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.
ABBOTS
FOR AGNÈS CASTIGLIONE
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.