Pierre Michon - Winter Mythologies and Abbots

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.