Two Summers in Guyenne: A Chronicle of the Wayside and Waterside

by Edward Harrison Barker

It was true that this fortress, nearly hidden by vegetation, was no longer in a state to withstand a long siege, but who could tell what importance it might have in the eyes of a foreign Power traditionally credited with a large appetite for other people's property? However, he was not an ill-natured man, and when I had talked to him a bit, he moved his hand towards the ruin with quite a noble gesture, and told me that I was free to do there anything I liked. Had I been a snake-catcher, I might have done a good deal there.

We were afloat again before the sun had begun to warm an apple's ruddy cheek; but already the white lips of the water-lilies were wide-parted, as the boat slid past or through their colonies upon the reedy river. We glided under brambled banks, overtrailed with the wild vine; then the current took us round and about many an islet of reeds and rushes where the common phragmites stood ten or twelve feet high; and now by other banks all tangled with willow-herb, marsh-mallow, and loose-strife. Over the clear water, and the wildernesses of reeds and flowers, lay the mild splendour of the morning sunshine. But the blissful minutes passed too quickly; all the tones brightened to brilliancy, and by ten o'clock the rays were striking down again with torrid ardour.

We had lunched amongst the reeds under a clump of alders, and were paddling on again, when the massive walls and tower of a vast fortress of old time appeared upon the top of a steep hill, rising above all other hills that were visible, and at the foot of the castle rock were many red roofs of houses that seemed to be nestled pleasantly in a spacious grove of trees. Above all was the dazzling blue of the sky. A truly southern picture, flaming with shadeless colour, and glittering with intense whiteness. We were reaching Aubeterre.

We beached the canoe beside a meadow, opposite a spot where about twenty women were washing clothes, their noses very near the water. They were mightily surprised to see us suddenly arrive in our swift boat. All the heads came up together, and the rest went down.

We walked into a riverside inn, and there I made friends with the innkeeper over one or two bottles of beer—there was an innocent liquor so called on sale at Aubeterre. The aubergiste was rather down on his luck, for some mill at which he had been employed had gone wrong financially, and the wheels thought it no longer worth while to turn round. He therefore undertook to show us the way to everything that ought to be seen at Aubeterre.

He led us up a steep winding road where the sun smote furiously, where there was no shade, and where the dust was so hot that it might have roasted an egg, if the person waiting for it was in no great hurry. We had gone a very little way, when Hugh proposed to return and mount guard over the boat, for whose safety he had become unreasonably anxious. On reaching the steep little town there was more shade, because the streets were narrow, but the rough pitching of cobble-stones was very bad for feet so sore as ours, and so swollen that the boots into which we managed to force them before leaving the river were now several sizes too small.

We stopped at the parish church, but not so long as I should have, had I been a lonely wayfarer without anybody to guide me. It is a delightful example of a Romanesque style that is found much repeated in Périgord, Angoumois, and the Bordelais. The great interest lies in the façade, which dates from the eleventh century. Here we have a large central portal, and on each side of it, what the architectural design supposes to be a smaller one, but which in reality is only a sham doorway. The slender columns of the jambs, and the archivolts filled in with little figures, sacred, fantastic, and grotesque, are there, as in connection with the central arch; but all this has only an ornamental purpose. The spectator who is at all interested in ecclesiastical architecture will examine with much delight the elaborate mouldings and the strangely-suggestive forms of men, beasts, birds, shapes fantastic and chimerical, which ornament these Romanesque doorways.

But this church has not the interest of singularity which belongs to another at Aubeterre—that of St. John. It is, or was, truly a church, and yet it is not an edifice. Like one at St. Émilion, it is monolithic in the sense that those who made it worked upon the solid rock with pick, hammer, and chisel; in which way they quarried out a great nave with a rough apse terminating in the very bowels of the hill. On one side of the nave, enough has been left of the rock to form four immense polygonal piers, whose upper part is lost to sight in the gloom, until the eye grows somewhat reconciled to the glimmer of day, which, stealing in through openings in the cliff, is drowned in darkness before it reaches the hollow of the apse. On the opposite side is a high gallery cut in the rock in imitation of the triforium gallery. The row of piers separates the church proper from what was for centuries the cemetery of Aubeterre: a vast burrow made by the living for the reception of the dead, where they were plunged out of the sunlight teeming with earthly illusion and phantasy, to await the breaking of the great dawn.

Not a spring violet nor a gaudy flower of summer gave to the air the perfume, or to the earth the colour of sweet life, to soothe and lighten the dreariness of the dead: such thoughts in the Middle Ages would have been almost pagan. Then the darkness of death was like the darkness of night here in this necropolis hewn in the side of the ancient rock, whose very substance is made up chiefly of other and older forms of life. Moreover, the hope that was then so firmly fixed beyond the grave was the hope of rest—everlasting repose—after so much tossing and battling upon the sea of life. The palmer dying of weariness by the wayside, and the Crusader of his wounds upon the blood-soaked sand, could imagine no more blessed reward from the 'dols sire Jhésu' for all their sacrifice of sleep, and other pain endured for their souls' sake, than a 'bed in paradise.' To me it seemed that had I lived seven centuries ago, I should, when dying, have been so weak as to beg my friends not to lay my body in the awful gloom of this sepulchral cavern, there to remain until the end of time. But the mediaeval mind, having better faith, appeared to be moved by no such solicitude for the lifeless body.

If there are ghostly people who haunt the earth, and have their meeting-places for unholy revel, what a playground this must be for them at the witching hour! It is enough to make one's hair stand on end to think of what may go on there when the sinking moon looks haggard, and the owls hoot from the abandoned halls open to the sky of the great ruin above. The burying went on within the rock until thirty years ago, and the skulls that grin there in the light of the visitor's candle, and all the other bones that have been dug up and thrown in heaps, would fill several waggons. It was with no regret that I went out into the hot and brilliant air, and left for ever these gloomy vaults, with their dismal human relics and that penetrating odour of the earth that once moved and spoke, which dwells in every ancient charnel-house.