Day Twenty-Four: Headlong Into Rapture
Here's a question for the next time tabletalk flags at a supper party for the intelligentsia -- what are the twelve stations of the cross? (This stimulated by the twelve hunched mounds of an abandoned calvary going up the hill beside the monastery.)
Observation on French Life and Culture #20: There are an awful lot of very young people in the ranks of France's hoteliers. Staff of the Logis du Mont d'Ares exclusively of the "Hey gang, let's put on a hotel!" vintage.
Slept the dark, heavy, motionless sleep that leaves one unsure why one should ever awake. Clattered out to discover the Haute Garonne much improved by misty rain -- transfigured into a very accomplished sketch by 19th century lady water-colourist... It being the perfect day to loiter around fusty medieval churches, what could I do but spend the day loitering around fusty medieval churches?
(Let me interrupt to say that I am now officially looking on a month without antihistamines as a Welcome Challenge rather than a Dire Ordeal. Once or twice a day I'm convulsed by a seizure of sneezing -- as rapidly as possible I crawl away from the cause, then sit down until the explosive stage passes -- then for about an hour afterwards I sniffle and drip and blink -- and that's that. Contrast with spending two or three hours sleepy and dull from drugs.)
St. Bertrand du Comminges is a very pretty medieval town occupying a cramped little bluff over the Garonne. Because of the rainy-Tuesday-ness of the scene, for most of the visit, I was alone, or followed by a dim echoing footstep or two. The cloister is part of the Romanesque kernel to the present florid edifice. You can hear sheep bleating and rattling their bells at one another on the grassy hillside below. In addition to the beautiful proportions of the courtyard and the lovely carving of the capitals -- such palms, pomegranates, snakes and knotting! -- there was also a small exhibition of photos from Sao Paolo. An itinerant Italian sculptor immigrated there in the seventeenth century; having lost the use of his limbs from illness, he designed special tools to allow him to continue sculpting. And proceeded to create this incredible series of figures of the Last Supper and some of the stages of the cross. All of the figures are very individual and life-like -- the expressions are priceless at the Last Supper, where Christ has just apparently dropped his bombshell about the...betrayer... being... right... in... this... very... ROOM! All the apostles look like flurried principles in an English parlor mystery. Will it be Apostle Mustard in the Conservatory with a Candelabra?
With those impious thoughts, we proceed into the cathedral building itself -- and fall headlong into rapture (as well as falling headlong down half a flight of ill-lit stairs).
Most of the center of the sanctuary is taken up with the choir -- carved in dark wood in the 15th century by an anonymous set of master artisans. I've never seen anything like it. It would be useless to try and give any description of the art, the genius of it -- it's just a whopping big set of choir stalls, filled to bursting with delicate, detailed, lively, funny, noble, sad, pious, impious, downright pagan carvings. Up and down -- wherever you lay your eyes, a feast. You could spend your whole life looking at it.
I stumbled out into the main sanctuary again, determined to find the embalmed crocodile that the Cadogans promised me. Yes, there he is -- nailed up to the wall beside the parish altar, looking for all the world like someone's trout fishing trophy. The one that didn't get away.
And then the usual collection of murky devotional paintings -- St. Bertrand performing some sort of miracles -- reliquaries holding weeny shreds of things -- I can't make out what they are and am glad I can't, considering the sort of nasty effluvia that tends to end up in reliquaries...
Withheld myself from breakfast so as to have a good appetite for a luncheon blow-out at Chez Simone, which the Cadogans recommend for a satisfying treat in St.B.du.C. Still couldn't finish half of what was put in front of me, in that big warm room halfway between a Tyrolean hunting lodge (heads of things stare down at you with incongruously cheerful expressions) and "classy" pizza parlor (red check tablecloths and stoneware pitchers).
What did I eat? A divine soup -- to call it "chicken noodle" would throw disgrace on a noble, puissant broth by bracketing it with Campbells -- so instead we must call it pottage au poulet et vermicelli. That and the crispy fresh bread would have been enough, but the ordeal was just begun. A heavenly little potato salad in a very light peppery mayonnaise and assorted sausage cuts for hors d'oeuvres... Then two succulent tiles of roast veal and a pot of peas, carrots, potatoes and bacon in a creamy pea sauce. And when I'd manfully (womanfully?) worked my way through that, a not-too-sweet, not-too-heavy gateau Basque accompanied by a dollop of almost unsweetened preserved strawberries and an infusion of herb tea.
The problem with the hearty lunch is that one experiences a hearty desire for sleep afterwards. I walked a bit in the misty tail-end of the rain until the feeling passed, and headed out for fusty medieval church #2, the basilisque of St. Just in Valcabrere
Now here is where France starts to get trippy for the sensitive visitor. On the one hand, you have one of the acknowledged jewels of High Renaissance ecclesiastical architecture -- and not ten minutes away, literally within sight of the cathedral, you have one of the acknowledged jewels of Romanesque ecclesiastical architecture, minding its own business in the midst of fields, and attached to a humble burying ground where locals are still being planted to this day. It might have been too much, seeing both of them in one day, if they hadn't been so different.
Romanesque can be so satisfying in its purity. The four evangelists guarding the portal are standing on their beasts, but look ready to slip off. The columns inside go up and up and UP, to a vaulted ceiling... The walls rounded in and pierced up high with tiny windows filled with startlingly Celtic-looking abstract stained glass. A gloomy dark organ, gloomy covered baptismal fount, gloomy dank confessional that scorns to hide anyone from view. And surprise after surprise -- you look up and find a wholly untouched fresco of delicately abstracted red flowers above the Lady chapel. You look down and find a pagan tombstone used to pave the aisle. You turn a corner up at the main altar, and see the most stunningly lush marble acanthus carvings imaginable... I stared and stared and stared. And when you walk around the building outside, it looks to your layman's eye, that they have early Christian stone coffins just lying hither and thither around the back and haven't quite figured out what to do with them yet.
The rest of the day was rather an anti-climax to that -- sampled the fleshpots of Montrejeau (one gravelly bare place, one bumptious mairie, one fussily officious church nave), and the fleshpots of St. Gaudens to the east -- a very pretty little cloister outside the collegiale, with very droll capitals -- Adam getting a tummy ache from the forbidden fruit, God waggling his finger in reproach, the angel of the annunciation bringing the virgin a tidy FTD bouquet. But the collegiale itself doesn't let tourists in, fooey-kablooey. Got a ravishing tartlette au citron to console myself with, and headed to my shelter under the eaves.
Observation on French Life and Culture #21: I think there is something very, very wrong with bakeries selling butane.
Crumpled up crackers on the window ledge for the sparrows clamoring at all hours -- this makes me feel too like Heidi to believe myself. In the morning, not a crumb will remain. Ravenous little perishers, those sparrows. Suppose I should be glad they aren't carnivorous.