Day Thirty-Eight: Mountains and Molehills
Mailed off a carton of books this morning, lightening my load to human proportions. Young Madame in the Poudenas post office and I exchanged pleasantries about the difficulties each others' tongues afford students.
Was fortunate enough to score parking right near the cathedral at Auch. They are in the process of restoring -- sandblasting in particular -- the outside of the cathedral. The whole town could actually use a good blasting. Moodled around for the scant remainder of the morning until I began to feel damp and sweaty and cold and ague-ish, and crawled into the backseat of the car to get dry and rest until the cathedral treasury opened after lunch.
Well. Just when you think you are thoroughly jaded, along comes a work of art that absolutely knocks your socks off. I speak of the stained glass designed and executed by Arnaut de Moles in the early 16th century. As I walked from one brilliant panel to another -- all the details, intricate enough to qualify as painting, etched in with various type of acid, the colors as rich and true as if they had been made yesterday, except yesterday no one would have had the skill or interest to make such rich, true colors... well, I kept having to snap my jaw shut as it fell agape again and again. I can't even begin to describe the detail, except to say all the sibyls looked very saucy, knowing wenches.
And if that wasn't enough, the cathedral also has a choir stall a la St. Bertrand de Comminges -- except more elaborate, if you'll believe me. A monk two hundred years ago set out to count all the carved figures (he was probably avoiding some other project) -- he came up with something over fifteen hundred.
I don't know if it was such a good idea to see both of these wonders on the same day, for I felt rather irreverent by the time I entered the choir. It seemed the junior-high-school-math-assignment-border-doodle elements were more prominently represented here -- I refer specifically to the bat having its eyes plucked out by hippogriffs, but also the hairy, lavishly tongued demons and ladies with alarming quantities of bosom.
I stumbled out goggle-eyed into the daylight... got lost again trying to find the Musee des Jacobins... so tragically lost that I ended up having to climb the goddamn monumental stairway again, at which point walking through an art museum was no longer an option.
Came back to chez Leroy -- okay, Le Roi if you must -- and slept ten hours.