Les Églises Paintes

Today was a tour of forgotten little churches in the farming valley of the Allier River.

I was inspired by a YouTube video I saw months ago, that I vaguely remembered had some people passionate about restoring a lot of old paintwork that had been falling off the walls of these churches for, say, six hundred years. They looked different from what I usually see in France, the usual vertiginous Gothic with lurid stained glass. This nice part of the Bourbonnais doesn’t just have lovely farm country, a free-flowing river, and humble people, it has about 20 Romanesque churches about a thousand years old. These only have small windows, since they hadn’t yet discovered how to make tall ones, so, it seems that about 400 years later, after the impressive Gothic churches were the standard, these little country churches decided they needed to add some painting to brighten things up.. Then, slowly since the 1400s, everyone seems to have forgotten about them, until recently.

The first stop, L’Église de St. Laurent, in Châtel de Neuvre, was the smallest. There was no one there, but when I got up to the altar, a tiny older Frenchwoman had entered and found me, and announced in anguished tones that the Pope had died, just this morning. She was very worried about the priest of this church, who lived across the drive and whom it turns out she came and helped every day. She said he is the exact same age as the deceased Pope. Whose name I am not even sure of. I think he was 89 years old. She said her priest was just the same, with his selfless concern for the poor, and his generosity even against his own best interests. She said nobody is like that anymore. I was as respectful as I knew how to be in French, and thanked her for letting me know, and shared what I thought were reassuring thoughts.

The next church was L’Église de St. Martial in Contigny, but none of my pictures made the cut. Again an older woman came in when I was trying to see in the spooky darkness, but she didn’t say anything about the Pope.

Then I was off to a village in the hills nearby that is reputed to be one of the most lovely in France, called Charroux. It was pleasant, especially with just the few visitors there today. Fully medieval and with more flowers and pastel window shutters than usual. I had lunch and did a little shopping, and had great fun chatting with the women who served me. Maybe the woman who said the people here are poor is right, but they sure are more relaxed than anywhere else in France. Some history buff thought Easter Monday was a good day to take his mean ride out for a spin. The classic Citroen parked in the streets of Charroux.

The last church on my tour was the best. L’Église de St. Martin of Tours, in Jenzat. It was not as pure architecturally as the first one, St. Laurent (above), but the paintings were far and away the coolest.

Look at these! I am far from a church expert, but I’ve never seen anything so homey yet delicate, in the way of a church. You can feel how different the world must have looked to whomever did this work.

They decided to make the last days of Jesus into a comic strip, as you can tell from today’s featured image. One of the scenes is set after they had removed Jesus’ body from the cross, and he was lying there dead with his band of followers, all feeling sad. I found it interesting to see how the local artist chose to portray the two Marys. Jesus’ mother Mary is on the right, looking pious, but Mary Magdalene, on the left, is shown as a confident blonde, complete with a properly demure expression in front of her mother-in-law. She does have a halo, after all. Maybe our painter was trying to impress a local lassie, and so left her lovely hair uncovered.