book follows the author’s memories from Cambrai to Douai, where his early love of English letters leads to a fascination with the English Benedictines: their secluded college, Pugin’s chapel, solemn Gregorian vespers, a humane and demanding educational ethos, and finally the blow of expulsion under anticlerical laws. It then shifts to a quiet visit at La Trappe, where a sparse meal and a long, delicate conversation with an elderly hospitaller reveal theological anxieties, love of language, and the human texture of cloistered life, before a brief tour of cloister, dormitory, brewery, and cemetery. The narrative next turns to the Roussillon: train and coach into the Tet valley, the Catalan cadence of speech, the fortified charm of Villefranche (its church, streets, and a failed 17th‑century plot), and the small, beautiful Cadi valley running toward Vernet and the Canigou. (This is an automatically generated summary.)