1
Outside the entrance of the Mariabronn cloister, whose rounded arch rested on slim double ns, a chestnut tree stood close to the road. It was a sweet chestnut, with a sturdy trunk and a full round that swayed gently in the wind, brought from Italy many years earlier by a monk who had made a pilgrimage to Rome. In the spring it waited until all the surrounding trees were green, and even the hazel and walnut trees were wearing ruddy foliage, before sprouting its own first leaves; then, during the shortest nights of the year, it drove the delicate white-green rays of its exotis out through tufts of leaves, filling the air with an admonishing and pu fragrance. In October, after the grape and apple harvests, the autumn wind shook the prickly chestnuts out of the trees burnished gold ; the cloister students would scramble and fight for the nuts, and Priory, who came from the south, roasted them in the firepla his room. The beautiful treetop—secret kin to the portals slender sandstone ns and the stone ors of the window vaults and pillars, loved by the Savoyards and Latins—swayed above the cloister entrance, a spicuous outsider in the eyes of the natives.
Geions of cloister boys passed beh the fn tree, carrying their writing tablets, chatting, laughing, ing, and squabbling, barefoot or shod acc to the season, a flower or a nut betweeeeth or a snowball in their fists. There were always newers; and the faces ged every few years, yet most of them resembled one another, if only for their blond and curly hair. Some stayed for life, being novices and monks; they had their hair shorn, donned habit and cture, read books, taught boys, grew old, died. Others after finishing their studies were taken home by their parents to castles, or to merts and artisans houses, and the out into the world and lived by their wits or their crafts. They returo the cloister occasionally as grown men, bringing their little sons to be taught by the priests, stood for a while smiling pensively at the chestnut tree, then vanished once more. The cells and halls of the cloister, betweehick round window vaults and the trim double ns of red stone, were filled with life, with teag, learning, administration, ruling; many kinds of arts and sces—the pious and worldly, the frivolous and somber—were pursued here, and were passed on from one geion to another. Books were written and annotated, systems ied, a scrolls collected, new scrolls illumihe faith of the people fostered, their credulity smiled upon. Erudition and piety, simplicity and ing, the wisdom of the testaments and the wisdom of the Greeks, white and black magic—a little of each flourished here; there was room enough for everything, room for meditation aance, fariousness and the good life. Oerest would usually outweigh another, predominating in accord with the personality of the incumbent abbot or the tendency of the day. At times the cloisters reputation for exorcism and demoing would attract visitors; at other times the cloister would be known for its fine music, or for a holy monk who had the power to heal and perform miracles, or for the pike soup and stag-liver pies served in the refectory. And among the throng of monks and pupils, whether pious or lukewarm, fasting or fat, who came and lived there and died, there would always be one or another who ecial, whom all loved or all feared, who seemed to be chosen, of whom people spoke long after his poraries had been fotten.
Even now the cloister of M