Maine-et-Loire, France - November 1793
In the previous chapter I showed you an idea entering a mind in Oxford in 1317. In this chapter I show you what that idea produced when it reached its fullest institutional expression, four hundred and seventy-six years later, in the western provinces of France.
Thomas of Hexham asked: and if the consent is withdrawn? Ockham said: then we are in the realm of politics. By 1793 the realm of politics had decided, by decree of the National Convention, that Christianity was a superstition incompatible with republican virtue, that the Church was an instrument of oppression, that the clergy were enemies of the people, and that the public exercise of religion was forbidden.
The decree did not extinguish the thing it was meant to extinguish. This is the record of why.
- T.M., 1961
What follows is drawn from two sources: a parish register from Saint-Laurent-sur-Sèvre, recovered from the cellar of a farmhouse in 1802 and deposited with the diocesan archive in Luçon; and a deposition taken in 1796 from one Marie-Anne Forestier, widow, of the commune of Mauléon, in which she described the events of November and December 1793 in her household. The deposition was taken as part of a broader inquiry into the activities of nonjuring clergy during the Terror and was subsequently sealed. It was unsealed in 1821 and has remained in the diocesan archive since.
The priest's name was Bregeon. His given name does not appear in any source I have found, which I take as evidence that even in 1796, three years after the worst of it, Marie-Anne Forestier was not certain that the worst was entirely over.
The priest arrived at the Forestier farmhouse on the fourteenth of November, 1793, at approximately ten o'clock in the evening, in the rain.
Marie-Anne Forestier was forty-one years old. Her husband had died of fever the previous spring, leaving her the farm and three children between the ages of eight and fifteen and a set of debts that she was managing by selling the smaller of the two orchards and making economies elsewhere. She was not a woman given to sentiment or to what she would have called foolishness, by which she meant any action whose cost was not clearly worth its outcome. She had agreed, six weeks earlier, to allow the priest to use her barn for Mass on Sundays, not out of particular piety but because the priest had asked her directly and she had been unable to think of a reason to refuse that seemed adequate to the refusal, and because her neighbor Bertrand, whose opinion she respected, had told her that the priest was a serious man who would not bring trouble to a house that was careful.
She had been careful. The Sunday Masses were attended by no more than twelve people at a time, by arrangement, and the arrangements were changed each week, and no one who came to the barn on Sunday came by the road in front of the house.
The priest was serious, as Bertrand had said. He was fifty-three years old, which meant he had been ordained in 1762 and had been a priest for thirty-one years, which meant that for more than half his priesthood he had been doing what he was doing now - saying Mass in barns and kitchens and cellars, in the presence of people who came by the back way and left separately and said nothing about it afterward. He was not a heroic man in the sense of a man who had chosen suffering in the name of a principle. He was a man who continued to do what he had been ordained to do because he did not know what else to do and did not believe that the decree of the National Convention changed what he had been ordained to do, and who found, having thought about it as carefully as he was capable of thinking, that the simplest course was to continue.
He came to the farmhouse on the fourteenth of November because he had nowhere else to go. The house where he had been staying for the previous three weeks had been searched that afternoon by a delegation from the local committee of public safety - not systematically, not with any specific intelligence, but as part of the periodic sweeps that the committees were conducting through the countryside, looking for nonjuring clergy and for the objects of superstition that the decree had forbidden. He had not been there when they came. He had been at the Bertrand farm administering last rites to old Bertrand's mother, who had been dying for two weeks and who died, as it happened, at four o'clock that afternoon, at which point the priest had said the prayers and covered her and walked two kilometers in the rain to the Forestier farm because Bertrand had told him to go there if he ever needed to go somewhere quickly.
Marie-Anne opened the back door, looked at him for a moment, and let him in.
He stayed for six weeks.
During those six weeks he said Mass eleven times - once in the barn, twice in the cellar, and eight times at the kitchen table with the shutters closed and the door locked and whoever was present that week crowded around the table on whatever stools and chairs and overturned crates could be assembled. The largest congregation was nine people. The smallest was three - Marie-Anne herself, her eldest daughter, and old Bertrand, who had come through the fields in the dark because his mother had died without the viaticum and he was, as he put it to Marie-Anne afterward, not comfortable with the arithmetic of it.
The ciborium was kept on the kitchen shelf between the salt box and a jar of dried herbs. This was Marie-Anne's arrangement, not the priest's. The priest had suggested the cellar, which seemed to her unnecessarily dramatic, and had then suggested the barn, which seemed to her careless, and she had looked at the shelf and made the decision that the shelf was the right place because it was in plain sight and anyone who came into the kitchen looking for a ciborium would be looking for something that did not look like something on a kitchen shelf.
On the eighth of December, which was the feast of the Immaculate Conception and which fell that year on a Saturday, a delegation from the committee came to the farm.
There were three of them. They were polite, in the careful way of men who had the authority to be otherwise and had decided, for reasons of their own, to use it gently today. They said they had received a report - they did not say from whom - that the Forestier farm had been used for counter-revolutionary religious activity. They asked to look around.
Marie-Anne said yes, of course, and opened the kitchen door and stepped aside.
The delegation looked in the kitchen. They looked at the table, the chairs, the fireplace, the shelves. One of them picked up the salt box. Another opened the jar of dried herbs and smelled it. The third looked at the ciborium on the shelf between them, which was a plain brass cup with a lid, and did not pick it up because Marie-Anne had, at the moment they came through the door, placed a pot of soup on the shelf beside it, and the shelf was the shelf where she kept things, and the pot of soup was a pot of soup that had been on the fire, and there was nothing remarkable about any of it.
They thanked her and left.
The priest left the Forestier farm on the twenty-first of December, moving on to another arrangement in a different commune, carrying with him the parish register and the ciborium and three consecrated hosts wrapped in linen, which was all he was carrying when he arrived and all he took when he left.
Marie-Anne watched him go from the back door and then went inside and took the soup pot off the shelf and put it back on the fire.
She made no record of any of this. The record I have is the deposition of 1796, in which she described what had happened with the flat precision of a woman who had decided, having thought about it, that what she had done was ordinary and that the only remarkable thing about it was that the committee man had not picked up the ciborium, which she attributed to the soup pot and to the fact that he was looking for something remarkable and had not thought to look at what was simply there.
I do not know what happened to the priest. His name - only his surname - appears in two other depositions from the same period, both describing Sunday Masses in barns, and then does not appear again. This is the record's way of saying that he continued, or that he stopped, and that we do not know which.
What I know is the ciborium. It appears in the diocesan archive's inventory of 1802, recovered with the parish register from the cellar of the farmhouse, cataloged as: one ciborium, plain brass, provenance unknown. The archivist noted that it appeared to have been in regular use.
It had.
The custody holds in kitchens, not only in chapels. It holds because a woman in her forties looked at a shelf and made a decision about where to put a soup pot, and the decision was the right one, and she did not think of it afterward as anything other than a decision about where to put a soup pot.
The record survives because ordinary people do ordinary things with ordinary care, at the right moment, without quite understanding that the right moment is what it is.
- T.M., 1961