leaf that there was still a muted shine under the egg tempera.
The two portraits were progressing at approximately the same pace; unlike Penelope, who, in the night, undid the work accomplished during the day, I used the first one as a guide to finish the second piece, devoting to it all the hours from sundown to sun-up. Wracked with fatigue, I would fall asleep at the first glimmer of dawn. Before Anna arrived, I would make sure I hid any evidence of this nighttime portrait, but one morning my exhaustion got the better of me. I collapsed fully dressed on a pile of blankets that I had thrown in a corner, and I dreamed of dunes slowly engulfed by the sea.
When I awoke, she was standing in front of the second portrait. Seeing them side by side like that, my first thought was that my painting did not do her justice, and my heart clenched. But then I realized I would never see her again, and the tightness in my chest became a fist.
As I rose and tried to straighten my clothing and my hair to compose myself, she turned to me and said in a clear voice, pointing to the smaller of the two portraits, ‘I want that one.’
I mustered the courage to answer, with a hoarse voice, ‘I doubt it would please your future husband,’ but before reaching my lips, the words future husband became a ball of thorns in my throat.
From that day on, we started to have unwieldy triangular conversations, the governess serving as an interpreter, as if we weren’t speaking the same language.
‘Is this the first time you have had your portrait painted?’ I asked her, not finding anything more interesting to say.
She didn’t answer, or did so by shrugging her shoulders, almost imperceptibly. The woman in black started talking.
‘Great artists have captured Mademoiselle’s likeness, names you are no doubt familiar with, such as…’
In a haughty tone, she listed some of the most celebrated portrait artists in the county.
‘The first portrait was painted when Mademoiselle was just one year old. It was so perfect that her father long refused to part with it, and he took it with him when he travelled. A number of others were painted over the years. The most recent was last summer.’
‘No doubt it is also a masterpiece. But then, tell me, why call on my services this time?’
The governess opened her mouth and closed it immediately, as if suddenly realizing that there was no answer to that question. She glanced quickly at Anna.
‘Perhaps Mademoiselle had seen my portraits?’ I ventured, pride getting the better of me.
The governess gave a sharp nod to indicate that that was a plausible theory.
A few months later, when she was lying by my side, her hair tousled, and I was tracing the line of her jaw with my thumb, Anna told me, a trace of pink on her lily-white cheeks, ‘I had never seen your portraits, but I had seen you.’
Perhaps I should have been insulted, but I rejoiced like a child at this confession.
§
I was awakened one night by light on my eyelids. I opened my eyes: the moon was practically full behind a veil of clouds, and a white light fell across my face. I looked around at the monks sleeping. They had gone to bed right after compline and were sleeping like the dead. Snoring had begun, resonant, regular. At the other end of the room, someone was quietly whimpering. Whether he was suffering in a dream or trying to give himself pleasure, I didn’t know, nor did I know why it is that men have only one noise for both pleasure and pain.
Some monks had their own cell, but I slept in a room with sixteen others. It was like bees in a hive, and then I remembered what Robert had told me about the rule that they had sworn to: monks may not possess anything of their own. Not even sleep. But don’t bees each have their alveolus? I don’t know anymore.
There was enough light to make out the contours of the room and the sleeping forms, but the world had lost its colour. At night, there are only black, white and countless shades of grey. I must have long known this, but I felt as though I were realizing it for the first time. How is it possible that eyes suddenly lose their ability to distinguish colours? Or is it the colours themselves that go away, returning at dawn? All I know is, there is no night darker than mourning.
Without lighting my lamp, I rose in silence and made my way, shivering, to the church of the abbey. The building site was deserted. Here and there I spotted piles of rocks like great beasts slumbering. The walls reached only halfway up, but even incomplete they were already vertiginous. It was as if Robert had sworn that his church would touch the heavens. Isn’t that why it crumbled the first time? I advanced cautiously between the pillars and blocks of stone. The predawn sky was milky pale. White dust swirled, flakes as numerous as the stars some evenings, disappearing as it touched the ground. I held out my palm: a tiny bite of cold. It was snowing inside the church.
The first sanctuary dedicated to Saint Michel was built in 708 in the rock at Mont Tombe, like the one at Monte Gargano, which inspired it. Before that, there was nothing, just a hole in the skull of a bishop charged with building it.
Notre-Dame-Sous-Terre was built on the orders of the holy man with the hole in his head, heeding the instructions of an archangel, which in turn were on the advice of a bull – the reason for which, no doubt, they would later call the bulk of the abbey La Merveille, the Wonder.
The story goes as follows: Aubert, the wise and pious bishop of Avranches, was visited in a dream by the archangel Michael, who commanded him to build a sanctuary. Forgetful or distracted, and in any event not in enough of a rush, the holy man failed to obey immediately. The angel was indulgent and visited him a second time, then a third. The third time, to be sure he was heard, he rested his finger of fire on the temple of the sleeping man, burning a hole into the bone that can still be admired today, because Aubert’s skull and its hole rest in the Saint-Gervais d’Avranches Basilica.
So the bishop sent a few clerics to Monte Gargano in Italy, and they returned with a piece of Michael’s scarlet coat, as well as a piece of the altar where he appeared and where the print of his heavenly foot can still be seen. The effect of these precious relics was soon felt. A blind woman from the hamlet of Astériac, not far from Mont Saint-Michel, suddenly recovered her sight. It was said that she cried, ‘It is so beautiful to see!’ The hamlet changed its name and still bears the name of Beauvoir – beautiful to see.
So Aubert chose to erect the sanctuary on the little island of Mont Tombe, deserted since the two hermits had left a century before. A bull was brought in, a crude but powerful animal, and tied to a picket, and it was decreed that the abbey would be erected wherever the beast trod the grass with its ancient hoof. The bishop was still unsure of how big the sanctuary should be, but he received another sign: the dew during the night fell on the summit of the mountain, except for one place that remained dry. It was a circular shape and could accommodate around a hundred people. That is where Notre-Dame-Sous-Terre was finally built.
Then the bishop found a local man, a good man, who, with the help of his twelve sons, laid the foundation for the sanctuary. It was a wasted effort: they couldn’t finish the job. They had to bring a newborn baby to split the rock with his immaculate foot for construction to begin – yet more proof, if any more was needed, that sometimes there is no greater strength than weakness.
This is where legend ends and history begins. But the history of the construction (more fitting to say constructions) of the buildings of Mont Saint-Michel has plenty of holes, conjecture and supposition. You can consult records for the most-documented structures, study the plans executed in different eras, annotate everything, even scrutinize the models on exhibit at the site, but you will never have an accurate idea of the order in which the work was done or what Mont Saint-Michel looked like at any point in time.
But some things seem almost certain: the construction of the church at the abbey began around 1017 and lasted some sixty years. Since the rock was too hard to cut into or to level, they built around it, and the mountain showed through in many spots. This no doubt explains in part how trying to get one’s bearings in the maze, real or on paper, that is Mont Saint-Michel, can make a