The Beautiful Mystery

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2012

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Chapter 3

Chapters 4-6

Chapters 7-10

Chapters 11-14

Chapters 15-17

Chapters 18-21

Chapters 22-25

Chapters 26-29

Chapters 30-34

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Chapters 15-17Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 15 Summary

The abbot is disconcerted when Gamache asks what skills besides his singing Frère Luc was recruited for. Gamache also notes that the abbot is protective of his secretary, who seems defensive.

The map the abbot gives Gamache is dated 1634, the year of the order’s foundation, and it is written on the same vellum parchment as the text the prior died clutching. However, though the paper may be ancient, the ink is new. Gamache decides that the love of music in the abbey is like an addiction: “if religion was the opiate of the masses, what did that make chants?” (144).

The abbot explains the difference between a standard chant and the prior’s scrap of parchment: the notation on the scrap defied all the traditional rules by including harmonies and instruments. The abbot asks his secretary to make Gamache a copy, and Frère Simon’s complies with a “sour look” (146).

Chapter 16 Summary

Gamache is in the abbot’s personal garden. He wonders about the prior’s last moments and when and how the killer decided to strike. The abbot’s alibi is that he was in the basement investigating the geothermal heating system—alone because the abbey engineer is overly chatty. Before Frère Simon found the body, he was tending to his beloved chickens.

Gamache, after patient probing, gets the abbot to admit the meeting he was supposed to have with the prior was not routine—it would have been about the possibility of another recording. The abbot thinks to himself that the recordings are a “travesty” that ruined everything (155).

Beauvoir is mystified that Frère Antoine, a man his own age, would choose such a strange life. Frère Antoine dismisses the idea he would be replaced as the soloist as firmly as Frère Luc believes it. Frère Antoine explains that all newer monks are assigned the small room nearest the door, as a reminder that they can still exit if they have misinterpreted their calling. Frère Luc still seems unable to commit to the new community (158).

The abbot tells Gamache that Frère Antoine is slated to become the new choir director. Gamache is surprised, and the abbot is offended by the idea that his monastery contains political factions. The abbot insists that once the investigation ends, the commitment to silence will return. There will be no grand entry into the world, no concert tour. Beauvoir’s interrogation shows the opposite: Antoine believes the abbot envied and resented Frère Matthieu’s genius and would have conceded to in the end.

The sound of a plane interrupts: It is the helicopter bringing a senior leader from the Sûreté, “another creature entirely—smelling blood” (164).

Chapter 17 Summary

The helicopter has brought Chief Superintendent Sylvain Francoeur, Gamache’s direct superior and longtime adversary in the Québec police force. Francoeur is very self-assured: “He appeared to be completely at home, composed and comfortable. While most men would look slightly ridiculous arriving in the wilderness in a fine suit and tie, this man made it seem perfectly natural. Even enviable” (166). Francoeur immediately tries to get the abbot on his side by assuring him that he has more power than Gamache does to protect the monastery from the press. Gamache is curious about Francoeur’s motives.

Gamache and Beauvoir compare their interview notes, and Beauvoir wonders if the abbot promoted Frère Antoine as a political maneuver to placate his opponents. Gamache considers whether the killer may have thought his murder would lead to a greater good. During their rift over church sovereignty (the king wanted secular courts to punish church crimes), King Henry II ostensibly condemned Thomas à Becket to death by asking, “Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?” (170)—words that some subordinates interpreted literally. Beauvoir wonders if the same thing happened on behalf of the abbot.

Gamache posits that most of the monks are afraid of losing a place they love, especially when the alternative is a return to a world they have no place in, a sentiment Beauvoir identifies with as he recalls his own struggles with addiction. During Mass, Gamache admires St. Gilbert’s ability to defy authority for his beliefs and watches Francoeur.

Chapters 15-17 Analysis

Gamache must rely on historical analogies to understand the monks, men so unlike himself. He likens their fixation on the chants to an addiction, even quoting Karl Marx’s famous assertion that “religion is the opiate of the masses.” Marx’s line was meant to indicate that religion prevented the working classes from fully understanding their economic exploitation and rising up against it, but Gamache uses the analogy to suggest that the chants might be so compelling that the monks would kill for them. The chants cannot be harmless if they are a motive for murder—and Beauvoir argues they are perhaps all the more concerning for their inscrutability, since he believes that it is dangerous to come between a person and their deeply held truths.

Until now, the monks and the investigators have had opposite views of the world outside the monastery: While the abbot and the brothers see the world as an intrusion they must hide from, Gamache and Beauvoir use their connections to their loved ones as a safety valve. Now, however, Francoeur’s arrival realigns these formerly opposing perspectives. Just as the abbot panics that the helicopter is bringing reporters, Gamache experiences the unwelcome incursion of a professional enemy, and Beauvoir finds his anxiety triggering thoughts of his addiction—negative external forces they have been protected from within the monastery walls.

Francoeur is familiar to readers from previous novels in the series. He was close to officers whose corruption Gamache exposed, and he opposed Gamache’s efforts to thwart a terrorist attack. Now that Gamache is professionally vulnerable after a warehouse raid took the life of one of his protégés and other would-be-rescuers. Gamache, unlike the abbot, has higher authorities to answer to. He looks to the past for aid: Like St. Gilbert and Thomas à Becket, he must defend his moral convictions. This aligns Francoeur with Henry II, a secular authority who believes the ends justify the means. The struggle between the two men, and Beauvoir’s struggle to maintain his sobriety, will shape the rest of the investigation.