Winter Mythologies and Abbots

I

It is to some secondhand chronicles, to the General Statistics of the Vendée published in Fontenay-le-Comte in 1844, and to a belated happenstance in my own life that I owe the tale I am about to relate.

It is the year 976. Ancient Gaul is a hotchpotch of names bolted to lands, which are themselves names: Normandy belongs to Guillaume, Guillaume Long-Sword; Poitou belongs to Guillaume, Guillaume Towhead; France belongs to Eudes, duke of France; the crown, that trinket, belongs to Lothaire, the king, which is to say squire of Beauvais and Laon. For Anjou and the Marches it’s Robert the Calf and Hugues the Abbot. Alain of the Twisted Beard controls Brittany. And the diocese of Limoges is in the hands and under the miter of Èble, brother of Guillaume, not the Long-Sword but the fair-haired, frizzled Tow-head. The towhead has two characteristics: it is too fair and too full; it blazes up in an instant. Guillaume is too fair and his anger gallops like fire. Èble has his brother’s towhead but without the tow’s two qualities: beneath the miter of the one and the helmet of the other you can see the same hirsute swirl of frosted locks, the same frothing fuzz, the same crushed straw with short curls, but on Èble’s head the tow does not catch fire at the least impediment; on Guillaume’s head it does.

Whether Èble’s towhead might blaze for other reasons, this tale will tell.

Èble has spent his life putting out the fire on Guillaume’s head: he has kept watch on the embers, cultivated the ash. The real policies of his brother — the alliances and the gifts, the endless parleys — were carried out by him while the other hothead drove his flames against Long-Sword, against Eudes, against Alain, against anything that bore a name and a lance. Èble is weary; he’s thrown in his hand and withdrawn from the world. He is sixty years old. He has relinquished the bishopric of Limoges and the monastic benefices from Jumièges, Angély, and Grammont. He will never again have the pleasure of excommunicating anyone. He no longer has the power of the keys, the power to condemn paltry or wicked souls to hell, nor has he the patience to run his cool hand over the boiling head of Guillaume. Fire is no longer his affair. On the midget island of Saint-Michel, facing the vast sea, he is contemplating the clouds and the water. For he has kept the midget Abbey of Saint-Michel.

The monastery is devoid of charm, thrown together with planks of wood and peat, for the whole thing, which was founded and consecrated by Philibert the Ancient, has been trampled a hundred times over by the Normans — burned down, bailed out, rebuilt, taken apart. The walls of the chapter house are cob, the cloister is raw brick. The choir is older, built of the local white stone, but the fires have turned it black. It is fire too which melted the great bells, and the ones hammered by the blacksmith brother are small and shrill. A ring of logs forms the library — which, besides some canonical odds and ends, contains the Life of Saint Martin, the Life of Saint Jerome, and much learned bullshit from before the Revelation. Right up against the library is the very long, two-story hut where the monks eat and sleep. All these buildings have landed here like dice thrown from a cup. The eye meets nothing that has been made to last. It’s named for the wilderness, the hermitage, Saint-Michel-en-l’Herm. It suits Èble very well. He has merely fortified the islet with good white stone from Luçon brought by water on barges, so that people can tell from afar that this hut belongs to God, which is to say to Èble the abbot, who has the gift of quelling fire, even the fire belched by a Viking dragon. Èble is the man of unimpressive stature and bulk, but with a completely white and remarkable towhead, who is contemplating the water in the month of May around the year 1000.

The water does not consist entirely of water.

The midget island sits just inside the mouth, facing the sea where two rivers marry, the Lay to the right and the Sèvre to the left: and as it happens these nuptials are rich with sand, mud, oyster shells, and all the debris that rivers calmly snatch up and crush: windfall and dead cows; the waste that men throw out in sport, from necessity, or from weariness; and sometimes their own human bodies thrown likewise in sport, from necessity, or from weariness. With the result that it’s neither the forthright sea nor the honest river that Èble has before his eyes but something mixed and tangled: a thousand arms of fresh water, as many arms of salt water, and as many again of water that is neither fresh nor salt embrace a thousand plots of naked blue mud, naked pink and gray mud, red-brown mud, worthless sand where the devil — which is to say nothing — plies his trade. Besides, he is the only being able to set foot here because everything else — men, dogs and horses, field mice — is instantly swallowed up in a shroud of stinking gases. Only the flat-bottomed barges come this way bringing the monks’ pittance over the water’s arms, and even then the water is so thin that you need to use long poles to sail across the mud. It’s not earth, because seagulls screech above the eels, or sea, since crows and kites fly up with vipers in their beaks. Èble is not sure that this does suit him so well: it’s like when you don’t know whether the meadow at Longeville belongs to Twisted Beard, Long-Sword, or Tow-head, and you have to unsheathe iron and square the parleys in order to decide whether Longeville belongs to one of the three or to all three at once, which is as good as to say to the devil. Èble thinks for a moment about his brother Guillaume, softens at the memory of this man of fire who doesn’t belong to the devil. He pictures Guillaume with broigne, halberd, and helmet, his fair tow hair in the wind, lance held aloft, riding his horse determinedly across the marsh, flying over it at an angelic gallop, like Saint George. Èble smiles, though you can’t see it since we’re looking from some way off and his back is turned as he leans against the fortifications, a tiny dark figure bearing a radiant head at one end — for this is a black monk, a Benedictine, clearly silhouetted and visible against the white limestone.

This same evening in May, after Vespers and None, at the hour when the first lamps are lit and before the first psalms are sung, he summons all the monks to the chapter house: some fifteen patricians like himself, drawn or banished here by a violent reading of the Life of Saint Martin, by their courage, by their cowardice, by a brother who wants to rule alone because the fiefdom is only small, and — who knows? — some by God. A few lay brothers too, clerks of humble origin, called by the prospect of bed and board, and some by a desire for books. You can hear the seagulls and the sounds of water. Èble looks at them one after the other in the early lamplight as it dances on their faces, faces that are sharp, heavy, crushed, burning, or calm. Then he makes the sign of salvation, and the others do the same, casting huge shadows of arms onto the cob walls. He allows more silence to go by — he knows how you govern, he has parleyed in close-fought argument with Louis, late king of France, with Alain and Eudes; he has even taken fiefdoms with a smile and a few pretty words from Guillaume Long-Sword, a Viking’s son and almost a Viking himself — he lets them contemplate at leisure his towhead and his mouth, from which there will emerge a sound that is different from the cry of the seagulls which measures time. Eventually he asks Brother Hugues, who is young and a clerk, to come and stand beside him and to open the Book.

He asks him to read the Third Day of Creation.

Hugues’s voice is strong and young, crushed and burning. He reads, “And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called He Seas: and God saw that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the third day.” Hugues trembles slightly. Èble stretches an arm toward the window which gives onto the mouth of the river, and he says, “We have reached the Second Day. The earth and the waters are not disentangled. We shall make the Chaos and the Void which lie beneath into something on which we can set foot. Saint George must be able to ride his horse across it and cows graze upon it. In a year from now I want to plant my crozier on it and have it stand firm without being swallowed up by the great maws below.” The gulls are heard again. Then the psalms are sung.

The next day before dawn they take the two barges that belong to the abbey, launch them on the trickle of water, and set off in search of the arms that will separate the Chaos from the Void. Abbot Èble is part of the expedition, and Hugues is there too. Each of them is sitting in a barge, two acolytes with poles in each stern. They know a little about the arms they’re going in search of, as these are the ones that fish for themselves and for the monks, and live on the little islands nearby, Grues, La Dive, La Dune, Champagné, Elle, Triaize. From one barge to the other in the backwater, they joke about these natives who stink of fish. They say that they worship rain like a wandering idol. They say that they piously coat the crosses which are planted for them with honey, and make them offerings of bird carcasses and flat stones. They grant that they are tall and often handsome, with arms of iron, for the miasmas from the marshes carry off so many in their early years that those who survive are made of iron. They grant that they are gentle. The monks visit them from time to time and talk of salvation, the natives listen obligingly but barely understand the language. However, they understand perfectly when the monks say to them: so many barrels of herring to the monastery for Christmas, so many thornback skate and carp for Easter, so many sardines for the monks’ everyday fare. It’s because they’re half fish, says Hugues. But we still christened them, says Èble. They laugh, and the huge pale sky above the two tiny black monks laughs too, along with the gulls.

They disembark at Grues, at La Dive, at Triaize. There are huts with drying fish, one or two ambling cows. They gather the fishermen or their womenfolk, whatever is to be had: faces that are sharp or heavy, crushed or burning, assorted bodies dressed in tunics which look very like the monks’ cowls, except that they are not necessarily black. The monks make the sign of salvation over them and they all sit down. The monks tell them that they are going to drain the marsh at the foot of Saint-Michel, transform mud into rock, work a miracle. Ever since the monks spoke to them of miracles, they have retained the word, and they listen more attentively. The miracle requires their arms. The monks tell them that this miracle land and the cattle it will bear are to be shared, half for them and half for the monks. The monks say to them that those who are enticed by this prospect should follow them at once, and set up their shacks in the meadow by the monastery for several months each year over the summer — and that they will be able to return to their homes from October to mid-May, when the marsh reverts to being forthright sea and honest river. It is Hugues who does the explaining in his beautiful, burning voice, and Èble adds that besides the extra land and the cattle they will have salvation. The natives talk for a long time among themselves; some go back to their nets, but others don’t. On Dive two couples with their children launch a barge and follow the monks; on Grues a silent old man and two young men; on Triaize no one. They land on Champagné.

It’s the middle of the day. They are hungry.

Six black monks climb the steps of the harbor on Champagné, and they are now in the middle of a ring of huts. On Champagné the men are hungry, too; they have all returned from fishing and raised the nets and the creels; fish is cooking on the huge fires. The explanations, the hires, and salvation can wait until later: six black monks sit scattered among the fishermen, talking of sturgeon, pike, and the summer months. They laugh; the steaming bowls are filled. Èble has not engaged in talk and is sitting alone; he is tired, irritated with himself; he is wondering what possessed him yesterday to tangle with water-courses — what pride, what diabolical imposture. Someone hands him a bowl; he looks up. Above him a very young and beautiful, very serious woman is holding it out to him with an open hand. She has a strong nose and lips, wide open eyes. She is tall and her skin is white. Her bare feet are like marble. Èble blazes in an instant.

Èble is indeed the brother of Towhead, and it’s time to say so. He too can burn. It’s true that his fire doesn’t take the form of a shimmering hulk that gallops about with halberd, broigne, assorted ironware, and a lance at its tip; his fire is more subtle, less noisy — his two fires, that is. For he has retained the two passions which come from the fire and which smolder assiduously beneath the black hood in the hut at Saint-Michel, as they smoldered beneath the gold miter at Saint-Martial in Limoges, amid the fumes from the incense: his two flaming torch brands, glory and female flesh. Glory, which is the gift of spreading fire within the memory of men, and flesh, which has the gift of consuming bodies at will in a spike of flame or a bolt of lightning. And the tall woman who is standing in front of him, and who is already walking away on her feet of marble, has the unbound vertical force of a lightning flash.

Night is falling; the huge twilight sky is red. After Champagné, the six men in black set up their bait of cattle and salvation on Chaillé, Île-d’Elle, La Dune, Le Gué, and they land a good catch. More than thirty barges are following them, laden with many arms, men, women, children, and a few gray cows. In one of these barges there is the woman from Champagné, with her husband the fisherman. Èble looks at her, and he sees that Hugues is looking at her. She is looking at the water.

May is drawing to a close.

In the library they have the books that speak of the land and the sea, like the two verses from the Third Day but with less solemnity: those by the captains who always need to drain a little water for twenty legions to keep their feet dry as they pass with catapults and horses (Caesar and Constantius); those by the historians who recount how the towheaded tyrants set about putting a mountain in the place of a lake, a torrent in the place of a mountain (Cassius Dio and Tacitus); those by the dabblers and the agronomists (Pliny, those who wrote to him, and those who refuted him); and Augustine, who proves that matter and miracles are joined like mortise and tenon. They all pore over these books, argue fiercely, make plans, decide on the equipment needed, and share out the tasks. Èble does not take part and is bored. He thinks fondly about the ragings of his brother, who is fully armed and already in the saddle, setting off at a gallop, and whom he couldn’t restrain. He can’t restrain himself, either. He opens the door of the library. It’s a morning of fine May drizzle. He pulls his hood down over his head. He is now in the meadow where the gentle savages who believe in cattle and salvation have set up home. They have built huts out of the beeches that grow here and, under the direction of the lay brothers, a forge and a carpentry shop. The gray cows wander here and there beneath the drizzle; the black abbot with his hood goes straight to a hut he knows. She is squatting on her feet of marble. She’s alone; her husband is at the forge. He throws back his hood; she sees the towhead. She bares herself up to the waist, she lies down, she opens. He looks at the wound of wet fire in her tuft of tow, then sees it no longer because he has plunged into the fire. She cries out like a seagull, the bolt of blue lightning unites them; beneath his hood Èble returns to the library. He passes Hugues, who is walking toward the huts beneath his hood.

Sometimes with exasperation, at other times with enjoyment, but always with pride because the glory will redound to him, Èble follows the summer’s work from higher up. He sits on the fortifications, his legs dangling over the marsh, or else he stands and makes the sign of salvation over all the bustle. He can see that the brothers have indeed read their Pliny or their Augustine, unless they are thinking of Moses when he parted the waters or are just adapting their hands marvelously to the decrees of their minds. Their method is simple. Starting from the edge of the little island the natives mark out a plot of two or three acres; they surround it with planks of wood so that a man can touch bottom. From this wooden deck the natives dig a deep ditch and pile up the earth to form an embankment; inside the plot, the women and children dig another ditch against the embankment, building it up further, stamping it down, beating it, making it firm. Èble loves to see the two feet of marble beating the mud, the same feet which each day beat the empty air in pleasure, raised and cleansed by the bolt of blue lightning. After two weeks it is possible to walk without fear on the plot, in three it is dry. By September four plots have been disentangled from the waters. Laughing, praying, rejoicing, Èble puts on his abbot’s miter and comes down to plant his crozier. It remains upright, it stands in earth. Fifteen male voices sing out, the natives kneel.

In the evening, when the husband has gone to put out the creels, when wordlessly she bares herself from feet to waist, the fire is wetter and burns hotter: she has seen the miter, she has seen the crozier, and it is the miter and the crozier that she has behind her closed eyes, between her raised feet. The bolt that shatters her is a man’s member but the glory is of an abbot. Èble sleeps content; he dreams that the little thuribulers from the past in Limoges, God’s little dancers with their dancing dishes, the incense for the bishop, the breath of God are huge, utterly naked women.

The rest are working twice as hard. The monks have decided on large, very heavy plows, with long broad plowshares, for six oxen and four men: they need to dig deep, beneath the lighter pink and gray surface silt, the green, to reach the blue silt beneath which is fat and heavy, and then to mix these different colors together. And for these huge plows the furnace in the forge never goes out, either by night or by day; the iron is beaten at nighttime, dipped red-hot into water, where it cries out, wedded with tremendous force to great pieces of oak to form the plowshares, and the fresh young oak burns and shrieks. Each night before Compline, Èble goes outside, walks to the hut or not, depending on whether the husband is away fishing or not, but each night he sits in the meadow to enjoy the orgies of sparks, the loud cries emitted by the iron as it submits. He thinks about his brother. He thinks about the love that his brother had for iron when it is mastered to the point where it molds itself to a man’s body as closely as wool, or when it is allowed its ferrous freedom, when you thrust it through the body of another man and it emerges dripping on the other side. This kind of iron is glory; it’s like the silk on a miter and the gold on a crozier. He lifts his head; the stars tell of another glory — the gold and the iron of God which stamp the dark night. Once, when he is absorbed in this heavenly reverie, Hugues soundlessly sits down nearby and looks at him. The sheaves of sparks light up the tow of his hair here and there, turning it to gold. Hugues passionately wants to kiss the tow, and also to rip it off. Èble leaves the stars, sees Hugues sitting there. Hugues has told him in confession that he too makes the feet of marble rise from the ground. He loves Hugues, who knows the books and reads them in a throbbing voice; and he would also like to thrust thirty inches of iron through Hugues’s young body. For a long while they remain silent, each thinking to himself about the two feet raised above the other man. The shriek from a wheel of fresh wood being strangled in a ring of red-hot iron by the cartwright soothes them both. They talk about the blacksmith brother who is a colossus, about his violent character which is nonetheless contained, about the rule of Saint Benedict beneath which monks groan but are purified and hardened, like iron in the furnace. Hugues observes that the rule speaks of gold, not iron. And that it is in gold that glory is visible, not iron. Èble remains silent for a long time, then he suddenly asks Hugues what glory is. He asks if it’s power. If it’s a name that echoes for centuries in the memory of men. If it’s for God alone, brilliant and brief, like the blue lightning bolt in the hut, or interminable and lost in the air, like reading, or like singing. If it’s fixed like the stars, or wayward like the sparks. If it’s pure. He asks if it can be mixed — with matter, with ambition, with the body of a living man. He asks derisively if draining twenty acres of land taken from the Chaos and the Void is glory. He falls silent. Hugues does not pause to reflect; he’s a young clerk with hollow cheeks who throbs, who knows, and who wants. He says, “Matthew says that Jesus says, Ye are the light of the world. Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house. Let your light so shine before men.” He adds that glory is good and honest like gold; it’s flagrant and visible; it’s a miter, it’s fire, it’s the cloak of Saint Martin — and all this must be shown to men. It’s ten acres of land reclaimed from the marsh because a mitered man willed it, because twenty men in black and fifty fishermen created it. He hesitates; he looks away from the abbot and says in a less confident voice that the devil can make use of glory, that it was glory he showed to Jesus when he took him to the mountain. Then they hear movement between the dormitory and the choir; they get up, they go to sing the Vigil. Èble thinks about David, about Bathsheba, about Uriah the Hittite.

At the end of September, Èble blesses the plows. There’s no time to lose; the rains are coming. Ten gigantic plows, ten war machines with handles as long as a lance and as broad as a thigh, and six oxen fettered, two by two, to the shaft. Èble is croziered and mitered in the early dawn. He can see them from above on the new land, like ten catapults erect and pointing at Saint-Michel. He walks down; he makes the sign of salvation over these diabolical machines and the horned herd. All at once the men shout, the oxen move off, and the machines follow; the earth opens; red and black are mixed: one monk by the shaft, four fishermen taking turns and propped along the handles. At the due hour the monks climb back up the little island and go to sing; the natives guide the oxen and maintain the furrow on their own. The chants fall like dew from above onto the sweat and the shouting, the panicked muzzles of the oxen, the earth that is shifted and laid bare. The fishermen eventually know the chants, take them up down below. The children run and dance along the plowshares, day after day.

One morning before Lauds, as the autumn drizzle is setting in and the plowing is coming to an end, an equipage arrives on two barges, with men-at-arms and an imposing figure who seems to be wearing a squirrel-fur hood, but it’s hard to be sure: day has scarcely broken. The lookout brother goes to fetch the abbot, and leaning against the outer wall beneath their black hoods the two men scrutinize and speculate, say that it must be this person, or rather that. The barges dock, the imposing figure stands up in an agile movement, and the moment he sets foot on the first step the abbot recognizes him: it’s Benoît, who was like a son to Èble in the days of incense and the purple ring, and whom he named coadjutor at Saint-Hilaire in Poitiers. Today he’s the one who wears the purple ring on his finger. He has come in person. He’s taller than Èble. Beneath the squirrel fur he looks a little like Hugues, but his skin is not as dark, his cheeks not as hollow. On the terrace in the drizzle he kisses the abbot’s hands, they embrace, and he says, “Your brother Guillaume is dead, and before he passed away he asked us to convey his farewells to you.” No, he did not die by iron; he too was tired, he’d thrown in his hand, he drew his last breath at the monastery of Saint-Cyprien, surrounded by orisons. They embrace once more, black hood alongside gray hood they walk to and fro, Benoît talks about the departed warrior, about the other men of fire: Foulque who now controls Anjou, little Hugues Capet who controls France and whose teeth are long. Èble isn’t really listening to these tales of secular matters which no longer concern him; his thoughts are wandering. He looks at little Benoît who served mass for him and who wears the purple ring; he thinks about Hugues, who is the same age as Benoît, about the sons he never had, and about the iron Guillaume used to brandish at every turn: when he was drunk, when he was joshing, when he was choked with anger. He weeps for Guillaume from the bottom of his heart, but there is something in his tears that gladdens him like wine. The sun is fully up now. The fishermen are walking down to the reclaimed plots with the oxen. Together they look at the war machines that require twenty arms to lift the shaft and yoke the oxen. Benoît remarks that the oxen in the third team are exhausted, and the lead ox is jerking its head the way they do when they’re about to turn nasty. The bishop retires to sleep, the abbot in the chapter house distributes the tasks for the day. For the shaft of the third team he picks Hugues.

The drizzle persists all morning. The animals have gaiters of mud right up their legs, as heavy as they. Around noon, an ox on the right-hand side of the third team collapses, and on the left-hand side the lead ox, exasperated by this resistance, bellows and charges. Hugues, who jumped to the wrong side, the left, takes the charge full in the chest; he falls, five standing oxen and one slumped ox trample across his body, and finally thirteen inches of iron slice his body in two.

It’s the first death since the monastery has been restored. A hole has been dug in the old cemetery, which dates from the time of Philibert — a few bones from the time of Philibert have briefly seen the light of day again. Hugues arrives in the white shroud; the monks have piously washed and anointed what remained and disentangled the bones from the mud. They have placed a plank of wood inside the shroud so that the two pieces look like one. The sun has returned. He is laid in the earth; his beautiful throbbing voice will never again be heard. The shrill bells all ring out, the beautiful confident voices all sing, and, deep inside, each voice hears the voice that throbbed and is dead. Bishop Benoît without miter or cowl sings among them as if he were one of them. Then the seagulls can be heard: Èble slowly steps forward without miter or hood, pronounces the prayer of absolution for the dead. The vast red twilight shines through the white towhead; he looks like a saint.

The fishermen on the barges leave to set up the nets for the night catch.

Next to the bishop at the guest table, the abbot’s place is empty. He is not seen either at Compline.

He has been walking in the old cemetery where Hugues’s fresh cross is all there is. Once the barges have left, he is inside the hut. A body, or the earth in its entirety, bares itself up to the waist in the dark. In the dark a plow slices a man in two, a manat-arms expires in a slow death agony, a brother kills his fellow brothers. The world is gathered in a wound of wet fire, and this world can be joined and then disjoined at will. Shifted thus the world cries out and exults. The abbot cries out and exults. He returns to the cemetery, where the moon has risen. He prays for Hugues before the tiny new cross, he laughs and weeps, and once again he hurries to the hut. He leaves only when he hears the voices of the fishermen. As he leaves, he passes the husband on the doorstep. For a moment they look at each other in the moonlight, then each goes where he must.

He wakes the bishop. Benoît lights the little oil lamp, puts on his stole, makes the sign of salvation over the other man, sits and listens while Èble kneels and speaks. He painstakingly confesses what he knows. He weeps frequently; he talks about Hugues’s throbbing voice, about Guillaume whom he loved, about pleasure, and about the things you don’t want to share. When he is finished the bishop absolves him with the customary penances. He tells him that the flesh is evil, which they both know, and that it is the lesser evil. He tells him that the lead ox on the third team is not called Èble; it is one of God’s creatures and endowed with freedom. He tells him that the first blood to be spilled consecrates a piece of land. He tells him that glory — the glory of having expanded Saint-Martial in Limoges, of having established fiefdoms on the fires lit by his brother, of having restored to God a hundred acres of land reclaimed from the Chaos and the Void — has already overlaid his infamy with gold, just as the glebe will tomorrow overlay the blood of Hugues. He tells him to rise; he kisses his hands.

In the middle of October, when the fishermen are piled into the barges with their cattle and their children to return to their islands, the woman is pregnant. As she leaves she very quickly kisses the abbot’s hand; she smiles at him.

All winter long the monks maintain the ditches and fortify the embankment. The reclaimed land remains as land on which the rains trickle down without eroding it. In the spring there is grass growing on it. The monks beam with delight and cavort about on it; they speak of miracles and agronomy. Èble laughs too. Saint George gallops in the meadow; a woman awaits him behind a dragon. The cattle are put out to graze on it. When the days lengthen in May, the barges arrive with their freight of rain worshipers who have come to serve God. Some have died or are occupied elsewhere, but there is a greater number of new arms. The woman from Champagné is not there.

Nor does she return in the following summers. The monks reclaim a hundred acres each season, and now after the plowings on the oldest land-takes they are growing beans and corn. The place where Hugues died remains a meadow, and Èble thinks he sees that in the spot where blood was spilled the grass is thicker. The twilights are vast and red, or sink, modest and damp, in the drizzle. The monks now have great deep bells which have come by water from Limoges, engraved around the rim: Benoît, bishop, to Èble, abbot. Storms sometimes pass overhead, the blue lightning bolt shatters the great raised arms of the plows. None of this is of concern anymore to Èble. He spends hours just sitting, in the chapter house or the cloister, on the grass in the meadow. He leaves the prior to take on the business of allocating the tasks, of being proud of successes, or of weeping over failures. The towhead fades, memory grows weary, it can no longer disentangle Hugues from Benoît, or Guillaume, or Denis who arrived two or three years ago and whose throbbing voice drowns out the others. It can no longer disentangle the woman of the marshes from the viscountess of Chalus, Adélaïde, or Mathilde, who were once avid and penitent, all of them pierced by the lightning bolt, stripped bare, marked by a wound and by cries. All these figures join hands and dance before him, couple and kill each other, embrace. All things are mutable and close to uncertain. Sometimes he gives a solitary and mostly cheerful little laugh: he is thinking about glory, and that draining lands is like blessing crowds with the purple ring. It is undoubtedly glory, but all these things are very precarious candles which are quickly covered by the bushel and then lit elsewhere. The red twilight does not move; everyone knows where it is lit without changing, and at the root of this unchanging glory there is no man, living or dead. Èble is on good terms with the death that is on its way; it is written into the round of life, and it is not glorious.

He walks down to the harbor. It’s the dead season of Christmas, when the fishermen bring barrels of herring and the finest fish — sturgeon and pike — for the table at Epiphany. The winter morning will be very blue; it’s already blue, but a few patches of mist are still traveling across the water. Out of the mist, heading straight toward him, a flat-bottomed boat emerges in which plump fish gleam. In the prow of the boat there stands a small, fair-skinned girl with a head of tow, a thousand densely packed sunbeams, gold that shines against the silver of the pikes. She bears the torch of daybreak. The sun exists for this brilliance, the blue belongs to her. It looks like a crown. It looks like something else which Èble knows well and which is not himself or his brother Guillaume. The abbot thinks very quickly, and what comes to mind is the word glory.

The little waves slap against the boat, the seagulls make their usual complaint about the world, the word glory is borne directly to Èble.

The boat docks; in the stern with his pole he recognizes the man from Champagné. The little girl jumps onto land, very quickly kisses the abbot’s hand as she has been told, picks up the big fish and throws them into the baskets. What brilliance. Her tiny bare feet are firmly planted on the white stone. The gold straw covers her eyes, and sometimes a little hand impatiently pushes her hair aside. The abbot and the man look at each other, like the other time. His beard is turning gray now, and he looks like Saint Joseph. “Is this your daughter?” says the abbot. The man replies with a resolute Yes, and that they have had three other children since. The baskets are full; the little girl leaps like a flame; she is in the boat, in the mist, the blue completely envelops a black monk among the baskets of sturgeon.

Sometime later — weeks or years — he senses that he is dying. He summons the monks, requests his stole and his crozier for the kiss of farewell. The monks fetch them; they bend over him and talk of the God who awaits him, in joy, in glory. Yes, Èble who can no longer see their faces sees that glory does exist, and that it is manifest. That glory is a mixed thing. That it is a dazzling flame which burns bright when it encounters things that are mixed. This he accepts. It is born of the women’s wound, it’s a fair-haired little girl who appears, sparkles, and vanishes. For Guillaume it was mixed with iron and with blood. For God it’s mixed with the choir of angels and the actions of men; it’s mixed with the flesh of the Son who bled on the Cross. It’s mixed too with the embroidered stole which has been placed on him and with the crozier which he grips with a withered hand that shakes. One by one the monks bend down and give him the kiss of farewell; for one last time, shaking as he does so, he makes the sign of salvation over them. He lies back in the glory of the chant for the dying sung by thirty virile voices.

The boat arrives. The monks see him sit up with a start and cry out; he’s afraid he might see two sections of a dead man. But there’s nothing except a small, fair-haired girl. He climbs aboard, and she ferries him away.

II

It is to Pierre de Maillezais, who was certainly not called Pierre but chose this monastic Christian name when he renounced the world, who acquired the name Maillezais neither from his place of birth nor from his family but as a monk in the abbey of Saint-Pierre de Maillezais, and who wrote his Chronicle of Maillezais in the years when, from the kennels in Hastings, Guillaume, grandson of Guillaume Long-Sword, was releasing his hordes across England — in sum, to this hybrid, this forgery, this purely nominal entity that I owe the tale I am about to tell.

Pierre relates that in the beginning, long before he was a monk, even before he was born and the monastery existed, there was a boar.

Guillaume, son of Guillaume Towhead, observes this boar. Night after night, he waits and watches for it with passionate attention. Not that there is any shortage of boars: he puts up three a day, or more; he lets them run, this not being the season for boar. Surrounded by water, Maillezais is a deep oak forest where the acorns fall like manna on the population of wild pigs which groan and grumble beneath the shelter of the trees. But this particular boar seems determined, is enormous and enigmatic. Its coat is gray and at the withers it stands taller than a mastiff. Guillaume is watching the edge of the wood at twilight; he doesn’t wait long: the beast’s head appears, its forequarters emerge from the wood, it snuffs the wind with its snout, and Guillaume has plenty of time to see the huge, barely curved tusks, like daggers. Then it bolts and reappears a little farther off, or a little nearer by. It is requesting, tempting, willing. When day comes, no beater has put it up. Pierre in his Chronicle is undecided as to whether the boar is a demon or an angel, or at any rate a messenger.

Guillaume has reached the end of summer with a great fanfare, accompanied by his constable, his household, ninety-four companions and sergeants, his birds, and his blue hounds. It’s just a forest surrounded by a beach and rocks, with not a living soul. Since his father’s day there has been a hunting lodge on the tip of the island, wooden turrets above the water and the forest, pallets for the knights and the horsemen, and, right in the middle of it all, the reason for the existence of the turrets, the pallets, and the stables: a vast covered hall for banqueting. Guillaume — Guillaume Fierabras — is young and powerful, he is free, he has just succeeded his father, and he is disporting himself with tracking game, dancing, and wine. He’s happy. He has also brought the women with him, and Emma, whom he took in Blois and married yesterday in this very spot: she disports herself with tracking game, dancing, and pleasure. She is happy. He loves her flesh. She has a curious way of observing Fierabras, sidelong, with the smile that is special to dark-haired women who have a good head on their shoulders.

She too observes the boar.

Around the Feast of the Holy Cross in September the men and the blue hounds are busy with hart; the women hunt hare on the shore with hawks and sheld-fowl with slender, quivering dogs from Syria. The gray boar emerges from the russet oak wood, and twenty paces off he trots the length of the procession, as if he were following them. The few Syrian dogs foolish enough to approach him are gored without causing him to even swerve from his path. The women turn back and retreat to the castle; they set up a gallop, the boar gallops too, twenty paces off; they take fright, but not Emma. She has a sort of fondness for this monster: it’s like night in full day, like a horse that has scented wild cat and quivers beneath her, like Fierabras who quivers on top of her in the night. He doesn’t leave them until they reach the postern; he trots unhurriedly back toward the tree cover.

At the Feast of Saint Andrew in winter, when the oak woods are smarting in the frost, Guillaume decides that from today they will hunt boar; he’s had enough of hart and buck or wolves. The varlets remove the green tunics worn for deer, put on the gray tunics with which you kill wild pig. The knights have ermine and wolfskins, and they make a fine picture. They are carrying spears and the special four-foot-long swords, whose blade has no cutting edge on the knuckle-bow side. The cavalcade, the ermine and the gray tunics, the blue hounds calmly reach the tree cover, watched by the women in the turrets. Emma in her furs remains on the turret; until the last minute she looks at the wolfskins on Guillaume’s shoulders, the wolves’ heads tossed back and dancing against his hips. There is only the water on the shore and the breeze in the oaks, and then suddenly a great galloping. In the forest you no longer hear the Ho moy, ho moy! Cy va, cy va! of the hart, but the Avant, maistre! Avant! Or sa, sa! We’re in the Middle Ages, of course, horses’ breath in winter, codified cries in the depths of the woods, blue frost.

Ten days, and four times as many boar have been taken, but they haven’t seen the gray. The women, however, have seen him on the edge of the wood as usual, snuffing the wind, and once he even came as far as the postern, within arrow’s reach. Guillaume is now infuriated; he wants this animal, he’ll have it. He will not have it.

At this point Pierre’s Chronicle introduces a character who serves the workings of Providence: it’s Gaucelin, whose body, says Pierre, is sturdy and bright, and I cannot tell whether this brightness is valor, a fair complexion, good looks, or the soul made visible. He has not been conjured out of nowhere, and I will add to Pierre’s Chronicle that he is a very young man, an apprentice knight, a squire from the House of Blois. He has not yet fully attained chivalry: he still sleeps with the churls and sits at the lower end of the table. One evening, as the slender crescent of the moon is appearing just above the woods and the men are finally returning through the archway with their pig carcasses, their enormous hunger, and their laughter, the gray boar thrusts his forequarters between the trunks of two oak trees; he allows his whole body to emerge, takes a few steps so that he can be clearly seen, and waits. Gaucelin has lingered — for a call of nature or from a tendency to daydream, given that bright souls like to linger in the bright frost beneath the moon — he is still in the saddle on the shore. He sees the beast and immediately swings round; he races toward it alone with three blue hounds which had also dawdled. The boar doesn’t move. The other ninety-three men are unharnessing; they’ve not seen or heard a thing in their loud laughter. The women have seen — Emma’s heart beats in her throat. Gaucelin is right over the beast: he can hear its breath with its thick hide and tough bristles, and in the very instant that he hears it, the breath, the hide, and the tough bristles plunge into the forest at a gallop. Providence, the sturdy bright body, and its three blue hounds disappear after it.

The women hear the furious gallop through the dead leaves and the specific cry, then nothing more until, after a time which seems astonishingly short to them, Gaucelin sounds the capture loud and clear.

Emma is the first in the saddle, with two churls carrying torches. The trail is easy to follow — they had charged straight ahead. There at the top of a nearby hill, in the light of the torches, two lifeless hounds and a horse are swimming in blood and their own entrails, a single blue hound licking its wounds to one side. Gaucelin is lying against the dead head of the boar, whose withers are pierced by twenty inches of spear, its hindquarters still inside the wallow from which it had confronted its pursuer: they have dismounted, the torches dance along the ground, the wallow is a very ancient construction crudely built by human hands — a dolmen no doubt. Emma kneels over the squire; he opens his eyes, sees the small dulled eyes staring through the tough bristles and above them Emma’s laughing eyes, and above them again the horn of the moon. He strokes the coarse bristles, and with his other hand still gripping the calling horn he strokes Emma’s face. She throws her ermine over him. The horsemen arrive, the hounds. Guillaume embraces Gaucelin at length. Emma is on her feet again and stands facing them all. She is radiant.

She says it’s a sign from the beyond. That perhaps the dead boar was an angel and so is flying around them in the dark. That it was perhaps a demon which wanted to have done — a demon’s lot is hard, even when gorged with acorns beneath a thick hide. That Gaucelin, who died before her eyes, has come back to life, as the torchbearers can testify, and they flamboyantly testify. She says that the ancient construction is the altar from the old priory of Saint Pient, Saint Pient the hermit their grandparents used to talk about. That the boar is perhaps also Saint Pient, the untamed part of Saint Pient, the part of the soul which is hackled with tough bristles and tusks, which stirs and grunts inside each of us, even hermits, the part of Saint Pient which was waiting in Limbo to be set free and dispatched this sign to them each evening. She says they must inform the men of God and with their permission rebuild the monastery. She asks Guillaume for sole control of the monastery. Guillaume hesitates, then agrees.

They are all filled with zeal, their hearts beating; it’s good, after the hunt, to hear a woman talking determinedly about God. The consecrated candles are fetched and arranged around the dolmen or, rather, the altar, and on the altar itself. Huge fires are lit. The boar has been dragged a little farther off, a stick placed in its open jaws according to custom. Its head and feet are cut off. It is speared from one end through to the other so that the bristles can be singed above the fire, the hide scraped. The blue hounds sit with their tongues hanging out, and wait. Meanwhile, Guillaume kneels before the altar in his wolfskins and prays, Gaucelin kneeling in Emma’s ermine prays, and Emma prays, standing behind them without her fur-lined cloak; she isn’t cold, she’s burning. This nuptial island between two rivers, the bed of her pleasure, will no longer just be this hullabaloo where ninety-four men halloo and blow horns, it will be the chanting of eighty black monks held in the palm of a hand that belongs to a tiny, dark-haired woman. She will rule over the island like Guillaume over Poitiers. Blessèd be this boar. It’s the curée now; the boar is disemboweled, the paunch and the guts are thrown on a bed of embers, pink bubbles burst in the black blood, the swollen blue entrails scream like water in fire: for in those days it was believed that the flesh of the boar should be cooked even for the hounds. They whine quietly, and finally they are thrown the smoking innards on the tips of pikes; they pounce on the food. The carcass has been skinned; the hide is hanging on a branch in the frost close to the moon; the choicest pieces are being roasted for the men. The sergeants and the squires have been sent away — only the flower of chivalry has been kept to enjoy the flesh that has been touched by Providence, fewer than twenty mouths — and Gaucelin, who has joined them. Wine has been brought up. They eat like wolves, and between two wolf mouthfuls Gaucelin looks at Emma. She asks that with Gaucelin’s consent, since it’s his by capture, the boar’s hide be reserved for her. Gaucelin joyfully consents.

In the lay chapter of Saint-Hilaire and in the chapter at Ligugé owned by the black monks, Emma’s request is considered. It has on it the seal and the coat of arms of the House of Poitou. The scribes are consulted: Yes, Saint Pient did go into the wilderness, the oldest chronicle in Ligugé certainly mentions his dilapidated hermitage, but it is on the reverse side of a leafy initial; the copper oxide in the green has eaten away both the initial and what was behind it so that you can’t read clearly whether it was at Maillé, Maillezais, or Chaillé. It is to be Maillezais. Theodelin, a monk at Ligugé and a very young one, comments that a boar does not constitute proof and that Martin of Braga said as much: “Many demons preside over the forest.” They scoff at his timidity and point out to him that the House of Poitiers controls Aquitaine and half of Anjou, and that it was the countess of Poitiers in person who saw the hand of God on the boar. The abbot takes Theodelin in his arms and draws him to one side: he tells him that the order needs another foothold in the bay and the marshlands, the first foothold having been established at the far end by Èble of Saint-Michel, many years before. Theodelin is the son of converted Jews, and he takes the point. The black monks inform the mother house, Cluny; the request is accepted, then ratified by the chapter and the bishop of Poitiers.

In the spring Cluny sends the abbot, Gaubert, and the rest are levied from Ligugé and Marmoutier: a contingent of thirty young and hardy monks, including Theodelin. The horsemen vacated the site in March for war, against Brittany or Anjou, or perhaps both — they haven’t yet decided. Only Emma, who saw Providence, and Gaucelin, the arm of Providence, have stayed behind to guard the altar, along with Emma’s women and a few of Gaucelin’s companions to guard the two of them, to plunge hawks’ talons into the backs of hares, and to banquet. They are all at the harbor to welcome the monks. Gaubert is lordly, suave, and inflexible; he steps down from the boat like a pope, presents lavish compliments to the House of Poitiers, and sees only the House of Poitiers in the tiny woman but not the joyousness or the fire. Theodelin, the small swarthy monk, can see them. He sees the tall bright squire who is the same age as him, and beneath this brightness the fire. They walk up the hill — the path is now as broad as an avenue — beneath the oaks which are greening up. Instead of fur-lined cloaks, there are velvets and woolen cloth, crimsons and azures, pearl grays, all dancing against the fantastical Benedictine black. Up at the top they sing. The monastery, says Gaubert, will be dedicated to Saint Peter, the patron saint of Cluny. Saint Peter — Pierre — will rule over Emma’s nuptial bed.

Cluny is powerful: the architects and the stonemasons, the image makers, are hard at work within a week. The yokels drawn from round about are clearing the land; the barges with their blocks of white stone each as tall as a man — one block per barge — pitch and sometimes capsize; they never stop, two hundred blocks of stone per day. On one occasion a boat turns turtle before Emma’s eyes: there’s a great splash of water, then endless stinking bubbles, the entrails of the earth, as two tons of white stone drop right down to the bottom of the mud with the passion of falling things. No matter. Emma sees the raising of the nuptial bed, its whiteness, its strength, all of it arranged around the black altar, the old wallow, which has simply been faced with stone and whited. The image makers have carved two large overlapping birds on the capitals that look as though they are pecking at two smaller birds beneath them. Gaubert hunts with hawks; he shows that Cluny, the salt of the earth, already has a foothold up in heaven, and is busy with birds; he has delegated to Theodelin the illusory power of raising buildings here below. Theodelin dreamily listens to the wind in the oaks; he thinks about the demons who preside in the forests, and that God is being installed in their place. He wonders whether his brand-new power comes from the demons or from the cunning of Cluny, which can transform demons into white stone or sonorous coin. He gets along well with the tiny woman who loves power; he accepts her advice. The architects say whether a thing is possible or not, create it or not. If it turns out as she wanted, a capital or a door, she discovers and savors the meaning of the words power, hope.

Gaucelin has other hopes. He recalls the moment when after the terror, after the thick breath and the enormous tusks a hair’s breadth away from his belly, he caressed the life being restored to him as it bent down under the blade of the moon. The Chronicle, as we know, says that his body is sturdy and bright. The arm of Providence brushes Emma’s arm, the tall bright young man seeks her hand, grasps her by the waist in dark recesses and tries to embrace her; he follows Emma and Theodelin as they walk together round the building site, and, amid the white stone that is being raised, he sees only the crimson skirts, the bare arms. She firmly eludes him. She loves Gaucelin too; he was her Providence, but Providence is not made of flesh. Emma does not want to mix one thing with another: she is for Guillaume, who is making war and for whom she is waiting. She is not irritated by Gaucelin’s desire, or if she is, it’s with a certain delight, and sometimes she’s on the point of yielding. She doesn’t yield. She has the boar’s hide tanned: it’s been hemmed and chamoized, but it remains rough. She wears it belted beneath her gown against her skin, as if, in his absence, to feel the rough hand of Guillaume upon her. Guillaume has taken Angoulême. He’ll be coming with his wolfskins. The summer is over. He’s here.

This year there are a hundred and twelve of them. Guillaume climbs the hillock, embraces Theodelin and Gaucelin but not Gaubert, who has left to spend the winter at Cluny in the saltworks. Theodelin shows him around, explains. The construction of the choir is complete, and when Guillaume sees the altar he doesn’t recognize the wallow, the winter’s night, now covered in a canopy of white linen, the gold cupboard which contains the coin, the sacred vessel. When he is told, he bursts out laughing. Emma looks at him with her sidelong little smile; it’s her own body that he’s exploring and laughing over or praising, it’s across her body that his spurs ring out. She belongs to him the way the choir here belongs to Christ. The others are already sounding their horns; they are after the hart; Gaucelin and Guillaume go after it too.

Thirty nights or more of nuptial revelry. When Guillaume saw the leather pulled tight against bare flesh under the gown, the delicate skin flayed around her waist, he too began to burn. The hunt continues through the night; he tracks and he finds, he allows his quarry to escape, draws it in, and takes it. They bounce up and down, then collapse — and no, these are not the grotesque postures that the monks in Cluny say they are, the frantic gestures of the damned, but the precise and perfect gestures of the mort and the capture. Emma sounds her own capture and sounds it well. Her body is here and sounds the horn, and it’s also out there built in white stone that shimmers beneath the moon, where large birds peck smaller birds, and the monks chant. When he embraces her in the evening she can hear Compline, when he takes her at daybreak it’s Matins. Life is an unending chant.

At the first moon of winter, the gray tunics and the wolfskins are out again, the Avant, maistre! Or sa! the boar. The maistre returns in the evening, slung from the pummel by the feet, dripping. Gaucelin excels: he brings back more than all the others; he wants her to see that this debauch of gashed hides and blood-soaked bristles is for her. The others are envious. One evening, Hugues, one of Gaucelin’s companions who stayed behind all winter and who eats at the lower end of the table, lashes out at Gaucelin, who had dealt the death blow to a wild pig that Hugues himself had surprised in its lair. Everyone has drunk a lot; they are laughing, then they stop: Hugues says that it’s not just the animals put up by others that Gaucelin is adept at taking; he’s equally adept with the women that others have flushed out. He names the countess. Guillaume asks her to rise and come and stand before him. She is very erect and pale; she denies it. Gaucelin says nothing. Guillaume banishes him. He’s in the saddle beneath the moon, heading for the court in Anjou.

The count does not repudiate Emma because the House of Blois is strong and holds the House of Anjou in its pincers, or perhaps it’s for other reasons. But he no longer looks at her.

Until Christmas, Emma sleeps alone; she hears the Vigil and Matins, she wears the tight pig’s hide day and night, she thinks about her power, and she keeps up her hope.

Pierre, who doesn’t linger over these amorous annulments or the hunt, reports that in the depths of this second winter the powers gather at Maillezais to draw up the charters, declare what the abbey is, under which rule, and what it shall be. Pierre indulgently describes the powers gathered here beneath the hand of God, through the happenstance of a boar. The boats bring purple and crimson, scarlet beneath the wolfskins: the men stepping down from the boats look across the swaying oak wood at the spire rising tall and straight above the choir. The archbishop of Bordeaux looks, the bishop of Saint-Hilaire, the bishop of Saint-Martial, and the bishop of Saint-Front. Gaubert looks too; all in black and more fantastical, he has dragged himself away from Cluny to come to this place and represent the suave and implacable salt of the earth. And the great vassals, their wives. They all of them draft and hunt. It’s the High Middle Ages, with its beautiful images, assiduous scribes, and horses.

I am tired of these images, tired of Pierre’s bland Chronicle. The rest goes quickly: you have only to look at the viscountess of Thouars, her fair complexion and her bursts of laughter, her tall figure, her brightness, like Gaucelin if Gaucelin were a woman. She smiles with passion at everyone. Her sturdy bright arms can control a horse like a man. She follows the men going after boar, she likes their company. She rides alongside Guillaume, their eyes mingle, he takes her. It is she who each night now sounds her own capture in the count’s bed. Emma can hear.

What follows is scabrous and romancical. Pierre, who relates it without blandness, retreats prudently behind his sources: his master the learned Arcère and the Gallia christiana, and the tale that Theodelin told him in person. One day, as the prelates and the men-at-arms are reading the charters to one another, arguing every inch of the way for a meadow or a tree, the women go hunting with birds of prey — but not all of them: it seems that Ermengarde de Thouars is alone with Emma, Emma’s falconer, and Emma’s varlets, who have kept the Syrian dogs on a leash. They are hunting with large birds, goshawk or gyrfalcon, the ones that kill buck, in the glades close to the abbey where Emma wants to steer them. She looks sidelong at the passionate smile when the birds of prey plummet. Suddenly she seizes Ermengarde’s saddle by the pummel, strikes her across the face with her crop, and unseats her. Ermengarde has understood and is already off at a run. The falconer and the varlets have stopped. “She’s yours,” says Emma, and they release the dogs and the bird, they run. Ermengarde flees toward the abbey; she’s almost there, the gray tunics hot on her tail, the Syrian dogs nipping at her heels, the gyrfalcon seeking out her eyes. She collapses; they all take a lengthy turn at her beneath the walls of the abbey. Her stark white legs, her thighs, the gray tunics, her tears. Very pale, Emma looks on: it’s her own body that is being broken here, and she is elated by it. Theodelin, who has come out from the choir, looks too; when he rushes forward Emma repulses him with her crop and tramples him; her horse’s hoof has broken his thigh. The demons preside in the forests: they have stepped down from their seats and are plying their trade. When it’s over, Emma looks at the white priory which she took for her own body. She vanishes.

She has ridden through the wood, and left her horse at the harbor. It’s already five o’clock in winter, she can hear the evening psalms being sung up above. Torches are running hither and thither in the forest, people searching for her. The moon is tiny. She unties a barge and reaches the current in the river. Her elation hasn’t left her: she is laughing, her soul thirsting for obedience to a sinister fate. She disrobes, throws velvets and fur-lined cloak into the water. Around her waist she has kept the sign, the two hands’ width of tightened boar hide. It was a sign, but she read it wrong. It wasn’t God’s boar. It was a boar that begat Gaucelin, begat the ancient altar, begat the priory, begat the charters and the viscountess of Thouars, begat crime, and is about to beget her death. It was Emma’s boar. The spire above the choir gleams in the moonlight; a monastery is not a woman any more than a boar is an envoy from God. She is also elated by her mistakes, and she can see the truth alongside them, stripped of signs. All things are mutable and close to uncertain. She throws herself into the water; she sinks to the bottom, then into the wallow of the mud where she will never be found.

Or else, on the following day, she is washed up downriver on the shore of the island of Champagné, near a village of yokels whom Pierre describes as cruel, unbiddable, and barbarous. The yokel who finds her goes to fetch one of the boathooks used to haul in big fish; he returns with a few other men, and using the tip of the boathook they push the body back into the current, bloated like a leather bottle and still with the pig hide that has almost sliced it in two. They wonder whether it’s a man, a woman or a pig. They laugh. The leather bottle is swept away downstream.

III

It is once again to Petrus Malleacensis — who wrote his Chronicle under the rule of Goderan, the fourth abbot of Maillezais, also appointed from Cluny, the saltworks of the earth, at a time when he (Pierre) was growing old, for he took his vows under the abbacy of Theodelin, lived through the exceptionally long abbacy of Humbert, and was still there, effective and in full possession of his wits since Goderan chose him for this long-term undertaking — in other words, to the inexhaustible Chronicle of Maillezais and also to the Intransitive Chronicles of Adémar de Chabannes, whom posterity knows better than Pierre, a delightful and ambitious man of letters, something of a forger, and a Limousin by birth, who oversaw a faked, devious, incontrovertible Life of Saint Martial, to these two authors, the one obscure and the other renowned, that I owe the following history.

Young Pierre, the scribe, is on the road to Charroux with some ten black monks on muleback in the dreary countryside, for Adémar says that it’s October, and it’s hard to make out the monks, blurred by the driving rain, for Adémar also mentions that it was a year of excessive rains, when the rivers burst their banks. Theodelin is riding one of the mules. He’s old. He has raised buildings, fought for power, and kept it; he had Guillaume Fierabras in the palm of his hand, where he now has his son Guillaume, the Great, but he’s not tired, he’s enchanted by this trip to Charroux in the pouring rain. He appears to me in the form of a small, swarthy man whose hair is scarcely grayed, brusque, expansive, and brooding by turns, who limps a little when he is not on muleback. Pierre says he is a Hebrew by nation but clothed in Gallic piety, by which he doubtless means excessively preoccupied with detail, as converts are, persnickety about ritual, and, since he was born among the nation that has no idols, particularly idolatrous, with the specific idolatry that is tolerated and blessed by the saltworks of Cluny, the one devoted to saints, their lives, and their remains.

The era, as we know, loves bones. Not all bones — they’re careful to choose; they argue and sometimes kill one another over these choices: only the bones that can be arrayed in a text — the Text written a thousand years ago, or the texts written a hundred years previously, or the text that was written for them the minute before — the bones that Cluny or Saint-Denis have named and sealed, those that, according to patently visible signs which are now illegible to us, were once part of a human frame from which the word of God emanated, the human frame of a saint. How they decided that one bone was to be dressed and named, displayed in gold before the eyes of men, and that another, anonymous and naked, was fit only for the blind earth we cannot understand, and only the words cynicism or utter credulity come to mind, but certainly not the words knowledge and truth. We gawp at these reliquaries in the depths of cold churches (you have to place a coin in a slot for them to emerge from the shadows), we gawp at the little notice that summarizes the saint’s life which is always fundamentally the same one; the nuances escape us as they have escaped the writer of the notice; we are bored long before the little bulb goes out, the black calcium carbonates glimpsed through the grimy little window revolt us — and the artistry of the reliquaries is not particularly complicated, despite the thickness of the catalogues intent on proving that it is. We’ve seen the signs which no longer signify. But as we step out into the sunshine and look toward the carpark in front of the church, if five o’clock is striking in the tower above our heads, or if a few birds fly up or a wing mirror dazzles us, a mixed elation takes hold of us because on this same portico in the sunshine the thing we cannot understand — the bone and the gold and the written words all mixed together — was brandished by cynical or knowledgeable prelates before credulous or genuine crowds who were deeply affected by it. Inside the car we leaf through the thick catalogue of national museums which we do believe in, whether out of cynicism or credulity. We drive off in the October sunshine, and in an October downpour Theodelin and his monks arrive at Charroux.

There’s a great gathering of bones. Martial has been brought from Limoges, his skeleton complete right down to the last metacarpal, as Adémar ensured; Valérie, whose head is all there is; and also the head alone of Saint Hilaire, the arms of Saint Stephen which were broken by stones, and many others. But all these bones matter only for their number: they’ve been brought to worship and vouch for an extraordinary bone, a bone from before the New Covenant, before the Text itself, the intact skull of John the Baptist, the specimen displayed on the platter in Machaerus when Salome danced and Herod drank. All the relics are there in the choir, but not the extraordinary head; it’s been locked away no one knows where, the better to reveal it at the Feast of the Nativity of Saint John the Baptist, five days before All Souls’. All the prelates in the world are there, all the abbots in black, the kings — Robert, king of France, and the king of Aragon, Sancho of Navarre — all the dukes and the counts, and each day the great and powerful men of this world walk with their relics through the marveling rain-soaked crowds from Poitou, the Limousin, and Aquitaine. The head of the Baptist was found by Abbot Audouin of Angély during the demolition of the old entrance to his basilica, which was collapsing: the masons came to fetch him and led him to a stone chest set into the stone of the entrance, but of a different kind. The chest was opened, and inside there was a plain silver ball, the top of which could be lifted off, as it duly was, to reveal a skull and these words written on the inside of the lid: Here reposes the head of the Forerunner. Outside in the rain people are waiting patiently for the head.

It’s the fifth day before All Souls’. The rain is also waiting for the great Builder, the Vienne has burst its banks, the crowds which gathered well before dawn are wading through an unbridled River Jordan. Finally the prelates arrive with the kings, the crowd pulls back, they enter the basilica, and its doors close. Theodelin and his scribe are among their number, with the great abbots in black. The pedunculated silver ball appears between the hands of the archbishop of Bordeaux; he lifts off the lid, and the scribe sees the cranial skullcap of the illiterate saint who had a way with words. The archbishop gently removes the skull: it’s there, in its entirety, with its dead man’s teeth. It’s placed on the altar, smoke rises from the incense, the chants start up, the bells ring out, and outside the multitudes rage. The doors open, the head brandished aloft appears on the portico. The crowds, wide-eyed, clamor, those at the back are unable to see properly because of the rain, the weighty monster which presides over the depths of the masses starts to move, those at the front climb the steps so as not to be crushed, the skull and the archbishop beat a retreat, and all the ordinary folk from the Limousin and Aquitaine, from Poitou, charge with their monster’s weight from the Vienne to the church. The clerks and the kings create a rampart for the relic with their bodies, men trampled underfoot scream — and chance has driven Theodelin and Pierre right up against the altar, right up against John the Baptist. Pierre then sees the following: Theodelin deftly opens the dead man’s jaw, takes hold of a tooth at the back which is slightly loose, wrenches it out, and hides it inside his own mouth. The clerks and the kings have finally cleared the door at the back and flee with the relic. Theodelin carries off the mouth with golden words inside his own mouth.

Pierre says that he never knew whether the abbot saw that Pierre had seen him.

At Maillezais they are short of relics: all they have is a yokel right at the bottom of the sainted hierarchy, Rogomer, whose remains were made over to them by the count of Tours and reluctantly conceded by Cluny to be holy. Throughout the return journey, Theodelin, brooding, thinks about the destiny he needs to ascribe to this powerful bone which lies against his tongue and on which another tongue once rested in order to vociferate in the wilderness. Although his abbey is the most powerful in the gulf, the best built, the whitest, it is not powerful enough to flaunt the theft in the face of Angély, which is equally powerful. To say that the Forerunner lost a tooth at Maillezais would stretch all credulity. He will have to wait.

The tooth disappears.

Adémar didn’t even notice its disappearance in Charroux, Pierre hasn’t seen it since Theodelin filched it, and he won’t see it again until much later: the chronicles are no use to me here; I shall go in search of it myself.

Theodelin has also always been in the habit of disappearing for a while: he hands the keys over to the prior, climbs into a boat, and pushes off downstream. The monks are used to it and do not comment. They know more or less where he goes: it’s that time in history; he goes on retreats in the wilderness — in this case on the easternmost island in the bay (more of an islet), which raises a steep and jagged prow toward the sea but whose stern settles onto a long sandy slope where you can land, the Île de Grues. There’s not a living soul on it, scarcely any trees; the wind blows across it and sweeps down the valley of the River Lay. In winter, as now, the marshes disappear beneath the forthright sea — except for the reclaimed land that lies, just across to the south and almost within earshot, on the other eastward island, the other abbey on the gulf, Saint-Michel-en-l’Herm. On the higher part of the island, in the middle of a chaotic scattering of rocks, Theodelin has built himself a roof of wooden planks and a bed of sand, from where he can hear the sea and the wind without suffering their effects. The sea is like the sands of Egypt. It’s true that Theodelin no longer really believes in the wilderness and the mortifications of Jerome and Martin, and this makes him uneasy; on the other hand, he knows that language is re-created in this windswept solitude, it recovers its focus and its fulcrum, so that on his return it cuts clean through the chatter of the monks and decisively slaps down all the blustering little monads with the Universal Monad. This is where he has come in this month of November with the tooth of John the Baptist in his mouth or in a little leather pouch, depending on his mood.

John the Baptist is returning to the wilderness.

The fishermen bring his pittance, or a monk from Saint-Michel, whose cellars are well stocked. Most often the purveyor is Hugues, a young and sturdy brother. His large body is awkward — not that he knocks over the things he has in his hand, but as if the things he is holding and the gesture itself were suspended in the void. It’s the same with the way he speaks. He’s the opposite of a chatterer: he never remarks on the salted herring or the bread that he unloads, never offers any explanation if today it’s fresh sardines or gruel instead; he never comments either on what’s happening at Saint-Michel, the mandates, the betrayals, the boredom or the joy as one day follows the next. If he’s asked a question, he stammers a little and blushes. But if, while the younger man is carrying his herring up to the hut, Theodelin takes it upon himself to remark in misty weather that the sea and the sky are as hard to disentangle as the Chaos and the Void, or to point out the shape of an ox in the clouds which gradually turns into a man and is sliced in two, then Hugues abruptly sets down his keg of herring and begins to speak, without the hint of a stutter. He says, No, what he sees is more like the shape of a stag, and of a woman sliced in two, and though you might think the sea and the clouds are not disentangled, they nevertheless are, since they’re the flesh and the spirit. He can talk like this for hours on end — you just have to prompt him from time to time — then he stops all of a sudden, embarrassed and as if to apologize. He names only those things that can be interpreted and gradually extended to cover the entire world, things that you can match and substitute with words. He’s not a chatterer, but a born preacher, and he doesn’t know it. Although Hugues is very thin, tall, and covered in a thick pelt of hair, whereas the other man is stocky and already bald, Theodelin likes to link him in his mind with Pierre, his scribe. He’s like the opposite twin: he speaks the way the other man writes, in a strange mixed state of awkwardness and elation. And it satisfies neither of them, the scribe or the word-spinner.

He has already come several times this winter. As secrets are hard to keep, and as Theodelin is itching to confess, at each visit he has suggested something to Hugues which one way or another might set him on the trail of John the Baptist — and it’s not at all difficult: the paths where one man always precedes another, the goatskin which you wear in winter over your black habit, the interminable baptism of the rain, a dove flying past in a brief spell of sunshine, the decapitated clouds, everything comes back to John the Baptist, the Forerunner, the Supplanted, the man who spoke loud and strong and who, because of his words, was sliced in two in Machaerus on the shores of the Dead Sea. One day in January the sea is wailing like a small child beneath a leaden sky, which may be threatening snow; everything in the bay stands out very clearly, sharply delineated, each emerging for what it is, separate, and this distresses Theodelin, who is separate and alone like a small child. He can feel his old injuries, the broken thigh from long ago, the betrayal of his former race, remorse. The boat arrives; it’s Hugues bringing a ham in a sack for the last days before Lent. Without a word they walk up the path with the sack; Theodelin limps along in front; they enter the hole with its rock walls and its roof of wooden planks, where the fire is lit. Hugues takes out the ham and hangs it up by the fire, Theodelin goes over to the little altar which bears a crucifix, picks up a small leather pouch, and in front of Hugues takes out a tooth — it might have fallen out of his own mouth the minute before — he says it’s a tooth belonging to John the Baptist.

After the astonishment and the excitement, the prayers, Theodelin recounts the whole thing: the rain in Charroux, the treasure stolen from under the noses of Odilon of Cluny and Robert of France, which makes them laugh, the diplomatic wait before revealing the treasure in the broad light of day and attracting alms to Maillezais. He says he doesn’t trust his monks, who pry and chatter; he says, “The treasure will remain here, and there’s no one worthier than you to watch over the Forerunner.” He feels relieved of a great burden; the sea below has stopped wailing like a small child, it’s making the noise of the sea. Hugues swears on the relic that he will speak of it to no one, that he will not steal it, that he will take care of it right here, that he will glorify it. They place the leather pouch in a little pinewood box and bury it in a place they both know beneath a larch. As the boat moves off, Theodelin hears Hugues talking to himself in a loud, strong voice. He thinks he can hear “Art thou he that should come, or do we look for another?” Theodelin leaves before Lent.

He returns at the end of the following winter. The tooth is still there. The monks in Saint-Michel have seen the smoke rising from the hut; it won’t be long before they come — they take to the water with logs, bread, and fish. It’s Hugues who carefully unloads the baskets of logs and who has changed: his hair is longer, he’s more emaciated but seems younger, radiant. Theodelin is most astonished when, without the hint of a stutter, the other man apologizes that it’s mostly chestnut wood, which burns with an infernal noise and sparks — but this year has been cold; they’ve had to burn a lot of wood to keep the monastery warm, and there’s only chestnut left. And chestnut wood is a topic worthy of mention. In the hut he remarks that things will have to be mended here, cleared out there, and that he will attend to it. They go to sit under the larch and contemplate; Hugues meditatively pulls up a few weeds which are starting to grow — it’s the end of March — as if it were a vegetable patch. The weeds are also worthy of being named, and he names them. This doesn’t mean that he’s lost his abilities as a preacher — on the contrary, he still happily expatiates on the shape of clouds, or that of the soul — but he’s no longer embarrassed when he stops; he is innocent of the shape taken by the clouds or his words. The two men are still under the larch, standing side by side. Without looking at him, Hugues thanks the abbot: it’s because of him that he has seen the sign which gives meaning to the world, and he’s even become its protector. Theodelin understands — the relic of Saint John has performed a miracle: the world henceforth has a meaning for Hugues; there’s no need to go looking for it in the clouds, although you can also seek it and find it in the clouds; meaning is everywhere, it’s buried in the sand under the larch in a leather pouch.

Another time, as the purveyor is not Hugues but the steward brother, Theodelin gets him talking. The days of the abbot of Saint-Michel are numbered, the prior is a melancholy man; there’s no doubt that Hugues will be the next abbot; they’ve seen him transfigured during the past year, they are enthralled by his sermons; he bears the abbey on his shoulders. Theodelin thinks that the vox clamantis in deserto wasn’t perhaps so vociferative, and certainly not melancholy, and that, as Saint Matthew says, Herod enjoyed listening to it in the prison at Machaerus.

The years pass; Hugues is abbot of Saint-Michel, Theodelin’s hair is turning white, his old injuries have laid him low. He no longer goes into the wilderness — the tooth is still there, and he is right to trust Hugues, who can see the larch from the walls of the abbey, to intercede with Saint John on Theodelin’s behalf. His ambition has lost its edge; he no longer wants to exhibit the relic for the glory of Maillezais, and if he did exhibit it, it would feel as if he were stealing it for a second time, but without the panache of the first. The two abbots see each other only on important occasions: consecrations or councils, arbitrations between counts, mitered appearances in Guillaume’s bishopric at Poitiers, or the great black Chapter-General at Cluny. They are sometimes rivals, but it’s rare that Theodelin wins, so sure are the other man’s words of their right and of that of God. One winter, in the year the Norman duke and his nephews take Palermo, they are summoned to Angély by the order. They make the journey together, peaceably; they talk the way they used to, about the clouds, the body and the soul, chestnut trees and larches. Pierre the scribe is also on the journey; he reappears furtively on his mule behind the chestnut trees, and he takes up the tale again: he will write that Theodelin is limping badly, that he needs help with walking — but he doesn’t say whether Hugues’s is the arm that Theodelin leans on. The great prior of Cluny welcomes them in person, his demeanor grave. He welcomes Adémar de Chabannes, who arrives at the same time, and Adémar picks up the thread of his own narrative in his devious and romancical manner. The great prior gathers them in the basilica; the head of Saint John lies at the far end of the narthex in the spot reserved for those who have been excommunicated — the reliquary is wide open on the altar.

All things, says the prior, are mutable and close to uncertain. The deceased abbot Audouin did not come upon the head of Saint John in a stone wall. An Italian merchant at the hour of his death has publicly confessed, among other crimes, that he was a forger; it wasn’t the head of the Baptist that he sold to Audouin, it was the head of another John, John of Edessa or John Golden Mouth, the orator of Antioch; and then, as the shadows of Hell crept over him, the terrified merchant cried out that it was nothing at all, just a bone. They proceed to the narthex; they cover the bone with thorns and ashes. They snuff all the candles; in the dark they say the prayers of malediction and mourning.

Back in his abbey, Abbot Hugues stops short on Sunday in the middle of his sermon. He stares at the bare flagstone in front of him. His words are once more suspended in the void — they finally fall into it, they abandon him, he breaks them off. They lie on the flagstone. He stutters out a few more words in which some of the monks think they recognize the verse from Ecclesiastes about words and wind. It’s over. He sets down his stole and goes up to his cell. He will never speak again. He outlives his words for many years. He has become an ordinary monk once more, the lowest of the brothers, kept on only for what he once was. The younger generation, who never knew what he once was, wonder what to do with the silent old man who flees books, dutifully opens his mouth during the services, and pretends to sing. Eventually he is employed a great deal on the water, on the boats that ply from one end of the bay to the other, bringing logs and salt, fetching visitors from terra firma: this he can do, and he even seems to derive some pleasure from it. His eyes seek something in the water.

On the same Sunday that Hugues definitively falls silent, Theodelin does his duty. He launches a boat on the river — or rather Pierre, the scribe, launches a boat on the river, and Theodelin, leaning on his arm, climbs into it. Standing in the stern with his long pole Pierre steers them to the Île de Grues. The sea is wailing like a small child. Theodelin has difficulty stepping onto land and even more difficulty climbing up the slope. He curses and swears coarsely at Pierre, who is doing the best he can. He doesn’t even glance at the old hut, which is falling to bits. Only once he’s beneath the larch does he catch his breath again, lengthily. The wind from the south carries the sound of the bells from Saint-Michel across to them. With an oath Theodelin mutters something between his teeth, and the other man thinks he hears the verse from Ecclesiastes about words and wind. Sitting on the sand Theodelin shows Pierre where to dig; he unearths the little leather pouch and hands it to the abbot, who takes out the tiny bone: Pierre recognizes the tooth from Charroux, which belongs not to John the Baptist, but to no one. The abbot gets to his feet again — Pierre helps him up — they walk toward the sheer cliff which is close by and which looks out onto open sea. With an oath the abbot hurls the tooth into the water the way an angry child hurls a toy.

Or else the abbot loses interest and sits grumbling beneath the larch waiting for it to be done with. It’s Pierre who hurls the tooth into the water. He doesn’t see where it lands, and he comes up with the line which much later will be the last in his Chronicle: As all things are mutable and close to uncertain.