Lamy of Santa Fe Read Free

rooted to the earth, while the Gothic sought to leave it.
    So the earlier forms were bound to the common land rather than to the aspiring pinnacle—cavern, glen, hill; tilling or feeding creatures, bent in their own small bodily arches to their tasks. Mortality is present; but in terms of supplication, even in the romance of the time—the Chanson de Roland itself:
    Save my soul against all threat
The which my life’s sins may beget .
    Upon his arm he sinks his head,
He joins his hands and he is dead .
    Fatality inescapable; but in the very admission of this, in spirit, form, observance, lay appeal to what rested in the common eternity—the promise of life from life, light from light. It was the same spirit which raised the round Roman arch to the Gothic spire, and gave central conviction and unity to a whole vast and various society.

iv .
    Auvergnats
    A NTIQUITY MARCHES FORWARD in a procession of persons, creating a tradition whose depth of culture formed belief, character, and vocation for centuries. Gergovia, once the capital of Celtic Averni, became the city and see of Clermont, whose founding bishop was St Austromonius, believed in his land to have been one of the “seventy-two disciples of our Lord, who came to Rome with St Peter.” Before the tenth century, twenty-three of Clermont’s bishops were canonized. One, Innocent VI, became pope (1332–62), five of its monks were saints, five popes passed through the city of whom one was Urban II mounting a crusade in 1095, and in his exile Thomas à Becket visited Clermont. Now the provincial metropolis of central France, the city is called Clermont-Ferrand. By 1262 its Gothic cathedral rose above the old medieval quarter, where to this day a weekly street market is set up with bright booths and counters to which country people come to mingle and trade with the townsmen.
    A feeling of remoteness attaches to the city—removal from the energetically forwarding affairs of Lyon to the east, Paris to the north. In architecture there are echoes here and there of the grand palace manner of Philibert de Lorme and the seventeenth century, and in intellectual history abides the luster of Pascal, who came from Clermont, and Massillon, who is commemorated by an important school there. The Loire château style, bastioned and towered, carved and vaulted, with doorways under ogee arches, is visible in the foliaged ruins of the great castle of Tournoël on a long ledge far overlooking the valley where a tributary of the Loire flows on pale sand through a green spread all the way to the horizon. The greens are dense yet various—silver of willows set against yellower grasses under the black shade of groves. Dürer-like scapes of river and hill, villages, spire, roof, all glow in that palette in which gold seems to underlie all other colors. In the fields and meadows creatures are bent to earth, men and women, two or three in a group, cultivating, horses grazing, and black and white cows, uniting in a Virgilian cycle the recurrent antique with the pathos of what is fugitive:
    The people—broad of face, reserved in manner—suggest a temperament born of the silence and the space of their great elevated plain. When they used their experience in their music, it was to imitate shepherds’ dialogues across the same fields where Caesar heard their ancestors calling. Songs of sowing and harvesting set little piped scales under monotonous melody in simple repetitions made to carry over bucolic distance. Mountain flageolets imitated the spinning wheel, and bagpipes groaned the toil of market carts along the road. If they merged into dance figures, the Auvergne folk tunes sometimes clattered with Iberian effect, recalling the long-ago link with the Spanish pilgrimages. Cradle song and lover’s lament both seemed to bear an underlying stoicism touched with a poor sweetness, as by those who worked hard to meet simple needs in a land beautiful,