Pierre Michon - Winter Mythologies and Abbots

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 .