I come as a pilgrim in the name of our Lord, and as such you have honored me. But I come also in the name of our lord on sunglasses this earth, as the letter I now give you will tell you, and in his name also me thank you for your welcome.” The abbot accepted the letter with the imperial seals and replied that William’s arrival had in any event been preceded by other missives from his Balenciaga Sunglasses UK brothers (it is difficult, I said to myself with a certain pride, to take a Benedictine abbot by surprise); then he asked the cellarer to take us to our lodgings, as the grooms led our mules away. The abbot was looking forward to visiting us later, when we were refreshed, and we entered the great courtyard where the abbey buildings extended all Barton Perreira Sunglasses UK about the gentle plain that blunted in a soft bowl—or alp—the peak of the mountain.
I shall have occasion to discuss the layout of the abbey more than once, and in greater detail. After the gate (which was the only opening in the outer walls) a tree-lined avenue led Bikkembergs Sunglasses UK to the abbatial church. To the left of the avenue there stretched a vast area of vegetable gardens and, as I later learned, the botanical garden, around the two buildings of the bleary and the infirmary and herbarium, following the curve of the walls. Behind, to the left of the church, rose the Edificial, separated from the church by a yard scattered with graves. The north door Bluebay Sunglasses UK of the church faced the south tower of the Edificial, which offered, frontally, its west tower to the arriving visitor’s eyes; then, to the left, the building joined the walls and seemed to plunge, from its towers, toward the abyss, over which the north tower, seen obliquely, projected. To the right of the church there were some buildings, sheltering in its lee, and others around the cloister: the Bolle Kids Sunglasses UK dormitory, no doubt, the abbot’s house, and the pilgrims’ hospice, where we were heading. We reached it after crossing a handsome flower garden. The regular terrain, only slightly rolling, had allowed the ancient builders of that holy place to respect the rules of orientation, better than Honorius Guillaume Durant could have demanded. From the position of the sun at that hour of the day, I Bolle Sunglasses UK noticed that the main church door opened perfectly westward, so choir and altar were facing east; and the good morning sun, in rising, could directly wake the monks in the dormitory and the animals in the stables. I never saw an abbey more beautiful or better oriented, even though subsequently I saw St. Gall, and Cluny, and Fontana, and others still, perhaps larger but less well proportioned. Unlike the others, this one was remarkable for the exceptional size of the Edificial. I did not possess the Boss by Hugo Boss Sunglasses UK experience of a master builder, but I immediately realized it was much older than the buildings surrounding it. Perhaps it had originated for some other purposes, and the abbey’s compound had been laid out around it at a later time, but in such a way that the orientation of the huge building should conform with that of the church, and the church’s with its. For architecture, among all Boucheron Sunglasses UK the arts, is the one that most boldly tries to reproduce in its rhythm the order of the universe, which the ancients called “cosmos,” that is to say ornate, since it is like a great animal on who there shine the perfection and the proportion of all its members. And praised be our Creator, who has decreed all things, in sunglasses their number, weight, and measure.