For a treat, I stayed in the Hotel Wilson, trois étoiles, a massive bath and a television on which I could watch the Romanian revolution being played out. Eating in a delicatessen resaurant, drinking rosé de Cahors, a fresh, cutting dry rosé, watching the deserted squares of the lonely winter town as the tables were wiped in the cafés and the lights went off in the offices.
Cahors is another brick town, like Figeac, but a darker and more aggressive brick. Some bricks are fallen, some blackened by ages of grime and soot, some newly cleaned and pointed; the clean inside sparkles orange where lumps have been chipped off. The stone used here is so friable that even sixteenth century work in the cathedral cloisters has largely decayed; the exactness of mouldings has completely fallen into meaningless jags and humps. The brick on the other hand still retains its pristine form and crispness; and any response to the architecture is more likely to be a response to the weathering of the materials than to its innate quality. In the cloisters the bosses are gone, leaving only sockets. Were the bosses perhaps wooden, easily destroyed?
The famous Pont Valentré is picturesque enough, but what I wonder is the strategic purpose of the towers on the bridge? - it could not be great, since the far bank is not adequately guarded. Was it a defence, or a municipal statement of pride? It seems to belong to an era when the practicalities of defence were no longer needed, were used as a display of pontless chivalry; machicolations become mere prinked-out papercuttings, battlements become decorative balustrades or mere series of pinnacles. It was a misty morning; the far tower was hardly visible.
The cathedral is extraordinarily wide, the chevet immense and squat, sustained only by the strength of its walls. The two domes cover a bay each, of three lights (the central light being higher and wider, so that vertical aspiration is squashed into horizontal conformity); beneath, a confusion of later chapels and chantries oppresses the mind. The break between nave and apse is abrupt, in form, in material., in aspect. The original shape of the cathedral has been lost, and it squats toadlike on its foundations, all warts.
The one feature of beauty is the fourteenth century painting of the apostles in the dome; shades of russet, orange, yellow, like long faded ink or pressed flowers. Superb quality of line and conception.
But the real treasure of the cathedral is hidden outside in a squalid street, behind dull railings; a superb tympanum of 1135, roughly contemporary with Conques. Christ sits between angels; the curves of the drapery, the downswept wings of the angels, are fluid, delicate.
Does this seem disjointed? Cahors itself seems disjointed; despite its situation, like Durham in the coil of a river, surrounded by the meandering Lot, the town is less defined than the map gives out. The city fills only the south-east corner of the isthmus, tightly closed into a narrow ridge between the river on the east and the Boulevard Gambetta on the west; yet the ramparts extend across the whole width, or very nearly; and the Pont Valentré is on quite the other side of the landspur. An intriguing enigma, like the shape of the cathedral, altogether unsatisfying and mysterious.
Cahors is a city of towers; not belvederes and minarets, as Figeac; but strong defensive works - the Pont Valentré, the tower of John XXII (a Pope who never existed, except for the schismatics), the Barbacane, the Château du Roy (now the prison; a stronghold of continuing practical value). It is not only on overcast days that one feels the harshness of the town.
Streets turn at an angle so imperceptibly as to appear straight, but one can see no more than twenty yards either way. Squares are odd corners pasted together. The Cours de la Chartreuse is a neat, almost Chelsea, square surrounded by terraces and mews cottages; but it has no grass, and the trees were bare.
The overcast atmosphere had me musing on death, and the tombs in the cathedral, pasty and dilapidated. What stops first; the breath? the heart? the thought? The medieval poets imagined themselves at the moment of death, but this was just a fiction, like the cadaver-tomb; then Raleigh, breaking the silence with his amazing image - "just at the time when my veins start and spread"; then Tennyson, with the sunlight growing paler, and outlines blurring in a dying man's eyes, as the vision slowly fades after the current has been cut. But it is only in that moment of dying that the truth of life is found; which responses, which acts, are for us truly existent, truly central. We treat death as a break; but it is another facet of living, Brother Francis' sister Death. I lay awake that night listening to my heartbeat drumming in my ears, waiting for the moment of sleep, trying to distinguish that moment between waking and sleep; I woke next morning suddenly, with a start, and the room was cold as ice.