Meymac: An Abbey of Improbabilities

The road has been falling toward Meymac for two segments, and it arrives, as the last essay promised, at an abbey. I have a weakness, which the years have not cured, for places that keep more than they were ever entitled to; and the abbey of Saint-André, reached almost before the riders are well into the town, has kept three things it ought long since to have lost. A Black Madonna whose history the records decline to support. A centre of perfectly contemporary art, lodged in a Benedictine house of 1085. And the memory of having been, after a fashion, a capital of the Bordeaux wine trade, this a granite town six hundred metres up and a long way from the nearest vine. I will take them in their turn.

The house is the proper beginning, being the reason the rest is here. What is documented, to the day, is that on the third of February 1085 Archambaud, third viscount of Comborn, founded a priory here and gave it to the great abbey of Uzerche, in reparation (the charters are frank about it) for damage his men had done the monks of Saint-Martin at Tulle. Penance built Meymac, and built well. The priory became an abbey in 1146 under Ebles the Second of Ventadour, a name worth keeping by you, for the viscounts of Ventadour will have something like the last word in this stage, spoken further down the road at Ussel.¹ The oldest thing standing is the clocher-porche, a bell-tower built as a porch, with eleven sculptured capitals in the heavy Limousin Romanesque; the nave behind it is of the later twelfth century, and a man who looks well at it will know its cousin when he meets it a segment on, in the priory church at Saint-Angel.

Inside sits the first of the improbable possessions. The Black Madonna of Meymac is a small carved and gilded Virgin in majesty, her face and her hands dark, and genuinely old, of the twelfth century. The story told of her, with relish, is that a crusader carried her home from Egypt or the Holy Land, and that her blackness is the blackness of that origin. It is a very good story. The official record, I am bound to say, knows nothing of it: the notice that classified her in 1908 sets down her age and her workmanship and stays silent as to any crusader, any voyage at all, treating her colour as a question of how she was made and not of where she came from.² I would not deprive the town of a legend older and more agreeable than the truth commonly is; I only record that the legend and the register are not on speaking terms. And the figure in the church is a copy. The true Madonna keeps to the safe of the town hall, and comes out only twice in the August of each year.

If the Madonna's pedigree is a blank the legend has filled in, the abbey's other relic is almost too well documented. The church is dedicated to Andrew and Léger together, and of Léger it keeps, in a reliquary bust, the skull. Léger, bishop of Autun, was blinded and then killed about the year 678 in the savageries of the Merovingian court, on the order of Ebroïn, mayor of the palace; a real man, really martyred, his bones really moved, the relic recorded as having come not from any crusade but soberly overland from the abbey of Saint-Maixent in Poitou. He was a great curer of madness, was Léger, and the afflicted were brought to him by cart from a wide country round, the abbey keeping a book of the cures.³ One relic with a provenance and no legend, one legend with no provenance: the abbey keeps both. Later it passed, as such houses did, to commendatory abbots who drew its income from afar, among them the abbé d'Aubignac, the sternest theorist of the French classical stage,⁴ who never, so far as anyone knows, set eyes on the Corrèze.

The third tenant no medieval founder could have foreseen, and it is, I confess, the one I like best. Since the end of the nineteen-seventies a centre of contemporary art has held a wing of the old monastery, a serious one, which has shown the living and the difficult for half a century and was lately raised by the French state, not a body that gives the title cheaply, to the rank of a contemporary-art centre of national interest. I am old enough to be expected to grumble at the white wall set against the eleventh-century granite, and I decline to: there is a rightness in an abbey going on being used, and the alternative to the new tenant is not the returning monk but the empty room, which is the saddest thing a building can come to. In another wing the town keeps the collections of Marius Vazeilles, and here the stage doubles back on itself. The dark planted forest the riders have descended through for two segments was largely the work of this one man, a forester who came before the first war, found the high country nearly bare, and spent a life putting trees on it and arguing, at last in the Chamber as deputy for Ussel, that the plateau had a future if it were planted. The same man dug its past out of the ground, and his spade-work fills the museum.⁵ The forest the riders came down and the antiquities they might go and see are two halves of one stubborn life, both kept now in an abbey.

Which brings me, by the roundabout road the subject deserves, to the wine. The plain and nearly unbelievable fact of Meymac is that this granite mountain town was, within the grandfathers' memory, a power in the trade of Bordeaux. It began with one native, a man named Gaye-Bordas, who went down to the wine city about the middle of the last century, prospered, and sent for his neighbours, until for the better part of fifty years a whole emigration of Meymacois ran the wine business of the north of France and of Belgium. And they did the thing that makes me fonder of the town than all its saints can: they gave their Belgian customers, as the address of their houses, the words Meymac-près-Bordeaux. Meymac, near Bordeaux. It is two hundred and fifty kilometres if it is a step, and uphill the whole way; they wrote it with the straightest of faces, and the Belgians, with no atlas to hand and a thirst to slake, believed them.⁶ I have been careful, in this essay, about what the record will bear. Here, for once, is a tall story that happens to be true.

There is one more thing the town keeps, and with it the cataloguing temper must stop, for it is not of a kind that can be enjoyed. In the second week of June 1944, after the maquis had briefly held and lost Tulle and the SS division was coming north to take its revenge, a column of the Resistance brought to the woods near Meymac some forty-seven or forty-eight German prisoners and one Frenchwoman, taken in the fighting about Tulle, shot them there and buried them, and the war moved on and the place was lost. It was lost so completely that only in our own time, on the testimony of one survivor grown very old, did the search begin; and when the ground was at last opened, in 2023, it gave up cartridges and coins and the marks of what had been done, but not the men.⁷ Early in this stage the blog stood in Tulle, under the balconies from which that same June the same division hanged ninety-nine men; this is the season's other and harder reckoning, the one that runs the opposite way. I set it down because it is true and because it happened here, and I do not propose to work a paragraph of sentiment out of it. The wood keeps its secret, and the road goes on.

The road leaves Meymac and at once goes up. The rise is the Côte des Gardes, a little over two kilometres at something above four per cent, the last upward grade the stage has to give, cresting some fourteen kilometres from the line at Ussel. By the standards of the day now behind them it is nothing, and a strong man will go over it without rising from the saddle. And here, for the last time, the official accounting and the road part company. The King of the Mountains takes no notice of the Côte des Gardes: the four climbs the day counted, the Naves, the Suc au May, the Croix de Pey, the roof at Mont Bessou, are every one of them behind, the points all spent, and the board treats this final ramp as so much terrain. The riders, who have to climb it, will hold another opinion, as they held another opinion of the uncounted hill at Lachaud and of the wind on the open roof; for the men in the race a difficulty is a fact whatever the clerk enters, and a short steep launching-place fourteen kilometres from a Tour finish, with the bunch already thinned and the legs already emptied, is exactly the kind of place a hard rider goes from. It will decide more than its category admits. So, I notice, does the Madonna, whose legend the register also declines to enter, and who is venerated no less for it.

Our own four reach Meymac in their own measure, a kilometre or two at a sitting, and they reach it level. By the capped and faintly fictional reckoning the blog has kept since April, all four stand together at the hundred and seventy-sixth kilometre, beyond the abbey now and beyond the day's last rise as well, with nine kilometres of the route still between them and Ussel; level, and yet not alike, for beneath that even surface the daily figures run as unevenly as ever. Nan and Justin have kept the heaviest of the recent days, each averaging close to six kilometres over the last five logged; Marian, whose totals once carried the drag of that long flight west from Scotland to British Columbia, has found her legs again and closed to under five; Wally, of the four, has gone quietest this week, nearer two and a half, though his remains, as it has all along, the steadiest hand of the four. And beneath even that runs the truest ledger, the one the daily cap was made to hide: by the plain count of ground walked, every one of the four passed the whole hundred and eighty-five kilometres of this route many weeks ago, and simply kept walking. They come to Meymac, then, much as its abbey came to its own treasures, carrying more than the official tally will admit; which makes it the right town for them to have passed through. Beyond the last small climb the board declines to count, the granite eases away downhill at last toward the high place by the river, the town that has waited a hundred years for the afternoon now coming. But that is the next essay, and the one after it.

One count in this loose competition is not yet closed, though most now are. The blog has kept, alongside the daily cap, a small points table of its own, modelled loosely on the race's own jerseys: ten climbs and five sprints, scored as the four have walked past their marks, something like a King of the Mountains and something like a green jersey, run in miniature and largely for the blog's own amusement. The mountains competition closed today, at the Côte des Gardes, a climb the peloton's own table does not even recognise; Nan has led it by a margin none of the other three can now close. The sprint competition has not closed. Marian and Nan arrive at Meymac tied on points, Justin two behind them and Wally two behind him, and of the five sprints marked along the route only the last is still to come, at the line itself, in Ussel. Whichever of the four crosses that mark first, on the same afternoon the stage and the blog both end, will carry a jersey that exists nowhere but in this blog's own accounting, and will be argued about nonetheless.

For the moment the four are at Meymac, near Bordeaux, which is to say a very long way from it, and exactly where they ought to be.

Sources

• The abbey of Saint-André de Meymac, its 1085 foundation by Archambaud III de Comborn, its raising to an abbey in 1146 under Ebles II de Ventadour, its Romanesque clocher-porche and nave, and the joint dedication to Saint-André and Saint-Léger: Abbaye Saint-André de Meymac, Wikipédia; base Mérimée PA00099804.
• The Vierge noire, its twelfth-century date and 1908 classification, the absence of any documented Crusades provenance, and the displayed figure being a copy: base Palissy PM19000492; France 3 / franceinfo.
• The Centre d'art contemporain de Meymac, in the abbey since 1979 and labelled a centre of national interest in 2022, and the Marius-Vazeilles museum: Centre d'art contemporain de Meymac, Wikipédia; Marius Vazeilles, Wikipédia.
• "Meymac-près-Bordeaux" and the Corrèze wine merchants of Bordeaux: Meymac-près-Bordeaux, Wikipédia; Tourisme Corrèze, "Meymac-près-Bordeaux".
• The execution of German prisoners near Meymac in June 1944 and the 2023 excavation: France Bleu, "Fouilles de Meymac".
• The Côte des Gardes as the last rise of Stage 9, cresting roughly fourteen kilometres from the finish and not among the stage's four categorised climbs: Tour de France 2026, Stage 9, cyclingstage.com.

Pair-written by Justin Simpson and Claude Opus 4.8. Voice register: saintsbury-period (registers-framework).