The Beautiful Mystery

Frère Simon has translated the paper that was found with the prior. The words are nonsense and have no relation to any known sacred text, and Frère Simon wonders if it is “a mockery” (236). Gamache decides the manuscript still matters, and asks Frère Simon to explain the musical notation to him. To Gamache’s astonishment, Simon sings it, and its beauty is striking. The lyrics, though not coherent, fit the music, as if the composer were in search of a lyrical collaborator. Frère Simon finds the idea of the prior composing something so sacrilegious impossible to believe, and Gamache wonders if he argued with his killer over it. He asks Frère Simon if he found Frère Mathieu before he died and heard dead man’s final words.

Beauvoir approaches the prior’s office, the space Francoeur has taken for his own. He finds Francoeur concealing something on a laptop screen. Beauvoir asks what Francoeur meant by his compliment earlier, and Francoeur tells him that his departmental reputation is: “Armand Gamache’s puppy. They call you his bitch, because while you growl and sometimes bite, they don’t think you actually have balls” (243). Pointing to a recent failure, when Gamache arrested a friend and Beauvoir later discovered the real killer, Francoeur tells Beauvoir, “I came to save you. From him” (246), intimating that Gamache is planning to replace Beauvoir.

Frère Simon at first denies concealing finding the prior alive, but after Gamache tells him the medical report says the prior lived after his attack, and that in his experience dying people are unflinchingly honest as they face mortality, Frère Simon finally admits that he did hear the prior’s last word: “homo”—which is either the Latin word for “man” or the prior confessing a sexual sin. Gamache is skeptical—his own last words when he thought he was dying were his wife’s name. To Gamache’s astonishment, Frère Simon tells him the monks keep no record of their past histories or their former monastic homes—the past becomes irrelevant once a man arrives at Saint-Gilbert. While Frère Simon has no knowledge of the abbey’s structural integrity problems, he does confess to having hidden the murder weapon: “It was the old iron rod, used for hundreds of years to gain admittance to the abbot’s most private rooms. And used, yesterday, to crush the skull of the prior of Saint-Gilbert-Entre-les-Loups” (256).

Beauvoir, furious, races out to the abbey grounds and physically pummels Francoeur because of what he found on the laptop: The video of the warehouse raid and the shooting. Beauvoir accuses Francoeur leaking it. Beauvoir has been consumed by the identity of the leaker, as the viral video compounded his mental health struggles and his addiction. He promised Gamache to stop watching it as part of his recovery. Francoeur denies being the leak, and accuses Gamache of doing so in a quest for fame. He reminds Beauvoir that Gamache left him in the factory: “You’ll never be his friend. You’ll never be anything other than a convenient subordinate. He has you over to his home, treats you like a son. But then he leaves you to die” (266). Francoeur stuns Beauvoir by guessing that Beauvoir is now with Annie.