Plaça de l’Esgésia

“Imagine a village from days gone by, still without the agony of radios and motorcycles, with only a hundred or so small and sun-bleached houses, with the shelter of an old church, immutable and seemingly new, just as when they built it. (…) And what can we say of the landscape surrounding this ode-worthy village? Up to Rousseau and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, landscape has counted for little in literature. Romantics invented it and then exhausted it immediately. Landscapes comprise trees, land, rocks: inanimate objects, or almost, the same now as in Roman times, described once and for all. The drama of a history is not in the vegetable or mineral kingdoms. It is man we should care about. If I have talked of the church, of the Bearns’ house or the baroque fountain in the square, it is because behind these things there is, in the flesh, the man who created them.”