The Slow Breath of Stone: A Romanesque Love Story. Pamela Petro
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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,