Yeshuotl the theologian looked up and said to Monsieur Godeau: “If you really wish to regulate your life and judge history, you should at least know how God spends his days. He has kept a certain place in heaven for himself, four cubits by four, and there he studies the Talmud for the first three hours of the day. From the fourth to the seventh hour, God sits and judges the world. But as he sees that the world is guilty, he gets up from the seat of Justice and goes to sit on the throne of Mercy. During the third part of the day, He sits there and feeds the world, from the rhinoceros to the fleas. During the fourth part of the day, God sits and plays with the Leviathan.”

Around Port-Royal

A great somber sky, a deep, revolving, unknown universe, where at times, in certain places and at certain moments, life is brought together, generated, renewed; and man molders in an instant and dies with a thousand insects, on this grassy island that rises and falls in the marsh. Looking up to this sky was the abbey of Port-Royal, built in a hollow of scrubland, where the water sleeps. There, three leagues from Versailles, it was already wilderness.

This cloister, which was bare and weed-strewn in its early days, extended the perspective of arches by mirrors over the passage of time—this cloister that was both school and Cour de Miracles, where recalcitrant Ossianic foundlings, fearsome reapers of tears, haughty executioners of the Reaction and their twins, souffleurs of the Revolution, were educated—this cloister … How could it be that from the reform of a convent for young girls, in whose vicinity certain rugged hermits gathered and surveyed the wilderness with a spyglass, how could it happen that ungovernable events could unfurl from such a domestic ball of thread, a slender fiber produced from the maceration of lace, hair shirts, jute, and palm leaves?