was almost back to where he started. He needed to speak to David and Amy. He needed to speak to David. Where were they? What was happening down there in southern France?
He remembered Tomasky’s sister. What she had said. A monastery in France.
In France? A monastery called Tourette.
Hunched forward, Simon typed.
The screen returned his answer at once.
The monastery of La Tourette.
Built between 1953–1960, at the instigation of Reverend Father Couturier of the Dominican Order of Lyon. Architect Charles Edouard Jeanneret-Gris (known as Le Corbusier).
Simon paused.
The Dominican Order?
He remembered what Professor Winyard had told him. The Dominicans. The Dogs of God. The burners of witches. The hammer of witches. The Malleus Malleficarum.
Now his pulse quickened, dramatically. This monastery was apparently near Lyon. Near Lyon?
David Martinez had told Simon about the map that had been owned by David’s father and handed on by David’s grandfather. On that map, as Simon recalled, was one curious outlier, one hand-drawn blue star that was way beyond the Basque region, way outside the purlieus of the Cagots. Wasn’t that near Lyon? Or was it Marseilles? It was Lyon, wasn’t it?
The mystery coiled and hissed.
He read on.
Le Corbusier, the websites told him, was the greatest architect of the last century. He was also renowned for his purity, his cleanliness of vision: utilizing the precept form follows function. Everything he did was deliberate. He was also known as an atheist, ‘therefore the commission to design this post-war monastery of La Tourette came as a surprise’.
But many things about this monastery were, it seemed, a surprise. Where the money came from – in impoverished post-war France. Why the Dominicans suddenly decided to construct a large priory when so many old and war-damaged buildings were in need of repair. Most of all, why the building had such a strange design.
As one book phrased it: Le Corb’s idea was that living in this building, ‘La Tourette’, should be, in itself, a penance. The daunting nature of the structure, the difficulty of living within it, should be part of the austerities of the monastic life.
These austerities, it seemed, were more than theoretical. The building was ‘largely finished’ in 1953. By 1955 ‘half the initial community of monks had mental disorders’. These included nervous breakdowns and major depressions, and they occurred precisely ‘because the building was so oppressive’. The jarring spaces and the brutalism of the design apparently tipped the denizens over the edge.
Another factor, one critic claimed, in the ‘outright unpleasantness’ of the building, was the acoustics. At night ‘every single sound in the building was amplified’. Every breath, every whisper, every snore. This was apparently ‘a function of the concrete fabric and the inherently echoic spaces’: in other words, the hostile nature of the building was a deliberate feature, designed to disorientate.
There was one more website. It was an architecture blog. A simple, humble blog, written by an architecture student from Brisbane. Who had apparently stayed at La Tourette a few summers back, after years of research on Le Corbusier.
The essay began with a short autobiographical note. And then launched into a blistering attack on the architect.
The basic allegation of the student was that Le Corbusier was a Nazi. During the war years, it seemed, Le Corbusier was very close to Pétain, the leader of the puppet French fascist regime of Vichy. Le Corbusier was also, the author alleged, a big fan of Hitler. The essay quoted one ‘notorious’ remark, when the architect said the Führer was ‘marvellous’.
The blog attempted a counterbalancing argument. Admitting that Le Corbusier was not alone, that many architects had fascist or Marxist sympathies: because architects are utopians. Architects want to change society. It doesn’t necessarily make them Nazis or communists or killers…
The blogpost drew to a close with another barb. It made the claim that Le Corbusier’s famous building in Marseilles, the Unite d’Habitation, was the most popular place to commit suicide in the South of France. And yet, the essay said, the monastery of La Tourette was even more oppressive – the only reason it didn’t see so many suicides was because visitors tended to flee after a few days. The monks had to stay, and suffered terribly, and yet their religious vocations prevented self murder.
And then the essayist asked the obvious question: Why? Why did the Dominicans mysteriously commission a man like Le Corbusier to build a mysterious structure like this?
Simon shut down the computer to listen to the silence in his study, and the major chord of logic in his mind.