Carcassonne

Or Sketching in Stone

Carcassonne is a dream location for visiting illustrators. Walking about Carcassonne is like wandering inside a vast sketch.

Carcassonne is done in broad strokes, with that ambivalence of line that all sketches have. Viollet-le-Duc, undoubtedly pressed for time – he seems to have been a man in quite a hurry his lifetime long – and predictably faced with all manner of contrarieties inherent in such an unprecedented undertaking (“Mon cher Eugène, are you absolutely sure you must have all those towers? Could we not perhaps, let us say… economise one or two…?”) is betrayed by the scope of his ambition. Alluring from a distance, it is somehow impassive up close.
Viollet-le-Duc (1814-1879) was the perfect 19th-century creator. Watercolorist, historian, architect, daring and energetic, he spearheaded the brand-new Commission on Historical Monuments dedicated to the preservation of France’s crumbling patrimony, under the enthusiastic impetus of Prosper Merimée. (This kind of undertaking was revolutionary; until then, old abandoned buildings were simply potential quarries of already-dressed stone. The bits missing from Rome’s Colliseum, for example, fell prey not to time, but to busy masons.) Vezelay, Coucy, Avignon, Troyes, Sens, le Puy, the storybook castle of Pierrefonds; the catalog of Violllet-le Duc’s restorations covers most of France and most if its history.
(Incidentally, those world-famous gargoyles – or “chimeras”, as Viollet-le-Duc liked to call them – leering over the parapets of Notre-Dame-de-Paris, the emblematic paradigm of medieval design, are neither medieval nor really gargoyles, and were created in the mid-1800’s. In his later career, Viollet-le-Duc turned from old buildings to new and died on the threshold of the Art Nouveau movement. It is a grand shame, he might well have left us with exquisite buildings from his own imagination rather than his much-disputed legacy of restoration. It is a paradox that he be decried for saving much of France from ruin and decay and be lauded for one of the most misleading pieces of historical research ever accomplished: his all-encompassing and wholly flawed Medieval Encyclopedia.)

Nevertheless, ample lines are meant to hint at detail, leave room for intricacy and invite a closer look. Up close, the restorations have none of the suppleness of line and the easy equilibrium that so characterizes medieval architecture.  There is something cold and industrial in the regularity of the stone that tops the ramparts and towers. The difference between the two is clearly visible, but it’s easily enough forgotten and forgiven, given the acres of wall involved. Many of the tower roofs feel austere and far too Flemish for such a meridional structure, but no matter. From a distance, it is truly breathtaking and perhaps one of the few places in the world that gives us such a hint of the scale of a medieval city.

Left: Carcassonne from our hotel. Taking pictures of the sprawling cité is a little frustrating – it has been already done frustratingly well by local photographers in far more auspicious light and seasons. The most famous views – the ones in every film featuring a large medieval city – are taken from the other side. Centre: The castle proper. Right: The facade of the palace, old stone and restorations.

The interior of the cité, on the other hand, is entirely devoted to tourists’ insatiable appetites for plentiful calories and ugly trinkets. Nearly every boutique vies to flog the most repulsive souvenirs, all imported directly from Applied Atrocious Taste Ltd. (AAT supplies the tourist industry the world over. WHO buys this stuff? Actually, come to think of it, I don’t want to know… We also passed on the Haunted House, the Torture Museum and the Museum of Chivalry, which seemed to have obtained its displays from the local shops.) While this kind of thing is disturbing enough in a modern setting, in a site like Carcassone it borders on traumatic.

It’s a wonder shopkeepers can remain as friendly as they do, under the pressing flow of gawking and boisterous sightseers. Actually, some don’t…
“Is the amount right?” I politely enquired of the lady in whose palm I had deposited the exact change for two postcards (about the only thing worth purchasing in the whole grotty shop).
“Yes,” she replied, I was just looking at the red coins.” (The 5 centime coins are copper-coloured.) “I just love counting them in the evenings.”
“Oh, well hold on a second.” I replied helpfully, “I’m sure I can find you some more.” After much digging in pockets and wallet, I managed scrounge up a dozen of them. (Sarcasm is always a lost cause with me. If we ever return to Carcassonne, I will take a bag of small coins. I can always use a few more postcards.)
In all fairness, there are a few shops and galeries managed with taste, but they must feel very lonely. (I can already imagine some archaeologist from another planet, digging up the past in Carcassonne and writing Earth’s civilization off as a bad idea when he unearths layer after layer of tawdry tourist trinkets…)

Left: A fine display of tasteful wares. I particularly like the monk showing his bum, though the skulls are rather nice too. Centre: And the AAT Award winner is…! This lamp was SO excessively ugly I didn’t even manage to get it in frame properly. It even had a price tag to match. After getting the evil eye for brazenly photographing the merchandise, I had to buy two postcards to get out of the shop… Right: “Why on earth are you taking pictures of a parasol?” my wife said. “It’s not a parasol,” I replied, “it’s a giant with a gilded helm and a cloak seen from the back.”

The museum displays full-size reproductions of Viollet-le-Duc’s before- and-after watercolour renderings of the cité. Each principal view is painstakingly painted in watercolour in the state in which he found it, then once more with his proposed renovations. They are absolutely breathtaking pieces of art (and of course unavailable except in the form of disappointingly small postcards).

Upper left: Romanesque column – the photo doesn’t do it any justice at all – each capital is a beautiful forest scene with riders and creatures in the trees. Centre: Rosace. I’d like to believe the traces of paint are original. Right: Summit of a Calvary, under a surreal interior sky. The ceiling was done in that spectacular cerulean that skies just take for granted. (The day they unearth the shell Venus stepped out from, it will be that colour.)
Lower left: Altarpiece from the early 16th century. (The sign said 15th, but museums are notorious for skimming a few crucial years off artefacts, in order to get the much sought-after “medieval ” label instead of the rather more common “renaissance”.) Centre: A bevy of Pontius Pilate’s evilly leering and otherwise villanous cronies. Left: Fountain or basin, ringed by tiny visages of lions and angels.

The best way to invest a fortified city, as everyone knows, is to attack just before sunrise. So, I set the alarm for 6:00, armed myself with camera and bag and set off. (My wife is not a morning person, so my cheery daybreak announcements are always met with that newborn kitten look – eyes squeezed shut and an unintelligible mewing I have learned to interpret as “Off you go then, you momentary inconvenience, have fun out in the cold.” )
Lone scout for the tourist army scheduled to invade at 9:00, I had the whole place to myself. It really is daunting at dawn, I felt very much like the traveller who had arrived too late the evening before, and who was awaiting the opening of the gates at first light. Being shut out of something so vast makes one feel very small and vulnerable (of course the various gates and doors in the walls are not closed at night, but it is easy enough to imagine).

Left: Carcassone at dawn. Centre: Door within a door. I truly LOVE this kind of thing, it is always so far superior than anything you can ever invent. I believe the towers in this section of the wall are Visigoth. Right: Between the outer wall and the remparts of the cité

So why Carcassonne, and why this amateur travel log? Carcassone is on the border between ourselves and a world forever gone into time, and the work of Viollet-le-Duc is the looking glass in which we can see both ways. The same awkward enchantment seems to be in the mortar of all our attempts to actively stay time. Europe is dotted with these set-in-stone forays into positive archeology, from Minos to Stonehenge, Haut-Koenigbourg to Nuremberg. Restoration now is generally confined to arresting decay, retouching paintings is done in such a way that future restorers can not only identify additions, but remove them should techniques progress. The mid-19th century had no such scruples. Restorers repainted medieval scenes, even adding details if they thought they improved the composition. While going that far is of course unacceptable, it seems to me that the Viollet-le-Ducs of this world aspired to high ideals that raise them above the worst of their critics.

Castles were once intended to house the bodies of the populace, to provide refuge in troubled times; now they are the places where our imaginations dwell. We would indeed be much poorer without them. In our eagerness to embrace the future – by the time tomorrow is today, tomorrow itself is out of reach again – makes us careless.  We either disparage the past or worship it as a Golden Age that never existed. (Rather in the same way that we readily subscribe to the idea of the “Wisdom of the Ancients” and the turning of lead into gold while simultaneously inventing terms like the Dark Ages…) Worst of all, we don’t always recognize the true use to which the vestiges of our past should be put. They are poetry in stone. What they lose in “usefulness” they acquire in eloquence. They are there to tell us stories if we listen attentively at their feet – or wander around their walls at dusk or dawn… In a world where we are hard-pressed to rediscover magic, all places containing a hint of it must be regularly visited, so the magic can remain.
New buildings are blanks books with beautiful covers. They haven’t yet had the time to be written.  Ruins are old worn books with the title long gone and the binding tattered but with pages penned in generations of hands. Somewhere between the two is where we live. We need not choose one or the other. Both are ours.

While I’m no tomb-spotting Harold who hangs about cemeteries, they are beautiful places for all manner of conflicting reasons. There is one practically under the shadow of the walls of the Cité, so I couldn’t resist. Above all, cemeteries are where polymers truly come into their own. Left: The bouquet is all plastic, leached by sun and weather until it was a study in greys. Centre: Ceramic flowers in a pewter vase. Weather seems to deposit a sort of pruinose on pewter, akin to the bloom on plums. How strange that English have only one word fro everything between black and white… Right: Neglected graves are doubly abandoned; once by life, once by the living. This one was very beautiful.