looked like a place that was firmly rooted in the past. Old stone houses with gardens full of roses stood proudly along a handful of streets that led to a bustling square full of small shops and businesses, buying and selling at the steady pace of a healthy heart.

The outskirts of the village were dotted with tiny farms and workshops that supplied the local shops.

It was a small community comprising an industrious group of farmers, craftsmen, shopkeepers, and professionals, a retiring, select circle of academics and the sober brotherhood of monks who lived at the abbey of San Ireneo.

Their interlocking lives formed an entire world.

They were the cogs of a human engine that was proud of being self-sufficient through trade and the small-scale production of goods and services, and of its neighborly courtesy.

Those who said that it seemed to belong in the past were probably right.

Yet only a few years earlier, there would have been no sign of the thriving, cheerful market that now greeted visitors.

What had happened between then and now? Had Miss Prim, going to her interview, asked the proprietor of the stationer’s, the latter would have replied that this mysterious prosperity was the result of a young man’s tenacity and an old monk’s wisdom.

But as Miss Prim, hurrying to the house, did not notice the pretty shop, its owner was unable to reveal with pride that San Ireneo de Arnois was, in fact, a flourishing colony of exiles from the modern world seeking a simple, rural life.