Part 15 (2/2)

He told me that all the beams of wood had now rotted (they may have helped to warm him on winter evenings), but that nails a foot long were often found amongst the stones of the wall or in the soil round about it. He had picked up several, but had taken no care of them.

When I observed that I should much like to see one, he said he thought there was one somewhere in his house, and, calling to his wife, he asked her in Languedocian to look for it. While she was searching he drew my attention to a circular stone lying upon the top of his rough garden wall. It was about a foot in diameter, and concave on one side. 'What is it?' I asked.

'A millstone,' he replied.

True enough, it was one of the stones of an ancient handmill, such as was used in remote antiquity, chiefly by women, for grinding corn. It must have been as nearly as possible after the pattern of the first implement invented by man for this purpose. The peasant set no value upon it; I could have had it for a trifle--even for nothing, had I been so minded; but whatever liking I may have for antiquities, it did not gird me up to the task of carrying a millstone back to Vers. The nail could not be found, so I was obliged to leave without a souvenir of the Celtic city. Not far from this spot I found another millstone that would have fitted the one I had left and made a complete mill.

They are doubtless still lying upon the dreary height of Murcens; but whether they are there or in a museum, they are as dumb as any other stones, although, had they the power to repeat some of the gossip of the women who once bent over them, they might tell us a good deal that Caesar left out of his Commentaries because he thought it unimportant, but which we should much like to know.

I did not return by the way I came, but kept upon the plateau, going southward, then, dropping down into another valley at the bottom of which ran a tributary of the Vers, I crossed the stream and rose upon the opposite hill, making somewhat at random towards the village of Cours. On my way I started numerous coveys of red partridges from juniper and box and other low shrubs. Had I been a sportsman carrying a gun I could have made a splendid 'bag,' but these chances generally fall to those who cannot profit by them. I wondered, however, at the lack of poaching enterprise in a district so near to Cahors. It is not often that one meets even in the least populous parts of France so many partridges in an absolutely wild state. Immense flocks of larks were likewise feeding upon the moorland, and the beating of their countless wings as they rose made a mighty sound when it suddenly broke the silence of the hills. I met a small peasant girl with a face as dark as a Moorish child's, and eyes wonderfully large and l.u.s.trous.

She was a beautiful little creature of a far Southern or Arabian type.

At Cours I talked to a woman who was a pure type of the red-haired Celt. How strange it is that with all the intermixture of blood in the course of many centuries the old racial characteristics return when they are deeply ingrained in a people!

I took shelter at Cours from a sharp storm. It was a wretched little village upon a dreary height, and the inhabitants, to whom French was a foreign language, stared at me as if I had been a gorilla. An overhanging 'bush' of juniper led me to a very small inn that bore the familiar signs of antiquity, dirt and poverty. I knocked at the old oak door studded with nail-heads, and it presently creaked upon its rusty hinges. It was opened by a poor woman whose manners were wofully uncouth; but this was no fault of hers. She was honest, as such rough people generally are. Although she must have wanted money, it did not occur to her to extract a sou from the stranger beyond the just price.

When I had had enough of her wine and bread and cheese, and asked her to tell me what I owed her, she carefully measured with her eye how much wine was left in the bottle, how much bread and cheese I had taken, and when her severe calculation was finished she replied, in a harsh, firm voice, which meant that the reckoning being made she intended to stand by it: 'Eleven sous.'

When I met the valley of the Vers again the storm had pa.s.sed far away; the evening rose was in the calm heaven, and the topmost oaks along the rocky ridge burnt like tapers upon a high altar of the vast temple whose roof is the vaulted sky. Already the deep aisles were dim with gathering shadows. When I reached the inn at Vers it was nearly dark, and after my day's tramp I was very glad to exchange the outer gloom for the brightness of the cheery fireside and the warmth of the chimney-corner beside the redly glowing logs.

The next day brought me to the end of my long journey down the valley of the Lot, for I had decided to leave the country below Cahors until some future day. I reached the city of Divona when the yellow glow of the autumnal rainy sunset was stealing up the ancient walls.

It is always with a certain dread that I say anything about history, because when I am once upon such high stilts I do not know when I shall be able to get down again. Moreover, when one is so mounted, one has to step very judiciously, especially in a region like this, where the roads to knowledge are so roughly paved. Nothing would be easier, however, than to fill a book with the history of Cahors, for the place, since the days of the Romans, has gone through such vicissitudes, and witnessed such stirring events, that those who wish to turn over the leaves of its past have abundant facilities for doing so; but it will be better for me to speak rather of what I have seen than what I have read. Nevertheless, my impressions of this old town at the present day would be like salad without salt if no flavour of the past were put into them.

When, a mud-bespattered tramp, I came down the road by the winding Lot, and saw the pale golden light rising upon the walls of churches and towers high above me, I could not but think of some of the terrible scenes which, in the course of 2,000 years, were witnessed by the inhabitants of Cahors. In the fast-falling twilight I saw the ghosts of the Vandals and Visigoths who helped to destroy the works of the Caesars, and pa.s.sed onward to the unknown; of the Franks who burnt Cahors in the sixth century; of the Arab hordes, dabbled with blood, who afterwards came up from the South slaying, violating, plundering; of the English troops under Henry II. besieging and taking the town, accompanied by the Chancellor, Thomas-a-Becket; of the Albigenses and Catholics, who cut one another's throats for the good of their souls; of the Huguenots and Catholics, who repeated these horrors in the sixteenth century for the same excellent reason; but of all these shadows, the most interesting and the most dramatic was that of Henry IV. He was then Henry of Navarre, and the hope of the Protestants in the South, while Cahors was one of the strongholds of Catholicism.

What a feat of war was that capture of Cahors by Henry with only 1,400 men, after almost incessant fighting in the streets for five days and nights! How red the paving-stones must have been on the sixth day, when it was all over, and the surviving Navarrese, smarting from the recollection of the tiles and stones that were hurled at them from the roofs by women, children, and old men, had given the final draught of blood to their vengeful swords! Never was so much courage so uselessly squandered. After the lapse of three centuries Henry's figure is still full of heroic life, as, with back set against a shop-window, and sword in hand, he shouted to those who urged upon him the hopelessness of his enterprise: 'My retreat from this town will be that of my soul from my body!'

If is really wonderful how certain buildings at Cahors have been preserved to the present day through all the storms of the tempestuous Middle Ages, the furious hurricane of religious hatred that brought those centuries to a close, and that other one, the Revolution, which ushered in the new epoch of liberty and well-dressed poverty. Of these buildings, the cathedral has the right to be named first. As a whole it cannot be called a beautiful structure, for its form is graceless; but what a charm there is in its details! Even its incongruity has a singular fascination. This most evident incongruity arises from the combination that it expresses of the Gothic and Byzantine styles. The facade is very early Gothic (about the year 1200), still full of Romanesque feeling, but the church having been much pulled about in the thirteenth century, it came to have a semi-Byzantine choir and two depressed domes, quite Byzantine, over the nave. The facade, with its squat towers, exhibits no lofty aim, but when one looks at the tabernacle-work in the tympan of the divided portal, the capitals in the jambs and the mouldings of the archivolts, the elegant arcade above and the tracery of the great rose window, one feels that although the Pointed style could not yet embody its dream of beauty by means of the tower and spire, it was moving towards it through a maze of glorious ideas destined to become inseparable from the spirit of the perfect whole. Still more interesting than this facade is that of the north portal (twelfth century). It is Gothic, but the general treatment has much of that Byzantine-Romanesque which produced some very remarkable buildings in Southern France. The portal is very wide and deeply recessed, and the tympan is crowded with bas-reliefs, the sculpture of which, rude yet expressive, is of a striking originality.

There is a broad arabesque moulding in the doorway suggesting Eastern influence, and the closed arcade of the facade, with corbel-table above and its row of uncouth monstrous heads, presents a highly curious effect of struggling motives in early Gothic art.

The nave is much below the level of the soil, and is reached by a flight of steps from the main entrance. These steps at the Sunday services are crowded by the poorer cla.s.s of churchgoers, sitting, kneeling, and standing, and, like the catechumens in the narthex of the early Christian basilica, they look as if they were separated from the rest of the faithful on account of their not being as yet full-fledged members of the Church. It may well be that they are the most faithful of the faithful, for stone is a hard thing to kneel upon, and when it is used for this purpose without ostentation, it is a pretty safe test of sincerity in religion. The grouping of the people here would interest at once an artistic eye, the more so because many of the women of Cahors wear upon their heads kerchiefs of brilliant-coloured silk folded in a peculiarly graceful and picturesque manner, resembling the Bordelaise coiffure, but yet distinct.

The nave of the cathedral is cold and tasteless, the whole effect being centred upon the choir, the richness of which is quite dazzling.

The vault is a semi-dome, and the apse-like polygonal termination is pierced with several lofty Gothic windows, so that the eye rests upon the harmonious lines of the tracery and a subdued blaze of many-coloured gla.s.s. Then the columns, walls and vaulting of the choir are elaborately decorated in the Byzantine style, and, all the tones being kept in aesthetic harmony, the result is a general effect more beautiful than gorgeous. I observed it under most favoured circ.u.mstances. I entered the church for the first time during the pontifical High Ma.s.s. The vestments of the mitred bishop under his canopy, of the officiating priest and deacons, of the canons in their stalls, together with the white surplices and scarlet ca.s.socks of the many choir-boys distributed over the vast sanctuary, and the sunbeams stained with the hues of purple, crimson, azure and green by the windows that reached towards the sky, falling upon all these figures, realized with a splendour more Oriental than Western a grand conception of colour in relation to a religious ideal.

After leaving the cathedral I changed my ideas by looking for the Gambetta grocery. It happened to be close by. The name is still over the door, but the shop no longer looks democratic. Its plategla.s.s, its fresh paint and gilding, and the specimens of ceramic art which fill the window, give it somewhat the air of one of those London shops kept by ladies of t.i.tle. Sugar, coffee, and candles now hide themselves in the far background, as though they were ashamed of their own celebrity.

Much more interesting than this shop is the old house where Gambetta spent his childhood. His parents did not live on the premises where they carried on their business. Therefore the odour of honey and vinegar had not, after all, so much to do with the formation of the clever boy's character. I found the house down a dark pa.s.sage. The rooms occupied by the Gambetta family are now those of a small _restaurateur_ for the working cla.s.s. After ascending some steps, I entered a greasy, grimy, dimly-lighted room, the floor of which had never felt water save what had been sprinkled upon it to lay the dust.

It had the old-fas.h.i.+oned hearth and fire-dogs and gaping sooty chimney, a bare table or so for the customers, a shelf with bottles, and the ordinary furniture and utensils of the provincial kitchen. Here I had some white wine with the present occupier as a reason for being in a place that must have often resounded with the infantile screams of Leon Gambetta. I ascertained that he was not born in this house, but that he was brought to it when about three months old, and that he pa.s.sed his childhood here. I was shown an adjoining room, darker, dingier, less persecuted by soap, if possible, than the other. It was here that Gambetta slept in those early years. Did he ever dream here of a great room in a palace, draped with black and silver, of a catafalque fit for a prince, of a coffin heaped with flowers?

Again I changed my ideas by crossing the Lot and searching for the Fountain of Divona, now called the Fontaine des Chartreux. The old name is Celtic, and as it charmed the Romans they preserved it.

Following the river downward, I came to a spot where a great stream flowed silently and mysteriously out of a cavity at the foot of lofty rocks overgrown by herbage and low shrubs that seemed to have been left untouched by the hand of Autumn, that burns and beautifies. The water came out of the hill like a broad sheet of green gla.s.s, giving scarcely any sign of movement until it reached a low weir, where it turned to the whiteness of snow. The Romans held this beautiful fountain in high esteem, and if they had known how to raise the water to the level of the town on the opposite bank of the river, they need not have taken the trouble to carry an aqueduct some twenty miles from the valley of the Vers. Nowadays it is the Fountain of Divona that supplies Cahors with water.

Still following the river, I came to that famous bridge, the Pont Valentre, which is one of the most interesting specimens of the defensive architecture of the Middle Ages. It is probably the most curious example of a fortified bridge in existence. In addition to its embattled parapet, it is protected by three high slender towers, machicolated, crenellated, and loopholed. The archway of each spans the road over the bridge, so that an enemy who forced the portcullis of the first, and ran the gauntlet of the hot lead from the machicolations, would have to repeat the same performance twice before reaching the bank on which the town is built. This bridge was raised at the commencement of the fourteenth century. By what wonderful chance was it preserved intact, together with its towers, after the invention of gunpowder? The people of Cahors call it the Pont du Diable. When a certain stone was placed in one of the towers, the devil always pulled it out, or did so until lately.

THE END.

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