When we woke up it was raining, and Keith had to scoot out to get fresh bread for breakfast under an umbrella. It was a pity that there were no other pilgrims staying to chat with, but on the other hand, we were able to spread out over the whole place and make ourselves truly at home.
Our first port of call was the church of Saint-Sauveur, which was an abbey. The abbey at Figeac was started in the ninth century. It was an offshoot and rival to the abbey at Conques, and the Abbot and monks ruled the gradually growing community in commercial and legal matters as well as over religious issues. They had many fingers in the commercial pie, running farms, mills, tanneries, cloth dying – all the essentials of medieval trade and daily life in what became a flourishing medieval city. You had to apply to the abbot for permission to have an oven in your kitchen, and then promise that it would not be used for bread making, because the monks and merchants that they licensed were the only suppliers of bread.
The abbey church of Saint-Saveur is very beautiful, with a lot of light flooding through colourful windows depicting major moments from the bible, such as the scene in the Garden of Eden, and circular windows like those in Notre Dame in Paris, which absolutely glowed. The Chapel of Notre Dame de Pitie was a very large chapel, which originally opened off the cloisters and which was joined onto the church in the 17th Century renovations. It has amazing wooden sculptured wall panels, painted in gilt and colour, by Isaac Declaux, who was commissioned to create them in 1673. They depict various scenes of the passion of Christ, with an emphasis on Mary and her reactions to all the developments. One is very unusual and shows Jesus as a baby, floating in space with symbols of various parts of his life yet to happen around him.
Originally the abbey and accompanying buildings, which amounted to an enormous complex, was walled. There is no sign of the walls now, which were torn down in the 19th Century in an attempt to improve sanitation and to let light and air into the city. All of old Figeac, and most of new Figeac, is on the one side of the Lot River, with the water being important to the development of the city over the centuries. We were entranced by the narrow streets and old houses, and also by the bustle of an ordinary city where the town has not been sold out to tourists.Looking is one thing, but we wanted to know more about what we were seeing, so we called at the tourist office where we bought a walking guide. The old part of the city has signs with numbered keys, which connect to the guide, and it was very easy to follow. Quite apart from being able to note buildings and building developments from different eras, the history of the town started to come alive when we saw the tower that remains from the very large house built for the Viguier, who represented King Philip the Good. It was then that we learnt that the King of France had no currency here until 1302. At that point the merchants were finding the rule by the Abbot too hard to bear and they backed the king in a peaceful administrative takeover. I imagined that ovens were installed all over the place and that everyone suddenly went mad with bread baking. Actually the new administration operated as a council of men from wealthy merchant families advising the Viguier, and the regulations were strict, but for a different group’s benefit. There were two very large market squares; the corn market and the oat market. A certain number of butchers were allowed to operate, no more and no less, and there was control over the cuts and standards of meat sold. I saw a butcher’s delivery man in a white coat today, pull up in his van outside a butchers shop. He opened the back doors of what was no doubt a refrigerated section, where whole portions of animals were hanging, and took one down, carrying it as gently as you would a baby, into the shop. No doubt it was all done in accordance with today’s regulations. What could that have meant in medieval times, and how could the poor person on the council in charge of overseeing it have managed? At what point would he have deemed that a fly blown piece of meat with a green tinge to it swinging in the sun was past it?
So many of the residential buildings had been originally built with commercial premises on the ground floor, and the usage seems to be the same for many today. The town developed around both the abbey church and around the parish church of Notre-Dame-du-Puy, up the hill. The church sat on a terrace overlooking a network of lanes and was not open for visitors. During the Reformation, the Protestants had taken over the town and forced the Abbot and the Monks out. The abbey was left deserted but they requisitioned the parish church for their own worship, first stripping it of all its Catholic trappings. After a period of only 46 years, the Catholics had regrouped and came back in force, driving the Protestants out. The poor church was much damaged, as it was used as one of the Protestant fortresses and then, after all that, it had to have any hint of Protestantism torn off. It was redecorated during the Counter Reformation.
Using the map, we followed many roads we may not have found, with one being a street of modern artisans practising ancient arts. In one shop a young man was setting up his board to create a picture using all the skills of a Medieval illuminator, book binders were preparing exquisite volumes and a carver was at work. Another street had been a canal, dug by the monks in the Middle Ages along with a mill pond, to assist their many commercial activities. In the 1950s, the picturesque canal, along with its bridges, was done away with, at a time when a report on the infrastructure of Figeac said that there was nothing there of any importance worth preserving. Luckily, by the 1980s there was a change in thinking and heritage is greatly valued now.
While we had been absorbed with following the map and the keys, Figeac had been quietly closing up around us. Everyone stopped work for two hours or more, with only cafes and restaurants open to the public. What a pity we had not already bought anything for lunch. Even the museums we were planning to visit were closed. There was nothing for it but to go back to the gite and have a cup of tea and a banana. Keith had a nap, but I was off and out at ten to two, ready to go to the first museum on my own; the one that would be opened for you upon demand at this time of the year.It is about the history of the city and is housed at the Mairie (town hall). It had detailed and interesting information about the city’s history and I spent about three quarters of an hour reading there. Today, 89% of the population lives in the rural areas. The Protestants controlled the city from 1576 – 1622. During that time they improved the city by paving the streets and building a new market and a new bridge. Municipal Councils in the 18th,19th and 20th Centuries were responsible for the destruction of many old buildings, the razing of some areas and the canal destruction. Various urban plans were developed from 1848 on, with the latest ones including the revitalization of the old centre.
I had asked a lady in one of the offices to be allowed to see the exhibition, and now I returned to tell her that I had finished, so that she could lock up. I had noted that there had been a rounding up and removal of a group of Figeac citizens in 1944, at the time of the Nazi occupation, and had assumed that they must have been Jews. When I asked the lady in the office about it, she told me that they were members of the Resistance, who were being made an example of. They were put on transports to Germany and were never heard of again. It happened in other villages around here as well. The Germans had taken over the aeroplane and helicopter factory that had been operating in Figeac since 1904, and were using it to make aeroplanes and helicopters for the German war effort. Members of the Resistance sabotaged trains bringing necessary materials in. It was such a tiny mention of some not too recent but very important heritage, right at the end of the display. Obviously this was not the place for a very long section to have been made, but because it is in the living memory of some people, and in the family experience of the next generation at least, and is a vital part of the history of this city, I think that the war time history of the city warranted a bigger part in this exhibition.
It was only a little way to the Champollion Museum in Champollion Square, where I was to meet Keith. Champollion was born in Figeac and is rightly venerated, for deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics. Room 0 was devoted Champollion. He went off to stay with his older brother in Grenoble when he was quite young; an older brother, a learned man who was fascinated by Egypt. He enrolled young Jean Francois in a high school, and by the time he was seventeen, JF had decided to make solving the mystery of hieroglyphics his life’s work. He went on to study ancient languages in Paris – specializing in seven of them as well as modern Egyptian. He was made a Professor of Ancient History at the incredibly young age of twenty, a year after completing his doctorate. He was a prodigious worker and thinker, and he was in correspondence with others trying to solve the same puzzle. One of his notes, after he returned from an extensive expedition to Egypt, said that he had studied every monument, copied down all the hieroglyphics and pictures, and now had plenty of material to work with. He can’t have ever slept. He made many false premises and hit walls, but kept trying. One of them was that each character in a hieroglyphic must represent an idea, rather than a sound, because there are so many of them. In fact, some hieroglyphics are concepts and others are sounds, and there can be more that one hieroglyphic for the same sound. He was wrong in his initial thinking that Demotic, a form of cursive script eventually known to derive from hieroglyphics, preceded hieroglyphics. Much of his thinking was intuitive, using a clue and checking it in other sources. Eventually he was able to recognize ‘Ptolemy’ and ‘Cleopatra’, and the names of foreign kings such as Alexander. Knowing modern Egyptian and putting himself creatively into the shoes of the inventers of hieroglyphics, were helpful skills. Could this be the god of the underworld that was always represented with green skin and could he fulfil other functions of a god of agriculture, with sheaves of wheat as a symbol? At that time, there was no knowledge at all of Ancient Egyptian civilization and religion. Eventually Champollion brought all his ideas together and used the Rosetta stone, which has the same text in Hieroglyphics, Demotic and Greek, to decipher the code. He died only in his forties, after a great deal of research reading hieroglyphics and learning about Ancient Egypt.
We had walked on a giant version of the Rosetta stone set into the ground on the Square of Writers.
The rest of the museum gave a history of writing from its development in Mesopotamia around 3300BC. There were various ancient examples showing how right from the beginning, writing had allowed for control of people by rulers and religious leaders, for commercial and legal purposes, and for personal arrangements such as marriage contracts. The development of the alphabetic system of writing was a revolution between the 18th and 16th Centuries BC. By the 12th Century the Phoenicians had developed an alphabet from which nearly all alphabetical systems today are derived. The adoption of that alphabet by the Royal Assyrians meant it spread to the Middle Orient and it gradually moved on geographically until the Greeks took it up with some inversions and rotations, and through them it reached the Italians. By the 7th Century BC, the Latins had fixed the 26 letters and the direction of writing being from left to right. There was a funny note which said ‘This showed great promise for the future.’When we entered the museum, we were given a booklet to borrow, which had all the information in English, but it was much quicker and easier to read the French, rather than to refer to the booklet, nevertheless it was a very thoughtful thing to do.
The main developments have been in the roles played by writing, with the advent of books in the 3rd Century, printing in the 15th Century and graphic technology in the 19th and 20th centuries each bringing major changes. I looked at the ‘Registre des Consuls de Martels’, one of the four oldest documents on paper in France, which was written between 1247 and 1252. Imagine the privileged hand that had learnt to write, and that could be entrusted with such a task. Only a few would have been able to read it.
Over time the idea that reading and writing belonged to the elite disappeared, and schools for the poor created a market for cheap books that could be carried around. The first books were often so big that they had to be put on a special stand. Alde Manuce, who lived from 1450 -1514 in Venice, produced small books with plain red covers very cheaply, and he included pictures and translations of classical languages into vernacular languages. He even published new stories on contemporary themes. The book for this point was called, in Italian, ‘Le Cose Vulgari de Messer Francesco Petrarcha’, and I laughed to think of all the ordinary people rushing out to buy their plain red covered book that I roughly translated as ‘The Vulgar Things of Mr Francis Petrarch’.
By the 16th Century, the form of most texts had been established and from the 17th to the 20th Century the nature of texts changed. They became vehicles to disseminate new or different thinking, they introduced travel and different cultures to people, they dealt with philosophy, science and romance, while others were informative like encyclopedias and almanacs. Mass production and great advances in technology for reproducing illustrations led to the development of cartoons in the 19th Century and books specially for children. The last room of exhibits listed the purposes that people have for writing, and then had a series of cupboards for you to open, each with documents or materials from Figeac’s past, for you to consider under the list headings. Finally, you could watch videos on computers about Champollion’s progress and life, but with only five minutes until closing time, we left a man who had been there as long as us, and who was obviously fascinated and glued to a screen, for the guard to shoo out when they locked up.
We had an omelette for tea, and felt very happy that it had rained all day, justifying our decision to stay on in this town where the museums were only open in the afternoons.
From a distance we had no idea why Figeac would have a memorial in the shape of an Egyptian obelisk. When we read the inscription we were delighted to remember that this is the birth place of Champollion, the great Egyptologist, the man who deciphered hieroglyphics. 
The Figeac war memorial
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