WEEK
46
A Time to Keep Silence

With curiosity and misgiving I walked up the hill . . . toward the Abbey of St. Wandrille . . . I wondered if my project had not better be abandoned.
—Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time to Keep Silence, 1957

Day 1: Monastic Idol

A full three hours before sunrise, as the monks of l’Abbaye Saint-Wandrille de Fontenelle were in Vigils, the first of the day’s seven services, I was headed to my own chapel of sorts—the abbey four-nil, or bakehouse—crossing the enormous courtyard under the chilly and starry Norman sky with my bucket of levain, acutely aware of the crunching of the gravel under my feet. Something above caught my eye, and I stopped and looked heavenward.

The world stopped with me.

Total, utter stillness. Not a sound to be heard anywhere, no voices, no traffic from the town outside the abbey walls. No early-morning birds, no distant barking dogs, not even the sound of my own breathing, which must have ceased for the moment as I absorbed the wondrous sight before me. To the east, directly above the abbey church, a star shone brightly, more brightly than any star I’d ever seen in any sky, a star that burned, I thought, surely as bright as the star of Bethlehem. Venus? Maybe, but I’d never seen the second planet from the sun shine so brilliantly. I looked for another explanation — perhaps there was an astronomical event, say, a supernova, that I was unaware of. It was possible; I hadn’t seen a newspaper for weeks. Or was it the air over Normandy?

I wanted to stay in that spot, just staring at the sky endlessly, but instead I set the world’s machinery in motion again, continuing across the courtyard to the dark, chilly bakery. It was time to feed the levain.

——————————————

I had arrived by taxi the previous morning after taking a long, luxurious, and badly needed bath at the little hotel in Yvetot, which I’d found at midnight almost by accident, when I feared I was lost. As I lay soaking in the tub, washing off Morocco, sending deep heat into my tired back, I wondered if my project had not better be abandoned. I would’ve been quite content to stay put in the hotel for a few days, taking baths, sampling Norman cuisine, and lying in the soft king-size bed while watching French television coverage of the rail strike that had paralyzed the nation. I had indeed been on the last train out of Paris.

With my destination at last so close, this entire ridiculous enterprise — posing as an expert baker, baking in an unfamiliar oven, with unfamiliar flour, in an unfamiliar and intimidating place, communicating in a foreign language that I barely spoke — was starting to feel like just about the worst idea ever. I remembered a conversation I’d had with Katie shortly before leaving.

“Dad, what are you going to be doing in France?”

“Training a new baker in a monastery built in 649.”

“You?” she blurted out, her eyes wide. “Why are they trusting you?”

“They think I’m a master baker.”

“How’d they get that idea?”

“I told them I’d won second place in a New York bread contest.”

The last time I saw Katie, she was doubled over in laughter, and justifiably so, but a deal is a deal, a promise is a promise, and having persevered to make it this far, I knew I had to see it through.

My stomach kneaded into a nervous nausea, I stepped out of the cab and through the gates of l’Abbaye Saint-Wandrille de Fontenelle. Before I’d gone ten paces, the tension started to drain out of me. The grounds were calming and soothing. Sunlight streamed through the mist, emerging in the kind of rays you see in religious or romantic art but almost never in nature. Before me soared the stone ruins of the ancient church, stark and beautiful under a crisp blue sky. There wasn’t another soul in sight.

Entering a doorway marked RECEPTION, I found an elderly layperson at the desk. I tried to explain in French who I was, but nothing registered. Perhaps I wasn’t expected after all. He tried calling someone, to no avail, so he directed me to the guesthouse outside the abbey walls, directly across the street. I dropped my bags at the door and rang the bell.

No answer. This was some welcoming committee. I was thinking about that king-size bed I’d just left in Yvetot, when a balding, slightly rotund monk in round glasses came scurrying by, his black habit rustling.

“Ah, you must be the baker,” he said rapidly, in a distinctly British accent.

Relieved, I said I was. He looked at the luggage I’d dropped in the doorway.

“Are those your bags?”

They were.

“No, no, no, no, no,” he said rapidly. “He never gets anything right. You are not here. You are inside the abbey, with us.” It was the first time, but not the last, that I’d hear myself included in “us” during the next few days. “Come, come, come, come, come,” said this Dickensian character in a French monastery as he whisked me away.

I struggled to keep up as we crossed the street, dragging my bags back through the abbey gate and into the interior guest-house, where the père hôtelier, or guest keeper — a discouragingly severe-looking fellow whose tightly clipped hair doubled the size of his already generous ears — greeted me with the barest of nods.

“I take you to your cell,” the père hôtelier said in English, the word “cell” reverberating with me as I followed him to a fifth-floor room in a five-story walk-up in what in New York City would be called a prewar building. Except the war that this building was “pre” was the French Revolution.

As we climbed the narrow, ancient spiral staircase, around and around, up and up, motion detectors switched on lights as we reached each landing, an improvement for sure over the dim candlelight that would’ve been the only source of illumination in this dark stairwell for most of its existence. The père hôtelier informed me that lunch followed the 12:45 service (or “office”) called Sext, during which I was to sit in the front row of the church. I was to follow the monks into the refectory immediately after the service. In other words, if I wanted to eat, I was going to church today. I was eager to hear the Gregorian chant for which the abbey is known, but still, the assumption that I would be attending the service was a stark, perhaps intentional reminder that I was a guest at an abbey, not a hotel.

He handed me the key. “You are the only guest at the abbey,” were the guest master’s Bates Motel–esque parting words, making my remote location all the more mysterious.

I certainly hadn’t been assigned the room for the view. The tiny cell was windowless save for one round window so small you’d complain if it was in your berth on a Caribbean budget cruise, and so high up that the only view it provided was of the sky. Otherwise, the room wasn’t bad, with a single bed (nice, firm mattress on a board), a desk, and a sink, but the room’s sharply angled ceiling, following the roofline, reminded me of the kind of attic apartment that rental agents had always shown me in my young, nearly broke days, except that I’d never been in an attic apartment whose ceiling was punctuated by massive hand-hewn beams. Their presence, while undeniably adding a certain ambience, closed the room in even further, literally forcing me to my knees to retrieve clothes from the bureau.

I had been expecting a room with a nice window. Just before leaving home, I’d stumbled upon an out-of-print book by a British writer, Patrick Leigh Fermor, who’d come to Saint-Wandrille after World War II, looking for a quiet, contemplative place to do some writing. Later he described his time at Saint-Wandrille and two other monasteries in A Time to Keep Silence. Of course, his visit had occurred over half a century ago, so I didn’t know how relevant it would be to mine. The answer soon became apparent. Hardly anything had changed, except that he had a room with a garden view. A bathroom with two shower stalls and a toilet stood directly across the hall, in effect giving me a private bath. All in all, it was a fine cell.

Ten minutes before Sext (so named because it is, by the old Roman clock, which begins at sunrise, the sixth hour of the twelve-hour day), I pushed open the heavy door of the church and was immediately blinded by the darkness. I stopped for a minute to let my eyes adjust, afraid to take another step for fear of stumbling over a precious relic or a monk. But there were no monks and fewer relics, precious or otherwise, in the austere, bare church, with one notable exception: a medieval-looking black and gold box, with a glass front, mounted on the wall. I peered through, and as my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I was startled to find someone peering back. It was the thirteen-hundred-year-old skull of the founder of the abbey, Saint Wandrille himself !

——————————————

In 649, when the owner of this skull, a monk named Wandrille, came to this pastoral valley to found the abbey that carries his name, Christianity was still in its formative years; Muhammad, the founder of Islam, had been dead just seventeen years; and nearly a millennium would pass before Columbus would land in America.

Wandrille’s abbey, which is said to have boasted a three-hundred-foot-long basilica, flourished until 852, when Viking invaders sacked and burned the buildings. The monks escaped with their lives (and, more importantly, their relics, including the skull of their founder), spending years wandering northern France before finding refuge in Belgium.

In 960 the community returned and rebuilt the abbey, initiating a period of prosperity that saw the abbey’s population grow to three hundred monks and spawned, over the next thousand years, some thirty saints. During the darkest of the Dark Ages, when centuries of knowledge were being destroyed or lost throughout Europe, the monks of Saint-Wandrille and other monasteries throughout Europe kept knowledge alive. Saint-Wandrille was renowned for its school, where not just religion but the arts and sciences were taught. Just as important were its library and scriptorium, where texts sacred and secular were preserved, painstakingly copied and illuminated, protected from the barbarians, and preserved for future generations.

The abbey’s trials were far from over, however. The coming centuries would bring more fires (both accidental and intentional), sackings, governmental interference, and persecutions. Napoleon allowed the magnificent fourteenth-century Gothic cathedral to be used as a convenient “superterranean” stone quarry around 1800, leaving only the ruins standing today. The current church was a fifteenth-century Norman barn that had been disassembled and relocated stone by stone to the abbey, then built into the present church largely with the monks’ own hands from 1967 to 1969.

Unlike the great churches of Europe, with their richly carved furniture, paintings, marble statues, and enormous stained-glass windows, which flood the faithful with colorful filtered light, Saint-Wandrille’s interior was almost barren, its small windows set so deeply in the thick stone walls that whatever light made it into the church was gobbled up by those walls, darkened from years of burning incense. This church was, in fact, as bare, as dark, and as gloomy as the Middle Ages themselves.

I wondered if the very austerity was the point. This was a church built not to attract the community at large or to seduce or intimidate the heathen, but for the use of the monks, who were not here to be entertained. There was nothing in this church to distract them. I would float this theory several days later to Brother Christophe, the Dickensian monk who’d brought me into the abbey that first day. He agreed, but added, “Still, it could be lighter. It’s so bloody dark!” There was, however, one notable source of ever-present radiance: a spotlighted, nearly life-size gold crucifix almost magically levitating over the altar, suspended on thin chains that were all but invisible at certain times of the day. The position of Christ, his back arching out from the cross, added to the feeling of levitation, giving the impression that he might simply free his bonds and soar from the cross, down the length of the church, at any moment.

——————————————

My eyes having adjusted to the darkness, I took a seat in the second pew, ignoring the guest keeper’s instructions to sit in the first because it was roped off from the rows behind (did he mean the first pew, or the first pew behind the rope?). Services are open to the public, but there were only two other people in the church, both elderly. Waiting for Sext to start, I became dimly aware of an uncomfortable sensation. My feet were freezing. In fact, my entire body was becoming chilled, even though it was shirtsleeve weather outside. I made a mental note to “dress for church”—meaning, in this case, to wear every piece of clothing I’d brought with me.

The huge church bells rang out, and the monks filed into the church in their black robes from a passageway behind the altar. Actually they didn’t so much file in as amble in over a period of several minutes, during which we three laypeople stood in respect. The monks, about thirty in all, arrived in ones and twos, taking their places in the choir, two rows of choir stalls on each side of the altar, facing one another. As would be the case with every service I attended, a few stragglers came in late, after the service had started.

The abbot, who looked to be about eighty, entered last. Then the service began, fifteen minutes of nearly unbroken Gregorian chanting of the psalms, the two sides of the choir alternating verses, answering each other in stirring antiphony. The voices, particularly from several of the young soloists, were so beautiful that I later jokingly asked if you had to audition to become a monk. What a great idea for a reality show, I thought: Monastic Idol.

The psalms were sung in Latin as our little congregation followed the monks through a baffling sequence of standing, bowing, and sitting. Or almost sitting. The monks in the choir never got to sit for this brief service. Instead they reclined back into their choir stalls at about a twenty-degree angle, looking a bit funny and informal in their identical black robes, as if they might be leaning on the rail on an ocean liner’s ecclesiastical cruise, except with a psalm book, not a drink, in hand. The strange bow they did was equally fascinating, a deep, stiff, ninety-degree bow from the waist, making them look like picnickers who’d lost something in the grass. Fearing for my back, I never tried to imitate it.

At exactly one o’clock the short service ended, and the monks filed out toward the refectory for lunch, while the père hôtelier with a little wiggle of the hand nervously signaled for me to follow. What a jittery fellow! On the way he whispered that I should have been on the other side of the rope, in the front row. Damn! I had screwed up already! Yet it wasn’t so much an admonishment as it was an explanation of the privilege being afforded me.

“You have a right to be there,” he said, indicating that I should use the door from the courtyard, an area closed off to visitors, and this door opened to the inside of the rope. Which raised a question.

“Where am I allowed to go?” I asked, assuming that parts of the abbey were off -limits to the overnight guests.

He seemed surprised. “Anywhere. You are one of us.”

We entered the refectory, a breathtaking medieval hall over a hundred feet long, built in the tenth century. Both long walls were lined with beautiful windows that flooded the room with light, a welcome change from the dreary church. One of the walls was decorated with Romanesque arches, and the open, vaulted ceiling gave the room an airy feel. A row of tables, pushed together to form a continuous table perhaps a hundred feet in length, lined each of the long walls. The monks sat with their backs to the wall, facing one another across the room, mimicking the arrangement of the choir. A third row of tables, reserved for guests, ran plumb down the center, just so everyone could keep an eye on us.

The père hôtelier and I were the last ones to enter the room, and I was startled to see that the monks and several guests were all standing at their places, almost at attention, while just before me, a young monk stood poised with a silver pitcher of water and a matching bowl. The hotelier signaled for me to put out my hands, and a moment later, the abbot of l’Abbaye Saint-Wandrille de Fontenelle did as abbots have been doing here for 1,358 years: he Officially welcomed me by ritually, and with humility, washing my hands.

Then, following the hotelier’s signal, I made the excruciatingly long walk to my assigned seat at the far end of the hall—my place was marked with a heavy silver napkin ring embossed with my room number, 13(!)—as the standing monks watched, getting their first look at the boulanger américain. (I’d soon learn that everyone had been anticipating with curiosity my pending arrival.) We all stood at our places while the abbot said a brief prayer; then the monks all shifted down one or two places toward the front of the room to fill in any empty seats, and lunch was served.

Fearing that monastic life would leave me hungry, I’d planned to stock my room with snacks beforehand, but with the last-minute rush to beat the strike, there hadn’t been time. I needn’t have worried. Lunch consisted of a robust and well-prepared meal of beef bourguignon, incredible french fries—real Belgian frites, cooked, I suspected, in duck or goose fat since that’s the only way you get frites that good—lettuce picked that morning from the abbey’s own garden, and, for dessert, flan and strong black coffee.

My heart sank, however, at the sight of the beautiful-looking baguette, with a golden crust and perfect grignes, that sat on a simple breadboard at the center of the table. Oh, no, how was I going to compete with this? I tentatively took a nibble, then relaxed. It was more pleasing to the eye than to the palate. I knew I could make better bread than this. At least, I knew I could at home.

Meals at the abbey are eaten in silence—among the monks and guests, that is. As food was brought to the table by waiter-monks, the abbot, standing a few feet above us in a little perch built into the wall, began reading aloud and continued until lunch was over. The tone of his voice—a strange monotone chant—said “prayer,” but the words, as far as I could tell, said “history lesson.” I couldn’t make out exactly what the reading was about, but I recognized the words “Étas-Unis” and “américain,” so it certainly wasn’t ancient history. The other words I kept hearing were “histoire de Michelin.”

I figured that Michelin, in addition to writing travel guides, must also have a French history book, or even a series, titled Histoire de Michelin, sort of like the History of Herodotus or something. Later I would have a chance to ask Brother Christophe about it.

“That history lesson at lunch, what period of time was it covering?” I asked. “The French and Indian Wars?”

“Oh, no, it’s quite contemporary. It’s about Michelin.”

“The man?”

“No, the tire company.”

“The abbot is reading the history of a tire company?”

“It’s rather interesting, in fact.”

Not as interesting as the discovery that the monks had daily “story time.” And that monotone chant! If I did readings like that, I’d clear customers out of a bookstore faster than a bomb threat. But of course the abbot had a captive audience.

I thought about this style of narration later and decided that like many things about the abbey that at first seemed baffling or even ridiculous, a method to the madness did eventually emerge. Chanting the text in a monotone serves several purposes: It relieves the reader of having to study the text beforehand, to understand what words to give emphasis to, and it sounds the same no matter who reads it. As with the drabness of the church, the monotone guarantees that the focus stays on the story, not the storyteller. And never, ever, is there any mumbling.

Just before the reading began, I caught a couple of the younger brothers playfully making faces at each other across the refectory, one pretending to clean his ears with his napkin. It heartened me greatly to see humor at the abbey, as I’d been a little intimidated by the nervous and severe-looking hotelier. Of course, the fact that I had disobeyed his very first instruction by sitting in the second row in church didn’t help. The sixth-century Benedictine Rule, which still governs daily monastery life today, dictates that all abbeys shall receive guests—in fact, receive them as (gulp) Christ—but it is the hotelier’s job to make sure that they don’t interfere in any way with the monks’ lives of prayer and contemplation. He had a lot of responsibility, and if I screwed up, say, by sitting down at the abbot’s table or interrupting the history lesson with a loud burp, it was his head.

I didn’t become familiar with the Rule until I’d returned home, but the level of specificity in this document is remarkable. Even the procedure for the mealtime reading is spelled out. “Not just anyone who happens to pick up the book shall read,” the Rule instructs. “The one who should read should begin on Sunday and do so for the whole week.” Such detail was necessary. Saint Benedict, writing a hundred years before the founding of Saint-Wandrille, was trying to restore order and discipline to the monasteries, which even in those early years of Christendom had become loose and corrupt.

I mostly welcomed the mandatory silence at meals for the freedom it provided from having to make obligatory small talk with strangers (“Do you come here often?”), but at times it became something of a farce. There were six of us at the guest table at lunch this first day (a mixture of day guests and some new overnight guests who’d arrived), and we used sign language—as specified in the Rule—for offering to pour cider and the like. Some mouthed, “Merci.” An occasional whisper (“Say, could I have some more of those terrific fries?”) while the abbot was droning on about radial steel belt tires would’ve gone a long way. As a matter of fact, at one point I wanted more french fries, but other than poking the diner next to me—a gloomy, blond young man wearing rectangular eyeglasses, jeans, and a red nylon jacket tightly zipped to his chin, making him look as if he’d just descended from the French Alps—in the ribs, I had no way to communicate that critical piece of information.

As the monotone continued, everyone at the table, picking up on some signal that only I had missed, folded his cloth napkin and placed it back in its ring. I followed suit, wondering if this meant I’d see the same napkin at dinner. It did. And the next day. And the day after that. The monks took this frugality one step further, each using his napkin to clean out the inside of his drinking glass and wipe down the table before stowing the napkin, along with his silverware and glass, in a small wooden box, ready for the next meal.

With such a substantial midday meal, I suspected dinner would consist of lighter fare, but that night’s menu started with a fabulous, thick green vegetable soup, followed by chicken cordon bleu and roast tomatoes (from the abbey garden), and for dessert, french toast — recognizably the dreary baguettes from lunch, transformed into a sweet dessert.

Practically every monk in the place, though, was trim and fit. The French paradox at work? Not exactly. The secret here is that meals are not a lingering affair. Food is plentiful but is whisked in and out at such a frantic pace that to get a full stomach, you have to eat quickly—two chews and down the hatch—or you’ll leave hungry. During my stay, the typical dinner, a three-course affair consisting of soup, entrée, and dessert, was concluded in a Maalox-inducing nineteen minutes! I hadn’t had to eat that fast since junior high school lunch period.

Near the end of dinner one night, I followed as the guests again put their napkins back into their rings. The man across from me, however, laid his ring on top of his folded napkin. A moment later, the père hôtelier rose and, looking particularly stern, strode quickly over, picked up the napkin ring (silently, it goes without saying), and walked quickly down to the far end of the hall, where he dropped it into a drawer, while the poor fellow sat with downcast eyes. Had something happened? Was he being thrown out on his ear? Maybe for sitting in the wrong pew?

No, it was just another ritual, one that I would eventually experience myself (thank goodness I’d be prepared for it). When you arrive, the abbot washes your hands; when you leave, the hotelier returns your napkin ring to the sideboard. That way, everyone knows it is your last supper.

——————————————

After lunch that first day, a short middle-aged monk, a tall young monk, and a medium monk, all wearing glasses, were outside waiting for me.

“Are you the baker?” the medium monk, who was apparently there to be a translator, asked in fluent English. He introduced me to the tall monk, Bruno, who was to be my apprentice, and to the short monk, Philippe, the abbey’s accountant, who looked every bit the part. Philippe, whose English actually wasn’t bad, had been placed in charge of me for the visit because he’d been the assistant to the last baker and knew his way around the fournil.*

The four of us went over to take a look at the mothballed bakery, but the monks didn’t have much time. It was already two, and the next service—None (or “ninth”)—was at 2:15. I had expected to be working in a corner of the kitchen, but the abbey had a dedicated fournil opposite the large courtyard, the last in a row of shops, housed in a long fourteenth- to seventeenth-century building, that included the laundry, the woodshop, and the commercial business that supported the abbey, a document-digitization service. I was tickled by the fact that, given its renowned history of copying medieval texts, Saint-Wandrille was still in the document-preservation business, but none of the monks seemed to appreciate the irony. Instead they viewed the business as an annoyance that they’d just as soon unload if they could find a replacement source of income.

The bakery itself seemed to date from not long after the Middle Ages. The first thing I saw as we entered was an old, belt-driven commercial kneader, which, I was told, was purchased in the 1930s. “We won’t be needing that. We’ll knead bread by hand,” I said breezily.

Philippe and Bruno exchanged nervous looks. Had I said something wrong? Philippe then introduced me to the enormous oven, which was comparatively new—only a half century old, with a panel of dials and toggle switches bearing mysterious labels like “Petit Chauffage” and “Grand Chauffage.” About ten feet deep and six feet across, it took up most of the bakery, although the baking area inside was less than a foot high. I’d have to watch the rise of my boules in that thing. I peered inside. The top of the interior looked like the business end of a toaster, covered with rippled wires that would glow red when this behemoth was powered up. I was thrilled to see that the oven had a heavy firebrick floor and a steam injector. Philippe opened a manila envelope and pulled out a stack of worn papers, the original instructions for the oven. If there’s one thing monks excel at, it’s record keeping.

I looked around. There was a very small workbench and a crude proofing cabinet made from plywood, which held ten shelves of greasy black bread trays, each molded to hold a half-dozen long loaves. We wouldn’t be using those, either.

I showed Philippe and Bruno the levain I’d brought from home. They weren’t quite sure what it was or how it was going to be used. I explained that we could either use instant dry yeast (which they’d never heard of—Philippe had only used fresh cake yeast in the past) or levain, or a combination of both, to leaven the bread. I pulled out my recipe for pain au levain, which required half a kilo of starter for a good-size miche.

“But to feed the abbey, we will need so much of it,” Philippe said, peering into my half-gallon container. “Eighteen kilos a day.”

Eighteen kilos? That was, like, forty pounds.

“How do you figure?” I asked. “You only need a half kilo for a loaf.”

“We used to make thirty-six loaves of bread a day.” “Excusez-moi? Combien?” How many? Surely he hadn’t said thirty-six.

“Thirty-six,” Philippe repeated in English.

“Thirty-six petite loaves. This makes a big miche.”

“No, thirty-six one-kilo loaves.” Eighty pounds of bread.

I gulped. That didn’t make sense. There were only thirty-five monks at the abbey. Even adding in a few guests, I’d figured a good-sized miche feeds six, so we’d make six a day. I explained my math to Philippe.

“Yes,” the accountant replied, “but we eat bread three times a day, and we bake only three times a week. At breakfast, it is all we eat. And on weekends, we sometimes have twenty or more guests.”

No wonder they were worried about kneading by hand. That also explained the presence of the enormous industrial oven, purchased when the abbey had not thirty-five monks but sixty. I clearly wasn’t prepared for this kind of volume. Or was I? Suddenly, what I had thought was a wasted week at the Ritz, mixing huge batches of dough, dividing, weighing, and working with a commercial oven, seemed to have served a purpose. Even, one might say, been part of a plan.

“We’ll just use the levain for special occasions,” I said, trying to appear cool and confident but realizing that, even to do a couple of loaves, I’d quickly have to build up the little bit I’d brought with me. In fact, it was time to feed it right now. “You have some flour?” I asked.

Philippe pointed to a large sack standing on the floor. “See?” he said. “We got exactly what you asked for.”

I looked at the label. It was marked “Boulangère Spéciale” and had a long list of ingredients:

Farine de blé type 55

Farine de triticale

Gluten de blé

Farine de blé malté 80 g/ql

Amylases fongiques 15 g/ql

Acide ascorbique 4 g/ql

In other words, pretty much the type of flour that had ruined French bread, loaded with additives like ascorbic acid, extra gluten, and enzymes to ensure a rapid, tall rise, the flour that Poilâne, Kayser, and Saibron had been campaigning against. The only additive missing was the bane of the postwar baguette, fava bean flour. And the boulangère spéciale was type 55, not the type 65 I had asked for. I bit my lip. Oh, well, at least I wouldn’t have to worry about finding malt (my little bit of malt syrup had since dried up), but how could they have gotten this so wrong?

Still, I didn’t want to hurt the feelings of my hosts. Philippe was so pleased he had obtained exactly the flour this boulanger américain had requested. But where was the whole wheat, the farine complète? I was willing to try to make bread with this flour, but I didn’t want to make Wonder bread. We needed some whole wheat.

“Où est la farine complète?” I asked Philippe.

He seemed confused by my question. There were twenty-five kilos of it right in front of me.

“No,” I said in French. “This is white flour, not complète.”

He pointed to the writing near the bottom of the bag: “Boulangère Complet.” The flour was complete, having everything the baker needed, including added malt and gluten. That explained the confusion, but I marveled again how some people in France didn’t know what whole wheat flour was.

I decided to let it drop for now. Thank goodness they had obtained the bag of rye flour I’d requested. We discussed how to get started, and I suggested that we just bake two loaves tomorrow to acquire some experience with the oven and the flour. Philippe and Bruno had been thinking along the same lines, and we agreed to start at 8:15 a.m., after Lauds.

Before leaving the fournil, though, I needed to feed the levain. The twenty-five-kilogram bag of flour was sewn shut. I was struggling with it, when the monk who was acting as translator reached under his habit and whipped out a large pocket knife with a locking blade that wouldn’t have been out of place in South Central Los Angeles.

“What the he . . .”—I caught myself just in time—“heck are you doing with that thing?”

“All the monks are required to carry them,” he deadpanned. “Except when we sleep, for fear we’ll cut ourselves.”

I cut open the bag and returned the knife. Clearly I had to revisit some of my notions about monks. As my companions scurried off to None, I settled into the old bakery—for the next few days, my bakery!—blowing the dust off peels, finding some couches for forming the loaves, trying in vain to coax some heat out of the radiator (the place was freezing), and planning out the next day. I realized that if I was making a pain de campagne at eight, I’d have to feed the levain by 5:30 a.m. or so.

Before I knew it, evening had come and the bells were ringing for Vespers. I entered the church from the door in the courtyard, following two new guests, who, before sitting, knelt and said a silent prayer. For the first time in many, many years, I did the same. This is what I said, this Prayer for Nonbelievers Who Nonetheless Could Use a Little Help:

Dear God, if you exist and you are the kind of God that these good men at this abbey are sure you are, a God who is aware of each and every one of us and listens to and even sometimes answers our prayers, I don’t often ask anything of you, but I have endured sickness, theft, strikes, scam artists, and wandering a strange city at midnight to get here, only to find a 1930s mixer and the wrong flour. I ask you just one favor: Please, dear God, don’t let me screw up tomorrow. Let the bread be good.

Day 2: D-Day

High on the list of Things I Never Thought I’d Hear Myself Say: “If we start the poolish after Vespers, we can refrigerate it overnight, take it out to warm up before Vigils, knead the dough after Lauds, let it ferment during Terce, form the loaves just before Sext, and bake after None.”

Which would bring us back to Vespers. I triumphantly tapped the point of the pencil down on my notebook. “Bon!” I said out loud, letting out a huge sigh of relief.

——————————————

Our first day of baking had not gone well. The oven thermostat was off by 50 degrees Celsius (a full 90 degrees Fahrenheit), so our test loaves were scorched in the oven. (I should’ve known something was wrong when the parchment paper I’d brought along instantly turned to ash.) The miche I’d made with the boulangère spéciale flour had risen so much, I was afraid it would hit the heating coils on the oven ceiling. Most troubling of all, though, was another, more vexing problem to be solved: fitting the bread making into the busy (and inflexible) schedule of the monks.

I had come to Normandy with my artisan sensibilities, slow, cool fermentations, five-hour poolishs, and six-hour levain risings—all unwelcome alms to a monk-baker who had to run off to church seven times a day, not to mention his assorted study groups and other commitments (including playing the organ on Sundays). I was amazed by how tied to the clock abbey life was. A monk doesn’t technically need a watch, for the bells still toll, as they have for thirteen centuries, fifteen and five minutes before each service, but every monk I saw wore one. Bruno’s was a sharp-looking digital model.

The liturgy of the hours, starting with the predawn Vigils at 5:25 (which lasts up to an hour and ten minutes) and ending with the close of Compline at 9:00 in the evening, with five other Offices and two fixed meal hours in between, left little time for much else. Here is the schedule we were faced with:

Plus another afternoon gathering for the monks in the chapter house, various study groups, and time devoted to private prayer. Not to mention that all of the brothers also had jobs. They were doing the laundry, cutting the grass, cleaning the kitchen, practicing the organ, being guest masters, doing bookkeeping, managing the gift shop, sweeping the great halls, lighting the church, and being the homeowners of a thousand-year-old house (and being the homeowner of a mere baby of a hundred-year-old house, I have more than an inkling of what that involves). “When is there time for contemplation?” I asked Philippe, who seemed confused by the question.

“We only work for an hour and a half in the morning, and an hour and a half in the evening,” Philippe answered. “There is time after Mass and in the afternoon, after None.”

Perhaps, but not nearly enough time to make the somewhat fussy and time-consuming bread I’d brought to Saint-Wandrille. I had thought monks took long, leisurely walks and had hours each day to do nothing but think and pray. These monks, though, always seemed to be rushing around, often late for services, always pressed for time. The rigorous timetable seemed to impose an almost military discipline on the monks, but after all, I guess discipline is the name of the game when one chooses the monastic life.

——————————————

“We have to wait five hours?” Philippe asked with alarm, peering down at my bubbly poolish. “Then another three hours after that? We won’t be baking until Vespers!”

He had a point. Even the mere baking of the miche had been a problem, since it took nearly an hour — an hour that had to be jammed in between services. In fact, Bruno and Philippe had had to run off to church, although the miche was still in the oven. I needed to come up with something that fit into their schedule, that could be made in quantity (which left out my state fair miche, leavened with only the wild yeast levain), and, most importantly, that Bruno could handle after I left in only two days. I could almost see Philippe and Bruno shaking their heads as they left for None. Tomorrow, Saturday, we were to make our first batch of bread for the abbey. Sunday was a day of rest, and Monday morning I was leaving for the Normandy coast before returning home the following day. In other words, I had one shot at this, and one shot only, to have any chance of repairing the broken tradition of bread making at Saint-Wandrille.

Gathering up my sheaf of recipes and my notebook, I stepped outside. Bells tolled ominously as the huge barn of a church drew in the black-robed monks like a giant magnet attracting iron filings, leaving a sudden, still void in the courtyard. I looked around. A speck in the enormous courtyard, I felt infinitely small and insignificant. Cross-legged on the ground outside the bakery, leaning back against its south-facing wall, I closed my eyes, feeling the energy of the sunshine flow into my face, down into my limbs.

I started pondering the problem, and suddenly pieces of a puzzle, cut during the previous forty weeks of wandering in the baking wilderness, started falling from my subconscious into place, fitting together with a remarkable synergy. Spending the afternoon at Bobolink, experimenting with poolish and levain, learning to weigh ingredients, knowing how to use the baker’s percentage, loading the Ritz’s commercial oven, and most of all, fiddling endlessly and single-mindedly with my peasant loaf recipe—I suddenly realized that all of it, whether I’d been staring at my navel or at microscopic yeast, was not only relevant but critical.

I laid out the schedule of services and the recipes. The first to go was the pain au levain. There was no way we were ever going to have enough levain to make that bread in sufficient quantity. Still, I had become so used to baking with my levain that the thought of not using it seemed heretical. Besides, I hadn’t given up the fantasy that my starter would still be in use at the abbey a dozen, a hundred, or—why not?—a thousand years hence. I thought maybe we could use just a little in each loaf, not for leavening, but for flavor. I’d never tried this before, but I didn’t see why not.

The next problem was the long wait for the poolish to develop, a process that was setting the baking back too far in the day. We could do just a straight dough in a couple of hours, but I had come to the monastery as an apostle of artisan bread, which to me meant using some kind of preferment. Otherwise the brothers might as well continue buying that dreary bakery bread. At home on a few occasions, I had done an overnight refrigerated poolish with success. I looked at the monks’ schedule. If Bruno could manage to take the poolish out of the fridge on his way to Vigils at 5:25 a.m., it’d be warmed up and ready to use by the end of Lauds, around 8:15. That allowed sufficient time to mix, autolyse, and knead the bread before Mass. Then we could give it a good two-hour fermentation and return at 11:30 to divide, weigh, and form the loaves before Sext and lunch. After None ended at 2:30, we’d return for the actual baking.

I thought this timetable would work; now I just needed to come up with a recipe that combined an overnight poolish and some levain. I worked out a formula that made a half-dozen onekilo loaves, using nice round numbers, a formula that we could easily double or triple or even quadruple as needed. I started with three kilos of flour spiked with five hundred grams of levain, then figured out how much whole wheat, rye, water, and salt I would need for that amount of flour.

Six months earlier, this would’ve been a tedious exercise of ratios and guesswork. But knowing how to use the baker’s percentage—the very same method I had once derided—saved the day. I knew I wanted about 12 percent whole wheat (assuming I could find some) and 6 percent rye. Figuring how much salt to use was easy—salt is always 2 percent of the total flour weight. Where the percentage really came in handy, though, was with the water. I generally used a 68 percent hydration level, but, concerned that working with such a wet dough would be difficult for a novice, I settled on a 65 percent hydration formula. This would give us a moist but still workable dough for shaping. So all I had to do was add up the weight of all the flours and multiply by 0.65.

Not so fast! Fortunately I had screwed this up at home more than once, or I’m certain, given the fatigue and the pressure, I would’ve made the same mistake here. When calculating the hydration, you have to remember to account for both the flour and the water in the levain. That is, one hundred grams of my levain adds fifty grams of flour and fifty grams of water to the total. Doing all the math by hand, I came up with a recipe and checked it three times.

Bon. The only thing left was the yeast. I had brought with me a small box of instant yeast in foil packets just to get started, figuring I’d buy a one-kilo bag of SAF instant yeast (still made in Louis Pasteur’s old town, Lille) along the way, but nowhere in France had I seen yeast in quantity. I marveled at the fact that I can walk into any number of stores in the States and buy a jar of French SAF yeast, yet it didn’t seem to exist in France, another reminder that home baking seemed almost unknown here.*

The unavailability of instant yeast was immaterial, anyway. I could see that Philippe didn’t trust the stuff. As he’d reminded me a few times now, when he was the assistant baker, they’d used fresh cake yeast. He’d questioned my dry yeast enough that I decided we’d go with fresh. Fortunately I had held some of it in my hand at Lallemand, or I might not even have known what it was. Never having used it, though, I didn’t know the correct baker’s percentage—that is, how much to use in my dough.

What was I going to do? Tomorrow was Judgment Day. We’d be making our first batch of bread for the abbey, and I didn’t want merely to guess at the amount of yeast. Yet I was stuck without my reference books and without Internet access. Wait a second—I’d received e-mails from the prior. Surely there was Internet access somewhere. When Philippe returned from church, I asked if I could get on a computer to send an e-mail. This monk with a degree in business took me to his Dell computer with a seventeen-inch monitor and an external security device that required a smart card. His computer setup was more sophisticated than mine at work, and I’m an IT director.

Logging on to my e-mail account, I sent e-mails with the attention-getting subject line “SOS from Normandy” to Charlie van Over (and his wife, Priscilla, because I knew that Charlie wasn’t religious about monitoring his e-mail) and Peter Reinhart, hoping that one of them would respond before the next morning.

Afterward I met with Philippe and Bruno in the bakery. The two test loaves had cooled enough for a tasting. They had risen, yes, but had about as much personality as François Mitterrand. We needed some whole wheat flour. And I wondered again about that boulangère spéciale flour, with all the additives. I didn’t think it was making very good bread. Furthermore I knew Philippe and Bruno were worried about the baking schedule, and I needed to address the issue. It was time for a little tête-à-tête.

“When I came here,” I began, “I didn’t understand how much bread you had to make, and how little time you had to make it. The recipes I’ve brought are no good for you. But I’ve worked out a new recipe that I think will be much easier and still make very good bread. I’ve never made it before, so tomorrow will be another day of experimentation.” They seemed satisfied with that. “Also, I think you’d prefer to use fresh yeast. Perhaps we can get half a kilo from the bakery?” Philippe smiled. He seemed very satisfied with that.

“And we must have some farine complète.” I explained the confusion, pointing out the word complet on the bag of flour, attributing the problem to my lack of French, which was partly true. But I could see that Philippe, who’d bought the flour, still felt bad. “And,” I continued, building to the coup de grâce, “I don’t like this flour. This is commercial flour, made to stand up to mechanical mixers and short rises. We are artisan bakers.”

I paused to let the words sink in.

“We cannot make artisan bread with commercial flour. When you go to the bakery for the farine complète and the yeast, can you see if they have any type sixty-five without additives? And tomorrow we will make six loaves from my new recipe.”

Bruno was intrigued. “You’re making a new recipe up just for us? This bread has never been made anyplace in the world?”

“Jamais, Bruno.” Never.

I showed him my scratch pad with the recipe. He grinned broadly as he read the title aloud: “Pain de l’Abbaye Saint-Wandrille.”

Dough-caked bowls and tools littered the sink; flour coated every surface. For two loaves of bread, I’d made quite a mess, but I was too tired to clean up now, and besides, it was getting late. I went back to the room to change out of my flour-stained clothes.

After dinner — three courses served in a record fourteen minutes (geese on their way to becoming foie gras aren’t fed that quickly) — I went back to my room to change into work clothes again. I still needed to clean the bakery and prepare the poolish.

Normandy cools off quickly after the autumn sun sets, but despite the chill, I didn’t bother with a shirt or a jacket, but just changed into my jeans and pulled my apron on over my stained T-shirt. As I left the room, I happened to glance in the mirror over the sink and was startled by the image I saw looking back—the stereotype of a French baker, right down to the bloodshot eyes! The only thing missing was a Gauloise hanging out of my mouth.

I made the trek across the dark courtyard. It was eight thirty, although it felt like midnight. I’d spent fourteen of the past sixteen hours on my feet, preparing poolish, building levain, baking, formulating, and mopping. I thought I’d be living the life of a French monk in my four days here. How fatuous; I was living the life of a French baker. My spirits revived when I switched on the light in the bakery. Two bags of flour—a bag of whole wheat and a bag of unadulterated type 65—sat on the table. Philippe had come through. Now the only question was, would the type 65, without malt, come through? Was malt really required to kick-start fermentation? I hoped not, for I had none. Perhaps the little bit of levain I was adding, less than a hundred grams for each one-kilogram loaf, would serve the same purpose.

I mixed the flours, made a poolish with a guesstimate for the fresh yeast I’d found in the kitchen refrigerator, and built up some more levain before returning to my cell. As it was after nine o’clock, the strict rule of silence was now in force. Not that you could generally tell the difference.

My head hit the pillow and I fell instantly into a deep sleep.

Day 3: Pain de l’Abbaye

Just after five thirty in the morning, I groped my way into the basement entrance of the dark kitchen, walking my hands along the cold stone walls until I found the stairs and some light at the top. Philippe had, as promised, taken the poolish out of the refrigerator on his way to Vigils, and it looked nice and bubbly, a good sign. Retrieving the levain from the walk-in refrigerator, I brought it across the courtyard to the bakery, once again pausing to admire—and wonder about—that brilliant star shining brightly in the east.

By the time Philippe and Bruno arrived after Lauds, at quarter past eight, I’d measured out the flours on the abbey’s antique brass scale and wiped a couple of years of dirt out of the huge copper kettle of the commercial mixer, itself as much a relic as anything else at Saint-Wandrille. “Okay,” I said, projecting as much optimism as I could muster. “Time to make the premier batch of pain de l’Abbaye Saint-Wandrille.”

Bruno showed that infectious childlike grin. “First ever,” he said.

“First ever.”

Before we started, though, I needed to check my e-mail to see if my SOS to Charlie and Peter had been answered. I had responses from both. Predictably, their answers were different—Charlie’s exactly double Peter’s—but Charlie, whom Priscilla had paged out of a meeting, freely admitted he wasn’t sure of his figures, as it had been a while since he’d used fresh yeast himself. I went with Peter’s figures of 0.1 percent for the poolish (I’d used 0.075, a remarkably close guess), and 2 percent for the final dough. I’d learned that, when in doubt, less yeast is better than more.

We dumped the poolish, flours, and water—over fourteen pounds of dough—into the copper kettle, measured out eighty grams of fresh yeast, gave it a quick mix by hand, and let it sit for a twenty-minute autolyse while Philippe adjusted the heavy brass arms of the mixer. Every modern (or even not-so-modern) kneader I’d ever seen has a single dough hook, which, with some variation, spins while also moving around the bowl in an orbital motion, not unlike the action of my KitchenAid stand mixer at home. But this museum piece had two solid-brass arms, which resembled a giant salad fork and spoon. The bowl rotated slowly while the two mixing arms swung back and forth in opposite directions, just missing each other as the spoon passed through the two prongs of the fork. It was a mesmerizing and wondrous sight to behold.

After five minutes we switched the machine off, scraped the dough down into a mound, and threw a cloth over the bowl. I looked at my watch. Even with a lengthy autolyse and much fiddling with the machine, it was only quarter past nine—we’d finished with time to spare before Terce. So far, so good. I asked Philippe and Bruno to meet me back in the fournil to form the loaves at eleven thirty, giving them some free time, and the dough a good two-hour fermentation.

By half past eleven, the dough had risen nicely—a little too nicely, in fact. So much for needing malt. The levain in the poolish had packed more wallop than I’d expected, so next time we’d cut the yeast in half. As Bruno divided the dough into 1.1-kilogram pieces on the digital kitchen scale I’d brought from home, we discussed what shape to form the loaves into. I was, of course, partial to the boule, but Philippe saw a problem.

“The long loaf is a better shape, as every brother gets the same-size piece. With the round one, the middle slices are much bigger than the ends.”

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 fifteen 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 frères 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 washroom 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, fifteen 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.

After lunch I was afforded a private tour of the abbey with Brother Christophe, the monk with the British accent whom I’d met at the guesthouse door the first day. We strolled the buildings for an hour as Christophe, who was remarkably versed in the abbey’s history and architecture, played docent, revealing to me the symbols hidden in the bas-relief sculptures and filling in my century-size gaps in French history. I asked him if he’d heard of A Time to Keep Silence. I probably should’ve known this beforehand, but it was like asking a U.S. senator if he’d heard of the Gettysburg Address.

“Heard of it! That’s why I’m here,” Christophe answered, amused. He had come across the book in his native Canada some years earlier (he acquired his accent during his schooling at Oxford, where he earned a master of arts degree in history) and had been inspired not only to visit a monastery but to become a monk. “We have a signed copy in the library.”

A decidedly modern beep sounded as we walked around the medieval cloister, its pavement covering tombs of the founding abbots. Oh, no, I hadn’t absentmindedly taken my cell phone with me, had I? I patted down my pockets while pretending I hadn’t heard anything. No, I was clean.

The beep sounded again. It was close; it must be me—what could it be? A low-battery warning or something?

“I’m so sorry,” I said to Christophe while I frantically searched for my phone, my camera, or anything else that could be beeping.

“Oh, it’s me,” he said casually, and pulled a pager out from under his robes. My jaw almost dropped to the tomb of the fourteenth-century abbot directly beneath my feet. Christophe excused himself and made a phone call. As the tour wound down and we walked across the grounds, I gently edged the conversation from architecture to religion. I had come to the abbey protected with a healthy shell of skepticism and in a mood to discuss—maybe even challenge—the rationale of the cloistered life. These monks, as commendable as they were, weren’t exactly Mother Teresa. That is, they weren’t out feeding the hungry, or defending the poor, or running hospitals or schools, or even, as their predecessors had done, copying texts during the Dark Ages. What, then, were they doing? “How do you see your role in the modern world?” I asked.

Christophe thought for a moment as we looked down at the quickly moving Fontenelle. “To pray.” He paused and was about to elaborate, then stopped. “To pray. I’ll just leave it there.”

“To pray,” I said. “It’s as simple as that.”

“It’s as simple as that.”

To pray. For all of us. That was the end of my much-anticipated debate over the cloistered life, since it seemed like a perfectly sensible answer, and I could find absolutely nothing in it to challenge. Four days ago the skeptic in me might have, but on this afternoon I accepted Christophe’s answer as he and the monks of Saint-Wandrille had accepted me—willingly, unquestioningly, and, most of all, without judgment. No one had asked about my religious convictions, about my commitment, about my motives for being here; it was utterly impossible to question theirs.

Up until the moment I asked Christophe that shamelessly loaded question, I would never have known I was speaking with a monk. The same was true of Bruno and Philippe. These men—all the men I’d met at Saint-Wandrille—wore their piety lightly. Perhaps that’s why I took to them so easily. I suspect I’m not alone in generally feeling uncomfortable around priests, ministers, and the holy, some of whom wear their holiness as a badge. Priests, like cops, move and speak in a certain way that is unmistakable. They don’t even have to be overt about it. Trust me, nothing is worse than running into your minister in town and hearing, “I haven’t seen you in church for a while.”

By contrast, the monks at Saint-Wandrille spoke so strongly with actions that they didn’t need words. Christophe’s simple answer—to pray—had, I thought, a corollary: To be. Not to preach. To be. As he might say, it’s as simple as that.

Patrick Leigh Fermor wrote about the feelings of claustrophobia and oppression he had felt in his first days at Saint-Wandrille, and I had made sure I’d packed some Valium, as I fully expected I might feel trapped, if not experience a full-blown panic attack. I never needed it. With each passing day, the rhythms and traditions of the abbey seeped deeper into my soul, aided and fueled by the still-unbroken autumn sun, and the pure joy of being with these stimulating, intelligent, gentle men in this mystical and timeless place had overcome any feelings of isolation or foreignness. In fact, never had I felt less foreign.

Of course, I had another reason to be happy, as well. I had my own French bakery.

It had become my home away from home, and after a few days of baking, the chilly room had started to warm up, to smell comfortably of flour and yeast and bread. We had managed to tame the oven and had mastered the antique mixer. I was happily spending fourteen hours a day in the fournil, becoming a familiar sight in the courtyard (and in the church), and receiving nods and smiles from the monks as I scurried across the quad in my T-shirt and stained blue apron, on my way to the kitchen or the guesthouse. If I looked strange, the tall, middle-aged, flour-dusted American who had come to bake bread, no one let on.

The fournil was in fact where I was headed now, and moments after entering the courtyard, I saw another familiar tall figure enter directly across from me, carrying levain. I’d been avoiding Bruno and Philippe all day long, for I didn’t want this wonderful feeling I was experiencing to be spoiled with bad news about the bread.

There was no avoiding the verdict now.

——————————————

With my long strides and Bruno’s even longer strides, the distance between us closed quickly, and I soon saw that Bruno’s grin was as wide as the courtyard. He could hardly contain himself.

“They loved it! The brothers all loved the bread! Every one! They want to have it all the time, instead of the old bread! They were so happy to have good bread, and bread that’s good for you!” As we walked toward the bakery together, this shy young man, who hadn’t even offered a handshake on my first day at the abbey, instead keeping his hands clasped under the billowing folds of his scapular, patted me on the shoulder—not once but twice—as he said, “And all because of you!”

“You’re the boulanger now, Bruno,” I said, too startled by the gesture to return it. “If you hadn’t volunteered to bake, I wouldn’t be here right now.”

Bruno had more exciting news. “One of the brothers told me it tasted like the bread he’d had in Paris.”

Bruno had mastered the technique of speaking to me slowly, using a third-grade French vocabulary, so we were able to more or less converse in French, but had he just said what I thought he’d said?

“Notre pain?” I asked. Our bread?

“Oui, notre pain!”

Bruno wanted to confirm something. “And this bread has never been made before, correct? You made this recipe just for the abbey, yes?”

I answered in the affirmative, to his visible relief. Apparently he’d been repeating that tale and needed to confirm it, as the legend of the pain de l’abbaye was already spreading. Bruno had two reasons to be excited, of course. Not only had he formed the loaves that had garnered such rave reviews, but the unqualified success of the bread most likely meant that Bruno now had the new job he desired: the abbey boulanger.

Of course, I was also thrilled—or more accurately relieved—but still a touch skeptical. Bruno was too much of a fan to be objective. Soon, though, other reviews started drifting in as we weighed out the flour and made the poolish for the next day’s loaves. A knock came at the door, and I waved in a monk I hadn’t yet met.

“I want to congratulate you,” he said in English. “The bread is magnificent.”

Even Philippe, who hadn’t been impressed with our test loaves, was won over. He was more excited than I’d ever seen him, telling me with great pride that a suggestion had already been floated that they start selling the bread in the abbey gift shop. Bruno quickly put the kibosh on that idea. He knew he had yet to even bake a single loaf on his own. Feeling in an expansive mood, I asked Philippe if he and Bruno could be my guests for a dinner in town to celebrate. I wanted to do something for these fine men, either of whom would give you the hair shirt off his back.

“Thank you so much,” Philippe answered. “That’s very kind. But we simply cannot.” I had figured as much, but it was worth a try. Bruno, I noticed, looked disappointed.

Philippe left Bruno and me to finish up, and it was dark when we left the bakery, matching strides as we crossed the courtyard, bringing the levain and poolish to the kitchen.

“Look,” Bruno said, gesturing with his head toward the living postcard in front of us. A full moon was hanging directly over the refectory, adding its circle of moonlight to the rectangles of light softly glowing through the translucent windows.

We both looked at it in silence. Finally Bruno said, “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

“It’s perfect, Bruno. It’s perfect.”

Day 5: The Monk, the Baker, and the Atheist

My last full day at the abbey was a blur of yeast and chant. I attended all seven Offices, from Vigils, at 5:30 a.m., to Compline, which ended just before 9:00 p.m., and in between baked seven loaves of bread with Bruno—another batch of a half-dozen pain de l’Abbaye Saint-Wandrille, plus the pain au levain miche that Bruno wanted to learn.

Bruno was surprised when he heard I was doing the sweet seven.

“I want to see what your life will be like as the baking monk,” I explained, another of the half lies I was becoming distressingly comfortable with.

Alone in the bakery for much of that day, Bruno and I discussed the future. Bruno thought he could bake three times a week, and he already had an assistant baker lined up. In my wildest dreams I couldn’t have anticipated such success. So perhaps I was feeling a little cocky and just a little too comfortable with my new best friend when I decided to have a little fun, and to let him in on a secret.

“That levain you love so much, I told you it’s twelve years old, no?”

“Oui.”

“That it’s from Alaska?”

“Oui.”

“That it was given to me by an atheist?”

Bruno froze and looked up, his face contorted in alarm.

Damn! I realized I had made a mistake, had misjudged, had forgotten where I was. What I thought was merely a little irony was a spiritual crisis for this young man. I could see the whole week going down the drain. How incredibly stupid of me! You don’t joke about religion with a monk!

“But he’s a very good man,” I added quickly, frantic to save the situation. “Very generous, very kind, and dedicated to bread. I think he would be happy to know that his levain made it here and that the abbey is baking bread again.”

Bruno relaxed a bit. “Make sure you tell him his levain is in an abbey,” he said, with a wry smile.

“Oh, I will. I will.”

Then Bruno let me in on a little secret of his own, one that, like mine, also threatened the resurrection of the abbey fournil. The acceptance of the bread had been almost universal, but not quite. Only one person in the abbey wasn’t happy with the bread. Unfortunately it was the abbot. He had trouble with his digestion and didn’t like this slightly darker, denser bread. He wanted a baguette.

“I’ll leave you the recipe,” I told Bruno, wishing I had another day to spend with him. “Baguettes are very easy and quick. In fact, you can make up a big batch once a week and freeze them in plastic bags. Your oven is still nice and warm at dinnertime if it’s a baking day, and you just put the baguette from the freezer into the oven. The abbot gets a fresh, warm loaf of white bread. When he breaks it open . . .” I mimed inhaling a loaf of bread, closing my eyes, and smiling. It was easier than continuing in French, which was exhausting. Bruno nodded and laughed. He got the idea. We both knew, if the abbot ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.

My final meal at the abbey featured moules frites, a real treat. Steamed mussels and, best of all, more of those great french fries. When the food was brought out, though, I immediately saw a problem. In the best of circumstances—say, quiche—it was a challenge to eat enough before the food was whisked away. How on earth would I ever eat enough labor-intensive baby mussels to fill my growling stomach? As I dug the little mollusks out with my dinner fork, growing more frustrated with each shell, I glanced at the long table across from me and realized I was doing it all wrong. The monks had solved this problem. Most used half a shell to scoop out the mussels, far more efficient than my attempts to pry them out with a fork, but a few dropped all niceties altogether and were eagerly slurping them right out of the shells. Now, that was really efficient.

I adopted the shell-scoop method, but what I really wanted was more of those frites. Alpine Hiker, the collar of his jacket almost covering his mouth, was still seated to my left, and the plate of frites was to his left, so near, yet so far. He failed to notice that my plate was empty (violating one of the unwritten rules of abbey dining—scratch that, it is written, in the Benedictine Rule, which clearly states that “the brothers shall serve the needs of one another, so no one needs ask for anything”). So, feeling rather at home now, and with little to lose, I swallowed hard, leaned over, and broke the rule of silence while the abbot burned rubber, whispering, “Frites, s’il vous plaît.” Lightning did not strike, no one hustled over to escort me out, and I got to enjoy more frites before it came time to lay the napkin ring on top of my by now well-soiled napkin. Right on cue the père hôtelier snatched it up, marched the length of the hall, and dropped it into the drawer with a clink.

After dinner, back in my room and tired from a day of baking and bowing, I was half-undressed when I happened to glance at the abbey schedule under the clear desk protector. I still had one more Office to attend. I quickly bundled up and headed to the church for Compline, the only Office I hadn’t been to yet. Operating in true monk fashion now, I was late, and the service had already started. Even for this church, it was dark, so dark I could hardly see where I was walking as I groped my way to the front pew. The only light glowed dimly from behind the altar. As my eyes adjusted, I could make out the monks in the choir, faces hidden deep inside their hoods—Compline being the only service during which they wore their cowls. It was a thoroughly spooky, medieval scene. And about to become spookier. As usual, my eyes drifted up to the life-size, gold crucifix hanging above the altar.

It was swaying.

I looked around but didn’t see a source of moving air. All the church doors were closed, and there were no electric fans in sight.

Yet, dear Mother of God, it was swaying! Almost imperceptibly, but back and forth ever so slightly, as if Christ were on a playground swing, not a cross. Or was it? Was I hallucinating? My eyes fixed on the cross, I tried to find a reference point behind it, a mark on the wall, so that I could determine whether the cross was swaying or I was, but the church was too dark. Disturbed, I needed something familiar to look at. I lowered my eyes to the choir and sought out Bruno, towering above the others. I could only make out his shadowy silhouette. His face hidden deep in the recesses of his hood, he was no longer my new best friend, his ear-to-ear grin lighting up the fournil. He was a stranger—unfamiliar, unfathomable, unapproachable. I shivered. I was back in the cold darkness of an earlier century.

It was time to go home.

Day 6:Pain Surprise

I woke to unexpected good news. My airline seat had been miraculously upgraded to business class. It looked to be a relaxing, easy trip home today. Before packing, though, I wanted to have breakfast and attend Lauds because, mindful of the selfish prayer I had uttered on my first day here, I had some unfinished business in church. A surprise treat awaited in the guest kitchen, where someone—presumably Bruno—had left half of the pain au levain miche we’d made the previous day, turned on its cut end, just as I had instructed on my first day. I smiled. When I turned the bread over, I was stunned at the beautiful, open crumb and the distinctly alveolar structure. This was my bread? I had never baked a loaf that looked like this.

I cut a slice, the knife leaving a yeasty fresh-bread aroma in its wake, and took a bite. The bread bit back, announcing its presence, filling my mouth, my mind, my soul, with a medley of flavors and textures. The crumb was firm but yielding, with suggestions of rye and whole wheat, and just enough levain. I let the bread play on my tongue, which delighted in finding and poking through the generous holes, the vacuum of life left from the wild yeast’s frenetic anaerobic activity as, fueled by the intense heat of the abbey oven, it furiously metabolized, leaving little contrails of gas until, at about 125 degrees Fahrenheit, it exhaled its last breath.

I bit into the dark brown crust, crackly but not overly hard, remarkably and naturally sweet and complex, the product of those Maillard reactions I’d been seeking. I took another bite. And another. And one more, just to be sure. This was the best bread I’d ever tasted.

I had baked the perfect loaf.

The quest was over. Yet I felt cheated—there was no one to celebrate with. In fact, I was four thousand miles away from anyone who could even appreciate what this meant. Then I remembered where I was and realized that this was an occasion for contemplation and reflection, not hugs, noisy shouts, and champagne. I did at least get the pealing of bells, although they were intended for Lauds, not me. I took a photograph of the bread and scurried to the church one last time.

Afterward I’d expected to meet only Bruno in the bakery, but a small farewell committee awaited me: Bruno and Philippe, of course, but also the prior, Jean-Charles, and the monk whose pocket knife had opened our first sack of flour what seemed like ages ago. I returned Bruno’s computer flash drive with all of the recipes on it, including one I’d written up the previous night for baguettes. Jean-Charles then made a short, gracious speech, thanking me, and presented me with a wrapped gift, “something for the eyes and something for the ears,” which turned out to be a gorgeous book of photographs of the abbey and a CD, recorded at Saint-Wandrille, of Gregorian chant.

In turn, I thanked Jean-Charles for this unforgettable experience, for allowing an American amateur baker to bake in their fournil and stay at this abbaye magnifique. Jean-Charles, embarrassed at my effusiveness (or perhaps my French—who knows what I really said), laughed. The festivities were cut short by some bad news: la grève had returned, with scattered strikes wreaking havoc with rail traffic into Paris, and trains running intermittently and off-schedule. They wanted to rush me to the station and an earlier train. I had ten minutes to pack.

Saying my good-byes quickly, I almost missed Bruno, my dear apprentice, shyly standing back. “Oh, Bruno!” I laughed, returning. He put out his hand. I shook it, then spontaneously embraced and kissed him, French-style, on each cheek. “Bon chance, mon ami,” I whispered in his ear.

I may have arrived by taxi, but I was leaving by chauffeur. Philippe drove me to the station in the abbey’s little car, winding past pastures and farms as I nervously glanced at my watch. Along the way, we reflected a bit on the week.

“Bread is important to the church as a symbol, no?” I said.

“Bread is the church,” Philippe said as we pulled into the train station nearly simultaneously with what would turn out to be the last train into Paris until evening, delivering me from the abbey in the same dramatic fashion in which I’d arrived.

With one last wave to Philippe, I ran aboard with my bags. As the train pulled out of the station, out of Normandy, out of the Middle Ages, I collapsed into a seat.

And wept.