Signs of Life . . .

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On the same afternoon as the flowers were photographed in the below post, several small villages were also visited out in the countryside. I love to go look around churchyards and take in the architectural details of the older churches, which often go back several hundred years or more in this part of the world.
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On the walls of the church shown in this first photo however, I noticed some examples of graffiti carved in the stone, which is not something I've seen alot of in the past on other churches, but then maybe I just hadn't been looking closely enough in the right places.
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The thought that someone stood here over 200 years ago scraping away at these stones just sort of washed me out into the sea of silent wonder. We came from that distant past, and we too will fade into a future we can barely imagine. Will the traces we leave last as long, and age so gracefully ? This blog could disappear with the click of a mouse or the failure of a memory unit somewhere. But it would be hard to carve these pages on a stone. Will any of us be remembered 200 years from now ?
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I so wanted to open this ancient door, I shook it, but it was locked and bolted. I knocked, but no one answered, no one came. Knock, knock, knocking on heaven's door ?
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This first is a little hard to read, but the dates are clear with 1731, 1739, and 1771
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Antoine Sangnie, fils de Flourent, 1754 (son of Flourent)
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1759, someone took some pains to cross this one out, but fortunately did not succeed in effacing these beautifully crafted numbers . . . A true artist carved this, the curves in that number nine are seductively graceful . . .
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For some unfathomable reason, someone decided to carve "1799" in reverse, I can assure you, it is not that the photo is reversed. And I could not help but think of the line in the Crosby, Stills, and Nash song Cathedral, where there is a line which says, "And I'm standing on the grave of a soldier who died in 1799 . . ."
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1913, did anyone have an inkling of the catastrophes to come the following year ?
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1914, but was it carved before or after the start of the Great War ?
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A single, stark, enigmatic word all by itself on the expanse of stone wall, conjuring up images of dreadful suffering, contagion, panic, paralyzing fear . . . Who carved this word ? And why ?
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Walking through Beauvais, a shadow figure watching passersby . . .
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Machine à Traire : Milking Machine, of the Diabolo brand name . . . a diabolic milking machine ! Best to stand well away from it before turning it on . . .
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