None of these objects are for sale, of course, but it doesn’t take a great leap of the imagination to see a fine Saturday market in the making.
Based on sheer numbers, the museum shines in its assortment of ceramic holy-water vessels, but its chief prize is singular: an anthropomorphic menhir about waist-high, found locally and erected sometime between 3500–2200 BC. Statue-menhirs, which are essentially standing stones carved with human attributes, are rare, though the greatest concentration in Europe is in the Rouergue. Some sport schematic arms and legs, beards and breasts, even tattoos incised onto large, tooth-shaped stones; this one, however, was more enigmatic. Two deep eyeholes and a long, half-open mouth seemed to fix the viewer from a place far older than the Bronze Age. I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was an ancestral totem, a sire of all creatures with eyes and mouths before we differentiated into separate species. It was an eerie sight, like looking deeply into everything and nothing in particular at once.
When I visited the Musée Joseph Vaylet I had the place entirely to myself; the handful of other museum-goers in Espalion were all next door at the Musée du Scaphandre – the Diving Suit Museum. The unusual fact that a land-locked town like Espalion has a museum of the diving suit, advertised by a statue of a bronze diver in antediluvian gear standing in the middle of the River Lot and an orange diving bell on the pavement, is imperfectly explained by the fact that two local men were diving pioneers in the mid nineteenth century. I never made it there; I was too busy pondering M. Vaylet’s exhibits, the only common attribute of which seems to be their irrelevance to the present day.
The sixteenth-century building that holds his collection, the former church of St Jean, is irrelevant itself, having been made redundant in the late nineteenth century by the construction of a new parish church across the street. The older structure is an urbane building, compact and narrow but lofty – the in-town edifice of a rising middle class grown wealthy on the tanning trade. The only thing it shares with its predecessor, the field-locked church of Perse, is building material of local red sandstone. There must have been a town meeting at which the masons, tailors, tanners, and stone-cutters of Espalion decided that an eleventh-century church in a meadow outside the town was no longer fitting to their stature, so they decided to commission a new one.
It was in this former church, now a repository of the extinct and obsolete, itself the very agent that had thrust irrelevance on the church of Perse five hundred years earlier, that I momentarily lost faith in my adventure. Here at the beginning of my journey was every reason to abandon it. If a nineteenth-century antelope-headed mallet was no longer useful to the residents of Espalion, how could eleventh-century Romanesque sculpture be relevant to me? It rendered an increasingly discredited theology of judgement and damnation in thoroughly discredited artistic shorthand: what could be more irrelevant than that? St Bernard’s question – ‘What profit is there in this art?’ – had got inside my head. What did I want of it, not to mention the Porters and Lucy’s photographs?
The facts I’d gathered about their lives were as so many exhibits in these cloudy glass cases. Lucy liked to garden; Kingsley was driven to distraction by the unruly clanging of church bells in French villages; they were both bothered by flying insects in the night. Knowing these things didn’t begin to answer why I was so drawn to them.
Instead they rendered the Porters in a kind of Romanesque perspective. Lucy and Kingsley moved about in my imagination, but they did so within the constricted, one-dimensional space of the past. They were like photographs shot by my mind’s eye – as yet a camera without a depth-perceiving lens, restricting its subjects to the surface plane. My mental images of them reminded me of the sculpted tympanum figures on the church of Perse. Although the Perse sculptures were shaped in the round, they had been conceived to inhabit a flat universe. Christ is depicted sitting, but because he sits in one dimension, his knees occupy the same plane as his torso. Writing about Romanesque sculpture, Meyer Schapiro tried to explain how three-dimensional carvings could be rendered in one dimension: ‘They are’, he wrote, ‘like shadows cast on a wall’ – the antithesis, in other words, of real photographs, which are themselves flat but depict depth.
At this point in my journey I felt like that eleventh-century sculptor who had shaped the awkward little figures at Perse. Perhaps, over time, Lucy’s photographs and their stony subjects, abetted by her journal and Kingsley’s letters, even the French countryside itself, might begin to lend the couple shading and spatial depth. Perhaps my own younger self would flesh up a bit, too, and speak to me of the real reasons she’d felt such an affinity for this strange art; at the moment she was little more than a shadow cast behind the present Pamela. It seemed odd to be looking for answers – for personalities, even – in stone. But then I thought of Lucy’s words about winter in Paris; how she’d seen frozen sprays of ice issuing from the mouths of gargoyles, and how they’d revealed the way the wind had been blowing on the first cold day.
I, too, wanted to know which way the wind had been blowing; I wanted to catch secrets on the breath of stone. Lucy had found traces of the wind’s restless passage in ice; perhaps I would be lucky enough to find answers – or at least clues – in sculpture.
I chatted again with the pea-shellers, who directed me to an excellent greengrocer. I was feeling better about things. For good or ill – for now, anyway – let the Porters be a pair of Romanesque photographs cast on the wall of my mind’s eye. About the old sculptures Schapiro had also written: ‘Although they represent incidents … drawn from a real world, it is another logic of space and movement that governs them.’ His words gave me a way to think about Lucy and Kingsley that honoured them for what they were at present: not a living, breathing couple who had stood outside the church of Perse eighty years earlier, perhaps chatting with Joseph Vaylet, their three-legged view cameras at the ready, but guides reshaped on the focusing-plate of my imagination by the logic of my journey. The questions that propelled my travels governed my acquaintance with them. I was not so much their biographer as their fellow traveller, in the same place but another time, and their own painstakingly constructed, black-and-white photographs would be my maps.
There are 1,527 photographs in Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads, and only three, to my count, have people in them. In one, a priest poses in front of St Michel de Cuxa near the Spanish border; in another, three children line up before the entrance to a church in Western France; the third, labelled ‘Baptism of Christ; Shepherds; Magi’, is the most curious. Lucy shot the other figures, but Kingsley took this picture, and as a documentary photograph of column capitals it is an abject failure. The capitals are barely legible – the carvings look like webs secreted by a clumsy, stone-spinning spider – but below them, in sharper focus, stand two young peasant children, a boy with a hat pulled low over his eyes and a girl whom Kingsley half-cropped out of the picture.
It wasn’t unusual for the Porters to take pictures of the children who gathered to watch them work, but it was a rare portrait that Kingsley allowed into print. Lucy noted in her ‘Devastated Regions’ journal that, ‘I let the Le Duc brothers – aged 11, 9, and 5 – stand in my picture. They were clad in cast-off soldiers uniforms.’ That photograph was not included in Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads.
Everything about Kingsley’s picture is curious. The capitals and the children are pushed to the extreme left side of the image; the right simply shows a blank, masonry wall. Had he been fully concentrating on the sculpture he could have got much closer to it, as he did with a different set of capitals in the next photograph. That he didn’t suggests he was taking a portrait of the children, and yet the little girl is half missing. It is either a rare display of sentiment, if not quite sentimentality – both children look solemnly obstinate – or a display of wry humour. From their dress and the rural setting of the church, it’s a good bet the children are shepherds. The fact that they stand directly beneath their carved, biblical colleagues suggests that Kingsley was making a visual pun and a subtle reference to the rural pastureland in which he and Lucy, the church, and the children found themselves.
This photograph is from
