The impudent Chateaubriand feigns to discuss the credibility of this legend with philological scrupulousness. And he even proposes a plausible solution: that the beheading was carried out not simply because of the meanness of those who wanted to save on a coffin but for reasons of anatomical study. The conclusion, however, is clear: “All poets have accepted Larroque’s version, all clergy have rejected it.”⁷⁷² Here the waters divide: for his very last book, which was supposed to cast him as a penitent, Chateaubriand reserved the most irreverent revelation: he would stand, in this case, and forever, on the side of those who believe more in legend than in religion, and of those for whom religion itself is, most of all, a legend. At last he was admitting that he was, first and foremost, a writer. Before saying farewell, he deposited the head of Madame de Montbazon in the cell of the Trappist reformer. This time it was indeed his last piece of bric-à-brac. Then he closed up his cupboards.

“What have you been doing over these forty years?”

The lips of the Trappist opened for an instant to break the silence: “Annos aeternos in mente habui—I had in my mind the years of eternity.”

M. DE SAINT-LOUIS: I have always been a soldier. I still had my regiment, which served under Turenne, when I first went to La Trappe: it was in my part of the country, smothered by hills and ponds, in the old forest of Le Perche. Large solitary leaves slid over the water like on a pavement of lead. I had never come across such an absence of life, except at the Escorial. I had been told that Rancé, our Monsieur de La Trappe, was under threat from enemies of his reform that paid honor to silence. I offered him my services to defend him. He didn’t refuse, he didn’t accept, he didn’t even smile. Further time went by before I sold my regiment to the eldest son of Villacerf and went back to Rancé to ask to stay at La Trappe. He gave me lodging in a place he’d had built outside the wall of the abbey. One day he spoke the words that would determine my conduct for over thirty years: “Make a rule for yourself, as mild as you wish, provided you are faithful to it.” Once he also told me, with a hint of the gentleman who had loved Madame de Montbazon, the most beautiful woman of our time and the most shameless in vice, that I, with my long experience of the world, already knew the humiliations that awaited me: for the people next to whom we live in the midst of the world are the instruments chosen by God to humiliate us, so that in one single instant of that life one often suffers the mortifications that a monk encounters over the years. I despaired for a long time, in my lodging at the margins of the true rule. But one day, in that silence, I saw the world pass by in a gust of wind. It was light and insubstantial, empty. The rule had done its work. And then I was happy once more with my weapons, in a desolate garrison at the ends of the earth, hearing again the song of soldiers and tumble of casks, waiting for the noise to end.