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.