There is an imperial Byzantine purple pall, with green and pink birds in cartouches, its colours still frappant after all this time. What a frisson, suddenly and in a moment to see Byzantium not faded into the seepage of water on stone, or the sun-parched and time-pitted brick, but to see her in all her glorious array, to see her even with the very eyes of Phocas or Belisarius. The shock is vivid; not as with mosaics, cold hard evidences of fossilisation, but the shock of seeing suddenly the warm reality (or almost) in such a fragile but very vibrant proof.
A tiny fragment of light repoussé on a flat piece of dull metal perhaps leaves the most lasting memory, and the most saddening. A face - just eyes, nose, mouth; sad, intelligent eyes, lifted slightly upwards.
A portable altar of porphyry and silver, with niello portraits round the sides; another of alabaster, of the eleventh century, with highly stylised roundel of the Evangelical beasts, in cloisonné enamel. These altars are such beautifully self-contained, sturdy works; they stand on little feet, they do nothing else, they were intended for no other purpose.
Books, too, have become shrines; no longer texts, for an age of illiteracy, but sacred objects, relics. Their bindings are no longer functional, but are cases for the holy relic; the book is not for reading.
Finally, I come to the quietly posed Sainte-Foy, the golden presence whose eyes have followed me since I enetered the dim dark. She is a collage, not a statue; gems, cameos, seals, have all been added to her over the ages, clusters of jewels encrusting the saint. Yet through all this stares that pair of Roman eyes, rich, impassive and disquieting.
The tale of Conques is one of monastic skulduggery. Deserted by most of its monks in favour of the then independent monastery at Figeac, where discipline was less onerous, Conques fell into decay by the tenth century. Few monks remained. But one of those that did had an eye on the main chance. He moved to Agen, possessor of the relics of Sainte-Foy, where he stayed a monk for years before seizing his chance. Stealing the relics away by night, he made for his mother abbey. This act of pilfering was successful; and Conques never looked back.
In the kirkhouse attached to the treasury is a series of tapestries of Mary Magdalene, of the sixteenth century, conflating her typically (but uncanonically) with Mary the sister of Lazarus. In the scene of Martha's accusation ("Mary has the better part") Christ appears as a Sun King, almost a Charles I, in his throne and with his neat beard and fashionable turnout; he is Solomon in all his splendour, making the Solominic judgment. The age saw the Bible through its own light, in its own terms; and overlaid the many layers of Biblical typology with yet more layers of its own.
A tapestry of Aesop's dog and wolf with foliage straight out of the jungles in which Douanier Rousseau's tiger stalked.
I gave up an entire day to Conques. It would have been worth giving up all hope of Roncevaux for this; and as I got to thinking, I wondered whether it would not be better to stop at Saint-Jean, where the Camino Francés begins, and leave the Pyrenean passess till the beginning of the Spanish pilgrimage. There are so many variants to this route, or set of routes; and I have already rejected some; and I have so little time in each place, to know it.
The west portal is dominated by the tympanum of the Last Judgment; it is a chaos of bodies, of different planes and plaques, divided by the strips of pediment and inscription that cover almost every scene. The arcade that covers the formal, frontal poses of the blessed contrasts with the tohu-bohu of the damned, swirling around each other, contorted; in the mandorla, even Christ is off-balance, arms akimbo as he shows the stimata. Figures are crammed into every crevice, separate planes of existence abut one another, angels and demons, waves and clouds and earth. The classical pediment is subverted by cramming little figures - kneeling ,sitting, leaning, bent, whichever way they need to be to fit - into the gaps between pediment and arch. The effect is cramped, busy, chaotic; but itself surrounded by a simple pedimented arch, the confusion of the tympanum stands alone.
The inscriptions of the tympanum are perhaps worth recording. Their unevenly stressed, doggerel Latin jogs along; in a smi-literate society, who would have read it? The top band says;
SANCTORUM CETUS STAT XPISTO IVDICE LETVS HOMNES PERVERSI SIC SVNT IN TARTARA MERSI -
"amongst the saints sits Christ the stern judge; thus are wicked men plunged into Tartarus." Then on the central band;
SIC NATUR ELECTIS AD CELI GAUDIA VICTIS GLORIA PAX REQUIES PERPETVVSQ. DIES PENIS IN IVSTI CRVCIATVR IN IGNIBVS ISTI DEMONAS ATQ. TREMVNT PERPETVOSQUE GEMVNT
"Thus the chosen are born into heavenly peace, joy, glory, rest and perpetual day. In these fires the unjust are tormented; they tremble and wail continually." And then under the arches of the arcade;
SANCTI PACIFICI MITES PIETATIS AMICI SIC STANT GAUDENTES SECURI NIL METUENTES HOMINES MENDACES FALSI CUPIDIQUE RAPACES SIC SUNT DAMPNATI CUNCTI SIMULEI SELERATI.
"The blessed peacemakers stand rejoicing and secure, without fear. Lying and covetous men are thus damned with all other scoundrels." Finally, at the very bottom;
O PECCATORES TRANSMUTETIS NISI MORES -
"sinners, change your ways or die for ever." So the scheme works down the face of the cathedral, from Christ in majesty above, through the supernal worlds and the circles of hell, each time with explicit reference to what is seen, and finally down to the sinner who sees, and is exhorted. By the inscriptions, the viewer is brought into the Judgment; to enter the abbey church is to be judged.
The size of the abbey is not a function of height or length, but is created by the width of the transept, the spaciousness of the crossing. The transept windows are the largest in the church, or so it seems from the glorious glow of light that fills the crossing after the dim recesses of the aisles. Bulky, the buttresses enhance the massiveness of the construction.
The abbey's chevet is achieved not by carrying the nave arches round but by increasing the stilting of the arches; gently in the choir, dramatically at the turn of the chevet, so that the arches seem to spring ever higher, and yet the rhythm of stone survives, lapping like ever increasing ripples on a pool. Strange to find effects of grace in such a stern, bulky church; but high above the crossing, angels look down on me, and the light tries hesitantly to penetrate to this dim area so far below. By the choir, by the steps upwards, I stand in the dark by the iron grilles made from the fetters of prisoners liberated by Sainte-Foy, and the church is silent.
Although its greatest building is of stone, Conques is unmistakably the first town on the Way of St James which is wholly in the France of halftimber. Most of the houses are at least partly of timber construction; utilitarian, not sophisticated into an art form as in the Welsh Marches with their curved, decorative beams, or in the Toulouse of huge wooden palaces, or in the fishing towns near La Rochelle with their slate-shingled housefronts. The protruding ends of beams are capped by angled slates, protecting them from the traveller or from rain; beams and mullions lean any way they can to make up the rough square of the wall.
Seen from above the town is a shell, a crescent, twined about a bend in the valley. But within this shape it is difficult to see how each street, each house, begins or ends; rooflines are continuous, dropping away like a mountain range. The ground floor of one house is the second storey of the next. Dormers become cross-roofs; chimneys straddle the edge between houses.
At dusk there is no sound but that of water; a stream flows, drops fall into the dark fountain, and in the alley at the side of the abbey, moss-walled where the moist earth is piled up in ramparts, the wet seeps slowly.