Lamy of Santa Fe Read Free Page A

yielding, but demanding, where in winter the plain lies open to harsh weather, in summer to hazes of heat which all but erase the horizon mountains.
    Much in the present, then, seems constant from the past. In June the cherry orchards show their enamelled fruit hanging along branches with long leaves. A dead crow dangles from a planted stick as a warning to other crows in a ripening field. From the corner of the eye a shuttered flash—the white stripes on the wings of great blackbirds against the bright haze. In the open country, pale villages look like houses of cards, with their red tile roofs. Red poppies echo the color, amidst the green checkerboards of the fields. Within the city of Clermont, the same tile-red housetops, accented by shutters to close against heat or cold, seem to make a common roof if seen from any small height. The streets rise and fall on many contours, and turn with inner hills, and like those of any ancient city seem to lose their narrow way in hidden districts and secret enclaves. Where these open out, as at the Place de Jaude, a prospect of state makes a sweep of elegance for great shops and municipal palaces, for a park, for sculpture, and there, at the head of the vista, rises a heroic statue of Vercingetorix on his “finest mount.”
    A street bearing to the south presently leaves city houses behind, and turns dusty, entering the country to lead to small villages, one of which, forty-eight kilometres away, is called Lempdes.

v .
    The Home Village
    T HERE — TO RETURN TO THE NARRATIVE from the base upon which it rests—Jean Baptiste Lamy was born on 11 October 1814, in a clay-plastered house on an earthen street.
    His parents, described as “paysans aisés” —well-to-do peasants—were Jean Lamy and Marie Die. They represented old and respected families of the countryside—the father at one time was mayor of Lempdes. Of their eleven children, only four survived as adults. Two sons—Louis and Jean Baptiste—became priests, a daughter Marguerite entered the sisterhood, and a third son, Etienne, fathered Antoine and Marie, who in turn became priest and nun.
    The family house sat flat-faced and flush with the other houses on its street. It presented a scatter of windows at random heights, some square, some small, others large and shuttered (oddly suggesting the fenestration in the church of Ronchamps by Le Corbusier of the twentieth century). A single-span door opened into the house at one end, and a wide double door at the other was the entrance to the concealed animal and wagon yard and barns behind. There were three low storeys, rising to the dusty vermilion roof like that over all the other houses.
    Lempdes sat on a gently domed hill above the right bank of the Alagnon River. Its narrow streets, all uncobbled, wound about on low slopes as if established by the meander of domestic animals. Proper narrow stone sidewalks were edged by running gutters. Heavy old masonry was revealed here and there through broken plaster. An occasional flourish of style was added by a wooden balcony at a second storey, and, open, an old sagging wooden doorway gave on to a fortress-like courtyard entered through broad arches high enough to admit farm wagons and horses. Two-wheeled carts, tired with iron, used wheels as high as the cart cages. Far in the narrow aisles curving between houses, glimpses showed of a forge, or a crib full of hay, or, in a miniature enclosed farmyard behind a house, a byre, straw, droppings.
    Near the entrance of the village, and at its highest point, the publicsquare presented a row of flat-fronted buildings painted in a succession of pale fresco colors—blue, beige, rose, white. Flower pots stood in summer along the pavements. If there was an air of poverty, it had the dignity of self-sufficiency, and if there was pride, it was centered in the modest Romanesque church which dominated one end of the small square. This was the home of the