Into the Monédières

A second note from outside the entry. Justin spent Sunday to Tuesday at the Open Source Founders Summit inside la Rotonde de la Villette, the Ledoux barrière at the south end of the bassin pictured at the top of the previous entry, and walked the rest of the week. The photograph above is the Porte Saint-Denis on the Grands Boulevards: a triumphal arch begun in 1672 to François Blondel's design to commemorate Louis XIV's Rhine victories of that summer, set into the line of the old Charles V fortifications which Louis ordered demolished at the same moment. Blondel's arch and Ledoux's pavilions are not on the same wall – the Mur des Fermiers généraux ran kilometres further out a century later – but the walk from one to the other crosses two of Paris's old edges, takes in the faubourg the rue Saint-Denis became when the inner wall came down, and meets the bassin the city dug after the outer wall went up. Two and a half kilometres on foot; three centuries of edge.

The other five photographs in the gallery below are from the same week.

Back to Corrèze

The road comes off the Puy de Lachaud crest at three and four tenths per cent for something like two kilometres, and then the gradient turns. At kilometre ninety-two the route enters the Saint-Augustin commune at five hundred and twenty-two metres, on a small plateau between the puy behind and the Monédières ahead. From there it climbs in two unhurried lifts joined by a half-kilometre of false flat. The steepest pitch inside the segment runs at seven and a half per cent for not much more than a hundred metres; the segment's net work is eighty-five metres of climb and forty of descent across six kilometres of road. By the standards of the day so far this is not climbing; by the standards of the day still ahead, it is the runway.

The bourg of Saint-Augustin sits a few hundred metres south of the road, on a small rise the route leaves to its left at kilometre ninety-four and a half. The polyline runs nine metres off the bourg centre and does not turn for it. Population four hundred and twenty-seven in the 2023 census, area twenty-nine square kilometres of granite-and-bocage country on the southern flank of the Monédières, the commune takes its name from the Augustinian priory founded here around the tenth century, not from Augustine of Hippo. It is inside the Parc naturel régional de Millevaches en Limousin. The southernmost named puy of the massif, the Puy de Chauzeix at eight hundred and ninety-three metres, stands inside the commune limits, two kilometres north-west of the bourg; the commune's full range of elevation is three hundred and fifty-five to eight hundred and ninety-seven metres, of which the road takes the lowest fifty.

What is on the road, then, is the bourg passed at racing speed, a hamlet a kilometre north, and a memorial off the verge a kilometre and a half further on. The parish church on the small rise inside the bourg is Saint-Augustin de Saint-Augustin, thirteenth century, modified in the fourteenth through sixteenth, inscribed Monument Historique in 1929¹. What the rider does not see, going past, is the retable inside.

The retable is a Crucifixion flanked by Saint Augustine, with the flaming heart of the Augustinian canons, and Saint Roch, with dog and staff. It was commissioned in sixteen eighty-one from Pierre Duhamel, the Tulle woodcarver, with the menuisier Antoine Cessac. It is the earlier of a pair. The same atelier, twenty-three years later, finished the Retable de Naves, twelve metres of walnut by fourteen, twenty panels with scenes from the life of Saint Peter, signed by Pierre on its Adoration of the Magi panel; that retable, in the church the riders did not enter two segments back, is the larger and later work of the hand that worked here first. The earlier retable, in the church the riders also do not enter, is the same hand at it twenty-three years younger and at a smaller scale. Two parish churches on the same plateau, on the same workshop's books a generation apart, is the kind of country that could still commission walnut at the scale walnut took.

The road climbs out of the bourg and bends north-east. The massif opens across the eastern half of the segment: Puy de la Monédière at nine hundred and twenty-two metres, Puy de la Jarrige at nine hundred and nine, Suc au May at nine hundred and eight, Puy Messou at nine hundred and seven, with the broken peaks of the Plateau de Millevaches behind them. The Limousin granitic basement that has carried the road since Tulle is unchanged, but the relief is now stronger and the cover changes with it. The oak-and-chestnut bocage gives way at this elevation to the brandes², the heath community of heather and gorse and bilberry that defines the paysage of the massif and which the road will be inside for most of the next two hours. The named figures of the Monédières, the Bourrée played by the Chaumeil violinists and the accordion of Jean Ségurel and the criterium he built in the year after the war, arrive on the road at Chaumeil, two segments on. What lands here is the horizon they sit inside.

At kilometre ninety-six and three quarters the road passes within two hundred and forty-nine metres of a small stele in the maquis of the Monédières. The stele almost certainly commemorates Camp Roland, the FTP-Corrèze³ unit named after Auguste Vangierdegom, Roland, the first FTP combatant killed in action in Corrèze, on the night of the thirteenth to fourteenth of July nineteen forty-three, age twenty-two. The original detachment, Camp Guy Môquet under Marcel Gibiat (Metallo), operated from Puy-Chassagnoux; surviving comrades established Camp Roland in the Monédières as a memorial unit after Vangierdegom's death⁴. The heath the riders are about to climb through was a hiding country. The stele itself, two hundred and forty-nine metres off the road, is not the kind of memorial the rider going past at racing speed sees. The country carries the name regardless.

The cycling history of this road, as it happens, is also a history of going the other way. On the tenth of September two thousand and twenty, on the longest stage of that year's Tour de France, Chauvigny to Sarran at two hundred and eighteen kilometres, the peloton came over the Suc au May from the Treignac side and descended through Saint-Augustin southbound, toward a finish at Sarran tied by route choice to the family château of Jacques Chirac. Marc Hirschi, then twenty-two and riding for Sunweb, attacked off the Suc au May descent with twenty-five kilometres still to go, and won alone. The 2020 race read the road as a descent. The 2026 race, this Wednesday, reads it as a climb, into the same massif from the opposite side. The Tour has been on this road before, but always going down. This is the first time the road is climbed.

L'Agglomérée 2026, the regional cyclosportive from Tulle Auzelou on the fifth of April this year, climbed Suc au May from the same southern approach as the 2026 Stage Nine. The hundred-and-five-kilometre course refuelled at Saint-Augustin twice, at kilometre twenty-three on the outbound leg and kilometre forty-eight on the return, which makes the village the cyclosportive's Suc au May threshold the same way it makes it the Tour's. By the time the peloton arrives the road has been climbed in the new direction, by the local amateurs, for six weeks.

The road climbs toward the next commune line and the gradient sharpens. Ahead, the heath the maquis hid in is the heath the climb goes through. The mountains are no longer on the horizon.

Sources

• Saint-Augustin (Corrèze) commune fundamentals (population 427 in 2023; area 29.31 km²; Augustinian priory founding around the tenth century; commune inside the Parc naturel régional de Millevaches en Limousin; Puy de Chauzeix at 893 m as the southernmost named puy of the Monédières inside the commune; commune elevation range 355-897 m): Saint-Augustin (Corrèze) – Wikipédia.
• Église Saint-Augustin and the 1681 Duhamel retable (Pierre Duhamel of Tulle with the menuisier Antoine Cessac; Crucifixion flanked by Saint Augustine with the flaming heart and Saint Roch with dog and staff; Monument Historique inscription dated to 1929 in the Mérimée database): Église Saint-Augustin – Mérimée notice PA00099811; Saint-Augustin (Corrèze-Histoire-Patrimoine).
• Retable de Naves cross-reference (1704, fourteen by twelve metres, twenty panels with scenes from the life of Saint Peter, signed by Pierre Duhamel on the Adoration des mages panel, attributed to the same Tulle workshop as the 1681 Saint-Augustin retable): Retable de Naves – Wikipédia.
• Monédières massif (granitic basement of the Limousin, Variscan emplacement 360-290 Ma; named peaks Puy de la Monédière 922 m, Puy de la Jarrige 909 m, Suc au May 908 m, Puy Messou 907 m; brandes heath community): Monédières – Wikipédia; Géologie du Limousin – Wikipédia.
• Camp Roland and the Maquis Roland identification (Auguste Vangierdegom / Roland, first FTP combatant killed in action in Corrèze on the night of 13-14 July 1943, age 22; Camp Guy Môquet under Marcel Gibiat (Metallo) at Puy-Chassagnoux as the precursor detachment; Camp Roland established in the Monédières after Vangierdegom's death): Saint-Pardoux-la-Croisille local-history page. The stele's dedication has not been ground-verified.
• 2020 Tour de France Stage 12 (Chauvigny → Sarran, Thursday 10 September 2020, 218 km, the longest stage of that year's Tour; Marc Hirschi soloed to the win from a Suc au May descent attack with 25 km remaining; the peloton crossed Suc au May from the Treignac side and descended southbound through Saint-Augustin): Tour de France 2020 – Wikipedia; Inner Ring, Stage 12 preview (Chauvigny → Sarran).
• L'Agglomérée 2026 (regional cyclosportive from Tulle Auzelou on 5 April 2026, 105 km course climbing Suc au May from the southern Saint-Augustin / Chaumeil approach, refuelling at Saint-Augustin at km 23 outbound and km 48 on the return leg): L'Agglomérée 2026 – Tulle Agglomération; Battistrada calendar listing.

Pair-written by Justin Simpson and Claude Opus 4.7. Voice register: tls-essay (scholarly sub-mode).