CHAISE DIEU

On the level summit of a mountain-land, not isolated, yet above the general confusion of the bare hills—looking over a deep toward the sombre wall of the Margeride beyond—stands the Chaise Dieu. It is a church of granite, enormous, forsaken and alone. Attached to it, a sort of fortress, hangs a cube of high-walled building, equally huge and deserted, which once held its community. A sombre warden keep or tower and a guarded gate, deep like a tunnel, watch toward the east. The face of the great shrine watches toward the west; but it seems blind or fixed, without that movement in stone, that expectation, which is the note of Christian shrines; without that serenity which is the note of Pagan. It is enchanted; not asleep, but gazing dumbly; and its sheer blanks of wall confront time. They are very dark; and their simplicity is more than austere, for it has about it something of doom. The two square towers which our civilisation sets upon the face of its temples are here the two strong limbs of a giant beast, neither in repose nor at bay, but eternally awaiting. I know nothing like it in Europe.

About the great affair still gathers a little town, impoverished since the life of its overwhelming maker sank into such silence. The inns are small and ill-frequented. The flow of human power has left the hill and its wealth is no longer gathered. I believe that few to-day have seen or know the place or even read of it. Yet one of the main roads to the south passes over that summit. Le Puy, which all the world talks about, is a day’s walk upon one side; Vichy—which might be Ascot or Nice—is two days’ walk upon the other. The Chaise Dieu is preserved by that ironic power which sends wealth to live down noisy highways and protects whatever desires to be silent and to endure. It can build up its memories within itself and await securely the return of its business. No sound disturbs it.

The name it bears signifies ‘The House of God’—‘Casa Dei’ (for the mountaineers of Central France soften the Latin ‘c’ into ‘ch’)—and that name hangs fittingly about the mighty roof; it is consonant with the purpose of those stones: their centuries of strength, their unchangeable hard lines, their purpose of resurrection. If ever too great a title might be excused it is here. For there is a sense both of habitation brooding about the stronghold and of supremacy; and each of these its soundlessness to-day enforces.

Its foundation was new when they fought at Battle; the later stones are of the fourteenth century. It will not seem older in a thousand years. The profound and simple windows which pierce its man-deep sides might be unglazed and a passage for storm-winds without affecting its aspect. Its monstrous oak doors might be taken away and yet leave the aspect the same. It depends upon no ornament; but is a majesty in itself, in its proportion and assize, its weight upon the rock from which it was hewn. The hurricanes of winter on these Avernian summits, their long depths of snow, and their frosts so near the stars, and the brazen heat of their summers on the bare uplands, do nothing to the exact fitting of those stones or to their surface; less than to the quarries whence they came. It is as though the men who built them up and squared them had known spells; or as though they had been given power to bridge across decay from their own time, through outs, to a return.

I came upon all this through the deep woods which cover the mountain on its northern slopes and cease towards its summit. I discovered the mass of the thing suddenly, not a mile off, towards the approach of night. Indeed the evening was far advanced, the trees had already grown dark against the smouldering sky, and the water of the ponds had taken on that dead flat white which they present to the beginning of darkness, when I came upon those harder lines of granite and that black immensity towering. I entered by a very broad and high archway to the side of the church in the monastery wall. I went up a flight of steps made as though for a host of men, as broad as a river, dark now, and echoing too loudly to a single tread; there was no voice near: nor any other sound. I came abruptly into the awful emptiness of that nave. The last glimmer of light, within, barely distinguished floor from wall, and the roof was all gloom. The powerful arches of the windows were exactly cut against the last faint colour from the west. I stood there till this had wholly faded, and the first stars were seen.

With the morning I returned. The solemnity of the place was oddly greater under the effect of day. And this was because the bare stones, upon which in the darkness one might have imagined relief, were seen to be unadorned. The effect was greatly emphasised by the one monument the place contained.

For, in the midst of the church, stands an exquisite tomb, the tomb of that Avignon Pope, Clement, who had concentrated so much wealth upon this rebuilding of the Chaise Dieu, and who desired to connect it for ever with his name. The tomb is of black and white marble, and the anarchists of the Huguenot rebellions (who went about destroying all they could of ancient beauty) shattered the minor statues wherewith it was surrounded. I am not sure that they did not increase the value, through isolation, of what remains: the noble figure of the dead, and the contrasting simplicity of the twin-coloured stone. There is a Dance of Death upon part of the wall; there are also tapestries hung, not very large. There is woodwork, but not of a sort enriching or dominating the great space, and, for the rest, there is still this strange emptiness, as though the whole place were a tomb, with this one reclining figure in its midst.

Even if one had not heard a word of the long history one would know the place to be haunted. Here Anselm waited upon the mountain height for the message from Rufus. That is truth—but there is also an odd legend. For men here showed the tomb of Edith, the Confessor’s Queen, Harold’s sister. Yet surely the Conqueror had her buried by her husband’s side at Westminster? I know not how the story arose, but they seemed convinced that she came in her widowhood to retirement here and here died. She was the only one of Godwin’s hateful blood for whom men could find a good word. But how came she to be linked with this deserted hill?

That, then, is the Chaise Dieu. I left it by noon to go down the long mountain slope towards Le Puy. To my right, as I journeyed, still stood endless, level and high, the blue ridge of the Margeride; and I could fancy to hear—though it was a long day’s walking away—the tumbling of the torrent Red Cap, which roars through its gorges. Before me and to the left, the Cévennes showed an indigo edge of lump and peak. All about me was the burned land. But the landscape was filled with the spirit of the Chaise Dieu as a garden is changed and informed by music.

I could wish to return in a hundred or two hundred years and see whether my guess that the great place should come into use again had proved true or false; for certainly it bears the air of a foundation intended to endure, and to be restored to life.