The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

ourselves. That is to say, let the rest be ours but not joined and glued so firmly that it cannot be detached without taking our skin along with it, and tearing away a piece of us. The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to ourselves.’ *
    But neither the Knight of the Green Cloak nor Montaigne satisfied me by their counsels, for my mood on my retirement more closely resembled that described by Jacques in As You Like It:
    ‘I have neither the scholar’s melancholy which is emulation; nor the musician’s which is fantastical; but it is a melancholy of mine own compounded of many scruples, extracted from many objects and indeed, the sundry contemplation of my travels which by often rumination wraps me in a most humorous sadness.’ But my most humorous sadness did not take away the longing, which for some years past I had felt, to set out on a journey, which in some way would be expiatory, in accomplishment of a promise made in my conscience. During the early years of the Second World War, I had promised my dear friend and colleague, Monsieur Legendre, the Director of the Casa Velazquez in Madrid, whose death in 1954 I mourn, to make a pilgrimage with him to the mountain shrine of Our Lady of France at the end of the war. For Legendre the Norman, profoundly Catholic and lover of Spain, the pilgrimage to the celebrated mediaeval hermitage above Las Hurdes, which had always been the closest spiritual bond between France and Spain, was more than expiation, more even than the ritual of ancestor worship. It was, as he said to me, un pèlerinage de l’âme, a journey of the soul, which for him was an emanation of the physical pilgrimage we both accomplished ritualistically in company with the crowds of peasants from the primitive valleys of Las Hurdes. I then realized that as we get older we become more and more obsessed by the longing to undertake a hidden journey which will remind us gently of the ultimate one, and evoke for us countless shadowy spirits, who, though they have long since been ferried across to the further bank of the last river, yet continue to haunt us when we plod along the road.
    At times during my wandering life I have been conscious of this shadow journey. In 1929 when I lived among Roumanian peasants in Transilvania, I used to listen to their keening songs—the bocete —with which they ‘wake’ the dead and which, they believe, can be heard by the dead man in his coffin; for that reason they cut two holes in the coffin that he may hear them on his way to the graveyard. It is also customary to give seven copper coins and seven pieces of bread with lighted candles sticking in them to beggars who gather around the tomb, and coins and a pair of new shoes are also buried in the coffin. All these rites serve one purpose—to help the dead on their journey into the next world. The Roumanians, being a kindly people, thus supervise the journey of their dead from this life, for the copper coins will enable the latter to pass the toll houses on the way, and the superstition recalls the ancient Greek belief that it was necessary to put an obol between the teeth of a dead man to enable him to pay Charon for ferrying him across the river Styx.
    With these thoughts I journeyed towards Arles and les Alyscamps.

ALBIGENSIAN OR CRUSADER

    During my journey from Arles to St. Gilles, Montpellier, Beziers, Narbonne, Carcasonne and Toulouse I should find myself continually reminded of the fierce Albigensian crusade, which lasted for twenty years from the original mobilization and march of the crusading army in 1209 to the treaty of 1229, which provided for the incorporation of the great county of Toulouse in the Crown of France.
    In the early Church a great many heresies were rife before it divided into the Eastern and Western rites. The heresy of Arrianism was condemned under Constantine at the Council of Nice in 325, but it continued to flourish for many centuries in North Africa and Spain. The heresy of Priscillianism, even after its founder had been slain and its devotees converted, continued to exercise a certain influence in Galician monasteries and still does among the people, who believe in the transmigration of souls. The heresy of Catharism, which originated in Bulgaria, was of Slav or Judaic origin and spread from the East of Europe to Provence, just about the same time, as the Albigensian heresy had already started in the city of Albi and united in itself a little of all these