Authors: William Alexander
I hadn’t even planned to be at the station until the following morning, but just before leaving Morocco, I’d finally been able to check my e-mail and couldn’t believe what I read: Karen, the friend to whom I’d entrusted my
levain,
was warning me that the French transit workers had announced a strike beginning Thursday—the day I was to take the train from Paris to Normandy. Karen suggested I try to get a train Wednesday evening instead of spending the night in Paris as planned. She would meet me at the station with my starter and the rest of my clothes.
Sounded like a good plan, if—and this was a big if—the trains were still running, which we wouldn’t know until we met at the station. In keeping with true Gallic tradition, the Thursday strike was in fact rumored to be starting on Wednesday night, as early as 7:00 p.m. As my flight from Morocco wasn’t scheduled to arrive in Paris until 6:30, and the train to Normandy didn’t leave until 9:20, I could very well be stranded, not just in Paris, but at the airport, fighting hundreds of other stranded passengers
for a taxi! I could not believe my bad luck. I felt like Humphrey Bogart, lamenting from the soundstage that passed for Morocco, “Of all the days and all the trains . . .”
Even if I were able to catch a train to Normandy late Wednesday, I couldn’t very well come knocking on the abbey’s doors at midnight. So just before leaving Morocco, I had frantically and luckily secured, at an outrageous price, what must have been the last available hotel room in Yvetot, the train stop closest to the abbey. Because of the late hour of my arrival, however, I’d first have to walk from the station to their sister hotel in town, pick up the key, and then find my hotel.
Mon dieu!
Couldn’t someone from the hotel meet me at the station?
“Non, monsieur,” the Frenchwoman chirped cheerfully.
Well, then, could they arrange for a taxi to meet me?
“Non, monsieur,” she said again in that same incongruously chipper, singsong voice, the tone that said yes while the words said no.
*
The hotel, Madame insisted, was an easy walk from the train station. And the second hotel was an easy walk from that one. I gave her my credit card number and hoped for the best.
The flight from Tangier to Paris arrived, thank goodness, on time. As I left the baggage claim, I looked at my watch: 6:45. Fift een minutes before the earlier of the rumored strike times. I raced to the commuter train, relieved to find that it was still running. Eventually I made my way to the Gare Saint-Lazare, where I sat on the cold floor, facing thirty train tracks, the station fading from frenetic to eerily quiet as the last trains pulled out—or not. Up and down the platform, the departure times on each gate changed to
CANCELED
. . .
CANCELED
. . .
CANCELED
. . . I stared at the sign at gate 29, willing it to remain at 9:20.
I couldn’t help wondering if I was being tested. It did in fact seem as if I had to prove my worth, my dedication to this mission, before being allowed into the sacred abbey. Injury, sickness, theft, strikes—I was experiencing the Trials of Job: Travel Edition.
This was a little tricky because, well, I didn’t believe in God, probably not in any kind of God, but certainly not the kind who’d want to become involved in the daily petty struggles of us mere mortals down here on earth. Yet I felt comfortable with my assertion that I was indeed being tested, comfortable with being able to hold the simultaneous beliefs that (a) God didn’t exist, and (b) He was testing me. After all, the theory fit the facts so well.
Whether my ordeal was due to divine intervention or a bad run with the dice, I couldn’t help laughing out loud as I realized that what I would normally view as a nightmare to be avoided at all costs—wandering around a strange foreign city at midnight with my luggage, searching for not one but
two
hotels—was the circumstance that I now fervently, desperately hoped for. This was, remarkably, my best-case scenario.
To realize it, however, I would need to be on virtually the last train out of Paris. The station grew nearly deserted. Another sign switched to
CANCELED
, and another. Clutching my
levain,
I went back to staring willfully at the sign above gate 29, a beacon of hope, still improbably glowing 9:20.
With curiosity and misgiving I walked up the hill . . . toward the Abbey of St. Wandrille . . . I wondered if my project had not better be abandoned.
—Patrick Leigh Fermor,
A Time to Keep Silence,
1957
Day 1:
Monastic Idol
A full three hours before sunrise, as the monks of l’Abbaye Saint-Wandrille de Fontenelle were in Vigils, the first of the day’s seven services, I was headed to my own chapel of sorts—the abbey
four-nil,
or bakehouse—crossing the enormous courtyard under the chilly and starry Norman sky with my bucket of
levain,
acutely aware of the crunching of the gravel under my feet. Something above caught my eye, and I stopped and looked heavenward.
The world stopped with me.
Total, utter stillness. Not a sound to be heard anywhere, no voices, no traffic from the town outside the abbey walls. No early-morning birds, no distant barking dogs, not even the sound of my own breathing, which must have ceased for the moment as I absorbed the wondrous sight before me. To the east, directly above the abbey church, a star shone brightly, more brightly than any star I’d ever seen in any sky, a star that burned, I thought, surely as bright as the star of Bethlehem. Venus? Maybe, but I’d never seen the second planet from the sun shine so brilliantly. I looked for another explanation
—
perhaps there was an astronomical event, say, a supernova, that I was unaware of. It was
possible; I hadn’t seen a newspaper for weeks. Or was it the air over Normandy?
I wanted to stay in that spot, just staring at the sky endlessly, but instead I set the world’s machinery in motion again, continuing across the courtyard to the dark, chilly bakery. It was time to feed the
levain.
——————————————
I had arrived by taxi the previous morning after taking a long, luxurious, and badly needed bath at the little hotel in Yvetot, which I’d found at midnight almost by accident, when I feared I was lost. As I lay soaking in the tub, washing off Morocco, sending deep heat into my tired back, I wondered if my project had not better be abandoned. I would’ve been quite content to stay put in the hotel for a few days, taking baths, sampling Norman cuisine, and lying in the soft king-size bed while watching French television coverage of the rail strike that had paralyzed the nation. I had indeed been on the last train out of Paris.
With my destination at last so close, this entire ridiculous enterprise
—
posing as an expert baker, baking in an unfamiliar oven, with unfamiliar flour, in an unfamiliar and intimidating place, communicating in a foreign language that I barely spoke
—
was starting to feel like just about the worst idea ever. I remembered a conversation I’d had with Katie shortly before leaving.
“Dad, what are you going to be doing in France?”
“Training a new baker in a monastery built in 649.”
“You?” she blurted out, her eyes wide. “Why are they trusting you?”
“They think I’m a master baker.”
“How’d they get that idea?”
“I told them I’d won second place in a New York bread contest.”
The last time I saw Katie, she was doubled over in laughter, and justifiably so, but a deal is a deal, a promise is a promise, and having persevered to make it this far, I knew I had to see it through.
My stomach kneaded into a nervous nausea, I stepped out of the cab and through the gates of l’Abbaye Saint-Wandrille de Fontenelle. Before I’d gone ten paces, the tension started to drain out of me. The grounds were calming and soothing. Sunlight streamed through the mist, emerging in the kind of rays you see in religious or romantic art but almost never in nature. Before me soared the stone ruins of the ancient church, stark and beautiful under a crisp blue sky. There wasn’t another soul in sight.
Entering a doorway marked
RECEPTION
, I found an elderly layperson at the desk. I tried to explain in French who I was, but nothing registered. Perhaps I wasn’t expected after all. He tried calling someone, to no avail, so he directed me to the guesthouse outside the abbey walls, directly across the street. I dropped my bags at the door and rang the bell.
No answer. This was some welcoming committee. I was thinking about that king-size bed I’d just left in Yvetot, when a balding, slightly rotund monk in round glasses came scurrying by, his black habit rustling.
“Ah, you must be the baker,” he said rapidly, in a distinctly British accent.
Relieved, I said I was. He looked at the luggage I’d dropped in the doorway.
“Are those your bags?”
They were.
“No, no, no, no, no,” he said rapidly. “He never gets anything right. You are not here. You are
inside
the abbey, with us.” It was the first time, but not the last, that I’d hear myself included in “us” during the next few days. “Come, come, come, come,
come,” said this Dickensian character in a French monastery as he whisked me away.
I struggled to keep up as we crossed the street, dragging my bags back through the abbey gate and into the interior guest-house, where the
père hôtelier,
or guest keeper
—
a discouragingly severe-looking fellow whose tightly clipped hair doubled the size of his already generous ears
—
greeted me with the barest of nods.
“I take you to your cell,” the
père hôtelier
said in English, the word “cell” reverberating with me as I followed him to a fift h-floor room in a five-story walk-up in what in New York City would be called a prewar building. Except the war that this building was “pre” was the French Revolution.
As we climbed the narrow, ancient spiral staircase, around and around, up and up, motion detectors switched on lights as we reached each landing, an improvement for sure over the dim candlelight that would’ve been the only source of illumination in this dark stairwell for most of its existence. The
père hôtelier
informed me that lunch followed the 12:45 service (or “office”) called Sext, during which I was to sit in the front row of the church. I was to follow the monks into the refectory immediately after the service. In other words, if I wanted to eat, I was going to church today. I was eager to hear the Gregorian chant for which the abbey is known, but still, the assumption that I would be attending the service was a stark, perhaps intentional reminder that I was a guest at an abbey, not a hotel.
He handed me the key. “You are the only guest at the abbey,” were the guest master’s Bates Motel–esque parting words, making my remote location all the more mysterious.
I certainly hadn’t been assigned the room for the view. The tiny cell was windowless save for one round window so small you’d complain if it was in your berth on a Caribbean budget
cruise, and so high up that the only view it provided was of the sky. Otherwise, the room wasn’t bad, with a single bed (nice, firm mattress on a board), a desk, and a sink, but the room’s sharply angled ceiling, following the roofline, reminded me of the kind of attic apartment that rental agents had always shown me in my young, nearly broke days, except that I’d never been in an attic apartment whose ceiling was punctuated by massive hand-hewn beams. Their presence, while undeniably adding a certain ambience, closed the room in even further, literally forcing me to my knees to retrieve clothes from the bureau.
I had been expecting a room with a nice window. Just before leaving home, I’d stumbled upon an out-of-print book by a British writer, Patrick Leigh Fermor, who’d come to Saint-Wandrille after World War II, looking for a quiet, contemplative place to do some writing. Later he described his time at Saint-Wandrille and two other monasteries in
A Time to Keep Silence.
Of course, his visit had occurred over half a century ago, so I didn’t know how relevant it would be to mine. The answer soon became apparent. Hardly anything had changed, except that he had a room with a garden view. A bathroom with two shower stalls and a toilet stood directly across the hall, in effect giving me a private bath. All in all, it was a fine cell.
Ten minutes before Sext (so named because it is, by the old Roman clock, which begins at sunrise, the sixth hour of the twelve-hour day), I pushed open the heavy door of the church and was immediately blinded by the darkness. I stopped for a minute to let my eyes adjust, afraid to take another step for fear of stumbling over a precious relic or a monk. But there were no monks and fewer relics, precious or otherwise, in the austere, bare church, with one notable exception: a medieval-looking black and gold box, with a glass front, mounted on the wall. I peered through, and as my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I was startled
to find someone peering back. It was the thirteen-hundred-year-old skull of the founder of the abbey, Saint Wandrille himself !
——————————————
In 649, when the owner of this skull, a monk named Wandrille, came to this pastoral valley to found the abbey that carries his name, Christianity was still in its formative years; Muhammad, the founder of Islam, had been dead just seventeen years; and nearly a millennium would pass before Columbus would land in America.
Wandrille’s abbey, which is said to have boasted a three-hundred-foot-long basilica, flourished until 852, when Viking invaders sacked and burned the buildings. The monks escaped with their lives (and, more importantly, their relics, including the skull of their founder), spending years wandering northern France before finding refuge in Belgium.
In 960 the community returned and rebuilt the abbey, initiating a period of prosperity that saw the abbey’s population grow to three hundred monks and spawned, over the next thousand years, some thirty saints. During the darkest of the Dark Ages, when centuries of knowledge were being destroyed or lost throughout Europe, the monks of Saint-Wandrille and other monasteries throughout Europe kept knowledge alive. Saint-Wandrille was renowned for its school, where not just religion but the arts and sciences were taught. Just as important were its library and scriptorium, where texts sacred and secular were preserved, painstakingly copied and illuminated, protected from the barbarians, and preserved for future generations.