Title : On the idea of ​​a community of solitary people - Pascal Quignard - book

Summary :

What makes Port Royal special to me is the exciting invention - even if it is difficult to imagine - of a community of solitary people.
The word "solitary," in the sense given to it by the Jansenists, is ultimately as beautiful as it is enigmatic. "Solitaires" designated men of civil society, aristocrats or wealthy bourgeois, who opted for the ways of the convent (its abstinence, its silence, its austerities, its vigils, its tasks, its reading) but who refused to bind themselves to it by vows. [...] They left the court to travel twenty kilometers and find themselves in a wood.
They were guided by no external rules, obeyed no one, jealous only of their withdrawal from the world. [.] They studied. They did not address anyone informally. Neither God, nor children, nor the poor, nor animals. They greeted the crows, admired their hard, black beaks, and stroked the cats.
In 1678 the last solitary people were forced to leave the Granges farm under penalty of imprisonment or burning at the stake. In 1711 Port Royal was razed on the orders of King Louis XIV so that "not one stone would remain upon another." Then, at the end of autumn, when the cold was very bitter and the ground was covered with snow, the graves were opened. Hungry dogs, crows, rooks, and field mice devoured what remained of flesh on the bones of the saints who had died. They devoured Racine. They devoured Monsieur Hamon, who had been his master.

In this intimate and tender text, Pascal Quignard writes—like a score—the mystery and commitment of the life of a solitary scholar. He sings the melodic line of The Last Kingdom, the uncrowned kings, and the ruins of Le Havre where he was born.

• EAN: 9782363080769
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