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Born in 1715 in a fairy-tale castle built on piles on an island in the
Indre River in the beautiful Loire Valley of central France, the man who
would become known as the Abbé Abdiqué began a lifetime
that spanned the entire Age of Enlightenment -- the historical period
which at its end included both the American and the French Revolutions.
France was the most densely populated country in Europe, enjoying eighty
years of domestic peace and economic prosperity. A new philosophical spirit
emerged in salons, cafés and clubs which led to the gradual erosion of
monarchical authority.
A trend toward light-heartedness and the weakening of traditional moral
codes became more pronounced and were to flourish during the reign of
Louis XV. A widespread taste for elegance, comfort and beautiful objects
even infiltrated the ranks of the bourgeoisie. 
Had he been given the opportunity, the future Abbé may have been
the most ideally suited member of his family to participate as a nobleman
in the Age of Enlightenment, but his overly pious father, widowed at his
youngest son's birth, required that at least one of his three sons enter
the Church. The eldest, a parsimonious and self-seeking aristocrat of
the type most hated and feared by the under class, would, as first-born,
fall heir to the property and the title of Count. The middle brother,
being thus deprived of means, stole a fortune in family silver and gold
and fled the country to a new French colony continents away.
Only the youngest boy was left, age twelve, an unruly child not given
to obedience and on whom rested the burden of his mother's death. His
father turned him over to a monastic order, hoping its strict discipline
would tame the boy's wild heart. The child himself believed it a punishment
for his mother's death. Dragged by monks into a coach, he shouted that
he would return if it took a lifetime and that the castle at Azay-le-Rideau
would one day belong to him. Then the coach sped him away to an uncertain
destiny.
He passed the next fifteen years sequestered in a monastery in the South
of France. The fiery rage of his boyhood gradually cooled during long
periods of enforced confinement meant to break his will, but serving only
to allow him time for contemplation of his inner nature. At the age of
twenty-five, by which time he had fully resigned himself to his soul's
imprisonment behind monastery walls, his life took a dramatic turn leading
to a trial which would result in his summary expulsion from the monastic
order. Beau Geste ("Noble Gesture"), first of the Confessions,
tells the story of why the young monk was forced out into the world to
become an unattached ecclesiastical abbé, or itinerant priest.
Until the discovery of his Confessions nearly two centuries after
his death, almost nothing was known of him except that he became celebrated
at the height of the French Revolution toward the end of his life. He
was called again to trial before a religious tribunal, but this time on
a much larger scale than that of his youth. The Pope at Rome dispatched
to Paris a warrant for his arrest, charged with unspeakable acts too dreadful
to name.
It was at a time when the Church itself trembled in fear for its own
life in France. Priests and nuns and monks had been murdered all over
the country, yet the Abbé walked fearlessly among the population,
being called "the people's abbé." He refused even to address the
charges against him until brought before his accusers. 
At the time of the Abbé's arrest in November of 1792, the abdicated
King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette, whom the Abbé and others
had tried in vain to spirit out of France to safety the year before, were
both awaiting trials which would lead to their deaths on the guillotine
(the king's execution shown at left). Spies in the pay of the Bishop of
Paris pointed out the Abbé near the Temple, an old monastery converted
to a prison, where the royal family (the king, the queen, and their two
surviving children) were incarcerated in conditions of abominable filth.
A small army of churchmen with muskets and drawn swords pushed through
the hostile masses, arrested him and took him for trial at Notre Dame,
the national cathedral of France.
When confronted with charges his judges still claimed too unspeakable
to pronounce, the Abbé drew himself up proudly to utter these words
in stentorian tones: "I answer only to the citizens of Paris, for the
Church is now finished in France. I have given Frenchmen my love. I have
nursed them and healed them in ways you know not of. I denounce you as
enemies of the nation! I renounce all association with your Pope and your
Church! As Louis has abdicated his throne in favor of the people, so do
I abdicate my priesthood in the name of my country!"
With a great flourish, the tall, distinguished, silver-haired Abbé
swept aside his voluminous black cape in a dazzling turn toward the crowd
and lifted it like the widespread wings of an eagle preparing to soar
into the sky. The crowd fell back in awe of his splendor. Even the judges
were agape. 
At that instant, a blond youth of 18, named Bertrand, leapt to the high
statue of a saint and shouted, "It is true! He is a man of the people!
He is no more subject to the tyranny of the Church than are you! I have
followed him for days around Paris. I have seen with my own eyes his holy
work among the people. I have seen how they love him!" With one hand holding
him to the statue and the other placed over his heart, the speaker continued,
"Pardon me, my dear Abbé, but I love you, too!"
For one brief moment, their eyes locked in a spiritual embrace while the
energy of love shot between them like a flame.
As if drawn by a magnet, the young man leapt from the statue to kneel
before the Abbé. The accused pulled him up to his side, enfolding
him tenderly in the cape. Then, the Abbé, in a voice even mightier
than before, shouted three times: "Vive la France! Vive la France! Vive
la France!" The assembled masses picked up the cry and rushed forward
as one man to lift both aloft to carry them triumphantly into the street
before Notre Dame. The judges, terrified by the menacing crowd that remained,
fled unceremoniously into private passages in the Cathedral, praising
God on the run for having spared their own unworthy lives.
It was for this reason that the Abbé, by now celebrated as the
Abdicated Abbé, was allowed to take possession of his family castle,
which had stood vacant since his brother the Count and his entire remaining
family except for the fugitive brother, of whom no one had ever heard
again, had already been executed on the guillotine for their myriad crimes
against the peasant class. 
It was for this reason also that he was able to die in peace seven years
later at Azay-le-Rideau, a beautiful silverfox of 84. He had spent his
last years writing his Confessions, nursed and cherished by the
young man who had been with him at Notre Dame and in whose arms he breathed
his last breath in a farewell kiss. Knowing his time had come, his final
entries in the Confessions are a celebration of his fulfilling
romance with Bertrand, the Last Love of his life, who was only
24 when the Abbé died.
The following afternoon, after the morning burial of the Abbé,
Bertrand placed the Confessions in a strongbox and set it deep
within a stone wall in the castle at Azay-le-Rideau. That evening, he
disappeared. Some said he jumped from a high window in a peppercorn tower
of the castle and drowned in the waters of the Indre. His body was never
found, perhaps trapped among the pilings on which the castle is built.
The townsmen had known of his special relationship with the Abbé
and loved him for loving the great man whom they all loved as well. They
were indeed produced by a libertine century which took the sexual nature
of mankind in stride. A legend grew that the two lovers -- foxhunter and
silverfox -- were often seen walking arm-in-arm in the castle garden for
the next century or more, while ghostly moonlight shimmered on the snowy
hair of the Abbé Abdiqué.
In 1987, Ben Boxer spent a month at Chenonceau touring the peerless
chateaux of the Loire Valley. He visited the garden at nearby Azay-le-Rideau
(ah-ZAY-luh-ree-DOH) on several moonlit nights, but, unhappily, saw no
phantasmal lovers. He did, however, come away with an indelible vision
of the romantic castle implanted forever in his mind.
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