A quickening of stones

Pass any Gothic cathedral, and you will most likely find them watching you. Those grotesque carvings serve a purpose—they serve as downspouts to divert water from the roofs of buildings. Indeed, the word ‘gargoyle’ comes from the Old French gargole, gargoule, which means ‘throat.’ The name has also been linked to a French legend of a water-spouting dragon named Gargouille. Defeated by a bishop, the monster’s head was mounted on a church wall to ward off other evil spirits. In this issue’s story ‘A quickening of stones,’ Gregory Feeley examines the monstrous nature of gargoyles and the familiar desire to belong. We hope you enjoy it.

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In that first hour of life, human and gargoyle newborns look surprisingly similar. If you are going to venture a substitution, that is the time.

Loys was drunk the night that his child was born, and the midwife feared his rage, for he had badly wanted a son. His wife lay half-conscious and very pale, but she was neither haemorrhaging nor feverish, and the midwife, who had other business (there had been many infants conceived the previous June), left an hour later. With both parents stuporous and the two older children asleep, the gargoyle mother crept in and left her own newborn. What the gargoyles wanted with human babes has never been known.

Loys was astonished to wake and find his wife nursing an infant boy. She had not been told the babe was female; the midwife, who tended four births over the next day and a half, later supposed she had misremembered. Enough children died that winter that little was asked of those who had not.

Gargoyles tend to be plump but not those nursed on human milk, and Guarin was a sickly child. Withal he was a gargoyle, immune to human diseases, and the plague that carried away his mother and sister a few years later (his brother had died the year before) left him neglected but standing. Loys, crazed with rage and grief, deposited him with a cousin and left for the wars. His cousin, although unhappy at the prospect of another mouth to feed, had use for additional hands, for the plague had left untilled fields to work. He kept the boy for ten years and then took the gangly adolescent, whose presence threatened to disturb the portioning of lands (the years following the plague had been good for villeins who had engrossed their holdings), and deposited him with the Benedictines. The monks were prevailed upon to accept him by a gift and an assurance that the youth, though ugly and seemingly slow of wit, could work hard and ate surprisingly little.

And so Guarin became a postulant, albeit one whom few spoke to. Though not excluded from the normal course of instruction, he was not expected ever to be a scribe. Like most things, this left him untroubled.