On my way over to Montcabrier on the 811, someone kept trying to pass me, swerving in and out in my rear view mirror. My driving often causes this temporary insanity in French drivers where they forget all that they love about life, their little children perhaps, the well-feathered retirement they have in store in not so many years, all forgotten in their obsession to get around this putain de Kangoo going 65 kph (if I’m lucky) in a 90. How must they be feeling? Are they enraged? Or is it more like the irresistable need to square up a picture that is hanging crooked? When I got to the usual turn-off for Cazes, I decided to ignore the detour sign and give the poor bastard behind me a break. Halfway up the mountain, a major tree-trimming project forced me to turn back. And that’s why I ended up going to Montcabrier through Duravel, the way I used to ride my bike over there to work, before the murder.
I think I am used to Le Moulin de Cavart being empty and for the most part, I enjoy being there, at the foot of towering cliffs with caves that were supposedly all inhabited during the Neolithic. You can’t see the home of the Dutch neighbors for the thick stand of bamboo. The shop is much as it was when I worked there: my last, unfinished project, repairing an armoire is still balanced on a bench where I left it maybe 4 years ago, like Miss Haversham in her wedding dress. The carp pond looks like hell, clogged with weeds, the water level low, the carp apparently eaten by herons. I did an inspection of the house maybe just to make myself feel sad. The shutters that I made and that made Helene happy. Alix’s room plastered with awful fashion photos from a phase she has undoubtedly outgrown in LA, Dorian’s floor strewn with millions of little pieces of toys he’s outgrown in just two years. Eleonore’s room with her strong drawings, the bed I made for her trashed by a small bird that somehow got in and died, feathers all over the place.
On the way back the sign for the “vestiges” of the 11th century church of Saint Avit caught my eye and I decided to make another pilgrimage. I don’t trust the Kangoo on dirt roads after getting stuck in Floressas, towed out with a tractor. It’s a pretty lane into a gnarly oak forest. Does anybody remember why they built a church exactly there? Did some narcissitic nobleman make a vow during a battle? Don’t the slit windows suggest a fortified church? Did all the farmers run in and hide out during a raid? And the masons who cut the stones and laid the lauze roof of the apse, were they forced to do this for free or paid a wage? And by the way, are chunks of lauze apt to fall while I gaze upward taking photos?
view into the abside. note the slit window
lauze, dry stone, corbelled , roof of the abside. If the center stone fell...
And then beyond the material facts, what did anybody get out of this church? Was it, like my suburban Methodist church (funded by a narcissitic capitalist benefactor), principally a place to socialize and make music? The only iconography I would make out was at one side of a voute, two figures that I imagine to be Adam and Eve. They have that horror-struck expression of many primitive Romanesque carvings, the recognition I suppose that sex is so profoundly evil that if you yield you will be driven into exile from paradise. This is pretty much the message on other rural Romanesque churches I know, such as the far finer one in Besse.
carving at the base of the arch. (click for a closeup of the sinners)
I’d love to know what bearing this message had on the life of parishoners a thousand years ago. Did it cause them horrible anxiety and inner conflict? Or did they regard it as cynical propaganda, an analog to international terrorism in our day, a way of scaring the children before they go to sleep, giving them bad dreams? And why is it always Adam and Eve, the Fall? Why not, say, Cain and Abel, the horror of breaking the taboo on murder?
update Francis kindly sent a link to a brief and tantalizing item on the Duravel tourism office web site (here). Here's my translation:
"This rustic church served outlying houses in a parish with a population of 200 souls. The church was constructed beside a spring with curative powers and was also close to an important crossroads. From its style, the church dates to the 12th century but the foundations of the choir are more ancient still and in the nave, hewn stones from the 6th century have been found."
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