In Dinan I have a lovely job to do. As well as a general visit to a very attractive medieval walled town, I must search out the location of one of the young Lawrence’s most distinctive photographs. It is of a font, and apparently it is one of Dinan’s churches. I start with the receptionist at my hotel, brandishing a copy of the image on my mobile phone.
“Oh, yes, I know that”, she says, confidently. “It’s in the Basilique St Sauveur…” Her confidence tails off. “… I think.”
It turns out not to be there, of course, but no matter. With just two major churches in Dinan it shouldn’t be hard to find. At least she recognised it, which means it’s pretty likely to be somewhere in the town… See more about the young TE Lawrence’s photograph of the font in… well… a church in Dinan.
But for now, Dinan itself... I stumble out of the hotel into the main square, which feels odd. It is huge and oblong, mainly car park, though there are trees all around. I assume it is also the market place. But the buildings around me are so tall that it feels as though I have walked mistakenly into an amphitheatre: all around I am hemmed by flat-fronted, four and five-storey buildings, each with an exaggeratedly tall and steeply pitched roof. A hundred windows peer down at me with expectation – a lion might be released from another door… My apocalyptic dreaming is interrupted by a sight to behold, again. The hirondelles are on their evening flight, swirling in patterns of black specks, rising and falling, turning themselves inside out against the evening sky – like moebius strips in motion.
Beyond the main square the town becomes all enticement, breaking into the filaments of medieval alleys, narrow and curving, some on a gradient, everywhere arches and cobbles, casting me immediately back in time. The streets are lined with half-timbered houses, some supported on pillars, opening into covered walkways. The town certainly honours its medieval past - in a nook lies a stone coffin topped with the effigy of a knight – as though, in a prank, some naughty school-children had hoisted half a ton of stone from its place in a church and left it at the streetside.
It all sings gloriously of that hinterland of historical and geographical displacement that is so ripe for romantic fantasy. I peek through some hefty wooden doors set in an ornamented stone gateway – topped with carvings of what look like fish, though it is named the Gate of the Pelicans. Inside is a compound where I could imagine a knight or nobleman sliding off his horse on return from a quest;– it’s all mismatched stone facades and magical pointy-topped towers, some originally dating from the Fifteenth Century, but heart-rendingly attractive. There’s nothing like a bit of carved stone to set the romantic imagination running.
Eventually I settle in a square of lovely buildings where the huge flagstones are tightly clustered with restaurant tables belonging to at least two bars. History seeps through the very walls of the place… I sit and write my notes, musing on the idea of ancient and modern, how easy it is – when surrounded by ancient stone beauty - to forget the human aspects of life long past: the blustering minor Lord and his scurrying, scheming prelate, bellowing market traders and mendicants, milkmaids… fishwives, and not to forget, of course, the village idiot. Who knows what horrors this square might have witnessed: someone might have been executed right in front of where I am sitting now.
More relevantly, what would the young Lawrence have thought a hundred years ago? Life was crueller even then. He was given to dreaming and romantic turns, but he would have been well aware of the pleasures and pains of medieval life.
My lugubrious thoughts are interrupted by a sweet trill of voices, twisting and floatingon the evening air, like the hirondelles. See, lighter sides to life do echo down from the across the ages. Choir practice is happening somewhere nearby, just as it has for centuries.
Time for the city walls: these are still complete, and the best bits hover above the River Rance, by which I arrived, giving a lovely view. The trusty stone walls, the battlements and crenellations, reignite my romantic confusion. Again, who knows what brutality took place here. I am standing next to a hole designed specifically for pouring burning oil onto men beneath.
A young woman dressed in bright red satin wafts past; then two lads, self-conscious in their black and white finery; finally a small cohort of youth tramping along the walls. It must be prom night. They pause at a tower, space to pose for a photograph, and walk on to their evening.
They are the same age as the young Lawrence when he visited in 1906. In their youth they are both beautiful and ill-defined. The lines of life - and those of adventure - have yet to etch their faces. As I return to my hotel I pass the school where these students are headed. The author Chateaubriand was educated here. I wonder if any of this year’s cohort will turn out to be his equivalent, or a TE Lawrence for our age.
