I dropped in to the bar at Espeyrac; it is a lively town in summer, I was told, but deserted in winter; only two or three families winter there, and the doors are bolted against weather and wayfarer. The whole town seemed barred and bolted and boarded up, with much more than the usual mid-afternoon desertion of the French town. I understood now why this had been such a solitary journey; I had seen no-one for days, other than in the towns where I spent the night; no-one along the path, no-one at the farms. The land was dead in the grip of winter, despite the flooded sunlight.
I decided - not without regrets - to bypass that exceptionally lovely vision of a sunstruck Sénergues, and make on for Conques. But within a few hundred yards I found a reason to digress; a huge brown and gold sign pointing down a track (a filthy, ankle-breaking track) to the historical, cultural, patrimonial "site" of Sénergues. What could I do? the decision seemed to have been taken for me. Well, the bad track turned into a worse, and then it turned into an alleyway between wire fenced allotments of moth-eaten cabbages, but eventually I made my way to Sénergues.
Its church is much like that of Espeyrac; Gothic, early Gothic, with roughly chamfered piers, not truly octagonal, barrel vaulting (only one pair of ribs) and crude, flat circular bosses carved only in low relief. The sandstone is light but matt in colour, and the stucco is creamy; the church is nothing special, but it seems privileged to receive the light and form it once again into something heavenly and pure.
The church at Golinhac is altogether another matter. I should have missed it entirely had I not found a brochure at the gîte, which for want of anything else I read at supper. A lesson to the incurious not to neglect a church for the sake of a nineteenth-century fa‡ade. Golinhac is in essence a romanesque Greek-cross, with high sturdy aisles and a ribbed dome under the tower; the eastern aisles or chapel has been torn away and replaced by gothic extension. It is unsurprising to find that this imposingly heavy building was part of the fortifications of the now disappeared château. Even from outside the church is narrow and high. Above the line of the vault are windows which I could not remember seeing from inside; perhaps lighting a roof space, a vaulted chamber. Was there a door to this space? I saw none.
A bird calls; whea-ty! whea-ty! as if advertising for cornflakes. But the blackbirds today were dumb though glossy in their neat undertaker clothing; a pity, for they are truly the most melodious of birds, their voices liquid, trilling, like a stream of tamarind syrup.
I had my lunch at Sénergues, in a small restaurant of that plain, almost dingy type that is so utterly French; neat tablecloths, chairs and benches with the dark brown patina of the years, walls that needed a new limewash. I was the only other diner besides a family en fête, crowded on to a table and benches down the whole of one side of the room. I realised with a start that it was New Year's Day. There was much coming and going between the family and the kitchen; then the waitress sat down at her place on the other table, and I realised with a sense almost of intrusion that this was the patron's feast.
The children sang the Marseillaise - a little girl stood on a chair to sing "Petit Papa Noel", with prompting for the words, which she forgot half way through the third line. (How many English children would sing "God save the Queen" at New Year? There is a splendid emotionalism to French patriotism, unmatched elsewhere.) The food kept coming; and I was invited over, at the end of the meal, to share their champagne before I was set on my way for Conques.
Sénergues was open, dusty, sunstruck still. A high tower is all that remains of the château; it is not square enough to avoid the impression that it lacks solidity. The coping and machicolations at the top are decrepit; you can see, against the light, the shape of each cavity. Half a wing of the château remains, in façade at least, and there are several suggestive piles of stones. The bailey is a farmyard, occupied by massive turkeys like a flock of duennas, gossiping, hissing, clicking away.
The old turkey-herder set me on my route before I had time to stray. He was old and wizened, his beret and his halfgreyed moustache the biggest things about him. He too found the desertion of the land melancholy; the young go to Paris, and what is left for the peasant now but to see his farm and countryside decay? He, I suppose, would understand the terrible sadness of Virgil; the piercing hurt of "Tityre, tu recumbans sub tegmine fagi" - the emphasis on tu - you're all right, Jack, rich and Augustanised and able to take your fake-pastoral holiday from the city, but what about us, the ones proscribed and left behind? The saddest image in the whole of Virgil is the grey smoke drifting up from hearth fires; and here, the hearth fires are almost burnt out.
Through the pines and the jags of a landscape which doesn't quite make it, half hearted bursts of rock. I have looked ahead on the map to the sound of a new country in the south, the Langue d'Oc, with its sharp consonantal romance; Moissac, Figeac, Aurillac, Cugnac, Cognac. To pass the time I think of words I like, repeating them almost sensuously; vertiginous, sabretache, quinquennial (but not centennial), Sexagesima, Pondicherry, gesundheit, prosit (or Jivio!), anything with the vowels e acute and i, in that order - précis, dépit . . . I discover I do not like the word pecadillo - it is too like the ridiculous armadillo, but without the darkness of the long anteater-ar.
The road continues down into the vale and the words click through my mind as fast as my feet crunch on the rock.
The descent to Conques was a savage disappointment as I could not see through the conifer leaf the view of the cathedral; a high wall came to keep me company on one side as the day darkened. I reached Conques just as grey slid gently into darkness and the lights went on in the wayside houses. An immediate impression of tipping, reckless roofs and crinklycrankly streets, and at the bottom of the long descent the immensity of Sainte-Foy - not long, like an English cathedral, but immensely wide and broad, each element of the architecture massy and huge.
The bells were ringing as I came down. French campanology is not the disciplined, highly mathematical, almost donnish pursuit of the English, nor the pretty and precious carillon of the Dutch; it is richly aleatoric, with two or three bells set ringing, each in its own rhythm; sometimes coinciding, sometimes ringing in sequence, setting up a rich chaos of noise. The bells drift apart and come together, and there is never any pattern to the sound. It is a chaos like the chaos of the streets, and the sound is held like the town itself within the ragged walls of narrow valleys meeting.