I seem to be writing more of the towns than the landscape. I am after all an urban creature, half brought up in a cathedral close. The history of landscape, too, is closed to me; it has no characters in it, only automatons, the slow passage of time and custom. Its people have no faces. And I found I had become strangely weary of those little towns, too; each a gem of its age, but with none of the glorious complexity of Rome or London, layer upon layer of the past, and the commanding hand of Julius or Wren, and the layers of dreams, the unbuilt beauties, the ruined realities. Only once on this walk did I find quite that texture of the past, and that was not in a town or city, but in that marvellous archaeological bijouterie, the palimpsest Sainte-Foy.
However tired I was of these hill villages, though, Larresingle was something else; it draws forth a mixture of a sigh and a bravo, encircled by mists and by time. It is a block of masonry apparently without join, set in a nest of hills, with only one high and narrow gate. On closer view, much of the outer wall has tumbled down, is glued together only with creeper and vine. Square blocks of masonry, light fawn with faded green lichen, are set rough and matt in uneven courses.
I spent the journey out of this quiet fortress remembering the sound of bells, because I had heard none at Larresingle. The sound of bells is so intimately associated with this sort of castle, one expects to hear them; I was disappointed. Sitting down after the steep ascent from Marsolan, I had heard the Angelus rung so slowly it might have beena funeral knell; and between each note I heard, distinctly, the harmonies dying away, and that last lowest hum that is left when the tone is dead. Condom has three bells; two, a third apart I seem to remember, which sound alternately quarter, half, third quarter, hour, and one which (lower) counts the hours. The two high bells, intertwined, sum up the elegance of the town; though I dare say this is mere imagination.
Also, the sound of a town is quite distinctive, like the roar I had heard of the hidden Cahors; coming down from the hills into Condom, the hum of the town is apparent; cars, feet passing, opening and shutting of doors and windows.
In Eauze I found a better lodging, and a patron who could cook a daube of richness and thickness unequalled, the very darkness visible of cooking. He was a rugbyman - which in French was all one word - and the bar was hung with signed photographs of French teams back to the days of knee length shorts. "You will have to excuse me if the cooking tomorrow is not of quite such a high standard," he stated, flatly. "My wife is cooking it tomorrow. I shall be in Cardiff."
A French town has few of the signs indispensable in an English, or a German street. There are no barbers' poles; no inn signs. Shops are often bare of all identification bar the obligatory blue street number, with its quintessentially French, almost art deco typeface. But if the signs of every nation are different, the mix of trades is the same; only the names differ. A polyglot inventory, a complutensis of professions and trades, would not need much altering for each nationn; baker, boulanger, panifex, starting perhaps with the list of corporations at Ostia, set out in the mosaics of the forum pavement.
Inventories; that convenient shorthand for the spirit of a time and place; a place in time. But it is only certain lists that do this; not indices, but bibliographies; not the list of Mozart's works, but of his journeys; not Rossini's famous laundry list, but perhaps a list of unfinished operas, or nonsense songs. Most evocative; the catalogues of vanished libraries and forgotten works; the library of Provost Hacomblen's King's, or Gibbons' library, or Duke Humphrey's lost books.
Perhaps also lists have an internal coherence which fulfils our desire for a certain order, like the leather caress of a country house library all in the gentleman's binding, or an early pharmacy's battleorder array of jars. (Why is the country house library always the site of a murder? Purely and simply because for that age it was their Eden, the paradise garden into which murder comes as a snake in the grass, and the detective is theangel with the flaming sword.)
Eauze is a town of fine half timber houses, the main uprights carved into mouldings, with corbels instead of unfinished beam ends. The craftsman evidently desired some geometrical bravura. The cathedral's creamy stone interior is so luminous it seems to purr or hum with light. A strange note struck by the onion dome or pepperpot of the clocher, with its tiny cylindrical stair turret.