“It has lots of silly verses,” Stefan added. “You dance, I dance, we all dance. The girls dance, the boys dance. The dolls dance, the soldiers dance. Frogs. Gorillas.”
“Frogs and gorillas? My mom never mentioned those,” Miranda said. “She just sang the first verse over and over. No wonder it put me to sleep—it was so boring! Matter of fact, I could use a nap right now.” She faked a yawn.
Halfway along the bridge was a small stone building, ancient and showing its age badly. The front of the building partially blocked the bridge; the back, though, jutted above the river, supported by an extension of one of the bridge pilings. “Nice fishing shack,” I observed.
“The chapel of Saint Bénézet,” said Stefan.
“Saint who?”
“Bénézet,” said Miranda. “The kid that built the bridge.”
“This bridge?” She nodded. “It was built by a kid?”
“Yep. Maybe a teenager. Hard to be sure. ‘A young shepherd boy’ is how most of the stories put it. I read up on it after Stefan brought me here.” Suddenly I was less excited about the bridge, now that I knew I was retracing an outing they’d made together. But Miranda went on. “The kid’s minding his flock, minding his business, and suddenly he has a vision, or an angel swoops down, or some such. God tells him to build a bridge over the Rh?ne, right here. So Bénézet goes and relays this message to the bishop of Avignon. The bishop says, ‘Yeah, sure, kid—’ ”
“Wait,” I interrupted. “Really? The bishop says, ‘Yeah, sure, kid’?”
She cut her eyes at me. “What, you’re thinking the bishop says, ‘Forsooth, callow youth, thou pullest my leg’?”
“Okay, smarty, I guess ‘Yeah, sure, kid’ is more like it.”
“Anyhow,” she resumed. “So then the bishop says—and I’m paraphrasing, mind you—‘Okay, junior, if you want me to believe that God sent you, you gotta prove it. See that huge stone over there? Thirty men can’t lift that stone. If you can, I’ll believe you; if you can’t, go back to the farm and quit wasting my time.’ So the kid—”
“Young Bénézet?”
“Our boy Benny. Benny goes over and hoists it with his pinky—”
“With his pinky?”
She rolled her eyes in exasperation. “So maybe he uses both pinkies. The point, Dr. Hairsplitter, is that Benny hoists the giant rock, plunks it in the river, and voilà, the bridge building has commenced. Seven years later, while the bridge is still going up, Benny goes down—dies, at age twenty-five, plus or minus.”
“Of overwork?”
She shrugged. “Overwork. Underfeeding. A surfeit of saintliness. Who knows? The historical record is vague on cause of death.”
“But that’s why the bridge only goes halfway across the river.”
“Not at all. When Bénézet dies, it’s far enough along that other, lesser mortals can finish it. But maybe their workmanship wasn’t as miraculous as his, because after four or five centuries, most of the arches collapsed during floods and wars. Anyhow. Bénézet’s body was entombed in this sweet little chapel they built on the bridge to commemorate him.”
“Is it still here?”
“Duh. If you keep walking another twenty feet, you’ll smack into it.”
“Not the chapel, smart-ass, the body. Is it still here in the chapel?”
“Non,” said Stefan, who had kept quiet for what was—for him—a remarkably long time. “During the French Revolution it was moved to a convent outside the city to protect it.”
I couldn’t resist a joke, though I feared it would trigger another round of pedantry. “Even corpses got guillotined during the Revolution?”
“The revolutionaries considered religion an institution of tyranny,” he began, and my fears were confirmed. “All over France, they destroyed churches, religious statues, other symbols of oppression.”
God save us from oppressors, I prayed. And from pedants.
“But,” Miranda interrupted, snatching back the reins of the narrative, “here’s some trivia you’ll find interesting. He was an Incorruptible.”
“Excuse me?”
“Bénézet. He was an Incorruptible.” She stopped and nodded at the stone chapel, whose stout wooden door faced the bridge. “Bénézet’s body, lying here for centuries, did not decompose. Leading one of the popes, in the sixteen hundreds, to proclaim Bénézet one of the Incorruptibles.”