A Place of Light
Page 28
Usually the movement back from the flexible world of the imagination happened gradually, a cautious re-entry that, nevertheless, left Madeleine confused. But when Robert said her name, her confusion evaporated and her breath caught in her throat. Blushing, Madeleine dropped her eyes, but not before she noticed the look in Robert’s eyes.
Ignoring his evasive words, she sought the cause of his distress in the cloud of light surrounding his head. What she gleaned sent a shudder through her body, for amidst the bands of color she recognized the ruby glow of lust. Taking a deep breath, she focused on the long slow rush of air into her lungs and willed herself calm. When she had regained her composure, she took a closer look.
Unlike the men she had known in Rouen, Robert’s lust did not dominate his colors. Instead, bands of blue, turquoise, and pink joined and intertwined with the ruby creating a rainbow of compassion. Robert’s desire was not separate from his love, but prompted and tempered by its presence. Once she understood the meaning of his halo, her feelings for him became translucent. When she placed her hand against Robert’s beard, their love for each other lit the room and wrapped them in its glory. Then fate interceded, and Robert, weak from fasting, grew faint.
Sitting beside him while he slept, Madeleine hummed softly and considered the possibilities implicit in their love. By the time Robert woke, she had made a decision. And while she could not have rendered her resolve into words, she recalled the emotion that prompted it when she painted Saint Lucy’s hands cleansing the wounds of Saint Sebastian. Sooner or later Robert would judge any love that distracted him from his love of God as adulterous, and that betrayal would destroy him. With this realization, waves of loss washed over her. In their wake she felt a ripple of relief, for she suspected that she did not have it in her to love as a woman loves a man. What she felt for Robert, the tenderness of unrealized passion, contained a purity of restraint that comforted and sustained her. She prayed it was the same for him.
Madeleine thought often of the night she met Robert, She remembered a solemn man with a bright halo and a persuasive voice who took her breath away. When he spoke of the abbey he hoped to build, she remembered entering the grand portal into a place of light.
But who can tell with memories what is real and what is imagined? Time is an unreliable storyteller, shifting focus, providing details where none exist and filling in lapses with fancy and lies. Regardless of what happened in Rouen, the scriptorium was Madeleine’s place of light.
Marie would have argued that miracles are few and far between, that most of what happens in life is a result of hard work and good luck. Robert would insist that happiness is a matter of grace. Madeleine did not pretend to understand the workings of grace, but she knew for certain that she had found her life’s purpose at Fontevraud. In this she felt truly blessed.
Historical Background and Sources
Robert of Arbrissel was born around 1050 in the town of Arbrissel, near Rennes, France. In 1101 he founded Fontevraud Abbey. Over the next fifteen years, he established twenty more priories in France, including daughter houses in Anjou, Poitou, Aquitaine and Berry. A renowned preacher and a friend of important ecclesiastical figures of his day, including Geoffrey, Abbot of Trinity monastery in Vendôme, he also became a confidant of Philippa, Duchess of Aquitaine and Countess of Toulouse. He died in 1117 at Orsan in Berry and was buried at Fontevraud. The relics of this uncanonized saint now rest in Martigné-Briand.
Philippa married William, the ninth Duke of Aquitaine. They had seven children, two sons and five daughters. When Duke William went on crusade, Philippa acted as regent to his estate. Later, she attempted to have him excommunicated after learning of his affair with Dangerosa, Viscountess of Châtellerault. A great supporter of Robert of Arbrissel’s, Philippa eventually joined the order of Benedictine nuns, dying at the daughter house of Les Fontaines at an unknown date.
Philippa and William’s eldest son, William, the tenth Duke of Aquitaine, married Dangerosa’s daughter, Aénor. William X and Aénor are the parents of Eleanor of Aquitaine.
Girard is loosely based on one of Robert’s followers, Girard of Sales, who accompanied Robert to Fontevraud and later founded a monastery housing only men.
The historical Evraud, though not a rapist or a leper, was the leader of a band of robbers who inhabited the area where the monastery was built. Fontevraud derives its name from the Latin fons Evraldi (fount of Evraud). The Evraud Tower, the most famous architectural feature of the abbey, houses an eight-sided kitchen, much like the one depicted in the novel.
Marie and Madeleine are fictional characters. Their story is inspired by the so-called miracle of Rouen, an apocryphal tale describing Robert’s conversion of a group of prostitutes whom he led to Fontevraud. Madeleine’s name is borrowed from the name of the convent at Fontevraud rumored to have housed repentant whores and married women, which took its name, as similar communities often did, from the association of repentant sinners with Mary Magdalene.
Moriuht is also a fictional character. His name is taken from an early eleventh century satire by Warnerius of Rouen.
While writing this book, I consulted a number of sources, including The Medieval Underworld, Andrew McCall; Medieval Children, Nicholas Orme; Born to Procreate: Women and Childbirth in France from the Middle Ages to the Eighteenth Century, Rolande Grave; Hildegard of Bingen’s Selected Writings, translated with an introduction and notes by Mark Atherton; “Love and Marriage in the Middle Ages,” Fabian Parmisano, O.P.; The Rule of Saint Benedict, Preface by Thomas Moore, edited by Tomith Fry, O.S.B; Fontevraud Abbey, Claire Giraud-Lbalte; European Perspectives: a Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism, Lawrence D. Kritzman, editor; Food in History, Ray Tannanill; The Ministry of Beauty, Samuel. E. Eastman; The Medieval Artist at Work, Virginia Wylie Egbert; Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages, Umberto Eco, translated by Hugh Bredin; “Eliduc,” The Lais of Marie De France, translated and with an Introduction by Glyn S. Burgess and Keith Busby; Augustine’s Confessions; The Works of Bernard of Clairvaux, On the Song of Songs I, translated by Kilian Walsh OCSO; The Desert Fathers, Helen Waddell; The Medieval European Religious Lyric, Patrick S. Diehl.
The major Latin sources for Robert’s life are Baudry of Bourgueil’s Vita B. Roberti de Arbrissello and the Vita Altera B. Roberti de Arbrissello both of which are contained in Jacques-Paul Migne’s Patrologia cursus completus, seria latina (vol. 62, col. 1043-78). Modern biographies include Jacque Dalarun’s L’impossible sainteté: La vie retrouvée de Robert d’Arbrissel (v.1045-1116), fondateur de Fontevraud and his Robert d’Arbrissel, fondateur de Fontrevraud as well as Jean-Marc Bienvenue’s L’étonnant fondateur de Fontevraud, Robert d’Arbrissel. Another important source, which explains the relationship between Robert and Philippa, is Reto Bezzola’s Les origines et la formation de la littérature courtoise en Occident (500-1200).
Geoffrey of Vendôme’s and Bishop Marbod’s letters to Robert of Arbrissel were translated from the Latin by Marc Wolterbeek, PhD.
About the Author
Kim Silveira Wolterbeek teaches literature and writing at Foothill College in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her short fiction has appeared in numerous periodicals and in A Line of Cutting Women (CALYX). She is the author of The Glass Museum (Bellowing Ark Press).
© 2013 Kim Silveira Wolterbeek
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, scanning, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission from the author and publisher.
ISBN: 978-0-9911215-0-2
eISBN: 978-0-9911215-6-4
Front Cover: Marigolds and Fontevraud Arch
© 2013 Sydney C’ de Baca
Cuidono Press
Brooklyn NY
www.cuidono.com
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Author's Note
The Miracle at Rouen
Part One Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Part Two Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Part Three Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
Chapter Thirty-seven
Chapter Thirty-eight
Chapter Thirty-nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-one
Chapter Forty-two
Chapter Forty-three
Chapter Forty-four
Historical Background and Sources
About the Author
Copyright
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Begin Reading
Afterword