wonderingly. He spoke French with difficulty, but his boy--a lad of
about twelve, who had been to school--could help him over the stiles.
I got the man to speak about the ancient wall, although it was
evidently not a subject that interested him so deeply as his pigsty.
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 lustrous.
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 passed 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 passed 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-à-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
façade 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 façade, 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 façade 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 façade, 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 class 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 glass. 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
circumstances. I entered the church for the first time during the
pontifical High Mass. 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 cassocks 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 plateglass, 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 title. 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 passage. The
rooms occupied by the Gambetta family are now those of a small
_restaurateur_ for the working class. 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-fashioned 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
Léon 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
passed 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 glass, 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
Valentré, 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.