The Beautiful Mystery

“Annie took the plunger. ‘I’ll think of you every time I use it. Though I think you’ll be the one using it most of the time. You are full of it, after all.’ “Too kind,” said Beauvoir, ducking his head in a small bow. She thrust the plunger forward, gently prodding him with the red rubber suction cup as though it was a rapier and she the swordsman. Beauvoir smiled and took a sip of his rich, aromatic café. So like Annie. Where other women might have pretended the ridiculous plunger was a wand, she pretended it was a sword. Of course, Beauvoir realized, he would never have given a toilet plunger to any other woman. Only Annie.”

This scene portrays Annie and Beauvoir in a domestic idyll, and the humor and warmth between them. Annie is comfortable teasing her partner and he is able to laugh at himself. Beauvoir’s loving admiration of her use of the plunger as a weapon leads him to reflect on her role in his life. In this moment, he is content in the present, free of the fear and anxiety that will come to define his work on the investigation ahead.

“At the very end of the bay a fortress stood, like a rock cut. Its steeple rose as though propelled from the earth, the result of some seismic event. Off to the sides were wings. Or arms. Open in benediction, or invitation. A harbor. A safe embrace in the wilderness. A deception. This was the near mythical monastery of Saint-Gilbert-Entre-les-Loups. The home of two dozen cloistered, contemplative monks. Who had built their abbey as far from civilization as they could get. It had taken hundreds of years for civilization to find them, but the silent monks had had the last word. Twenty-four men had stepped beyond the door. It had closed. And not another living soul had been admitted. Until today. Chief Inspector Gamache, Beauvoir and Captain Charbonneau were about to be let in. Their ticket was a dead man.”

The setting is crucial to understanding the work facing the characters. The monastery is a “seismic event” like an earthquake, leaving the landscape permanently altered—and perhaps, on a fault line that will collapse. The monastery is compared to many things, some of them contradictory: Gamache and Beauvoir will have to piece together how a place that seems like a “safe embrace” is also a “deception.” The paradoxical description continues in the phrase the “silent monks had the last word”—their silence is more powerful than speech. Penny emphasizes the abbey’s long years of isolation—visiting it is as grand an event as Charlie getting to Willie Wonka’s chocolate factory, as the word “ticket” suggests.