The Abbot of St Wandrille de Fontanelle
“had a gentle, rather diffident charm that kindled easily into eagerness over the subjects that interested him – theology, the inviolability of primitive ritual, architecture, the arts, mysticism, archaeology and history… Often, as though it were a quite normal procedure, his voice would slide off ex tempore into the soft ecclesiastical Latin of the Vatican; and this easy breathing back to life of a language so long dead gave me, each time it occurred, the same spasm of delight… Early in my stay I commented on the blessed relief from talk during so much of the day. ‘Oui,’ the Abbot said, ‘c’est une chose merveilleuse. Dans le monde hors de nos murs, on fait un grand abus de la parole’.”
– Patrick Leigh Fermor, A time to keep silence (1957)
(Hamburg, last summer)
