[Courtesy of John Gaw Meem]
[Photo by David Young]
Note: Many of these photographs came from Miss Isabel Echols, who received custody of them from the estate of E. Dana Johnson, the distinguished editor of The Santa Fe New Mexican.
Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini
I
FRANCE
1814–1839
NOTE
Letters by Lamy have been transcribed here without alteration in any way. He always expressed himself plainly, and often eloquently; but his English, except when polished for public use, did not always conform to common usages of capitalization, punctuation, and spelling. However, his mild aberrations in a language not native to him seem to bring his presence more immediately before us; and out of respect for this advantage, I have felt justified in letting them stand.
P. H.
i.
The Fugitives
DURING THE HOURS BEFORE SUNRISE on 21 May 1839, Jean Baptiste Lamy, accompanied by his closest friend and former school-mate Joseph Priest Machebeuf, made his way on foot through the silent streets of the old Roman town of Riom, in the Massif Central of France. With his companion he was walking toward the Paris highway, crossing the northern arc of the great drive which circled the city after the manner of roads laid upon buried Roman fortifications. Within the town were small dark enclaves of medieval stone—gray, damp, impregnated with rank airs from the barnyards on the green hillsides all about. Beyond in the dimness sat the low, small-timbered mountains of Auvergne.
Lamy was not well. He had recently risen from a sickbed to join his friend in Riom, but his determination was calm. The better not to be noticed, he was dressed as a layman, and so was Machebeuf. In their usual dress, since they were both priests, they would be marked that night if anyone should see them. Lamy, the younger, was twenty-five years old and had been ordained only six months before. Machebeuf, twenty-seven, had received final holy orders two years and five months earlier. Their states of mind and emotion were high. With baggage for a journey of thousands of miles, they were going to the open highway in the pre-dawn twilight to await the fast coach from Lyon to Paris, and the first stage of an expedition.
In spite of their care, they were even at so early an hour seen and recognized by a former fellow student. He queried them. They now risked telling him of their plans, shaking hands in farewell. Their interceptor later reported their emotion as they parted—the unexpected friend perhaps on his way to early Mass, the other two walking to the outskirts, where there were houses to pass even after the new travellers should be safely aboard the coach.
They were fugitives from home who understood that if their plans were known, one of them might have to face obstacles which would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to overcome. As in every joint exploit, one was the mover, the other the recruit. In this case it was Machebeuf, small and impulsive, who had laid the long train of arrangements which brought them both to the coach stop, and whose consequences were to last their lifetimes. But it was the other, Lamy, taller, deliberate and mild, who was destined to become the leader in lifetime terms. What these were to be, they could not foresee except in the most general way, yet were compelling enough to make the young men take flight. For occasions of defeat or hazard, the patois of their homeland had a proverb which made people laugh in self-recognition when they heard it spoken—“Latsin pas!”—and behind it lived the spirit which moved the fugitives to set aside, for their own purposes, home and those they loved, for it meant, “Never give up.”
The coach came and bustled to a halt, they entered, and rolled on. There was one more peril—the road led directly past the house of Machebeuf’s father, who was Riom’s leading baker. Day was now breaking. Machebeuf had the impulse to halt for a moment to take leave; but higher obedience prevailed, and passing his father’s door he threw himself to the floor of the coach in the rue de la Charité to avoid even the chance of recognition. Lamy knew how he felt, for, though his parents were aware of his plans to go, he himself had come away without saying an outright farewell to them when he had seen them the day before in their village of Lempdes, to the south, below Clermont. Now he tapped Machebeuf on the shoulder to sustain his resolve. Soon it was safe to come up off the floor of the diligence and face toward Paris—a drive of over two hundred miles—and the future.
Within them rested a rich cumulation of history, tradition, belief, inherited ways, which had made them what they were; and despite the shocks of change they would meet in a new world, they took with them out of the past all to empower them for the life ahead.
ii.
Caesar and Vercingetorix
AUVERGNE—the people today bound it as “tout le Massif Central”—is a great plain raised above surrounding France. It reaches south toward the borderland of the ancient Languedoc region, and in its place names, pronunciations, and patronymics, continues to echo the hard, clicking style of Languedoc speech, as against the more elegant and fluid idiom of the old Langue d’Oïl of Paris and the northern provinces. Great hill systems, with woods, ravines, glens, wide meadows, keep a bucolic aspect, all set off by ranges of distant wooded mountains whose dominant peak is the noble cone of the extinct volcano Puy-de-Dôme, after which the political district is called.
Under so much open sky, settlements remain sparse and far apart. Their distance one from another seems matched in the people by a reserve perhaps imposed by a history of separation. To reach each other, as Caesar wrote, the early Gauls, when they had matters of note to communicate in that landscape, shouted over meadows and through districts, asking neighbors to continue the relay afar, across high green acres where voices could carry on long cries. Early Gallic settlements were rough stockades, in high ground for protection against raid and for periodic market gathering. Life came from the earth and even in spirit returned to it. Caesar saw the Gauls as the most “religious” of men. Rivers, woods, springs, and mountains, in their various mysteries of source and atmosphere, all had their gods. It would not be strange to see the isolated rise of the Puy-de-Dôme itself as a great altar, whether almost lost in summer haze or lighted by clear winter. To live, propitiate, propagate, and die, remote from the sophisticated Roman energies which stirred to the south toward the Mediterranean; to take the earth’s yield and defend the land when necessary—such tasks and impulses governed life in the ancient Averni of pre-Roman Gaul, and seemed eternal.
But in a half century before Christ the Roman drive across Europe under Caesar intruded its superb array into Auvergne. Independence was threatened. The Averni resisted, and found their leader in the son of their king. He was Vercingetorix, who, making a coherent force out of what Caesar dismissed as “rabble,” stalled the conqueror. The tribal prince reached to the spirit of his people, led them to heroic measures, such as burning their own rude stockade towns to deny the invader protection and stores, and defeated Caesar’s attempt to take Gergovia (Clermont) in 52 B.C. The defenders put the torch to more than twenty of their own towns in a single day in one district. Other states did much the same. “In every direction,” wrote Caesar, “fires were to be seen.”
In the end, Rome’s wits and resources were too great to withstand. Overwhelmed by a huge Roman reserve force of men and supplies, Vercingetorix acknowledged defeat. He sent for his chiefs to let them decide whether they should put him to death for his failure, or deliver him alive to Caesar. Since this was a matter for the conqueror to resolve, messengers were sent to him to ask him his will. Caesar received them enthroned before his camp, demanded their weapons and the delivery of Vercingetorix, whose style