The road through Beynat

I take up this week the seventh segment of Stage 9, which begins like the sixth on a climb already begun: the Côte de Lagleygeolle, named for a village the road passed seventeen kilometres ago and finally summiting two kilometres into the present segment, at the modest height of three hundred and ninety-seven metres. I have always thought there is something proper about a climb that does not end where it is named, proper in the sense that the geography of cycling is not, and has never been, identical to the geography of the maps from which the names are drawn, and the Côte de Lagleygeolle is, by that measure, an exemplary climb. After the categorised summit, on which the points are scored, the road continues to rise, in a fashion that goes uncategorised and unscored, for another five kilometres at a moderate gradient toward what will eventually become the Côte de Miel in segment nine. The rider does not get a break.

Two kilometres into the climb, at kilometre 44.16 by my count, a road sign on the left points north toward Brugeilles and the Cabane de la Fée. The Cabane is a Neolithic dolmen, classified historic monument by decree of 24 February 1910 and explored some forty years earlier by Philibert Lalande, founding member of the Société Historique et Archéologique de la Corrèze, whose other excavation reports do not, I confess, much trouble me. He found, when he opened the chamber, gray pottery shards and charcoal. The Neolithic does not always leave more. The chamber itself, gneiss, opening to the east, with an oval coverstone of three metres twenty by two metres fifty, has been overlooking the valley of the Roannelle since rather before any of the place-names involved had any of their present consonants. Two thousand two hundred metres north of the road. The riders will not see it; they will pass under its road sign and climb on.

Of the Neolithic dolmens worth standing in front of in this part of Bas-Limousin, four lie within reasonable reach of today's road: the Cabane itself; the Dolmen de Rochesseux, a few kilometres west in Aubazine; the Dolmen du Puy de la Ramière, some ten kilometres south-west of Beynat in Noailhac; and, further west still and almost at Brive, the Dolmen de la Chassagne in Saint-Cernin-de-Larche. The Cabane is the closest to the present road and, by general consent, the best preserved of the four.

Beynat itself, the village proper, arrives at kilometre 46.23, seventy-four metres from the road. I described, last week, the approach to Beynat through Lanteuil's corner, and I will not rehearse it; the road today reaches the village. The chestnut festival mentioned then arrives at this kilometre in October each year. The dolmen above is older than the village by some four thousand years, and the village is older than the language under which it is presently administered by a margin I have never seen attempted. Beynat in Limousin Occitan is Beinat. Albussac, the next commune east, ahead at kilometre fifty, is Albuçac; the cedilla preserves the Albuciacus first attested in 861. The dialect that would call these places by these names is one of six varieties of Occitan, the language half of medieval France actually spoke and that Dante named lingua d'oc in his De vulgari eloquentia, one of three Romance literary languages identified by their words for yes: òc, sì, oïl. The Limousin variety once carried particular literary weight. Today the language is critically endangered, spoken by an aging minority across a geography that includes the road the riders are climbing. The names on the signs are the residue of a tongue that once organised the country differently.

There is, as it happens, a son of Beynat who became, by considerably more travelling than the village has ever done collectively, a saint of the Catholic Church. Pierre-Rose-Ursule Dumoulin-Borie was born on 20 February 1808, the sixth of twelve children of Guillaume Borie and Rose Labrunie, in Beynat itself. He took orders at Bayeux in 1830, sailed for Macao in 1831 (reaching it on 18 July of that year), and was smuggled by Chinese vessel to the South Tonkin mission in what is now Vietnam, where the Nguyễn dynasty was at the moment of his arrival in the middle of one of its periodic persecutions of Christians. He was named titular bishop of Acanthus on 30 January 1836, and learned of the appointment, as such news will sometimes reach a man, in prison. He was beheaded in Tonkin on 24 November 1838. Pope Leo XIII beatified him in 1900; Pope John Paul II canonised him in 1988 alongside one hundred and sixteen other Vietnamese Martyrs.¹ His remains, exhumed eleven months after his death, today rest at the Missions Étrangères de Paris, in the seventh arrondissement, a building Borie himself never saw. The world does not always come back to people in the order they leave it.

The road continues to climb through Beynat and on toward the boundary with Albussac at kilometre fifty, where a hamlet called Les Quatre-Routes marks the next change of commune and the segment's end. Ahead, in segment eight, a twelfth-century Templar commandery sits four kilometres off the road in the same Albussac commune; the riders will not see that either. Roland Barthes, writing about the Tour in the summer of 1955, called the race a modern epic. I have always thought he was right in the spirit and a little high in the register; the epic is what the race becomes at the climbs that ask. Here the climbing is climbing, but the asking has not yet started in earnest. The categorised summit was the road clearing its throat. The mind, on the long pull through Beynat, is free to register what arrives: a dolmen older than every other thing in the segment, a village whose son took two centuries to come back, a language under which all of this was once spoken, and largely still is, by aging speakers along the road. The road climbs through three different distances at once.

Sources

• Cabane de la Fée listing, dimensions, and excavation: Mérimée notice PA00099684 (Ministère de la Culture); T4T35 megaliths database; "Le dolmen de Brugeilles" (Persée, Bulletin de la Société préhistorique de France, 1905).
• Other Bas-Limousin dolmens: Dolmen de la Chassagne (Wikipédia); Dolmen de Rochesseux (T4T35); Dolmen du Puy de la Ramière (Noailhac Patrimoine).
• Beynat history and demographics: Beynat (Wikipedia).
• Pierre Dumoulin-Borie biography and canonisation: Pierre Dumoulin-Borie (Wikipedia); IRFA, Missions Étrangères de Paris (entry 0386).
• Albussac etymology and Albuciacus (861): Albussac (Wikipedia).
• Occitan and Dante's De vulgari eloquentia: Occitan language (Wikipedia); Dante and Occitan (Dante Poliglotta).
• Roland Barthes, "Le Tour de France comme épopée," in Les Lettres nouvelles (Summer 1955), collected in Mythologies (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1957).

Pair-written by Justin Simpson and Claude Opus 4.7. Voice register: saintsbury-modern (registers-framework).