WINTER MYTHOLOGIES
We know from the teaching of the Lotus Sūtra That the Bay of Naniwa in the province of Tsu Is real too.
Three Miracles in Ireland
BRIGID’S FERVOR
Muirchu the monk relates that Leary, king of Leinster, has three sweet young daughters. Brigid is the eldest. About the two others, the monk has knowledge only of their youth and their sweetness, not their names. Three young girls. It is daybreak in April in Dún Loaghaire, a town of wood and peat, which broods under the rule of a fortified clod. It’s a royal town. The king is widowed and powerful, he is sleeping; he has thrown off his covers in the murky sleep of dawn. Brigid, who is awake, can see the river through the window under the first rays of the sun. She’s a wise girl whose custom is to ask her father only for what her father cannot refuse her. She slips into the king’s chamber, and before she sees that he is naked she has gently placed her hand on his shoulder. At her touch the king has a dream which agitates him the way a woman might. Brigid sees his agitation. He wakes. They look at each other like strangers, or husband and wife. Blushing, she asks his permission to bathe in the river with her sisters. He blushes and gives his consent.
All three girls run through the spring dawn. They reach the bottom of the embankment and throw their clothes under the foliage. Their little feet taste the water, and above their little feet their milk-white rust-spotted flesh is naked a hundred times over, the flesh of Ireland and of paganism. For the first time Brigid sees that this flesh is excessive, like a dreaming king. She laughs louder than her sisters. All three shriek when the cold bites their bellies; they slap the water with the palms of their hands, the birds fly up, and the hullabaloo reaches the road above.
Muirchu relates that along this road there is someone coming.
It is Patrick, archbishop of Armagh, the stateless Gaul, the miracle-worker, the founder. He is a graying colossus. A widower by vocation, and powerful. Behind him are thirty disciples and attendants with croziers and reliquaries, circular shields, books and swords. It is not entirely a stroll: if he is marching like this from Armagh to Clonmacnoise, from Armagh to Dún Ailinne, and from Armagh to Dún Loaghaire it’s because he must convert to Christ the kings who in their fortified clods feebly worship Lug, Ogma, cauldrons, harps, and idols. And that, thinks Patrick on this spring road, is not difficult. All it requires is a few druidic spells, a couple of well-primed acolytes, and snow is instantly turned into butter, water into beer, the flames of purgatory appear at the tip of the magic rod, and the Holy Trinity in a shamrock leaf. These conjuring tricks are enough to bamboozle the jocular, pensive kings, who waver. And perhaps because he is growing old and his ardor and his malice are becoming blunted, Patrick regrets such facility as he walks along this road. He would like a real miracle to occur, just once, and for once in his lifetime, matter in its all its opacity to be converted to Grace before his eyes. He looks at the dust at his feet; he has not noticed that the road runs alongside a river. He hears the shrieks of the three girls.
He lifts his head; he sees the milk-white rust-spotted flesh through the leaves. The troop halts. He walks alone partway down the embankment. The girls are still at their games and do not know that the men are looking at them. Patrick immediately loves them with soul and body: they are flagrant and excessive, like Grace itself. He calls to them. Their gestures freeze. Against the morning sun they see silhouetted the powerful man who looks like a king: his linen tunic, his cloak, the gold on his clasp; and above him they see the royal procession, thirty attendants brought to a stand, croziers and shields, silence. Below this array the girls are naked. They offer greetings the way princesses greet a king, step unhurriedly onto the riverbank, and put on their clothes. He has come down and stands beside them; he is very tall. He asks whose daughters they are. He asks if they know the true God: they see that the gold on his clasp is a cross. They say that they do not know Him but that a slave has told them about Him, that they wish to know Him. They laugh; this beautiful morning has brought them a bathe, a king, and a god. They form a sort of pagan circle around the old colossus. They ask questions the way they slapped the surface of the water, the way they ran, with body and soul entire. “Is He handsome?” they say. “Is He young or old? Does He have daughters?” says Brigid. “Are his daughters beautiful, and are they loved by the men of this world?” Patrick replies that His beauty is devastating and that all the girls on this earth are His daughters. Although He is young, He has a son, but the Son is no younger than the Father, nor the Father older than the Son. He is the Bridegroom of every girl in this world.
The two sisters have sat down, but not Brigid. She has stepped a few paces away on the riverbank; she looks at her bare feet; she half turns her back to Patrick. She shivers. In a rasping voice she says, “I want to see Him.”
“No one has seen Him,” says Patrick, “who is not baptized.” He talks about the River Jordan, the angels on its banks, the waters that redeem, about John and the Master. The girls want to be baptized. Once again they stand undressed in the river, very serious, their eyes closed. Patrick rolls up his chausses, and above this excessive flesh he performs the requisite small gestures. Brigid opens her eyes; the sun has turned; it is almost noon. “I don’t see Him,” she says.
King Leary’s servants appear; he is worried about his daughters. A few words are exchanged. The procession leaves the river; they pass through the mantlet and the wattle surrounding the clod. The fortified gate closes on the croziers, the blessed colossus, and the girls: he clasps the two sisters close, holding them by the shoulders; Brigid walks ahead. Now they have disappeared from view. Patrick is doubtless performing his usual repertoire, devised for the benefit of the last of the feeble Merovingian kings. Leary’s loud laugh can be heard, druidic spells, Latin. Preparations for a banquet can also be heard. Then, all night long, singing, inebriation. The girls are in their chamber.
Once again it is a spring dawn. Brigid at her window closes her eyes violently, and opens them: there is only the daylight gradually approaching, the silver thread of the river growing larger. The sun rises like a bridegroom, but it’s not the Bridegroom. Gently she pushes open the door of the king’s chamber. Wrapped in his fur-lined cloak Leary is sleeping like a drunkard, dreaming of raids and cattle. His mouth is open, he is older than he was yesterday, but brutal and handsome. He is talking in his sleep. He says a name. Brigid thinks she hears her own name in the name from the dream. All the blood leaps in her heart; she flees in panic down the passages; she is in the guest chamber. Patrick opens his eyes. Brigid is standing over him. She seems very tall. She is pale. She is excessive and determined like a queen. She says, “I want to see your God face to face.”
Patrick sighs. He sits up on his bed.
Now we may imagine that all morning long and perhaps until nightfall, without leaving the guest chamber Patrick sits holding her in his gaze and evangelizes the girl, whose soul he sees naked just as he saw her milk-white rust-spotted breasts. All without druidic quibble, just the arid truth of the Greeks and the Jews; the Fall, which veils the holy Countenance from us, the oblique mirror in which fallen man can nonetheless glimpse the holy Countenance, and the promise that one day the veil will be torn away, a promise made to us on the banks of the River Jordan and repeated at a supper in Jerusalem. Brigid does or does not understand; but she understands only too well, and with painful clarity, that you sometimes see the face of God when you have received within your own body the body of the Bridegroom in the form of a little wafer that melts on the tongue. This is what she wants. And starting from that moment, on the following day and the days after that the colossus prepares the three virgins for communion, with the permission of the king, who, jocular or pensive, sometimes appears in the doorway of the room where Patrick is performing his holy pedagogical duties. Eight days, then: eight days of study and mortification, time for April to give way to May — and outside still the silver river where the girls no longer go. They learn Latin words from books, which they read by running their tiny fingers over them. Patrick’s heart melts.
At last the eve of the ceremony arrives. They have tried on their white linen robes, the gold fibulas. They are asleep, except for Brigid. She is still wearing her robe and her fibula. She tiptoes into the king’s chamber. It is lit by the moon. In the warmth of the May night, the king lies naked and quiet, at ease; he is not dreaming about women. Brigid wants to weep. And weeping she runs to the guest chamber. She kneels beside Patrick; he is sleeping somberly, and the sorrow caused by his dream is visible on his face. He dreams that Christ is dead, and Lord, how young the saints appear: they caress the naked body with their milk-white rust-spotted fingers. Brigid touches his shoulder; he sits bolt upright, afraid, and he is irritated by this indistinct fear. He can see the excessive flesh inside the white linen, he can smell it. “Swear to me,” says Brigid, “that I shall see Him tomorrow.” He looks at her with staring eyes, a large, irascible old man ejected from his dream back onto earth. He says, “You will see Him when you die, as will all of us in this world.”
She is in the garden beneath the moonlight. She knows where she is going. She picks the red berries off the yew tree. They appear at the start of winter, and now, in the spring, they are always more concentrated and vicious, devastating. She crushes them and produces a small quantity of powder which fits in the hollow of her palm. Day is about to break. She goes back indoors, her fist clenched over the sombrous powder. The serving women have already brought the princesses’ milk. Brigid opens her hand and the powder mixes with the milk.
They take communion in their white robes. Leary is there, wavering. He has combed his beard and donned his fur-lined cloak. They kneel, Patrick stands very tall above them, they receive the body of the Bridegroom from his hand. They are now in His presence, although He remains hidden. They have closed their eyes. Opening them, Brigid sees only the impassive face of the king. It is over. They step out into the May sunlight, and in the sunshine, one after the other, they fall to the ground: one on the steps, one on the path, and Brigid beside the rosebush. One has her head in her arm, one in the dust of the track, Brigid is turned toward the sky, her eyes wide open. They are impeccably dead. They are contemplating the face of God.
COLUMBKILL’S SADNESS
Adamnan recounts that Saint Columba of Iona, who is still called Columbkill, Columbkill the Wolf — a member of the tribe of the northern O’Neills through his ancestor Niall of the Nine Hostages — is a brutal man in his youth. He loves God violently, and war, and small precious objects. He was reared in a bronze cradle; he is a man of the sword. He serves under Diarmait, and under God. Diarmait the king of Tara can count on his sword for raids in the Irish Sea, marauding cattle, crapulous feasts which turn into massacres. And God, King of this world and the next, can count on his sword to persuade the disciples of the monk Pelagius, who deny Grace, that Grace is devastating and can be weighed in iron. The small objects are also allies of God and the sword: they are won at sword point, and all of them — chalices, rings, or croziers — belong to God. The most beautiful, the rarest, the most precious — those that later, when they exist in plenty, the West will call books — speak of God, and God speaks in them. Columbkill prefers books to ciboria: for this military captain, whom Adamnan calls the Soldier of the Isles and of God, Insulanus Dei miles, this wolf is also a monk in the manner of monks at that time, a manner that is inconceivable to our way of understanding. When he lays down his sword, he rides from monastery to monastery, where he reads: he reads standing up, tensed, moving his lips and frowning, in the violent manner of those times, which we cannot conceive of either. Columbkill the Wolf is a brutal reader.
It is winter in the year 559, and he is reading.
He has just arrived at the monastery of Moville, built in dry stone on the bald heath facing the Irish Sea. It is raining the way it rains in Ireland; you can hear the sea below, but it is not visible. Finian the abbot has left him alone in the hut that serves as the library. There are four books: Columbkill leafs through the large altar copy of the Gospels, a copy of the Georgics, and Priscian’s Grammar. The Gospels are a run-of-the-mill piece of work; he read the Georgics when he was in Cork. He also knows Priscian. He bends over the fourth volume: it is smaller and fits inside a little pouch with a strap that needs unfastening. He opens it at random, and reads, I hate double-minded men, but I love Thy law. He does not know this text. It is a great rhyming paean divided into a hundred and fifty smaller paeans. In the pictures on the facing pages you can see King David variously occupied with slaughter and music. The colors are very beautiful: an orpiment yellow and a vertiginous lapis lazuli. The blue and the paean are the book of Psalms. It is the first psalter he has ever held in his hand, perhaps the only one that exists in Ireland. He can hear the sea below dropping with all its weight. He sinks into the text.
For seven days he returns to the library and the rain doesn’t cease. He reads standing up in his cloak, his hands numb with cold and his mouth voracious. On the seventh day he knows the text in detail: he has identified its articulations, he can recite the refrains; he has recognized the author’s mannerisms, and he knows that what he holds in his hand is Saint Jerome’s translation and that it was copied by the monk Faustus, because in the colophon he has read, ora pro Fausto. He prays for Faustus. He prays for Jerome. Despite Faustus and Jerome, a voracious sadness gnaws at his heart: he is going to have to leave the book behind. In the evening he dines with Finian and praises him for owning such a treasure. Finian beams with pride. Over Columbkill’s wolfish face there passes a fox’s smile. “Allow me,” he says, to copy it. “I shall keep the copy for myself; no monastery in Ireland shall be able to boast that it shares Finian’s treasure.” Without replying Finian rises and leaves the table.
During the night, Columbkill slips from his bed. In the darkness of the rain and the loathsome thundering of the Irish Sea he reaches the library. Like a robber he lights a small candle and copies Faustus’s text, which Faustus copied from Jerome. When he reaches Psalm IX, Finian enters and seizes the copy. The psalter falls, King David surrounded by blue plays his lyre. The wolf bares his teeth, but Finian is also a wolf. Both are sure of their right. Very calmly they set a date to meet at Tara in King Diarmait’s palace, and he will decide which of their two rights is that of God. Columbkill is on his horse, which is streaming in the wet, and the rain and the dark carry him off on the way that is dark and slippery, as the psalm says.
At Tara, King Diarmait on his iron chair says, “The book belongs to Finian as the calf belongs to the cow.” Columbkill hurls his ring of allegiance at the king’s feet.
All winter long on horseback he raises his warriors, forty decades of young men in Drumlane, twelve decades in Kells, thirty in Derry. At the feasts of alliance, when he is drunk and weary, he pictures the incalculable blue that seems to rise from David’s harp. He is happy; he sings to himself the refrains from the psalms. In the spring all the O’Neills are under arms. He hurries to Moville with long day-marches and six hundred horse. Diarmait is waiting for him with a thousand horse in the bog of Culdreihmne beneath a clearing sky. Columbkill kneels down: he prays for Faustus, who is in heaven, the blue place which awaits us and favors us. He wants to laugh. He gets to his feet; they draw their swords. On the dark and slippery way they merge and set about each other; many young men are laid in the byre of death. At noon Diarmait lies in the marsh with a thousand horses, you cannot see them because it’s raining much harder now, but you can hear them dying and you can hear the crows cawing with delight. Covered in blood and mire, laughing and drunk, Columbkill takes forty horses and gallops flat-out to Moville. He can be heard laughing beneath the rain at the head of the cavalcade. When Finian opens the door of his monastery, he sees the other man halted there with forty warriors. Their cloaks are gray like the rain. Columbkill has a fox’s smile and the eyes of a wolf; he holds out an open hand. Without a word Finian goes to fetch the little pouch and gives it to him. Forty horses sally forth beneath the dark sky.
In his war tent at Culdreihmne, Columbkill trembles as he unfastens the little pouch and takes out the book. It is plump and docile like a woman. It belongs to him as the calf belongs to the cow, and a woman to her lover: it is his from the incipit to the colophon. He wants to enjoy it slowly: he opens it, caresses it, leafs through it, contemplates it — and suddenly he is no longer trembling, he has stopped laughing, he is sad, he is cold; he searches the text for something he has read and cannot find, and the picture for something he has seen and which has vanished. He searches long and in vain, yet it was there when it wasn’t his. Everything seems to have been spoiled, to have changed, and perhaps only the colophon is like itself — the colophon where the monk Faustus asks that people pray for him. Columbkill lifts his head; he can hear the death throes of the wounded and the crows’ rejoicing. He steps out of his tent; it is no longer raining, and above his head there are even large patches of blue traveling over the byre of death. The book is not in the book. Heaven is just an old blue place beneath which we stand naked, and the things we possess are wanting. He throws down the book, throws off his cloak and his sword. He takes the habit, he takes to the sea, he seeks and he finds a desert in the loathsome Irish Sea: on the bald island of Iona he sits down, free and stripped of everything, beneath a sky which is sometimes blue.
SUIBHNE’S LEVITY
The Annals of the Four Masters recounts that Suibhne, king of Kildare, has a taste for the things of this world. He is a simple man. Simple happiness and simple pleasures are his way. He is heavy and coarse, with nasty fair hair on his head like moss on a stone — and no delicacy of mind or soul. He wages war, he eats, he laughs, and for the rest he is like the brown bull of Cúailnge which covers fifty heifers a day. Fin Barr the abbot follows close behind this human monolith, and tries to remind him that the hereafter reckons even the thickness of a hair. The thickness of the soul is worse. Fin Barr lived for nine years at the tip of a headland, and nine more years on the lake, at Gougane Barra, with the seagulls and the crows: he is all mind and hands of glass. Curiously, he loves Suibhne because Suibhne is like a bull or a rock that might possibly have a soul. And Suibhne loves Fin Barr, who makes him feel, beyond the joys of this world, the joy of having a soul.
Fin Barr’s brother is the king of Lismore. In the month of May, Suibhne takes up arms against the neighboring king. The pretext is unimportant: what Suibhne wants is the king’s drinking cup, his fat cattle, and his wives. He also wants to stretch his legs and to ride his horse through the spring. He has sought the advice of Fin Barr, who said, “Kings go to war with one another, it’s the rule. Make war on the king of Lismore since he’s a king. But if you are victorious, spare my brother — who is your brother too, for are we not like brothers, you and I?” Suibhne is in excellent spirits, and he promises.
The weather is fine when they set out. They have bossed shields and polished scabbards. The army in the sunshine is like a gleaming stream. The war dogs chase butterflies. Suibhne sings at the top of his voice; his horse is thickset like him, and together they look like a hill with moss on the top. Fin Barr is also happy. There is blood beating in his hands of glass. He says to himself that in delight and contentment the thick soul of the king almost has delicacy and is at any rate clear; indeed, at that moment the king turns, looks round for him, sees him, and makes a very delicate sign with his hand. So, thinks Fin Barr, I shall save this soul — and if I save this one, the mountains too shall be saved.
The decades of the king of Lismore are deployed on the edge of the oak forests of Killarney. It’s dawn, with the sweet breath of the woods. On the largest horse, in the midst of the handsomest warriors, with a crow’s feather in his helmet, Suibhne can see the king, his equal. Suibhne himself wears a white feather, but the rest is the same. He’s glad that the two kings are handsome. Above them there hangs a great silence, great expectancy, and the day breaking over the dew in May. The first cuckoo can be heard. Then it can no longer be heard, for Suibhne has raised his arm and his gesture unleashes a blast of thunder. All day long, one step at a time, filled with happiness he moves closer to the crow’s feather. By five o’clock, the decades of both men are scattered along the edge of the wood, and they are now face to face: they look at each other, they laugh, they draw breath again with a kind of roar. The wholesome frenzy of war that Suibhne feels is suddenly mixed with another. The king with the black feather is the image of his brother, slender and hard like him, but with hands of iron instead of fragile glass: and this, strangely, increases his frenzy ten times over. Before the other man, who is still laughing, has raised his shield, he runs his body through with his sword. He finishes him off with an ax.
Faced with the body his intoxication drains away. Suibhne’s soul returns to him.
The cuckoos call to one another through the forest.
In a clearing, the king sits on the moss, unlaced and groggy. His head hangs down. He raises it. Fin Barr is standing in front of him. Suibhne looks at him like a guilty child. For a long time Fin Barr says nothing; then he curses him. And to finish he says, “Your only brothers shall be the wolves in the depths of the forest. You have no more soul than they.” Fin Barr turns on his heels, and Suibhne follows him like a dog. At the camp he sits down on the ground, his head obstinately lowered, thinking.
In the evening, the soldiers round the fires suddenly see the king get up and flee into the forest like a wolf. He does not return.
Nine years pass. Fin Barr, the abbot of Kildare, is looking for beams to fortify the abbey: in the oak forests of Killarney he walks from bole to bole with his churls. They look upward, they compare, and they choose. In the fork of an oak tree that is too gnarled to be used as wood for making beams, Fin Barr sees, at the center of what he first took to be a tuft of mistletoe, a pair of laughing eyes which come to life and compose a face: it’s a man, who raises his hand and makes a small, delicate gesture to the abbot. It’s the king.
He leaps to the ground. He has a crow on his shoulder, which from time to time, when the king moves, flaps its wings a little and then very seriously smooths its feathers. Suibhne kisses Fin Barr; he laughs; he strokes him — but he cannot reply to his questions: he no longer has the use of words. Yet he seems to talk to his crow in a sort of jargon to which the other replies in the jargon of crows. And when the dialogue stops, the king sings softly, almost without pausing. He seems prodigiously happy and busy with his happy task. All day he follows Fin Barr and his churls, hopping along behind them like a crow himself. When they halt, he goes in search of berries and cress for them, and he devours it all with the same avid glee he had for the fare of kings, and the crow eats from his mouth. The churls are delighted. Fin Barr is moved; he strokes the ball of mistletoe and black feathers that was once a king. He says to himself that the king hasn’t changed at all. In the evening he holds the large hand for a long time in his own long hand, lets it fall, and Suibhne hops away toward the woods, as if he were about to fly off. They will not see each other again before the bird of Death comes upon each of them.
The Annals of the Four Masters says that through the workings of Grace, King Suibhne has become a bird: that his feathers were given by the angels, that he catches the holy dove on the wing and speaks the divine word in the jargon of crows; that he is a saint and a madman, a thing of God. This is not entirely the opinion of Fin Barr, who returns to Kilmore in the melancholy evening on a cart that creaks beneath the weight of the undressed timber, his weary churls already asleep on the floor of the tumbril. Fin Barr doesn’t know what to think. He is glad that Suibhne enjoys the state of sylvan tramp as much as that of king, that his joy is invincible and manifold like that of God. But he cannot decide whether it comes from the soul. A little woodcutter at the abbot’s feet talks in his sleep, piteously, as if he were in distress. He is at the mercy of his soul. Is the soul what makes you moan in the dark? thinks Finbar. Or is it what makes you laugh and dance against all reason? My king, whom I cursed, embraced with passion the only joy that was within his grasp. Is this what it is to be a saint? Is it what it is to be a beast? Is it what it is to be at the mercy of the soul, or in thrall to the body? Only God knows, and the Four Masters, who have the ear of God.
BRIGID’S FERVOR
Muirchu the monk relates that Leary, king of Leinster, has three sweet young daughters. Brigid is the eldest. About the two others, the monk has knowledge only of their youth and their sweetness, not their names. Three young girls. It is daybreak in April in Dún Loaghaire, a town of wood and peat, which broods under the rule of a fortified clod. It’s a royal town. The king is widowed and powerful, he is sleeping; he has thrown off his covers in the murky sleep of dawn. Brigid, who is awake, can see the river through the window under the first rays of the sun. She’s a wise girl whose custom is to ask her father only for what her father cannot refuse her. She slips into the king’s chamber, and before she sees that he is naked she has gently placed her hand on his shoulder. At her touch the king has a dream which agitates him the way a woman might. Brigid sees his agitation. He wakes. They look at each other like strangers, or husband and wife. Blushing, she asks his permission to bathe in the river with her sisters. He blushes and gives his consent.
All three girls run through the spring dawn. They reach the bottom of the embankment and throw their clothes under the foliage. Their little feet taste the water, and above their little feet their milk-white rust-spotted flesh is naked a hundred times over, the flesh of Ireland and of paganism. For the first time Brigid sees that this flesh is excessive, like a dreaming king. She laughs louder than her sisters. All three shriek when the cold bites their bellies; they slap the water with the palms of their hands, the birds fly up, and the hullabaloo reaches the road above.
Muirchu relates that along this road there is someone coming.
It is Patrick, archbishop of Armagh, the stateless Gaul, the miracle-worker, the founder. He is a graying colossus. A widower by vocation, and powerful. Behind him are thirty disciples and attendants with croziers and reliquaries, circular shields, books and swords. It is not entirely a stroll: if he is marching like this from Armagh to Clonmacnoise, from Armagh to Dún Ailinne, and from Armagh to Dún Loaghaire it’s because he must convert to Christ the kings who in their fortified clods feebly worship Lug, Ogma, cauldrons, harps, and idols. And that, thinks Patrick on this spring road, is not difficult. All it requires is a few druidic spells, a couple of well-primed acolytes, and snow is instantly turned into butter, water into beer, the flames of purgatory appear at the tip of the magic rod, and the Holy Trinity in a shamrock leaf. These conjuring tricks are enough to bamboozle the jocular, pensive kings, who waver. And perhaps because he is growing old and his ardor and his malice are becoming blunted, Patrick regrets such facility as he walks along this road. He would like a real miracle to occur, just once, and for once in his lifetime, matter in its all its opacity to be converted to Grace before his eyes. He looks at the dust at his feet; he has not noticed that the road runs alongside a river. He hears the shrieks of the three girls.
He lifts his head; he sees the milk-white rust-spotted flesh through the leaves. The troop halts. He walks alone partway down the embankment. The girls are still at their games and do not know that the men are looking at them. Patrick immediately loves them with soul and body: they are flagrant and excessive, like Grace itself. He calls to them. Their gestures freeze. Against the morning sun they see silhouetted the powerful man who looks like a king: his linen tunic, his cloak, the gold on his clasp; and above him they see the royal procession, thirty attendants brought to a stand, croziers and shields, silence. Below this array the girls are naked. They offer greetings the way princesses greet a king, step unhurriedly onto the riverbank, and put on their clothes. He has come down and stands beside them; he is very tall. He asks whose daughters they are. He asks if they know the true God: they see that the gold on his clasp is a cross. They say that they do not know Him but that a slave has told them about Him, that they wish to know Him. They laugh; this beautiful morning has brought them a bathe, a king, and a god. They form a sort of pagan circle around the old colossus. They ask questions the way they slapped the surface of the water, the way they ran, with body and soul entire. “Is He handsome?” they say. “Is He young or old? Does He have daughters?” says Brigid. “Are his daughters beautiful, and are they loved by the men of this world?” Patrick replies that His beauty is devastating and that all the girls on this earth are His daughters. Although He is young, He has a son, but the Son is no younger than the Father, nor the Father older than the Son. He is the Bridegroom of every girl in this world.
The two sisters have sat down, but not Brigid. She has stepped a few paces away on the riverbank; she looks at her bare feet; she half turns her back to Patrick. She shivers. In a rasping voice she says, “I want to see Him.”
“No one has seen Him,” says Patrick, “who is not baptized.” He talks about the River Jordan, the angels on its banks, the waters that redeem, about John and the Master. The girls want to be baptized. Once again they stand undressed in the river, very serious, their eyes closed. Patrick rolls up his chausses, and above this excessive flesh he performs the requisite small gestures. Brigid opens her eyes; the sun has turned; it is almost noon. “I don’t see Him,” she says.
King Leary’s servants appear; he is worried about his daughters. A few words are exchanged. The procession leaves the river; they pass through the mantlet and the wattle surrounding the clod. The fortified gate closes on the croziers, the blessed colossus, and the girls: he clasps the two sisters close, holding them by the shoulders; Brigid walks ahead. Now they have disappeared from view. Patrick is doubtless performing his usual repertoire, devised for the benefit of the last of the feeble Merovingian kings. Leary’s loud laugh can be heard, druidic spells, Latin. Preparations for a banquet can also be heard. Then, all night long, singing, inebriation. The girls are in their chamber.
Once again it is a spring dawn. Brigid at her window closes her eyes violently, and opens them: there is only the daylight gradually approaching, the silver thread of the river growing larger. The sun rises like a bridegroom, but it’s not the Bridegroom. Gently she pushes open the door of the king’s chamber. Wrapped in his fur-lined cloak Leary is sleeping like a drunkard, dreaming of raids and cattle. His mouth is open, he is older than he was yesterday, but brutal and handsome. He is talking in his sleep. He says a name. Brigid thinks she hears her own name in the name from the dream. All the blood leaps in her heart; she flees in panic down the passages; she is in the guest chamber. Patrick opens his eyes. Brigid is standing over him. She seems very tall. She is pale. She is excessive and determined like a queen. She says, “I want to see your God face to face.”
Patrick sighs. He sits up on his bed.
Now we may imagine that all morning long and perhaps until nightfall, without leaving the guest chamber Patrick sits holding her in his gaze and evangelizes the girl, whose soul he sees naked just as he saw her milk-white rust-spotted breasts. All without druidic quibble, just the arid truth of the Greeks and the Jews; the Fall, which veils the holy Countenance from us, the oblique mirror in which fallen man can nonetheless glimpse the holy Countenance, and the promise that one day the veil will be torn away, a promise made to us on the banks of the River Jordan and repeated at a supper in Jerusalem. Brigid does or does not understand; but she understands only too well, and with painful clarity, that you sometimes see the face of God when you have received within your own body the body of the Bridegroom in the form of a little wafer that melts on the tongue. This is what she wants. And starting from that moment, on the following day and the days after that the colossus prepares the three virgins for communion, with the permission of the king, who, jocular or pensive, sometimes appears in the doorway of the room where Patrick is performing his holy pedagogical duties. Eight days, then: eight days of study and mortification, time for April to give way to May — and outside still the silver river where the girls no longer go. They learn Latin words from books, which they read by running their tiny fingers over them. Patrick’s heart melts.
At last the eve of the ceremony arrives. They have tried on their white linen robes, the gold fibulas. They are asleep, except for Brigid. She is still wearing her robe and her fibula. She tiptoes into the king’s chamber. It is lit by the moon. In the warmth of the May night, the king lies naked and quiet, at ease; he is not dreaming about women. Brigid wants to weep. And weeping she runs to the guest chamber. She kneels beside Patrick; he is sleeping somberly, and the sorrow caused by his dream is visible on his face. He dreams that Christ is dead, and Lord, how young the saints appear: they caress the naked body with their milk-white rust-spotted fingers. Brigid touches his shoulder; he sits bolt upright, afraid, and he is irritated by this indistinct fear. He can see the excessive flesh inside the white linen, he can smell it. “Swear to me,” says Brigid, “that I shall see Him tomorrow.” He looks at her with staring eyes, a large, irascible old man ejected from his dream back onto earth. He says, “You will see Him when you die, as will all of us in this world.”
She is in the garden beneath the moonlight. She knows where she is going. She picks the red berries off the yew tree. They appear at the start of winter, and now, in the spring, they are always more concentrated and vicious, devastating. She crushes them and produces a small quantity of powder which fits in the hollow of her palm. Day is about to break. She goes back indoors, her fist clenched over the sombrous powder. The serving women have already brought the princesses’ milk. Brigid opens her hand and the powder mixes with the milk.
They take communion in their white robes. Leary is there, wavering. He has combed his beard and donned his fur-lined cloak. They kneel, Patrick stands very tall above them, they receive the body of the Bridegroom from his hand. They are now in His presence, although He remains hidden. They have closed their eyes. Opening them, Brigid sees only the impassive face of the king. It is over. They step out into the May sunlight, and in the sunshine, one after the other, they fall to the ground: one on the steps, one on the path, and Brigid beside the rosebush. One has her head in her arm, one in the dust of the track, Brigid is turned toward the sky, her eyes wide open. They are impeccably dead. They are contemplating the face of God.
COLUMBKILL’S SADNESS
Adamnan recounts that Saint Columba of Iona, who is still called Columbkill, Columbkill the Wolf — a member of the tribe of the northern O’Neills through his ancestor Niall of the Nine Hostages — is a brutal man in his youth. He loves God violently, and war, and small precious objects. He was reared in a bronze cradle; he is a man of the sword. He serves under Diarmait, and under God. Diarmait the king of Tara can count on his sword for raids in the Irish Sea, marauding cattle, crapulous feasts which turn into massacres. And God, King of this world and the next, can count on his sword to persuade the disciples of the monk Pelagius, who deny Grace, that Grace is devastating and can be weighed in iron. The small objects are also allies of God and the sword: they are won at sword point, and all of them — chalices, rings, or croziers — belong to God. The most beautiful, the rarest, the most precious — those that later, when they exist in plenty, the West will call books — speak of God, and God speaks in them. Columbkill prefers books to ciboria: for this military captain, whom Adamnan calls the Soldier of the Isles and of God, Insulanus Dei miles, this wolf is also a monk in the manner of monks at that time, a manner that is inconceivable to our way of understanding. When he lays down his sword, he rides from monastery to monastery, where he reads: he reads standing up, tensed, moving his lips and frowning, in the violent manner of those times, which we cannot conceive of either. Columbkill the Wolf is a brutal reader.
It is winter in the year 559, and he is reading.
He has just arrived at the monastery of Moville, built in dry stone on the bald heath facing the Irish Sea. It is raining the way it rains in Ireland; you can hear the sea below, but it is not visible. Finian the abbot has left him alone in the hut that serves as the library. There are four books: Columbkill leafs through the large altar copy of the Gospels, a copy of the Georgics, and Priscian’s Grammar. The Gospels are a run-of-the-mill piece of work; he read the Georgics when he was in Cork. He also knows Priscian. He bends over the fourth volume: it is smaller and fits inside a little pouch with a strap that needs unfastening. He opens it at random, and reads, I hate double-minded men, but I love Thy law. He does not know this text. It is a great rhyming paean divided into a hundred and fifty smaller paeans. In the pictures on the facing pages you can see King David variously occupied with slaughter and music. The colors are very beautiful: an orpiment yellow and a vertiginous lapis lazuli. The blue and the paean are the book of Psalms. It is the first psalter he has ever held in his hand, perhaps the only one that exists in Ireland. He can hear the sea below dropping with all its weight. He sinks into the text.
For seven days he returns to the library and the rain doesn’t cease. He reads standing up in his cloak, his hands numb with cold and his mouth voracious. On the seventh day he knows the text in detail: he has identified its articulations, he can recite the refrains; he has recognized the author’s mannerisms, and he knows that what he holds in his hand is Saint Jerome’s translation and that it was copied by the monk Faustus, because in the colophon he has read, ora pro Fausto. He prays for Faustus. He prays for Jerome. Despite Faustus and Jerome, a voracious sadness gnaws at his heart: he is going to have to leave the book behind. In the evening he dines with Finian and praises him for owning such a treasure. Finian beams with pride. Over Columbkill’s wolfish face there passes a fox’s smile. “Allow me,” he says, to copy it. “I shall keep the copy for myself; no monastery in Ireland shall be able to boast that it shares Finian’s treasure.” Without replying Finian rises and leaves the table.
During the night, Columbkill slips from his bed. In the darkness of the rain and the loathsome thundering of the Irish Sea he reaches the library. Like a robber he lights a small candle and copies Faustus’s text, which Faustus copied from Jerome. When he reaches Psalm IX, Finian enters and seizes the copy. The psalter falls, King David surrounded by blue plays his lyre. The wolf bares his teeth, but Finian is also a wolf. Both are sure of their right. Very calmly they set a date to meet at Tara in King Diarmait’s palace, and he will decide which of their two rights is that of God. Columbkill is on his horse, which is streaming in the wet, and the rain and the dark carry him off on the way that is dark and slippery, as the psalm says.
At Tara, King Diarmait on his iron chair says, “The book belongs to Finian as the calf belongs to the cow.” Columbkill hurls his ring of allegiance at the king’s feet.
All winter long on horseback he raises his warriors, forty decades of young men in Drumlane, twelve decades in Kells, thirty in Derry. At the feasts of alliance, when he is drunk and weary, he pictures the incalculable blue that seems to rise from David’s harp. He is happy; he sings to himself the refrains from the psalms. In the spring all the O’Neills are under arms. He hurries to Moville with long day-marches and six hundred horse. Diarmait is waiting for him with a thousand horse in the bog of Culdreihmne beneath a clearing sky. Columbkill kneels down: he prays for Faustus, who is in heaven, the blue place which awaits us and favors us. He wants to laugh. He gets to his feet; they draw their swords. On the dark and slippery way they merge and set about each other; many young men are laid in the byre of death. At noon Diarmait lies in the marsh with a thousand horses, you cannot see them because it’s raining much harder now, but you can hear them dying and you can hear the crows cawing with delight. Covered in blood and mire, laughing and drunk, Columbkill takes forty horses and gallops flat-out to Moville. He can be heard laughing beneath the rain at the head of the cavalcade. When Finian opens the door of his monastery, he sees the other man halted there with forty warriors. Their cloaks are gray like the rain. Columbkill has a fox’s smile and the eyes of a wolf; he holds out an open hand. Without a word Finian goes to fetch the little pouch and gives it to him. Forty horses sally forth beneath the dark sky.
In his war tent at Culdreihmne, Columbkill trembles as he unfastens the little pouch and takes out the book. It is plump and docile like a woman. It belongs to him as the calf belongs to the cow, and a woman to her lover: it is his from the incipit to the colophon. He wants to enjoy it slowly: he opens it, caresses it, leafs through it, contemplates it — and suddenly he is no longer trembling, he has stopped laughing, he is sad, he is cold; he searches the text for something he has read and cannot find, and the picture for something he has seen and which has vanished. He searches long and in vain, yet it was there when it wasn’t his. Everything seems to have been spoiled, to have changed, and perhaps only the colophon is like itself — the colophon where the monk Faustus asks that people pray for him. Columbkill lifts his head; he can hear the death throes of the wounded and the crows’ rejoicing. He steps out of his tent; it is no longer raining, and above his head there are even large patches of blue traveling over the byre of death. The book is not in the book. Heaven is just an old blue place beneath which we stand naked, and the things we possess are wanting. He throws down the book, throws off his cloak and his sword. He takes the habit, he takes to the sea, he seeks and he finds a desert in the loathsome Irish Sea: on the bald island of Iona he sits down, free and stripped of everything, beneath a sky which is sometimes blue.
SUIBHNE’S LEVITY
The Annals of the Four Masters recounts that Suibhne, king of Kildare, has a taste for the things of this world. He is a simple man. Simple happiness and simple pleasures are his way. He is heavy and coarse, with nasty fair hair on his head like moss on a stone — and no delicacy of mind or soul. He wages war, he eats, he laughs, and for the rest he is like the brown bull of Cúailnge which covers fifty heifers a day. Fin Barr the abbot follows close behind this human monolith, and tries to remind him that the hereafter reckons even the thickness of a hair. The thickness of the soul is worse. Fin Barr lived for nine years at the tip of a headland, and nine more years on the lake, at Gougane Barra, with the seagulls and the crows: he is all mind and hands of glass. Curiously, he loves Suibhne because Suibhne is like a bull or a rock that might possibly have a soul. And Suibhne loves Fin Barr, who makes him feel, beyond the joys of this world, the joy of having a soul.
Fin Barr’s brother is the king of Lismore. In the month of May, Suibhne takes up arms against the neighboring king. The pretext is unimportant: what Suibhne wants is the king’s drinking cup, his fat cattle, and his wives. He also wants to stretch his legs and to ride his horse through the spring. He has sought the advice of Fin Barr, who said, “Kings go to war with one another, it’s the rule. Make war on the king of Lismore since he’s a king. But if you are victorious, spare my brother — who is your brother too, for are we not like brothers, you and I?” Suibhne is in excellent spirits, and he promises.
The weather is fine when they set out. They have bossed shields and polished scabbards. The army in the sunshine is like a gleaming stream. The war dogs chase butterflies. Suibhne sings at the top of his voice; his horse is thickset like him, and together they look like a hill with moss on the top. Fin Barr is also happy. There is blood beating in his hands of glass. He says to himself that in delight and contentment the thick soul of the king almost has delicacy and is at any rate clear; indeed, at that moment the king turns, looks round for him, sees him, and makes a very delicate sign with his hand. So, thinks Fin Barr, I shall save this soul — and if I save this one, the mountains too shall be saved.
The decades of the king of Lismore are deployed on the edge of the oak forests of Killarney. It’s dawn, with the sweet breath of the woods. On the largest horse, in the midst of the handsomest warriors, with a crow’s feather in his helmet, Suibhne can see the king, his equal. Suibhne himself wears a white feather, but the rest is the same. He’s glad that the two kings are handsome. Above them there hangs a great silence, great expectancy, and the day breaking over the dew in May. The first cuckoo can be heard. Then it can no longer be heard, for Suibhne has raised his arm and his gesture unleashes a blast of thunder. All day long, one step at a time, filled with happiness he moves closer to the crow’s feather. By five o’clock, the decades of both men are scattered along the edge of the wood, and they are now face to face: they look at each other, they laugh, they draw breath again with a kind of roar. The wholesome frenzy of war that Suibhne feels is suddenly mixed with another. The king with the black feather is the image of his brother, slender and hard like him, but with hands of iron instead of fragile glass: and this, strangely, increases his frenzy ten times over. Before the other man, who is still laughing, has raised his shield, he runs his body through with his sword. He finishes him off with an ax.
Faced with the body his intoxication drains away. Suibhne’s soul returns to him.
The cuckoos call to one another through the forest.
In a clearing, the king sits on the moss, unlaced and groggy. His head hangs down. He raises it. Fin Barr is standing in front of him. Suibhne looks at him like a guilty child. For a long time Fin Barr says nothing; then he curses him. And to finish he says, “Your only brothers shall be the wolves in the depths of the forest. You have no more soul than they.” Fin Barr turns on his heels, and Suibhne follows him like a dog. At the camp he sits down on the ground, his head obstinately lowered, thinking.
In the evening, the soldiers round the fires suddenly see the king get up and flee into the forest like a wolf. He does not return.
Nine years pass. Fin Barr, the abbot of Kildare, is looking for beams to fortify the abbey: in the oak forests of Killarney he walks from bole to bole with his churls. They look upward, they compare, and they choose. In the fork of an oak tree that is too gnarled to be used as wood for making beams, Fin Barr sees, at the center of what he first took to be a tuft of mistletoe, a pair of laughing eyes which come to life and compose a face: it’s a man, who raises his hand and makes a small, delicate gesture to the abbot. It’s the king.
He leaps to the ground. He has a crow on his shoulder, which from time to time, when the king moves, flaps its wings a little and then very seriously smooths its feathers. Suibhne kisses Fin Barr; he laughs; he strokes him — but he cannot reply to his questions: he no longer has the use of words. Yet he seems to talk to his crow in a sort of jargon to which the other replies in the jargon of crows. And when the dialogue stops, the king sings softly, almost without pausing. He seems prodigiously happy and busy with his happy task. All day he follows Fin Barr and his churls, hopping along behind them like a crow himself. When they halt, he goes in search of berries and cress for them, and he devours it all with the same avid glee he had for the fare of kings, and the crow eats from his mouth. The churls are delighted. Fin Barr is moved; he strokes the ball of mistletoe and black feathers that was once a king. He says to himself that the king hasn’t changed at all. In the evening he holds the large hand for a long time in his own long hand, lets it fall, and Suibhne hops away toward the woods, as if he were about to fly off. They will not see each other again before the bird of Death comes upon each of them.
The Annals of the Four Masters says that through the workings of Grace, King Suibhne has become a bird: that his feathers were given by the angels, that he catches the holy dove on the wing and speaks the divine word in the jargon of crows; that he is a saint and a madman, a thing of God. This is not entirely the opinion of Fin Barr, who returns to Kilmore in the melancholy evening on a cart that creaks beneath the weight of the undressed timber, his weary churls already asleep on the floor of the tumbril. Fin Barr doesn’t know what to think. He is glad that Suibhne enjoys the state of sylvan tramp as much as that of king, that his joy is invincible and manifold like that of God. But he cannot decide whether it comes from the soul. A little woodcutter at the abbot’s feet talks in his sleep, piteously, as if he were in distress. He is at the mercy of his soul. Is the soul what makes you moan in the dark? thinks Finbar. Or is it what makes you laugh and dance against all reason? My king, whom I cursed, embraced with passion the only joy that was within his grasp. Is this what it is to be a saint? Is it what it is to be a beast? Is it what it is to be at the mercy of the soul, or in thrall to the body? Only God knows, and the Four Masters, who have the ear of God.
Nine Passages on the Causses
BARTHÉLÉMY PRUNIÈRES
Barthélémy Prunières is on the Causse Méjan. He is looking for dead men. This is his passion. The fact that he is a doctor in Marjevols is of little importance: he prefers bodies that have ceased to suffer to the suffering bodies of his daily round. If at this very moment God or the devil were to appear before him on the causse and command him to justify his life, he would say, I am an anthropologist, a member of the Anthropological Society of Lille, the Anthropological Society of Paris, and the Anthropological Society of Bordeaux; in August 1870 I telegraphed my resignation to the Anthropological Society of Berlin. There is not a Society in Europe that does not know of me. I have shifted enormous quantities of ancient remains. I have studied Baumes-Chaudes Man, a fine dolichocephalic troglodyte who ate hare in huge dishes of unglazed clay, and it was I who named him. I studied Causse Man, the brachycephalus with the highly orthognatic face who belongs to the race I called dolmenic—it was I who named it. I had the honor of discovering that in both racial groups, the dolmenic as well as the troglodyte, individuals destined for the role of shaman underwent substantial trepanation in their early years; that a circular piece of bone the size of a five-franc silver coin was removed from their cranium; that this piece of bone removed from their head was worn round the neck as an amulet and made them all-powerful. To people who were disturbed by the barbarity of these practices, I said that gods who asked of man nothing more than a piece of his skull might be considered lenient. What the gods ask of me, each day, is to piece together the infinite puzzle of dead humanity.
He is on the Causse Méjan, at the southwest edge, just before the causse tips passionately down to the bed of the River Jonte, toward Saint-Pierre-les-Tripiés; he is on the site of the Cave of the Dead Man, which of course was named by him. It is autumn in 1871. The site is an ossuary in a rock shelter, which Prunières discovered in the spring of 1870; he dug it only once; he left little protection for it, thinking he would be back in a month or two. But war came, and with it the uhlans and sabers that perform excellent trepanations, and the gods who, when all is said and done, are lenient and will trade two years of famine for a brand-new republic. There have been two years of rain, frost, rodents, and landslips on the causse; when Prunières returns, half the ossuary has fallen into the gully.
It is autumn. Prunières has brought along Dr. Broca, president of the Anthropological Society of Paris (a man who knows us in his own particular way, though we do not know him: inside our skulls we each carry a cerebral convolution known as Broca’s area). All day long they have assembled and named bones, like the gravedigger in Hamlet. They have placed them in two large crates that the curé of Saint-Pierre had carpentered for them. It’s the end of the day. Broca is tired and stands smoking a cigar outside the cave; he looks at the autumn, the troglodyte bones in the curé’s crate; he thinks about things and about the naming of things. Prunières is carrying out a final inspection of the gully before leaving. And there, three hundred meters farther down, he finds a very fine, very white humerus. At the same time as the bone, he finds the simple, beautiful sentence he will utter at the Bordeaux Anthropological Congress on September 12, 1872: “All the bones had been bleached white by the rain, the dew, and the snow.”
In December 1893, Dr. Prunières is returning in the depths of night after attending a birth on the Aubrac plateau. He is caught in a snowstorm. He struggles on for several hours — he has a strong constitution, hardened by handling suffering bodies and bodies that have ceased to suffer. Then he gives up the struggle and settles himself between three rocks like an old troglodyte. He says to himself, “I am going to die.” He repeats to himself, “Baumes-Chaudes Man, the troglodyte race, the dolmenic race, circular pieces of skull.” He says to himself that his body will not be found. Aloud, he says, “All the bones had been bleached white by the rain, the dew, and the snow.” The snow lays a maternal blanket over him.
He was still alive when he was found in the morning. He died during the day, from acute pulmonary edema.
SAINT HILÈRE
Bishop Hilère has abandoned his miter. His beard is quite white. He has handed in his crozier. He has founded a community of brothers no one knows where on the banks of the River Tarn, doubtless on the spot where Énimie, the saint with Merovech’s blood, will later come.
Hilère is growing old. We know that he is growing old, but very little else is known about him. We know what he is not. He is not Hilary of Poitiers, who returned from beyond the grave to wield Clovis’s sword against Alaric at the Battle of Vouillé. He is not Hilary of Carcassonne, who was there on the day of Pentecost, backstage with Saint Sernin, and who consequently saw the tiny flames above the heads of the apostles, observed the apostles twirling and humming beneath the fire like girls dancing in a ring, was convinced that it was the truth which danced and blazed like this, and followed Saint Sernin to the Gauls, a bishopric, and martyrdom. He is not the Hilary of Padua whom Correggio painted from memory. Nor is he Hilarion of Gaza, friend of Saint Anthony, about whom Flaubert brazenly said he was the devil. Our Hilère is also well acquainted with the devil.
He has made a little hermitage for himself, halfway between the Tarn below and the Causse Sauveterre above, on the edge of the cliff, in the locality of Les Baumes. It is flat like the palm of a hand. It combines the advantages of a chasm with those of a desert. You’re in the dungeon of the universe, and yet on the top of the world: it’s a good hermitage. This is where Hilère comes more and more often to escape the chatter of the brothers, to talk within himself to that other person who is God, and also to talk within himself to the other person he once was, when his beard was black. And here, in this very long conversation with himself, the devil will sometimes appear.
For whole days at a time, he takes the harmless form of naked girls. At other times, he takes the form of Hilère himself, wearing a tiara on the seat of Saint Peter. And at other times still, he has no form at all, just a light wind, beautiful sunshine, and the lovely fresh leaves on the poplars along the Tarn, a moment of elation, or a desire to stretch one’s legs. “I’ll climb up to the edge of the causse,” says the hermit to himself.
It’s very slow going, with endless detours. The old man has to keep stopping.
He is on the causse. The wind blows over it like the Holy Spirit. It is infinite but definable, like the name of God which can be woven into three Persons. It is the open palm of Creation, holding up to God a tiny blessed figure leaning on his stick. The earth arose up by miracle by the will of Our Lord, in such wise that he sat as high as the other: it’s in the Scriptures and Hilère recalls it. He repeats the sentence to himself, and the wind blows over his heart. The wind plays with the trees. Perhaps it’s the wind speaking to him: What need have you of a miter? What need have you of Rome? This is your bishop’s seat. These are the seven hills, and God is directly overhead, with no one to stand between Hilère and Him. He is intoxicated with pride. He opens his arms, he runs, he’s a little out of breath — and Lord, how the sun has sunk; he must get back before night. He turns away from the causse, the throne of Saint Peter, the bare back of the earth where nothing grows: he thinks he sees a little old monk leaning on a stick and laughing. It’s only a juniper tree. “So it’s you, Satan,” he says reproachfully. He makes his way down as night falls. He can hear his miserly old man’s breath in the night. Bats fly past; it’s our own tiny heart beating up there. It’s the tiny black heart of the pope, of Hilère, or of the lowliest cowherd. No one knows. One man is all men, one place all places, thinks Hilère. He wonders whether this thought comes from God or the devil.
ÉNIMIE
Énimie is the granddaughter of Fredegund, who had her rivals tied to horses’ tails. She is the daughter of Clotaire II, king of Paris, who, for as long as his mother was alive, did not reign, and who has scarcely dared to reign since her death. Énimie is fifteen years old.
Clotaire is waging war against the king of Metz and the king of Austrasia. The king of Austrasia wants peace; Clotaire summons Gondevald, mayor of the palace of Paris, who can read and is on good terms with the mayor of the palace of Metz. They draft a treaty. On the first page there is a list of the possessions that the king of Metz will hand over to the king of Paris if he returns his weapons to their sheaths.
Clotaire is satisfied with the possessions that Gondevald reads out from the parchment. There are many distant priories among them, for which abbots must be appointed — fictitious abbots who will never set foot in them but who will receive the benefices. Clotaire accordingly makes himself abbot three times over, little Dagobert his son twice, Gondevald four times, and the remainder go to his close allies and cousins: Sigisbert, Gontran, and Caribert. The mayor and the king laugh, and drinks are brought. They pick up the list again and have a momentary hesitation because the next name is that of a monastery for girls, and as Fredegund is dead they are uncertain whom to allocate it to. The shade of Fredegund passes between them. They drink without pleasure — then Gondevald smiles: “Énimie,” he says.
She is summoned. She is beautiful and pale, with jewelry made of hammered iron. She simpers at Gondevald. Gondevald looks at her bosom. He talks to her about a priory in the diocese of Mende, on a river called the Tarn, in a place with an unpronounceable name which Gondevald can nonetheless pronounce. He says to her, “You will be abbess of this place.” He adds that it’s a sort of game, that in any case she won’t leave Paris or Soissons, that each winter she will simply receive sacks of gold from the distant place with the unpronounceable name. He tells her that of course all these sacks of gold will not really be for her, and that each year she must hand them over to her father. She looks at him. “Yes,” she says. Her white hand places a little cross alongside Clotaire’s little cross at the bottom of the treaty.
When she is alone, she wonders whether the Tarn is like the Seine, the Marne, and the River Oise. She decides that it isn’t. She decides that this far-off place with the name which no one can pronounce should be ruled over by a young abbess and a mayor of the palace. She sleeps with Gondevald. When she unfastens her gown, she likes to think that she is offering Gondevald the abbess of an unpronounceable name. Her pleasure is felt in the body of an abbess. She asks her lover several times to repeat the beautiful pure Latin name, the name of her priory. He pronounces it with a laugh as he kisses her in the straw and the sheets. Then he stops pronouncing it. He is sleeping with Galswinthe.
She soon falls ill. It is said to be leprosy. When she dies at Soissons, she pronounces the unpronounceable name.
SIMON
Under the reign of Louis IV d’Outremer, son of Charles III–Charles the Simple — the Benedictine community of Saint-Chaffre becomes overpopulated and begins to swarm: a handful of monks settle in Burle, on the banks of the River Tarn, and restore the disused monastery which had been founded by a very ancient hermit. Having in their pocket a deed of cession signed by Pope Agapetus does not suffice: the barons in the valley do not like sharing privileges with the lords in monks’ habits whom Heaven has visited upon them. The barons arrive with axes and horses; they make threats and steal a few chickens. Dalmatius, the Father Abbot, asks Brother Simon, who can read and use the noble tongue to perfection, to establish the legitimacy of the monastery in the noble tongue.
Simon ponders. He has the earth dug up beneath the choir of the old chapel, which has long since been ruined. Three skeletons, each holding a sword, are discovered, which he immediately has covered up again. Another is found, overlaid by the shreds of what was once a dalmatic and a stole. Simon ruminates at length over this one, and then after three days regretfully has it buried for a second time. A slighter skeleton is found whose dark black plaited hair has been well preserved and has gleams of life in it. It looks like a woman. “Yes,” says Simon. He carefully cleans the hair and, one by one, the bones. He places them in a small wooden chest. He kisses the chest. He asks the carpenter brother to depict Our Lord on the Cross on one side of it and on the other a female saint.
He sends for Brother Palladius, who is young, likes walking, and is a passionate reader of the noble tongue. He shows him the wooden chest, where the carpenter has just started on the figure of Our Lord. He talks to him for a long time about an unknown female saint who is waiting with great patience in Paradise for two monks, Brother Simon and Brother Palladius, to restore justice to her in this world. He tells him that she appeared to Brother Simon in the form of plaited hair beneath the earth, and that she will appear to Brother Palladius in the form of a name in a monastery archive. It will perhaps be in the bishopric of Mende, perhaps in the bishopric of Le Puy; perhaps it will be at Saint-Denis, where the monks of the king of France live; or in Rome, where Our Lord is directly overhead. Brother Palladius must walk until the saint appears to him written in black on white. He will recognize her. Brother Palladius kisses the small wooden chest and sets out. Several winters pass: Brother Simon has time to read Athanasius, to reread him, to understand him, to copy the text, and to know the first three chapters from memory.
One spring he is sitting in the meadow, and he sees a vaguely familiar man coming down from the causse; from a certain way he has of cavorting as he walks, he recognizes Palladius. He gets up and makes broad gestures to him under the lovely clear sky. Up above, Palladius replies with both arms and starts to run. He shouts something that Simon can’t understand, the same thing over and over again, like a name of three or four syllables which sounds like alleluia. When Palladius has almost reached the enclosure and shouts once more, Simon can hear the three syllables. “Enimia!” shouts Palladius. “So it’s Enimia,” says Simon.
So it’s her. Enimia, the daughter of King Clotaire, sister of good King Dagobert, abbess of Burle in Gabali country in the year of Our Lord 610: this is what Palladius read when he visited the very learned monks of Saint-Denis — not a word more, but it’s quite enough. Simon cuts his quills and prepares a fine calfskin parchment. He feels free, like a child, and yet serious, responsible for a dead woman as Our Lord is responsible for all mankind. For two weeks, every day when he rises he sees the well-stretched fresh parchment and the quills ready in his cell; he doesn’t touch them, but he walks in the springtime. One day he hears a leper’s rattle; he sees the leper walk past beneath the wide clear sky, and when he is close, it seems to Simon that the leper is a woman. “A princess sick with leprosy,” he says to himself. He goes to drink from the spring at Burle. He says, “This water.” Before his eyes, in the hollow of his palm like clear water, he has the entire life of the saint. He exults. He climbs up to the causse. A cloud hides the sun, the wind blows on the ailing trees. He doubts everything: the saint, the wooden chest, the name in writing at Saint-Denis. “Satan,” he says. But he doesn’t leave; he looks honestly at the open expanse. He kneels down, and he says, “Saint, don’t let him stop you. Don’t let him stop me.”
He walks back down. In a single sitting, in the noble tongue, he writes the Vita sancta Enimia.
SANCTA ENIMIA
The anonymous monk who may have been called Simon wrote a Life which looks like this:
Enimia, daughter of Clotaire, is beautiful and pale. She is loved and desired by men. She thinks that she loves God, withdrawal from the world, silence. Her father the king wants to marry her to a ruffian baron by the name of Gondevald. She knows that she doesn’t love Gondevald: he has an iron hand and hard, constantly shifting eyes which only come to rest on virgins. The wedding is set for tomorrow. It is night: the stable grooms are laughing in the courtyard, a few muffled thunderclaps can be heard in the distance, upsetting the horses, and in her chamber Enimia is praying, “Lord, do not let this man place his hand upon Thy servant.” There is a louder clap of thunder, much closer by. It’s night: the grooms have turned in and are asleep, the horses sleep standing up, the storm is a long way off. Enimia looks in despair through her window at the moon, and as she turns in the moonlight toward the mirror, which is next to the window, instead of her lovely face which men desire she sees a mask that is white and puffy like a wasps’ nest. It’s leprosy. Enimia bursts out laughing in the night. Prostrate, she gives thanks to God for the excess of his goodness and his mercy. She weeps and then sleeps.
Later, on another night, there appears at the window an adorable form which has come from the beyond. It’s most assuredly an angel. He tells her that the Lord does not want His servant to remain leprous. That He loves His pale and beautiful brides. That the wasps’ nest that she bears on her shoulders is a trick to get rid of Gondevald, and that she is now to be cured. “Drink,” says the angel, “from the spring at Burle in Gabali country.” Something silken returns into the night, and Enimia can only hear the Maytime nightingales.
The procession of the children of Merovech is now passing through the gates of Paris and across the Berry, the Auvergne, the great unknown territory — the oxen and the horses, the smell of the byre, the hammered iron rings with enormous gemstones, the carts with crimson cushions and creaking wheels whose axles bend and break, the barons, the royal retinue, the bishops, the croziers, the ciboria, the grooms, and the little veiled princess in the heaviest wagon. The slowness, the seasons. Behind the hangings of the large wagon laughter can be heard, and Enimia talking to God, to her goddaughter Galswinthe who laughs the most, and to her angel. God loves her, and she will once again be beautiful; happiness is of this world. The procession slowly crosses the causse, moves down the gash made by the Tarn: the spring at Burle.
The hangings on the large wagon part; the princess steps down. Her bare feet are made of white card like a wasps’ nest. She kneels, she lifts her veil, she takes the cool water in her card-paper hand, she drinks passionately as if she were kissing her angel. For a long time her eyes remain closed, as if she were clasping her angel to herself, then she opens them and looks at her hand: it’s the long, pale hand of a young girl. She throws off her veil and runs on her pink, young girl’s feet. She dances and laughs till she cries. The barons, the bishops, and the grooms look at her. She looks at them with a sort of hunger.
Soon they are ready for the return journey. The hangings on the large wagon are open; the princess sits in it with her hammerediron jewelry and her gown which reveals her arms and her shoulders, her universal hunger. Bishop Sigebert touches her arm as he talks to her, Duke Gontran her hair. She laughs loud and often. It is as if it were her angel touching her through each man. They set off before dawn; six pairs of oxen are placed between the shafts of the large wagon to climb the gash of the Tarn. When they are on the causse and they stop to unharness, it’s daybreak. Enimia, who is looking at the daylight, wants to see it gleaming on her rings. She lowers her eyes to her hand: her rings are sunk in the puffy blisters of a wasps’ nest. All her blood returns to her heart. As her blood stops, she says, “Satan.” In front of her, Duke Gontran, who has seen nothing, is helping the grooms to unharness the oxen: the men’s necks are thick, their hands mean on the withers of the oxen. She looks at her own hand again, and she says. “No, it is Thou, Lord.” She draws the hangings. Behind the hangings, her voice very calmly gives the order to go back down.
She drinks once more, once again her feet are pink, and her hands are hands of love. But she doesn’t throw off her veil. She will keep it on. She is beautiful for God — for no one, perhaps for nothing: to remember, to hope, to talk within herself to that other person who is the angel, to rejoice that she scarcely exists, to tremble, to be long in dying. Life is leprosy. The present hour is leprous. She founds, endows, and rules over Burle Abbey in Gabali country; she buries herself away there. She will never see Soissons again. When she dies, her angel carries her adorably away.
BERTRAN
Under the regency of Queen Blanche, around the time when Saint Louis is laying siege to the city of Damietta after setting out on crusade, Bertran de Marseille is bailiff to Guillaume, bishop of Mende, which means that he is the guardian of his seals and his writing desk. He is the steward of written things. He copies written things which prescribe the occurrence of real things between the bishop and the canons, the bishop and the villeins, the bishop and God. Nothing of what he writes causes real things to occur in the life of Bertran de Marseille. This suits him only in part: the flow of written words passes through his hands but does not belong to him, and he would love to divert it at some point, to dam it up, call it his own and be its master before God.
Bishop Guillaume notices his melancholy. And as he is merciful by virtue of his office, he decides to give Bertran mastery and something like suzerainty over a small piece of language. To do so he has recourse to a political pretext: the barons of Cénaret are again contesting the ownership of the spring at Burle by the monks of Sainte-Énimie; the barons of Cénaret are pettifoggers obsessed with legalities, but they have no education: they can neither read nor understand Latin. They haven’t read the Vita sancta Enimia in which the spring at Burle is devolved upon the beyond. In order to nonsuit them, it will be necessary to write the Life in the vulgar tongue and, vulgarly put, to place all bets for the beyond on the spring. Guillaume knows that no one speaks Occitan better than Bertran: he was born and reared in Marseille — not the big, Greek Marseille, but the little Marseille that’s a stone’s throw from Volcégure, on the Causse Méjan. He was suckled on the obscure language of the barons.
The bishop rises at the hour of Matins. He walks through the outer ward and sees the dishes of lentils for the midday meal ready beneath the great crucifix in the refectory. He summons his bailiff to the audience chamber. Before him on the episcopal table there lies the very old manuscript whose parchment is cracking in several places: Vita sancta Enimia. The light from a candle falls across it. Bertran recognizes it at once: he has read it. Both men contemplate the antiquated object with a certain excitement. The bishop’s hand caresses it and spreads it open. He says, “You will rewrite all this in the language that is spoken between Nabrigas and Saint-Pierre-les-Tripiés. The barons must be able to understand it. The jongleurs must be able to understand it and tell it to the villeins in the fairs. Even the villeins must be able to understand some glimmer of it, and laugh or shed tears when they hear it.” Bertran, whose heart is pounding, says that he can do this. The bishop has rolled up the manuscript, and, gripping it tight in his hand, he uses it to emphasize each word as if it were a crozier: “What you write must be absolute like God’s power, clear like the water at Burle, and visible like a tree or a dish of lentils. Make the absolute visible and clear. Describe to perfection a dish of lentils and the appetite you have for it; and without pausing to draw breath, use the same words to describe the appetite that God has for the spring at Burle. The barons do not doubt lentils, and they will not doubt God. They do not doubt the ownership of their porringers, and they will not doubt that God has his porringer at Burle.” He adds, “For those boors to understand you, you will have to speak the truth and yet lie. I shall treat you as if you hadn’t lied, but I cannot grant you absolution. Only the true things that you place at the heart of your lie can absolve you. You will be the master of it before God.”
It is still dark when Bertran goes out. He is full of a taut joy like the bells for Matins. All winter and spring he is busy with written things that cause real things to occur between God and himself. Then he has finished. He brings the bishop a poem of two thousand lines in octosyllables and rhyming couplets written in the vulgar tongue: the Life of Saint Énimie.
It’s summer. The bishop is sitting after dinner under the vine arbor at the bishop’s palace, perhaps with a concubine. He is smiling and cheerful in the lovely light and the lovely shade. Bertran is very serious, intimidated, and proud, without a shadow of melancholy. He looks at his manuscript in the prelate’s hands, between the strawberries and a carafe of ruby-red wine. “Did you put in the dish of lentils?” asks Guillaume maliciously. “Yes, Monseigneur,” says Bertran. He becomes a little flustered and blushes: “And the strawberries too.”
In the evening, when he is alone, the bishop reads. Yes, Bertran wasn’t lying, the things he said are really there: the absolute and the visible, the absolute is hidden but clear at the heart of the visible. There is the Causse Méjan, sin, and salvation. There are the names of the places; each bend in the Tarn is named; each stone along the Tarn appears as it is itself, and not the one next to it; and behind the stones, the Drac monster and the saint — which is to say Good and Evil — appear, disappear, and confront each other: Good and Evil hurl themselves at stones that can be named. There are the many forms taken by the created world, which is to say the visible stakes over which Good and Evil do battle. There are miracles, ramrod stiff corpses that supplely rise up and walk, rocks that climb the gash of the Tarn of their own accord, trees that speak unaided of God’s power, which is to say absolute Good applied without contradiction to visible form. There is the doubt that grips you when you cross the causse and it’s raining, which is to say Evil. There is a woman who disrobes three times and whom we see three times naked in the spring at Burle — but this lovely body in which Satan with all his might has laid his trap is a body that is true and pure like the hand of God: the inconceivable and nonetheless visible body of a saint. Good is the utterly naked body of a young girl.
The bishop looks black on white at the naked body of the saint. He has an appetite for the forbidden flesh of a saint. God is in this flesh. He rejoices and weeps as will the villeins in the fairs, when the jongleurs recount the Life of Saint Énimie.
SEGUIN
Seguin de Badefol has just taken Mende.
He no longer knows where he was born. Ever since he was able to speak he has sold his body, his horse, his glove, and his sword: he’s a captain. He has fought under King John with the Fleur de Lys. He has fought under the Black Prince; last September at Poitiers with the Black Prince they captured King John beneath an oak tree in the gully of Maupertuis. The Black Prince has returned to Brittany, King John is under lock and key in the Tower of London — there are no more princes to pay for employment in war. No matter, others can become princes; after you’ve had truck with them and been under their heel you learn what a prince is: a man with fur-lined cloaks worn over iron who grinds villeins in his mill and makes excellent flour out of them. So it is that the somber barons of the Great Companies, whom the English call warlords, have flourished and wield power.
For ten years — or five — Seguin has excelled in the iniquitous business of being a prince. He keeps a tight grip on the bandit princes who rule thanks to the vacancy of King John. He has called them by name. He has shouted their names in combat. He has traded a horse or a parish with them, insulted them, loved and hated them, betrayed them, ridden with them, iron boot against iron boot, at the hour in winter when, as evening comes, they have nothing to say to each other; he has dismounted and drunk with them. They have been drunk together on air, on wine, and on blood. He has ridden and dismounted with Bertugat d’Albret, Petit-Meschin, Perrin Boïas, the Bastard of Armagnac, Guyot du Pin; with Arnaud, known as the Arch-priest; and at other times, with complete indifference, he has fought them when they took it into their heads to grind villeins that Seguin himself was planning to grind. He has fought the entire world. The armor is heavier in the evening. The ermine looks gray when night falls. Seguin is growing old; he abandons the fat lands of Burgundy and Berry to the Archpriest and the Bastard of Armagnac; he settles on poorer, less coveted lands where the villeins endlessly bow beneath the rain, the famine, and the warlords. He has his fief in the Limousin, and from there he has the Limousin, the Gévaudan, the Rouergue, and the Auvergne revolve at his behest, the way you make a top spin with a whip. He wearies of this occupation. He has white hairs in his beard, which he is apparently the only one to see: no one has mentioned them to him.
He has just taken Mende with Perrin Boïas and Petit-Meschin under his command, and they have seen the white hairs in his beard quite distinctly. They find it hard to put up with the suzerainty of the old man. All day long they have killed, seized plate, girls, and fur-lined cloaks. All night they have drunk, among the huge, swift flames made by the peasants’ huts, and the slower, richer flames made by the wooden structures of the burghers’ houses; and suddenly it is daylight: the flames grow pale and the sky appears. It’s a gray sky. They are full of gab and wine. They feel like ghosts, airy flames, gods or devils, the way you feel in the sleeplessness of early morning. One of them — a young fellow — suggests setting off straight away to see if there is a monastery willing to open up or to burn, if the peasants’ women are in the right mood, if the devil is around. They’re up like ghosts. They kick the valets awake, and they are laced into their battle dress. Their fur-lined cloaks over the top. In the saddle. Iron boot against iron boot, five or six captains and men-at-arms. And now they are on the Causse de Sauveterre, galloping along, full of dismal wine with the dismal sky above their heads. The sun has not once appeared. The open expanse is arid, like a captain’s life. There are trees growing here whose names are known only in Purgatory. It is the open palm of the earth offering up five or six captains to God or the devil. Seguin de Badefol pulls on his reins and halts. His face is ashen, like his beard. “I’ll not go any farther,” he says. Perrin Boïas and Petit-Meschin exchange a glance. The horses have stopped on the causse. The dull mist of the clouds blows against their armor. Strangely, Seguin, in an ashen voice, starts to speak — of God, of what it is permitted to do on earth and what it is permitted not to do — and he might well speak of remorse if he had the habit, the use, or even the memory of the word. Perrin Boïas and Petit-Meschin smile. The first man touches the hilt of his sword. He says, “Old men go no farther than this.” Seguin is silent: he looks for a moment at the open expanse, the stunted trees, the interminable horizon. Perrin Boïas does not have time to draw his sword fully from its scabbard before Seguin slits his throat. Seguin sighs. He wipes his blade on the mane of his horse. The horses’ breath creates soft little clouds at regular intervals. He heads full tilt toward Sauveterre. “Let’s keep going,” he says.
ANTOINE PERSEGOL
On June 9, 1793, under the rule of the one and indivisible republic, the Montagnards have swept away the Girondists, the Commune rules, Robespierre rules, compassionate zeal toward the unfortunate rules, and Antoine Persegol is walking on the Causse de Sauveterre. He is walking in the company of twenty-one lads from La Malène and some others, from Saint-Chély and Laval — forty-seven in all. They have weapons and they are drunk: they were plied with drink down in La Malène to incite them to join the troops of the True Friends of the Monarchy, the army led by Charrier who was député for Mende and is now a Chouan. It wasn’t difficult to persuade them: they are peasants or carders, weavers paid by the piece; poverty is their lot; and the great upheavals, the foreign wars, and the Law of the Maximum have made their poverty twice as bad. Down in the town an hour ago in front of the pitchers of wine, it was child’s play to get them to blame the republic for the grim poverty that only recently they blamed on the king.
Antoine Persegol is walking over the Causse de Sauveterre with his scythe on his shoulder fashioned into a pike, the tip of the blade in the longer part of the handle. Others have bayonets. They all have the white cockade. The open air has sobered him up a little, and he is very uneasy: he is secretly fond of the republic. He thinks about the republic the way he thinks about his mother, who has stayed behind down in La Malène and wept when he left: something old and frail yet constantly fresh, that always needs him. He thinks that the republic has occasionally asked his opinion, like his mother when she is preparing dinner and asks him whether he would prefer broad beans or lentils. He thinks that the republic regards him exactly the same way it regards Baptiste Flourou, even though he is the lowliest of the carders and Baptiste Flourou owns twenty carders, all the wool that they card, and the mills where they card it: the republic regards both of them the way his mother regards him and his brother André, who has been an imbecile since birth.
The wine is wickeder. It is absolute like the king. Wine made him take the white cockade and put his scythe together back to front.
They reach La Capelle. They enter the village. From each house, from behind each stone wall, and from under each tree there emerge the blue uniforms with the red trimmings of the one and indivisible republic. It’s the Bleus. They have cavalry. They have a superintendent with a tricolor sash who gives orders in the language that is spoken in Paris. The forty-seven men surrender without a fight: the wine has drained away, abandoned them in the June sunshine, and without the wine they suspect that the republic is not the only cause of grim poverty. Antoine Persegol feels as if a great burden has been lifted from him.
They are parked in a small sloping field with stone walls. The roll is called, then they are left for a while, with a Bleu posted at every second stone along the wall. They do not speak. Antoine Persegol tells himself that everything will be straightened out, since the republic loves the truth, and the truth is that he loves the republic. Truth is the mother of freedom. The truth will appear, and this evening he’ll be free; he’ll see his mother. He can see the superintendent with the sash walking to and fro beneath the elm tree on the square, a lad his own age with worn hands like those of the carders. He looks like a decent fellow. He loves the unfortunate, that’s for sure. Antoine Persegol walks up to the wall to get a better view of him: he’ll signal to him and the other man will come over; he’ll talk to him, and they will patiently allow the truth to emerge between them, lovely and indubitable like the tricolor silk. A Bleu roughly pushes him away; he goes back and sits down. Toward evening, carts arrive. As they are being led away he finds himself by chance in front of the superintendent. He says in patois that he’d been drunk and that he loves the republic. “What’s this scoundrel saying?” asks the superintendent in the language that is spoken in Paris. The sergeant shrugs his shoulders, and the superintendent turns away. They are loaded into carts and taken to Florac. So now he will explain everything in Florac, and he’ll see his mother tomorrow.
The reality is otherwise. Reality is a cruel stepmother. The next morning at Florac five men sitting in black hats speak in an incomprehensible language to forty-seven men standing before them. They are pushed into the June day with their hands tied. On the cart he thinks about his mother standing in the June day on the doorstep of her house in La Malène, looking toward the far end of the empty track. The huge machine with the swift bevel is set up on the square in Florac. Forty-seven times the iron blade of Mother Death severs a head from a trunk, forty-seven times a head severed from a trunk violently confirms the law of falling bodies. Antoine Persegol is the fortieth.
ÉDOUARD MARTEL
At Le Rozier on the River Tarn and the River Jonte, where the three major causses meet — Sauveterre, Méjan, and Noir—Édouard Martel is sitting on the terrace of the Hôtel des Voyageurs. It’s September. He is in his prime; he’s about to succeed in life, and he knows it: that is what he is telling himself on this sunny terrace in September, between the vast sky above and the sparkling waters below. He proudly contemplates September. He holds his head high with its fine Roman features and blond goatee. He is one of those men who love glory. He has abandoned the sad profession of scribe at the court of law in Paris; it seemed to him that for a man of his caliber the profession of explorer was the shortest path to glory; it also seemed to him that the surface of the earth, the ground on which you walk beneath the sun, was too easy a terrain for the explorer’s quest, too obvious and somehow duplicitous: he has taken the darker part of exploration, the caves and the chasms, Erebus and Tartarus, the kingdom of the dead. Within this kingdom he is searching for his own, like Dante or Orpheus. He has founded speleology. A hundred feet below ground he has created a reputation for himself.
He loves the causse where this reputation originated when he discovered Dargilan ten years back. He is looking for other holes. He has made the Hôtel des Voyageurs his headquarters, like his African colleagues, the discoverers in pith helmets, who pitch their tents in Timbuktu or Zanzibar and from there gather information about the desert in the North, the forest in the West, send out patrols and wait for the dry season. The shepherds from the causse know the man with the blond goatee who has a liking for the Underworld, and sits with his legs crossed under the arbor on the terrace waiting for them to bring him news of the Underworld: if the earth opens up under a lamb, or if a stone dropped down a shaft is swallowed up without a sound, they come running to the Hôtel des Voyageurs and talk to the blond goatee with the crossed legs clad in gaiters. And on this very day, September 18, a man who has news of the Underworld is walking into the village of Le Rozier.
It’s Louis Armand, the locksmith. He is now under the arbor. He is full of a feverish joy. He says that on the causse between Nabrigas and La Parade there is a low entrance; the stones thrown into it drop the devil of a way down. “Well then, let’s go to the devil,” says the blond goatee with a laugh. As soon as he has been up to his room and fetched ropes, pegs, carabiners, helmets, and lamps they’re off.
Until the end of September the terrace is deserted. Or it seems that way because, although are there are a few drinkers in the afternoon — shepherds or carders, and a few passing horse dealers — the tall blond figure whom glory has brushed with its wing and who gives meaning to other men is no longer there. Autumn reigns alone; Martel does not see it. He is beneath the earth; he is exploring, mapping and measuring the most enormous hole he has ever seen. A hundred feet below ground he is tasting pure happiness.
In October, Martel, now somewhat paler, is sitting under the arbor. It’s a beautiful day again, and very hot. There are pens and an inkpot on the table, a blotter, and several sheets of paper which flutter in the wind like the leaves on the hornbeam above his head. All morning Martel has been lining up figures, calculating contour lines; he has sketched cross-sections, scale drawings; he has made a portrait of the chasm: the first hole, the enormous sloping nave with its stalagmites, the second hole lower down which is like a duplicate chasm. He contemplates the drawings with a sense of vertigo. Suddenly he lifts his head: the hotel owner’s wife is serving aperitifs to the short-stay guests and looking tenderly at the proud profile and the blond goatee. She doesn’t know that Édouard Martel wants to die. She doesn’t know that he is saying to himself, “None of this has the slightest meaning. It’s just a hole that slopes. These are just white stones rising up in the dark. The sun has never been here. It’s sinister. There’s nothing to see inside.” He stands up angrily, crumpling his papers as he takes them away. In the evening he gets drunk with Louis Armand. The hotel owner’s wife tenderly helps him upstairs to his room.
Later, on another day, he is once again under the arbor, which is at present quite bare. He has just been to the telegraph office, where he sent a cable to Paris, and he is now sitting down. He is calmer. At the top of the sheet that caused his despair the other day — the one with the scale drawings — he has carefully written in capital letters: Aven Armand, and under it in smaller letters: At La Parade Causse Méjan Lozère. He says to himself that it’s a good start. By the spot where the stalagmites are particularly bushy and numerous, he writes Great Forest; he immediately crosses this out and writes Virgin Forest, and then where they are all round and heaped on top of each other, The Jellyfish Corner. He goes through them, one by one, and against this or that stalagmite, he writes, The Grand Stalagmite (30 m), The Easter Candle, The Palm Tree, The Turkey, The Tiger. He can see very clearly in his mind’s eye the tall shapes as they appeared to him down below. He smiles: No, these are not white stones rising up pointlessly in the dark; they are objects full of meaning that have a name in men’s mouths. As he is making these observations to himself, the telegraph clerk arrives bringing him a reply from Paris. He reads it and exults. Without lifting his pen from the page, he writes under the drawings, The whole of Notre-Dame in Paris could be comfortably contained inside the large chamber. He rereads his words and tastes pure happiness. He says to himself that the profession of scribe is a fine one. He strokes his blond goatee.
BARTHÉLÉMY PRUNIÈRES
Barthélémy Prunières is on the Causse Méjan. He is looking for dead men. This is his passion. The fact that he is a doctor in Marjevols is of little importance: he prefers bodies that have ceased to suffer to the suffering bodies of his daily round. If at this very moment God or the devil were to appear before him on the causse and command him to justify his life, he would say, I am an anthropologist, a member of the Anthropological Society of Lille, the Anthropological Society of Paris, and the Anthropological Society of Bordeaux; in August 1870 I telegraphed my resignation to the Anthropological Society of Berlin. There is not a Society in Europe that does not know of me. I have shifted enormous quantities of ancient remains. I have studied Baumes-Chaudes Man, a fine dolichocephalic troglodyte who ate hare in huge dishes of unglazed clay, and it was I who named him. I studied Causse Man, the brachycephalus with the highly orthognatic face who belongs to the race I called dolmenic—it was I who named it. I had the honor of discovering that in both racial groups, the dolmenic as well as the troglodyte, individuals destined for the role of shaman underwent substantial trepanation in their early years; that a circular piece of bone the size of a five-franc silver coin was removed from their cranium; that this piece of bone removed from their head was worn round the neck as an amulet and made them all-powerful. To people who were disturbed by the barbarity of these practices, I said that gods who asked of man nothing more than a piece of his skull might be considered lenient. What the gods ask of me, each day, is to piece together the infinite puzzle of dead humanity.
He is on the Causse Méjan, at the southwest edge, just before the causse tips passionately down to the bed of the River Jonte, toward Saint-Pierre-les-Tripiés; he is on the site of the Cave of the Dead Man, which of course was named by him. It is autumn in 1871. The site is an ossuary in a rock shelter, which Prunières discovered in the spring of 1870; he dug it only once; he left little protection for it, thinking he would be back in a month or two. But war came, and with it the uhlans and sabers that perform excellent trepanations, and the gods who, when all is said and done, are lenient and will trade two years of famine for a brand-new republic. There have been two years of rain, frost, rodents, and landslips on the causse; when Prunières returns, half the ossuary has fallen into the gully.
It is autumn. Prunières has brought along Dr. Broca, president of the Anthropological Society of Paris (a man who knows us in his own particular way, though we do not know him: inside our skulls we each carry a cerebral convolution known as Broca’s area). All day long they have assembled and named bones, like the gravedigger in Hamlet. They have placed them in two large crates that the curé of Saint-Pierre had carpentered for them. It’s the end of the day. Broca is tired and stands smoking a cigar outside the cave; he looks at the autumn, the troglodyte bones in the curé’s crate; he thinks about things and about the naming of things. Prunières is carrying out a final inspection of the gully before leaving. And there, three hundred meters farther down, he finds a very fine, very white humerus. At the same time as the bone, he finds the simple, beautiful sentence he will utter at the Bordeaux Anthropological Congress on September 12, 1872: “All the bones had been bleached white by the rain, the dew, and the snow.”
In December 1893, Dr. Prunières is returning in the depths of night after attending a birth on the Aubrac plateau. He is caught in a snowstorm. He struggles on for several hours — he has a strong constitution, hardened by handling suffering bodies and bodies that have ceased to suffer. Then he gives up the struggle and settles himself between three rocks like an old troglodyte. He says to himself, “I am going to die.” He repeats to himself, “Baumes-Chaudes Man, the troglodyte race, the dolmenic race, circular pieces of skull.” He says to himself that his body will not be found. Aloud, he says, “All the bones had been bleached white by the rain, the dew, and the snow.” The snow lays a maternal blanket over him.
He was still alive when he was found in the morning. He died during the day, from acute pulmonary edema.
SAINT HILÈRE
Bishop Hilère has abandoned his miter. His beard is quite white. He has handed in his crozier. He has founded a community of brothers no one knows where on the banks of the River Tarn, doubtless on the spot where Énimie, the saint with Merovech’s blood, will later come.
Hilère is growing old. We know that he is growing old, but very little else is known about him. We know what he is not. He is not Hilary of Poitiers, who returned from beyond the grave to wield Clovis’s sword against Alaric at the Battle of Vouillé. He is not Hilary of Carcassonne, who was there on the day of Pentecost, backstage with Saint Sernin, and who consequently saw the tiny flames above the heads of the apostles, observed the apostles twirling and humming beneath the fire like girls dancing in a ring, was convinced that it was the truth which danced and blazed like this, and followed Saint Sernin to the Gauls, a bishopric, and martyrdom. He is not the Hilary of Padua whom Correggio painted from memory. Nor is he Hilarion of Gaza, friend of Saint Anthony, about whom Flaubert brazenly said he was the devil. Our Hilère is also well acquainted with the devil.
He has made a little hermitage for himself, halfway between the Tarn below and the Causse Sauveterre above, on the edge of the cliff, in the locality of Les Baumes. It is flat like the palm of a hand. It combines the advantages of a chasm with those of a desert. You’re in the dungeon of the universe, and yet on the top of the world: it’s a good hermitage. This is where Hilère comes more and more often to escape the chatter of the brothers, to talk within himself to that other person who is God, and also to talk within himself to the other person he once was, when his beard was black. And here, in this very long conversation with himself, the devil will sometimes appear.
For whole days at a time, he takes the harmless form of naked girls. At other times, he takes the form of Hilère himself, wearing a tiara on the seat of Saint Peter. And at other times still, he has no form at all, just a light wind, beautiful sunshine, and the lovely fresh leaves on the poplars along the Tarn, a moment of elation, or a desire to stretch one’s legs. “I’ll climb up to the edge of the causse,” says the hermit to himself.
It’s very slow going, with endless detours. The old man has to keep stopping.
He is on the causse. The wind blows over it like the Holy Spirit. It is infinite but definable, like the name of God which can be woven into three Persons. It is the open palm of Creation, holding up to God a tiny blessed figure leaning on his stick. The earth arose up by miracle by the will of Our Lord, in such wise that he sat as high as the other: it’s in the Scriptures and Hilère recalls it. He repeats the sentence to himself, and the wind blows over his heart. The wind plays with the trees. Perhaps it’s the wind speaking to him: What need have you of a miter? What need have you of Rome? This is your bishop’s seat. These are the seven hills, and God is directly overhead, with no one to stand between Hilère and Him. He is intoxicated with pride. He opens his arms, he runs, he’s a little out of breath — and Lord, how the sun has sunk; he must get back before night. He turns away from the causse, the throne of Saint Peter, the bare back of the earth where nothing grows: he thinks he sees a little old monk leaning on a stick and laughing. It’s only a juniper tree. “So it’s you, Satan,” he says reproachfully. He makes his way down as night falls. He can hear his miserly old man’s breath in the night. Bats fly past; it’s our own tiny heart beating up there. It’s the tiny black heart of the pope, of Hilère, or of the lowliest cowherd. No one knows. One man is all men, one place all places, thinks Hilère. He wonders whether this thought comes from God or the devil.
ÉNIMIE
Énimie is the granddaughter of Fredegund, who had her rivals tied to horses’ tails. She is the daughter of Clotaire II, king of Paris, who, for as long as his mother was alive, did not reign, and who has scarcely dared to reign since her death. Énimie is fifteen years old.
Clotaire is waging war against the king of Metz and the king of Austrasia. The king of Austrasia wants peace; Clotaire summons Gondevald, mayor of the palace of Paris, who can read and is on good terms with the mayor of the palace of Metz. They draft a treaty. On the first page there is a list of the possessions that the king of Metz will hand over to the king of Paris if he returns his weapons to their sheaths.
Clotaire is satisfied with the possessions that Gondevald reads out from the parchment. There are many distant priories among them, for which abbots must be appointed — fictitious abbots who will never set foot in them but who will receive the benefices. Clotaire accordingly makes himself abbot three times over, little Dagobert his son twice, Gondevald four times, and the remainder go to his close allies and cousins: Sigisbert, Gontran, and Caribert. The mayor and the king laugh, and drinks are brought. They pick up the list again and have a momentary hesitation because the next name is that of a monastery for girls, and as Fredegund is dead they are uncertain whom to allocate it to. The shade of Fredegund passes between them. They drink without pleasure — then Gondevald smiles: “Énimie,” he says.
She is summoned. She is beautiful and pale, with jewelry made of hammered iron. She simpers at Gondevald. Gondevald looks at her bosom. He talks to her about a priory in the diocese of Mende, on a river called the Tarn, in a place with an unpronounceable name which Gondevald can nonetheless pronounce. He says to her, “You will be abbess of this place.” He adds that it’s a sort of game, that in any case she won’t leave Paris or Soissons, that each winter she will simply receive sacks of gold from the distant place with the unpronounceable name. He tells her that of course all these sacks of gold will not really be for her, and that each year she must hand them over to her father. She looks at him. “Yes,” she says. Her white hand places a little cross alongside Clotaire’s little cross at the bottom of the treaty.
When she is alone, she wonders whether the Tarn is like the Seine, the Marne, and the River Oise. She decides that it isn’t. She decides that this far-off place with the name which no one can pronounce should be ruled over by a young abbess and a mayor of the palace. She sleeps with Gondevald. When she unfastens her gown, she likes to think that she is offering Gondevald the abbess of an unpronounceable name. Her pleasure is felt in the body of an abbess. She asks her lover several times to repeat the beautiful pure Latin name, the name of her priory. He pronounces it with a laugh as he kisses her in the straw and the sheets. Then he stops pronouncing it. He is sleeping with Galswinthe.
She soon falls ill. It is said to be leprosy. When she dies at Soissons, she pronounces the unpronounceable name.
SIMON
Under the reign of Louis IV d’Outremer, son of Charles III–Charles the Simple — the Benedictine community of Saint-Chaffre becomes overpopulated and begins to swarm: a handful of monks settle in Burle, on the banks of the River Tarn, and restore the disused monastery which had been founded by a very ancient hermit. Having in their pocket a deed of cession signed by Pope Agapetus does not suffice: the barons in the valley do not like sharing privileges with the lords in monks’ habits whom Heaven has visited upon them. The barons arrive with axes and horses; they make threats and steal a few chickens. Dalmatius, the Father Abbot, asks Brother Simon, who can read and use the noble tongue to perfection, to establish the legitimacy of the monastery in the noble tongue.
Simon ponders. He has the earth dug up beneath the choir of the old chapel, which has long since been ruined. Three skeletons, each holding a sword, are discovered, which he immediately has covered up again. Another is found, overlaid by the shreds of what was once a dalmatic and a stole. Simon ruminates at length over this one, and then after three days regretfully has it buried for a second time. A slighter skeleton is found whose dark black plaited hair has been well preserved and has gleams of life in it. It looks like a woman. “Yes,” says Simon. He carefully cleans the hair and, one by one, the bones. He places them in a small wooden chest. He kisses the chest. He asks the carpenter brother to depict Our Lord on the Cross on one side of it and on the other a female saint.
He sends for Brother Palladius, who is young, likes walking, and is a passionate reader of the noble tongue. He shows him the wooden chest, where the carpenter has just started on the figure of Our Lord. He talks to him for a long time about an unknown female saint who is waiting with great patience in Paradise for two monks, Brother Simon and Brother Palladius, to restore justice to her in this world. He tells him that she appeared to Brother Simon in the form of plaited hair beneath the earth, and that she will appear to Brother Palladius in the form of a name in a monastery archive. It will perhaps be in the bishopric of Mende, perhaps in the bishopric of Le Puy; perhaps it will be at Saint-Denis, where the monks of the king of France live; or in Rome, where Our Lord is directly overhead. Brother Palladius must walk until the saint appears to him written in black on white. He will recognize her. Brother Palladius kisses the small wooden chest and sets out. Several winters pass: Brother Simon has time to read Athanasius, to reread him, to understand him, to copy the text, and to know the first three chapters from memory.
One spring he is sitting in the meadow, and he sees a vaguely familiar man coming down from the causse; from a certain way he has of cavorting as he walks, he recognizes Palladius. He gets up and makes broad gestures to him under the lovely clear sky. Up above, Palladius replies with both arms and starts to run. He shouts something that Simon can’t understand, the same thing over and over again, like a name of three or four syllables which sounds like alleluia. When Palladius has almost reached the enclosure and shouts once more, Simon can hear the three syllables. “Enimia!” shouts Palladius. “So it’s Enimia,” says Simon.
So it’s her. Enimia, the daughter of King Clotaire, sister of good King Dagobert, abbess of Burle in Gabali country in the year of Our Lord 610: this is what Palladius read when he visited the very learned monks of Saint-Denis — not a word more, but it’s quite enough. Simon cuts his quills and prepares a fine calfskin parchment. He feels free, like a child, and yet serious, responsible for a dead woman as Our Lord is responsible for all mankind. For two weeks, every day when he rises he sees the well-stretched fresh parchment and the quills ready in his cell; he doesn’t touch them, but he walks in the springtime. One day he hears a leper’s rattle; he sees the leper walk past beneath the wide clear sky, and when he is close, it seems to Simon that the leper is a woman. “A princess sick with leprosy,” he says to himself. He goes to drink from the spring at Burle. He says, “This water.” Before his eyes, in the hollow of his palm like clear water, he has the entire life of the saint. He exults. He climbs up to the causse. A cloud hides the sun, the wind blows on the ailing trees. He doubts everything: the saint, the wooden chest, the name in writing at Saint-Denis. “Satan,” he says. But he doesn’t leave; he looks honestly at the open expanse. He kneels down, and he says, “Saint, don’t let him stop you. Don’t let him stop me.”
He walks back down. In a single sitting, in the noble tongue, he writes the Vita sancta Enimia.
SANCTA ENIMIA
The anonymous monk who may have been called Simon wrote a Life which looks like this:
Enimia, daughter of Clotaire, is beautiful and pale. She is loved and desired by men. She thinks that she loves God, withdrawal from the world, silence. Her father the king wants to marry her to a ruffian baron by the name of Gondevald. She knows that she doesn’t love Gondevald: he has an iron hand and hard, constantly shifting eyes which only come to rest on virgins. The wedding is set for tomorrow. It is night: the stable grooms are laughing in the courtyard, a few muffled thunderclaps can be heard in the distance, upsetting the horses, and in her chamber Enimia is praying, “Lord, do not let this man place his hand upon Thy servant.” There is a louder clap of thunder, much closer by. It’s night: the grooms have turned in and are asleep, the horses sleep standing up, the storm is a long way off. Enimia looks in despair through her window at the moon, and as she turns in the moonlight toward the mirror, which is next to the window, instead of her lovely face which men desire she sees a mask that is white and puffy like a wasps’ nest. It’s leprosy. Enimia bursts out laughing in the night. Prostrate, she gives thanks to God for the excess of his goodness and his mercy. She weeps and then sleeps.
Later, on another night, there appears at the window an adorable form which has come from the beyond. It’s most assuredly an angel. He tells her that the Lord does not want His servant to remain leprous. That He loves His pale and beautiful brides. That the wasps’ nest that she bears on her shoulders is a trick to get rid of Gondevald, and that she is now to be cured. “Drink,” says the angel, “from the spring at Burle in Gabali country.” Something silken returns into the night, and Enimia can only hear the Maytime nightingales.
The procession of the children of Merovech is now passing through the gates of Paris and across the Berry, the Auvergne, the great unknown territory — the oxen and the horses, the smell of the byre, the hammered iron rings with enormous gemstones, the carts with crimson cushions and creaking wheels whose axles bend and break, the barons, the royal retinue, the bishops, the croziers, the ciboria, the grooms, and the little veiled princess in the heaviest wagon. The slowness, the seasons. Behind the hangings of the large wagon laughter can be heard, and Enimia talking to God, to her goddaughter Galswinthe who laughs the most, and to her angel. God loves her, and she will once again be beautiful; happiness is of this world. The procession slowly crosses the causse, moves down the gash made by the Tarn: the spring at Burle.
The hangings on the large wagon part; the princess steps down. Her bare feet are made of white card like a wasps’ nest. She kneels, she lifts her veil, she takes the cool water in her card-paper hand, she drinks passionately as if she were kissing her angel. For a long time her eyes remain closed, as if she were clasping her angel to herself, then she opens them and looks at her hand: it’s the long, pale hand of a young girl. She throws off her veil and runs on her pink, young girl’s feet. She dances and laughs till she cries. The barons, the bishops, and the grooms look at her. She looks at them with a sort of hunger.
Soon they are ready for the return journey. The hangings on the large wagon are open; the princess sits in it with her hammerediron jewelry and her gown which reveals her arms and her shoulders, her universal hunger. Bishop Sigebert touches her arm as he talks to her, Duke Gontran her hair. She laughs loud and often. It is as if it were her angel touching her through each man. They set off before dawn; six pairs of oxen are placed between the shafts of the large wagon to climb the gash of the Tarn. When they are on the causse and they stop to unharness, it’s daybreak. Enimia, who is looking at the daylight, wants to see it gleaming on her rings. She lowers her eyes to her hand: her rings are sunk in the puffy blisters of a wasps’ nest. All her blood returns to her heart. As her blood stops, she says, “Satan.” In front of her, Duke Gontran, who has seen nothing, is helping the grooms to unharness the oxen: the men’s necks are thick, their hands mean on the withers of the oxen. She looks at her own hand again, and she says. “No, it is Thou, Lord.” She draws the hangings. Behind the hangings, her voice very calmly gives the order to go back down.
She drinks once more, once again her feet are pink, and her hands are hands of love. But she doesn’t throw off her veil. She will keep it on. She is beautiful for God — for no one, perhaps for nothing: to remember, to hope, to talk within herself to that other person who is the angel, to rejoice that she scarcely exists, to tremble, to be long in dying. Life is leprosy. The present hour is leprous. She founds, endows, and rules over Burle Abbey in Gabali country; she buries herself away there. She will never see Soissons again. When she dies, her angel carries her adorably away.
BERTRAN
Under the regency of Queen Blanche, around the time when Saint Louis is laying siege to the city of Damietta after setting out on crusade, Bertran de Marseille is bailiff to Guillaume, bishop of Mende, which means that he is the guardian of his seals and his writing desk. He is the steward of written things. He copies written things which prescribe the occurrence of real things between the bishop and the canons, the bishop and the villeins, the bishop and God. Nothing of what he writes causes real things to occur in the life of Bertran de Marseille. This suits him only in part: the flow of written words passes through his hands but does not belong to him, and he would love to divert it at some point, to dam it up, call it his own and be its master before God.
Bishop Guillaume notices his melancholy. And as he is merciful by virtue of his office, he decides to give Bertran mastery and something like suzerainty over a small piece of language. To do so he has recourse to a political pretext: the barons of Cénaret are again contesting the ownership of the spring at Burle by the monks of Sainte-Énimie; the barons of Cénaret are pettifoggers obsessed with legalities, but they have no education: they can neither read nor understand Latin. They haven’t read the Vita sancta Enimia in which the spring at Burle is devolved upon the beyond. In order to nonsuit them, it will be necessary to write the Life in the vulgar tongue and, vulgarly put, to place all bets for the beyond on the spring. Guillaume knows that no one speaks Occitan better than Bertran: he was born and reared in Marseille — not the big, Greek Marseille, but the little Marseille that’s a stone’s throw from Volcégure, on the Causse Méjan. He was suckled on the obscure language of the barons.
The bishop rises at the hour of Matins. He walks through the outer ward and sees the dishes of lentils for the midday meal ready beneath the great crucifix in the refectory. He summons his bailiff to the audience chamber. Before him on the episcopal table there lies the very old manuscript whose parchment is cracking in several places: Vita sancta Enimia. The light from a candle falls across it. Bertran recognizes it at once: he has read it. Both men contemplate the antiquated object with a certain excitement. The bishop’s hand caresses it and spreads it open. He says, “You will rewrite all this in the language that is spoken between Nabrigas and Saint-Pierre-les-Tripiés. The barons must be able to understand it. The jongleurs must be able to understand it and tell it to the villeins in the fairs. Even the villeins must be able to understand some glimmer of it, and laugh or shed tears when they hear it.” Bertran, whose heart is pounding, says that he can do this. The bishop has rolled up the manuscript, and, gripping it tight in his hand, he uses it to emphasize each word as if it were a crozier: “What you write must be absolute like God’s power, clear like the water at Burle, and visible like a tree or a dish of lentils. Make the absolute visible and clear. Describe to perfection a dish of lentils and the appetite you have for it; and without pausing to draw breath, use the same words to describe the appetite that God has for the spring at Burle. The barons do not doubt lentils, and they will not doubt God. They do not doubt the ownership of their porringers, and they will not doubt that God has his porringer at Burle.” He adds, “For those boors to understand you, you will have to speak the truth and yet lie. I shall treat you as if you hadn’t lied, but I cannot grant you absolution. Only the true things that you place at the heart of your lie can absolve you. You will be the master of it before God.”
It is still dark when Bertran goes out. He is full of a taut joy like the bells for Matins. All winter and spring he is busy with written things that cause real things to occur between God and himself. Then he has finished. He brings the bishop a poem of two thousand lines in octosyllables and rhyming couplets written in the vulgar tongue: the Life of Saint Énimie.
It’s summer. The bishop is sitting after dinner under the vine arbor at the bishop’s palace, perhaps with a concubine. He is smiling and cheerful in the lovely light and the lovely shade. Bertran is very serious, intimidated, and proud, without a shadow of melancholy. He looks at his manuscript in the prelate’s hands, between the strawberries and a carafe of ruby-red wine. “Did you put in the dish of lentils?” asks Guillaume maliciously. “Yes, Monseigneur,” says Bertran. He becomes a little flustered and blushes: “And the strawberries too.”
In the evening, when he is alone, the bishop reads. Yes, Bertran wasn’t lying, the things he said are really there: the absolute and the visible, the absolute is hidden but clear at the heart of the visible. There is the Causse Méjan, sin, and salvation. There are the names of the places; each bend in the Tarn is named; each stone along the Tarn appears as it is itself, and not the one next to it; and behind the stones, the Drac monster and the saint — which is to say Good and Evil — appear, disappear, and confront each other: Good and Evil hurl themselves at stones that can be named. There are the many forms taken by the created world, which is to say the visible stakes over which Good and Evil do battle. There are miracles, ramrod stiff corpses that supplely rise up and walk, rocks that climb the gash of the Tarn of their own accord, trees that speak unaided of God’s power, which is to say absolute Good applied without contradiction to visible form. There is the doubt that grips you when you cross the causse and it’s raining, which is to say Evil. There is a woman who disrobes three times and whom we see three times naked in the spring at Burle — but this lovely body in which Satan with all his might has laid his trap is a body that is true and pure like the hand of God: the inconceivable and nonetheless visible body of a saint. Good is the utterly naked body of a young girl.
The bishop looks black on white at the naked body of the saint. He has an appetite for the forbidden flesh of a saint. God is in this flesh. He rejoices and weeps as will the villeins in the fairs, when the jongleurs recount the Life of Saint Énimie.
SEGUIN
Seguin de Badefol has just taken Mende.
He no longer knows where he was born. Ever since he was able to speak he has sold his body, his horse, his glove, and his sword: he’s a captain. He has fought under King John with the Fleur de Lys. He has fought under the Black Prince; last September at Poitiers with the Black Prince they captured King John beneath an oak tree in the gully of Maupertuis. The Black Prince has returned to Brittany, King John is under lock and key in the Tower of London — there are no more princes to pay for employment in war. No matter, others can become princes; after you’ve had truck with them and been under their heel you learn what a prince is: a man with fur-lined cloaks worn over iron who grinds villeins in his mill and makes excellent flour out of them. So it is that the somber barons of the Great Companies, whom the English call warlords, have flourished and wield power.
For ten years — or five — Seguin has excelled in the iniquitous business of being a prince. He keeps a tight grip on the bandit princes who rule thanks to the vacancy of King John. He has called them by name. He has shouted their names in combat. He has traded a horse or a parish with them, insulted them, loved and hated them, betrayed them, ridden with them, iron boot against iron boot, at the hour in winter when, as evening comes, they have nothing to say to each other; he has dismounted and drunk with them. They have been drunk together on air, on wine, and on blood. He has ridden and dismounted with Bertugat d’Albret, Petit-Meschin, Perrin Boïas, the Bastard of Armagnac, Guyot du Pin; with Arnaud, known as the Arch-priest; and at other times, with complete indifference, he has fought them when they took it into their heads to grind villeins that Seguin himself was planning to grind. He has fought the entire world. The armor is heavier in the evening. The ermine looks gray when night falls. Seguin is growing old; he abandons the fat lands of Burgundy and Berry to the Archpriest and the Bastard of Armagnac; he settles on poorer, less coveted lands where the villeins endlessly bow beneath the rain, the famine, and the warlords. He has his fief in the Limousin, and from there he has the Limousin, the Gévaudan, the Rouergue, and the Auvergne revolve at his behest, the way you make a top spin with a whip. He wearies of this occupation. He has white hairs in his beard, which he is apparently the only one to see: no one has mentioned them to him.
He has just taken Mende with Perrin Boïas and Petit-Meschin under his command, and they have seen the white hairs in his beard quite distinctly. They find it hard to put up with the suzerainty of the old man. All day long they have killed, seized plate, girls, and fur-lined cloaks. All night they have drunk, among the huge, swift flames made by the peasants’ huts, and the slower, richer flames made by the wooden structures of the burghers’ houses; and suddenly it is daylight: the flames grow pale and the sky appears. It’s a gray sky. They are full of gab and wine. They feel like ghosts, airy flames, gods or devils, the way you feel in the sleeplessness of early morning. One of them — a young fellow — suggests setting off straight away to see if there is a monastery willing to open up or to burn, if the peasants’ women are in the right mood, if the devil is around. They’re up like ghosts. They kick the valets awake, and they are laced into their battle dress. Their fur-lined cloaks over the top. In the saddle. Iron boot against iron boot, five or six captains and men-at-arms. And now they are on the Causse de Sauveterre, galloping along, full of dismal wine with the dismal sky above their heads. The sun has not once appeared. The open expanse is arid, like a captain’s life. There are trees growing here whose names are known only in Purgatory. It is the open palm of the earth offering up five or six captains to God or the devil. Seguin de Badefol pulls on his reins and halts. His face is ashen, like his beard. “I’ll not go any farther,” he says. Perrin Boïas and Petit-Meschin exchange a glance. The horses have stopped on the causse. The dull mist of the clouds blows against their armor. Strangely, Seguin, in an ashen voice, starts to speak — of God, of what it is permitted to do on earth and what it is permitted not to do — and he might well speak of remorse if he had the habit, the use, or even the memory of the word. Perrin Boïas and Petit-Meschin smile. The first man touches the hilt of his sword. He says, “Old men go no farther than this.” Seguin is silent: he looks for a moment at the open expanse, the stunted trees, the interminable horizon. Perrin Boïas does not have time to draw his sword fully from its scabbard before Seguin slits his throat. Seguin sighs. He wipes his blade on the mane of his horse. The horses’ breath creates soft little clouds at regular intervals. He heads full tilt toward Sauveterre. “Let’s keep going,” he says.
ANTOINE PERSEGOL
On June 9, 1793, under the rule of the one and indivisible republic, the Montagnards have swept away the Girondists, the Commune rules, Robespierre rules, compassionate zeal toward the unfortunate rules, and Antoine Persegol is walking on the Causse de Sauveterre. He is walking in the company of twenty-one lads from La Malène and some others, from Saint-Chély and Laval — forty-seven in all. They have weapons and they are drunk: they were plied with drink down in La Malène to incite them to join the troops of the True Friends of the Monarchy, the army led by Charrier who was député for Mende and is now a Chouan. It wasn’t difficult to persuade them: they are peasants or carders, weavers paid by the piece; poverty is their lot; and the great upheavals, the foreign wars, and the Law of the Maximum have made their poverty twice as bad. Down in the town an hour ago in front of the pitchers of wine, it was child’s play to get them to blame the republic for the grim poverty that only recently they blamed on the king.
Antoine Persegol is walking over the Causse de Sauveterre with his scythe on his shoulder fashioned into a pike, the tip of the blade in the longer part of the handle. Others have bayonets. They all have the white cockade. The open air has sobered him up a little, and he is very uneasy: he is secretly fond of the republic. He thinks about the republic the way he thinks about his mother, who has stayed behind down in La Malène and wept when he left: something old and frail yet constantly fresh, that always needs him. He thinks that the republic has occasionally asked his opinion, like his mother when she is preparing dinner and asks him whether he would prefer broad beans or lentils. He thinks that the republic regards him exactly the same way it regards Baptiste Flourou, even though he is the lowliest of the carders and Baptiste Flourou owns twenty carders, all the wool that they card, and the mills where they card it: the republic regards both of them the way his mother regards him and his brother André, who has been an imbecile since birth.
The wine is wickeder. It is absolute like the king. Wine made him take the white cockade and put his scythe together back to front.
They reach La Capelle. They enter the village. From each house, from behind each stone wall, and from under each tree there emerge the blue uniforms with the red trimmings of the one and indivisible republic. It’s the Bleus. They have cavalry. They have a superintendent with a tricolor sash who gives orders in the language that is spoken in Paris. The forty-seven men surrender without a fight: the wine has drained away, abandoned them in the June sunshine, and without the wine they suspect that the republic is not the only cause of grim poverty. Antoine Persegol feels as if a great burden has been lifted from him.
They are parked in a small sloping field with stone walls. The roll is called, then they are left for a while, with a Bleu posted at every second stone along the wall. They do not speak. Antoine Persegol tells himself that everything will be straightened out, since the republic loves the truth, and the truth is that he loves the republic. Truth is the mother of freedom. The truth will appear, and this evening he’ll be free; he’ll see his mother. He can see the superintendent with the sash walking to and fro beneath the elm tree on the square, a lad his own age with worn hands like those of the carders. He looks like a decent fellow. He loves the unfortunate, that’s for sure. Antoine Persegol walks up to the wall to get a better view of him: he’ll signal to him and the other man will come over; he’ll talk to him, and they will patiently allow the truth to emerge between them, lovely and indubitable like the tricolor silk. A Bleu roughly pushes him away; he goes back and sits down. Toward evening, carts arrive. As they are being led away he finds himself by chance in front of the superintendent. He says in patois that he’d been drunk and that he loves the republic. “What’s this scoundrel saying?” asks the superintendent in the language that is spoken in Paris. The sergeant shrugs his shoulders, and the superintendent turns away. They are loaded into carts and taken to Florac. So now he will explain everything in Florac, and he’ll see his mother tomorrow.
The reality is otherwise. Reality is a cruel stepmother. The next morning at Florac five men sitting in black hats speak in an incomprehensible language to forty-seven men standing before them. They are pushed into the June day with their hands tied. On the cart he thinks about his mother standing in the June day on the doorstep of her house in La Malène, looking toward the far end of the empty track. The huge machine with the swift bevel is set up on the square in Florac. Forty-seven times the iron blade of Mother Death severs a head from a trunk, forty-seven times a head severed from a trunk violently confirms the law of falling bodies. Antoine Persegol is the fortieth.
ÉDOUARD MARTEL
At Le Rozier on the River Tarn and the River Jonte, where the three major causses meet — Sauveterre, Méjan, and Noir—Édouard Martel is sitting on the terrace of the Hôtel des Voyageurs. It’s September. He is in his prime; he’s about to succeed in life, and he knows it: that is what he is telling himself on this sunny terrace in September, between the vast sky above and the sparkling waters below. He proudly contemplates September. He holds his head high with its fine Roman features and blond goatee. He is one of those men who love glory. He has abandoned the sad profession of scribe at the court of law in Paris; it seemed to him that for a man of his caliber the profession of explorer was the shortest path to glory; it also seemed to him that the surface of the earth, the ground on which you walk beneath the sun, was too easy a terrain for the explorer’s quest, too obvious and somehow duplicitous: he has taken the darker part of exploration, the caves and the chasms, Erebus and Tartarus, the kingdom of the dead. Within this kingdom he is searching for his own, like Dante or Orpheus. He has founded speleology. A hundred feet below ground he has created a reputation for himself.
He loves the causse where this reputation originated when he discovered Dargilan ten years back. He is looking for other holes. He has made the Hôtel des Voyageurs his headquarters, like his African colleagues, the discoverers in pith helmets, who pitch their tents in Timbuktu or Zanzibar and from there gather information about the desert in the North, the forest in the West, send out patrols and wait for the dry season. The shepherds from the causse know the man with the blond goatee who has a liking for the Underworld, and sits with his legs crossed under the arbor on the terrace waiting for them to bring him news of the Underworld: if the earth opens up under a lamb, or if a stone dropped down a shaft is swallowed up without a sound, they come running to the Hôtel des Voyageurs and talk to the blond goatee with the crossed legs clad in gaiters. And on this very day, September 18, a man who has news of the Underworld is walking into the village of Le Rozier.
It’s Louis Armand, the locksmith. He is now under the arbor. He is full of a feverish joy. He says that on the causse between Nabrigas and La Parade there is a low entrance; the stones thrown into it drop the devil of a way down. “Well then, let’s go to the devil,” says the blond goatee with a laugh. As soon as he has been up to his room and fetched ropes, pegs, carabiners, helmets, and lamps they’re off.
Until the end of September the terrace is deserted. Or it seems that way because, although are there are a few drinkers in the afternoon — shepherds or carders, and a few passing horse dealers — the tall blond figure whom glory has brushed with its wing and who gives meaning to other men is no longer there. Autumn reigns alone; Martel does not see it. He is beneath the earth; he is exploring, mapping and measuring the most enormous hole he has ever seen. A hundred feet below ground he is tasting pure happiness.
In October, Martel, now somewhat paler, is sitting under the arbor. It’s a beautiful day again, and very hot. There are pens and an inkpot on the table, a blotter, and several sheets of paper which flutter in the wind like the leaves on the hornbeam above his head. All morning Martel has been lining up figures, calculating contour lines; he has sketched cross-sections, scale drawings; he has made a portrait of the chasm: the first hole, the enormous sloping nave with its stalagmites, the second hole lower down which is like a duplicate chasm. He contemplates the drawings with a sense of vertigo. Suddenly he lifts his head: the hotel owner’s wife is serving aperitifs to the short-stay guests and looking tenderly at the proud profile and the blond goatee. She doesn’t know that Édouard Martel wants to die. She doesn’t know that he is saying to himself, “None of this has the slightest meaning. It’s just a hole that slopes. These are just white stones rising up in the dark. The sun has never been here. It’s sinister. There’s nothing to see inside.” He stands up angrily, crumpling his papers as he takes them away. In the evening he gets drunk with Louis Armand. The hotel owner’s wife tenderly helps him upstairs to his room.
Later, on another day, he is once again under the arbor, which is at present quite bare. He has just been to the telegraph office, where he sent a cable to Paris, and he is now sitting down. He is calmer. At the top of the sheet that caused his despair the other day — the one with the scale drawings — he has carefully written in capital letters: Aven Armand, and under it in smaller letters: At La Parade Causse Méjan Lozère. He says to himself that it’s a good start. By the spot where the stalagmites are particularly bushy and numerous, he writes Great Forest; he immediately crosses this out and writes Virgin Forest, and then where they are all round and heaped on top of each other, The Jellyfish Corner. He goes through them, one by one, and against this or that stalagmite, he writes, The Grand Stalagmite (30 m), The Easter Candle, The Palm Tree, The Turkey, The Tiger. He can see very clearly in his mind’s eye the tall shapes as they appeared to him down below. He smiles: No, these are not white stones rising up pointlessly in the dark; they are objects full of meaning that have a name in men’s mouths. As he is making these observations to himself, the telegraph clerk arrives bringing him a reply from Paris. He reads it and exults. Without lifting his pen from the page, he writes under the drawings, The whole of Notre-Dame in Paris could be comfortably contained inside the large chamber. He rereads his words and tastes pure happiness. He says to himself that the profession of scribe is a fine one. He strokes his blond goatee.
ТЕЛЕГРАМКанал с обзорами, анонсами новинок и книжными подборками
Книжный Вестник
Бот для удобного поиска книг (если не нашлось на сайте)
Поиск книг
Свежие любовные романы в удобных форматах
Любовные романы
О психологии, саморазвитии и личностном росте
Саморазвитие
Детективы и триллеры, все новинки
Детективы
Фантастика и фэнтези, все новинки
Фантастика
Отборные классические книги
Классика
ВКОНТАКТЕБиблиотека с любовными романами, которая наверняка придётся по вкусу женской части аудитории
Любовные романы
Библиотека с фантастикой и фэнтези, а также смежных жанров
Фантастика
Самые популярные книги в формате фб2
Топ фб2
книги