"In pace, in idipsum, dormiam et requiescam…"
Jehan Prouvaire dutifully recited the hymn, then slid into bed. All around him, a dozen boys were doing the same, some with real fervor, the majority as if they were reading a passage from Euclid's Elements. Jehan sighed and tried to fall asleep.
If he was to be entirely honest with himself, it wasn't as if his own faith was wondrous lately. As a child, Jehan believed wholeheartedly. A student at the petit séminaire near Nantes since he was nine or ten, he had loved the entire affair. The beautiful hymns, the light filtering through the stained glass windows, the musky smell of candles, the echoes of his feet on the cold flagstones, the beautiful sentiment of the whole thing, the promises of love and peace and everlasting life for each and every one, the thunder and the glory, the punishment of the wicked and the reward of the good….
For five whole years, the seminaire had been his entire world. The strict monks became his fathers, the nuns in a neighboring convent were his absent mothers, and he had nearly forgotten that there had been something outside the ancient walls of the monastery. He loved the apple tree that grew in the garden and the butterflies that flitted around the rosemary bushes in the summer, he spent his whole recreation time gazing at the clouds on the blue sky above, yet he never wondered whether there was more of it outside. What he had was quite enough.
Half a year ago, just after his fifteenth birthday, Jehan had his first glimpse of the beyond when he fell ill with pneumonia. The local doctor gave up on him so they sent him home, apparently for the last time. Really, Jehan thought, they didn't give him enough credit. He could put up quite a fight when it was needed.
It was when he was convalescing, out in their park for the first time, that he discovered violets. He was just sitting on the warm grass, breathing in the saturated air, and when he looked down he saw them, three perfect bright little multi-petaled things, so bold yet timid peeking out of their leaves, so lovely and unique that their colour could only be described by their name.
And then, Jehan began to wonder why God didn't want these dainty little beauties all over the gardens of the world. Was it just to make one appreciate them more? But then, the monks never left the walls of the monastery. They would never see neither the violets nor the pine trees nor the sea nor that strange animal the books called a rhinoceros, they wouldn't witness even a fraction of the world's beauty and yet God wanted them to remain between four walls.
When he returned, Jehan saw the seminaire with new eyes. Only now did he notice that the sermons that once left him transported were the same every week. Only now did he realise that the bishop's hat was a little silly and the crosier too extravagant for a man of modesty. Only now did he begin to resent the monks forcing him to use the right hand to write instead of the left. And that eternal conflict of Catholic against Protestant now perplexed him - did it matter, after all, which way one crossed himself?
The rules and the rituals and the regulations began to frustrate him. Did it matter that he put a beautiful daisy into his button hole? Was it really a sin to read such eye-opening poetry? And wouldn't it be so much more fun if there really was a goddess in every blade of grass?
Jehan turned from one side to the other until it was almost midnight. Then, unable to bear it, he got up and sat at the wide windowsill, his nose against the glass, wishing he could find some answer, some sign…
Whatever there was outside the window, it was dark and cold and miserable and Prouvaire shivered in his thin nightgown, suddenly afraid of it, afraid of the unknown and the different and the consequences that would bring.
A glint of white caught his eyes.
Then, like in a fairytale, silently, without a moment's notice, soft flakes of white danced a leisurely waltz across the black ballroom floor. And instantly, Jehan knew that when his education at the seminaire was finished, he would write his father a passionate letter explaining everything that passed through his mind at that single moment.
Perhaps he wouldn't understand, perhaps he would throw him out into the dark, yet Jehan knew of another type of wonderful flower that could make it all right.
The snowdrop, shy yet intrepid, rising out of the dead ground and towards the light.
