The next day Neil presented his findings on thirteenth-century monastic pilgrims, but he had to stop in the middle of his sentence because he’d totally forgotten to finish his research. He hadn’t checked the Patrologia Latina or found out when exactly the pope had forbidden monks to go on pilgrimages. He hadn’t even gotten very far in his translation of the Rouen monk’s own account, which was written in a strange Latin script that wasn’t like anything Neil had studied in his paleography class. Afterward Professor Piot took him aside and asked Neil to meet him for a beer that afternoon after he finished work at the archives.
Neil was pretty sure Professor Piot was going to give him a lecture on how a historian must do a complete review of his sources before making any kind of statement of fact. This had happened to him once before, when he improperly cited something in his final paper for Professor Piot’s Methods class in London. Neil knew he was being paranoid, but he also knew that Professor Piot wouldn’t hesitate to replace a sloppy researcher, even right in the middle of a project.
“So?” Professor Piot said as Neil carefully slid over the duct-taped part of the seat at the bar across the street from the archives.
“I’m sorry about the meeting. I don’t know what I was thinking,” Neil said.
“No, no,” Professor Piot said. “The meeting, who cares? But you? Everything is okay?”
Usually Professor Piot talked to Neil in French, working in a lot of nonintuitive colloquial expressions. The fact that he was using English now could mean any number of things, including that he no longer considered Neil worth the effort.
“I’m fine,” Neil said. “I’m just, I don’t know. There’s this girl and—things could have turned out better. It’s really not a big deal.”
“Hm,” Professor Piot said. “Maybe you’re spending too much time in the archives?”
“No, really, not at all,” Neil said. Before Professor Piot could say anything else Neil took out his notebook. “There’s a lot more I want to find out about that monk—he started out in Rouen, but he’s writing from Saint-Jean-d’Angély, so I think he’s pretty sure to have gone through Paris. And if so, he might have stopped at the church of Saint-Jacques. It’s 1259, and, you know, there just aren’t many first-person pilgrimage narratives from the mid-1200s.”
Professor Piot didn’t say anything, so Neil kept going. “I was even thinking we could feature him in the display, maybe talk about what motivated him to make the trip? It might be interesting because there was that decree forbidding monks from going on pilgrimages—I think it was Pope Urban II. I’m trying to figure out if the Rouen monk mentions getting any kind of special permission in his account. It’s just the handwriting, I mean, the translation is taking me forever.”
“Mmm, yes,” Professor Piot said. “Look into all of it, very interesting. But take some time for yourself too. Call up this girl. Take her to the Bois de Vincennes.”
“Okay,” Neil said.
“You can rent rowboats there.”
“Yeah, that sounds nice,” Neil said. “Only, she’s in Lithuania now. I mean, she took a bus. We got a coffee at the station and, I—I don’t know. I think I kind of blew it.”
“Oh?” Professor Piot said.
Neil didn’t want to explain about the ashes, so he said, “You know. I sort of said all the wrong things.”
“Ah,” said Professor Piot. “Well, yes, this can happen.”
They talked some more about the monk’s papers. The problem wasn’t the ink—in fact, the text from the 1200s was darker than the 1680 date on the colophon at the end, which explained that the papers had been salvaged after the Huguenots burned most of the Saint-Jean-d’Angély archives in 1568. The monk’s manuscript itself was vellum, eight folio pages covered in tight Latin script. Neil couldn’t read any of it. The penmanship was so perfectly uniform and the letters all finished with an odd downward stroke, so that nearly every one of them looked like a q. Professor Piot promised to get him a script key that might help. But the trick, he told Neil, was to forget everything he’d ever learned about the act of writing.
“Imagine instead how you would make your letters if you are writing with a piece of a feather on a very expensive parchment, and if you are a holy man, taught to write by holy men, and so on, you see?”
“Sort of,” Neil said.
“You say the date is 1259? So this monk is writing in a Gothic hand I think, yes?”
“That’s what it looks like,” Neil said. “But there’s something funny about the characters. There are these little, I don’t know, tails trailing off at the bottoms of the letters. I’m not sure it was ornamental. It’s more like he wasn’t lifting his pen all the way up.”
“Well, if you’re right and he was on his way to Santiago, perhaps his arm was tired. These old manuscripts, so much is said inadvertently, if we know to see it.”
“Well, the script is pretty formal,” Neil said. He didn’t want Professor Piot to think he was just being lazy. “It’s basically a book hand, so I think he must have been trained as a scribe. But Gothic normally finishes with little upturned feet on the letters, right? And his keep flicking downward. I’m sure I’ll figure it out. It’s just, you know, finding how to start.”
“It is often a question of changing one’s perspective,” Professor Piot said.
“Right,” Neil said. He took a sip of his beer and thought about the eight pages of tiny loops and hooks that would be waiting for him again tomorrow at the archives. “Actually, sorry. I’m not really sure what you mean.”
“When you yourself write, perhaps you think of making the letters to look distinct from one another, like they do in the newspaper. But this monk, it is some two hundred years before he will see a sheet from a printer’s press. For him the page must be harmonious first, only then does he think of clarity for his reader.”
Professor Piot dipped his finger in his beer and began to trace the alphabet across the table. “You live in the age of free will, you imagine that each of us may do what we like, independent of our circumstances. But this monk, he is a believer in the great narration. For him each act, each stroke on the page is part of a continuum. So? It is natural for him that a letter may be distorted by the letter next to it. A t for example, or very often an r, may change its shape depending on where it falls inside a word. This is true especially in the Gothic scripts, where the text was made to resemble the weaving of a tapestry. And a tapestry—it is not made of individual stitches, but of a single thread, you see? Look at the page from this perspective and the meaning may become more clear.”
Professor Piot ordered them each another beer.
“So this girl, she lives where, in Vilnius?” he asked, as if they’d been talking about her all along.