The day after Baudet’s visit to the abbey, Brother Ferrand was summoned to Henri’s study. A young novice had given him the message and he knew at once the reason – Delbert had wasted no time reporting his “offence” to the abbey’s superior. He knocked on the door of the study, situated next to the small Notre Dame chapel and the cloisters, and waited. He knocked a second time, a little harder. The old man’s hearing was not as sharp as it had once been. At length, there came a faint voice: “Enter.”
Henri was sitting in his usual armchair beside a roaring fire, a heavy woollen blanket drawn across his knees. A tall angular man with a tonsured head and long straggly grey beard, nothing about him set him apart from any ordinary monk in the abbey. He looked up from the open Bible on his lap, sm
