The Pierre de Couhard, the nameless tomb of Autun

Before Autun there was Bibracte, the stronghold of the Aedui on Mont Beuvray, a nest of wood and earth in the wind. Under Augustus the Aedui came down into the plain and built a new town that bore the emperor’s name: Augustodunum. Bibracte was abandoned; the capital of the Aedui had changed hills. The new town was given streets drawn by the line, a theatre among the largest in the Roman west, temples, schools where the sons of the Gaulish families learned Latin, and a wall of almost six kilometres of which two monumental gates are standing yet.

The orators of late antiquity found no compliment too large for it: it was called the «sister and rival of Rome». The phrase has stuck, and the people of Autun still repeat it, half mocking, half proud, fifteen centuries after the fall of the empire.

Outside the walls lay the fields of the dead, for no one was buried inside the town. One of those burial grounds, to the south-east, is still called the Champ des Urnes. There, on the slope of Couhard, the pyramid rose. It looked down on the town, pale and smooth under its fitted slabs of stone. Whoever climbed the road saw it from far off and knew that beneath it rested someone whose name was meant to outlast his flesh.

Then Rome went away. Augustodunum became Autun, a smaller town, huddled behind its old ramparts. The centuries that followed saw in the ancient ruins a convenient and free quarry. Men climbed to Couhard with levers and carts, prised the facing slabs away, and they went into the walls of barns and houses. What was left was the rubble core, that heart of mortar and broken stone the builders never meant to be seen: rough, grey, eaten by the rain, and standing all the same, a good twenty-two metres high; with its facing the pyramid rose to some thirty.

A stone like that, with no inscription and no door, calls for an explanation. The countryside gave it several. It was said to be the tomb of a giant, whom no coffin on earth could have held. It was also said to be the grave of a lord from before the Romans, buried upright with his weapons and his horse, his face turned towards the town he had lost. Some called it the monument of a Gaulish druid, on the strength of a gold medal that someone claimed to have found there.

Scholars saw in it a cenotaph, or the tomb of a rich man from the neighbouring city of the dead. But nobody has found a chamber, a body or a name in it; and that absence of an answer left all the room to the stories. The giant has never left the slope.

Where there is a grave without a name, there is a treasure: Couhard did not escape the rule. It was said that in the heart of the masonry there slept a chest full of gold, or the weapons of the king buried there. As early as 1640 an abbot had a hole broken into it to reach the inner chamber: there was no chamber, and the hole can still be seen. After him came peasants digging by night, the curious on Sundays, gentlemen from the town with picks and ropes. They brought up nothing but earth and lumps of mortar.

Against that greed stood a fear. The old people said the stone must not be opened: on the day the heart of the tomb was reached, misfortune would fall upon Autun — fire, plague or war. They added that the most stubborn had come to a bad end. So the stone guarded its secret from both sides: it promised enough to make men dig, and threatened enough to make them stop.

It is still there. You climb to it in a short half hour from the cathedral, up to a grey mass that has been a protected monument historique since 1840. It has still not said whose tomb it is. Perhaps that is why it is loved: in a town that has kept its Roman gates and its carved tympanum, the Pierre de Couhard is the one monument that still refuses to explain itself.