The Slow Breath of Stone: A Romanesque Love Story

The next town I came to was called Cajarc, an old market village around an open square, which had been strung with coloured lights. I found a parking space in front of a café that also proved to be a hotel; inside, the owner-chef and his family were eating dinner before customers arrived. His wife jumped up when I walked in, letting the ladle she’d been gripping fall with a plop, handle first, into a big white tureen. There was a long moment in which no one seemed to move, or breathe, the air still as art. In the time it took to swallow, the impression vanished. The woman retrieved her spoon with a good-natured shrug, wiped the soup off her hand, and showed me to a room at the back.

A stairway led to seven second-storey rooms opening off an exterior corridor. She presented one and left me with a key, and I went back to the car to retrieve my suitcase. When I returned I’d forgotten which of the identical, numberless doors was mine. The fourth one, I thought, so I tried the key; it fitted, and I walked in. I had a moment’s deep dread – the rucksack I’d left was gone – before I decided, calmly, that this was simply the wrong room. I tried the fifth door, which also opened to my key but which was also empty; then the sixth, with the same result. With growing concern of several kinds I marched back to the third door, certain my key would work, and threw it open: inside a startled man in a wide-brimmed hat was placing a large bamboo staff against the wall. A different rucksack entirely, bound with a large scallop shell attached to a cord, sat on the bed. I apologized in embarrassment-addled French, and tried the second door, certain it couldn’t possibly be mine. It was.

All night long – a fluorescent light had glared directly outside the frosted glass door to my room, preventing measurable sleep – I amused myself with game-show scenarios presented by my skeleton key. Behind door number one lay this! Behind door number two lay that! Behind door number three stood – a pilgrim!

We met again at breakfast. ‘Bonjour, Madame,’ he greeted me. ‘Je suis un pèlerin.’ So you are, I thought.

He’d been driven to conversation with me because the locals – a fearsome pack of middle-aged men drinking strong coffee and beer at the bar, grunting to one another from their gullets – had confiscated the newspaper he had been reading while he’d gone to pick up his staff, which had fallen with a clatter. In between bites of local peach jam spread on a baguette, he told me he was walking the entire pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela. My eyes widened in honour. ‘In pieces, Madame,’ he specified. ‘I shall get no medal for speed. Last fall I walked from Le Puy en Velay to Conques in ten days. Now, this spring, I am walking from Conques to Moissac. I give my feet a rest in summer and winter. There are whole peach-halves in this confiture,’ he concluded, fishing one out of the pot with a spoon.

I wished him well. I had guessed he was a pilgrim on account of his outfit – a wide-brimmed hat and staff have been pilgrimage accoutrements since the Middle Ages – and because Cajarc lies on one of the branches of the great pilgrimage way. There are four principal routes of spiritual drainage across France, all of which converge in the Pyrenees. One route begins in Paris and travels through Tours and Bordeaux; another starts at Vézelay in Burgundy – home of my Pig-Snouted Ethiopians – and continues through Limoges and Périgueux; a third takes the southernmost route, starting in Arles and winding through Montpellier and Toulouse; and the last one, called the Via Podiensis, sets out where my friend began, at Le Puy en Velay in the Massif Central, and passes through Espalion, Conques, Figeac, Cajarc, Cahors and Moissac. The Via Podiensis is also known as the GR 65, ‘GR’ standing for Grande Randonnée, one of France’s meticulously well-marked, long-distance hiking paths, a map of which the Cajarc pilgrim had spread on his breakfast table in lieu of the missing newspaper.

So many well-trodden routes converging on one place suggest a very great destination at the end, and so Compostela was, and is yet. The allure began when the Apostle James, or in Spanish, Santiago, appeared to Charlemagne in a dream in which he revealed the location of his body, inconveniently buried in infidel-occupied Spain. Charlemagne tried to beat back the Moors, but failed; after Galicia was freed nearly two centuries later, pilgrims began flocking to James’s tomb in Compostela. There were other pilgrimage options for medieval travellers as well, Jerusalem being the holiest, but also the farthest; Rome was next in line of importance, with the bodies of two saints, Peter and Paul; after that, Compostela was the only other site in Europe to boast an entire Apostle (other churches had bits and pieces in reliquaries, but they didn’t match the glamour of an intact corpse whose owner had actually walked with Christ).

The Compostela pilgrimage was enthusiastically promoted by French abbots, who welcomed the revenue and prestige brought by masses of pilgrims travelling through French territory, not to mention the opportunity to shift attention from Rome. Its popularity also drew upon proto-tourist attractions along the route: the new Romanesque churches going up in southern France, with their beautiful, terrifying, bizarre sculpture – some abbeys also had powerful relics of their own – and the battlefield of Roncevalles in the Pyrenees, where Charlemagne’s nephew, the folk-hero Roland, had died in battle. By the 1130s the pilgrimage was established enough to have its own ‘guidebook’, which offered opinionated advice on just about everything.

‘The Navarese bark like dogs’, complained the anonymous, Francophile author. Kingsley Porter wrote that from The Pilgrim’s Guide, which is actually a portion of a manuscript called the Callistine Codex, ‘We learn the characteristics of various nations – which peoples were kindly, which treacherous, which dirty; where the wine was good, and where the food was bad; where rivers could be forded; and where inns or hospices afforded shelter for the night.’

For most Western Europeans the pilgrimage took a year to undertake. Set out at the end of winter, travel in spring, arrive in summer, retrace your steps in autumn, return with the first snow. If, of course, you returned at all (if you didn’t show up within one year, the compulsory will made out for you by your parish priest was promptly acted upon). The pilgrimage was attractive to all social classes – rich people eventually paid others to walk for them – but for the most part Compostela pilgrims were poor peasants and serfs, usually elderly and therefore expendable to their lords. These people walked an average of fifteen miles a day, often in hopes of curing pre-existing ailments. They were endemically cheated by toll-takers and moneychangers, beset by bandits, and at the mercy of river ferrymen who sometimes purposely sank boats in order to loot their drowned customers. They suffered from heat stroke on unshaded Spanish roads (French roads were purposely lined with trees on one side, to provide comfort). And they were trapped in late spring blizzards crossing the Pyrenees – an event I knew a thing or two about, having crept in my car from France to Andorra through the Pas de la Casa in April. The two-lane road had writhed in an agony of curves as snow slicked the surface and low clouds clamped visibility down to about ten feet. It was perhaps more treacherous in a car than on foot – accidents littered the shoulders – but unlike foot-travellers, at least I could turn up the heat.

Despite the litany of hazards, pilgrims went to Compostela. They went in droves, ushering in a boom in the medieval shoemaker’s trade, their only protection a deterrent that sprang from the same fountainhead as their own incentive: fear of eternal damnation. It was a grievous sin to harm one of St James’s faithful, who were identified by costume and an insignia – the scallop shell – which has been the symbol of the Compostela pilgrimage since the eleventh century.

The pilgrimage to Santiago, to the home of St James, was above all an expression of optimism. In a world that recognized no causality other than God’s or the Devil’s constant meddling – illness was the work of the latter, good luck of the former – one’s future in both life and death depended on the beneficence of otherworldly forces. St James had the power to intercede on a supplicant’s behalf, especially that of a pilgrim who had given a year of his life and crossed the better part of a continent to honour the saint in his resting place. James was powerful; he had been Christ’s disciple; he was a reminder that all was not lost. Through his bones shone a chink of light within the theological shadow of near-certain damnation. The pilgrimage ultimately attested to the tenacity of human hope.

The path of the GR 65 ruts the emotional landscape of the Rouergue and Quercy. It’s not on my Michelin map, but the chemin falls like a latitude line across people’s lives. It has been a constant for over a thousand years, and thus a directional anchor. ‘Oh, you’re looking for the dolmen? Go to the pilgrimage road, and turn left.’ Or, ‘You can buy tweezers in the Pharmacie de l’Europe. It’s the one near the bridge, on the Road.’

The Chemin de St Jacques is also an attitude line; it is impossible not to perceive its presence – the westbound direction laden with spiritual urgency, the eastbound with equal measures of relief and disappointment – as a yardstick for one’s own journeys. Everyone who travels in the territory must at some point wonder how a pilgrimage differs from a mere journey. Must one be travelling on the soul’s business, to address God, or can a pilgrimage be more prosaic? Does spiritual business necessarily involve God?

I was rather unproductively pondering these questions as I approached the village of Conques, in the Rouergue; specifically, I had been mulling over the idea of an incomplete pilgrimage, which is how I fancied my travels. I was setting out to visit Romanesque sites on a branch of the pilgrimage road in southwest France, but defying the historical and spiritual tug of its destination, in Spain. Few roads lead nowhere, and this one had one of the most famous endpoints in European history. Even the stars of the Rouergat sky formed directional arrows, reproaching me for my stillness (it is said that the Milky Way leads to Compostela, the ‘Starry Field’ in the west). What did it mean to be more concerned with a segment of the chemin than its conclusion? A wilful choice of body over soul?

I put my hand to the south door of the abbey and it drew me in more than opened to applied pressure. I lost my balance and stumbled inside, into the bear hug of a large priest who was on his way out into the night. His white cassock glowed against the black space beyond. We both spoke in wine-scented whispers. Yes, I was welcome to come in, the abbey was open. But attention! The paving stones were uneven.

I stepped inside: the great building was dissolving into echoes of darkness. At first greys, masonry greys, hovered at eye level. As they rose upwards they grew less substantial, optical memories more than illuminated stones, until the visual echoes faded entirely and the majestic barrel vault of Conques Abbey ceased to be, and for me, not knowing if the stars were out yet or not, became heaven itself. Soon the foundations of the massive pillars and the exterior walls disappeared too. I was inside an idea of a Romanesque church, nothing more concrete than that, but that idea was strong, and it was enough. I felt the muscle of architecture flex around me, repeating in pleats of rounded arches down the side aisles – and there was a quiet undertone of pleading in that repetition, too – the twelfth-century message of God’s tough love.

I sat down on one of the curiously tiny, rush-back chairs that filled the nave. The night-time had brought singularity back to the abbey. I could smell the church far better than I could see it – it smelled like the rock in my pocket, only damper – and that limy scent defined its space as unique, something different from the green smell of spring drifting on the night-mists outside. By contrast, daylight had revealed not only Conques Abbey itself, but its endless repetition throughout the village. Despite being a ‘Grand Site de France’ – advertised as such by banners on nearby auto-routes – Conques village has remained wondrously small and self-contained, coiled into deep, wooded countryside halfway down the steep declivity that separates the Causse de Comtal from the Dourdou Valley. There is not a modern bone in the village’s medieval body, and yet one of the first things that struck me upon leaving my car and walking into town was wave upon wave of photographic reproduction. I’ve rarely seen such a plural place.

So many images of a single spot! Granted the almost shocking magnetism of the abbey – imagine Big Ben, or the Empire State Building, surrounded by a rural hamlet – and yet still the proliferation of postcards overwhelms. There are old ones, new ones, black-and-white and in colour; postcards in matte finish, shiny finish, printed on textured paper. Postcards of parts of the abbey that are off-limits to visitors, like the one I’d bought of a mermaid clasping her forked tail in each hand, carved onto a capital in the upper gallery. To purchase for 35 centimes an image never intended to be seen from the ground seemed, somehow, a violation of the abbey’s privacy. But then photography heedlessly violates the privacy of time past as well as space delimited, for I had approached the great western façade of Conques, surrounded by its little apron of a cobbled place, with a fixed, black-and-white moment from the morning of 18 August 1920 clasped in my hand.

Unlike Lucy’s, my moment – afternoon, 20 April 2002 – came with distracting colour and sound. An announcer commented on a women’s gymnastics championship on a television set in the Salon de Thé opposite the abbey. ‘I am just ringing to say I am standing in front of the church,’ repeated a blond woman, loudly and carefully, into her mobile. Beside her an Irish setter was hopelessly knotted up in her leash in a patch of shade. Above us all rose the massive, no-nonsense towers of the abbey, braided ‘round above and below by the shimmering roofs of the village’ (Conques is so steep that windows of two-storey houses one block from the church overlook its nave). Hannah Green, in her memoir Little Saint, likened the roofs to dragonfly wings. The standard comparison is fish scales. The traditional Rouergat lauzes, thin, round roof-tiles, here cut from silvery schist and overlapped very much like gills – reminded me of braided leather, arresting my eye again and again with intricate fugues of texture.

I thought of Lucy and Kingsley in Vézelay in 1919, the summer before they had visited Conques. They had fallen in love with the village that clustered around the great Burgundian abbey just as I was becoming smitten with Conques. Lucy had written in her journal that their travelling companion, Bernard Berenson, had fallen asleep in the car on the way back to Paris, and she and Kingsley had been free to fantasize. They’d decided that if their taxes kept going up at home they would return to Vézelay to live in one of the little houses that framed the abbey, and have a garden in front and a view at the back.

I smiled at the familiar daydream, and began to commence on one of my own. But there was the setter to untangle, and a photo to be taken of three Brazilians from Belo Horizonte. After that, my moment in Conques merged with Lucy’s, and I forgot everything but the great, scarcely weathered tympanum before me, to which traces of coloured paint still cling. A Conquois friend of Hannah Green’s called the tympanum ‘one of the four wonders of the world’ (she neglected to name the other three). Just a glance reveals its importance. The early twelfth-century abbey is predominantly built of buttery yellow limestone (salted butter, to be exact; the interior is the paler shade of whipped sweet butter), with rosy mortar and mottled grey schist in-fill. The tympanum, however, and the pierres de tailles – the fitted stones – of the surrounding portal are pure, creamy, ochre-coloured sandstone. The very best stuff the quarry had to offer.

The eye notes this and marks it; only when you move in closer do you realize that the golden stones were set there as a lure, to lead you to one of the most magnificent spectacles of Romanesque art. And it is a spectacle, like a parade or a circus, with a multitude of incidents, intimate and grand, frightening and beatific, some grimly funny, mushrooming throughout every inch of the sculpted half-moon. The theme is the Last Judgement. At the church of Perse in Espalion the great reckoning was compactly and clumsily depicted in shorthand – just a reference to ignite whatever associations already existed in the viewer’s mind. Here the theme has become art, supplying visual images of its own, supplanting others. Imagine that a director of greatness, of real vision and inspiration, working with a troupe of earnest amateurs, has set out to perform skits from the Second Coming of Christ – not to convey the idea of judgement, but to narrate it. The result is the tympanum of Conques.

Back at university my professor had thought that the little sculpted actors, the saints and the saved, the devils and damned, had a ‘folk-art quality’; my guidebook found them ‘endearingly anecdotal’. What I think they both meant is that the carvings are not types, representing ideas, but individuals acting out very particular rewards and punishments. This is an impolitic thing to say, but then travel books permit the occasional lapse into sentimentality: they are heart-achingly sweet. Even the devils look like nice guys in masks, trying to be mean. An abbot takes the hand of Charlemagne, depicted as an old, stooped, shuffling king, and kindly leads him into heaven. And it was a compassionate heart that imagined the justice of the damned – nowhere else but the tympanum of Conques would a rabbit be given the opportunity to roast the man who had hunted him, on a spit, eternally, in Hell.

Ste Foy, to whom Conques Abbey is dedicated, kneels under a miniature eave on the left-hand side of the composition, blessed quite literally by the hand of God. Foy, the ‘little saint’ of Hannah Green’s book, was beaten, broiled, and decapitated at the age of twelve, in the year 303, for refusing to pay lip service to the Roman pantheon. She was canonized a century later. Her remains lay at Agen, near Toulouse, for over four hundred years, until she was either stolen, lent, or borrowed (the facts are unclear) and brought to Conques, where a piece of her skull was set into a portable reliquary statue around the year 900. Foy had already been working miracles, but she seemed to like the reliquary, with its golden face – probably originally that of a Celtic god – and feverishly granted prayers as fast as they came in, rendering the abbey not only a stop on the Via Podiensis, but a pilgrimage destination in itself.

Of all the incidents on the busy tympanum, Lucy typically found and focused on the moment of greatest tension. It is a tension her black-and-white photograph enhances, making the weary graininess of the thousand-year-old carvings into a kind of elemental cognate to the fraught scene (more appropriate to its mood than the cosy sunlight that pampered the stone when I saw it). On the lowest tier of the tympanum, right in the centre, just beneath an angel and devil tensely weighing souls, is a divide; on one side angels lead little souls into what looks like a coat closet, but is actually the door of heaven. On the other, devils cast the damned into the mouth of hell – here depicted as a kind of toothy fish – which emerges from another, grimmer, door. The angel and devil closest to the centre glare at each other across the gulf that separates good and evil. The devil, with sumo-wrestler proportions, punk-spiked hair, and an enormous bludgeon, is the only character on the tympanum blatantly to overwhelm his allotted niche. The others, encased in their cartoon-strip boxes, tell their stories; this devil, however, poses an active threat, as if at any moment he may free himself from the stone and add your story to his.

The angel at whom he stares grabs a little soul by the hand and pulls him out of no-man’s-land – the grey area between good and evil, from which we only see him partially emerging – it’s that close a save – before the devil can get his claws on him. The angel’s eyes hold a dare: just try it, he says to the bludgeon-wielding devil. And yet he hurries the little soul onward toward heaven, just to be safe.

This is it, Romanesque art at its most anxiously appealing. This moment is acted on what Hannah Green calls ‘the rim of time’. The everlasting is about to begin; mortality is about to end. Yet it is a quintessentially human moment, full of fear of the awful arbitrariness of fate. Far from ceasing to be, time plays a role – the angel snatched that soul from the void just in the nick of it – and so does luck.

Most art makes a statement. Romanesque sculpture poses a question: will we be saved? The only answer it musters is a shrug. Maybe. Probably not. There is uncertainty and death, hard work and hunger in this life, and judgement in the next. No wonder its quiet, secular moments, the corbels of clasping couples, fiddlers, dancers, and domestic beasts, all found their places on religious buildings. Each is a touching bid to secure a chip of immortality – the cheap kind found in stone – for the otherwise brief pleasures of life. Despite its fixation with the everlasting, the Romanesque point of view ultimately hails from the conundrum of the human condition. This is one of the reasons I love it so much: it dares to reveal not the nobility, but the vulnerability of life in the face of death.

Lights came on without warning, like a shock of lightning. I had slipped into an over-fed daze sitting in the stony darkness of the nave. Before entering the abbey I’d found a very pink garret room in the Auberge St Jacques, just steps away, and had eaten dinner there too in the over-lit dining room. The young waiter had inquired if I wanted a salade aux gésiers. I’d asked what it was.

‘Une salade avec pommes et poulet, Madame,’ is what I heard.

A salad avec pommes de poulets is what came. Not a salad with apples and chicken at all, but a salad with apples of the chicken – fried gizzards, in other words. Ah, I’d thought, undone by a crafty French preposition. Not the first time, nor the last. What I’d actually ordered was a Salade Caussenarde, a speciality of the region, made up of mixed greens, local walnuts, and either crumbled feta or Roquefort cheese. Mine came with Roquefort – an appropriate choice, considering the caves where the cheese is aged used to belong to the monks of Conques. I willed myself to forget what I was eating. After the duck, crusty crème brulée, and half-bottle of Gaillac that followed, and then the soft abbey darkness, I had almost fallen asleep. But the abrupt lights in the upper gallery banished any easygoing rapprochement between wakefulness and sleep, night and day, light and dark. My grey-black heaven was gone, replaced by definitive black shadows cutting at odd angles across brilliantly revivified white stone: a sight unbeheld for more than nine hundred of Conques’ thousand years, until the twentieth century wired the abbey for electricity.

An organist had come to practise for tomorrow’s mass. Far above me he struck the keys and vibrations filled every cavity, the barrel vault and my chest alike, making heavy, solemn music inside my body and out. I was thankful the nave itself was still fairly dark, and the side aisles, too. They beckoned me away from the electric intrusion like conduits to an alternate state of mind, much as the road outside my window had at night, when I was a child. A nearby streetlight had thrown leaf patterns into a small puddle of illumination, casting the road beyond into even greater darkness. I knew where it led – down to Grove Avenue, my school, the football field – but I would pretend it could take me anywhere.

Surely the drive to go, to be surprised, to leave the unrelenting known for whatever lay beyond, has always lurked somewhere beneath the pilgrim’s piety. In his book on pilgrimage, Peter Sumption suggests that upon taking to the road the pilgrim left behind the chief quality of medieval life – ‘monotonous regularity and the rule of overpowering conventions’. He cites a fifteenth-century writer who bluntly identified the wanderlust factor: a pilgrim’s principal motivation, he wrote, was ‘curiosity to see new places and experience new things, an impatience of the servant with his master, of children with their parents, or wives with their husbands’.