Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine | Page 4

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, and that, after the crucifixion, they left the Holy Land in a vessel which eventually landed them on the western coast of Gaul, not far from the present city of Bordeaux. They became associated with the mission of St. Martial, the first Bishop of Limoges, and at a later period Zaccheus, hearing of a rocky solitude in Aquitania, a little to the south of