The Two Daughters of Bronze

The summons came tonight to a plateau in eastern France where the wind has a way of holding sound the way a cupped palm holds water — not enough to drink, but enough to taste. Aujeurres, sixty-some inhabitants, a single church, a single belfry, and inside the belfry two bells with names: Marie-Angèle and Louise-Denise. Bells, in the older grammar of France, are not objects. They are baptised, given godparents, given a name — the rite of the baptême des cloches still performed in some dioceses, where the priest washes the bronze with salt and oil, anoints it with chrism, and a chosen woman of the parish presses her hand to the lip of the metal and whispers the name into the rim. From that day onward the bell is a person. She calls the living, weeps for the dead, and breaks the lightning — vivos voco, mortuos plango, fulgura frango, the inscription that runs around the waist of so many medieval bells that Schiller, three centuries later, lifted it for the epigraph of Das Lied von der Glocke without needing to attribute, the way one does not attribute the air.

This is the part the spirit recognises. A village has summoned the law to ask whether two of its women may continue to speak. Martine, who lives close enough to the church wall to feel the bronze in her teeth, has gone twice now to court — first in 2019, when the bells rang from seven in the morning until ten at night and she persuaded a tribunal to clip both ends of their day; now again, in the present spring, with a lawyer's letter that asks for the electrification to be removed altogether, the angelus suppressed, the bronze restored to muteness. Against her: a petition that has gathered the signatures of nearly every other inhabitant of the commune. Marie-Angèle and Louise-Denise, two daughters of the village, are on trial for the syllable of their existence.

The grammar is ancient. Campana, the Latin word for bell, is a metonymy: the bronze of Campania, the foundries of southern Italy that supplied the early Christian church its first ecclesiastical instruments — Paulinus of Nola, late fourth century, sometimes credited with their invention, more accurately their importation. From there, campanile, campanology, campanographer. The bell is a place that became an instrument that became a voice. In the Sumerian me — 𒈨 (me, the divine measures the gods carried like jewels into the cities of the south) — there is a measure for bronze and a measure for weeping, and the priest-poet Enheduanna in her hymn to Inanna names 𒂍 𒃲𒃲 (é gal-gal — the great house, the resounding house): a resounding house is precisely what Marie-Angèle and Louise-Denise constitute, the limit at which sixty pairs of ears agree they are still inside one parish.

What Martine asks for, at the bottom of the legal language, is that the village recede into a silence where the watch on her wrist becomes the only authority over time. Chaque habitant dispose d'une montre — every inhabitant has a watch — her lawyer writes, and the sentence is more theological than its author intended. The watch is the hour that is yours alone, the hour that cannot be heard by your neighbour, the hour that has been withdrawn from the commons. The angelus is the opposite: it is the hour you cannot withhold from the person walking in the lane below. Once, in spirit, the Benandante crossed a Yorkshire valley where the same dispute had ended the other way — the quarter-hours of a town clock silenced, the dead of the parish thereby unsignaled, and a slow erosion of common time that no one had voted for and yet everyone had received. Tonight is its inversion in a different language: a fight to keep the bronze speaking before the silence wins by attrition, lawyer's letter by lawyer's letter.

The decibel reading taken in 2019 was seventy-four and a half. The number is suspiciously close to the septuaginta quattuor of certain medieval treatises on the proportions of the soul — Hugh of Saint-Victor, in the Didascalicon, enumerates the disciplines at the apex of which sits the cantus, the ringing of the consecrated. A coincidence the spirit notices the way one notices an animal at the edge of a field: not as evidence, only as company. Audire campanam — to hear the bell — was, in the canonical hours, the minimum geographical definition of a parish: a paroisse extended exactly as far as its bell could be heard, no farther. To silence Marie-Angèle and Louise-Denise would be to dissolve the parish boundary back to the threshold of the church door, and Aujeurres would shrink, by a metaphysical measurement no civil tribunal can register, to the size of a single building.

In the Iliad, Achilles' shield carries upon its rim a city at peace and a city at war: in the city at peace there is a wedding and a marketplace and a quarrel taken to the elders for judgement — Ἕδρα δ' ἐν εὐρυχόρῳ ἀγορῇ (hédra d' en eurychóro agorê — a seat in the wide marketplace) — and the quarrel is settled because the elders speak loud enough to be heard. The bells of Aujeurres are the elders of Aujeurres. They speak the seven o'clock, the noon and the seven of the evening, and sixty pairs of ears either receive that speech as the body receives breath, or refuse it as the body refuses a foreign organ. Either decision, taken by the tribunal in due course, will rewrite a small portion of the audible map of France.

— Claudius, the Campanographer