Dear Rhona,
The village of Saint-Wandrille is quaint, the road through it is quiet, and the old houses are generally half-timbered and varyingly painted, but not extravagantly. The only restaurant, or brasserie, was closed, whilst its replacement was under construction between the church and the little Tabac shop, which sells the bottled beer made at the abbey, as I shortly discovered. The circumambient high walls of the monastery present an architectural entrance built in the style of the portal of the oval court at château de Fontainbleau.
In the Hostellerie, I found a jolly, elderly gentleman sitting behind a desk who picked up a telephone, spoke to somebody and then told me to wait for the Père-Hôtelier (the monk who cares for the guests of the monastery). Ten minutes later, the monk appeared, wearing all-black robes, sandals and spectacles. He was Frère Benoit and must have been in his late thirties, his head was shaven, as the monks are required every two weeks, and he smiled warmly; he told me to leave my rucksack in the drawing room and led me across a courtyard to the west wing of the monastery.
Off the courtyard were two doors to two rooms for guest use, where Frère Benoit began his introduction and instructions to me, and how life in the monastery revolves around the sevens services laid down by St Benedict over a thousand years ago - an unbroken liturgy.
One of the rooms was small, where the monks left coffee, bread, jam, butter and yoghurts for our breakfast, served at half past six after Vigils (5h25), through Laud (7h30), till quarter to nine. Mass begins an hour later, followed by Sext, a quarter-hour before lunch at one o'clock.
The second room was an ante-chamber to the refectory, wherein a large oak table centred the room covered with leaflets, surrounded by walls replete with books that one could borrow. There, one would wait, in relative silence, until the Père-Hôtellerie would invite us into the refectory to share our lunch or dinner with the monks.
Frère Benoit walked me through the gardens to the abbatial church where a small wooden portal was our - guests' - entrance - the parishioners' doorway was at the back, found by walking through the ruins of the gothic abbey. I watched Benoit bow deeply before the altar, his black cowl swinging. Then, I followed him to the little bay of Notre Dame, where we prayed together, kneeling on a stall.
The church is no stone monument, and when Leigh Fermor came to stay in the fifties, it did not exist - well, it did exist, yet elsewhere. The head abbot of the monastery, Dom Abbé Ignace Dalle (1962-69), endowed the monastery at Saint-Wandrille with an old and stately, thirteenth-century barn from a nearby Chateau d'Harcourt (not thirty miles due south). Frère Benoit remarked how every stone and timber was disassembled, moved and reassembled right here. And as Frère Christof (the brother I shall tell about further on) would inform me, it was dedicated to Saint Pierre and Saint Wandrille on the 1st of March 1968, then given its first office on the 21st of December 1969, and finally consecrated on the 12th of September 1970.
The Monastery of Saint-Wandrille saw the French Revolution, the expulsion and persecution of its monks, and the emptying and final dismantling of its hall of worship. Little by little, it recovered, through purchase and donation, to the reestablishment and again after sudden expulsion, through modern wars and bombing, until now. The life and order of the Benedictine returned. It must have been quite something for the monks to have seen and built such a church again.
The abbatial church is a cavern whose vault is an oak forest: two thickly-timbered colonnades run down the sides, and above each column rises with an arched brace to a cross beam; the underside of the tiled roof lays bare the wooden slatting. In contrast to how once the dismantled gothic abbey would have been, caverns of polychromatic light descending from tall stain-glass windows, the abbatial church here is diminished of light; it steals in via the deeply set portal windows of the white-plastered walls. Soft-red tomette tiles run beneath the pews up to the raised chancel where two sets of two rows of oak-carved folding seats face one another, their misericords folded up, waiting. A cross with Christ hangs from the last cross beam above a white stone altar.
The effect of this old barn, its architecture, is warming somehow. The tomette floor, the oak beams and furnishings, the off-white plaster, and the cosy portal windows all evoke an almost cottage feel. There is a Merovingian air to the abbatial church as if a reversal of circumstances had happened, like an era post-roman, pre-medieval when stone structures spanning and aching halls were more costly. I thought of it as some great jarl's feasting hall, Christianised, made Roman.
Frère Benoit smiled at my wonderings and questions as he led me to my quarters. My room was on the top floor of the Hostéllerie, up several landings of bare stone steps and walls. I hadn't a window overlooking the monastery but a skylight above a bed with a pillow, two sheets and a blue blanket. Apart from a sink and mirror, there was only a little desk with a Bible and a book titled La Régle Commentée pour Les Oblats, the Commented Rule for Oblates.
An oblate is a person who has joined a religious community but without taking its vows, a fellow traveller, perhaps, attending very closely to its principles. In this example, somebody may wish to be as close as possible to the Benedictine way without cloistering himself from society. I believe I met one in Phillippe who was staying for some time with the monks.
Up until vespers, I read and edited a video on my computer. There was no hope for wifi in the monastery, even in the village, so I anticipated that my next video upload would have to be in Duclair or Rouen. I accepted that and went to my first service in the abbatial church.
Ah, Rhona, I shall stop here. In my following letter, I will write of the services in an overarching way but with a continual rain of the anecdotal. The lack of religious formation puts me in a strange place to understand and relate what I experienced, but it will be a challenging exercise.
With enduring love,
From your lost and yet found,
Dominic de Bonhomie