Where traditional pilgrims on the ancient Compestella routes visit cathedrals in order to be stunned by their hugeness or by tiny relics, pieces of saints or of their crosses, we visit a certain prison in Agen. Here are no relics that I know of, probably no saints either, only Helene who lives there as though in suspended animation while the wheels of French justice slowly grind out a decision about her ultimate sentence. It was also rainy last year when we visited; the walls themselves weep as we pass our own brief sentence waiting before an anonymous doorway with its buzzer button and small fisheye camera. Visitors must spend a half-hour or so there for no apparent reason watching ordinary deliveries or else the odd prisoner with hands cuffed behind his back, joking with his captors, one of the cops firmly holding the chain between the handcuffs and then all three them disappearing into the court building just across the street. Getting into the visitors' room meant going through about the same amount of security as at the airport. This time I wasn't made to check my shoes and wear disgusting prison slippers. Between the drive to Agen and back and the pre-visit waiting period, about three hours are consumed. The visit itself is a mere half hour and it goes very fast. The guards are smiling and affable, like friends and I think they may have spotted us five or ten minutes extra.
Afterward, we decided to detour through Golfech and Moissac along the complex waterways of the Garonne and Tarn rivers, tracked by the Canal du Midi and a lateral canal all of which somehow connect the Atlantic Ocean with the Mediterranean Sea and are thus known as the Canal des deux mers. We had seen the plumes of the cooling towers for years from miles around but never driven past.
This tympanum is the best! The god guy is such a psycho power monger that the row of little you's and me's underneath appear like from a dream of Laurel and Hardie, with their slightly-too-big heads, craning and the loving detail of the legs and laps, all different.
Here's the story of Lazerus, sick and starving, dying, a dog licking his sores as the rich neighbors refuse his pleas and continue pigging out. Sound familiar?
Probably the most famous and incandescent of all the figures, the prophet Jeremiah:
