To a Land of Sloping Shale, Dark Woods and Extendable Steeds
I love driving north through Champagne. The vinyards peter out, replaced by wide rolling fields and finally steeper slopes and forest fill the horizon. The Ardennes*. There are too many trucks and tractors on the road and an excess of road works and I’m in a hurry. For a while, the sun makes an appearance, but thankfully it’s brief. I want grey skies when I skirt Charleville-Mézières and reach the river Meuse. Rain would be fine too, but no shadows and blue skies, please, that wouldn’t do at all.
I have a long-awaited rendezvous (and have briefly managed to escape my obligations as a guest at the Troyes Book Fair where I will find a lengthy line-up of patient – and resigned – signature-seekers on my return) so I don’t want the weather playing any tricks.
I have an appointment with a legend; I don’t want to be late.
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This is the street where we lived in Troyes, many years ago. The only time I’ve ever been able to touch both sides of my street with BOTH hands all at once… I often toyed with the idea of setting up a little booth and charging toll to the tourists.
My destination: the rusty little town of Bogny-sur-Meuse, huddled between the brown river and unstable slopes of shale clothed in shabby scrub and forest. This is not necessarily a cheerful riverside vacation destination. The Roman legions slipslid down these muddy tracks with their hobnailed sandals, ambushed by the Belgae and Treveri. Huns, hussars and half-tracks made their way carefully down the same steep slopes; this country is not far from the battlefields of many wars, and is itself dotted with reminders of the last war lost – to modernization and delocalization – with decaying smokestacks and rotting warehouses as memorials. The sign at the edge of town does not say “Ville Fleurie” or “Ville au Bord de l’Eau” or some such mellifluous platitude. It says “Pays de Labeur et de Légendes”.
A very good summing-up of a region that doesn’t take anything for granted. I’m sure it is very pretty in the summer, but the weather I’ve been granted is perfect: a sky of lead, with clouds of stone.
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Left: Lucky for me, legends are signposted in the Ardennes, and there’s a parking lot too!
Centre: The statue of the Four Sons of Aymon is on a high rock above the town. The green (bright green, so you don’t miss it) railing is to stop you from stepping back to admire the statue and plummeting to a rather ridiculous demise in the name of a decent photo.
Right: Tourist, four knights and a horse (thanks to a helpful passer-by).
The Four Sons of Aymon stand overlooking the valley of the Meuse. They were sculpted by a French artist named Albert Poncin, who appears to have left little else of note to posterity. Poncin seems to be principally known for having shared a barge with Paul Couchoud and André Faure on a trip down the Meuse in 1903, composing – of all things – haiku in French. (The 72 verses they penned were ultimately printed two years later – entitled “Au fil de l’eau”, 30 copies in all – and are considered to be the first and best French haïku ever written. An exploit surely laudable enough in itself, but a dubious epitaph for a sculptor.) Poncin, born in the Dauphiné in 1877, did leave other works – a Nausicaa at the Musée du Luxembourg, a Canephorus in a public garden in Lyon, as well as smaller sculptures, but his magnum opus is definitely this stocky assembly of ash-coloured stone overlooking the Meuse.
In 1929, visitors to the Salon des Artistes Français in Paris flocked around a monumental plaster maquette representing the Four Bothers Aymon and their steed Bayard. Representatives of the Ardennes region immediately fell in love with it and began to raise the money necessary to commission the statue and have it installed on the mountain of Fay, overlooking Château-Regnault-Bogny. They were not to have it without a fight. The deputy mayor of Charleville thought his constituency would be far more fitting, the cities of Lyon and Paris suddenly expressed interest. An energetic exchange of petitions and counter-proposals followed, until a ministerial decree finally put an end to the squabbling and awarded the statue to the present site.
With equal alacrity and surprising vehemence, polemicists took Poncin to task for not having done a statue more in keeping with the style of the times. Not enough drawn swords and vaulting steeds in their eyes, not enough panache. Indeed, Poncin’s heroes are unarmed except for a baton and a stave, and helms and shields. (And standing still! Leaning on their shields, parbleu, that will never do at all! They must be leaping, thrusting, sus à l’ennemi!) Arguing in public at that time was practically a national sport, and it must have offered the opportunity for some spirited set-tos. Poncin, however, in the image of his knights, stood firm.
He even donated the one hundred thousand franc grant the goverment offered him, and the Society of Authors of the Ardennes, local artists and war veterans as well as municipalitites in both France and Belgium raised the remaining funds. The stone was quarried locally.
The cornerstone was laid on the chosen site on August 29, 1932 and an inauguration was scheduled for Sunday July 22, 1934 at 3 p.m. (Even the President of the Republic was invited.) It was not to happen. The Great Depression at last reached France, workers were locked out of factories, the capital was in turmoil (13 shot dead in an assault on the Palais Bourbon) rumours of war were rife and finally WWII itself rumbled on the horizon and swept through the Ardennes. (It is a wonder the statue survived, so many monuments disappeared in eruptions of shattered stone to help sight guns.) At long last inaugurated in 1950, the statue was restored in 1981, using stone from the same quarry, and an exhibition in Bogny traced the history of the monument in 1982.
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No sketches or plans survive, according to the mayor’s office and the local library, no clay or plaster models. What a shame.
Just a statue on a hill.
The site itself is a little sad. Two or three iron boxes that once must have protected lights are now rusty cubes with stray wires and tubes like dead snakes twisted in the grass. A cavity carved out of the rock at the statue’s base is filled with garbage, one of Renaud’s hands has been damaged, the flanks of Bayard (his tail was replaced in 1981) and the heavy cloaks of the four brothers are scored with grafitti. (Joël loves Betty, François & Mireille 1999… WHY must people write their names on monuments? Is it something one does because it’s done, is there a thought behind it or is it just a Pavlovian reaction – see monument, scrawl name? Very mysterious, it’s not as though it was some lofty Everest or the moon.) But, today it’s deserted, my car is the only one in the lot, I have the place practically to myself and my thoughts. (Besides, a modicum of neglect is largely preferable to a half-dozen tour buses and a greasy hot dog stand. And there’s no denying it, desuetude is the postmodern excuse for romanticism.)
Just a statue on a hill and a wandering illustrator trying to make some sense of his thoughts. I love places like this. The statue is the excuse, of course. It’s the four brothers I’m looking for.
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The statue from a little closer up.
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While it’s generally agreed that Renaud is the figure in the fore, being the leader, if not the elder of the quartet, it’s anyone’s guess as to who Poncin had in mind for each of the other three.
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Hands. Renaud’s mail gloves hang from beneath his ample surcoat.
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Left: Renaud of Montauban.
Right: Besides streets, cafés and the like, the brothers are immortalized on… camembert boxes (with their names helpfully marked on their shields).
The earliest surviving manuscript of the chanson de geste of Renaud de Montauban dates from the 12th century, but the legend is much older of course. Other characters, such as the fay Oriande and the sorcerer Maugis d’Aigremont have drifted in to the legend, like moths to a bright light. Popularized in Italy in the 15th century, it eventually returned to France in the form of an irksome epic of 30,000 verses. It is of course also available in paperback, as one of those annoyingly condescending rewritings that so characterized French retellings of old texts in the ‘60’s and 70’s, but surprisingly few critical essays have been published. It has been, like all legends, a work of many hands of varying talent, but it is anchored here in the rock of the Ardennes as firmly as Poncin’s statue. It is popular across the border in Belgium (there is a particularly atrocious statue of the brothers in Namur) and defines the Ardennnes as precisely as the topography. This is a land with a slow heartbeat, but very strong, deep in the earth.
There exist exquiste medieval miniatures of the four sons of Aymon, notably by Lyédat and le Tavernier in the late 15th century, showing the four riders like sardines squeezed on Bayard’s ample back. Like all tales of chivalry, they ultimately migrated to children’s books and comics, being staple fodder for post-war weeklies like Tintin, or immortalised in street, square and café ensigns. Eugène Grasset, best known for his Art Nouveau designs – he is the artist who did the elegant “je sème à tout vent” logo for the Larousse Encyclopedia – lavishly illustrated a deluxe edition of the story. (It is as beautiful – and costly – as it is rare; I had the chance to consult a copy in the library at Charleville-Mezières several years ago and have since been atempting, without much success, to reconcile my finances and my desires…)
In a way, the four sons of Duke Aymon are local heroes. Homeboys who made good. The big time. The silver screen of the 12th century. Adapted by the big names south of the Alps: Boiardo, Ariosto, Berni, who added their own twists and takes and sent it back through the local circuit. Just like Disney with the Brothers Grimm or Errol Flynn with Robin Hood. Hollywood, it seems, wasn’t invented yesterday. But of course that is the nature of tales, to grow – or diminish, at any rate to transform – in the telling. Like local heroes, they outlived their own tales. Renaud, pilgrim’s staff and cockle shell, takes himself to the Holy Land as penance, makes a brief comeback at the sack of Jerusalem, then turns up as a mason on the cathedral in Cologne where he is martyred by jealous fellow labourers. An unhappy end; Butch Cassidy and the Kid in Patagonia. The other three simply fade away. Maybe wives, kids and weekends deer hunting in Dordogne like the old days, maybe not. It’s a fact, heroes aren’t supposed to outive themselves.
That’s what attracts me to places like this. Somehow legends and stories, the precise origins of which are forever lost, if indeed they can be pinned down, are still present in the land itself where we haven’t filled it with summer places and parking lots. Let’s face it, most of our inspiration is second-hand. Or third, or worse. It’s also served in palatable doses – films, books, history channels. We attend colloquia and seminars, nod sagely when the speaker talks, applaud politely when he’s done, as much buoyed up by the safety in numbers as by comprehension. As a good friend said once, about a convention he attended, “Here we were all in an air-conditioned hotel, eating take-away and discoursing on mythic journeys and heroes. Quite extraordinary, really.”
We’re such intellectual creatures. We ought to get out more.
So that’s why I’m willing to drive 300 miles in an afternoon between school classes and signing sessions: just in case. Just in case there’s something there. I need places like this to help me sort through my mind’s collection of smooth stones and bright pebbles – thoughts & images, things seen, things forgotten and things guessed at – and see which ones match up with the local stone, in the vain hope I can put a little order in such a jumbled bag of souvenirs and tricks.
You just never know.
One thing is for certain, though. Poncin has somehow managed to escape the conventions of his time (and even more admirably, a time when art commissioned by the state was both severely controlled and expected to exhalt ideals in vogue) and avoid the academic vacuity that characterizes so much patriotic sculpture. It’s not a clever work, rather it is powerfully introspective and dark. Figures like these need bedrock under them or they would capsize. You can pile acres of grey cloud on their shoulders, they don’t budge, storms don’t make them lift an eyebrow. On the other hand, there is so much defiant energy in them that a spark would make them explode, so you wouldn’t cross them carelessly. So much sculpture of the period is rather vain, looking at the spectator out of the corner of its eye, saying aren’t I just so cleverly done, but not this piece. It’s an embodiment of the solidarity and strength regions like this need to survive, the same sentiment that spawns all legends in the first place. These four brothers are a rough crowd, and you don’t run with them except at your peril. On the other hand, if you can claim some kinship, then there are four of them backing you up in a tight spot. No, five. There’s Bayard too of course.
But, all idle musing aside, the best part of the story is indeed Bayard. When necessary, he can accommodate all FOUR brothers on his extendable back. He is the length he needs to be, depending on who is astride. According to some versions he is a bay (hence the name, of course, but there is no truly reliable source). Other versions say he is a gift from the Fey Oriande. Others that he was tamed by the wizard Maugis who rescued him from a dragon on Volcano Isle. (Maugis also gave Renaud the sword Flamberge.) At any rate, he’s certainly not a simple Equus caballus, if he is indeed a horse at all…
Charlemagne furrows his brows and shivers slightly beneath the thick cloak, longing for the sun-warmed bricks of Aix-la-Chapelle. This dark and slippery land was oppressive, in a way no enemy could be. These are old hills, made of sharp and crumbling shale. What footing there is is treacherous and there is much thudding of mail-clad bodies and clashing of arms and curses as the army lurches and hunches its way through.
“We have them my Lord!” cries one of his captains, hurrying up, mud-flecked, to drop to one knee. “They cannot escape!”
“We have them”, muses Charlemagne, “would that we had. They will slip through the lines once more. God’s hooks! Would that I could let them be, let them lose themselves in these damp hills, but I cannot. We are bound in this tragedy, they and I. I am held by them as tightly as was our Savoir on the Cross, hammered fast by four nails, I am prisoner of my strife with these four.”
They are like the fingers of a hand. Challenge one, the other three are breathing on your neck. Slight one, the others have hands on hilts in an instant. Face one, you face his brother, with two more on your flanks.
The rumble of hoofs is matted, opaque, but sudden as thunder. From the trees bursts a horse, huge, eyes alight and nostrils aflame. Astride, four figures, log coats of scale to the ankle, tall shields and lightning blades. Their faces are hidden below helms and nasals, except for the flash of eyes. They are a gale through wheat, the Imperial troops scatter before them. No one will stand his ground before this quatuor of mounted steel-shod madmen. A brief and terrible marcato of blade on shield, on helm, on breast and bone and they are through, soon swallowed by the eaves of the dark woods.
But Carolus Magnus is a wise old wolf; Arrian, Procopius and Zosimus are his parchment companions during those solitary evenings under his silken tent, and seven years is a long season for a hunt. The ruined walls of Castle Montessor are grown over now with ivy, a rotten tooth in the broken jaw of the mist-shrouded skyline. The King of the Franks is a patient man, and he has laid the trap well.
Even now, those steel jaws close. A row of sharpened stakes at the crest of a slope halts the flight of the sons of Amyon. Even the monstrous bay cannot leap such teeth. They turn back, down to the muddy waters of the Meuse. The jaws of the trap snap shut. Phalanx upon phalanx of mail-clad soldiers hold close. Crashing shield walls block the ravine, shield overlapping shield, shoulder pressed hard to shoulder like the legions of Rome. Bayard leaps the first, iron hooves smash through the second, he stumbles on the bodies and the horse is down. The four brothers are up in an instant, sudden swords flashing then drowned under the numbers, pinned on their faces in the mud.
The havoc around Bayard is slower to dull to the silence of heaving chests and labouring flanks. Ropes criss-cross him like the web of some fantastical spider. Still, the stallion rears his head and men danse like puppets, jerked off their feet. At last, however, the creature subsides.
It is raining once more, the sky is lead where it is not granite, crushing the horizon’s thin sliver of amber. The river is the colour of earth, the earth the colour of water; the rain leaches the colour from mens’ eyes. The forest is a murky ashen haze. Colour seems to have forfeited any claim on the landscape, except in hectic cheeks and hands reddened by the cold.
Torches and braziers flare up; light dances on the opaque pelt of the Meuse. Renaud has begged for his brothers’ lives, offering his own, offering penitence and payment.
Carolus Magnus nods, but to himself. Men, in the end, are feeble creatures, for the strongest of limb have the simplest hearts. As for those weak of limb… wolves are always waiting for them to stray.
But as for the horse, it is a creature that cannot be conquered, only befriended, and the Emporer has no use for it. Besides, some sacrifice must be made that will permit him to gather the Brothers Aymon back into the fold. Grim lands call for grim justice, or judgements are too soon forgotten.
Bayard kneels atop a promontory overhanging the flood, hobbled and bound. It is raining harder now, drumming on helmets, pattering on shields. A huge millstone has been levered atop the outcrop, a massive chain is being threaded clanking through it. The smith is keeping a wary eye on those hooves as he hammers closed the links that tether the fey creature to the wheel.
A nod from Charlemagne, orders relayed in sharp barks, and the millstone slides and slithers down the shale. Bayard’s hooves strike sparks, splinter the stone. He hangs an instant in the air, then disappears in a geyser of ocre spray. The river flows on, there is a silence no one is willing to break.
Charlemagne bows his head. It is over, he thinks, over at last. I can pardon these four renegades. It is enough.
The Emperor turns to go, and all eyes follow him, upraised torches are lowered to light solemn steps; this is the end of a campaign, but none feel like celebrating, the silence is still too long. Four pairs of eyes however, remain fixed on the surface of the brown river. With respect to their grieving, the escort withdraws – the sons of Aymon surely will not hurl themselves in those waters with their arms bound behind their backs and what if they do? Good riddance and a curse on them besides. No, seven curses on them, one for each of these long years of hunting and pursuit.
An upwelling of the surface, a limonite bruise on the skin of the Meuse, a few bubbles rise and break, soft ripples course across the current. In the failing light, on the far bank, Renaud, Guinchard, Richard and Alart all see a flash of mud-streaked flanks and the toss of a heavy mane clogged with weed, before the reeds of the far bank are still again. They exchange a glance, and turn to follow their captors.
Two more pairs of eyes are watching from the reeds and overhanging boughs of the other bank. An old man, dressed in rough wool and leather, with beads and feathers woven into his beard, both knotty hands resting on a twisted staff. And a woman with a curious sheen to her skin and a mane of damp raven hair squats on the bank, trailing her hand in the water. She plucks a weed from her locks and rises.
The rain continues to fall. The sky is a dome of purple umber. They turn and go, and soon have disappeared into the forest.
*The Ardennes, just because it might one day be useful should the conversation stray to wooded mountainous regions of northern France, derive their name from the Celtic goddess Arduinna, the eponymous goddess of the Ardennes wildwoods (before Saint Wulfiliac exhorted the pagan inhabitants to mend their ways in the mid 500’s). The name Arduinna apparently comes from the Gaulish arduo, meaning height. A Gallo-Romain statue of a knife-toting woman in a short tunic, riding sidesaddle on a boar, has been identified as the goddess, but perhaps a little optimistically. The boar is the symbol of the region, and there was once a boar on the now-smooth shield of one of the four sons of Aymon.
DOCUMENTARY
A few more images from the documentary:
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Left: From the grand baston, looking south
Centre: Morning cloud over the Alsace
Right: Illustrator trying his best not to look like he’s scribbling dutifully here just to make a good shot.
