I first saw the church of Perse on a mild spring day in 2002. Its porous stones were the colour of a human tongue, some lighter, some darker, but all of the same hue. The interior was as cold as a cave deprived of geothermal heat. Awkward Gothic chapels meandered off the northern transept, and last year’s leaves collected beneath an ancient wooden door that once opened onto the grand south portal. It was locked now. Visitors used a smaller entrance fitted with an electronic buzzer.
The church was dank and forlorn inside – no nave was meant to be raked – so I went back out to see the temporal world meet its end on Perse’s façade. The earth was the same shade of tongue-red as the church; a breeze whipped up a pink whirlpool and I breathed the soot of France’s millennia into my lungs.
No one who has written about the tympanum of the church of Perse has avoided the word ‘rustic’. ‘Clumsy’, ‘anarchic’, and ‘inept’ are other adjectives that crop up. Most of these remarks pertain to the lower portion of the space, wherein we are to understand that Christ has come again, freeing humankind from the heartbreaking dictates of time. In the centre a corpse pokes his head out of a coffin, alert but addled with the sleep of centuries. For want of space, his head serves as the fulcrum for a set of scales, upon which angels and a cat-faced devil weigh souls. To the right, Jesus and the evangelists jumble crookedly into paradise; to the left, Satan and his devils feed the damned into a scaly, saw-toothed mouth of Hell, whose low-browed head erupts in a thatch of spikes.
Forme, a 42-year-old American woman drawn to France by my long-time love of Romanesque sculpture, this was a paradox as familiar as my own reflection: eternity in a state of decay. A thousand years of weather had made a crumbled mess of Satan’s face; Christ’s features were worn almost smooth. The everlasting angels were victims of the maladie blanche. The whole composition had lost the crisp admonition incised into it with a sharp chisel. Like a nursemaid, nature had said ‘There, there’ to our nightmare – for it was the rare man who was saved – and brought serenity to the Apocalypse. Ferreting in my bag I pulled out a small portfolio of fox-edged photographs and held up a dutiful shot of the tympanum, and then an inspired one of the angel Raphael, one of the figures that surrounds it. Most of the weathering had occurred before 1920, when the photographs had been made.
I moved into the surrounding cemetery and sat propped against one of the headstones, shivering like a reptile from its sudden warmth. Even though my side was in shadow the three-inch sandstone slab radiated heat. I calculated that the sun must have been shining on the facing side for at least three hours. Stone absorbs solar heat slowly, photon by photon, an inch an hour.
The photographs I held were from Volume IV of Kingsley Porter’s ten-volume masterpiece, Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads (one volume of text, nine of images). His wife Lucy – by far the better photographer – had shot the Espalion pictures and then taken a nap in the neighbouring field while he’d strode off to visit another church nearby.
There hadn’t been an ounce of sacrifice in Lucy’s nap. She’d loved the life that had led her to Espalion, in the old region of the Rouergue. She’d loved dashing through France, Italy, and Spain in the open Fiat; photographing Kingsley’s beloved Romanesque churches; enduring cold baths in provincial hotels, the two of them eating and sleeping like young soldiers. F. Scott Fitzgerald said that we all have a favourite, heroic period in our lives, and this had been theirs.
The field where she’d lain may have even seemed like a featherbed to Lucy after the conditions she had endured the previous spring. The war had just ended and Kingsley had been keen to visit and photograph Romanesque churches in the eastern environs of Paris. Lucy identified her journal from this time as, simply, ‘1919: Devastated Regions’.
The churches were often in ruins. ‘Climbed up fallen debris to height of capital to take photo,’ wrote Lucy without fanfare, or ‘Church had been blown up. Took heap of ruins, apse a circle against the sky.’ In another village she wrote, ‘Nothing standing and no people. Took a pile of stones to show what had been the church.’
Sometimes the churchyards had been shelled as well, so that the Porters were forced to navigate open graves and walkways strewn with body parts. ‘We had to pick our way carefully,’ recorded Lucy in April, ‘because of shells and hand grenades.’ Decaying horses littered the countryside. Lucy took in the horror and loss and legitimately feared for locals’ safety – ‘they mark [the buried shells] this year and not have them explode, but how about next year?’ – but she couldn’t keep her mind entirely off food (‘The Croix d’Or still sets a good table …’) nor her happiness discretely between the lines of her journal.
After our hot but poor coffee and tea we were off on the day’s work we both love so well.
… took interior, piers of nave distinctive. Despite the cold the birds, the flowering forsythia, and the ploughing oxen and horses announced spring. How happy I am!
Lucy may well have been content in her pasture, but I shifted restlessly against my tombstone. It was hard for me to sit still within eyeshot of the great pilgrimage way to Compostela. The road tugged at my peace, not so much that of my feet as of my mind. The Chemin de St Jacques implies a passage through time as well as countryside. In its promise of great distances lies the inescapable reckoning of passing seasons and years, and in my mind the Porters’ lives tumbled messily over the dam of 1920, down the decades of the twentieth century.
The thought nagged at me: why had Lucy been fearful of her and Kingsley’s great happiness? The phrase weighed down her journal like clumsy foreshadow. There amidst Perse’s dead I knew what she, in 1920, did not – that eventually Lucy had every reason to be fearful. That the Porters outlived the joy of that summer I knew from reading Lucy’s subsequent journals, discovered amongst her husband’s papers in a Harvard library. But that did not explain why a shadow had crossed her thoughts in Espalion. Was it a premonition? And did she recall that old, inexplicable dread a decade later when the high tide of her happiness had turned?
By then – the early 1930s – Kingsley and Lucy had forsaken the abundance of southwest France for the thin resources of the north of Ireland. On that warm, ripe afternoon, curled up against a rosy stone that smelled complete and holy, of everything that had ever lived and died, I couldn’t help thinking that in abandoning this place, this art, the Porters had left behind a source of salvation. These old French regions where my travels overlapped theirs – rural hinterlands once officially, but since the Revolution only affectionately, called Quercy and the Rouergue – are richly accommodating of body and soul. They burst at the seams with stone. Not the dense granite of Donegal, but fertile lime and sandstones central to the ecology, sculpture, and spirit of the great geological basin just south of the Massif Central.
In the Rouergue, which more or less corresponds to the modern département of the Aveyron, valleys of plum-coloured sandstone give root to the sloping vineyards of Marcillac. Quercy, a territorial ghost haunting today’s département of the Lot, is striated in bands of pale limestone plateaux called the causses – tablelands where the exposed bedrock is so plentiful you can smell it in the air. Its sheer abundance accounts for a culture of stony offspring varying greatly in age but retaining familial resemblance: dolmens and standing stones, erected thousands of years before Romanesque churches, and dry-stone walls, farmhouses, and conical shepherds’ huts – at once cheerful and ancient, like Stone-Age gazebos – erected centuries after. The bedrock from which they’ve all sprung, weathered into rich, calcareous soil, coaxes grapevines and walnut trees, melons and black winter truffles into abundance under the Quercynois sun.
This stone is both material and mortar. It not only builds art and shelter, it binds produce and architecture, sculpture and fungi, together as kin. The ‘black’ wine of Cahors is cousin to the angel Raphael, whom Lucy’s photograph freed from nine centuries’ bondage to the church of Perse.
To