If I could keep but one memory of the Abbey of Pontlevoy, it would be this:
I’ve never been a Thoreau. Nature tends to get into my nose and make me sneeze. But the fey beauty of the gardens and grounds of the Abbey of Pontlevoy bespelled me.
 |
On days when I felt that I couldn’t face another second of work (and there were many such days), I’d find myself tromping down the whorled staircase, pushing through the heavy oak doors, and emerging into the linden grove. The red-fingered branches of the linden trees spidered weirdly above a ground knobby with rabbit-warrens and hillocks of moss.
But it was over the brickabrack bridge, past the ruining dovecote and over the torpid ripples of the local stream, where I’d find myself drawn most often. I called it Queen Mab’s Pathway – the rambling walk cut into the woods beyond the grounds, barred by tall gates of iron and flanked by ivy-robed stone pillars.
The fence was too high and unstable to climb, but I found that if you placed your foot against the bank and grabbed the pillars just so, you could swing yourself across the river and onto the other bank.
 |
It was a wood – just a mess of overgrown shrub – but it always had that air of fairy-tale around it, like the brambles of Sleeping Beauty’s castle or the rose gardens of Beauty’s Beast. I half-believed that if I listened hard enough, if I looked closely enough, if I just was for a moment, nothing more …
I loved to lose myself, enveloped in the woods, cradled by the silence, breathing in the air of the country that birthed Joan of Arc and Eleanor of Aquitane … but, all too soon, I would have to turn back, shake off the cloak of sunlight and shadow, and return to work.
| « La Samaritaine | Centre Belge de la Bande Dessinée » |