The Slow Breath of Stone: A Romanesque Love Story. Pamela Petro
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contentment ever since I’d first heard of them twenty years earlier.
Before I could march off to France, however, I needed a copy of the book. A little hunting turned up three editions: the original of 1923, in 10 volumes and limited to 500 copies, and two later editions of 1966 and 1985, both compressed into three volumes. I descended into the art storage lair of Smith College and looked at all three. The plates in the 1923 books – many of which were missing, having been removed by Smith undergraduates over the years – were bathed in tones of grey, both luminous and grainy, like the pocked surface of a full moon. When the librarian brought out the newer editions I literally rubbed my eyes, thinking my contacts had clouded over. The beautiful plates were blurred and hazy, as if they’d been wound in plastic wrap. I later discovered that the reproductions had not only been taken from prints, rather than the original negatives, they had also been shot through slips of tissue paper that protected the plates.
I bought an original Volume IV and a plane ticket to France, and made up in metaphor what I lost in convenience. So much for obscuring the past.
Go inside a stone
That would be my way … I have seen sparks fly out When two stones are rubbed, So perhaps it is not dark inside after all; Perhaps there is a moon shining From somewhere, as though behind a hill – Just enough light to make out The strange writings, the star-charts On the inner walls.
‘Stone’, Charles Simic
I was lost and trapped behind a truck. Not just any truck, an Auto École truck – a big, lumbering learner’s vehicle that inched along and came to a painstakingly diligent stop at each intersection. Instead of overtaking it and risking a fiery death, I decided to hang back and try to get a bearing on where I might be.
It was late afternoon and the sun flared in my windscreen. This seemed impossible: according to my map I’d been heading east. But prolonged squinting proved I was driving west, and the map was old. So I pulled over, irked at lost time but thankful to be rid of the truck, swung the car around, and headed the other way, in the direction of the Rouergue – one of the few places in France, wrote Fernand Braudel, not yet entirely transformed by the modern world.
Quickly the ravishing but mild, carefully tended farmland of northeast Quercy, where the region meets the Dordogne, became a pleasant memory. As I drove east the vegetable colours faded and the soil grew pinker. Towns and farms became scarce and the wavy earth fell almost flat, like a sea with long, rolling swells from a distant storm. Only here the swells were covered in pale moors or forests of stumpy scrub-oak: low trees with thick, gnarly branches whiskered in lichen that made them an alternately venerable or menacing presence, depending on whether they were in sun or shadow.
I did not know it at the time, but later discovered that I was crossing the Causse de Gramat, one of Quercy’s ‘Petits Causses’, so named to differentiate them from the Grands Causses farther to the east. Despite the aged look of the trees they gradually came to seem newborn, a kind of piny stubble, once it became clear that the land was assaulting me with a dose of deep, geological time. Exposed bedrock was everywhere; the causse crawled with it, and the roadside shoulders were bleached white with its dust. Outcrops shared the moors with occasional sheep and goats. Dry-stone walls, thickly overgrown with moss and lichen, wine-tipped with tiny flowers, textured either side of the smooth macadam like mountains on a topographical map. The road itself was relatively new and its construction had left gashes in the earth that hadn’t yet scarred over in the weathered grey of the walls.
Out of these roadcuts tumbled the colours of crustacea, coral, and seashells: white and light grey, cream, tan, pink, and peach. The whitish stone had been tinted by iron oxide, but the marine allusion was on the mark. These were the same colours I would find in the cool interiors of Romanesque churches. This was the same smell I would smell there: a salt-and-chalk scent I remembered from childhood, from holding conch shells to my nose and taking a great sniff. It was the smell, I’d learn, of Conques Abbey. In that sanctuary and others I’d remember the Causse de Gramat and feel the tug of an ancestral memory-tide ebbing back to ancient seas. For that rock and this – everything within eyeshot, all of the stone tumbling from the roadcuts – was limestone.
Limestone is essentially calcium carbonate – it’s called calcaire in French – brought into being by the joint agencies of weight, time, and the sea. As sedimentary rock, limestone is made up from layer upon layer of compressed sea-bottom graveyards, rich with lime secreted from the dead things that collect there: algae, coral, the shells of marine invertebrates, the drowned. As building stone it’s wonderfully abundant, and for humid regions like Europe there has never been a material more receptive to man’s need for shelter, or his drive to express his imagination. The earth gives it up with relative ease and, unlike marble, limestone blocks hold firm against one another – marble skids – which is why Romanesque arches and Gothic vaults literally got off the ground. Most limestone is also mercifully soft and easy to carve (only soapstone and alabaster are easier, but they’re too delicate to be practical building materials). Although its rogue fossils occasionally deflect a chisel, it takes and keeps any detail a stonecarver’s imagination wishes upon it.
Like all sedimentary rock, limestone is a process as much as a substance. At the earliest stage it’s just latent ooze, still in the midst of precipitating out of seawater and collecting in beds on the ocean floor. There is limestone-to-be forming right this minute. The hard, chalky rock of the Causse de Gramat was at this stage during the Jurassic Period, the middle phase of the Mesozoic Era, which lasted from between 208 to 145 million years ago. At that time the causses formed the seabeds of shallow, prehistoric oceans: it was here that M. Vaylet’s plesiosaurus would have swum.
The Mesozoic was a 185-million-year bull market for the species then occupying the globe, especially the reptiles, whose evolutionary stock proliferated as their bodies swelled to stupendous size. The dinosaurs developed during the Jurassic, which was named for tremendous outcrops of limestone in the Jura Mountains, in Switzerland. The Jurassic has been called ‘the noblest of geological time’. Life was good then. The dinosaurs enjoyed the kind of environment we see today only on expensive vacations. Large, warm seas were hiked into shallows by chains of coral reefs. There were underwater gardens of sea lilies and acres of oyster beds. Dunes and shell banks piled the shores. The dinosaurs came of age in this period and then had their time in the sun all throughout the Cretaceous, as geologists call the following 80 million years. It was during this last period that a massive volcano erupted in what is known now as Espalion, about thirty miles to the east, covering its flanks in lava that, as it cooled and hardened, became the basalt mound Lucy Porter noted in her journal.
About 65 million years ago the dinosaurs vanished abruptly and the Mesozoic seas began to dry up, bringing the era to a close. As they evaporated they left behind limestone outcrops, where masons quarried only a thousand years ago for stone with which to build and sculpt Romanesque churches. Not quite a hundred years ago the Porters drove across these limestone plateaux in their 1920 Fiat, in search of the masons’ handiwork; today I was doing the same in my rented Renault. Had any of us been a few million years earlier, we would have needed a boat.
As I approached the crossroads village of Livernon – that is all it was, literally, a crossroads – I came upon a pile of bones left over from this fathomless, geological past: an acre, maybe, of loose, palm-sized rocks, pure white, for all the world like an archetypal joke, a caveman’s trash heap in a cartoon. I slammed on the brakes and got out and took one as a souvenir. It smelled of both seashells and sanctity; it smelled of church. There was latent sculpture underfoot, sanctuaries, farmhouses, walls, and villas. This was where Romanesque sculpture had come from and what had made it possible in the first place – this landscape, this stone, this history that so dwarfed my imagination. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, climbing a mountain in Germany, once defined the sublime by saying that it resided in a suspension of the powers of comparison. On that afternoon the causse achieved sublimity, as geological time struck my associative memory stone cold mute.
So I retracted back into the