June 13-14, 2015
This year is the 15th year of the annual Fete du Marbre in Caunes. I first saw the sculptures created for the festival when I first came here three years ago. Some are impossible to miss, like the rampant horse's head at the top of the main drag, Avenue du Minervois. There's also an abstract and a sculpture of what look like panda bears on the lawn by the parking area in the middle of the village.
And that does not begin to exhaust the number of pieces created over the years. In fact, there is a sentier du marbre, a "marble walk", that begins on the other side of Avenue du Minervois, across from the figure of the wild horse, on a road called l'allee du Carriere. That path takes the hiker past some of the new houses built on the outskirts of the village, an area that does not enjoy the historical landmark designation houses in the old part of the village do. For that reason, some call the area "the Italian area" (le cartier des Italiens), in a nod to the ethnic origins of many of the newcomers. The name could also be a nod to the fact that the giant blocks of marble quarried further up the road are shipped to Carrara to be polished and shaped.
Past the smaller houses on the allee du Carriere, the statues come into view. The newest "Goutte de Vie" ("drop of life"), was inaugurated yesterday. It is an ovoid of red marble placed on a metal plinth shaped like flower petals. The statue might be imagined to be a fat drop of water about to fall from faucet, shrinking and curving inward to the size of a smaller drop at the statue's top. I suppose it took a lot of work to form the shape from the block of marble where it began its life, but it is not one of my favorite among the marble artworks. Although it shares with most of the pieces on the path an abstract organizing principle, which may explain my indifference.
My lack of enthusiasm for most of the works on the marble walk is probably due to my ignorance about the difficulties facing those who would sculpt marble. What little I know is largely derived from reading The Agony and the Ecstasy, Irving Wallace's fictional biography of Michelangelo, as a teenager. Specifically, through the book I learned, if nothing else, that by starting to shape a block of marble with a hammer blow to the wrong area it can be ruined. In which case, most of the Caunois sculptors were very careful.
There is one scupture on the path, however, that astonishes. That is a giant statue of a lion, made from a giant rectangular block with a horizontal axis. The lion is sculpted in the style of the ancient Assyrians. The lion is two dimensional, the fur of the head and the fetlocks sculpted in geometric repeats, the head flat, the eyes two perfect circles within circles, the whole effect one of power and authority. The lion statue, inaugurated in 2000, was the first of the statues to represent the festival.
I intended for Beau and I to walk up to the marble quarry and start along the allee du Carriere, but after going a ways, the mechanized toy train rented for the festival arrives. We board and I pay 3 Euros for the privilege. The driver is a former vineyard owner who abandoned the metier. He tells us this for the price of the trip, pointing out, as we wind up the hill, that the fields we see growing wild are former vineyards, become fallow when wine-growing ceased to be profitable.
He might have said the same thing about the business of quarrying marble. During the course of my visit to la carriere du Roy (the historic quarry); and the modern one cheek-by-jowl with it, that quarrying marble has not been profitable for years. The polishing of marble is now done by machine, an advance in occupational safety. However, even if there were a safe way for individuals to avoid dying of silicosis from inhaling marble dust, there's little demand for Caunes' marble.
Two men now work at the active quarry; from three hundred in its heyday. The men are smicards --minimum wage workers. The French forest service owns the land, which grants a private company the concession to quarry marble in Caunes in return for a specified price. However, there is more marble quarried than there is demand for it. As a result, the quarry has a large inventory of blocks standing unused. The inventory is not commensurate to the demand because in order to maintain the concession, the forest service requires the company to quarry a minimum of blocks a year.
Other materials have taken the place of marble in homes. And there is considerable wastage even when a block is sold. My guide tells me that 85% of what is quarried is unusable for construction of baths or counters or tiles, should there be a demand for them. The unusable parts of the blocks are crushed and become gravel. Indeed Xavier, my guide (a retired paleontologist from Paris), tells me to take as a souvenir of my visit my pick of the marble fragments lying in a pile at the end of the tour.
"There are cycles of demand and supply", Xavier tells me as we look over the quarry, which is pharaonic in size. "There are sixteen quarries ready for use here when the market for marble comes back. And an inexhaustible supply in addition to that --enough for a thousand years. So the holders of the concession will not give it up."
The world of marble is a small one: marble is polished in Carrara and in Cairo. And until the twentieth century the material was quarried the same way for 2500 years. Finding the fissure in the marble, men would work at detaching the piece from its bed, using tree trunks as levers to add pressure and widen the crack. In the twentieth century a diamond coated wire began to be used to hasten the extraction of the blocks.
When Louis XIV built Versailles he used Caunois red marble for the columns of the Grand Trianon. At the time it took six men a week to prepare a cylindrical piece of marble that would be sculpted into an artful column in Tours in the Loire Valley. Today it could be done in a fraction of the time, but no one wants them.
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