The town retains its circular plan - church and castle at the opposite ends of the diameter - but the ramparts were destroyed first by Louis, then again after the English occupation of the Hundred Years War. The town was also taken by the Protestant forces and a good deal of destruction was wrought; compared to the devastation of Gascony by war after war, the English Reformation was carried out with little loss of life, or property, and the two Cromwells seem almost irrelevant.
I played pinball at lunchtime. No sort of a score at all. But the sun came out at last, and the afternoon was gloriously crisp, and then the evening became hazy, covered with a white mist as though the world had been painted in infintiely fair watercolours. Of all the times of this pilgrimage I think I loved the evenings best; the whirling snowdark coming down to Roncevaux, the woodsmoke of St-Alban, and the slow darkening of the light and mist creeping up the hill.
Montlauzun on its hill looks like an Istrian hill town, or a massive castle, but it is only a hamlet, a glimpse of stone in grass the colour of a medieval miniature. Lauzerte seen from here is like a miniature of the new Jerusalem, shining against a pallid sunset in the mist.
Now I am getting out of sequence again, I think, but somewhere on the path there is a pilgrim chapel of St-Jean-le-Froid, founded in the nineteenth century on medieval foundations. Its last great pilgrimage was in 1942, and from photographs it must have looked much like an East Anglian harvest feast. Faded pictures of a lost generation. The pace of change in our world is so fast that yesterday is already a century ago; and since all the past, even the recent past, is now so distant, the Merovingians could have lived yesterday, indeed, I feel sometimes closer to them than to my grandfather's generation, whose rules I can no longer understand, who are all buried as securely as Childebert and Clovis in St-Denis.
A dank cavern in the field beside the chapel conceals a well reputed to cure eye diseases; even in drought, it flows on every St John's Eve at midnight; but I was disappointed to find that the pump held no water. The landscape is deceptive; it promises citadels, fresh springs, but holds only hamlets and tepid ponds.
Soon the perfect white towers ofthe Château de Charry appeared; I seemed to be walking through the marginalia of an illuminated manuscript of immense refinement and freshness. The towers of the château are not aligned with the avenue that I pass, so the castle retains its mystery, hidden by leafy branches. The views open out from here on. The soil is no longer red, but tawny gray; sticky chalk, not slippery limestone underfoot. The processes of decay are different; where the limestone crumbles into fragments, the chalk dissolves into paste. Furrows are tawny and white, white where the lumps of chalk have been thrown up by the plough. The country has a southdown feel, but the ridges are too sharp and the alleys too narrow. Furrows carve out the ridges of the landscape, and lead the eye across the expansive gashes of the vales. Woods crown the hills, sharpening their apparent steepness.
I reflect in the drowsy afternoon on my fears. Dogs; the dark, but not moonlight or starlight; fog; sarcasm; feeling. That evening the nuns in the hostel at Lectoure told me how brave I was to set off on pilgrimage. That it was brave never occurred to me; for the one thing I do not fear is solitude, which has been with me from the beginning of my life.
Though I suppose I have been courageous not to give up, after the dog, at Figeac, or this morning in the fog. Or, later, at Moissac where the railway line runs so tantalisingly close and there is still so far to go to the mountains.
But it is a different sort of bravery. Not giving in to the glumness, the dullness, the unbearable sameness of trudgery, of mile after long mile, of the pace of my feet never changing, carrying me on. Not to give up to tiredness, to the charms of lassitude and despair. Not to close my eyes and daydream the hours away. It's that sort of courage.
I was running out of steam. Lack of company had begun to tell a little, I think; I was grateful for the nuns' interest. I had run out of interest in the walk; to keep myself going I had either to sing, or to talk. I remember striding along a road overarched by high tress, reciting Blake's Jerusalem to myself, letting my mind pace along the lines, infiltrate itself between the cracks of meaning. Lauzerte on its hill was like the Zion of which Blake sang. How strange it is that such a revolutionary song should be patronised by the reactionary. How could a conservative ever sing it? Criticism passes the while, if I am not careful I shall have exhumed most of Donne and all of Herrick before I ever get to Roncevaux. The paucity of interest, the unavailability of other stimuli, means that I can dwell on this one poem, focus on it, squeeze its pips for meaning, let it sink into my psyche, laze in it like a warm bath. It is a more intimate sort of knowing than the literary critique. It is becoming a part of me; I am becoming part of the text's history.
Examine first the adjectives; the rhetorical question posits, first, a pristine England of green pastures, and mountains green; then the hills, clouded, in other words darkened by the sins of man, but still creatures of nature; and finally the mills, the utter darkness, the darkness visible, made by man, and by man in revolt from God. The mills are the antitype of the heavenly Jerusalem, which is builded as a city that is at unity within itself (if I remember my psalms). How neat, and almost imperceptible, this slow widening by means of the adjective of the disparity between Jerusalem and England, between Christ and fallen man.
And Blake chooses his weapons with care, too. They are not simply human weapons, but weapons of divine power. The chariot is Elijah's chariot of fire, or Enoch's who did not die but was rapt up to the heavens alive; a prophetic vehicle. The clouds unfold to admit the prophet-poet in his burning car, to admit him to the New Jerusalem that his prophetic struggle has built.
Arrows of desire are the very hub of the revolution. "What is it that men do most desire? The lineaments of gratified desire." Blake is a man of strong hatreds, but what he detests most is lovelessness - in marriage, in laws, in humanity; desire - that is, spontaneous feeling - is his highest law. So he aims his desirous arrows at a society of stratification, of automata, of clockwork workers and double-entry-book-keeping bosses. Jerusalem is not a Utopia, built like More's out of common sense by forethought and legislation, but a state of existence brought about by true feeling which is the feeling of prophecy, the price within.
What does this have to do with walking? Nothing except the amorous feeling of lying on a bank with my eyes closed soaking up sun, with the prickle of sunlight in prismatical colours behind my eyelids, a great feeling of yearning and deep content. Blake's aquatints are coloured with the colours behind the eyelid, the pinks and electrical sparks of yellow, and translucent flesh oranges. Yet Blake was a townsman, unlike Wordsworth the walker and climbing Coleridge.
I was well looked after by the nuns in Lauzerte. Fed well, given slippers warmed before the stove and a furry dressing gown, and loved; and it is this love which is the wonderful welcome of a convent anywhere. I still remember a freezing Christmas night in Venice when I awoke in the deserted dormitory overlooking the Giudecca to find a nun secretly, solemnly placing a small present by the side of my bed; and the gentle questioning of another nun, unknotting my tension, simply leaving me the space and solitude to exist; to be only, without prejudice, without expectation. To be privileged unconditionally; this is a rare joy, a rare gift of hospitality.
Why then do I always feel like rebelling - like Harold Nicholson to write "cunt" in the legation book? I have sat down and wept in my inability to repay.
Have I found a voice? This again is a concern as I write - like the poor memory that erases the events of the day as I write, or jumbles their order and connections like the misremembering ofthe sequence of houses along a long road - and I wonder whether I am creating anything, or whether I am just allowing words to weave me into them and carry me away. Have I a voice? complex but strong, echoing baroque, firmly rooted in place and sight and object - this is what I would have, but what I write now must serve, pro tem.
Virgil I find not the most congenial, but the best guide of all the poets; pale, sad, nostalgic. A sacrificial lamb slaughtered for the very cause of Augustan Rome that he so solemnly celebrates. Who else could Dante have found as guide who could show him Hell, and yet imply at every step the foregone joys of Heaven? Virgil's great gift of a sense of place and landscape, his rootedness in the country, always seen from afar, from on high, from the ridge of the mountains or the eagle's sight, with the vivid imagination of the dispossessed.
There is nothing to see, nothing to feel, as the mist rolls in, only my musings to create an interior landscape.