Wednesday, May 27, 1992. 0830
The village of Saint-David-sur-Mer awoke this June morning like it did most others. As the sky paled to the same gray as the Mediterranean the cicadas began their rasping song; a counterpoint to the cries of the first waking gulls and the murmur of the waves on the freshly raked beaches. It was the finest time of year in the region, as the heat and hordes of the summer season had not yet turned this Provencal village into an overpopulated, gridlocked carnival. The produce in the market stalls would not be wilting in the heat, and you could still walk the beach barefoot most of the day without feeling like a torturer was working on the soles of your feet.
If you stood in the traffic circle whose spokes led consecutively east to the port, north up the winding road to the highway, northwest into the pedestrian area of downtown, or west along the beaches, you could smell the inviting scent of freshly baked bread wafting from the Boulangerie Saint David. It was said in town that God was the only thing awake earlier than the baker.
Certainly, as the village had supposedly been founded by a hermit priest in the eighth century, God was held in high esteem here. Even so, those who said that were not aware of the bustle in the town’s other major site, a monastery situated on the island a kilometre offshore. The island was known as Ile St David, though the monastery–for unknown reasons–had dropped “Saint” and was simply called “l’abbaye du Tour de David”—the abbey of the Tower of David. Many of the monks were up as early as the baker on a normal day, and this close to Pentecost there were reasons for even more activity. Pentecost, the celebration of the descent of the holy spirit, had a particular significance for those who lived within the walls of that pre-medieval complex.