The Lepers and the Kings

The 12th Century French Abbey of St. Pierre, Moissac

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The Abbey in Historical Records

The earliest extant written text about the abbey of St. Pierre is a stone plaque commemorating the dedication of the rebuilt church in 1063. Much like Abbot Suger’s later writings about the rebuilding of his church at St. Denis, the text says nothing about those matters that so concern later scholars — the aesthetic attitude of the patron toward the work. The brevity of the plaque logically precludes any such attention, but only if the creation of a work of singular beauty was not, in fact, the most important aspect of the occasion.

The text of the plaque, placed at first in the wall of the cloister and later moved to the interior of the church behind a gate in the ambulatory, reads as follows:

This house, dedicated the eighth of the ides of November
Celebrates by having renowned prelates here.
Auch sent Austinde, Lectoure, Raymond,
Comminges delegated William, Agen, William
Bigorre required Heraclius not to be missing
Oloron granted Stephen and Aire, Peter
You, Durandus, from Toulouse, its patron and ours.
Foulques-Simon remained in Cahors, his jurisdiction.
It had been 1063 years
Since God gave to the world that worthy child of the Virgin,
King Clovis founded for you, Christ, this church
Which later received enrichment through the gifts of Louis.

Eight renowned bishops, whose names comprise the bulk of the text, gathered for the dedication of the new abbey. The eight were witnesses; the plaque commemorates their witness. One stayed home, a witness by his absence to a change in the relationships represented by the abbey. The invocation of names concludes by recalling to consciousness the founder of the abbey (the founder, that is, that the monks wanted remembered) and its principal patron, who had been instrumental in the revival which had culminated in its present notable status.

In 1063, then, the structure of the abbey of St. Pierre warranted, by the evidence of the attendance of witnesses, considerable renown. What this structure looked like, how it was decorated and by whom, was, at the time of the dedication, less important than the event that took place within it, the particular characters, including Clovis and Louis, and the roles they played.

Subsequent texts through the following centuries are equally silent on the question of aesthetics. They speak instead of the mixed authority of the count of Toulouse, the abbot of the abbey, the secular abbot, and the patron (or patrons) of the abbey, each of whom swears a legal obligation to preserve, protect and defend the inhabitants of the town:

In the name of the Blessed Virgin Mary Mother of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and of the Blessed Apostles Peter and Paul, under the direction and the power of whom the people of the City of Moissac live and dwell, both the institutions and the regulations are and must be such that the secular abbot, immediately upon entering Moissac must summon, grant, and promise by his faith and swear upon the Holy Gospels to God and the Holy Mary, to the well-beloved Saint Peter and Saint Paul, and to all the inhabitants of the city of Moissac present and to come... .

The abbey also represented the place where relationships were acted out, the center of life in the medieval town. On occasion disputes were resolved and decisions rendered “before the portal of St. Pierre,” suggesting that the church, and particularly its portal, acted as a witness in civil and legal disputes, perhaps in a similar way to the custom of swearing on relics or on the altar. In this case, the result was not only public, it was binding by virtue of the place where the parties stood to accept the decision. The abbey plays a central part in the legal and commercial affairs of the town, sometimes as avenue of recourse, but often as plaintif. In 1455, for instance, a dispute arose between the abbey and the consul of the town who, in the course of repairing a wall on the road to the church of St. Michel, had disturbed the flow of water into the fountain in the abbey cloister which served the inhabitants, not only of the abbey itself, but of the town as well. This action was considered to be actively aggressive and to be harmful not only to the abbey but to its lord and to the people of Moissac.

Just at the end of the 14th century a learned monk and abbot of the monastery, Aymery de Peyrac, wrote a long, useful, and somewhat controversial chronicle entitled Chronique des abbès de Moissac. This chronicle, preserved today in the Bibliothèque National, provides the earliest attempt to set down the history of the abbey. Although Aymery may not have been concerned with absolute historical accuracy, his account remains a valuable witness to the early life of the building.

Aymery was abbot in a difficult time, following in a long line of abbots who had been forced by circumstance to defend the abbey from outside forces that they regarded as interfering with the abbey’s freedom. Aymery, therefore, looking back in his retirement upon his life and that of St. Pierre, told the story in such a way that the ancient and indisputable rights of the abbey would be clear. In many ways his account does not differ greatly from the plaque commemorating the dedication, for it concerns temporal power derived from an impeccable earthly lineage and consequent heavenly favor. He is concerned not at all with aesthetics.

Aymery wrote when St. Pierre, in spite of struggles and reverses, still maintained its position of preeminence in the spiritual and civil life of Quercy. Two hundred years later, in 1625, the abbey was secularized, the bulk of the library taken to Paris, and the buildings put to use as municipal storerooms. Not all of the treasures were taken away. Many lay neglected, prey to damp and the disdain of an age with a taste for the full-blown and the obvious. Some twenty years after secularization, a visitor to the abbey, Leon Godefroy, canon of St. Martin at Montpezat, left a record of his travels through the region. Speaking of the cloister (he did not mention the portal) he says: “If these pieces are badly made, one must attribute it to the crudeness of the times which did not possess the art of sculpture to the degree that we have now.”

We have reached a point of impasse. At the time the portal was painted, vibrant, in its element, no record remains by anyone who stood before it. It was not until cultural travelers began to stand self-consciously in front of the door, when that door had grown worn and incresingly irrelevant, that there begin to be written accounts.

The Antiquarian
Art history, which began as a wealthy man’s (and only a man’s) passion, required, among other things, a fine memory. The “proto-art historian” was an antiquarian, independently wealthy and highly educated, who produced a fine, elite writing — careful, descriptive, sure. Such an art historian, if we may call him that, visited Moissac in the early 19th century, a time distanced to some unmeasured degree from the horrors of the Revolution.

It is difficult now to imagine his visit and to imagine the place to which he came. The abbey, to be sure, had ceased to be a coherent religious force within the town long before the Revolution. The abbey had been in a state of shabby decline until its secularization in 1625. An Augustinian order made use of the buildings until the Revolution, saying their last office on 26 October 1792. The looting of the abbey property in October 1793 by gangs from Montauban was the final desecration of the abbey’s integrity but it came long after the life of the abbey was over. Within its context it was an event among many others much the same.

And so this scholar, Alexandre DuMège, a member of the “Ancienne Academie Celtique” and of the “Société royale des Antiquaires de France,” an aristocrat of the new order, “a pioneer in the study of the ancient arts of southern France,” made an archaeological and literary journey throughout the region and arrived, in due course, in Moissac. He was an intelligent observer and presumably had seen other buildings in his travels that either had been or still were used as churches. He catalogues the abbey carefully and identifies the sculptures on the walls in more or less the way we see them today — figures of saints and scenes from the life of Christ. Nevertheless, one gets the sense from his writing that his task was reconstruction, a task which he approached with confidence while at the same time acknowledging his role as a recorder of local opinion. Of the great figure in the tympanum he says: “The decoration of the large portal has been the subject of long controversy among the experts of the area, and it appears that at last the consensus is that this bas-relief represents Clovis and his court.”

This extraordinary passage contains all the poignancy of loss — a loss not of material wealth but of memory. What did it feel like to have stood before the door, grown shabby and bereft, and to have seen in the imposing image the figure of the long-ago ancestor of the decapitated king? Was this rationalization, to justify the looting? Did it reflect the current reality of Napoleonic imperialism? Or was disruption of memory a conscious act, a result of anti-Christianism? The upheaval of the Revolution, if that is the cause, was so complete that by the time of DuMège’s visit, there had been a “long controversy” over the nature of the portal, resulting in a conclusion that, although apparently supported by local tradition, still appears patently absurd to eyes accustomed to the Christian interpretation.

The lesson, though, is not the absurdity of their position, but of our own. In that moment, the abbey stood bereft of all its possessions, including its meaning. Since DuMège, every scholar who stands in front of the tympanum of Moissac sees a fractured and fragmented work. No deconstruction can have been more complete than that accomplished by the vandalism of time and violence. The story, if there is one, of the doorway at Moissac began in the 6th century with the founding of the abbey and, with DuMège, begins again.

© 2001 Susan R. Dixon