Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine | Page 4

When the angelus has sounded from the ancient sanctuary, and all the
forms of the valley are dim in the dusk, the silence is broken again by a
very quiet little bell, which might be called the fairies' angelus if it did
not keep ringing all through the spring and summer nights. It is like a
treble note of the piano softly touched. It steals up from amongst the
flags, hyacinths, and box-bushes of the neglected little garden which I
call mine, terraced upon the side of the gorge just beneath the balcony.

Now, from all the terraced gardens planted with fruit-trees, comes the
same sound of low, clear notes, some a little higher than others, but all
in the treble, feebly struck by unseen musicians. How sweetly this
tinkling rises from the earth, that trembles with the bursting of seeds
and the shooting of stems in the first warm nights of spring! And to
think that the musicians should be toads--yes, toads--the most despised
and the most unjustly treated of creatures!
This cottage is at Roc-Amadour, and before writing about the place I
cannot do better than go down to the level of the stream, and look up at
the amazing cluster of buildings clinging to the rocks on one side of the
gorge, while the old walls are whitened by the pale brilliancy of the
moon. Above the roofs of all the houses is a mass of masonry, vast and
heavy, pierced by narrow Romanesque windows--a building uncouth
and monstrous, like the surrounding crags. It stands upon a ledge of the
cliff, partly in the hollow of the rock, which, indeed, forms its
innermost wall. Higher still a great cross shows against the sky, and
near to it, upon the edge of the precipice, are the ramparts of a
mediaeval fortress, now combined with a modern building, which is the
residence of the clergy attached to the sanctuary of Notre Dame de
Roc-Amadour.
[Illustration: ROC-AMADOUR.]
The sanctuary--it is inside the massive pile under the beetling rock, and
over the roofs of the houses--explains why men in far-distant times had
the strange notion of gathering together and constructing dwellings
upon a spot where Nature must have offered the harshest opposition to
such a project. The chosen site was not only precipitous, but lay in the
midst of a calcareous desert, where no stream nor spring of water could
be relied upon for six months in the year, and where the only soil that
was not absolutely unproductive was covered with dense forest infested
by wolves.[*] And yet, in course of time, there grew up upon these
forbidding rocks, in the midst of this desert, a little town that obtained a
wide celebrity, and was even fortified, as the five ruinous gateways,
with towers along the line of the single street, prove even now,
notwithstanding the deplorable recklessness with which the structures
of the ancient burg have been degraded or demolished during the last
half-century. Nothing is more certain than that the origin of
Roc-Amadour, and the cause of its development, were religious. It was

called into existence by pilgrims; it grew with the growth of
pilgrimages, and if it were not for pilgrims at the present day half the
houses now occupied would be allowed to fall into ruin. It is
impossible to look at it without wonder, either in the daylight or the
moonlight. It appears to have been wrenched out of the known order of
human works--the result of common motives--and however often
Roc-Amadour may suddenly meet the eye upon turning the gorge, the
picture never fails to be surprising. It has really the air of a holy place,
which many others famed for holiness have not.
[*] Robert du Mont, in his supplement to Sigibert's Chronicles, wrote,
more than five hundred years ago, of Roc-Amadour: 'Est locus in
Cadurcensi pago montaneis et horribile solitudine circumdatus.'
The founder of the sanctuary was a hermit, whose contemplative spirit
led him to this savage and uninhabited valley, whose name, in the early
Christian ages, was Vallis tenebrosa, but in which Nature had
fashioned numerous caverns, more or less tempting to an anchorite. He
is called Amator--_Amator rupis_--by the Latin chroniclers--a name
that, with the spread of the Romance language, would easily have
become corrupted to Amadour by the people. According to the legend,
however, which for an uncertain number of centuries has obtained
general credence in the Quercy and the Bas-Limousin, and which in
these days is much upheld by the clergy, although a learned Jesuit--the
Père Caillau--who sifted all the annals relating to Roc-Amadour felt
compelled to treat it as a pious invention, the hermit Amator or
Amadour was no other than Zaccheus, who climbed into the sycamore.
The legend further says that he was the husband of St. Veronica,