The descent is less steep than yesterday, but the architecture has changed; it becomes more luxurious, more curvaceous. The "toits Philibert" of St-Côme, like galleys or reversed cradles or Norman helmets. The Chapel of the Penitence, perfectly romanesque in other details (and with a crude but effective carved corbewl table, a double-fishtailed mermaid, and a lean but satisfied cat) has this roof too, a lazy ogee, not sharp, but falling in to its centre as if gravity is too much for it.
With the exception of Le Puy, this is the first real town I have seen; a town, that is, not defined by its size, but by its urbanity, by the exclusion of the contry from this little patch of civilisation. Like St-Remy-en-Provence, St-Côme has lost its ramparts, but ther circular (or rather spiral) pattern of the ruelles around its castle and church testify to them, and a few of the gates remain.
One ancient lane, and one ionly, leads out of the town towards the chapel of Penitents. I wonder; wasthe chapel of Penance always outside the walls, in the dangerous space beyond the security of the town? Was penance a form of pilgrimage in small, a sort of ordeal?
The age of plenty for this town seems to have been the sixteenth century, when the new twisted-spired church was built. Salvanh, the architect, also built a townhouse with doubled ogees and a grinning caryatid, precise in the duplication and reduplication of mouldings. Creamy stone, as attractive as the best Ketton stone in Cambridge, but too friable to last in this precise and overelaborate style where every angle is sharp, chamfered, chiselled. Concave surfaces and spines of moulding. Above every door in this town is a little heart, charming, extended into curls or feathers or trailers of mist.
The town is dominated by the sound of bells. I found Notre-Dame du Puy by following the sound of bells upwards; here, though, the city is like an onion with its concentric rings around the church, and the buildings reflect the sound so that it is impossible to tell where it is coming from.
Outside the church is a monument to three generations of the Castelnau family, whose castle is now the mairie; a count, a viscount general, and a baron, all three of them brothers, and their sons and grandsons. The women pass away; there is none to remember them. Even the churches and the charitable insitutions have all been endowed by men; women are such shadows that even their works of charity are lost.
I remember this again seeing the Christmas maypoles erected to the sons of the Republic. France glorifies the military; what is there left for her daughters?
By the time I get to Saint-Côme I'm dog tired, coughing dry and painfully. I sleep in the afternoon (or as close as I can get to sleep) in a cold room, under piles of blankets. Nothing helps; I can't even get started on my usual daydreams and my eyes are too tired, my head too full of ache to read. Images, stripes, lights flicker through my mind as soon as I close my eyes, like the mad collage as film runs out of the projector, or images of space invaders imprinted on the retina. The next day through tiredness I miss my path and wolk down to Espalion on the busy road, missing the Eglise de Perse