going up in southern France, with their beautiful, terrifying, bizarre sculpture – some abbeys also had powerful relics of their own – and the battlefield of Roncevalles in the Pyrenees, where Charlemagne’s nephew, the folk-hero Roland, had died in battle. By the 1130s the pilgrimage was established enough to have its own ‘guidebook’, which offered opinionated advice on just about everything.
‘The Navarese bark like dogs’, complained the anonymous, Francophile author. Kingsley Porter wrote that from The Pilgrim’s Guide, which is actually a portion of a manuscript called the Callistine Codex, ‘We learn the characteristics of various nations – which peoples were kindly, which treacherous, which dirty; where the wine was good, and where the food was bad; where rivers could be forded; and where inns or hospices afforded shelter for the night.’
For most Western Europeans the pilgrimage took a year to undertake. Set out at the end of winter, travel in spring, arrive in summer, retrace your steps in autumn, return with the first snow. If, of course, you returned at all (if you didn’t show up within one year, the compulsory will made out for you by your parish priest was promptly acted upon). The pilgrimage was attractive to all social classes – rich people eventually paid others to walk for them – but for the most part Compostela pilgrims were poor peasants and serfs, usually elderly and therefore expendable to their lords. These people walked an average of fifteen miles a day, often in hopes of curing pre-existing ailments. They were endemically cheated by toll-takers and moneychangers, beset by bandits, and at the mercy of river ferrymen who sometimes purposely sank boats in order to loot their drowned customers. They suffered from heat stroke on unshaded Spanish roads (French roads were purposely lined with trees on one side, to provide comfort). And they were trapped in late spring blizzards crossing the Pyrenees – an event I knew a thing or two about, having crept in my car from France to Andorra through the Pas de la Casa in April. The two-lane road had writhed in an agony of curves as snow slicked the surface and low clouds clamped visibility down to about ten feet. It was perhaps more treacherous in a car than on foot – accidents littered the shoulders – but unlike foot-travellers, at least I could turn up the heat.
Despite the litany of hazards, pilgrims went to Compostela. They went in droves, ushering in a boom in the medieval shoemaker’s trade, their only protection a deterrent that sprang from the same fountainhead as their own incentive: fear of eternal damnation. It was a grievous sin to harm one of St James’s faithful, who were identified by costume and an insignia – the scallop shell – which has been the symbol of the Compostela pilgrimage since the eleventh century.
The pilgrimage to Santiago, to the home of St James, was above all an expression of optimism. In a world that recognized no causality other than God’s or the Devil’s constant meddling – illness was the work of the latter, good luck of the former – one’s future in both life and death depended on the beneficence of otherworldly forces. St James had the power to intercede on a supplicant’s behalf, especially that of a pilgrim who had given a year of his life and crossed the better part of a continent to honour the saint in his resting place. James was powerful; he had been Christ’s disciple; he was a reminder that all was not lost. Through his bones shone a chink of light within the theological shadow of near-certain damnation. The pilgrimage ultimately attested to the tenacity of human hope.
The path of the GR 65 ruts the emotional landscape of the Rouergue and Quercy. It’s not on my Michelin map, but the chemin falls like a latitude line across people’s lives. It has been a constant for over a thousand years, and thus a directional anchor. ‘Oh, you’re looking for the dolmen? Go to the pilgrimage road, and turn left.’ Or, ‘You can buy tweezers in the Pharmacie de l’Europe. It’s the one near the bridge, on the Road.’
The Chemin de St Jacques is also an attitude line; it is impossible not to perceive its presence – the westbound direction laden with spiritual urgency, the eastbound with equal measures of relief and disappointment – as a yardstick for one’s own journeys. Everyone who travels in the territory must at some point wonder how a pilgrimage differs from a mere journey. Must one be travelling on the soul’s business, to address God, or can a pilgrimage be more prosaic? Does spiritual business necessarily involve God?
I was rather unproductively pondering these questions as I approached the village of Conques, in the Rouergue; specifically, I had been mulling over the idea of an incomplete pilgrimage, which is how I fancied my travels. I was setting out to visit Romanesque sites on a branch of the pilgrimage road in southwest France, but defying the historical and spiritual tug of its destination, in Spain. Few roads lead nowhere, and this one had one of the most famous endpoints in European history. Even the stars of the Rouergat sky formed directional arrows, reproaching me for my stillness (it is said that the Milky Way leads to Compostela, the ‘Starry Field’ in the west). What did it mean to be more concerned with a segment of the chemin than its conclusion? A wilful choice of body over soul?
I put my hand to the south door of the abbey and it drew me in more than opened to applied pressure. I lost my balance and stumbled inside, into the bear hug of a large priest who was on his way out into the night. His white cassock glowed against the black space beyond. We both spoke in wine-scented whispers. Yes, I was welcome to come in, the abbey was open. But attention! The paving stones were uneven.
I stepped inside: the great building was dissolving into echoes of darkness. At first greys, masonry greys, hovered at eye level. As they rose upwards they grew less substantial, optical memories more than illuminated stones, until the visual echoes faded entirely and the majestic barrel vault of Conques Abbey ceased to be, and for me, not knowing if the stars were out yet or not, became heaven itself. Soon the foundations of the massive pillars and the exterior walls disappeared too. I was inside an idea of a Romanesque church, nothing more concrete than that, but that idea was strong, and it was enough. I felt the muscle of architecture flex around me, repeating in pleats of rounded arches down the side aisles – and there was a quiet undertone of pleading in that repetition, too – the twelfth-century message of God’s tough love.
I sat down on one of the curiously tiny, rush-back chairs that filled the nave. The night-time had brought singularity back to the abbey. I could smell the church far better than I could see it – it smelled like the rock in my pocket, only damper – and that limy scent defined its space as unique, something different from the green smell of spring drifting on the night-mists outside. By contrast, daylight had revealed not only Conques Abbey itself, but its endless repetition throughout the village. Despite being a ‘Grand Site de France’ – advertised as such by banners on nearby auto-routes – Conques village has remained wondrously small and self-contained, coiled into deep, wooded countryside halfway down the steep declivity that separates the Causse de Comtal from the Dourdou Valley. There is not a modern bone in the village’s medieval body, and yet one of the first things that struck me upon leaving my car and walking into town was wave upon wave of photographic reproduction. I’ve rarely seen such a plural place.
So many images of a single spot! Granted the almost shocking magnetism of the abbey – imagine Big Ben, or the Empire State Building, surrounded by a rural hamlet – and yet still the proliferation of postcards overwhelms. There are old ones, new ones, black-and-white and in colour; postcards in matte finish, shiny finish, printed on textured paper. Postcards of parts of the abbey that are off-limits to visitors, like the one I’d bought of a mermaid clasping her forked tail in each hand, carved onto a capital in the upper gallery. To purchase for 35 centimes an image never intended to be seen from the ground seemed, somehow, a violation of the abbey’s privacy. But then photography heedlessly violates the privacy of time past as well as space delimited, for I had approached the great western façade of Conques, surrounded by its little apron of a cobbled place, with a fixed, black-and-white moment from the morning of 18 August 1920 clasped in my hand.
Unlike Lucy’s, my moment – afternoon, 20 April 2002 – came with distracting colour and sound. An announcer commented on a women’s gymnastics championship on a television set in the Salon de Thé opposite the abbey. ‘I am just ringing to say I am standing in front of the church,’ repeated a blond woman, loudly and carefully, into her mobile. Beside her an Irish setter was hopelessly knotted up in her leash in a patch of shade. Above us all rose the massive, no-nonsense towers of the abbey, braided ‘round