Paris to the Pyrenees: A Skeptic Pilgrim Walks the Way of Saint James (10 page)

As if summoned by sympathetic magic, I watched as a very large SUV pulled up to the B&B. Out of it emerged three children, two adults, and six suitcases.

HIT THE ROAD, JACQUES!

The rain had stopped. Weightless, we left the B&B and walked the quiet, soulful streets of Marigny, my mind re-running my conversation with Philippe. Two intense Philippes in the space of twenty miles? I was glad this wasn’t fiction, because I would be inclined to disbelieve.

Marigny seemed to be the objective correlative of my psychological state. Half the village was for sale, the other half shuttered. Both grocery stores had gone out of business. The café was no longer. A chill wind blew past two manor houses, one rebuilt in a wild, 19th-century neo-Gothic style. Horse-head sculptures and lanterns protruded above the door of what appeared to be an eccentric carpenter’s workshop on the main square. Tacked to the door, a sign read:

Notice to inhabitants. There’s nothing more unpleasant to those who work than the presence of those who have nothing to do. Claude.

“Fortunate man,” I said, “if nothing in his life is more unpleasant than being pestered by talkative retirees. In any case, it suggests there are humans in this village.”

The
mairie
or town hall of Marigny occupied an unremarkable building near our B&B. There was no doorbell. We took Monsieur le Maire, Jean-Claude Jacquinot, by surprise. want to light a candle9HCh Alison deduced his name from a sheet of paper tacked to a billboard. The mayor swiveled and raised his large frame upon hearing us. “Not many people drop by,” he said, shaking our hands. Since we were staying at the B&B and seemed harmless, he rooted out the church keys from a deep pocket and held them out.

I’d read in a history book that “Jacquinot” was one of the French last names designating a pilgrim who’d reached Saint Jacques de Compostelle. When might the mayor’s ancestor have accomplished the feat, I wondered aloud, and was the mayor religious or
Républicain?
Now that I thought of it, weren’t the multiple variations on “Jack” in English derived from Saint Jacques? Millions of Englishmen had crossed the Channel and traversed France to the Spanish shrine. We had “man-jack,” “jack of all trades,” “jack of hearts,” “you’re in the groove, Jackson,” we even had “hit the road Jack, and don’t you come back no more no more no more no more.” Jack was the commonest of first names and part of many last names, a diminutive of John, I’d always thought, or, perhaps, in reality, derived from Saint John’s brother, James the Greater.

Dust impregnated the stifling air inside the church. Cobwebs encased the broken-down confessional. My eyes made an inventory. Two dead organs sat in the transept, the keyboards missing teeth; this made me think of the tortoise. Plaster peeled, drifting like autumn leaves to the dusty floor. Panes gaped in leaded windows. There was no sign of Saint James, yet Marigny straddled the pilgrimage route. I stood underneath a wall-mounted sculpture of Joan of Arc. It was one of those dime-a-dozen gaudy representations of the woman-child warrior made during the 19th century’s Catholic Revival. Joan’s sword gleamed. She was a church militant, like Saint Michael the dragon-killer and Saint James, also known as Saint James the Moorslayer. In the 1400s Joan drove out the English occupier, just as, in the Middle Ages, Saint James had driven the Moors out of Spain. He’s often shown wearing scallop-shell armor, and got his nickname, “the Moorslayer,” because the Christians of Western Europe happened to be at war for 700 years with the Muslim occupiers of the Iberian Peninsula. That long-forgotten struggle that ran and ran was called La Reconquista. James is still Spain’s patron saint, and Spaniards are still resisting Islam, nowadays in the form of illegal immigration and terrorism. I’d always found the political side of warrior saints offputting, but then, whether you liked it or not, perhaps the church needed an army to protect it, like all institutions of power.

“A Revival in need of revival,” I remarked, trying not to sound flippant.

Alison didn’t hear me. She was determined to light a candle, and was delving into every recess looking for one. But there were no candles to light.

MITTERRAND’S MEGALOMANIA:

BURY MY HEART AT BIBRACTE

Mayor Jacquinot of Marigny l’Eglise told us he’d spent his adult life in Paris, and had only recently retired and moved home. “I was an electrical engineer,” he said. Did he know about the reservoirs and why they were so low when it’d been raining for months, I wondered? “No, no, no—it’s not climate change,” he chuckled. “It’s kayaks. Whenever there’s a white-water kayak or canoe race down the Cure River we release water, lots of water.”

Alison and I caught each other’s eye. “Isn’t that kind of wasteful?”

“It’s good for touris to someone at the mayorwe was m,” Jacquinot replied, raising his stout shoulders toward his large ears and blushing ever so slightly. “And anyway, when the reservoir drops really low you get a treat. You can see the medieval stone bridge at the bottom.”

Jacquinot rose up on his toes like an excited boy. He told us the reservoir’s murky secrets. Not only did a humpback bridge sometimes emerge from the waters, like the monster of Loch Ness. There was also a submerged farmhouse.

“We’re talking the 1930s,” Jacquinot said, increasingly familiar. “They dynamited everything in the valley that could interfere with boating. One old guy refused to leave. He holed up in his farm. The firemen came in rowboats and pulled him out of the hayloft. I’ve seen photos. His house is still there, on the lake bottom, seventy years later.”

The pigheaded farmer’s family lives nearby, the mayor added. From their house they gaze at their “underwater farm.” Ever more cheerful, the mayor pulled out huge, detailed survey maps from centuries past, unrolling them across a table. He pinpointed the submerged bridge and farmhouse, and told us more than we thought we’d ever know about hydroelectric generation. “That guy with the farmhouse, he’s typical of the Morvan,” the mayor went out of his way to explain. “You hold out, you resist. This has always been a leftwing, pink territory—first we had the Celts, then the Protestants and Revolutionaries. That’s why the Résistance survived here in World War Two. The villagers and farmers joined them in the woods or helped from home. Anything to fight the Nazis. And that’s why Mitterrand set up shop here, too.”

The mayor, we knew, was referring to controversial former French socialist president François Maurice Adrien Marie Mitterrand, alias the Sphinx. A conservative aristocrat and member of the collaborationist Vichy Government, Mitterrand had somehow changed sides, joined the Résistance at a convenient juncture, emerged from the Occupation a hero, and become a councilman and then mayor of Château Chinon, one of the Morvan’s largest towns. Even after becoming president of France, he remained mayor of Château Chinon, a clever way to maintain his association—however tenuous—with the French Résistance, which had lived its greatest hours in this area.

It also explained why Mitterrand’s name was pasted all over certain towns and villages, I realized, and why Mitterrand had created the Résistance Museum in Saint-Brisson, and the Museum of Celtic Civilization at Bibracte on Mont Beuvray. To the nationalist and socialist mind they were powerful symbols of French identity. We’d be visiting both in coming days.

“While we’re at it,” the mayor added, “the Résistance myth and Mitterrand’s mayor-ship of Château Chinon are why he legally could have been buried in Bibracte.” Jacquinot paused significantly. “You’re familiar with Bibracte—the lost city of the Gauls? It’s where Vercingétorix rallied the tribes, and planned our last stand against Caesar. Like your General Custer.”

In France, said the mayor, you have the right to a grave in your own back yard, garden, or whatever piece of land you happen to own. So Mitterrand in an access of megalomania made the central government in Paris buy the top of the Gauls’s sacred Mont Beuvray from the Burgundy regional authorities, then he sold himself a plot in Bibracte, atop the mountain, near the spot where the heroic Vercingétorix had given his spiel against Caesar.

“You’re joking?” I couldn’t help saying.

“Oh, no, it’s no joke. You see, by owning the plot up there, the president had the right to build himself a tomb. He wanted to be immortalized in a sacred Gallic site.”

Beautiful. It was a gorgeous Mitterrand story, and a gloss on so much that was profoundly, incomprehensibly French.

I asked the mayor if he thought Mitterrand had imagined himself Vercingétorix reincarnate. Jacquinot played with the ring of keys before answering. “Who knows? The scheme didn’t work. People cried bloody murder and Mitterrand wound up buried in his home town, Jarnac.” He paused and grinned maliciously. “Do you know what a
coup de Jarnac
is? You’ve read
The Three Musketeers?
In fencing, Jarnac means an unfair thrust.” He made a downward, poking motion aimed at my calves.

It was, I realized, what we call a low blow.

RUSSIAN CELTS AND ROAMING ROMANS

Staring out from a shelf at our B&B was a vintage hardcover with the winning title
Histoire de Bourgogne
. Presumably this was a history not of Pinot Noir wine but of the Burgundy region. I plucked it and headed for a pre-prandial nap. Beyond the flowing draperies of our bedroom rose Marigny’s church spire. I plumped the pillows and squinted with heavy eyelids.

Written in the 1950s by a certain Charles Commeaux, the book recounted Burgundy’s early history, the part leading up to Caesar’s arrival. It told of waves of nomadic hunter-warriors who had swept in from the east around 500 BC, or so the author claimed, their ancestors having left what’s now western Russia sometime between 800 and 1200 BC. Go West, Young Barbarian! These so-called “Celts” had promptly set about exploiting the happy natives of Gaul, members of the older, sedentary, pacific, agriculture-based Halstatt Civilization, which didn’t sound very French either. The warlike Russian Celts’ modus operandi was much like that of the brutal Romans who followed them and the even more “barbarian” Germanic tribes who came after. In fact, with their beheadings, live burials and burnings, raping and pillaging and serious hygiene problems, the Celts sounded considerably worse than Caesar, more on par with Attila. As to Caesar himself, he came off as being less dasdardly than dashing, as portrayed in the pages of the book, despite his thinning hair. What color eyes did Caesar have, anyway? I blinked, trying to recall the painted statues I’d seen. The pages of the book blurred. I blinked again.

Instead of seeing Caesar’s eyes, I saw his nose, a Plasticine nose, with my forefinger outside it and thumb up a nostril, pinching the modeling clay. My hands felt youthful. Atop them arthritis-gnarled fingers nudged and directed. As I pinched and smoothed, my mother’s fingertips flattened my clumsy work and reshaped it with broad, confident strokes. “You’re putting in too much detail,” she said gently; “rough out his features first, and then go back.”

Art history books lay open, ranged around her basement studio. Black-and-white photos of busts depicting Caesar filled the clay-encrusted pages, each held open with a clothespin. And then I was standing in Latin class, a clothespin and the bust in my clay-crusted hands, saying to my teacher, “Here it is, my year-end project, it’s finished. We modeled the Plasticine first, rubbed it with Vaseline, made a two-piece plaster mold, and poured ‘cast-rock’ into it. Yes, ma’am, it’s the first head I’ve ever made, ma’am, and no, it isn’t perfect, and I’ll never try again, and yes, my mother helped me and yes, she helps me with my Latin, but she’s want to light a candle9HCh Italian and she doesn’t pronounce it the way you do, and that’s why you don’t like me. The nose and ears have too much detail, ma’am, the chin is weak, I agree, the forehead does look like a monkey’s forehead, yes, ma’am.” Miss Nelson the Latin teacher curls her lip at my Caesar, the same way she curls her lip when I read aloud from Cicero. Miss Nelson pronounces it Sissero, in that sticky southern accent of hers, and she pushes her glasses up her broad, flat nose over and over again. She says wheny, weedy, wiki, turning Caesar’s v’s into wimpy w’s in that syrupy Louisiana voice, threatening to flunk me if I won’t give up that vulgar “church Latin” in her classical Latin class. Veni, vidi, vici, I say back to her. Go ahead and flunk me, go ahead and—

“Wake up,” Alison whispered, nudging me. “It’s dinnertime. They’re waiting downstairs.”

GETTING TO KNOW YOU

In France, a
chambre d’hôtes
is what we’d call a B&B. When the establishment also serves dinner,
table d’hôtes
is tacked on. We no longer have an equivalent in America or England. Our hostelries and inns of old must have been something like a
chambre d’hôtes-table d’hôtes
—unpretentious hospitality in the family home, with everyone around the table. It’s literally potluck: you never know who you’re going to meet and what you’re going to eat.

We’d been promised a mixed salad, pork roast, and homemade fruit pie. Philippe and Armelle unexpectedly eclipsed themselves. There wasn’t room at the dining table and, more urgently, four-month-old Victor cried for his supper.

“Victory,” Philippe joked, coin purses of fatigue under his eyes.

The company was mixed—a global mix. It included an outspoken Swiss couple employed in high tech and their trio of lively children, and a diminutive but talkative French computer scientist, his large, trumpet-throated Taiwanese wife, and their sonorous offspring. The Franco-Taiwanese were the proud owners of the SUV I’d seen earlier. All our fellow guests were smart and curious, the adults especially so once lubricated by Pinot Noir.

Chit-chat swerved into serious talk of politics and religion—the twin taboos. The Swiss man said friends of his had walked the Compostela pilgrimage. “Not for religious reasons, but to see whether they should marry and have children. If they could get along while hiking for months, they could weather any storm.”

“It is reportedly wearing,” the Swiss wife chimed in, sizing us up like specimens in a Petri dish. “Very wearing. What precisely are you expecting to get out of it?”