Lamy of Santa Fe (3 page)

Rome gave its arches to the fabric, and where in classical times they had seemed to hang great weights of masonry high in the air, now in the Middle Ages they brought to mind the earth-bound body of man, braced in stone to endure with blunt shoulders man's earthly passage. If God made Christ in man, other personifications of Christian attributes and saintly individuals came as a logical step from life to art, and back to life again, by way of the vision of those who gazed at either the smallest or the largest of sacred artifacts—a chief function of iconography. Romanesque sculptured ornament—celebration of man and the common sweetness of his visible world—joined with the craft of the mason to hold constant in the great dark churches the power also of that which was invisible, yet describable. Faith itself seemed anything but abstraction.

In fixed quiet, Romanesque ornament celebrated all living things—animals, fish, men and women of the day at their work; plants of the earth in branch, leaf, fruit, as well as figures of the Passion and the personification of the demonic unseen which thus became as real as the rest. Anywhere, from the capital of a double column, or the base of a font, or the frontal of an altar, or the almost hidden groin of a twining stairway, suddenly one could recognize a common face in stone gazing forth as an angel, a fiend, a saint, one of the Holy Family, in constant reminder of how the world went, and how in his own essence one carried these, containing all: the capacity for the divine; for evil; for safety, either through imitation in prayer and act, or perdition through mortal caprice. The powers of piety were inescapable, whose ideal persisted in familiar expression from the times of the earliest religious pilgrimage until, eight centuries later, interpretations of the essential forces of life would take a new turn through the physical sciences.

In Auvergne, as in other regions with strong local flavor, the Romanesque style evolved its own variations. The churches were often made of the dark volcanic stone of the Puy-de-Dôme. Rounded external chapels leaned in support of central chambers like foothills against mountains. Articulated bare columns and arches were lofted to sustain interior galleries of lesser arches. At Clermont, Notre Dame de Port, one of the oldest “Roman” churches in France, created out of its rude
ingenuities an abiding grace of deep shadow, shafted height, and a simplicity as powerful as it was unambitious. Its circular ambulatory and side aisles, where the vision was symmetrically interrupted by pillars, offered visible analogy of processions, like those of life itself, which in the liturgy reenacted the ceremonies of worship in all their references to the mortal and the immortal.

The carved saints and the living world merged for the worshippers. At Mozal, the Holy Women at the Sepulchre are peasants in stone, with their strong, almost manly, faces, their voluminous folds of hardy cloth, their hands like those of farmers, all brought to pray in a stubby working grace. Elsewhere, a medieval bishop, already a figure of high consequence by his station, was the apostolic succession made visible; from the earliest time a figure of celebration and authority, in sculpture or fresco often represented as benign in expression, despite awesome mitre and crozier. In medieval glass the light of day was held like “the light of Christ, as in the Gospel.” Color was always an element, no matter how greatly time might turn all gray with age, so that to later eyes the medieval epoch, except for its glass, seemed all monotone. Posterity judged and admired age, failing to see the original youth. Was the glass of the Romanesque an echo of the first Gospel of John—the
“lumière de lumière”
? It was perhaps the prime glimpse of what was to come in the lofting Gothic style. But in its abiding character, the Romanesque seemed rooted to the earth, while the Gothic sought to leave it.

So the earlier forms were bound to the common land rather than to the aspiring pinnacle—cavern, glen, hill; tilling or feeding creatures, bent in their own small bodily arches to their tasks. Mortality is present; but in terms of supplication, even in the romance of the time—the
Chanson de Roland
itself:

Save my soul against all threat
The which my life's sins may beget
.

Upon his arm he sinks his head,
He joins his hands and he is dead
.

Fatality inescapable; but in the very admission of this, in spirit, form, observance, lay appeal to what rested in the common eternity—the promise of life from life, light from light. It was the same spirit which raised the round Roman arch to the Gothic spire, and gave central conviction and unity to a whole vast and various society.

iv
.

Auvergnats

A
NTIQUITY MARCHES FORWARD
in a procession of persons, creating a tradition whose depth of culture formed belief, character, and vocation for centuries. Gergovia, once the capital of Celtic Averni, became the city and see of Clermont, whose founding bishop was St Austromonius, believed in his land to have been one of the “seventy-two disciples of our Lord, who came to Rome with St Peter.” Before the tenth century, twenty-three of Clermont's bishops were canonized. One, Innocent VI, became pope (1332–62), five of its monks were saints, five popes passed through the city of whom one was Urban II mounting a crusade in 1095, and in his exile Thomas à Becket visited Clermont. Now the provincial metropolis of central France, the city is called Clermont-Ferrand. By 1262 its Gothic cathedral rose above the old medieval quarter, where to this day a weekly street market is set up with bright booths and counters to which country people come to mingle and trade with the townsmen.

A feeling of remoteness attaches to the city—removal from the energetically forwarding affairs of Lyon to the east, Paris to the north. In architecture there are echoes here and there of the grand palace manner of Philibert de Lorme and the seventeenth century, and in intellectual history abides the luster of Pascal, who came from Clermont, and Massillon, who is commemorated by an important school there. The Loire château style, bastioned and towered, carved and vaulted, with doorways under ogee arches, is visible in the foliaged ruins of the great castle of Tournoël on a long ledge far overlooking the valley where a tributary of the Loire flows on pale sand through a green spread all the way to the horizon. The greens are dense yet various—silver of willows set against yellower grasses under the black shade of groves. Dürer-like scapes of river and hill, villages, spire, roof, all glow in that palette in which gold seems to underlie all other colors. In the fields and meadows creatures are bent to earth, men and women, two or three in a group, cultivating, horses grazing, and black and white cows, uniting in a Virgilian cycle the recurrent antique with the pathos of what is fugitive:

The people—broad of face, reserved in manner—suggest a temperament born of the silence and the space of their great elevated plain. When they used their experience in their music, it was to imitate shepherds' dialogues across the same fields where Caesar heard their ancestors calling. Songs of sowing and harvesting set little piped scales under monotonous melody in simple repetitions made to carry over bucolic distance. Mountain flageolets imitated the spinning wheel, and bagpipes groaned the toil of market carts along the road. If they merged into dance figures, the Auvergne folk tunes sometimes clattered with Iberian effect, recalling the long-ago link with the Spanish pilgrimages. Cradle song and lover's lament both seemed to bear an underlying stoicism touched with a poor sweetness, as by those who worked hard to meet simple needs in a land beautiful, yielding, but demanding, where in winter the plain lies open to harsh weather, in summer to hazes of heat which all but erase the horizon mountains.

Much in the present, then, seems constant from the past. In June the cherry orchards show their enamelled fruit hanging along branches with long leaves. A dead crow dangles from a planted stick as a warning to other crows in a ripening field. From the corner of the eye a shuttered flash—the white stripes on the wings of great blackbirds against the bright haze. In the open country, pale villages look like houses of cards, with their red tile roofs. Red poppies echo the color, amidst the green checkerboards of the fields. Within the city of Clermont, the same tile-red housetops, accented by shutters to close against heat or cold, seem to make a common roof if seen from any small height. The streets rise and fall on many contours, and turn with inner hills, and like those of any ancient city seem to lose their narrow way in hidden districts and secret enclaves. Where these open out, as at the Place de Jaude, a prospect of state makes a sweep of elegance for great shops and municipal palaces, for a park, for sculpture, and there, at the head of the vista, rises a heroic statue of Vercingetorix on his “finest mount.”

A street bearing to the south presently leaves city houses behind, and turns dusty, entering the country to lead to small villages, one of which, forty-eight kilometres away, is called Lempdes.

v
.

The Home Village

T
HERE
—
TO RETURN TO THE NARRATIVE
from the base upon which it rests—Jean Baptiste Lamy was born on 11 October 1814, in a clay-plastered house on an earthen street.

His parents, described as
“paysans aisés”
—well-to-do peasants—were Jean Lamy and Marie Die. They represented old and respected families of the countryside—the father at one time was mayor of Lempdes. Of their eleven children, only four survived as adults. Two sons—Louis and Jean Baptiste—became priests, a daughter Marguerite entered the sisterhood, and a third son, Etienne, fathered Antoine and Marie, who in turn became priest and nun.

The family house sat flat-faced and flush with the other houses on its street. It presented a scatter of windows at random heights, some square, some small, others large and shuttered (oddly suggesting the fenestration in the church of Ronchamps by Le Corbusier of the twentieth century). A single-span door opened into the house at one end, and a wide double door at the other was the entrance to the concealed animal and wagon yard and barns behind. There were three low storeys, rising to the dusty vermilion roof like that over all the other houses.

Lempdes sat on a gently domed hill above the right bank of the Alagnon River. Its narrow streets, all uncobbled, wound about on low slopes as if established by the meander of domestic animals. Proper narrow stone sidewalks were edged by running gutters. Heavy old masonry was revealed here and there through broken plaster. An occasional flourish of style was added by a wooden balcony at a second storey, and, open, an old sagging wooden doorway gave on to a fortress-like courtyard entered through broad arches high enough to admit farm wagons and horses. Two-wheeled carts, tired with iron, used wheels as high as the cart cages. Far in the narrow aisles curving between houses, glimpses showed of a forge, or a crib full of hay, or, in a miniature enclosed farmyard behind a house, a byre, straw, droppings.

Near the entrance of the village, and at its highest point, the public
square presented a row of flat-fronted buildings painted in a succession of pale fresco colors—blue, beige, rose, white. Flower pots stood in summer along the pavements. If there was an air of poverty, it had the dignity of self-sufficiency, and if there was pride, it was centered in the modest Romanesque church which dominated one end of the small square. This was the home of the village patroness, Our Lady of Good Tidings—Notre-Dame de Bonne Nouvelle. On her altar in her side-chapel she stood in diadem and free-flowing carved robes, holding her naked child, who wore a little crown as He gazed upward into her broad-cheeked face in which lingered a composed merriment. She looked like a farm woman of Auvergne. Her healthy face glowed with simplicity above the gold leaf of her amply folded and tucked garments. Her eyes were dark, her high cheekbones were marked by smile shadows, and her closed lips seemed to indicate that she knew what she knew, and that what she knew was good. She was about ten inches tall. Jean Baptiste became her familiar at the age of five, when he began to pay her long and frequent visits in a
“grande devotion”
which was later recalled when his childhood was mentioned. Their silent dialogue established a meaning—a view of life—never to change for him.

A certain pathos dwells in the localism of childhood—who could know what horizons awaited far away, not for all, surely, but perhaps for one or two? But the children of Lempdes, innocent of futures, must always have seemed much the same at any period, and thus Lamy, where they played—limpid small boys with shining caps of hair and dark clove-like eyes and ruddy cheeks, in the dusty walled streets, where tiny kittens blinked and dozed, and hens wandered loose with gravel in their voices, and dogs lay in the center of the lanes in perfect confidence of rest undisturbed. No life was precisely like every other; but in the village, as in that part of the great world to which it was attached, all human matters drew order from a common source so strong that its flow of influence could not be separated from any act.

For the people prayed not only to God, in that equation which had no true form but inner conviction, but also to history. From the dawn of the Middle Ages until the century of Lamy's birth, the Church had grown to be the teacher of all things—the proprieties of custom, the styles of philosophy, the seemliness to be searched for in the relation between body and soul, earth and the unseen. Man's single life, and the life of the state, the life even of the Church's own servants, could show every range of human capability, from good to evil, throughout the centuries; yet the mystery of the need for truth and communion beyond the self persisted in an unbroken line of faith whose very monuments seemed as eternal as what they represented,
in all their variety, from the Islamic striped arches in Notre-Dame de Port, dating from 1099, to the groined elements meeting like hands in prayer high above the floor of the cathedral of Clermont. The church building made of this world's materials by men's hands was the gateway of prayer which led beyond death. To enter those dark caverns of worked stone and lofting shadow, those aisles where light shifted high in the air under the passage of the day, those obscure corners by pillar or arch, and to face the altar where the body of God could be addressed privately in the tabernacle where it lived, was to draw a secret line from the cares and hopes of a short life to eternal mercy.