The spirit of originality that animated the mediaeval architects in this part of France, and which has given to so many churches a distinct character, an individual expression, that keeps the interest of the traveller constantly alive, is strongly marked upon the church of St. Macaire. Commenced at the beginning of the twelfth century, its earliest portions show the Pointed style in its infancy, fearful as yet of committing what seemed so like heresy--a departure from the Roman arch; but in the same building a much bolder Gothic asserts itself in the parts that were added in the thirteenth century. The west front and doorway have not the majesty of the style as it was developed chiefly in the North, but they have that venerable air which is not always to be found in the stately and majestic. The low tympanum is crowded with figures belonging to the period when the statuary's art was still swathed in the swaddling clothes of its new infancy, and what with their own uncouthness, and the wear and tear of time, it is no easy matter now to trace in them all the purpose and meaning of the sculptor.
And yet in their blurred and battered state they tell us much more than they would if they had been restored with the best skill and learning of our own time. The age is gone when these bas-reliefs were the religious books of the people. To imitate them is mere aestheticism, and to restore them is often destruction.
A few words must be said of the old market-place of St. Macaire. Thanks to the poverty or the apathy of the commune, three sides have retained all their mediaeval character, the interest of which has been refined and deepened by the artistic touch of time, the sentimental ravisher, the slow and gentle destroyer. A Gothic arcade encloses a wide pavement, and each bay, with its vaulting, forms, as it were, the portico of the house, whose first and higher storeys rest upon it. Here those who are interested in civic architecture can see thirteenth and fourteenth century houses still retaining their wide Gothic doorways.
I rested awhile in a café, and chance led me to one that was kept by an Englishman. He recognised my nationality, while I supposed him to be a Frenchman, and he seemed as glad to see me as if I had been an old friend. He told me that when he was a boy his father brought his family from England to Les Eyzies, where he was employed at the iron works. (The smelting furnace has been cold for many a year.) The man who spoke was middle-aged, and although he expressed himself with difficulty in English, and turned his phrases out of French moulds of thought, he had kept a strong accent of the Midland counties. The tenacity with which an accent adheres to the tongue, even when the language to which it belongs has been half lost, is very remarkable. I remember meeting in my roamings an Englishwoman who had married a French cobbler, and who had been buried alive with him in the Haut-Quercy for forty years. She had learnt to speak patois like a native, but it had become a sore trial to her to put her thoughts into English words; nevertheless, when she did bring out those words that had been so long put away in the mind's lumber-room, the accent was as pure Cockney as if she had but lately drifted away from her own Middlesex.