Following the Sun (22 page)

The town was founded by Cardinal Richelieu, whose family had come from this area. Once the Cardinal had risen to power during the reign of Louis XIII, in the early seventeenth century, he set out to establish a monument to himself and ordered the construction of a vast château and also a new town. For ten years, more than two thousand workers were kept busy constructing the buildings and laying out the streets.

Richelieu is now a very orderly sort of place, which reminded me for some reason of Savannah, Georgia. But even here, in the quiet French countryside, chaos lurked. At one point on my stroll, I found a beautiful cecropia moth pinned, for some unknown reason, but still slowly pumping its wings, to one of the plane trees. Worse things have happened in this part of France, of course, some of them instigated by Richelieu himself. He had all the competing
châteaux
in the region dismantled so as not to rival his own, and was not fond of Protestants—to say the least. But then Protestants were not fond of Richelieu, nor any other Catholics. They were both fond, it seems, of murdering one another, and this peaceful river valley, winding beneath the low wooded and pastured hills, saw some of the bloodiest atrocities during the wars of religion.

I got a late start the next day and rode toward Champigny sur Veude and then on for Chinon. By this time the bright May morning had declined and there were storm clouds in the north, above Chinon, just in the direction I was headed. About twenty minutes later I ran into showers, so I fished through my gear, brought out my poncho, and forged on, and by the time I could see Chinon in the distance, there were breaks in the clouds.

A bridge crosses the Vienne River that runs along the southern end of the town, and there beyond the bridge, arcing over the city in a vast half circle, I saw a magnificent rainbow. One end rose out of a green meadow in the east, swept upward over the town, and then descended into a collection of buildings to the north.

When I was a child growing up in the green American suburbs we used to make rainbows by twisting down the nozzle of a garden hose to a fine spray and then squirting the water against the sun. One friend of mine and I used to play for hours, barefooted on the grass, making rainbows and disproving (unfortunately) the old myth that there is a pot of gold at the end.

We had of course learned in school why rainbows form. Each droplet of water, as we were told, acts like a tiny prism. As light waves enter the raindrop they are slowed, and bent and broken up, revealing the range of colors from red to orange to yellow, green, blue, indigo, and finally to violet, the spectrum of the prism, in other words. The same principle is the cause of other celestial phenomena such as sun dogs, which are often seen at sunset and look like small bright versions of the sun itself, although not as brilliant. Under good conditions, that is, with the proper amount of moisture or ice in the upper atmosphere, you can see two of them, so that it appears that there are three suns in the sky. This may have given rise to the pagan and Hindu traditions of multiple suns.

More rarely the atmospheric conditions are such that there is a column of light near the setting sun, and periodically, often before a change in the weather, there may be a halo, or corona, or “glory” around the sun or moon, a sign that is often taken for an omen. The night before the famous mid-nineteenth-century wreck of the schooner
Hesperus
, off the coast of New England, for example, there was a silver ring around the moon. “Last night the moon wore a silver ring,” as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote in his poem about the event. “Tonight no moon we see.”

All of these celestial phenomena are caused by the refracted or reflected light of the sun, either by ice crystals or by uniform cloud droplets. While all the colors of the rainbow and corona are always present in full, unreflected sunlight, we can't see them until they are split up by a prism and separated into the spectrum, which arranges and displays the colors according to their individual wavelengths. All light is waves, and all light on earth proceeds from a single source. Long before waves were discovered, mystics had discovered and honored this.

In ancient Jewish tradition, an emerald light surrounds God's throne and beings in his presence were said sometimes to glow or shine with an interior light. Zeus had many of the same attributes, and later, Roman gods often appeared bathed in light and shining through a cloud. According to Christians, the son of the Hebrew god carried his father's luminosity. Jesus appeared as a flame or fire, and once on Mount Tabor he was transfigured in front of his disciples into a column of pure light. In Roman and Hellenic art the heads of gods were depicted surrounded by a disc-shaped circle of light, the halo, or nimbus, a tradition found also in Persia and Syria. Some of these nimbi exuded actual rays, like the sun, some were mere circles of light, or halos, and some evolved into aureoles, or mandorla, which are elongated almond-shaped spheres of light that surrounded the whole figure of holy persons. The symbol of the halo, and also the mandorla, was adopted in the Middle Ages to portray saints and other divines and appears regularly in the Christian art of the Renaissance.

In the little Basilica di Santa Maria in Trastevere, in Rome, there is a small fresco of the Madonna and Child on the eastern wall. There is nothing particularly unique about the image; it was executed sometime in the thirteenth century by an unknown artist, and it has all the traditional symbols and coloration of the Christian paintings in a thousand different churches throughout Italy. But the celestial symbols worked into the painting are striking. Both Mary and Jesus are surrounded by halos, of course, but the baby Jesus is also holding a golden sun disc in his left hand, and Mary's blue mantle, trimmed in gold, is festooned with stars, one of which shines with particular brilliance.

The connection between a divinity or supreme being and light occurs throughout world religions. The mandorla is found regularly in Buddhist art and still appears even in the folk art of Hindu India. Hindu divinities shine or exude light from their foreheads, or whole bodies, or hearts. In various Hindu and Tibetan practices, a series of meditations on light have developed, the most basic of which is the sun meditations, intended to balance the seven chakras, or points of energy that are located at various spots in the human body. These chakras, according to eastern traditions, are formed of clear spinning balls of light, tiny suns within the body. During the sun meditation, the practitioner imagines a great external fire in the sky, and absorbs its warmth and energy. After years of practice one is said to be able to actually become pure light. In some solar meditations, the three suns are used to vitalize the chakras or
nadis
, the meridians that in many eastern traditions are believed to provide an internal structure inside the body. In one Tibetan meditation on light, five suns are imagined, two in the feet, two in the hands, and one at the base of the spine. In heightened states, these can combine into a column of fire; and in some states of a higher level of meditation they will stream upward through the spine and leave the body through the top of the head and spout forth in a fountain of golden or white light that cascades down the outside of the body and returns at the base of the spine, forming the mandorla. The Hindu holy men often went right to the source in their veneration of this sacred fire and stared directly into the face of god—the sun—for hours and subsequently went blind. The Jews knew better. One does not look directly at the face of god, nor even speak his name.

In many so-called primitive religions, the rainbow provided a bridge from earth to sun. Archeologists have discovered images from the late Paleolithic era painted or engraved on cave walls or pebbles and bones that depict the rainbow as a symbol of connection between earth and sky, and there are many extant legends and myths of pilgrims and questing heroes who ascend rainbows to visit (or in many stories steal from) the king of the sky, the sun. In one tradition, after a grueling five-day ritual, select members among the tribes of the Carib Indians were able to climb to the sky on a rainbow bridge with the help of a figure known as Grandfather Vulture. Aboriginal Australian medicine men of the Forrest River region used to travel to the sun on the back of a Rainbow Serpent, and in an East African myth, Kyazimba, a poor but honest farmer, travels on a rainbow to the land of the rising sun and meets the brilliant sun-chieftain who bestows wealth upon the poor pilgrim.

For twenty minutes I stood beside the road outside the town watching the changing sky and the coming and going of the rainbow, until finally the show ended and I pedaled over the bridge and went into town to look for a place to stay. Above a door on the Rue Diderot I saw a tiny sign for a pension and rang the bell. There was no answer. Just as I was about to push on, the door opened a crack, and I saw a glittering eye in the shadows. Then the door opened a little more.

“Monsieur?” a cracked old voice demanded.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I was looking for a place for the night.”

I thought I had rung the wrong bell, perhaps.

“A lodging for tonight?”

“Yes, Madame,” I said politely, backing away. “I must have rung the wrong bell.”

“You are looking for a room, then?”

“Yes, if you know of any.”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

Silence.

“But one thing,” she said. “You must not make any noise.”

“No noise?”

“Make no noise.”

“Here?”

“Yes, here. No noise, though. Enter if you please.”

Given this beginning, I was not so sure I wanted a room in this place, but I followed her in. She was dressed in black, with a white ruffled collar, and had white hair pulled back in a bun and fixed with many hairpins, and she had a long crooked Gallic nose and bright black weasel eyes. I was certain that if I dared to take the room and made any noise that night she would either poison my coffee in the morning or, worse, cast a spell over me and turn me into a toad. But taking my heart in my hands, I followed her up the creaking stairway, then down a dark hall to a narrow oak door. Here she selected a long-shanked tarnished key from a large brass ring, and with her bony fingers, and a great deal of maneuvering, inserted the key in the lock, swung open the door, and stood aside.

Outdoors, the weather had cleared, and in the fading light beyond the streets great yellow and red streaks were fretting the sky. There was a tall French door on one end giving onto a small terrace and through this the yellowing light spilled into the room to reveal a huge canopied bed with a finely sewn counterpane, a high, vaulted ceiling above carved plaster cornices depicting angels and
putti
, and well-wrought dentils and fleur-de-lis along the sides. The walls were thick and plastered and musty, and there was an ancient armoire opposite the bed, also carved with
putti
and Greek warriors in plumed helmets. There was a single bed stand with spindled legs, and a single brass electric light on the table. Except for the electric light I might have been in the world of Catherine de Medici or Cardinal Richelieu.

The old crone stood beside the door, just outside the room, wringing her hands and eyeing me suspiciously as I looked around the room.

“Is the room to your liking, Monsieur?” she asked.

“It is beautiful,” I said.

“The price for this room will be exactly forty-two francs, twenty centimes,” she said, “but I suppose it is too much for you.” She wrung her hands again and tipped her head to the side, nodding sadly.

“No, no, no,” I said, “I think that would be all right, thank you.” Forty-two francs at the time was not a great deal of money, by any means.

“Very well then, you may have this room. But on one sole condition.”

“Yes, fine, what is that?”

“You must not make noise.”

“No, no, not me, I detest noise. Is it noisy here?”

“No, quiet, generally, but there are those …,” she said, nodding again. “One must take care, you understand.”

“Yes of course, Madame. I will be quiet here.”

“Good, that's done, then.”

Chinon's great claim to history is the fact that Joan of Arc stopped there to meet the dauphin. The young dauphin attempted to play a trick on her and disguised himself among his courtiers when she was ushered into his quarters. The legend is that she recognized him right away and even insisted that he was who he was after he denied his identity. It was at Chinon that she declared that the King of Heaven (she meant God, not the sun) had sent her to help the dauphin raise the siege of Orléans and would escort him to Rheims to be anointed king of France.

Chinon is a pleasant little town that is lined with gnarled trees that range above the clustered houses and is dominated by the towers and walls and oval keep of the great castle of Chinon. The local story is that Henry II died in this town and at one point during their stormy marriage met here at Christmas with Eleanor to try to settle the estates of their feuding children. These included Richard the Lion-Hearted and the bad king, John, who never managed England very well, did worse in Ireland, and was so hated by Robin Hood and his peasant associates. Richard took over the castle at Chinon after his father's death and maintained it as an impregnable fortress until his own death, whereupon his brother John took control. But Philippe-Auguste of France envied it and laid siege for a year before he managed to drive the English out.

For years I had been fascinated by Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine. She was one of the exotic powerful women of history, who supported the arts and was a great manipulator of kings and their courts. It is said, among other things, that the power of the queen and the relative weakness of the king in chess games was established in Eleanor's time. She was a poet and a great lover of the troubadours, and even established “courts of love” where ladies would put on trial the behaviors of their husbands and lovers.