Authors: William Alexander
This eerily echoed Clotaire Rapaille’s comments on bread democracy, but with the opposite reasoning: Rapaille had thought the
boule
more egalitarian, for no one got stuck with the pointy end piece, the
croûton.
But Philippe, reflecting the austerity of abbey life, was more concerned about the size of the portion.
*
I showed Bruno how to form one
bâtard,
which is shaped like a skinny football, then had him do the rest. His first loaf was a blunt-end cylinder, so I started to demonstrate how to roll the ends into nice points (a technique I’d just learned at the Ritz), when Philippe interrupted.
“But it is better not to have the points!” he insisted. “So everyone gets the same-size piece.”
I thought Philippe was carrying this a bit too far. “But then it
is not a
bâtard,
” I said, smiling. “It is a cylinder. The bread must please the eyes as well as the stomach.” I could hardly believe what was coming out of my mouth, yet I couldn’t help myself. It was as if Chef Didier had stowed away in a portion of my brain and come with me from the Ritz.
Leaving it up to Bruno, I changed the subject, showing him how to flour and fold the heavy linen
couche
to hold the shape of the loaves. Bruno was a bright, eager student and a quick study. We assembled six loaves and fired up the ancient oven. Seeing me covered in flour, and nervously looking at his watch, Philippe offered, “You don’t have to go to Sext, you know. It is not required of the guests.”
“But it leads right into lunch.” As far as I knew, it was the only way to get fed.
“Yes, but you can also meet in the
salle d’hôte.
The
père hôtelier
always checks in there first, to see if any new guests have arrived.”
Odd—the
père hôtelier
had neglected to mention that option. Even odder, I turned down Philippe’s offer. Surprising myself, I found I
wanted
to go to Sext, to sit in that cold, dark church for fift een minutes, to hear the voices of the monks, soothing, calming, and uplift ing. I was being drawn, whether I wanted to be or not, into the rhythm of monastery life. I had wondered beforehand if attending church services might reindoctrinate me into Christianity, but the chanting in Latin, while beautiful, was to my ears unintelligible. For all I knew, they could have been singing about the internal combustion engine. Yet I enjoyed the services and found that my time in the dark, austere church, listening to Gregorian chant, had the effect of sharpening my senses. I’d started to notice, for example, the repetition of significant numbers, the bells always tolling at the end of a service in repeating sets of three rings (representing the Holy Trinity),
and how the lighting of the church varied throughout the day, starting fairly dark for the predawn Vigils, then growing lighter for Lauds and Mass, and dimming again as the day wound down. Always lit, of course, was the ever-present crucifix, hanging from the ceiling, Christ poised to loose his bounds and fly down the length of the church.
Before hurrying to Sext and then following the monks to lunch, I had thrown on a sport jacket but hadn’t had time to change out of my floury jeans, and as I walked down the long refectory, past the rows of monks standing at their places, Bruno eyed me head to toe and grinned broadly. I winked and shook the leg of my pants as I passed, leaving a little puff of flour behind, and almost caused him to burst into laughter, which no doubt would have been a major breach of protocol.
You are one of us.
Indeed, it was beginning to feel that way. Which made what I did after lunch easier. I approached the guest master, who was turning out not to be such a stern fellow after all, but rather likable, about staying another day. “Bruno’s going to be a terrific baker,” I explained. “But he’s not quite ready.”
Which was precisely half the truth.
Philippe was pleased but felt guilty about my decision when I told him later. “But I thought you wanted to go to Honfleur,” he said in that gentle voice of his. It’s true, I had wanted to spend my last night in France in a comfortable bed in a
chambre,
not a cell, spending more than sixteen minutes at dinner, lingering over Normandy oysters and getting drunk on Calvados. Yet suddenly the thought of spending a day in a touristy village, which sounded a bit like a Norman version of East Hampton, the streets filled with British day-trippers from across the channel, was only slightly more appealing than landing on nearby Omaha Beach in the face of Nazi machine gunners. I preferred where I was.
Bruno was visibly relieved that I was staying, and he had a
request: he liked the country loaves we were making just fine, but he had really been intrigued by the
levain
and wanted to make a true
pain au levain,
with no commercial yeast at all, on our last day of baking.
“Bruno,” I said, starting to feel some real affection for this brother, “you are truly a baker. Monday, we’ll make a loaf like Poilâne’s.”
It being a Saturday, a handful of weekend guests had arrived. The glum Alpine hiker was still there in his red jacket. (Would he
ever
take that damned thing off ?) I found myself, now a veritable veteran of abbey meals, showing the newcomers—three young men who’d arrived together and a Dutch priest—the ropes, pouring cider for everyone, putting my napkin in the ring at just the right moment. The father abbot read us some more about the Michelin Man, and then it was almost time for church again.
After a fine None service, Bruno, Philippe, and I assembled in the bakery. With the schedule imposed on us, the loaves were proofing longer than I would’ve liked, but the bakery was chilly—in the midsixties—and I figured they could survive and still have enough left for a good oven spring. I had no choice, really, but I thought about all the times I had raced back to the kitchen—from the store, from the garden, even, memorably, from bed—a slave to a strict schedule, sure that if I was ten minutes late the bread would be ruined, yet here I found myself liberated from worrying about such precise timing. The only timing I was concerned with was that of the seven Divine Offices.
Bruno scored the loaves with a
lame
and slid them into the oven with a good spritz of steam. The loaves swelled instantly in this marvelous oven with its massive brick deck. A mere half hour later, the
bâtards
were done, shiny from the steam and looking quite professional, if a bit puffy. Now there was nothing to do but
wait for the verdict in the morning. And clean the bakery, which was coated with flour. As I reached for the broom, Bruno shooed me out. I protested, but he wouldn’t hear of it. “You’ve been living in here,” he said. “Go for a walk.”
Hanging up my apron, I threw on my jacket and headed out to really see the abbey grounds for the first time. We were in the third of what would be five unbroken days of warm sunshine in Normandy in October, a time of year, I’d been told by one of the monks, when cold rain is far more likely. I sat on a bench for a moment and contemplated how this weather seemed providential, a reward for my earlier travails. But that would require a belief in a divine Providence, one, no less, who would alter the weather for millions of other people—possibly to their detriment (maybe farmers needed rain or fishermen cloud cover)—to reward me alone for a loaf of bread! “Not possible,” I muttered, “and why am I even having this insane conversation with myself?”
As I ambled on, an amazing thing happened, a small, welcome miracle in its own right, one that I could freely accept: I stopped worrying about the bread. In fact, I stopped
thinking
about the bread for the first time since my arrival, so overwhelming was the beauty and peacefulness of this ancient place. My mind free, I drank in the solemn magnificence of the grounds, walking past neatly trimmed formal shrubbery, along the Fontenelle River, through apple orchards, discovering espaliered pear trees on a south-facing wall, and hiking to the remote seventh-century chapel that had been built by Saint Wandrille himself.
I was hungry, and as I passed an orchard near the chapel, a bright red apple beckoned. I looked around. There was no one in sight. Surely they wouldn’t begrudge me a single apple. The temptation to pluck this low-hanging fruit was irresistible. As I reached out for it, I wondered if the picking of fruit was explicitly forbidden, and at the flash of that word,
forbidden,
my arm
recoiled as I realized with horror the symbolism of the act I was about to commit.
I had come
that
close to inviting disaster. It was time to return. On my way back I walked through a small cemetery with two rows of markers, the graves of deceased monks, on either side of the path. One stopped me dead in my tracks: a headstone marked billy with the year of my birth! This was getting weird. Forbidden fruit, unexplained celestial events, now my name and the year of my birth on a tombstone! Was this all a dream? I dropped to a knee both for stability and a closer look. The stone wasn’t reserved for me. It was the grave of one Jean-Baptiste, better known, apparently, as Billy, who died the year I was born. I took out my camera and snapped a picture, the act reconnecting me with reality.
A few minutes later I was back in the courtyard. I had been out for two hours, and not once had I encountered another living soul. The thought occurred to me that I was more likely to encounter God. Not that I really expected to, but it did, for the first and only time in my life, seem possible in this ancient, otherworldly place to realize some kind of divine
experience:
a vision, a voice, an epiphany. I stayed on my toes, alert to His presence, but all I could see were the timeless ruins, the sparkling stream, flowers and herbs, fruit trees heavy with ripe apples and pears, birds chirping in the trees, church bells ringing in the distance, all of it drenched in that incredible Norman sunshine, and, above all, perfect, transcendental solitude.
Day 4:
Le Verdict
Normandy is still dark at seven thirty in the morning, so imagine what it’s like at five when the bells signal the monks and, on this occasion, one amateur baker to rise for Vigils. I wound my way down to the guesthouse kitchen (where guests serve themselves
breakfast, the only meal of the day not taken with the monks), only to find that the hot water dispenser for instant coffee hadn’t yet been switched on. With a few minutes to kill before Vigils, I crossed the courtyard to feed the
levain,
stopping midway to look at that extraordinary star. If anything, it had grown brighter, looked closer. Then, wrapped in a wool sweater and my lined, hooded leather jacket, I entered the dimly lit church. Only a handful of monks entered behind me. Even the abbot didn’t show up. “It’s very difficult,” Bruno said later when I expressed surprise at the poor attendance. A couple of
fr ères
sleepily wandered in late, as always, and a few yawned repeatedly throughout the service. A quarter of the dozen assembled blew their noses or coughed.
Like all the services at the abbey, Vigils is sung, but this one is sung with a difference: Vigils is a one-note song. For a full hour and ten minutes, the monks chanted psalms in monotone, while I questioned my decision to attend. I thought I’d dressed sufficiently, but I was freezing. And badly in need of coffee. I could see myself coming down with one beaut of a cold when this was all over.
The only saving grace was that most of the service was conducted seated, relieving my empty predawn stomach from the jack-in-the-box routine—Up! Down! Stand! Kneel! Stand! Sit!—of the other services. Even the monks were allowed to sit, rather than lean, for this one. Still it was brutal, and
so
cold. Afterward I hurried back to my room to take a long, hot shower, which was a challenge because the faucet was on a monastery-appropriate twenty-second timer, like the faucets on public wash-room sinks. With some experimentation, I found that by leaning against the knob with the top of my buttocks, I could keep the water on while remaining in an acceptably comfortable position. After I’d thawed, I barely had time to wolf down a couple of slices
of very stale baguette and a cup of instant coffee in the guest-house kitchen (while the monks were at this very moment judging my
pain de l’abbaye
in the refectory!) before the five-minute warning tolled for Lauds.
Adding a corduroy shirt under my sweater and jacket, I scooted back to the church. I didn’t regret it. Lauds is perhaps the most beautiful of the services, almost uninterrupted antiphonal chanting, although since it came on the heels of the hour-long Vigils, I’d expected it to be brief, fift een minutes or so. It turned out to be closer to forty. It wasn’t yet quarter past eight in the morning, and I’d already spent nearly two hours in church. How did these monks get anything done? I wondered. Then I remembered: this
was
what they did.
After spending a few minutes in the
fournil,
it was off to Mass at quarter to ten. The monks entered in a procession, some dressed in muted green frocks. These were the
pères,
whose extra study had elevated them to the rank of father. I was surprised to see Bruno, such a young man, in green. Brother Bruno was in actuality Father Bruno. Later I would ask him about it. “You’re young to be a
père,
no?” Bruno, I knew, was thirty-six.
“No. I’ve been a monk for eighteen years.” He thought for a moment. “Half of my life,” he said, sounding surprised, as if he’d never stopped to think about it before. But that’s quite possible. Bruno was doing something that he didn’t ordinarily have an opportunity to do: chat with a visitor, as guests are normally not allowed to speak with the monks. I had extraordinary access to the community, a fact that I knew and appreciated, and I’d like to think some of the monks appreciated it every bit as much. They, after all, were the cloistered ones.
I was appreciating some other advantages of my unusual status as well. As my breakfast of bread and water (flavored with instant coffee, but still bread and water) was leaving me famished well
before lunch, I’d taken to visiting the kitchen midmorning with a breezy, “Bonjour, chef!” and grabbing an orange or a small container of yogurt, along with my
levain,
on the way out.