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He travelled on foot, or mounted on an ass, sought every village and hamlet, to sow the seed of the Word of God, and where he could not go himself, he sent his disciples. Liguge, his monastery, became a centre of evangelisation to the country round. It was the first monastery planted on Gaulish soil. It was ruined by the Saracens in 732, and again by the Normans in 848. It was rebuilt in 1040.
But Liguge never had a worse enemy than one of its abbots, Arthur de Cosse. He made public confession of Calvinism; gave up the abbey to be pillaged, sold its lands for his own advantage, and did everything in his power to utterly ruin it. It owed its restoration to the care of Francois de Servier, Bishop of Bayonne. Liguge was, however, destroyed at the French Revolution.
Within the ravine, reached by a narrow goat-path, were caves in the cliffs, and into one of these Maximus retired in 434 and was speedily followed by other solitaries. The caves are still there, the faces walled up, but as at Liguge, and as at Marmoutier, and as at Brantome, so was it here.
"It is not with us that you ought to hear them; our choirs are too restricted, too weak to be able to raise the giant mass of those chants. You ought to go to the black monks of Solesmes or Ligugé if you wish to find the Gregorian melodies executed as they were in the Middle Ages. By the way, do you know in Paris, the Benedictine nuns in the Rue Monsieur?"
Defensor, the Bishop of Angers, signalised himself by his opposition. He absolutely refused to consecrate the poor dishevelled monk. Martin was then aged fifty-four. No sooner was he installed than he cast about him to establish on the banks of the Loire a monastic colony such as he had founded at Liguge.
I have always had an attraction towards that grand Order, which is, in fact, the intellectual Order of the Church. Therefore, when I was stronger and younger, I always went for my retreats to one of their monasteries, sometimes to the black monks of Solesmes, or of Ligugé, who have preserved the wise traditions of Saint Maurus, sometimes to the Cistercians, or the white monks of La Trappe."
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