The Slow Breath of Stone: A Romanesque Love Story

Not surprisingly, Kingsley put his finger on the same chord. ‘Into the psychology of the pilgrimage there must have entered love of wandering for its own sweet sake,’ he wrote in Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads. ‘The same restlessness that creates the modern tourist spurred on the men of the Middle Ages to roam.’

‘For its own sweet sake’. Again and again, Lucy notes in her journal their arrival at a hotel and her keen desire to bathe and nap, while Kingsley goes ‘out to investigate the village’, or ‘takes a walk’, or ‘visits the church’. The man was perpetually restless. During the early stages of their courtship it nearly killed him to spend the summer of 1911 at home reading Rabelais (counting the pages was ‘an indication, doubtless, that I am not properly enjoying it’), while Lucy travelled on the West Coast. He made a show of being enthusiastic about her adventures, but envy got the better of him. ‘One day I was dragged out yachting, which fairly made my hair curl with excitement.’ In another letter he was ‘stale from lack of travel’. When Lucy wrote of her climb up Mount Hood, in Oregon, he replied: ‘I thoroughly envy you the experience. I hate hard climbs while I am doing them – always get as scared as a kitten and never fail to vow to myself that if I get down safely I shall never no never try a mountain again – and yet one always does.’ By the time he finished writing, his blood was ‘on fire’ to climb anything.

Janice Mann, who wrote comparatively of Kingsley and Émile Mâle, believed Kingsley’s wanderlust to be typical of his nationality and generation. ‘For Porter,’ she wrote, ‘the process of art history was one of travel – physical and figurative – to the frontier. His sense of art historical accomplishment was satisfied by moving from familiar areas of the discipline into the unknown, just as progress in the European settlement of America involved moving repeatedly from civilisation into the wilderness. He was drawn to the open road both literally and metaphorically.’

It was true: as more scholars moved into the study of Romanesque art in the late 1920s, Kingsley shifted his focus to Ireland, where he and Lucy acquired a castle in Donegal as a base for his pioneering work on early Christian crosses. But even more intriguing than his need to roam was the nature of the unknown that Kingsley sought. For him, as well as for other American writers from Henry Adams to Henry James, the ‘wilderness’ of which Mann speaks was nothing other than the European past: a wilderness in time rather than place. In Kingsley’s case, he was not travelling to discover a new, empirical reality – a continent that could be sampled, measured, drawn, and detailed – but rather overlooked evidence that would substantiate a dream of the Middle Ages that he already held in his head. Like Conques Abbey in darkness, invisible but present, Kingsley imagined a world that could be sensed but no longer be seen, built upon remnants and old stone foundations that he and Lucy sought by day, of a society he valued far more than his own. Like me, he was a romantic, rebuilding the ruined eternity of the Romanesque in his mind, spellbound by his own reinventions.

His friends, notably the Irish poet George Russell, known by his epithet ‘Æ’, teased him about his disregard for modern life. Imagining Kingsley’s horror of air travel, Russell wrote with delight, ‘I suppose that would be an adhesion to the mechanical age which would seem to you almost as bad as Bolshevism. I fancy you sigh for travels with a donkey like Stevenson’s.’ He goes on to muse upon Lucy’s feelings for donkeys, then adds in clear-headed fashion, ‘I am sure with all your yearning for a simpler age without mechanics you could not endure it. You really ought to thank Heaven that you being born in a comfortable age can investigate uncomfortable ages without their dirt, smells, bad cooking, lack of sanitation, etc.’

Russell hit a nerve; Mann, too, feels that Kingsley regarded the medieval world as an insular, golden time in painful contrast to the whirring gears of an increasingly mass produced, mechanized America. It was this yearning of his, more than anything else, that provided a private, portable milieu within which he carried on his work as a scholar, and which suggests that the Porters’ travels amounted to a kind of pilgrimage in their own right – a pilgrimage back in time to satisfy a need of the imagination. An archaeologist’s search for relics upon which to build an imagined, better place is perhaps not so very different from a medieval pilgrim’s prayer to Ste Foy, or St James, to one day be admitted to the collective dream of heaven. That Kingsley linked his own road with the great pilgrimage route to Compostela is apparent, more than anywhere else, in the rapture of his prose. Of the Chemin de St Jacques he wrote:

One feels, as nowhere else, wrapped about by the beauty of the Middle Age. One is, as perhaps never before, emotionally and intellectually stimulated. Shards of the memory, long unused, are set vibrating. The actuality of the pilgrimage, like a cosmic phenomenon, overwhelms with the sense of its force, its inevitability. It seduces one, irresistibly …

Neither Lucy nor Kingsley was particularly religious; the endemic Protestantism of their youths seems to have manifested itself as a horror of idleness rather than a spirituality-driven habit of traditional churchgoing. Ironically, for a Luddite like Kingsley, it was their very American reliance on mechanical innovation – not just the Fiat, but the camera, especially – that most set their own journey apart from the spirit of the medieval pilgrimage in which he had so longed to invest himself.

The linchpin of pilgrimage, or relic-worship in general, is that the sacred item, be it a saint’s finger, whole carcass, or lock of holy hair, not only heals and answers prayers; it also confers sacredness on its environment. As William Melczer writes in his introduction to The Pilgrim’s Guide, ‘Pilgrim and relic are two sides of the same coin. The one is conditioned by the other. The essential mobility of the pilgrimage is a function of the essential immobility of the relic.’ Compostela, Conques, and all the other destinations of sacred medieval travel were mountains that would never, ever go to Muhammad.

Yet Lucy’s three-legged view camera broke the bond between place and pilgrimage. Her photographs rendered the hallowed stone fortresses to which penitents had trudged in a westward direction for almost a millennium as light and slim and portable as the paper on which their images were printed. Relics – or rather their encircling architecture – were no longer essentially immobile. Photographs took a print of their souls and rendered them relational commodities, open to comparison and historical analysis, able to be scrambled and studied; they were no longer absolutes wedded to a particular plot of earth by the sacred weight of a pile of stones. The ebbing of faith, of course, is responsible for the erosion of belief in traditional pilgrimage, but photography released the process of it, the procession of it, from the steady, seasonal gravitation of its course even for non-believers. Lucy and Kingsley did the Chemin de St Jacques backwards, in a car.

The abbey’s everlasting dampness had been inching through layers of skin, muscle, fat, and blood vessels until it finally reached the marrow of my bones, chilling me to my soul. I got up to leave and go to bed – the organ was still sending crashing breakers of Bach through my chest – and when I did, I noticed something unusual. The abbey’s white windows had taken on colour. Conques’ windows probably peeve traditionalists, but to me they are sublimely simple, pure and organic, a modern response to the craving for ‘stained’ glass. They were designed by the artist Pierre Soulages and installed in 1993: opaque white panes broken by black trim. By day they define whiteness, rendering the pale limestone interior creamy-grey by comparison. By night they pick up, alternately, the blues and amethysts of twilight and the pinks and oranges of the sodium vapour lamps outside, staining the glass with the modern colours of night.

I was seeing these shades for the first time, and I smiled to myself to think how similar they were to those of the limestone rocks spilling from roadcuts on the Causse de Gramat. Outside in the dark place, I put my nose to the window of a rock shop just opposite the abbey. Samples of barite, pyrite, agate, and ammonite fossils, all from the Rouergue, gleamed in the dim light. I bent down to look at a piece of limestone carved in the shape of an animal – I couldn’t see what kind – but the moonlight made the window a mirror, and instead all I saw was my own reflection. As I stood up a realization shot across the sleepy night sky of my mind. It wasn’t quite the experience Kingsley had in front of the Coutances cathedral, but it startled me into wakefulness.

‘I look up at the giant stones absorbing the summer sunlight into their age-old might and order, and I think of the massive size and grace of this Romanesque church – the stones, the stones; the skill that went into cutting these stones exactly to measure, each one … the work, the labor of transporting them such a distance across difficult terrain, the skill of the masons … who built with these stones, fitting them precisely, the strength required, the patience.’

Hannah Green’s ode to the abbey’s limestone rang in my ears. My pilgrimage, if it could be called that – and in this instant I thought perhaps it could – needn’t be incomplete. I had been looking at the wrong end of things. My starting point was the Romanesque, and the Porters were showing it to me; but lingering in Quercy and the Rouergue, ignoring Compostela, did not mean I had to be stationary. Kingsley had pursued a pilgrimage that delved into time; why could I not pursue one that delved into place – this place, and the art and architecture to which its environment, its very geology, had given rise? I would follow the sculpture I loved back to the quarries that had given it up a thousand years ago. Let others pursue questions of judgement and salvation; I would go backwards instead of forwards, plumb vertically rather than tread horizontally. It was indeed a body I was seeking: the body of the earth.

My heart pounded out the rightness of the idea. My square pillow, again found hidden in my room’s armoire – log-style French pillows prop my head up too high – would have to wait. Following the newly risen moon I followed some stairs near the south transept down into what remained of the abbey’s medieval refectory. A fountain splashed in the middle and columns salvaged from a former cloister made a dark gallery along one side of the square. In the strong moonlight it wasn’t hard to find the capital I was seeking. In the very best limestone of all, pale grey, denser and harder even than the smooth, tawny sandstone of the tympanum, were carved eight tiny stonemasons, peering out over the wall of the cloister that they were in the process of building. It was as close as I’d ever come to a snapshot from the early twelfth century.

I loved it: self-made memorial and in-joke, all in one compact composition. The masons’ wide faces had deep-bored eyes and serious expressions; one was blowing a horn, the others gripped a variety of tools of their trade. In the moonlight, glimmering with a hint of sodium-vapour orange, they looked to have been carved from opal. I told them about my pilgrimage and promised I would be back.

‘Quarries?’ wrote my friend Annie. ‘You are the oddest person. It’s that stone thing again, isn’t it?’

Annie Garthwaite, originally of Hartlepool, lately of Shropshire, met in Wales, had agreed to fly into Toulouse to join me for a long weekend’s hike. I sprang the quarry idea on her at the last minute; she had thought we were doing the pilgrimage route, but said the itinerary really didn’t matter as long as there was plenty of red wine at the end. I picked her up on a Friday afternoon, and we drove three hours straight to Conques on a highway posted with signs warning of wild boars. I was returning to the little masons, as promised, after a three-month absence. We passed toast-coloured stone barns propped with angled buttresses, textured like errant tweeds, and tiny villages where the roofs winked, turning up ever so slightly at the ends in the French proposition that, even in rural hinterlands, form should follow beauty, then function.

Back at the Auberge St Jacques we climbed four flights of stairs to our room, laden with plastic bags chattering with the weight of wine bottles, bread, cheese, chocolate, and grapes. Annie is a shrewd businesswoman with a hair-trigger appreciation of things ridiculous and absurd, quick wit, and a fanatical devotion to Richard III, whom she believes history has wantonly maligned. She has a practical streak that she takes care to keep well hidden.

‘Pam,’ she asked, pouring herself some wine and raising one eyebrow – a talent of hers – ‘just curious: where are these quarries? Do you have a map?’

I waved a 1:25,000 blue series production of the Institut Géographique National at her. ‘But come with me, I’ll show you our real map.’

I led her to the abbey. The oldest portions in the apse and south transept, including the Chapel of Ste Foy, which date from around 1040, are built of rougier, plum-red sandstone from the Dourdou Valley and the southwestern Rouergue. It’s soft stuff: a millennium of smoke, incense, and a miasma of congregational sweat have eroded even the interior capitals past recognition. Around the turn of the twelfth century limestone was discovered and began to be quarried in the nearby village of Lunel, southwest of Conques on the Causse de Comtal. The ochre-coloured limestone was sturdier, tougher, more reliable than rougier; masons used it for the towers, western façade, north wall, and most of the cloister capitals. Locally it’s called rousset, a word that derives from Occitan and means ‘dark yellow’, although underground, before the stone has been deepened and darkened by sunlight, it is the creamy-pale shade of the abbey’s interior, like the underside of my forearm.

There is plenty of pewtery schist in the abbey, too: local stone, still harvested from the neighbouring town of St Cyprien-sur-Dourdou, abundant but hard to quarry. Its metamorphic crystals give it a dull sheen like the iridescent film on dead fish.

Schist is everywhere in Conques; it fills the non-load-bearing walls of the abbey and makes up the walls, streets, and roofs of the village, knitting the place together top to bottom. Finally there are the special materials: dense, golden sandstone from Nauviale, a village just down the valley from St Cyprien, reserved for the tympanum and surrounding pierres de tailles, and the magnificent, pale grey limestone of the masons’ own cloister capital. Narrative sources claim that the masons’ limestone is from ‘the Causse’, though none takes care to name which causse. A few other capitals, along with the noble old fountain in the centre of the former refectory, are carved from black-green serpentine, brought in from the Massif Central.

‘Here’s your map,’ I said to Annie. Following the sweep of my hand her eyes tripped down the nave. The abbey may have been erected to please heaven, but it still sings of the earth. Stone is stone, raised in architecture or lying quietly underground. More than other structures, the great, glorified cave in front of us – that’s what Romanesque churches really are, barrel-vaulted, above-ground caves -affirmed the bond between nature and the works of man. Deep inside the Last Judgement are memories of the valley, the Dourdou and its fish, vineyards planted by the monks of Conques (vineyards that today yield the Rouergue’s only Appellation d’origine contrôlée wine, the reds and sophisticated roses of Marcillac). The façade and its towers remember ponies, sheep, a big sky; wind hurling across the open pastures of the Causse de Comtal. A thousand years ago masons united the topography of the central Rouergue in a religion of stone.

Trying to find a balance between geology and human history, Vidal de la Blache proposed, ‘One should start from the idea that a country is a storehouse of dormant energies whose seeds have been planted by nature, but whose use depends on man.’ It was those dormant energies that interested me now.

‘We, my friend,’ I said to Annie, in what I hoped was a grand manner, ‘are going to follow the rousset, everything you see around you – the limestone – back to its home on the causse. Tomorrow we’re hiking to Lunel.’

By morning, Annie, who had been studying the blue series map, had formulated a plan of her own. ‘Pam,’ she mused, dragging the ‘a’ in my name until it became two syllables, ‘instead of going back and forth to Lunel on the same route, why don’t we make it a triangle: south to St Cyprien, east to Lunel, northwest back to Conques?’

Her triangle seemed logical enough – I wondered why I hadn’t thought of it. We set off in a shower of church bells, not at the crack of dawn, but at a civilized mid-morning hour after an open-air breakfast attended by flies. I’d vouched for the coffee, but Annie had insisted on having tea.

Our route descended along a narrow, writhing lane from the car park outside the village, where all non-local cars must be stabled, to the main road to St Cyprien alongside the Dourdou. Healthy cornstalks rustled in the wind like conspirators. Annie, the inveterate gardener, identified flora: yellow evening primrose, coral-coloured campsis vines, which grew amidst sandstone outcrops the shade of old wine stains. I pocketed a piece of schist I’d been kicking along. We were too early for dégustation of the local Marcillac in St Cyprien, an incurious little town in the flatbed of the river valley, where residents were going about their morning business along the solitary shopping street. Here we turned east through a two-block suburbia until the houses were overtaken by cornfields.

Above us loomed the causse. ‘Ah, we’ve a climb ahead,’ said Annie lustily, shaking off a passing shower and striding uphill in her hiking boots. I, in my trainers, eyed the rising ground with trepidation. It’s an established fact of our friendship that Annie is hearty; I am less so. The ground rose with a vengeance. About halfway up to the causse, St Cyprien now pocket-sized below us, we came upon a sandstone farmhouse and its outbuildings, all topped with fanciful pavilion roofs covered in schist lauzes. Geraniums and roses outlined the courtyard.

I couldn’t believe the name: La Carrière. ‘It means ‘‘The Quarry’’,’ I translated to Annie, who can’t speak a word of French and doesn’t see this as a defect in the least. Glorious confirmation, it was, to find a thousand-year-old memory ringing in a name. Better yet, just opposite, on the rising hillside, was a geological event that took my breath away.

‘Stand there, stand there!’ I gasped to Annie, pulling out my camera. She finger-combed her blonde hair and smiled. ‘No, no, not you.’ She frowned. ‘Point to the rock and make sure you don’t get in the way.’

Annie pointed and I took a photograph of Ste Foy’s abbey in the rough, before it had become an idea shaped by man. Here on the road to Lunel, like two big animals lying together for warmth, the red sandstone of the lowland met the yellow limestone of the causse. Together their limy run-off turned hydrangea flowers pink rather than blue in the valley below. We could easily see the frontier between the two kinds of bedrock; the line was perpendicular to the ground but tilted precipitously on its axis. It made me shudder. What kind of tectonic chaos, how many millions of years of upheaval, erosion, unimaginable pressure, and more upheaval, had it taken to thrust primeval sea bed and board into this position? Like the masons’ achievement at Conques, this was another union of stone, telling a not-dissimilar story of genesis, death, and rebirth. It was a cycle that had been repeated over and over throughout the 4.55 billion years of pre-history; a cycle still in progress; a cycle given human form and a name in the silent stories of the abbey’s New Testament sculptures.

My compatriot, Henry David Thoreau, said that the Christian notion of looking for God in heaven, literally above our heads, prevents us from understanding that heaven is really here on earth, in the rock beneath our feet. For Thoreau, spirituality lay in the wonders of nature. But I felt its sudden, nascent spark in an interstice, in the tug of kinship between this cliff face and the Abbey of Ste Foy, and that kinship both thrilled and comforted me. Perhaps the two weren’t so different after all.

‘It’s called an angular unconformity,’ I announced.

‘And this,’ said Annie, pointing at a lacy, lavender flower, ‘is called scabious. And that is purple heather. It’s like you – it loves limestone.’

We continued climbing. Handkerchief vineyards clung to the upslope, walnut groves to the down. Without warning Annie became frighteningly high-minded and began quoting from George Herbert’s poem ‘The Pulley’. First she set the stage.

‘God, you see, makes man and then pours out for him a cupful of riches, all but contentment, which he leaves sloshing around in the bottom. Here’s the bit I can remember:

When almost all was out, God made a stay,

Perceiving that alone, of all his treasure,

Rest in the bottome lay.

For if I should (said he)

Bestow this jewell also on my creature,

He would adore my gifts in stead of me,

And rest in Nature, not the God of Nature:

So both should losers be.

Yet let him keep the rest,

But keep them with repining restlessnesse …

She launched that eyebrow at me. I’d thought she hadn’t been paying attention, and now she was reducing the ambiguities of my pilgrimage – and the fount of Kingsley’s wanderlust – to ten lines. Thankfully we’d reached the final, banked curve of the climb and stood at last on the causse. A metallic-tasting wind tossed away our sweat. ‘Where is it?’

I had promised Annie a dolmen. Ahead of us stretched a bumpy blanket of pastures and wheat fields, neatly separated by dark windbreaks. Lunel lay a mile or two down the road. I pointed in that direction.

It was cold now, and we walked with our heads bowed to avoid the wind. Our lunch by the roadside was a brief and chilly affair: an apple and a squashed nectarine, Quaker oatmeal bars I’d brought from home, and two thick slabs of Laguiole cheese from the Aubrac – rough, Rouergat highlands to the east. The cheese tasted like the rind of a fresh Camembert, a young, new taste, but with a supple texture; we ate it atop pilfered slices of baguette from breakfast. Shortly after lunch we came upon the great prehistoric hunks of granite. The dolmen sat next to the macadam encircled by a little gravel drive, giving the impression of a caged beast in a zoo. Annie prowled around it.

‘It’s a wonder to behold.’

‘Don’t make fun of the dolmen.’

‘Perhaps it was made by quite short people.’

At 5 foot 9, she was a good foot taller than the capstone. I had to admit it did look like a very large, mottled mushroom. Hannah Green, however, had been enamoured. She reported its Occitan name, La Peira-Levada, the Raised Stone, and said that a ring of menhirs had once stood nearby. She also wrote that the Celts believed dolmens to be meeting places where the living conferred with the dead, and that they became sites of pilgrimage. The fact that I can’t confirm this is what makes dolmens so wonderful – no one knows much about them, least of all their original or, in the Celts’ case, even secondary significance. Dolmens aren’t ruins; unlike weathered Romanesque carvings, it is their stories, not their shapes, that have eroded away.

And that’s fine. We need to forget in order to invent. Dolmens, too, offer a handshake to the human imagination.

‘Looks like a beached whale,’ remarked Annie. ‘By the by, dare I ask about this quarry of yours?’

I had been anticipating this moment. ‘Well, you see, there is no quarry per se, at least not any more.’ Up went the eyebrow. ‘It was filled in ages ago. But the exact site doesn’t really matter. We’re in Lunel; we know there was a quarry somewhere nearby. This is the place the abbey stone called home. Ancestors of those stone-hatches you just identified for me probably knew it as neighbours.’