Lyon's colours are dirt and orangey-red, buildings are stuccoed with plaster or grime. From Notre-Dame de Fourrière the coloration spreads out to the horizon below; Lyon is a pastel haze, with the one long black stripe of the Cours Gambetta leading out to a horizon of sudden black mountains.
St-Martin, an early romanesque church memorable for its gray, sombre light and for the charming, and very classical, detailing of the apse- pilasters sculpted with medallions, fluting, swirls where the heavier Norman style would dogtooth and beak.
Alas for the huge and horrendous basilica where the gods of Hollywood are worshipped, or maybe Mammon, in a cinematic banking hall of art deco style and overconfidence. It has not the hallow hush of a basilica but rather the constrained bustle of a railway terminus or the City branches of the Midland Bank; sapient and diligent sutlers scurrying in near-silence. The ornamental forms are a more than eclectic mix of Gothic and classic, mere fragments glued into an over-ripe collage, a motza pudding oozing with gunge. The arch no longer springs, the capital does not support; the elements have lost their raison d'être and with it their clarity. Ruskin's functionalism seems clear and healthy here in this fantasmic belly of a church. The huge angels under the roof are not in place, not supportive like the princes, dominations, powers of East Anglian hammerbeams; they hover stolidly, and if they have any architectural feeling they have already suffered a hundred years of indigestion. Despite massive size the place is claustrophobic and I am glad to leave it, walking into the breadth of sky and scene that spreads below the terrace.
On to Le Puy by a rackety train and two changes in coal towns dimly seen, unremembered. It is dark already. On to a silent hotel where I am the only guest and arrive late, and unpopular, and very much under suspicion of madness. In the morning it is still pretty dark and I wander up to the sacred cité through winding and ascending streets full of mist.
In the chapter house I consider the geometries of dead men, hearing the tolling bell and the reptitive plainchant of the simpler creed. The Sanctus too rings us not to divinity but to death in this dark and austere church, built on a catacomb of vaulted tunnels. Its founders built on a hill; but it is a hollow hill, a maze of subterranean porticoes and stairs. Nothing is what it seems; walking down from the south transept into the narrow iron-grilled passages, suddenly turning into a yawning gulf of panorama, framed only by the arches of the low façade. Yet this is not what was intended; for the pilgrim comes up the steps (a hundred and thirty two of them), and into the stooping dark, and into the church very hole-in-corner and hugger-mugger, through an angle of the wall.
It is an impressive, but crushing approach; the pilgrim feels the weight of the church, the weight of stone, the huge and inhuman strength of the Church pushing down. From the long flight of steps even the façade is foreshortened, seems to be bearing down on the tiny speck of humanity that is the pilgrim. brp
I walked widdershins round the church, in contravention not just of my luck , but of good order; for the church was a sort of one-way system. Pilgrims entered through the stairs to the south transept, and went out either to the Place du For or through the north transept. The architecture is ordered; how different from the open and diffuse spaces of the German pilgrimage churches, of Vierzehnheiligen. The grand escalier also bifurcated, and led off to the cloisters; but this "occasioned no small trouble to the canons of the Enlightenment", as the guidebook says, being a source of draughts, and is now shut off by a twelfth-century screen, previously the choir screen.
It is difficult to imagine this great church once closed off, dominated by a massive screen of iron, like the rejas of the cathedrals of Spain. The space is too austere, too enormous to admit of subdivisions.
The cloisters too have a dead feel, tall and narrow and overshadowed by the chaotic masses of the nave. Dark brown stone and typically Carolingian, typically Auvergnat pointing emphasise its straitness and enclosure. The classical capital has here turned into something quite different, though retaining the shape of the volutes; it is broken into tight bands of pattern; the acanthus core, a ribbon of interlace, and above, faces, birds, tiny figures where the Corinthian leaves once curled over. The sculptor took the classical, spare geometry of Roman ruins, and made them live again in his own world, one of magical forests, barbarism, the monstrous and the unexpected. Pastoral dies, and is replaced by fantasy and romance.
St Michel d'Aiguilhe on the other hand has a more charming sort of craziness, roosting on its needle rock; all the architecture is at strange slants, carelessly thrown together, at acute angles, irrational, like a mad outcrop of sharper rock. Mozarabic cusps, romanesque sculptures, polychrome rock in brown and cream and red with white mortar; an efffect of richness almost uncontrollable.
The town of Le Puy huddles underneath these rocks as if it is trying to ignore them, on a flat plain out of which the cité and the chapel and the huge rock of the virgin push like forces of nature still erupting. Under this weirdness and brute force there is another geography, that of straight streets and huddled houses, oppressed but ignoring the oppression of the rocks.
For the whole day I had felt encircled by mountains. In the distance, dark forested slivers of rock hemmed in the plateau across which my route ran; yet with the exception of a long haul out of Le Puy and a sudden descent along the flank of a cliff, returning and returning ever lower in tight curves and haripins, the way was nearly flat. I could not escape the jaws of the mountains, but they were darkly inaccessible, retreating out of my path as I went.
There was mist that morning and my breath hung damp on the air, thoughthe air came burning cold into my lungs, a tongue of ice at the heart of me. Coming out of La Roche, the other side of the steep valley was white, but marbled with the shadows of higher trees on the mist; marbled rather a pale gray and a paler, like veins in the rock. Dry stone walls, long, low slopes, worm-holed black tufa, and a low sun casting long shadows across the landscape, casting it into high relief, each valley clear in mad chiaroscuro. The few rosehips that were left glowed brightly red, the only colour in the leached landscape.
Late afternoon is the best time, when one steps out of the shadow of a mountain or cloud and suddenly the sun is strong on the slopes, yellow-brown with a tinge of faded green; and then imperceptibly the glory fades, and the air grows darker, and colours merge into one, and night comes. L'aire s'imbruna, the air makes itself dark, Dante says; I made it down the steep pineslopes into Privat d'Allier just as night indubitably came, about five-thirty. brp
Montbonnet, which I passed at lunchtime, I would have described as perched on its rock; but it is too solid a village to do any perching - it squats, rather, heavy and solid and dark brown, walls reticulated with wide jooints of white mortar. A line of poplars crowns the flank of the hill, and the road ascending slowly runs through fields where donkeys graze. So the solidity of man's work is not estranged by walls or density from the open nature of the landscape; and in this Montbonnet seemed typically Auvergnat.