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iv.

Auvergnats

ANTIQUITY 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, 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.