THE SLOW BREATH
OF STONE

A Romanesque Love Story

PAMELA PETRO

For Mary Diaz and Tom Ferguson

and for Richard Newman

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Map of Southwest France

Map of the Pilgrimage Road

1 Discovery

2 Preparations

3 Stones

4 Kingsley and Queensley

5 Maps and Quarries

6 Sculpture

7 The Causses

8 Pilgrimage

9 Racannières

Epilogue

Index

A Note on Sources

Acknowledgements

Also By Pamelo Petro

Copyright

About the Publisher

Map of Southwest France

Map of the Pilgrimage Road

1 DISCOVERY

Lend me the stones of the past, and I will lend you the wings of the future.

Robinson Jeffers

Lucy Porter awoke in a meadow outside the town of Espalion. She was unaccustomed to lying in meadows, but the summer of 1920 had been kind to the grass in southwest France, and it was as thick and inviting as any mattress. She propped herself up on an elbow. Perhaps Anfossi, her chauffeur, had jacked up the Fiat to check the patch on their latest puncture. But he was still asleep at a discreet distance in the next field. No matter, she was awake now. Lucy picked up her pen and rolled onto her side, pulling her journal closer. Its filled pages looked like an artist’s rendering of a hedgerow.

‘In the evening,’ she wrote of last night’s after-dinner stroll, ‘to walk by the River Lot. The willows grew in an exact Corot way – a boat with a touch of red in it, would have completed the Metropolitan Museum picture.’

The composition in which she lay was equally satisfying, perhaps more so thanks to the addition of her own small body, her pale dress like a white erasure against the green meadow. In front of her, its solitary bulk dwarfing the town and surrounding river valley, was a great cone of basalt, a volcanic orphan of the Mesozoic Era about eighty million years old, capped by the erratic profile of a ruined château. Behind Lucy lay a more recent, more imaginable past: a cemetery of granite crypts, many topped with vases holding fresh flowers, and, behind the graves, a worn, red church of the eleventh century.

Lucy sat up and looked back at the church of Perse, adjusting the bun at the nape of her neck. Her hair was dark but beginning to grey in weedy strands. She didn’t like it – grey hair reminded her that Kingsley was so much younger – but what did she expect? She was forty-four years old. The church was greying, too. White blotches – what the French called la maladie blanche, secretions of lime oozing from the red sandstone – had broken out over its façade, under the eaves, across the faces of sculpted apostles.

An image in Lucy’s mind, an image framed only a few hours earlier on the focusing plate of her view camera, superimposed itself across the bare western profile of the church. At the time the image had been upside down, but her mind’s eye righted it for her. She’d been dutifully recording the tympanum, the half-moon formed by the lintel of the church’s entrance and the rounded arch above, but then had become taken with one of the angels that framed it.

Her angel, Raphael, had more to do with architecture than art. It was his image that now lodged behind her eyes. He had been carved out of the wedge-shaped, fitted stones that formed an outer arch around the tympanum, cut in two at the waist, his upper body hewn from one stone, his legs and feet from another. More utilitarian than aloft, she’d thought – his wings were really little more than scratches – but she had made him fly. She had focused her camera on Raphael; the maladie blanche lightened him, and lifted him away from the stone. Then she had cropped the image severely, leaving only the angel and the curve of the arch to which he was bound, which suddenly, to her surprise, became transformed into a vertiginous arc of flight. Looking at him on the focusing plate, her head draped under the camera’s black cloth, she had thought he would propel himself right out of her frame. From the frozen gasp on his thin, wide-eyed face, he seemed to have thought so too.

The memory of Raphael’s flight was interrupted by a sound. At first it had been one note amidst the persistent birdsong, but now her ears sifted out the familiarity of her husband Kingsley’s whistle. Lucy smiled, turned around, and quickly grabbed her journal to record the moment.

‘In about two hours I heard his whistle and saw him coming in the softness of the August afternoon, the castle, the pastures and ripe blackberries setting off exactly his dear, sensible face. So tall and fair and mine!’

Later that day, before dinner, Lucy added a line. ‘Again, almost fearful because of our great happiness.’

Ste Foy, or St Hilarion, de Perse – it is known by both names – is not one of the great Romanesque churches of southern France. Its situation alone gives it a measure of rural dignity. It is possible to drive to the field-locked church, but not past it; only a footpath accomplishes this, passing beneath its northern profile and forcing walkers to crane their necks to take in the sizeable pile of red sandstone upon its hillock. A human body on its own tired feet ensures the church relative majesty by comparison. So does the fact that one’s feet are treading the Chemin de St Jacques, the famous medieval pilgrimage road to Santiago de Compostela, eight hundred miles away on the Spanish coast.

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 my mind Raphael and his Romanesque brethren are as generous to humankind, in their way, as the landscape. Their physical decline – Perse’s paradox of a sculpted vision of eternity fallen to ruin – is at heart a romantic paradox, begging us to imaginatively reanimate the life of an idea just as it asks our eyes to fill gaps in crumbled stone. These sculpted fragments and their pleas to be made whole again drew me, as nearly a century earlier they had drawn Lucy and Kingsley, generously and irresistibly into the sculpture. For the greatest romance of all is that of the self in love with the shadows it throws onto the external world. Romanesque art in its thousand-year-old decrepitude begs us to cast shadows. It insists we become part of what we view. And if we are unable to reinvent and reanimate? Then we are left with the dark pleasures of tragedy.

Lucy and Kingsley Porter were New Englanders, but they had meridional hearts: they loved Italy and found joy in what Lucy called ‘the choppy country’ of the Rouergue. And yet they exchanged the ready fecundity of southwest France for the dense granite and busy skies of County Donegal, in Ireland. Eventually I followed them there, too, to a saw-edged ridge of pink cliffs on Inishbofin, a tiny island barely clinging to the rim of Europe. Crouched there on the granite, I wondered if Lucy had remembered, as I was remembering, the tongue-red church of Perse, and that it was precisely the same colour as the headlands. The tumult of waves had worn them smooth just as rain and wind had erased the features of Christ’s face from the tympanum. Lucy must have wondered how she had come to travel so far from that sanctuary.

The autumn day I visited Inishbofin was unusually warm and I’d tarried on the little island, letting my imagination repopulate the past. I saw Lucy and Kingsley and their new young companion, Alan Campbell. Each in my mind’s eye poised in his or her turn on the cliff edge, a look of surprise not unlike that worn by Raphael on their faces. It was about Alan that I wondered the most. Alan, the inveterate dreamer, who would have been as likely as I – I’m easily his match in the sport of daydreaming, as was Kingsley – to fill the latent romance of the scene with characters and melodrama. By then, however, in midsummer 1933, he would have known that he’d wandered into a story beyond his own conjuring.

Alan was 21 years old at the time. I had been the same age when I discovered Romanesque art. Both of us were in dire need of a good hard slap from the backhand of maturity. And both of us got it, though I dare say mine stung a good deal less.

Shortly after I graduated from university, on the heels of my twenty-second birthday, I moved to Washington, DC to work at the Smithsonian Institution. Washington was then, and still is, overrun by ambitious young people who intern by day and party by night. My friends grazed on free appetizers put out as bait at slick bars and danced in clubs. Sometimes I did, too, but more often I stayed home drinking cheap wine and listening to the radio while I slowly, painstakingly filled a pencil drawing I’d made with tiny black dots of Indian ink.

My drawing was copied from a photograph of the tympanum of Ste Madeline of Vézelay, a twelfth-century Romanesque abbey in Burgundy. The picture tightly focused on a man and woman who held hands as he bowed to her. They were rapturously elegant, with rows of neatly braided hair and garments blown by unseen air currents into cascades of folds. Each partner bore the snout of a pig.

These were the ‘Pig-Snouted Ethiopians’, members of the heathen damned carved onto the great abbey of Vézelay at a time when tympana mapped a geography of Christianity’s fertile imagination. Night by night, my face inches from the paper and the desk lamp inches from my head – so close I could smell my scalp cooking – I lovingly translated their big hands and heads, their slim, pointy feet and voluminous drapery from photographed stone into ink. I was in love with Romanesque sculpture.

I’d discovered this strange art, the eccentric, embarrassing forebear of Gothic sophistication, just months earlier during my final semester at Brown University, in Providence, Rhode Island. In my medieval art seminar I’d learned that the word ‘Romanesque’ had been coined in the nineteenth century with derogatory intent. It referred to the heavy, earnestly sturdy abbeys and basilicas that had begun to crop up in Europe around the turn of the first millennium, in the muddy, nameless years between the classicism of Rome and the spun stone of Gothic cathedrals.

These buildings of the eleventh and twelfth centuries had ‘Romanesque’ features – columns, capitals, arcades – but their decoration was radically unclassical. Hand in hand with the renaissance in architecture, the remembered skills of sculptors and masons had rushed back into currency as well. But instead of sculpting well-proportioned narratives of gods, these artisans freely – sometimes giddily – cut, scored, drilled, and chiselled the façades and column capitals of Europe’s Romanesque stonescape with stories from the Bible and detritus from their nightmares.

Out of the willing stone emerged hares in Hell, roasting poachers on a spit; rams playing harps and devils eating men’s brains; a female centaur pulling a mermaid’s hair; women suckling snakes at their breasts; tiny Peeping Toms. There were acrobats displaying their private parts; a man yanking out his own tooth; two warriors sharing a single penis; and in the Pyrenees, a marble dog stretching out his tongue, eternally unable to touch his water dish carved just out of reach.

Relatively little Western art before or after, excepting that of Hieronymus Bosch and the Surrealists, has been so feverishly inventive. From the beginning it was this very strangeness that was wondrous to me, this stony certitude that there was more to the world than sunlight illuminated for our eyes. Don’t misunderstand: I wasn’t looking for fairies and angels, rather confirmation that at one point in time, at least, images of the mind’s eye bore equal value to those fixed on the retina. Romanesque art stirred in me a deep, visceral joy, an inchoate thrill of imaginative validation, all the more extraordinary for spanning so many centuries.

Perhaps its appeal also betrayed the innate curiosity of a born traveller who had not yet travelled. In one of his brilliant essays on the Romanesque, Meyer Schapiro cited St Bernard’s furious twelfth-century letter condemning the then-new decoration of Clunaic abbeys. ‘What profit is there’, thundered the saint, ‘in those ridiculous monsters, in that marvellous and deformed beauty, in that beautiful deformity?’ Schapiro pointed out that Bernard sensed in those monsters an attitude that would eventually compete with Christian doctrine – ‘an attitude of spontaneous enjoyment and curiosity about the world’. A traveller’s attitude.

At the time I didn’t question too vigorously what fuelled my schoolgirl crush on the Romanesque. I just admired its easygoing, latent democracy. It was the first art of the Western tradition to place scenes of daily life – a peasant drying his socks by the fire – side by side with those of didactic importance, such as Abraham sacrificing Isaac. I felt an instinctive sympathy for its carved figures with oversized heads and eyes. Their bodies performed stunts possible only in a world unacquainted with linear perspective. Boats sailed on top of the sea, and Jesus and the Apostles evidently consumed the Last Supper in a room without gravity, where the tabletop floated before them and nothing fell off. Shoulders faced forward and knees turned to the side. After the Renaissance elevated the human eye and the illusions that please it above the soul and the cautionary tales that might save it, Romanesque art looked ridiculous. It became vulnerable; how could its ideas be taken seriously if it looked so naive?

It should come as no surprise that I did not choose the Romanesque as my field of study. I didn’t want my personal attachments supplanted by extraneous knowledge. So I left it at that, and did something else for twenty years. Then I attended the end of the world.

‘Before and After the End of Time: Architecture and the Year 1000’, read my friend Marguerite from the arts page of the newspaper, repeating the name of an exhibition so I could make a note of it. She thought it was something I might enjoy.

The show had been mounted in the second half of 2000 at the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard to commemorate the more-or-less millennial birthday of Romanesque architecture. While a copy of the Pig-Snouted Ethiopians drawing hangs in my stairwell – regrettably, I sold the original for pub money when I was a poor postgraduate at the University of Wales – I have tended not to think much about things Romanesque over the years, but I made a point of seeing the exhibition. ‘The idea of the millennium enables us to contrast what might have happened in the year 1000 – the descent of the Heavenly Jerusalem – with what did happen, the Romanesque revival of architecture,’ wrote Christine Smith, an art history professor at Harvard who curated the show. ‘We juxtapose the City of God with the City of Man, the eternal with the temporal, and the divine with the human architect.’

To give viewers something to look at as she pursued these heady divisions, Smith pulled a couple of nearly hundred-year-old black-and-white photographs from Harvard’s Fine Arts Archive. ‘Old pictures of older buildings, what could be duller?’ asked my friend Dick, who’d worked at Harvard at the time. I thought much could be duller. The black-and-white prints revealed a reverence for the tactile surface of stone. Every crack, every crumbling rough edge or rash of lichen was fixed with absolute clarity and modulation of light. These were not simple documentary photographs. They were scrupulously unsentimental, but they betrayed a sense of humour and a devotion to texture; a clear-eyed acknowledgement of great age; a sense of grace; susceptibility to valuing the overlooked. Whatever the source, there was passion in these pictures.

I checked a label for the photographer’s name: Arthur Kingsley Porter. Months passed before I discovered that his wife Lucy, or ‘Queensley’, as she was called, had actually taken most of the pictures in the show. By then I was planning my own tour around southwest France to see what she and Kingsley had seen almost a hundred years earlier, and to find out why her photographs quickened my heart. I had no idea then that their Romanesque love story would lead me to Ireland as well.

Twenty years ago, when I was at university, I pondered the body of Romanesque sculpture but not its soul – nor did I give much thought to my own, for that matter. For argument’s sake, let us say that if carved stone has a soul, perhaps it looks like a photograph. In the course of writing this book I came back time and again to a working proposition I’d first articulated to myself at the Harvard exhibition: that stone carving is to the body what photography is to the soul. One describes the solid, three-dimensional art of occupying space and being at rest; the other, a chimera of light and water, the art of being in motion, of being in two places at once – of travelling.

I needed both to learn about the paradox of the Romanesque and to understand the reasons why I loved it so much. I needed to look back to the beginning of the twentieth century in order to really see the sculpture of the eleventh and twelfth, as it crystallized on Lucy Porter’s focusing plate. As I travelled and read and learned over the course of three years her face began to appear there as well, a shadowy overlay that grew ever stronger. Often Kingsley’s reflection flickered next to hers, and together their images foxed the present with intimations of their beleaguered, but always graceful, love story. Finally, once or twice, I glimpsed my own image beside them.

2 PREPARATIONS

The Yukaghir people of northeastern Siberia, seeing a camera for the first time, called it ‘the three-legged device that draws a man’s shadow to stone.’ The three legs were the tripod, and the shadow drawn to stone was the image inscribed onto the glass-plate negative.

Drawing Shadows to Stone, Laurel Kendall

Room Five in the two-star Hôtel Quercy struck the visual equivalent of perfect pitch. The walls were white; so were the gauze curtains and quilted cotton bedspread. A chestnut armoire, in which I knew I would find two square pillows cased in starched linen, sat on Empire legs in the corner, a full-length mirror dividing its two doors. Simple wooden tables flanked both sides of the bed, and a third, set with two chairs and a flowered cloth, was placed beneath the full-length, open window. The bathroom had all the appropriate fixtures including a white marble baptismal font of a sink, and a small wooden table for toiletries.

Two stars release hotel rooms from the need for incidentals, and that was fine: sensibility, simplicity, and forethought were on view without distraction. There was no telephone or television, nothing betrayed a date. It could have been any decade of the twentieth or twenty-first centuries, or even the nineteenth.

Several months earlier I had woken in a similar room after arriving in France and driving from the airport, and not known if I’d slept for an hour – if it was 8:20 p.m. – or if I’d slept off my jetlag for thirteen hours and it was 8:20 a.m. Thick yellow sunlight had slanted through the curtains: marginal sunlight, but I had no clue from which margin of the day, morning or evening, it shone. For two or three minutes I had been helpless, acutely baffled, until I’d turned on the television and found the evening news.

A time traveller might have the same problem in Room Five of the Hôtel Quercy. It was one of the best places in France, in addition to Romanesque churches, in which to conjure Lucy and Kingsley Porter.

Called at 8. We strolled about town, having leisurely put on pressed [and clean] clothes … Natalina makes this hurried travelling almost luxurious.

Without Lucy’s journal I probably would not have envisioned Natalina, her Italian maid, ironing their summer linens. Despite having to make do with provincial hotels (‘the hotels … are abominable’, wrote Kingsley to Bernard Berenson, ‘but the sculptures are worth putting up with anything’), the Porters travelled in style. Berenson’s biographer describes them in Paris at the end of the First World War: ‘a well-to-do, well-educated couple of no particular idiosyncrasies apart from their obsession for some curious sculpture.’ In appearance they were opposites. Kingsley had the tall, slim, slightly awkward frame of a runner who doesn’t run – he was in fact an intrepid walker and swimmer – matched by gentle, blond good looks. Lucy was short and a little stocky, her face broad and candid, with high cheekbones and a square jaw; her husband’s, by contrast, was long and thin, an oval of smooth, sloping angles. In photographs she looked directly into the camera. He tilted his head and sought the horizon, always slouching apologetically for his height.

Both were from wealthy families that split their time between Connecticut and New York City. As affluent young men do in Connecticut, Kingsley had gone to Yale University; as affluent young women do, Lucy had attended Miss Porter’s School for Girls. After graduation, Kingsley wasted no time in becoming an academic wunderkind, publishing his first book on medieval architecture in 1909, at the age of 25. It immediately seized his peers by both the imagination and intellect – a twin reaction he’d inspire for the rest of his life. Kingsley was an art historian who thought of himself as an archaeologist. When other scholars went to the library he went into the field, took comparative photographs, sought out primary documents, and drew his dates accordingly, rejecting prevailing notions about architectural development. His work was consequently perceived as both rigorous and romantic. First at Yale, where he was an assistant professor, then especially at Harvard, he was surrounded by admirers who considered him ‘a valued exotic’. As one former student wrote: ‘His scholarship offered a paradoxical blend of solidity with a penchant for living dangerously.’

How much Kingsley believed and perpetuated his own myth is uncertain; it’s doubtful he considered being chauffeured around the back roads of southwestern France with his wife and her maid a hazardous undertaking. Yet in some ways he did see his fieldwork as a scholarly extension of the big-game hunting he’d pursued in Newfoundland as a teenager. Early in 1920 he wrote to Berenson about his great project, photographing and comparing Romanesque sculpture on the pilgrimage roads of France and Spain, in hopes of discovering a relational lineage of development. ‘I am delighted with some of the things that have turned up from the Burgundian photographs we made last summer. There are so many things I want to find out about that the excitement of the chase perhaps lends an interest not purely aesthetic …’

Fuelled by adventure, romance, and a kind of moral pragmatism in equal parts – a scrupulous, verging on puritanical, need to set eyes on his subjects before he wrote about them – scholarship, for Kingsley, could never be a strictly indoor pursuit. After Yale and a two-year stint at the Columbia University School of Architecture in New York, he moved to Europe to study on his own. It wasn’t what was meant to have happened; his mother, one of the first students to study at Vassar, had intended him to join his brother Louis’ law firm. But in the summer of 1904 Kingsley visited Coutances, in Normandy, and beheld the cathedral that had recently captured the attention of Henry Adams, another gentleman-scholar from New England. Of the cathedral Adams had written in his book on Romanesque and Gothic architecture, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, which would be published the following year: ‘Nothing about it is stereotyped or conventional, – not even the conventionality.’ The same might be said of Kingsley.

Adams thought that the Coutances cathedral epitomized the Normans’ masculine, martial culture. ‘The meaning of the central tower cannot be mistaken,’ he wrote; ‘it is as military as the ‘‘Chanson de Roland’’; it is the man-at arms himself … the mere seat of the central tower astride of the church, so firm, so fixed, so serious, so defiant, is Norman …’ For Kingsley it became the place where the present cracked open and he glimpsed his future. He’d been standing in front of the cathedral when suddenly, he recalled, ‘shined a light round him’, and it was as if he’d fallen into a trance. When he awoke, he later told Lucy, he knew he would never be a lawyer.

Like his rival, the Frenchman Émile Mâle, Kingsley felt he had been called to the study of medieval art – a vocation announced by epiphany rather than mere choice or happy accident. ‘Only romantic personalities,’ wrote Janice Mann in a study of their rivalry, ‘would imagine themselves so singled out by fate.’ It was the passion of this conviction that made Kingsley a memorable teacher. Students who later in life couldn’t tell a cornice from a corbel could not forget the intensity of his love for the subject, which lay like bedrock under his surface shyness and affability. They remained a little star-struck, even years later. ‘His intransigent idealism, his extreme sensitiveness, his incorruptible magnanimity and high-mindedness, even his prodigious capacity for work, have something Shelleyan about them,’ wrote one. Others were moved to even loftier comparisons:

It was … in the manner in which he transmitted to others the results of his own studies and of his perfectly rounded character, making an indissoluble unit of his research, his instruction, and his friendship, that he attained an Hellenic integration of all aspects of his personality.

One of the reasons for Kingsley’s immense popularity was that Lucy channelled his generosity into a weekly schedule. Both Porters became famous at Harvard for their ‘Sunday Afternoons at Home’, when they would open their house to students who flocked there to converse, look at photographs, and be fed. One undergraduate later wrote of Kingsley and his Sundays: ‘I value the memory of hours spent with him in his study and photography collection from 1925 to 1930 beyond any other recollection of the university.’ Lucy had hit upon the idea of Sunday parties to protect her husband, who otherwise would have had students round every night. She was, one of them later recalled, the unflagging guardian of Kingsley’s ‘never robust health’.

That Kingsley felt the same way about his students as they did about him is evident from the dedication he made in his 1931 study, Crosses and Culture of Ireland. ‘To My Teachers’, wrote Kingsley, ‘– My Harvard Students’.

On 1 June 1912, Kingsley married Lucy Bryant Wallace in her parents’ home in New York City, when he was 29 and she 35. During their courtship, initiated by his loan to her of some photographs of Italian architecture, he portrayed himself to her as precisely the reserved romantic his peers made him out to be. Shortly after their engagement he’d made the mistake of perching himself on the arm of another woman’s chair at a tea given by Lucy’s family. By the time he reached home he was eaten up with guilt, and immediately wrote her to apologize. ‘I am afraid you have in hand a wild and wayward nature that has so seldom thought of conventions and forms that it never considers until afterwards that one’s thoughts are judged by purely external actions.’ In the same letter he reminded her, ‘as you know darling social tact is the one thing more than any other that I haven’t’.

Despite his protestations to the contrary, Kingsley’s was a waywardness strictly controlled (so strictly it was perhaps only apparent to himself, though he tried hard in his letters to impress this ‘wild side’ upon Lucy). When she complained that a visit from his relatives had been ‘the most formal kind of call’ he explained to her: ‘My family are all so mannered and stiff; the only way to treat them is to rather break through the ice wall with which they surround themselves. I know because I am just like them.’ Later in life he expanded on the theme to Berenson. Kingsley wrote that it was a part of his ‘Puritanism’ never to show his feelings, a characteristic he loathed, and tried hard to rectify in letters. In many ways, art history – his brand of it, practised in the field – offered a means by which to reconcile his self-perceived ‘wildness’ with his inherited propriety. Roving about the European countryside on his own terms (universities and publishers gave him so much free reign he felt guilty) was never anything less than a respectable vocation. Yet it simultaneously renounced the ‘very formal, very quiet, very refined, in perfect taste, and deadly dull’ world of tennis and dinner parties in which he had grown up.

Kingsley’s second fortuitous discovery was Lucy Wallace: a wealthy, respectable woman with whom he could have a comfortable and respectable marriage and yet, from the first, share his inner nature. While propriety laid its claims on her as well, Lucy’s natural spontaneity reduced the distance between her public and private selves, just as Kingsley’s habit of reflection increased the space between his. The letters they exchanged during the six months of their engagement, beginning on 12 December 1911, are revelatory. Kingsley’s were neat, even-lined, long and analytical; Lucy’s dashed at top speed in impossible scrawl on tiny blue note cards (when she ran out of space she borrowed the old technique of turning the cards on their sides and writing on the perpendicular, between her previous lines). She made no bones about how she felt: ‘Just the tiniest note in the world to carry the biggest amount of love to the finest and most loveable man.’

When Kingsley went to a conference in Pittsburgh shortly after their engagement, she chafed under her sister Ruth’s watchful eye and literally counted the hours until he returned to New York, unembarrassed that she was 35 and carrying on like a teenager. ‘Sweet adorable Kingsley (I just can’t be proper anymore) are you never coming back to me?’ Further down she added, ‘I must wait forty-four hours before you can hold me in your arms again. That would or should solicit tears from a stone (Lucky Ruth does not censure this note!).’ The day before, she promised him that she was getting fat and rosy and lonesome in his absence. This she later amended, insisting ‘I’m not getting fat and rosy. I’m only getting lonesomer and lonesomer and LONESOMER.’

For Lucy, such declarations must have been the equivalent of going out on an emotional limb, for until she met Kingsley she practised a degree of independence unusual for women of her time and, especially, class. She worked as a schoolteacher – by choice, certainly not financial necessity – teaching elementary students at a private school in New York City. In one of her letters she tried to tease Kingsley into coming along to help her hunt for subjects and predicates during a grammar lesson. That she continued teaching, possibly against her parents’ wishes, certainly against her friends’ – one was scandalized that she kept it up after her engagement – suggests that Lucy, too, chafed against the world into which she was born. ‘I never leaned so willingly on anything’, she wrote to Kingsley before their wedding, ‘as I did on your protective care. And can it be I am to have that always, Kingsley, dear?’

After their marriage and honeymoon at Lake George, in New York State – snapshots show Lucy looking uncharacteristically demure, holding a parasol, and Kingsley surprisingly jaunty – the Porters were inseparable, moving always as a pair. When, in 1918, Kingsley was appointed by the French Ministry of Fine Arts to a panel of experts charged with assessing war-damaged medieval monuments (the only foreigner so honoured), Lucy went along and took photographs and made notes. The Porters were based in Paris, where they would remain until the autumn of 1919. It infuriated Lucy to be attending luncheons in the same city where Woodrow Wilson, David Lloyd George, and Georges Clemenceau were simultaneously redrawing the world map for the Treaty of Versailles and to be without adequate news sources.

‘I stumble in my groping ignorance,’ she wrote in frustration. ‘I can’t feel it is fair for the ‘‘Little Powers’’ to have only 5 representatives together against two for each of the 5 powers.’ Paris at the time was still very much a city in recovery. Even for the very wealthy a lukewarm bath was reason for celebration; mail delivery was sporadic at best. And Lucy’s French was still a work-in-progress. In February 1919 she wrote of attending a lunch party with one of Kingsley’s colleagues and his family: kind people who were none the less not of the same social class as the Porters. It was the first time Lucy had been able to speak French with abandon in Paris, a feat for which she later berated herself in her journal. ‘I was ashamed’, she wrote, ‘that my fluency came from a superior feeling socially.’

Curt reflection was a trademark of Lucy’s journal writing, no matter what the subject. She recorded and commented; she didn’t dwell. A rare theme – Lucy was too eclectic to be repetitive – was that of her and Kingsley’s desire for privacy in an unrelentingly social environment. ‘I suppose a tea once in awhile brushes up one’s manners,’ she conceded.

About Paris Lucy avoided generalizations, preferring the sharp, focused observations of a photographer. ‘A thin whiteness over the city’; or, on walking past Notre-Dame in mid February: ‘It was closed but I studied the south portal. The frozen spray of ice from the mouth of each gargoyle showed which way the wind had blown on the first cold day. On my return home a warm shower of family letters.’

In March 1919 the Porters gratefully exchanged city for countryside (‘Glad to leave Paris,’ commented Lucy) so that Kingsley could begin researching Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads in earnest. They would remain travelling, despite a few hiatuses, until Kingsley took up his post at Harvard in the autumn of 1921.

‘How many young dead we meet,’ wrote Lucy as they struck out east of the capital, ‘– always they are before us.’

I was equally glad to trade the congestion of Toulouse for the small towns of the Rouergue. The city’s wealth of sun-faded brick, with its southern promises of warmth, long naps, and lingering meals, was compromised by the edgy graphics of its thriving shops, not to mention its labyrinthine system of one-way streets. I was drawn to the shops, but my heart belonged to the brick’s promises, which no urban hub could ever keep. When I’m in the city I always long for the country; in the country the city never enters my mind.

Upon arrival in Toulouse I’d risen from the Capitale Métro station straight into a 200,000-strong student demonstration protesting against recent successes of the French far Right. Like a piece of foreign flotsam I’d been swept into the human tide, whereupon I immediately began marching, dragging my wheelie suitcase in an erratic path behind me. I was pleased to make a show against encroaching fascism, but the deep-throated chant of the crowd touched a nerve. That noise, like thunder, suggested a latent storm and made me fearful. Although the marchers remained calm – many leashed dogs participated – I’d been almost teary with relief to glimpse my hotel on a quiet side street.

I’d had a similar experience while visiting Toulouse’s great basilica, St Sernin (short for Saturninus), the largest Romanesque church in Europe, consecrated in 1096. The interior had been peaceful enough. Visiting in the 1880s, Henry James remarked: ‘What makes it so extraordinary is the seriousness of the interior … As a general thing, I favor little the fashion of attributing moral qualities to buildings; I shirk from talking about tender cornices and sincere campanili, but one feels that one can scarce get on without imputing some sort of morality to St. Sernin.’

He was right – James usually was – although the painted plaster walls that he, as well as Lucy and Kingsley, had seen have since been stripped down to masonry and pale brick. To my mind the dependability he attributed to the basilica (I felt it too) came from the fact that here brick and stone kept their promises of tranquillity and peace, as they could not in the surrounding streets. The long rhythms of the eleven-bay nave, barrel arched above, repeated the assurance of serenity.

In the time I’d slipped into St Sernin, however, early on a Saturday morning, and returned again to daylight, a massive ‘antiques’ market had gathered around the church, pressing in on it the way hungry children surround a tourist. The pilgrimage church’s quintet of radiating chapels, blooming in semi-circles at its eastern end, now radiated a makeshift architecture of their own: folding tables strewn with disorganized cast-offs, two aisles deep. This wide flounce of price-tagged junk actually extended all the way around the church.

‘Watch for pickpockets,’ shouted an elderly British tourist, inches from her husband’s ear. I took my rucksack off my back and wore it on my chest.

No one so much as glanced up at St Sernin; we were all hypnotized by the pretty rubbish of the century just passed. Mass-produced African sculptures; broken Portuguese pottery; detective paperbacks in French and English; used cassette tapes; a collection of doorknobs. There was even a white cast-iron kitchen sink. I had a friend who used to joke whenever he bought some bauble or other that he was part bower bird, a species inclined to build its nest out of glittery, shiny scraps. This was a bower bird’s dream-come-true.

I tried, but even with binoculars I couldn’t get close enough to the south portal to make out a capital of Adam and Eve’s expulsion; had I not carried Lucy’s photograph, I would never have glimpsed the pair’s rather proud demeanour – curious in the circumstances – caught in Lucy’s sunlit image, or their giant hands haughtily covering private parts.

After an African gentleman tried to buy my binoculars I gave up on the church and attempted to strike a bargain with one of the antique dealers over a copper kettle. From her journal I knew that Lucy had set off on a restorative walk in a city not too far from here, but instead had been lured into a shop selling copper utensils (‘ended by buying 21 articles for the kitchen’), so I was hoping for a nice convergence. But the woman wouldn’t budge.

The Musée Joseph Vaylet in Espalion, in the Rouergue, is St Sernin’s Saturday market enclosed, dusted, hushed, and (loosely) curated. I preferred it by far. It costs next to nothing to enter and is staffed by an elderly couple who take advantage of the time on their hands by shelling peas. Joseph Vaylet was a Rouergat worthy who fought in the First World War and lived until 1982. In the course of his long life he amassed a staggering collection of objects: a military horn used in the French army until 1840, the trumpet of which is shaped like a toothed serpent; a grape-picker’s basket designed to be worn on the head; a glass baby bottle with a glass nipple; gas masks from the Second World War, both military and civilian; a seventeenth-century gourd used for holding spirits; a photo from the Fête des Druides, 1937; a red sandstone sink; a bone from a plesiosaurus – the accompanying drawing shows a long-necked reptile like a brontosaurus, with fins – who lived on the causses for five million years, when they formed the bottom of the sea. None of these objects are for sale, of course, but it doesn’t take a great leap of the imagination to see a fine Saturday market in the making.

Based on sheer numbers, the museum shines in its assortment of ceramic holy-water vessels, but its chief prize is singular: an anthropomorphic menhir about waist-high, found locally and erected sometime between 3500–2200 BC. Statue-menhirs, which are essentially standing stones carved with human attributes, are rare, though the greatest concentration in Europe is in the Rouergue. Some sport schematic arms and legs, beards and breasts, even tattoos incised onto large, tooth-shaped stones; this one, however, was more enigmatic. Two deep eyeholes and a long, half-open mouth seemed to fix the viewer from a place far older than the Bronze Age. I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was an ancestral totem, a sire of all creatures with eyes and mouths before we differentiated into separate species. It was an eerie sight, like looking deeply into everything and nothing in particular at once.

When I visited the Musée Joseph Vaylet I had the place entirely to myself; the handful of other museum-goers in Espalion were all next door at the Musée du Scaphandre – the Diving Suit Museum. The unusual fact that a land-locked town like Espalion has a museum of the diving suit, advertised by a statue of a bronze diver in antediluvian gear standing in the middle of the River Lot and an orange diving bell on the pavement, is imperfectly explained by the fact that two local men were diving pioneers in the mid nineteenth century. I never made it there; I was too busy pondering M. Vaylet’s exhibits, the only common attribute of which seems to be their irrelevance to the present day.

The sixteenth-century building that holds his collection, the former church of St Jean, is irrelevant itself, having been made redundant in the late nineteenth century by the construction of a new parish church across the street. The older structure is an urbane building, compact and narrow but lofty – the in-town edifice of a rising middle class grown wealthy on the tanning trade. The only thing it shares with its predecessor, the field-locked church of Perse, is building material of local red sandstone. There must have been a town meeting at which the masons, tailors, tanners, and stone-cutters of Espalion decided that an eleventh-century church in a meadow outside the town was no longer fitting to their stature, so they decided to commission a new one.

It was in this former church, now a repository of the extinct and obsolete, itself the very agent that had thrust irrelevance on the church of Perse five hundred years earlier, that I momentarily lost faith in my adventure. Here at the beginning of my journey was every reason to abandon it. If a nineteenth-century antelope-headed mallet was no longer useful to the residents of Espalion, how could eleventh-century Romanesque sculpture be relevant to me? It rendered an increasingly discredited theology of judgement and damnation in thoroughly discredited artistic shorthand: what could be more irrelevant than that? St Bernard’s question – ‘What profit is there in this art?’ – had got inside my head. What did I want of it, not to mention the Porters and Lucy’s photographs?

The facts I’d gathered about their lives were as so many exhibits in these cloudy glass cases. Lucy liked to garden; Kingsley was driven to distraction by the unruly clanging of church bells in French villages; they were both bothered by flying insects in the night. Knowing these things didn’t begin to answer why I was so drawn to them.

Instead they rendered the Porters in a kind of Romanesque perspective. Lucy and Kingsley moved about in my imagination, but they did so within the constricted, one-dimensional space of the past. They were like photographs shot by my mind’s eye – as yet a camera without a depth-perceiving lens, restricting its subjects to the surface plane. My mental images of them reminded me of the sculpted tympanum figures on the church of Perse. Although the Perse sculptures were shaped in the round, they had been conceived to inhabit a flat universe. Christ is depicted sitting, but because he sits in one dimension, his knees occupy the same plane as his torso. Writing about Romanesque sculpture, Meyer Schapiro tried to explain how three-dimensional carvings could be rendered in one dimension: ‘They are’, he wrote, ‘like shadows cast on a wall’ – the antithesis, in other words, of real photographs, which are themselves flat but depict depth.

At this point in my journey I felt like that eleventh-century sculptor who had shaped the awkward little figures at Perse. Perhaps, over time, Lucy’s photographs and their stony subjects, abetted by her journal and Kingsley’s letters, even the French countryside itself, might begin to lend the couple shading and spatial depth. Perhaps my own younger self would flesh up a bit, too, and speak to me of the real reasons she’d felt such an affinity for this strange art; at the moment she was little more than a shadow cast behind the present Pamela. It seemed odd to be looking for answers – for personalities, even – in stone. But then I thought of Lucy’s words about winter in Paris; how she’d seen frozen sprays of ice issuing from the mouths of gargoyles, and how they’d revealed the way the wind had been blowing on the first cold day.

I, too, wanted to know which way the wind had been blowing; I wanted to catch secrets on the breath of stone. Lucy had found traces of the wind’s restless passage in ice; perhaps I would be lucky enough to find answers – or at least clues – in sculpture.

I chatted again with the pea-shellers, who directed me to an excellent greengrocer. I was feeling better about things. For good or ill – for now, anyway – let the Porters be a pair of Romanesque photographs cast on the wall of my mind’s eye. About the old sculptures Schapiro had also written: ‘Although they represent incidents … drawn from a real world, it is another logic of space and movement that governs them.’ His words gave me a way to think about Lucy and Kingsley that honoured them for what they were at present: not a living, breathing couple who had stood outside the church of Perse eighty years earlier, perhaps chatting with Joseph Vaylet, their three-legged view cameras at the ready, but guides reshaped on the focusing-plate of my imagination by the logic of my journey. The questions that propelled my travels governed my acquaintance with them. I was not so much their biographer as their fellow traveller, in the same place but another time, and their own painstakingly constructed, black-and-white photographs would be my maps.

There are 1,527 photographs in Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads, and only three, to my count, have people in them. In one, a priest poses in front of St Michel de Cuxa near the Spanish border; in another, three children line up before the entrance to a church in Western France; the third, labelled ‘Baptism of Christ; Shepherds; Magi’, is the most curious. Lucy shot the other figures, but Kingsley took this picture, and as a documentary photograph of column capitals it is an abject failure. The capitals are barely legible – the carvings look like webs secreted by a clumsy, stone-spinning spider – but below them, in sharper focus, stand two young peasant children, a boy with a hat pulled low over his eyes and a girl whom Kingsley half-cropped out of the picture.

It wasn’t unusual for the Porters to take pictures of the children who gathered to watch them work, but it was a rare portrait that Kingsley allowed into print. Lucy noted in her ‘Devastated Regions’ journal that, ‘I let the Le Duc brothers – aged 11, 9, and 5 – stand in my picture. They were clad in cast-off soldiers uniforms.’ That photograph was not included in Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads.

Everything about Kingsley’s picture is curious. The capitals and the children are pushed to the extreme left side of the image; the right simply shows a blank, masonry wall. Had he been fully concentrating on the sculpture he could have got much closer to it, as he did with a different set of capitals in the next photograph. That he didn’t suggests he was taking a portrait of the children, and yet the little girl is half missing. It is either a rare display of sentiment, if not quite sentimentality – both children look solemnly obstinate – or a display of wry humour. From their dress and the rural setting of the church, it’s a good bet the children are shepherds. The fact that they stand directly beneath their carved, biblical colleagues suggests that Kingsley was making a visual pun and a subtle reference to the rural pastureland in which he and Lucy, the church, and the children found themselves.

This photograph is from Volume IV, somewhat misleadingly called ‘The Aquitaine’, of his multi-volume work. In Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads Kingsley set himself an exhausting mission: to examine the sculpture of Romanesque churches along the great medieval pilgrimage ways that led to Santiago de Compostela, in Spain (the route flows like a straight river across northern Iberia, fed by tributaries that branch out into France, Italy, and northern Europe). He and Lucy took photographs in northern Italy and Spain and throughout France; then, using comparative analysis, he determined his thesis. Kingsley rejected the idea of national schools of medieval art, suggesting instead that Romanesque forms and iconographies, like the chansons de gestes, had grown up along the roads, flowing freely across linguistic and political boundaries. The French art historian Émile Mâle also postulated that there was an ‘Art of the Road’. Mâle, however, believed that the Romanesque flowered first in Toulouse and spread from there to Spain. Kingsley countered with the notion that pilgrims and masons carried the new art in both directions, though he thought it might have originated on the Iberian Peninsula. His nine volumes of photographs – totalling 21 pounds on their own, 23 with the volume of text – were the ammunition in his battle (most art historians today have left the battlefield, preferring instead to study Romanesque form rather than date it).

Kingsley amassed six volumes of principally French photographs; one of Italian; and two of Spanish. I chose to concentrate on ‘The Aquitaine’, which includes not only the area around Bordeaux, but almost all of southwest France from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, stretching as far north as the lower Limousin. I picked this volume for two practical reasons. One, I can get by in French, but speak not a word of Spanish or Italian; and two, as opposed to other volumes, which are liberally sprinkled with photographs taken by the Porters’ assistants or purchased from photographic services, almost all of the plates in ‘The Aquitaine’ were shot by either Lucy or Kingsley. Pride betrays this last fact, as each of the 1,527 plates in all nine volumes is attributed to the photographer who made it. The image of the shepherd children is labelled ‘A.K.P. phot.’, and the Espalion pictures ‘L.W.P. phot.’ – a rare practice in a scholarly text, but a fair clue as to how much both Porters valued their work.

There was a third, personal, reason I chose Volume IV as my map to Romanesque France. Nestling within the central portion of its geography, in the corrugated landscape of Quercy and the Rouergue, lie three of the churches I have wanted to see since I was an undergraduate: the great abbeys of St Pierre in Moissac, Ste Foy in Conques, and Ste Marie in Souillac. This litany of names, for me, summoned up the accessible majesty of Romanesque sculpture that, for some intuitive reason, had offered a steady source of serene contentment ever since I’d first heard of them twenty years earlier.

Before I could march off to France, however, I needed a copy of the book. A little hunting turned up three editions: the original of 1923, in 10 volumes and limited to 500 copies, and two later editions of 1966 and 1985, both compressed into three volumes. I descended into the art storage lair of Smith College and looked at all three. The plates in the 1923 books – many of which were missing, having been removed by Smith undergraduates over the years – were bathed in tones of grey, both luminous and grainy, like the pocked surface of a full moon. When the librarian brought out the newer editions I literally rubbed my eyes, thinking my contacts had clouded over. The beautiful plates were blurred and hazy, as if they’d been wound in plastic wrap. I later discovered that the reproductions had not only been taken from prints, rather than the original negatives, they had also been shot through slips of tissue paper that protected the plates.

I bought an original Volume IV and a plane ticket to France, and made up in metaphor what I lost in convenience. So much for obscuring the past.

3 STONES

Go inside a stone

That would be my way …

I have seen sparks fly out

When two stones are rubbed,

So perhaps it is not dark inside after all;

Perhaps there is a moon shining

From somewhere, as though behind a hill –

Just enough light to make out

The strange writings, the star-charts

On the inner walls.

‘Stone’, Charles Simic

I was lost and trapped behind a truck. Not just any truck, an Auto École truck – a big, lumbering learner’s vehicle that inched along and came to a painstakingly diligent stop at each intersection. Instead of overtaking it and risking a fiery death, I decided to hang back and try to get a bearing on where I might be.

It was late afternoon and the sun flared in my windscreen. This seemed impossible: according to my map I’d been heading east. But prolonged squinting proved I was driving west, and the map was old. So I pulled over, irked at lost time but thankful to be rid of the truck, swung the car around, and headed the other way, in the direction of the Rouergue – one of the few places in France, wrote Fernand Braudel, not yet entirely transformed by the modern world.

Quickly the ravishing but mild, carefully tended farmland of northeast Quercy, where the region meets the Dordogne, became a pleasant memory. As I drove east the vegetable colours faded and the soil grew pinker. Towns and farms became scarce and the wavy earth fell almost flat, like a sea with long, rolling swells from a distant storm. Only here the swells were covered in pale moors or forests of stumpy scrub-oak: low trees with thick, gnarly branches whiskered in lichen that made them an alternately venerable or menacing presence, depending on whether they were in sun or shadow.

I did not know it at the time, but later discovered that I was crossing the Causse de Gramat, one of Quercy’s ‘Petits Causses’, so named to differentiate them from the Grands Causses farther to the east. Despite the aged look of the trees they gradually came to seem newborn, a kind of piny stubble, once it became clear that the land was assaulting me with a dose of deep, geological time. Exposed bedrock was everywhere; the causse crawled with it, and the roadside shoulders were bleached white with its dust. Outcrops shared the moors with occasional sheep and goats. Dry-stone walls, thickly overgrown with moss and lichen, wine-tipped with tiny flowers, textured either side of the smooth macadam like mountains on a topographical map. The road itself was relatively new and its construction had left gashes in the earth that hadn’t yet scarred over in the weathered grey of the walls.

Out of these roadcuts tumbled the colours of crustacea, coral, and seashells: white and light grey, cream, tan, pink, and peach. The whitish stone had been tinted by iron oxide, but the marine allusion was on the mark. These were the same colours I would find in the cool interiors of Romanesque churches. This was the same smell I would smell there: a salt-and-chalk scent I remembered from childhood, from holding conch shells to my nose and taking a great sniff. It was the smell, I’d learn, of Conques Abbey. In that sanctuary and others I’d remember the Causse de Gramat and feel the tug of an ancestral memory-tide ebbing back to ancient seas. For that rock and this – everything within eyeshot, all of the stone tumbling from the roadcuts – was limestone.

Limestone is essentially calcium carbonate – it’s called calcaire in French – brought into being by the joint agencies of weight, time, and the sea. As sedimentary rock, limestone is made up from layer upon layer of compressed sea-bottom graveyards, rich with lime secreted from the dead things that collect there: algae, coral, the shells of marine invertebrates, the drowned. As building stone it’s wonderfully abundant, and for humid regions like Europe there has never been a material more receptive to man’s need for shelter, or his drive to express his imagination. The earth gives it up with relative ease and, unlike marble, limestone blocks hold firm against one another – marble skids – which is why Romanesque arches and Gothic vaults literally got off the ground. Most limestone is also mercifully soft and easy to carve (only soapstone and alabaster are easier, but they’re too delicate to be practical building materials). Although its rogue fossils occasionally deflect a chisel, it takes and keeps any detail a stonecarver’s imagination wishes upon it.

Like all sedimentary rock, limestone is a process as much as a substance. At the earliest stage it’s just latent ooze, still in the midst of precipitating out of seawater and collecting in beds on the ocean floor. There is limestone-to-be forming right this minute. The hard, chalky rock of the Causse de Gramat was at this stage during the Jurassic Period, the middle phase of the Mesozoic Era, which lasted from between 208 to 145 million years ago. At that time the causses formed the seabeds of shallow, prehistoric oceans: it was here that M. Vaylet’s plesiosaurus would have swum.

The Mesozoic was a 185-million-year bull market for the species then occupying the globe, especially the reptiles, whose evolutionary stock proliferated as their bodies swelled to stupendous size. The dinosaurs developed during the Jurassic, which was named for tremendous outcrops of limestone in the Jura Mountains, in Switzerland. The Jurassic has been called ‘the noblest of geological time’. Life was good then. The dinosaurs enjoyed the kind of environment we see today only on expensive vacations. Large, warm seas were hiked into shallows by chains of coral reefs. There were underwater gardens of sea lilies and acres of oyster beds. Dunes and shell banks piled the shores. The dinosaurs came of age in this period and then had their time in the sun all throughout the Cretaceous, as geologists call the following 80 million years. It was during this last period that a massive volcano erupted in what is known now as Espalion, about thirty miles to the east, covering its flanks in lava that, as it cooled and hardened, became the basalt mound Lucy Porter noted in her journal.

About 65 million years ago the dinosaurs vanished abruptly and the Mesozoic seas began to dry up, bringing the era to a close. As they evaporated they left behind limestone outcrops, where masons quarried only a thousand years ago for stone with which to build and sculpt Romanesque churches. Not quite a hundred years ago the Porters drove across these limestone plateaux in their 1920 Fiat, in search of the masons’ handiwork; today I was doing the same in my rented Renault. Had any of us been a few million years earlier, we would have needed a boat.

As I approached the crossroads village of Livernon – that is all it was, literally, a crossroads – I came upon a pile of bones left over from this fathomless, geological past: an acre, maybe, of loose, palm-sized rocks, pure white, for all the world like an archetypal joke, a caveman’s trash heap in a cartoon. I slammed on the brakes and got out and took one as a souvenir. It smelled of both seashells and sanctity; it smelled of church. There was latent sculpture underfoot, sanctuaries, farmhouses, walls, and villas. This was where Romanesque sculpture had come from and what had made it possible in the first place – this landscape, this stone, this history that so dwarfed my imagination. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, climbing a mountain in Germany, once defined the sublime by saying that it resided in a suspension of the powers of comparison. On that afternoon the causse achieved sublimity, as geological time struck my associative memory stone cold mute.

So I retracted back into the sphere of my kind, projecting human aspirations on the obliging rock. So much potential all around, and what did I find but the simplest, perhaps the first, stone structure of all: a dolmen, the evolutionary ancestor of all European building.

Just outside Livernon I saw a sign for the Dolmen de la Pierre-Martine. For the same reason that Quercy and the Rouergue boast an abundance of old churches they also, not surprisingly, have the market cornered on Stone-Age structures. There is a greater concentration of dolmens, or cromlechs as they’re also known, in this part of southern France than anywhere else in Europe. Quercy has eight hundred dolmens on record; the Rouergue has a thousand, most of them about 4,500 to 3,500 years old. The pursuit of this particular one led me down a farm track of such beauty that my throat ached. The grey, dry-stone walls had fallen into lavender shadow, behind which branches of scrub oak, roughly interlaced, made shard-patterns of the sky. Bells sounded as ponies bent down to graze.

The dolmen wasn’t much to look at; two of its supporting slabs had been reinforced with concrete to render its massive capstone perfectly flat. A dog’s leash lay on top, domesticating the tomb by association. It looked more like a picnic table than the skeleton of a prehistoric gravesite once filled with human bones (the horizontal and vertical megaliths originally would have been covered with earth, forming a tumulus). I taped my bit of limestone on it and tried to recall when I’d first begun to think about stone. My name, Petro, means ‘stone’ in Greek, and my father has collected gems and minerals since I was a child. But it was only when I was about forty that I began to suspect that my lithic adventures in life – dolmen hunting in a beat-up Renault in Portugal, toting dinosaur footprints to school as a child, a yen to build dry-stone walls – might add up to more than casual appreciation.

Shortly after my fortieth birthday I’d found myself crouching in a cave in Tuscany, inspecting an Etruscan relief carving of a faceless woman, her legs impossibly splayed outward like wings. A leaflet told me that she was a ‘mermaid with two tails’. I recognized her as a fertility goddess. I touched her shin, entranced. The other visitors wandered off, but an elderly Italian guide lingered behind. ‘You love this,’ he said in halting English, taking my hand and pressing it against the stone.

Over the next months it occurred to me that he was right. I didn’t just love Romanesque sculpture, I loved stone itself. Dogs may be our best friends, but stone is our most steadfast companion. It accepts whatever we find significant – our scratchings and carvings, our borings and borrowings – and remembers them far longer than we do until, like this dolmen, they become secrets. I trusted the mute companionship of stones, their testament to ancient lives and even older weather, and, especially, their humbling perspective. Compared to us, stones are immortal.

The only hotel in Livernon, a shifty-looking place, was closed, so I drove on to the much larger town of Figeac, not far from the Rouergue border. Venerable, mottled sycamore trees and neon advertisements lined streets crammed with rush-hour traffic. I could see a string of old hotels with lovely terraces on the far embankment overlooking the River Lot. In the forty-five minutes it took to travel three blocks to a bridge and cross the river, not a single parking space was left to be had. I bolted out of town in desperation, as fast as the Friday evening crush would permit, and fled south.

The ample croplands of the Lot Valley didn’t last long. Soon I was climbing, switch-backing up atop a high ridge, which gave onto the open, scrubby moors of the Causse de Limogne, another limestone plateau just south of that of Gramat. I bellowed out of the car window into the greying emptiness, noisy with relief. It was refreshing to find feral lands in France, where the trees aren’t pruned or planted in neat rows – an antidote to Gallic cultivation, in every sense of the word.

The next town I came to was called Cajarc, an old market village around an open square, which had been strung with coloured lights. I found a parking space in front of a café that also proved to be a hotel; inside, the owner-chef and his family were eating dinner before customers arrived. His wife jumped up when I walked in, letting the ladle she’d been gripping fall with a plop, handle first, into a big white tureen. There was a long moment in which no one seemed to move, or breathe, the air still as art. In the time it took to swallow, the impression vanished. The woman retrieved her spoon with a good-natured shrug, wiped the soup off her hand, and showed me to a room at the back.

A stairway led to seven second-storey rooms opening off an exterior corridor. She presented one and left me with a key, and I went back to the car to retrieve my suitcase. When I returned I’d forgotten which of the identical, numberless doors was mine. The fourth one, I thought, so I tried the key; it fitted, and I walked in. I had a moment’s deep dread – the rucksack I’d left was gone – before I decided, calmly, that this was simply the wrong room. I tried the fifth door, which also opened to my key but which was also empty; then the sixth, with the same result. With growing concern of several kinds I marched back to the third door, certain my key would work, and threw it open: inside a startled man in a wide-brimmed hat was placing a large bamboo staff against the wall. A different rucksack entirely, bound with a large scallop shell attached to a cord, sat on the bed. I apologized in embarrassment-addled French, and tried the second door, certain it couldn’t possibly be mine. It was.

All night long – a fluorescent light had glared directly outside the frosted glass door to my room, preventing measurable sleep – I amused myself with game-show scenarios presented by my skeleton key. Behind door number one lay this! Behind door number two lay that! Behind door number three stood – a pilgrim!

We met again at breakfast. ‘Bonjour, Madame,’ he greeted me. ‘Je suis un pèlerin.’ So you are, I thought.

He’d been driven to conversation with me because the locals – a fearsome pack of middle-aged men drinking strong coffee and beer at the bar, grunting to one another from their gullets – had confiscated the newspaper he had been reading while he’d gone to pick up his staff, which had fallen with a clatter. In between bites of local peach jam spread on a baguette, he told me he was walking the entire pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela. My eyes widened in honour. ‘In pieces, Madame,’ he specified. ‘I shall get no medal for speed. Last fall I walked from Le Puy en Velay to Conques in ten days. Now, this spring, I am walking from Conques to Moissac. I give my feet a rest in summer and winter. There are whole peach-halves in this confiture,’ he concluded, fishing one out of the pot with a spoon.

I wished him well. I had guessed he was a pilgrim on account of his outfit – a wide-brimmed hat and staff have been pilgrimage accoutrements since the Middle Ages – and because Cajarc lies on one of the branches of the great pilgrimage way. There are four principal routes of spiritual drainage across France, all of which converge in the Pyrenees. One route begins in Paris and travels through Tours and Bordeaux; another starts at Vézelay in Burgundy – home of my Pig-Snouted Ethiopians – and continues through Limoges and Périgueux; a third takes the southernmost route, starting in Arles and winding through Montpellier and Toulouse; and the last one, called the Via Podiensis, sets out where my friend began, at Le Puy en Velay in the Massif Central, and passes through Espalion, Conques, Figeac, Cajarc, Cahors and Moissac. The Via Podiensis is also known as the GR 65, ‘GR’ standing for Grande Randonnée, one of France’s meticulously well-marked, long-distance hiking paths, a map of which the Cajarc pilgrim had spread on his breakfast table in lieu of the missing newspaper.

So many well-trodden routes converging on one place suggest a very great destination at the end, and so Compostela was, and is yet. The allure began when the Apostle James, or in Spanish, Santiago, appeared to Charlemagne in a dream in which he revealed the location of his body, inconveniently buried in infidel-occupied Spain. Charlemagne tried to beat back the Moors, but failed; after Galicia was freed nearly two centuries later, pilgrims began flocking to James’s tomb in Compostela. There were other pilgrimage options for medieval travellers as well, Jerusalem being the holiest, but also the farthest; Rome was next in line of importance, with the bodies of two saints, Peter and Paul; after that, Compostela was the only other site in Europe to boast an entire Apostle (other churches had bits and pieces in reliquaries, but they didn’t match the glamour of an intact corpse whose owner had actually walked with Christ).

The Compostela pilgrimage was enthusiastically promoted by French abbots, who welcomed the revenue and prestige brought by masses of pilgrims travelling through French territory, not to mention the opportunity to shift attention from Rome. Its popularity also drew upon proto-tourist attractions along the route: the new Romanesque churches going up in southern France, with their beautiful, terrifying, bizarre sculpture – some abbeys also had powerful relics of their own – and the battlefield of Roncevalles in the Pyrenees, where Charlemagne’s nephew, the folk-hero Roland, had died in battle. By the 1130s the pilgrimage was established enough to have its own ‘guidebook’, which offered opinionated advice on just about everything.

‘The Navarese bark like dogs’, complained the anonymous, Francophile author. Kingsley Porter wrote that from The Pilgrim’s Guide, which is actually a portion of a manuscript called the Callistine Codex, ‘We learn the characteristics of various nations – which peoples were kindly, which treacherous, which dirty; where the wine was good, and where the food was bad; where rivers could be forded; and where inns or hospices afforded shelter for the night.’

For most Western Europeans the pilgrimage took a year to undertake. Set out at the end of winter, travel in spring, arrive in summer, retrace your steps in autumn, return with the first snow. If, of course, you returned at all (if you didn’t show up within one year, the compulsory will made out for you by your parish priest was promptly acted upon). The pilgrimage was attractive to all social classes – rich people eventually paid others to walk for them – but for the most part Compostela pilgrims were poor peasants and serfs, usually elderly and therefore expendable to their lords. These people walked an average of fifteen miles a day, often in hopes of curing pre-existing ailments. They were endemically cheated by toll-takers and moneychangers, beset by bandits, and at the mercy of river ferrymen who sometimes purposely sank boats in order to loot their drowned customers. They suffered from heat stroke on unshaded Spanish roads (French roads were purposely lined with trees on one side, to provide comfort). And they were trapped in late spring blizzards crossing the Pyrenees – an event I knew a thing or two about, having crept in my car from France to Andorra through the Pas de la Casa in April. The two-lane road had writhed in an agony of curves as snow slicked the surface and low clouds clamped visibility down to about ten feet. It was perhaps more treacherous in a car than on foot – accidents littered the shoulders – but unlike foot-travellers, at least I could turn up the heat.

Despite the litany of hazards, pilgrims went to Compostela. They went in droves, ushering in a boom in the medieval shoemaker’s trade, their only protection a deterrent that sprang from the same fountainhead as their own incentive: fear of eternal damnation. It was a grievous sin to harm one of St James’s faithful, who were identified by costume and an insignia – the scallop shell – which has been the symbol of the Compostela pilgrimage since the eleventh century.

The pilgrimage to Santiago, to the home of St James, was above all an expression of optimism. In a world that recognized no causality other than God’s or the Devil’s constant meddling – illness was the work of the latter, good luck of the former – one’s future in both life and death depended on the beneficence of otherworldly forces. St James had the power to intercede on a supplicant’s behalf, especially that of a pilgrim who had given a year of his life and crossed the better part of a continent to honour the saint in his resting place. James was powerful; he had been Christ’s disciple; he was a reminder that all was not lost. Through his bones shone a chink of light within the theological shadow of near-certain damnation. The pilgrimage ultimately attested to the tenacity of human hope.

The path of the GR 65 ruts the emotional landscape of the Rouergue and Quercy. It’s not on my Michelin map, but the chemin falls like a latitude line across people’s lives. It has been a constant for over a thousand years, and thus a directional anchor. ‘Oh, you’re looking for the dolmen? Go to the pilgrimage road, and turn left.’ Or, ‘You can buy tweezers in the Pharmacie de l’Europe. It’s the one near the bridge, on the Road.’

The Chemin de St Jacques is also an attitude line; it is impossible not to perceive its presence – the westbound direction laden with spiritual urgency, the eastbound with equal measures of relief and disappointment – as a yardstick for one’s own journeys. Everyone who travels in the territory must at some point wonder how a pilgrimage differs from a mere journey. Must one be travelling on the soul’s business, to address God, or can a pilgrimage be more prosaic? Does spiritual business necessarily involve God?

I was rather unproductively pondering these questions as I approached the village of Conques, in the Rouergue; specifically, I had been mulling over the idea of an incomplete pilgrimage, which is how I fancied my travels. I was setting out to visit Romanesque sites on a branch of the pilgrimage road in southwest France, but defying the historical and spiritual tug of its destination, in Spain. Few roads lead nowhere, and this one had one of the most famous endpoints in European history. Even the stars of the Rouergat sky formed directional arrows, reproaching me for my stillness (it is said that the Milky Way leads to Compostela, the ‘Starry Field’ in the west). What did it mean to be more concerned with a segment of the chemin than its conclusion? A wilful choice of body over soul?

I put my hand to the south door of the abbey and it drew me in more than opened to applied pressure. I lost my balance and stumbled inside, into the bear hug of a large priest who was on his way out into the night. His white cassock glowed against the black space beyond. We both spoke in wine-scented whispers. Yes, I was welcome to come in, the abbey was open. But attention! The paving stones were uneven.

I stepped inside: the great building was dissolving into echoes of darkness. At first greys, masonry greys, hovered at eye level. As they rose upwards they grew less substantial, optical memories more than illuminated stones, until the visual echoes faded entirely and the majestic barrel vault of Conques Abbey ceased to be, and for me, not knowing if the stars were out yet or not, became heaven itself. Soon the foundations of the massive pillars and the exterior walls disappeared too. I was inside an idea of a Romanesque church, nothing more concrete than that, but that idea was strong, and it was enough. I felt the muscle of architecture flex around me, repeating in pleats of rounded arches down the side aisles – and there was a quiet undertone of pleading in that repetition, too – the twelfth-century message of God’s tough love.

I sat down on one of the curiously tiny, rush-back chairs that filled the nave. The night-time had brought singularity back to the abbey. I could smell the church far better than I could see it – it smelled like the rock in my pocket, only damper – and that limy scent defined its space as unique, something different from the green smell of spring drifting on the night-mists outside. By contrast, daylight had revealed not only Conques Abbey itself, but its endless repetition throughout the village. Despite being a ‘Grand Site de France’ – advertised as such by banners on nearby auto-routes – Conques village has remained wondrously small and self-contained, coiled into deep, wooded countryside halfway down the steep declivity that separates the Causse de Comtal from the Dourdou Valley. There is not a modern bone in the village’s medieval body, and yet one of the first things that struck me upon leaving my car and walking into town was wave upon wave of photographic reproduction. I’ve rarely seen such a plural place.

So many images of a single spot! Granted the almost shocking magnetism of the abbey – imagine Big Ben, or the Empire State Building, surrounded by a rural hamlet – and yet still the proliferation of postcards overwhelms. There are old ones, new ones, black-and-white and in colour; postcards in matte finish, shiny finish, printed on textured paper. Postcards of parts of the abbey that are off-limits to visitors, like the one I’d bought of a mermaid clasping her forked tail in each hand, carved onto a capital in the upper gallery. To purchase for 35 centimes an image never intended to be seen from the ground seemed, somehow, a violation of the abbey’s privacy. But then photography heedlessly violates the privacy of time past as well as space delimited, for I had approached the great western façade of Conques, surrounded by its little apron of a cobbled place, with a fixed, black-and-white moment from the morning of 18 August 1920 clasped in my hand.

Unlike Lucy’s, my moment – afternoon, 20 April 2002 – came with distracting colour and sound. An announcer commented on a women’s gymnastics championship on a television set in the Salon de Thé opposite the abbey. ‘I am just ringing to say I am standing in front of the church,’ repeated a blond woman, loudly and carefully, into her mobile. Beside her an Irish setter was hopelessly knotted up in her leash in a patch of shade. Above us all rose the massive, no-nonsense towers of the abbey, braided ‘round above and below by the shimmering roofs of the village’ (Conques is so steep that windows of two-storey houses one block from the church overlook its nave). Hannah Green, in her memoir Little Saint, likened the roofs to dragonfly wings. The standard comparison is fish scales. The traditional Rouergat lauzes, thin, round roof-tiles, here cut from silvery schist and overlapped very much like gills – reminded me of braided leather, arresting my eye again and again with intricate fugues of texture.

I thought of Lucy and Kingsley in Vézelay in 1919, the summer before they had visited Conques. They had fallen in love with the village that clustered around the great Burgundian abbey just as I was becoming smitten with Conques. Lucy had written in her journal that their travelling companion, Bernard Berenson, had fallen asleep in the car on the way back to Paris, and she and Kingsley had been free to fantasize. They’d decided that if their taxes kept going up at home they would return to Vézelay to live in one of the little houses that framed the abbey, and have a garden in front and a view at the back.

I smiled at the familiar daydream, and began to commence on one of my own. But there was the setter to untangle, and a photo to be taken of three Brazilians from Belo Horizonte. After that, my moment in Conques merged with Lucy’s, and I forgot everything but the great, scarcely weathered tympanum before me, to which traces of coloured paint still cling. A Conquois friend of Hannah Green’s called the tympanum ‘one of the four wonders of the world’ (she neglected to name the other three). Just a glance reveals its importance. The early twelfth-century abbey is predominantly built of buttery yellow limestone (salted butter, to be exact; the interior is the paler shade of whipped sweet butter), with rosy mortar and mottled grey schist in-fill. The tympanum, however, and the pierres de tailles – the fitted stones – of the surrounding portal are pure, creamy, ochre-coloured sandstone. The very best stuff the quarry had to offer.

The eye notes this and marks it; only when you move in closer do you realize that the golden stones were set there as a lure, to lead you to one of the most magnificent spectacles of Romanesque art. And it is a spectacle, like a parade or a circus, with a multitude of incidents, intimate and grand, frightening and beatific, some grimly funny, mushrooming throughout every inch of the sculpted half-moon. The theme is the Last Judgement. At the church of Perse in Espalion the great reckoning was compactly and clumsily depicted in shorthand – just a reference to ignite whatever associations already existed in the viewer’s mind. Here the theme has become art, supplying visual images of its own, supplanting others. Imagine that a director of greatness, of real vision and inspiration, working with a troupe of earnest amateurs, has set out to perform skits from the Second Coming of Christ – not to convey the idea of judgement, but to narrate it. The result is the tympanum of Conques.

Back at university my professor had thought that the little sculpted actors, the saints and the saved, the devils and damned, had a ‘folk-art quality’; my guidebook found them ‘endearingly anecdotal’. What I think they both meant is that the carvings are not types, representing ideas, but individuals acting out very particular rewards and punishments. This is an impolitic thing to say, but then travel books permit the occasional lapse into sentimentality: they are heart-achingly sweet. Even the devils look like nice guys in masks, trying to be mean. An abbot takes the hand of Charlemagne, depicted as an old, stooped, shuffling king, and kindly leads him into heaven. And it was a compassionate heart that imagined the justice of the damned – nowhere else but the tympanum of Conques would a rabbit be given the opportunity to roast the man who had hunted him, on a spit, eternally, in Hell.

Ste Foy, to whom Conques Abbey is dedicated, kneels under a miniature eave on the left-hand side of the composition, blessed quite literally by the hand of God. Foy, the ‘little saint’ of Hannah Green’s book, was beaten, broiled, and decapitated at the age of twelve, in the year 303, for refusing to pay lip service to the Roman pantheon. She was canonized a century later. Her remains lay at Agen, near Toulouse, for over four hundred years, until she was either stolen, lent, or borrowed (the facts are unclear) and brought to Conques, where a piece of her skull was set into a portable reliquary statue around the year 900. Foy had already been working miracles, but she seemed to like the reliquary, with its golden face – probably originally that of a Celtic god – and feverishly granted prayers as fast as they came in, rendering the abbey not only a stop on the Via Podiensis, but a pilgrimage destination in itself.

Of all the incidents on the busy tympanum, Lucy typically found and focused on the moment of greatest tension. It is a tension her black-and-white photograph enhances, making the weary graininess of the thousand-year-old carvings into a kind of elemental cognate to the fraught scene (more appropriate to its mood than the cosy sunlight that pampered the stone when I saw it). On the lowest tier of the tympanum, right in the centre, just beneath an angel and devil tensely weighing souls, is a divide; on one side angels lead little souls into what looks like a coat closet, but is actually the door of heaven. On the other, devils cast the damned into the mouth of hell – here depicted as a kind of toothy fish – which emerges from another, grimmer, door. The angel and devil closest to the centre glare at each other across the gulf that separates good and evil. The devil, with sumo-wrestler proportions, punk-spiked hair, and an enormous bludgeon, is the only character on the tympanum blatantly to overwhelm his allotted niche. The others, encased in their cartoon-strip boxes, tell their stories; this devil, however, poses an active threat, as if at any moment he may free himself from the stone and add your story to his.

The angel at whom he stares grabs a little soul by the hand and pulls him out of no-man’s-land – the grey area between good and evil, from which we only see him partially emerging – it’s that close a save – before the devil can get his claws on him. The angel’s eyes hold a dare: just try it, he says to the bludgeon-wielding devil. And yet he hurries the little soul onward toward heaven, just to be safe.

This is it, Romanesque art at its most anxiously appealing. This moment is acted on what Hannah Green calls ‘the rim of time’. The everlasting is about to begin; mortality is about to end. Yet it is a quintessentially human moment, full of fear of the awful arbitrariness of fate. Far from ceasing to be, time plays a role – the angel snatched that soul from the void just in the nick of it – and so does luck.

Most art makes a statement. Romanesque sculpture poses a question: will we be saved? The only answer it musters is a shrug. Maybe. Probably not. There is uncertainty and death, hard work and hunger in this life, and judgement in the next. No wonder its quiet, secular moments, the corbels of clasping couples, fiddlers, dancers, and domestic beasts, all found their places on religious buildings. Each is a touching bid to secure a chip of immortality – the cheap kind found in stone – for the otherwise brief pleasures of life. Despite its fixation with the everlasting, the Romanesque point of view ultimately hails from the conundrum of the human condition. This is one of the reasons I love it so much: it dares to reveal not the nobility, but the vulnerability of life in the face of death.

Lights came on without warning, like a shock of lightning. I had slipped into an over-fed daze sitting in the stony darkness of the nave. Before entering the abbey I’d found a very pink garret room in the Auberge St Jacques, just steps away, and had eaten dinner there too in the over-lit dining room. The young waiter had inquired if I wanted a salade aux gésiers. I’d asked what it was.

‘Une salade avec pommes et poulet, Madame,’ is what I heard.

A salad avec pommes de poulets is what came. Not a salad with apples and chicken at all, but a salad with apples of the chicken – fried gizzards, in other words. Ah, I’d thought, undone by a crafty French preposition. Not the first time, nor the last. What I’d actually ordered was a Salade Caussenarde, a speciality of the region, made up of mixed greens, local walnuts, and either crumbled feta or Roquefort cheese. Mine came with Roquefort – an appropriate choice, considering the caves where the cheese is aged used to belong to the monks of Conques. I willed myself to forget what I was eating. After the duck, crusty crème brulée, and half-bottle of Gaillac that followed, and then the soft abbey darkness, I had almost fallen asleep. But the abrupt lights in the upper gallery banished any easygoing rapprochement between wakefulness and sleep, night and day, light and dark. My grey-black heaven was gone, replaced by definitive black shadows cutting at odd angles across brilliantly revivified white stone: a sight unbeheld for more than nine hundred of Conques’ thousand years, until the twentieth century wired the abbey for electricity.

An organist had come to practise for tomorrow’s mass. Far above me he struck the keys and vibrations filled every cavity, the barrel vault and my chest alike, making heavy, solemn music inside my body and out. I was thankful the nave itself was still fairly dark, and the side aisles, too. They beckoned me away from the electric intrusion like conduits to an alternate state of mind, much as the road outside my window had at night, when I was a child. A nearby streetlight had thrown leaf patterns into a small puddle of illumination, casting the road beyond into even greater darkness. I knew where it led – down to Grove Avenue, my school, the football field – but I would pretend it could take me anywhere.

Surely the drive to go, to be surprised, to leave the unrelenting known for whatever lay beyond, has always lurked somewhere beneath the pilgrim’s piety. In his book on pilgrimage, Peter Sumption suggests that upon taking to the road the pilgrim left behind the chief quality of medieval life – ‘monotonous regularity and the rule of overpowering conventions’. He cites a fifteenth-century writer who bluntly identified the wanderlust factor: a pilgrim’s principal motivation, he wrote, was ‘curiosity to see new places and experience new things, an impatience of the servant with his master, of children with their parents, or wives with their husbands’.

Not surprisingly, Kingsley put his finger on the same chord. ‘Into the psychology of the pilgrimage there must have entered love of wandering for its own sweet sake,’ he wrote in Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads. ‘The same restlessness that creates the modern tourist spurred on the men of the Middle Ages to roam.’

‘For its own sweet sake’. Again and again, Lucy notes in her journal their arrival at a hotel and her keen desire to bathe and nap, while Kingsley goes ‘out to investigate the village’, or ‘takes a walk’, or ‘visits the church’. The man was perpetually restless. During the early stages of their courtship it nearly killed him to spend the summer of 1911 at home reading Rabelais (counting the pages was ‘an indication, doubtless, that I am not properly enjoying it’), while Lucy travelled on the West Coast. He made a show of being enthusiastic about her adventures, but envy got the better of him. ‘One day I was dragged out yachting, which fairly made my hair curl with excitement.’ In another letter he was ‘stale from lack of travel’. When Lucy wrote of her climb up Mount Hood, in Oregon, he replied: ‘I thoroughly envy you the experience. I hate hard climbs while I am doing them – always get as scared as a kitten and never fail to vow to myself that if I get down safely I shall never no never try a mountain again – and yet one always does.’ By the time he finished writing, his blood was ‘on fire’ to climb anything.

Janice Mann, who wrote comparatively of Kingsley and Émile Mâle, believed Kingsley’s wanderlust to be typical of his nationality and generation. ‘For Porter,’ she wrote, ‘the process of art history was one of travel – physical and figurative – to the frontier. His sense of art historical accomplishment was satisfied by moving from familiar areas of the discipline into the unknown, just as progress in the European settlement of America involved moving repeatedly from civilisation into the wilderness. He was drawn to the open road both literally and metaphorically.’

It was true: as more scholars moved into the study of Romanesque art in the late 1920s, Kingsley shifted his focus to Ireland, where he and Lucy acquired a castle in Donegal as a base for his pioneering work on early Christian crosses. But even more intriguing than his need to roam was the nature of the unknown that Kingsley sought. For him, as well as for other American writers from Henry Adams to Henry James, the ‘wilderness’ of which Mann speaks was nothing other than the European past: a wilderness in time rather than place. In Kingsley’s case, he was not travelling to discover a new, empirical reality – a continent that could be sampled, measured, drawn, and detailed – but rather overlooked evidence that would substantiate a dream of the Middle Ages that he already held in his head. Like Conques Abbey in darkness, invisible but present, Kingsley imagined a world that could be sensed but no longer be seen, built upon remnants and old stone foundations that he and Lucy sought by day, of a society he valued far more than his own. Like me, he was a romantic, rebuilding the ruined eternity of the Romanesque in his mind, spellbound by his own reinventions.

His friends, notably the Irish poet George Russell, known by his epithet ‘Æ’, teased him about his disregard for modern life. Imagining Kingsley’s horror of air travel, Russell wrote with delight, ‘I suppose that would be an adhesion to the mechanical age which would seem to you almost as bad as Bolshevism. I fancy you sigh for travels with a donkey like Stevenson’s.’ He goes on to muse upon Lucy’s feelings for donkeys, then adds in clear-headed fashion, ‘I am sure with all your yearning for a simpler age without mechanics you could not endure it. You really ought to thank Heaven that you being born in a comfortable age can investigate uncomfortable ages without their dirt, smells, bad cooking, lack of sanitation, etc.’

Russell hit a nerve; Mann, too, feels that Kingsley regarded the medieval world as an insular, golden time in painful contrast to the whirring gears of an increasingly mass produced, mechanized America. It was this yearning of his, more than anything else, that provided a private, portable milieu within which he carried on his work as a scholar, and which suggests that the Porters’ travels amounted to a kind of pilgrimage in their own right – a pilgrimage back in time to satisfy a need of the imagination. An archaeologist’s search for relics upon which to build an imagined, better place is perhaps not so very different from a medieval pilgrim’s prayer to Ste Foy, or St James, to one day be admitted to the collective dream of heaven. That Kingsley linked his own road with the great pilgrimage route to Compostela is apparent, more than anywhere else, in the rapture of his prose. Of the Chemin de St Jacques he wrote:

One feels, as nowhere else, wrapped about by the beauty of the Middle Age. One is, as perhaps never before, emotionally and intellectually stimulated. Shards of the memory, long unused, are set vibrating. The actuality of the pilgrimage, like a cosmic phenomenon, overwhelms with the sense of its force, its inevitability. It seduces one, irresistibly …

Neither Lucy nor Kingsley was particularly religious; the endemic Protestantism of their youths seems to have manifested itself as a horror of idleness rather than a spirituality-driven habit of traditional churchgoing. Ironically, for a Luddite like Kingsley, it was their very American reliance on mechanical innovation – not just the Fiat, but the camera, especially – that most set their own journey apart from the spirit of the medieval pilgrimage in which he had so longed to invest himself.

The linchpin of pilgrimage, or relic-worship in general, is that the sacred item, be it a saint’s finger, whole carcass, or lock of holy hair, not only heals and answers prayers; it also confers sacredness on its environment. As William Melczer writes in his introduction to The Pilgrim’s Guide, ‘Pilgrim and relic are two sides of the same coin. The one is conditioned by the other. The essential mobility of the pilgrimage is a function of the essential immobility of the relic.’ Compostela, Conques, and all the other destinations of sacred medieval travel were mountains that would never, ever go to Muhammad.

Yet Lucy’s three-legged view camera broke the bond between place and pilgrimage. Her photographs rendered the hallowed stone fortresses to which penitents had trudged in a westward direction for almost a millennium as light and slim and portable as the paper on which their images were printed. Relics – or rather their encircling architecture – were no longer essentially immobile. Photographs took a print of their souls and rendered them relational commodities, open to comparison and historical analysis, able to be scrambled and studied; they were no longer absolutes wedded to a particular plot of earth by the sacred weight of a pile of stones. The ebbing of faith, of course, is responsible for the erosion of belief in traditional pilgrimage, but photography released the process of it, the procession of it, from the steady, seasonal gravitation of its course even for non-believers. Lucy and Kingsley did the Chemin de St Jacques backwards, in a car.

The abbey’s everlasting dampness had been inching through layers of skin, muscle, fat, and blood vessels until it finally reached the marrow of my bones, chilling me to my soul. I got up to leave and go to bed – the organ was still sending crashing breakers of Bach through my chest – and when I did, I noticed something unusual. The abbey’s white windows had taken on colour. Conques’ windows probably peeve traditionalists, but to me they are sublimely simple, pure and organic, a modern response to the craving for ‘stained’ glass. They were designed by the artist Pierre Soulages and installed in 1993: opaque white panes broken by black trim. By day they define whiteness, rendering the pale limestone interior creamy-grey by comparison. By night they pick up, alternately, the blues and amethysts of twilight and the pinks and oranges of the sodium vapour lamps outside, staining the glass with the modern colours of night.

I was seeing these shades for the first time, and I smiled to myself to think how similar they were to those of the limestone rocks spilling from roadcuts on the Causse de Gramat. Outside in the dark place, I put my nose to the window of a rock shop just opposite the abbey. Samples of barite, pyrite, agate, and ammonite fossils, all from the Rouergue, gleamed in the dim light. I bent down to look at a piece of limestone carved in the shape of an animal – I couldn’t see what kind – but the moonlight made the window a mirror, and instead all I saw was my own reflection. As I stood up a realization shot across the sleepy night sky of my mind. It wasn’t quite the experience Kingsley had in front of the Coutances cathedral, but it startled me into wakefulness.

‘I look up at the giant stones absorbing the summer sunlight into their age-old might and order, and I think of the massive size and grace of this Romanesque church – the stones, the stones; the skill that went into cutting these stones exactly to measure, each one … the work, the labor of transporting them such a distance across difficult terrain, the skill of the masons … who built with these stones, fitting them precisely, the strength required, the patience.’

Hannah Green’s ode to the abbey’s limestone rang in my ears. My pilgrimage, if it could be called that – and in this instant I thought perhaps it could – needn’t be incomplete. I had been looking at the wrong end of things. My starting point was the Romanesque, and the Porters were showing it to me; but lingering in Quercy and the Rouergue, ignoring Compostela, did not mean I had to be stationary. Kingsley had pursued a pilgrimage that delved into time; why could I not pursue one that delved into place – this place, and the art and architecture to which its environment, its very geology, had given rise? I would follow the sculpture I loved back to the quarries that had given it up a thousand years ago. Let others pursue questions of judgement and salvation; I would go backwards instead of forwards, plumb vertically rather than tread horizontally. It was indeed a body I was seeking: the body of the earth.

My heart pounded out the rightness of the idea. My square pillow, again found hidden in my room’s armoire – log-style French pillows prop my head up too high – would have to wait. Following the newly risen moon I followed some stairs near the south transept down into what remained of the abbey’s medieval refectory. A fountain splashed in the middle and columns salvaged from a former cloister made a dark gallery along one side of the square. In the strong moonlight it wasn’t hard to find the capital I was seeking. In the very best limestone of all, pale grey, denser and harder even than the smooth, tawny sandstone of the tympanum, were carved eight tiny stonemasons, peering out over the wall of the cloister that they were in the process of building. It was as close as I’d ever come to a snapshot from the early twelfth century.

I loved it: self-made memorial and in-joke, all in one compact composition. The masons’ wide faces had deep-bored eyes and serious expressions; one was blowing a horn, the others gripped a variety of tools of their trade. In the moonlight, glimmering with a hint of sodium-vapour orange, they looked to have been carved from opal. I told them about my pilgrimage and promised I would be back.

‘Quarries?’ wrote my friend Annie. ‘You are the oddest person. It’s that stone thing again, isn’t it?’

Annie Garthwaite, originally of Hartlepool, lately of Shropshire, met in Wales, had agreed to fly into Toulouse to join me for a long weekend’s hike. I sprang the quarry idea on her at the last minute; she had thought we were doing the pilgrimage route, but said the itinerary really didn’t matter as long as there was plenty of red wine at the end. I picked her up on a Friday afternoon, and we drove three hours straight to Conques on a highway posted with signs warning of wild boars. I was returning to the little masons, as promised, after a three-month absence. We passed toast-coloured stone barns propped with angled buttresses, textured like errant tweeds, and tiny villages where the roofs winked, turning up ever so slightly at the ends in the French proposition that, even in rural hinterlands, form should follow beauty, then function.

Back at the Auberge St Jacques we climbed four flights of stairs to our room, laden with plastic bags chattering with the weight of wine bottles, bread, cheese, chocolate, and grapes. Annie is a shrewd businesswoman with a hair-trigger appreciation of things ridiculous and absurd, quick wit, and a fanatical devotion to Richard III, whom she believes history has wantonly maligned. She has a practical streak that she takes care to keep well hidden.

‘Pam,’ she asked, pouring herself some wine and raising one eyebrow – a talent of hers – ‘just curious: where are these quarries? Do you have a map?’

I waved a 1:25,000 blue series production of the Institut Géographique National at her. ‘But come with me, I’ll show you our real map.’

I led her to the abbey. The oldest portions in the apse and south transept, including the Chapel of Ste Foy, which date from around 1040, are built of rougier, plum-red sandstone from the Dourdou Valley and the southwestern Rouergue. It’s soft stuff: a millennium of smoke, incense, and a miasma of congregational sweat have eroded even the interior capitals past recognition. Around the turn of the twelfth century limestone was discovered and began to be quarried in the nearby village of Lunel, southwest of Conques on the Causse de Comtal. The ochre-coloured limestone was sturdier, tougher, more reliable than rougier; masons used it for the towers, western façade, north wall, and most of the cloister capitals. Locally it’s called rousset, a word that derives from Occitan and means ‘dark yellow’, although underground, before the stone has been deepened and darkened by sunlight, it is the creamy-pale shade of the abbey’s interior, like the underside of my forearm.

There is plenty of pewtery schist in the abbey, too: local stone, still harvested from the neighbouring town of St Cyprien-sur-Dourdou, abundant but hard to quarry. Its metamorphic crystals give it a dull sheen like the iridescent film on dead fish.

Schist is everywhere in Conques; it fills the non-load-bearing walls of the abbey and makes up the walls, streets, and roofs of the village, knitting the place together top to bottom. Finally there are the special materials: dense, golden sandstone from Nauviale, a village just down the valley from St Cyprien, reserved for the tympanum and surrounding pierres de tailles, and the magnificent, pale grey limestone of the masons’ own cloister capital. Narrative sources claim that the masons’ limestone is from ‘the Causse’, though none takes care to name which causse. A few other capitals, along with the noble old fountain in the centre of the former refectory, are carved from black-green serpentine, brought in from the Massif Central.

‘Here’s your map,’ I said to Annie. Following the sweep of my hand her eyes tripped down the nave. The abbey may have been erected to please heaven, but it still sings of the earth. Stone is stone, raised in architecture or lying quietly underground. More than other structures, the great, glorified cave in front of us – that’s what Romanesque churches really are, barrel-vaulted, above-ground caves -affirmed the bond between nature and the works of man. Deep inside the Last Judgement are memories of the valley, the Dourdou and its fish, vineyards planted by the monks of Conques (vineyards that today yield the Rouergue’s only Appellation d’origine contrôlée wine, the reds and sophisticated roses of Marcillac). The façade and its towers remember ponies, sheep, a big sky; wind hurling across the open pastures of the Causse de Comtal. A thousand years ago masons united the topography of the central Rouergue in a religion of stone.

Trying to find a balance between geology and human history, Vidal de la Blache proposed, ‘One should start from the idea that a country is a storehouse of dormant energies whose seeds have been planted by nature, but whose use depends on man.’ It was those dormant energies that interested me now.

‘We, my friend,’ I said to Annie, in what I hoped was a grand manner, ‘are going to follow the rousset, everything you see around you – the limestone – back to its home on the causse. Tomorrow we’re hiking to Lunel.’

By morning, Annie, who had been studying the blue series map, had formulated a plan of her own. ‘Pam,’ she mused, dragging the ‘a’ in my name until it became two syllables, ‘instead of going back and forth to Lunel on the same route, why don’t we make it a triangle: south to St Cyprien, east to Lunel, northwest back to Conques?’

Her triangle seemed logical enough – I wondered why I hadn’t thought of it. We set off in a shower of church bells, not at the crack of dawn, but at a civilized mid-morning hour after an open-air breakfast attended by flies. I’d vouched for the coffee, but Annie had insisted on having tea.

Our route descended along a narrow, writhing lane from the car park outside the village, where all non-local cars must be stabled, to the main road to St Cyprien alongside the Dourdou. Healthy cornstalks rustled in the wind like conspirators. Annie, the inveterate gardener, identified flora: yellow evening primrose, coral-coloured campsis vines, which grew amidst sandstone outcrops the shade of old wine stains. I pocketed a piece of schist I’d been kicking along. We were too early for dégustation of the local Marcillac in St Cyprien, an incurious little town in the flatbed of the river valley, where residents were going about their morning business along the solitary shopping street. Here we turned east through a two-block suburbia until the houses were overtaken by cornfields.

Above us loomed the causse. ‘Ah, we’ve a climb ahead,’ said Annie lustily, shaking off a passing shower and striding uphill in her hiking boots. I, in my trainers, eyed the rising ground with trepidation. It’s an established fact of our friendship that Annie is hearty; I am less so. The ground rose with a vengeance. About halfway up to the causse, St Cyprien now pocket-sized below us, we came upon a sandstone farmhouse and its outbuildings, all topped with fanciful pavilion roofs covered in schist lauzes. Geraniums and roses outlined the courtyard.

I couldn’t believe the name: La Carrière. ‘It means ‘‘The Quarry’’,’ I translated to Annie, who can’t speak a word of French and doesn’t see this as a defect in the least. Glorious confirmation, it was, to find a thousand-year-old memory ringing in a name. Better yet, just opposite, on the rising hillside, was a geological event that took my breath away.

‘Stand there, stand there!’ I gasped to Annie, pulling out my camera. She finger-combed her blonde hair and smiled. ‘No, no, not you.’ She frowned. ‘Point to the rock and make sure you don’t get in the way.’

Annie pointed and I took a photograph of Ste Foy’s abbey in the rough, before it had become an idea shaped by man. Here on the road to Lunel, like two big animals lying together for warmth, the red sandstone of the lowland met the yellow limestone of the causse. Together their limy run-off turned hydrangea flowers pink rather than blue in the valley below. We could easily see the frontier between the two kinds of bedrock; the line was perpendicular to the ground but tilted precipitously on its axis. It made me shudder. What kind of tectonic chaos, how many millions of years of upheaval, erosion, unimaginable pressure, and more upheaval, had it taken to thrust primeval sea bed and board into this position? Like the masons’ achievement at Conques, this was another union of stone, telling a not-dissimilar story of genesis, death, and rebirth. It was a cycle that had been repeated over and over throughout the 4.55 billion years of pre-history; a cycle still in progress; a cycle given human form and a name in the silent stories of the abbey’s New Testament sculptures.

My compatriot, Henry David Thoreau, said that the Christian notion of looking for God in heaven, literally above our heads, prevents us from understanding that heaven is really here on earth, in the rock beneath our feet. For Thoreau, spirituality lay in the wonders of nature. But I felt its sudden, nascent spark in an interstice, in the tug of kinship between this cliff face and the Abbey of Ste Foy, and that kinship both thrilled and comforted me. Perhaps the two weren’t so different after all.

‘It’s called an angular unconformity,’ I announced.

‘And this,’ said Annie, pointing at a lacy, lavender flower, ‘is called scabious. And that is purple heather. It’s like you – it loves limestone.’

We continued climbing. Handkerchief vineyards clung to the upslope, walnut groves to the down. Without warning Annie became frighteningly high-minded and began quoting from George Herbert’s poem ‘The Pulley’. First she set the stage.

‘God, you see, makes man and then pours out for him a cupful of riches, all but contentment, which he leaves sloshing around in the bottom. Here’s the bit I can remember:

When almost all was out, God made a stay,

Perceiving that alone, of all his treasure,

Rest in the bottome lay.

For if I should (said he)

Bestow this jewell also on my creature,

He would adore my gifts in stead of me,

And rest in Nature, not the God of Nature:

So both should losers be.

Yet let him keep the rest,

But keep them with repining restlessnesse …

She launched that eyebrow at me. I’d thought she hadn’t been paying attention, and now she was reducing the ambiguities of my pilgrimage – and the fount of Kingsley’s wanderlust – to ten lines. Thankfully we’d reached the final, banked curve of the climb and stood at last on the causse. A metallic-tasting wind tossed away our sweat. ‘Where is it?’

I had promised Annie a dolmen. Ahead of us stretched a bumpy blanket of pastures and wheat fields, neatly separated by dark windbreaks. Lunel lay a mile or two down the road. I pointed in that direction.

It was cold now, and we walked with our heads bowed to avoid the wind. Our lunch by the roadside was a brief and chilly affair: an apple and a squashed nectarine, Quaker oatmeal bars I’d brought from home, and two thick slabs of Laguiole cheese from the Aubrac – rough, Rouergat highlands to the east. The cheese tasted like the rind of a fresh Camembert, a young, new taste, but with a supple texture; we ate it atop pilfered slices of baguette from breakfast. Shortly after lunch we came upon the great prehistoric hunks of granite. The dolmen sat next to the macadam encircled by a little gravel drive, giving the impression of a caged beast in a zoo. Annie prowled around it.

‘It’s a wonder to behold.’

‘Don’t make fun of the dolmen.’

‘Perhaps it was made by quite short people.’

At 5 foot 9, she was a good foot taller than the capstone. I had to admit it did look like a very large, mottled mushroom. Hannah Green, however, had been enamoured. She reported its Occitan name, La Peira-Levada, the Raised Stone, and said that a ring of menhirs had once stood nearby. She also wrote that the Celts believed dolmens to be meeting places where the living conferred with the dead, and that they became sites of pilgrimage. The fact that I can’t confirm this is what makes dolmens so wonderful – no one knows much about them, least of all their original or, in the Celts’ case, even secondary significance. Dolmens aren’t ruins; unlike weathered Romanesque carvings, it is their stories, not their shapes, that have eroded away.

And that’s fine. We need to forget in order to invent. Dolmens, too, offer a handshake to the human imagination.

‘Looks like a beached whale,’ remarked Annie. ‘By the by, dare I ask about this quarry of yours?’

I had been anticipating this moment. ‘Well, you see, there is no quarry per se, at least not any more.’ Up went the eyebrow. ‘It was filled in ages ago. But the exact site doesn’t really matter. We’re in Lunel; we know there was a quarry somewhere nearby. This is the place the abbey stone called home. Ancestors of those stone-hatches you just identified for me probably knew it as neighbours.’

Annie snorted good-naturedly as fast clouds patterned the fields with moving shadows. The little village of Lunel was entirely built of rousset – it looked like Conques’ little sister. Kind-eyed cattle the colour of dark caramel, Aubrac cattle, populated the adjacent fields. Here we turned around; the next day we would follow the same route in my car, taking twenty minutes to do what today had taken hours. We retraced our steps for about half a mile before heading off on a new track – the GR 62, a southern tributary of the Chemin de St Jacques – back toward Conques. A wrought-iron cross stood at the turning; pilgrims had come this way. There was also a signpost that put the distance to the abbey at 11 kilometres. I was aghast and immediately began to calculate.

‘Do you realize we’ve already hiked 15 kilometres? Dear God, that will make 26 altogether.’

‘Ooh, that sounds impressive.’

‘Impressive? It’s insane. That’s over 16 miles! No wonder my feet hurt.’ It now dawned on me, belatedly, why I hadn’t come up with Annie’s triangular itinerary on my own. It’s always been dangerous to let her plan hikes and parties: I lacked her fabled stamina in both realms. A farmer working sheep with a rambunctious Border collie – the lambs had tails like pipe cleaners – warned us it was a long way to Conques. ‘Downhill, though,’ he added cheerfully. Blossoms that Annie had just identified as evening-blue cornflowers were startled at our approach and flew off together, revealing themselves (we caught our breath) as butterflies. Wild thyme scented our footfalls.

It was a Rouergat paradise, but even so, once I’d worked out how far we’d walked I began to whine: my arches ached, my hips’ ball-and-socket joints felt like those of an old German Shepherd. Annie, however, marched on relentlessly. For a while the route held to the top of a high ridge, the south face of which fell away dramatically, culminating in the valley below in a perpendicular fan of woolly-wooded, peaked fissures. Patches of oxblood earth showed between gaps in the forest. Finally we began to descend. This is how the stone had come, too, atop wagons hitched to twenty-six pairs of oxen. We were following its tracks. It had been a tradition with medieval pilgrims walking to Compostela to carry stones as a penance (a variation on walking barefoot, or in chains). Sometimes monks put this practice to use, encouraging pilgrims to transport not just any old rocks, but to carry cut stones from quarries to ecclesiastical construction sites. I fingered the piece of schist in my pocket and trudged on.

Some time later Annie broke the silence by asking if I’d rather run a marathon or take heroin.

‘Right now?’

‘Yes, you have to do one or the other right now.’

‘Take heroin.’

‘Thought you’d say that.’

As we neared Conques we came upon a sign pointing toward a detour to a Point de Vue, overlooking the great concha of the Dourdou (Hannah Green translates concha as ‘valley’; others argue that it is the shell-shaped enclave on which Conques is built that lends the village its name). ‘Shall we?’ asked Annie in ready tones.

A look from me sufficed. ‘Ah, well, you get out there and find it’s only an opinion anyway.’

‘How dare you have the strength to be funny,’ I growled. Ancient apple and plum trees, woven with mistletoe, guided us back to the village: we’d been gone for seven hours. That night Annie treated me to a dinner of sea bass with chanterelles – the lacy mushrooms the French call girolles; along with groseilles (red currants), they’re a staple of summer markets – which we downed with a bottle of Gaillac, rounded off with Cognac, at the three-star Hôtel Ste Foy. It had become increasingly difficult for me to speak French in her profoundly English company, and I’m afraid our waiter suffered the consequences. Lucy and Kingsley had lunched in the same place; ‘a heavy meal, of much meat’. Later that night we went to a concert of ‘Chasticovitch’, Mozart, and Schubert, held in the abbey.

The clarity of sound in the big, white, clean space of the church was pure and true. Wayward lines of melody explored the nave, climbed its pillars, ribboned down the arches, while harmony felt its way along the dark side aisles with my eyes, or perhaps ears, in tow. Music and stone were old partners here, still searching together for common ground, joined tonight by the cries of house martins swooping in through the open door and whirling around the nave. Later I asked Annie if she’d picked them out amidst the Schubert.

‘Ah yes,’ she said, ‘They balanced it out. A fairly pleasant disharmony, didn’t you think?’

4 Kingsley And Queensley

My idea of paradise is a perfect automobile going 30 mph on a smooth road to a 12th century cathedral.

Henry Adams, 1902

On 22 July 1920 Lucy and Kingsley Porter found their friend Bull Durham waiting for them at the Spanish border. They had commissioned Bull to drive their new Fiat over from Italy, and together the three made their way into France along with Anfossi, the Porter’s chauffeur, and Lucy’s maid Natalina. The Porters had just spent two months in Spain photographing churches, eating too much, dressing in what they considered rags, and enjoying the good, earned weariness that comes from spending active days in fresh air. ‘We sleep in one stretch,’ Lucy wrote, ‘like a baby.’ As she did every night of their trip, she meticulously noted in her journal how much they paid for their hotel room and midday and evening meals, always taking care to add whether or not the wine was included, and how much extra they spent on Natalina, who ate alone.

Compostela had pleased them. Lucy was satisfied to find St James on the altar instead of Jesus: ‘It seems right Christ should take second place here.’ She thought the sculpture fine: ‘The South passageway interests me the most. The devils are exquisite … the nude figure (soul) held by the leg, head forward, is perhaps the loveliest of everything. I feel here how polytheistic the Catholic religion is! … It is a much more rational explanation of the existing universe than monotheism.’

By the time they reached France they were worn out. ‘The Spanish trip has left us in a condition of physical and mental exhaustion,’ wrote Kingsley to Bernard Berenson and his wife in Italy. Still they purposefully ploughed ahead, making their first stop in France at the Romanesque abbey of St Michel de Cuxa, just outside the town of Prades. From here it would take them nearly a month to reach Conques.

Travelling slowly, only laxly following their route, experiencing no punctures nor lengthy respites for camera repair, it would take me two days. (Lucy, I believe, secretly enjoyed the punctures; it provided an opportunity for exercise – she fretted about the effects of overeating – and to walk ahead alone with Kingsley in the ‘glorious air’ of the French countryside.) By contrast I endured only one hindrance en route to the Rouergue from a side-trip to the Pyrenees, at a roundabout coiled between gnarled vineyards just outside Castelnaudary. The police were stopping all northbound cars in a breathalyser sting. I hadn’t tried the local sparkling white, called Blanquette de Limoux, which had been much praised at lunch, but was nervous none the less. The gendarme had to demonstrate how to breathe into the tube, which I then tried to do as he presented it to me. ‘Non, alors!’ he snapped. ‘You take it!’

This I did, blew, and was pronounced sober. Distracted by my ineptitude, he hadn’t taken in my accent, leaving my identity as a foreigner to become apparent upon the presentation of my Massachusetts licence.

‘Voila une Américaine!’ He called his partner to the car and my heart sank. I wondered which French law I had openly flouted. The partner took my licence and addressed me gravely. ‘Have you, madame, yet tasted the cassoulet of the region?’ I shook my head. ‘Ah, well then. You must try it!’ As drivers fumed in an ever-growing line of cars behind me, the policemen first debated, then concurred upon, the best place to experience the wonderfully adaptable white bean stew of southern France, and gave me directions. We parted with a question about Boston baked beans: they are rumoured to be sweet – can this really be so? (Yes.) The gendarmes shook their heads in disbelief.

My nerves, it occurred to me, were a residue of the day’s drive. I had spent hours following the River Aude northward on a crumbling, thirties-era highway through a desolate park in the Pyrénées-Orientales. No cars trailed behind me, nor could I see any ahead. Clinging ferns and mosses and the dense over-storey above brewed the air into a shade and scent much like that of green tea. The bedrock muscled its way into my lane and would have forced me into oncoming traffic, had there been any. Farmhouses were rare, and empty; old resort hotels, advertising geothermal baths, had been long abandoned. I willed the foothills to fall to their knees but they complied only by eroding into individual, towering formations, left behind from another epoch. The geological drama reached a crescendo at the ‘Gorges de Georges’, a cubist collage of giant rocks like the bombed remains of cathedral towers, from which a natural crevice had been expanded to make room for the road.

Here was a very different relationship between humankind and rock – the brutal disagreement between the immovable object of immemorial age and human impatience to proceed in a straight line – and it was a fierce one. The narrow passageway was something nightmarish that Escher might have dreamt up had he been a sculptor: knife-sharp, angular thrusts of rock lunging at the car from every conceivable direction, and so dark I had to put on the lights. After I emerged, the land abruptly relaxed and grew agricultural, hills rolled, and a pretty haze formed from the exhalations of asparagus.

Many hundreds of hours earlier, it seemed, I’d begun the day in Prades, with a visit to the abbey of St Michel de Cuxa. Lucy’s journal hardly recommended it: ‘Once a famous Benedictine monastery, now served by a handful of Cistercian monks. Little left of its past grandeur.’ She added, ‘They talk with interest of … restoring church and cloisters (but out of what?). An old abbot (almost blind) and several dirty monks came and talked with us while we photographed the portal of the abbey.’

What Lucy didn’t say is that the monks had only taken charge a year earlier, in 1919; before that the abbey had been empty since the French Revolution, when the previous order was kicked out and the place sacked to a state of desolation. Today it is again run by Benedictines; in fact, a time traveller from the twelfth century would be more likely to recognize St Michael de Cuxa now, thanks to nearly a century of renovations, than would either of the Porters. Nonetheless, an older continuity than Christianity – the sun in this luxuriant enclave beneath the snow-capped Pic de Canigou, the orchards here, the lilacs, wildflowers and rosemary, the scent of cypress, the quietude broken by cuckoos’ cries, above all an inkling of Mediterranean ease while yet in sight of the great, cold mountains – created a kind of sacred serenity beyond the abbey walls that Lucy and Kingsley had surely experienced. Despite the discontinuity in architectural time, I felt very close to them in this secret place.

In 1920 there had been no crypt to visit; it was only resurrected in 1937. At its heart I found a domed room called the Chapel of Our Lady of the Crib (Christ’s crib, of which the abbey had reputedly owned a shard), supported by a single massive central pillar. At its peak the ceiling just permitted me to stand my full height (5 foot 5). The floor was earthen. Imagine a stone fountain spouting forth a circular jet of stones; imagine a perfect half-sphere of a cave with one magnificent stalactite growing in the centre from ceiling to floor; imagine if Buckminster Fuller had been born in the twelfth century and built his geodesic dome of mushroom-coloured stones mortared with lime.

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