Silence has become a rare currency. Noise everywhere leads us. Through her recent paths, our collaborator Monique Durand draws us into the rustling of silence, a balm for our bodies and minds in these noisy times, a common good to cherish and protect. Sixth of eight articles.
Abondance, Haute-Savoie, May 31. It is raining in the valley. It is snowing on the peaks. The peaks are fringed with angel hair, padded with mist, like clouds that would like to settle on the earth. How extraordinary the mountain is. At first sight for me something unknown, mysterious, in fact a little frightening. Masses of stones bristling with teeth and peaks. Chasms, abysses, passes, domes, crevices. A universe that is foreign to me, at once splendid and fearsome.
Why did you come to Abondance? Because of the silence of the mountains. And the silence of its 11th-century abbeye century. And then because of its name. A fabulous and delicious name, borne by the village and the valley where it nestles. Abondance is also a cheese, a little masterpiece made from raw milk matured on spruce boards, taken from the Abondance breed of cows. Historians are lost in conjecture about the origin of this name. German? Latin? Or even Celtic? The question remains unanswered.
I remain hung on these places of splendor where I stay, which are arranged in terraces, the greenery of the coniferous forests below, the tender green of the foothills of pastures and mountain pastures a little higher up, finally the dizzying peaks of the rocky heights. Kingdom of silence, but also of the dark night, the two often going hand in hand. Notable fact: in this region of France, the street lights are turned off for part of the night. The stars are given back to us.
The Notre-Dame d’Abondance Abbey, whose origins date back to 1080, is one of the oldest in Haute-Savoie. Although there have been no monks there since the French Revolution, the town beautifully displays its treasure and preserves its calm and contemplation. The bird orchestra resounds in the resonance box formed between the stone walls of the building. “With the abbey, we cultivate silence,” explains the mayor of the village of 1,500 inhabitants, Paul Girard Despraulex. “Moreover, silence is at the very origin of the place.”
Frescoes painted between 1400 and 1440 in the cloister illustrate daily life in this distant era. We see hams and sausages drying near the hearth and a cheese carrier. Charcuterie and cheese are still, in 2024, the centerpieces of Savoyard gastronomy. With a white wine that bears the name of Abymes, you couldn’t make it up!
Mountains, objects of a kind of devotion
It is no longer raining. The sun has just appeared. I am bathed in a bright light on my side of the valley, while the mountain slope facing me is already in shadow. Strangeness of the play of light specific to the mountains. Which has permeated the Alpine vocabulary and the naming of places. Thus, the north-facing slope is called ubac, and the south-facing slope, adret. Near Abondance, a hamlet is called Charmy l’Adroit and another, Charmy l’Envers.
“The monks, lamas, and monks have built their monasteries on the tops of mountains, where their prayers and meditations seem like ecstasies,” wrote the British-French mountaineer Henry Russell. “Worship seems natural on the summits,” he continued. The peaks are nearer the gods than the bottoms of the valleys.
So much has been written about mountains, which have always been the object of a kind of devotion. Up there, one no longer thinks quite as one does down there. “Listening to the silence of the mountains,” wrote the French adventurer Lionel Daudet, “has more to say than a gathering of philosophers.” Gaston Bachelard, a philosopher—with all due respect to Mr. Daudet—considered the desire for altitude to be a universal instinct. “The need to explore space, to go higher,” he argued, “is innate in the human mind.”
Our inner mountains
Already evening. From my balcony, I look out over the heights. The daylight has been out down below for a while now, but a pink and mauve brazier is still blazing up above. Strange to see the sun setting by climbing up the walls rather than descending onto the plain or the sea. Strange, unheard-of beauty.
“Mountains are geological events. But they are also products of human perception: they have been created by the imagination of the world over the centuries.” Robert Macfarlane is a British writer, born in 1976. In his eyes, the mountain is not only that of geography, but also that of an interpretation of our psyches and our cultures. Our inner mountains, in a way. “For centuries considered useless obstacles,” continues Macfarlane, “they are now among the most exquisite forms of the natural world.” And the most sought-after forms of the sublime.
The mountains are popular. In our region, Tourisme Gaspésie has been entrusted with the management of a program called Plan montagnes by the Ministry of Tourism. The goal: to develop a tourist offer focused on the mountains and over four seasons, because the heights have strong tourist potential. In short, the Gaspé coast, yes, but also the mountains in the heart of the peninsula.
Climbing sports are experiencing a real craze. Sport climbing is on the program for this summer’s Olympic Games in Paris. In Nepal, the Supreme Court has just ordered a limit on the number of permits granted to climb Everest, which peaks at 8,849 meters. (See adjacent comparison table.) The excessive human influx in recent years and the accumulation of waste are raising concerns for the environmental health of the roof of the world. Closer to home, rock and ice climbing is in vogue. On the North Shore, for example, the wall overlooking the sea at Baie des tous nus (sic), near Port-Cartier, is considered a jewel, accredited by the Fédération québécoise de la montagne et de l’escalade.
And then, stories of mountain expeditions always fascinate. Titles such as First of the rope, Annapurna, first 8000, The sky for a shroud continue to captivate readers of all stripes.
Another dimension of time
Strange thing of all: time passes faster in the mountains! In 2015, the magazine Quebec Science reported that “near the sea, time passes more slowly than at the top of a mountain.” For its part, the French magazine Science and Future pointed out in 2019 that a second is faster at altitude than on the plain, embodying Einstein’s theory of relativity which demonstrates that time and space are linked.
“Time has flown by like a shadow,” my old Monsieur Chavoutier, the only inhabitant of his village perched in the Vanoise massif, near Moutiers, in Savoie, had told me. I have never forgotten the man or his words. Nor have I forgotten one of the most striking fairy tales of my life, while I was perched in a neighboring hamlet: a full, pink moon rising over the great deserts of ice and the mauve chasms that night opened up over the Vanoise. The luminous disk rose between the ridges, diffusing such a soothing light and such silence that the monsters of stone and abysses all around had gently dozed off.
“It was one of the high points of my life.”* (1)
* 1. Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian. Words that the author puts into the mouth of the Emperor Hadrian, who one day climbed to the top of Etna, in Sicily.
The quotes about the mountain are taken from the collection Mountain. Anthology. The most beautiful pages from Antiquity to the present day by Frédéric Thiriez (Mont-Blanc editions, 2020).