Day Forty-Three: Wherefore Art Thou, Romieu?
The shadows of the end fall fast upon me. Soon the Le Roi will only be a dim, unpleasant memory.
Favorite French roadside caution sign: DANGER -- BOUE
Well, let's see -- what did I get up to today? Played slugabed again, since (in sharp contradistinction to most French hotels, where the chambermaids are likely to come in snapping wet towels at you if you lay abed past nine in the morning) this doesn't disarrange Madame's nonexistent housekeeping -- it is bitterly obvious that no one has set foot in the room other than me since I arrived -- and headed through very pretty country along the Lot to a Templar commanderie. The folks of this town were obviously in receipt of some renovation funds recently -- a reflecting pool with fountains a'glisten fronts the commanderie, which is now a hotel and restaurant, and glittering brick walks lead you around the civic promenade. Alas, the Templar chapel is locked. When everything is not quite so new, I imagine it will all be very pretty.
Here I had the very great pleasure of giving directions to actual French people -- yes, I utilized the words "la bas", because that's exactly where what they wanted was located. "Vous voyez les chaises par la fontaine, la bas? Voila, c'est la commanderie..."
(La bas -- “over there” -- is the phrase employed by every French person in giving directions to the benighted traveler. La bas may be twenty feet away, it may be twenty miles -- it would apparently be impinging on your development as a moral being to let you know which.)
Thought I would fill in the time before my afternoon excursions by a visit to La Romieu. This path led me over the Pays de Serres, a beautiful high landscape of plateaus, bordered by trees and planted with wheat, the young wheat moving in the wind like the skirt of a long-striding woman. An intriguing silhouette on one ridge led me to the churchyard at Nomdieu and one of the most fascinating sights of my trip.
The graveyard is still in use by the village and is very pleasant -- lots of hoary, mossy old tombs with cracked crosses and plenty of beautiful green plantings -- moss roses and pansies and carnations -- in addition to the usual clamorous kitsch. There are little signs on some of the old graves where the stones are too badly eroded to be read -- "Anyone capable of providing information about this abandoned tomb is earnestly requested to present themselves at the mayor’s office" -- signs of an attitude both humane and orderly.
The church is abandoned. I don't mean, it isn't in use as a church anymore and only tourists visit it -- I mean, it's abandoned. There's no roof, and shrubs are growing on some of its more substantial battlements (although I don't suppose they're called battlements when they're on a church), and the floor is a tumbled mess of stone and moss underneath the open sky. It was a perfect ruin. Do you understand me? A perfect ruin... It looked like the cover of an Oxford University Press printing of an obscure 18th century Gothick novel. Picking my way carefully through the wreck of floor, looking up at the bits of carved faces and birds and acanthuses still visible on the arches, listening to the wind sough through the cypresses outside and knowing that I was probably the first stranger to set foot there in centuries -- it was pure heaven.
Moved in the direction of Condom -- yes there is a town named Condom, and the residents are pretty bitter -- with a sidetrip to Lamontjoie, despite its being a bastide -- the church there has St. Louis's hand in a reliquary, and how often do you get a chance to see that? He only had two of 'em... Also cleverly got rid of all my noxious, useless little centime pieces down their tronc.
Reached La Romieu at exactly the stroke of two, when a very chipper young woman at the Syndicat d'Initiativ took my fifteen francs and confided me to the care of the Man With The Keys -- the keys to the Collegiale's treasures.
These being -- a very pretty cloister (okay, yes, Romanesque carved capitals, but much chewed by weather and Huguenots so one did not need to give them much notice); a nice airy church with some lovely "niaf" chapels fresh with flowers. One HELL of a climb up to the belvedere tower, on a very narrow spiral staircase with minuscule stairs -- no place for a long flowing skirt, I assure you! For an anxious while, I imagined that the belvedere tower was likely to be my final habitation, since descent seemed a more-than-dubious proposition. A pretty enough end, "The Girl in the Tower," illustrations by Perrault or Aubrey Beardsley as you please, living off whatever pigeons I could capture and dried lily stalks brought up to me by the Man With The Keys. But after a good rest, and tying up my skirt above my knees, and moving veeeeery sloooowly, I made it down again. Oh yeah -- the view was pleasant.
The final treasures of La Romieu were the frescos in the sacristy -- abstracts nobody knows the significance of around the windows, abbey founders and miscellaneous popes at eye level, a smorgasbord of biblical characters and prophets middling, and then the ceiling covered with heavenly strange black angels, with ocher, yellow and white furnishings -- and such long, luscious pinions!