A scorching hot day. Anna and Jag were leaving in the evening to go back to Paris. They are flying back to the States on Monday. We decided to visit the abbey of Fontevraud early in the morning while it was still relatively cool.
When we got there I noticed a sign for a new annual pass that they are offering. The usual price of entry is 7.90 euro but for 12 euro we can go anytime we like for a whole year. What a deal!
I hadn’t been inside the abbey in more than five years. We headed straight for the kitchens, the beehive structure with the fish scale roof. Inside the octagonal building there are eight fireplaces and chimneys – an indication of the numbers of people that the abbey served every day.
We walked around, soaking in everything: the huge refractory or dining hall, the cloistered gardens, the main church with the graves of Henry and Elinor, Richard and Isabelle. The abbey is vast, the biggest abbey in France. When you are inside the walls you definitely get the sense of what it was like for a young women to enter and never leave, to pass her whole life in that world of women and God, cut off from the world of temptation and the Devil outside the walls.
At the mortuary chapel I read the account of how a dying nun was laid out on a bed of ashes to remind her that she came from dust and would return to dust after her soul went to Heaven. This account solved a problem that I had been trying to resolve in my own mind – why does the mortuary chapel that Karen bought have a chimney? The oven and chimney are used to create the ashes that the dead body is laid out on before burial, a critical part of the faith of the Plantagenets and the people who lived at that time in this part of France.
There is an exhibition at the abbey, “Heros et Merveilles”, that gives a good account of what life was like for most people in the Middle Ages.
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