stone, the lizard basks and the bee fresh from its hive hums as
blithely among the yellow flowers of the celandine as if the blocks
raised by men in their reaching towards Heaven were nothing more than
the rocks that cast their shadows upon the Dordogne. Upon the ground,
man, by using no rein of respect to curb the lower needs of life, has
desecrated the spot with pigsties! Some inhabitant of Carennac, into
whose hands the cloisters passed in recent times, thought that a place
which was good enough for Benedictine monks to walk in might, with a
little fresh masonry, be made fit for pigs to feed and sleep in. But
an end had come to this idyllic state of things. The cloisters of
Carennac had just been placed on the list of historic monuments. The
adjoining church had been 'classed' long before.

This church, a small Gothic edifice of the twelfth century, has a
far-projecting porch enriched with a specimen of mediaeval carving
which is a long delight to the few archaeologists who find their way
to the almost forgotten village of Carennac. The composition, which
fills the tympan of the scarcely-pointed arch, represents Christ
surrounded by the twelve Apostles. The influence of Byzantine art is
perceptible in the treatment. Very few such masterpieces of
twelfth-century carving have been so well preserved as this. The
seated figure of Christ in the act of blessing His Apostles, the right
hand upraised, the left resting upon a clasped book, impresses the
beholder by its majesty and serenity. Very different are the figures
of the Apostles: these are men, and of a very common type too, such as
the Benedictines were accustomed to see in their own cloisters, or
among their dependents at Carennac. But how animated are the forms,
and how expressive the faces! The mouldings which serve as a border to
the composition are much more Romanesque or Byzantine than Gothic, and
the columns that support it have capitals which are purely Romanesque.