Paris to the Pyrenees: A Skeptic Pilgrim Walks the Way of Saint James (12 page)

Wherever it once stood, the Celtic-Roman fortress of Le Vieux Dun which we’d read about escaped our ken. We searched for it but soon gave up. Without the help of the natives, we were lost. Having also given up trying to replenish our water supplies, we headed east beyond the village and found an unlikely picnic spot—the bramble-tangled graveyard around an abandoned chapel. Out of punctilious respect, before sitting down on it, Alison was careful to choose to someone at the mayorwe was a tombstone whose owner’s name had worn off. She possessed an admirable ability to overlook the nastiness of the local populace wherever we went, and also magnanimously avoided sweeping associations between historical and current events. “You have an overwrought imagination,” she said, handing me a carrot. “Just eat your lunch.”

RECTITUDE VERSUS ROMANCE

Flanking the trail from Le Vieux Dun to the forest-hamlet of Bonaré, which lay several miles down the road, tall hewn stones stuck out of the undergrowth. Were they Roman paving stones, we wondered? Some might even have inscriptions on them, I told myself, trying to get a closer look. But probably not. Most of the ancient tombstones and milestones of France were hauled long ago to provincial museums where they fill dusty rooms seen by few. Might it have been better to leave them where they were, on the roadsides, evocative memorials to a mysterious, moss-grown past?

That, I knew, was a romantic notion based on the supposition that civilized, sensitive people would have civil sense. In other words, it was nonsense, the objective correlative of the romantic agony—the eternal struggle between reason and hope. Everywhere in Europe where monuments have been left in place, they’ve been stolen or vandalized, usually both, or knocked down in the name of progress. For every sensitive romantic, there are ten insensitive brutes of the opposite persuasion.

Our trail, in part trashed by off-road vehicles, rejoined the Cure in another deep, dark, enchanted forest cleft. Upstream we spied a B&B on the riverbank in a particularly scenic spot, where water cascaded from all sides. I closed my eyes and concentrated. But I couldn’t evoke Pan or Mary or play my friend Russ Schleipmann’s visual memorization game, for a very simple reason. Three trail bikes sat on trailers attached to SUVs with Belgian license plates. I was furious, and saw red everywhere despite the green.

Upstream another quarter-mile, we reached the Pont du Montal—a bridge at a crossroads and our day’s destination. Tacked to a corkboard in the entrance to our modest motel, called the Chalet du Montal, were posters advertising “extreme off-road tourism.” One company was based nearby in Dun-les-Places. There was no escaping the motorsports set.

A tall, thin, blue-eyed Dutchman showed us to our room and said his name was Huub Broxterman. He repeated it several times until we got it more or less right. A young retiree, Huub bought the motel in 2002. His target clientele was Dutch and Belgian. “Americans don’t know the Morvan yet,” he remarked amiably.

In our riverside room it sounded as if a waterfall ran behind the bed. Through the open doorway we watched the white water in the Cure froth and foam. Dams upstream must be releasing water for kayakers, I joked. No sooner had I spoken the words than a raft appeared, loaded with yelping kids. It floated past, bouncing over rocks. Another raft and then a canoe and kayak followed. This time the passengers were Africans. I heard a scream, a plop, and the sound of thrashing, and dashed out of the room to the river’s edge to pull out a teenage boy. He hesitated, trying to get out of the water on his own, and finally accepted a hand. His wary eyes stayed fixed on me, as if he expected a kick. I asked if he’d hurt himself. He shook his head, mortified, and without a word limped downstream.

Later, in the dining room, Huub explained to us that underprivileged kids from Paris’s grim suburbs are sometimes taken to the Morvan to experience “wilderness.”

It was a great idea, I agreed, also wondering aloud what most Europeans make of real wilderness, t rue Saint-Jacquesoic, and he American or African kind, where human beings are potential links in the food chain. I’d never seen a truly wild place on the Old Continent. Neither, it turned out, had Huub.

VERCINGÉTORIX, MITTERRAND AND VON STÜLPNAGEL

The Morvan Park headquarters are in a spacious farm compound at Saint Brisson, a mountain village about four miles from the Pont du Montal. After resting up for a while, we hitched a ride there. Towering old trees rose over a landscaped courtyard. In their shade stood the bust of a mature man, portrayed like a Roman emperor. His name was Paul Flandin, a founder-member of the French parks federation and president of the Parc du Morvan from its inception in 1970 to his departure in 1992. We’d seen and heard the name Flandin before, in Cure, and wondered now how many political mysteries and real estate deals lay buried under that bust.

Another inscription outside a two-story building informs visitors that on June 26, 1983 President François Mitterrand inaugurated the site’s Musée de la Résistance. We stepped into the Spartan, nondescript building. The ground floor offered a potted history of the Morvan, from Celtic times forward, gently aiding the visitor in constructing a mental bridge from Vercingétorix to other French war heroes. Propaganda? Perhaps.

Despite my years in France, I still fumble when I get “Vercingétorix” in my mouth. With my digital recorder in hand, I asked an affable woman at the ticket counter whether she’d mind providing the proper pronunciation. Surprised but game, she obliged, repeating “Vercingétorix” three times.

I duly repeated the name as I climbed to the museum’s upstairs displays. Vercingétorix, Vercingétorix, Ver-cin-gé-to-rix. It didn’t sound anything like Mitterrand.

From a document on display, I soon learned that the Italian Risorgimento freedom fighter Giuseppe Garibaldi had ridden to the rescue of the French at Autun, on the Morvan’s southern edge, in 1870, during the Franco-Prussian War—the prelude to World Wars One and Two. Garibaldi’s was a little-known twist on the Caesar saga, a friendly Italian attempting to save France from Germany. He’d failed, of course. The logical fallout to France’s disastrous defeats became clear a few steps up the staircase. There, an original Order of General Mobilization dated September 2, 1939 faced out. It filled me with foreboding. This was not going to be entertaining.

In a display case, a German aviator’s gloves and Nazi propaganda leaflets—produced to demoralize the French—flanked yellowing documents, photos, and maps. Evocative objects told the tale of the French
débâcle
, the Occupation and the rise of the Résistance. The line between Occupied and Free France ran across southern Burgundy. We would be crossing it down the road. We’d also be passing through half a dozen “martyr villages” destroyed by Nazi reprisal raids against the Résistance. I read the list of names: Dun-les-Places, Montsauche, Planchez, Anost, Glux. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, I said to myself, checking our marching plans.

Clandestine newspapers such as
Défense de la France
, founded on Bastille Day, 1941, had attempted to give the lie to German propaganda. So, too, had courageous historians. A quote by the 17th-century philosopher Blaise Pascal reprinted during the Occupation was displayed prominently above one Plexiglas case and seemed topical:
Je ne crois que les histoires dont les témoins se feraient égorger
. “I only believe stories whose witnesses would be willing to have their throats slit.” important stopover or starting point on fa n

Victor’s justice came with a victor’s version of history, from Caesar’s
Conquest of Gaul
to the present. I wondered what Goebbels & Hitler’s version of World War Two would have been, had they prevailed. Luckily, sometimes the good guys win. Sometimes no one wins and the world loses, and sometimes the good guys turn bad.

A notice to French citizens by the Nazi Occupier caught my eye. It was signed “Von Stülpnagel, General der Infanterie.”

Von Stülpnagel? At last we meet.

How to explain the exquisiteness of that name? In moments of great frustration, my father, a wartime Jeep driver, encryption man, and, later, correspondent, would sometimes blurt “Don’t be a Stülpnagel, for god’s sake!”

I’d always wondered what a Stülpnagel was. Now I knew, and could see the results of his actions: death, destruction, genocide.

Amid the wind-up radios, field telephones, and tattered code-books were photos of Allied parachute drops. In 1944, the RAF and the U.S. Air Force routinely dropped large canisters filled with communications equipment, dynamite and sabotage manuals, guns and first-aid kits, to assist the Résistance and the OSS units who joined them.

The vintage canisters on display looked like elongated, oversized propane tanks. Other photos showed artillery pieces and Jeeps being dropped in Operation Houndsworth. I peered at the Jeep. It looked exactly like the one my father had driven in the war. But didn’t they all?

In a snapshot taken at Autun in September 1944, crowds of Résistants and citizens gathered around an American Destroyer tank, celebrating the liberation of the city. I stared at that photo, wondering how after the Nazi Occupation the French themselves could continue to occupy Indo-China and Algeria and fight colonial wars to try to hold them in the 1950s and ’60s. I wondered what wrong turn had taken us into Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, not as the good guys, but as hated occupiers.

Before leaving the museum, Alison spotted another snapshot, this one taken on the Pont du Montal, theoretically across from our hotel. It showed a Panzer tank de-tracked by the Résistance. Derailing Nazi trains, blowing up power stations, and trapping tanks were the kind of hit-and-run actions the Résistance had done best.

“Notice anything?” asked Alison.

I thought for a minute. “Yeah: no Chalet du Montal; our hotel wasn’t there.”

BURGUNDY SNAILS GO DUTCH

“The hotel wasn’t built yet,” Huub explained that evening when we told him about the photograph of this spot at the Musée de la Résistance. The back wall of the dining room was decorated with black-and-white photos of the chalet from the 1940s and ’50s. “Built in 1948,” he said proudly, rapping the dining-room wall with his knuckles.

The river’s rapids, the forest setting, even the knotty pine décor, old tables and chairs, appeared unchanged since the 1940s, corresponding to the vintage prints. I was glad there were no Nazi tanks outside. The problematic presence of leather-suited, chainsmoking motocross riders in the bar area paled in comparison.

We asked Huub about his background. He told us he’d retired just in time, from a job as an administrator. He’d been in charge of ensuring that authors and artists received royalty payments on copyrighted material. What a quaint notion, copyright. By purchasing the Chalet du Montal, Huub jo to someone at the mayorwe was ined the other two thousand Dutch families who’ve moved from cramped Holland to the spacious Morvan since the year 2000. All told, about eight thousand Dutch households totaling twenty thousand individuals—and growing by the hour—now live in Burgundy. They often outnumber the less fertile native French, those, that is, presumably descended from Vercingétorix or the local chieftain, whose name we confirmed was Dumnorix.

Huub had hired a young Frenchman to be his chef, so while the Burgundy snails in puff pastry sounded daunting in Dutch as
slakken à la Bourgogne
, they turned out to be tasty.

The Dutchman’s explanation for why he chose the Morvan dovetailed with what we’d heard and read elsewhere. Holland’s population density is something like four hundred inhabitants per square kilometer—among the highest in the world. In the Morvan it’s eleven per square kilometer—among the lowest in Europe, on a par with the Himalayas. Ironically, as Holland clamps down on inbound immigration, it is sending record numbers abroad—to places like Burgundy, where the non-Europeans are few. Property prices are relatively low, and there’s an anything-goes, Far West feel to the place—by European standards. It isn’t exactly Montana or Texas. Bureaucracy abounds. Huub explained that the park area is parceled into 105
communes
, each with a mayor, totaling a mere 37,000 residents.

“That’s why they come,” Huub said, motioning to the group of motocross riders. “Trail riding is illegal in Holland and most of northern Europe so they come down here. It’s advertised on the Internet—come to the Morvan and do what you want, no one will arrest you, it’s wide open and empty.” Huub shrugged. Much of his business came from such people, he admitted.

“No one complains?”

“Oh, they complain. Bitterly. But each mayor has to rule on off-road use in his
commune
even though this is a regional park and the GR-13 is a cross-country, European pilgrim’s trail.” Huub glanced around. He lowered his voice. “You can imagine the chaos, it’s so French. Nine often people here are against this invasion of motor-sportsmen. The ten percent who are for it claim it’s good for business, and believe me it is good for business. In a few years it’ll be over, they’re going to outlaw it in France and that’s fine by me.”

Because I didn’t want to raise my blood pressure I said I understood. In a minor way it was the Occupation all over again, and here I was agreeing with a Dutchman collaborationist—a pleasant, decent, literate guy like Huub forced to go along.

VICHYSSOISE À LA MITTERRAND

Reflections, reflections.… Perhaps I’d merely been inattentive. At the Musée de la Résistance built by President François Mitterrand, nowhere had I seen it mentioned that François Mitterrand’s codename was “Morland.” Nor were the details given of Morland’s earlier, pre-resistance role in the collaborationist Vichy government. Perhaps it was unfair to expect it. The museum wasn’t really about Mitterrand, was it?

It appears to be a documented fact and is widely reported in the French press and in biographies of François Mitterrand: in 1943 he secretly left France, presumably with the help of the Résistance and Free French, in order to meet Charles de Gaulle in London. De Gaulle loathed him, suspecting ulterior motives. De Gaulle wanted order imposed on divergent Résistance movements. He understood France’s historical weakness as fractious important stopover or starting point on fa ntribalism. In response, Mitterrand reportedly claimed that a central command was not possible. The political divide between right and left was too wide. The best compromise the insurgents could offer was an agreement that neither anti-communist nor pro-communist militancy would be tolerated among the maquisards.