Wanderings by Southern Waters, Eastern Aquitaine

by Edward Harrison Barker

The season was farther advanced when I continued the journey from this point to Cahors.

A person who had contracted the 'morphia habit' would probably find the most effectual cure for it by forced residence at Capdenac, because the town does not boast the luxury of a chemist's shop. Supposing the patient, however, to be a lady of worldly tastes, she might die of ennui in twenty-four hours. The Capdenac of which I am speaking is not the utterly unpicturesque collection of houses that has been formed about the well-known railway junction on the line to Toulouse, but old romantic Capdenac, whose dilapidated ramparts, dating from the early Middle Ages, crown the high rocky hill that rises abruptly from the valley on the other side of the Lot, which here separates the department named after it from, the Aveyron. The situation of this town is one of the most remarkable. It is perched upon a lofty table of reddish rock of the same calcareous composition as that which prevails throughout the region of the causses. Its walls are so escarped that the topmost crags in places overhang the path that winds about their base far below. Only strategical considerations could ever have induced men to build a town on such a site. The Gauls set the example, and their oppidum was long supposed to have been Uxellodunum, but the controversy has been settled in favour of the Puy d'Issolu.

I chose the hour of eight in the morning for climbing the rock of Capdenac. The broad winding river was brilliantly blue, like the vault overhead, and although the vine-clad hills, which shut in the valley, and the bare rocks, whose outlines were sharply drawn against the sky, were luminous, the light had the pure and clear sparkle of the morning. Reaching the hill, I took a zigzag stony path that led through terraced vineyards. The vintage had commenced, and men, women, and children were busy picking the purple grapes still wet with dew.

The children only, however, showed any joy in the work, for the bunches hung at such a distance from each other that a vine was very quickly stripped. The vigneron, with his mind dwelling upon the bygone fruitful years, when these arid steeps poured forth torrents of wine as surely as October came round, wore an expression on his face that was not one of thankfulness to Providence. They are a rather surly people, moreover, the inhabitants of this district, and I do not think at any time their hearts could have been very expansive. As I approached a woman who had a great basket of grapes in front of her, she hastily threw a bundle of leaves over them, casting a keenly suspicious glance at me the while. If she meant me to understand that the times were too bad for grapes to be given away, the movement was unnecessary. Where now are the generous sentiments and the poetry traditionally associated with the vintage? Not here, certainly. Men go out into their vineyards by night armed with guns, and the depredators whom they fear most are not dogs that have acquired a taste for grapes. The stony path was bordered by brambles, overclimbed by clematis, whose glistening awns were mingled with blackberries, which not even a child troubled to pick. There was much fleabane—a plant that deserves to be cherished in these parts, if it be really what its name indicates, but it would have to be extensively cultivated to be a match for the fleas. After the vineyards came the dry rock, that held, however, sufficient moisture for the wild fig-tree, wherever it could find a deep, crevice.

Passing underneath the perpendicular wall of rock, and the vine-clad ramparts above it, built on the very edge of the precipice, the winding path led me gradually up to the town. A little in front of an arched gateway was a ruined barbican, the inner surface of the walls being green with ferns and moss. Four loopholes were still intact. Had it been night I might have seen ghostly men with crossbows issuing from the gateway, but it being broad daylight, I was met by a troop of young pigs followed by a little hump-backed woman who addressed her youthful swine in the language of the troubadours.

In the narrow street beyond the arch a company of gigantic geese drew themselves up in order of battle, and challenged me in chorus to come on; but their courage was like that of Ancient Pistol. No other living creature did I see until I had walked nearly half through the ancient burg, between houses several centuries old, their stories projecting over the rough pitching and the stunted fig-trees which grew there unmolested. Some of these dwellings were in absolute ruin, with long dry grasses waving on the roofless walls. Nobody seemed to think it worth while to rebuild or repair anything. The town appeared to have been left to itself and to time for at least two hundred years. And yet there really were some inhabitants left. I found another gateway and another ruined barbican, and near to these, on the verge of the precipice, a high rectangular tower, which was the citadel and prison. The lower part was occupied by the schoolmaster of the commune, and he allowed me to ascend the winding staircase, which led to two horrible dungeons, one above the other. Neither was lighted by window or loophole, and but for the candle I should have been in utter darkness. Great chains by which prisoners were fastened to the wall still lay upon the ground, and as I raised them and felt their weight, I thought of the human groans that only the darkness heard in the pitiless ages. In another part of the building was a heavy iron collar that was formerly attached to one of these chains. There were also several old pikes in a corner.

A little beyond the citadel I found the church, a small Romanesque building without character. An eighteenth-century doorway had been added to it, and the tympan of the pediment was quite filled up with hanging plants. Still more suggestive of abandonment was the little cemetery behind, which was bordered by the ramparts. It was a small wilderness. Just inside the entrance, a life-sized figure with outstretched arms lay against a damp wall in a bed of nettles and hemlock. It had become detached from the cross on which it once hung, and had been left upon the ground to be overgrown by weeds. I have seen many a neglected rural cemetery in France, but never one that looked so sadly abandoned as this. It was like the 'sluggard's garden,' where 'the thorn and the thistle grow higher and higher.' Most of the gravestones and crosses were quite hidden by dwarf elder, artemisia, wild carrot, and other plants all tangled together. A grave had just been dug in this wilderness and it was about to have a tenant, for the two bells in the open tower were sounding the glas, and a distant murmur of chanting was growing clearer. The priest had gone to 'fetch the body,' and the procession was now on its way. On the top of the earth and stones thrown up on each' side of the new grave were a broken skull, a jawbone, several portions of leg and arm bones, besides many smaller fragments of the human framework. I thought the gravedigger might at least have thrown a little earth over these remains out of consideration for the feelings of those who were about to stand around this grave, but concluded that he probably understood the people with whom he had to deal. Presently this functionary—a lantern-jawed, nimble old man, with a dirty nightcap on his head—made his appearance to take a final look at his work. After strutting round the very shallow hole he had dug, in an airy, self-satisfied manner, he concluded that everything was as it should be, and retired for the priest to perform his duty.

The great difficulty with the people of Capdenac in time of war must have been the water supply. When their cisterns were empty, they had the river at the bottom of the valley and a spring that flowed at certain seasons, as it does now, at the foot of the rock on which they had built their little town. When they were besieged, they could not descend to the Lot to draw water; consequently they laid great store by the stream at the base of the rock. A long zigzag flight of steps down the side of the precipice was constructed, and it was covered by a wall that protected those who fetched water from arrows and bolts. Near the spring this wall was built very high and strong, and was pierced with loopholes. It also served as an outwork. The steps and much of the wall still exist. The spring in modern times came to be called Caesar's Well, because the elder Champollion and others endeavoured to prove that Capdenac was the site of Uxellodunum. The fact, however, that the spring is dry for several months in the year, and could never have been aught else but the drainage of the rock, is in itself a sufficient refutation of the hypothesis; because, according to Caesar, the fountain at Uxellodunum was so perennially abundant that when he drew off the water by tunnelling, the Gauls recognised in this disaster the intervention of the gods.

Capdenac appears to have given the English a great deal of trouble, which the natural strength of the place fully explains. It must have been a fortress of the first order in the Middle Ages, and would be so to-day, if the French thought it worth while to use it in a military sense; but, happily for the inhabitants of this part of France, their territory now lies far from the theatre of any war that is likely to occur. A charter by Philippe le Long, dated 1320, another by King John, and a third by Charles VII., recognise the immunity of the people of Capdenac from all public charges on account of the resistance which they constantly opposed to the English. The rock must, nevertheless, have fallen into the hands of a company attached to the British cause, for the Count of Armagnac bought the place in 1381 of a band of so-called English routiers. Sully lived there after the death of Henry IV., and the house that he occupied still exists.

According to a local tradition, Capdenac was on the point of being captured by the English, when it was saved from this fate by a stratagem. The defenders were starving, and the besiegers were relying upon famine to reduce them. In order to make the English believe that the place was still well provisioned, a pig was given a very full meal of all the corn that could be scraped together and then pushed over the side of the rock in a cautious manner, so that the animal might appear to be the victim of its own indiscretion. The pig fulfilled expectations by splitting open when it struck the ground, and thus revealed the corn that was in its body. When the English saw this, they said: 'If the men of Capdenac can afford to feed their swine on wheat, they must still have plenty for themselves.' Discouraged by this reflection, they raised the siege. When they went away there was not an ounce of bread left to divide amongst the garrison.