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The Home Village

THERE—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 public square 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 village patroness, Our Lady of Good Tidings—Notre-Dame de Bonne Nouvelle. On her altar in her side-chapel she stood in diadem and free-flowing carved robes, holding her naked child, who wore a little crown as He gazed upward into her broad-cheeked face in which lingered a composed merriment. She looked like a farm woman of Auvergne. Her healthy face glowed with simplicity above the gold leaf of her amply folded and tucked garments. Her eyes were dark, her high cheekbones were marked by smile shadows, and her closed lips seemed to indicate that she knew what she knew, and that what she knew was good. She was about ten inches tall. Jean Baptiste became her familiar at the age of five, when he began to pay her long and frequent visits in a “grande devotion” which was later recalled when his childhood was mentioned. Their silent dialogue established a meaning—a view of life—never to change for him.

A certain pathos dwells in the localism of childhood—who could know what horizons awaited far away, not for all, surely, but perhaps for one or two? But the children of Lempdes, innocent of futures, must always have seemed much the same at any period, and thus Lamy, where they played—limpid small boys with shining caps of hair and dark clove-like eyes and ruddy cheeks, in the dusty walled streets, where tiny kittens blinked and dozed, and hens wandered loose with gravel in their voices, and dogs lay in the center of the lanes in perfect confidence of rest undisturbed. No life was precisely like every other; but in the village, as in that part of the great world to which it was attached, all human matters drew order from a common source so strong that its flow of influence could not be separated from any act.

For the people prayed not only to God, in that equation which had no true form but inner conviction, but also to history. From the dawn of the Middle Ages until the century of Lamy’s birth, the Church had grown to be the teacher of all things—the proprieties of custom, the styles of philosophy, the seemliness to be searched for in the relation between body and soul, earth and the unseen. Man’s single life, and the life of the state, the life even of the Church’s own servants, could show every range of human capability, from good to evil, throughout the centuries; yet the mystery of the need for truth and communion beyond the self persisted in an unbroken line of faith whose very monuments seemed as eternal as what they represented, in all their variety, from the Islamic striped arches in Notre-Dame de Port, dating from 1099, to the groined elements meeting like hands in prayer high above the floor of the cathedral of Clermont. The church building made of this world’s materials by men’s hands was the gateway of prayer which led beyond death. To enter those dark caverns of worked stone and lofting shadow, those aisles where light shifted high in the air under the passage of the day, those obscure corners by pillar or arch, and to face the altar where the body of God could be addressed privately in the tabernacle where it lived, was to draw a secret line from the cares and hopes of a short life to eternal mercy.

Every age marked by a distinct historical style is an age of faith. The object of faith may change, but the impulse to define and live life in terms of a system of belief is constant. Great acts have been done in the name of many different beliefs. To understand any such act and the individual who gave it interest for us, it is necessary to take as a given element, regardless of our own relation to what we see as reality, the absolute and sometimes glorious significance of the faith which moved him.

The Catholic form of this view in Lamy’s time lay at the foundation of the state, the town, the family, and the person. It was as naturally expressed by believers as life through the act of breathing. Believed in, its formalisms were not burdens but aids to a divine end, through a culture both intensely local and fervently strong because it was by definition universal. Familiarly but awesomely, a life given to the Church brought anyone, whatever his original lot, to take his vocation with a sense of immense privilege and with it a calm assumptiveness of power whose duties embraced all terms of life, death, and eternity. Nothing long-lasting was done without religious conviction. Piety was an energizing force, and a clear gaze into the mystery showed forth in early Auvergne fresco paintings of the saints drawn in formalized conventions which called on the manners of the old Roman, the Byzantine, the Iberian, the Arabic, the Mozarabic, in resemblances not entirely accounted for by historical linkages. Who in the presence of such silent witnesses staring from a painted apse, seeing them from his earliest life, would not retain in imagination something of their suggestive power?

With the turn of the eighteenth century, the age of piety seemed for many to be ended, in the name of reason. But still, for vastly many more, the motive of Christian belief survived, and for them the offering of self in its behalf remained an act of unquestioned reasonableness. Without that, much in any chronicle of a religious life might seem implausible and unmeaningful. With it, achievements in its name could be recognized, taking for granted that spiritual conviction lay behind them.

It need not be further explained to the broadly skeptical taste of a later time why men and women in religious commitment thought it worthwhile to bring the works of faith, hope, and charity to strange lands and changing societies. Once they have recognized their gods, men have always served them.

From childhood, Jean Baptiste Lamy, gazing from the tilled fields well to the north of Lempdes, across bluing hills, to the farthest line of the land where the solitary profile of the Puy-de-Dôme rose in the distance, could see between near and far the hazy cluster of the city of Clermont-Ferrand. The only constant and distinguishable features which he could pick out were the two spires of the cathedral side by side, there, at the end of the country road leading from Lempdes to the city and the world. At that angle, in certain airs and lights, they might fancifully suggest the twin spires of a mitre, such as worn by a bishop, a lord and teacher.