Pilrig wrote:
From the word Amor (Love) of the marchioness he went readily to the word Mort (Death), then to Mort Epee (Dead Sword), the authentic sword of the last knights after they found Excalibur.
He stared wide-eyed at the tomb of Father Gelis, renovated on this 17th January 2006, proof that researchers have a heart and a certain talent for their quest for the Grail. He started to believe in humankind. A cold and dry wind titillated his cheeks as he dozed in front of the town hall of old Coustaussa, the guardian of the secrets of the Haut-Razes.
He was woken up by a quarrel between the watchmen of the Parchments: he smiled mischeviously thinking that the past was indeed for tomorrow.
Advance, advance on the path of the Custode, master blackmailers, authors of hope sheets, intoxicated by the little tricks of the Devil and his laments for past times."
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I presume Chaumeil is writing about himself here ? I suspect it is an analogy. And town hall of old Coustauassa, is there such a building ? or more likely considering the size of that village, somebody's garden shed ?!
To the priest of Coustaussa….The Custode
By de Cherisey i think?
In the primary sense, the custode is a heavy hanging of crimson and gold which one draws around the royal bed. The evening of the marriage a torch hung at the top of the bed lights it like a scene of theatre. In the same manner that the red and yellow sil gives by fusion the alabaster and the rock crystal, the custode becomes a transparent muslin. The courtiers who make a circle in the shadow see the royal marriage and note that there is blood on the sheet. A derived meaning presents the custode as a curtain drawn in front of the altar at the moment of elevation, and also behind the altar when the penitents will be stripped there with the invitation of Jesus on the cross to go down again naked towards the baptismal font.
In the second sense, one will call custode the container of the sacred bread. This coffer was presented very early in the form of a model of the sacred building, a small church in the large one. As one passed from the Roman to the Gothic the small windows of the custode increased and the opaque custode became the transparent monstrance which starting
from 14th century does not have the any more shape of a church but of the sun presented to the faithful at the time of the Corpus Christi. Custode then takes the more precise direction of a gold-ringed crystal monocle. Here passes the glance of God and the faithful one does not know any more very well if he must contemplate the sunlight or lower the eyes by
fear of the dazzling. The eyelid bends down like black goggles, like a filter of night. Custode became also this tent with eight sides, an octopus with the eight tentacles, which recovers the ciborium.
The name of custode is more familiar to us when it indicates the case, the sheath, the sleeve of a naked sword. When the knight finishes this daemon of the guardian he puts his weapon there. By limitation the custode came from there to indicate the small shield which separates the blade from the hand.
A limited enough use of the word custode indicates the guardian of a treasure or a tradition. Saint Antony of Padua “agent of the secret letters” was thus custode of the Limousin at the time that he lived in France. Cresambene, at the end of the 17th century, having based the Academy of Arcadians on a college of fourteen shepherds was the treasurer-custode. Custode is a word which shows how the secrets are kept by their obviousness better than in the darkness.