Paris to the Pyrenees: A Skeptic Pilgrim Walks the Way of Saint James (14 page)

Finally, down the main highway, and far from the lake, we found the hotel. No one seemed to be manning the desk. We called out and no one answered, so we unsaddled ourselves and explored what felt like the French retort to a Victorian inn, with neo-Baroque and New Age overlays. The lobby harbored knick-knacks, eclectic, shabby-chic furnishings, and a gutted TV set transformed into a Buddhist shrine. Brazilian lounge-lizard music played. It matched the mauve, purple, pink, and scarlet color theme. As my bafflement and exhaustion ebbed, I began to have an inkling of why we’d been misdirected. There were probably sorcerer’s cry"text/css" hre

BEN HUR, BLUEBERRIES AND
LES DEMOISELLES DENÉFLES

While resting in our lavender room, Alison read aloud to me from the local newspaper. It was only mid-April, but celebrity director Robert Hossein’s planned at 1,700 feet above sea level st said.interpretation
of Ben Hur
, to be held in September in Paris’s gigantic soccer stadium, the Stade de France, had already pre-sold 150,000 tickets.

Had France always been as obsessed as I was by enslavement, ancient foes, and the Roman Empire, I wondered?

Posters in the hallway advertised the area’s attractions, starting with tree-climbing and tree-draping, whatever that might be. Others ran the gauntlet to Paint Ball, Saint James pilgrimages on the scallop-shell route, river rafting, a prehistory park, Quad/motocross, a summer bagpipe festival in Autun, and an accordion festival in Saint-Léger-sous-Beuvray. Autun also offered a Gallo-Roman spectacle in its Roman amphitheater, with charioteers and a sound-and-light extravaganza. Rome? Again?

Yet another poster tacked to the wall announced that Lac des Settons was 1,054 kilometers from … Rome … and a mere 210 kilometers from Paris. The spirit of Imperial Rome might be with us, but the Eternal City and the City of Light felt several million miles away, and I for one did not miss either.

Between courses at dinner downstairs we learned many things. For a start, the Lac des Settons area was renowned for its timber, which had once been bound into rafts and floated from here to Paris. The area also reportedly had great beef and wild bilberries. The berries grew in the woods, whatever was left of them after the timbermen had done their work. We also confirmed our suspicions that our hosts Claire and Fabien were not ye olde locals but rather Parisian
néo-ruraux
. Trendy castaways, they’d moored themselves here in 2003. Fabien had been the creative director of a magazine, Claire a corporate consultant. She was now a self-taught and surprisingly passionate if somewhat baroque chef. The secret to their easy insertion into the prickly Morvan lay in Claire’s childhood, spent with grandparents on the lake and in nearby Autun. Tired of the stress of big-city life, they’d hoped to open a B&B but happened instead upon this abandoned hotel, an architectural hodgepodge from the mid-1800s. Like the lake, the hotel had a checkered past.

As suspected, Lac des Settons turned out to be the Second Empire’s “wilderness” counterpart of Paris’s 1850–60s parks. This required further explaining from our hosts.

For decades, Claire told us, little steam trains called “Tacots” linked the lake and Paris. They took wet-nurses up, and brought down foundlings and tourists. Settons was the prototype Second Empire resort—entirely artificial, yet so skillfully made that you were taken in, or might actually prefer it to Nature. Its pragmatic creators had envisioned the lake as a reservoir for Paris, a staging ground for logging, and a vacation spot. By now it had become almost natural, with a century and a half of settling. In the 1990s, a massive clean-up, new sewage system, and ban on motorboats had brought the water quality back to 19th-century levels.

That was reassuring. Our Paris drinking water awaited us below. In the meantime I ordered a bottle of imported San Pellegrino, not a good choice for locavores and the environmentally sensitive, with the excuse that I needed bubbles to be happy. The bubbles helped us get through the long wait as dinner was prepared and served, with doses of history between courses.

For decades, the hotel had belonged to three unmarried sisters from Paris, known locally as Les Demoiselles Denèfles—a polite way to say “the old-maid Denèfles sisters.” They’d had “artistic leanings,” explained Claire, and one, a professional painter based in Montmartre, had probably painted the naïf landscape mural in the dining room. Dur important stopover or starting point on fa ning the war, the sisters took refuge here and helped the Résistance. They also hid Spanish civil war refugees and Jews in the attic, under the rafters. The hotel had been built in stages. It was a compact but disorienting labyrinth of hallways and rooms. Part of the attic had been rendered inaccessible by poorly planned additions, and the Nazis never discovered several secret rooms.

That night we slept lulled by the cascading water. It was good to know that, like the lake, the hotel had been reborn. For once, a tale of rebirth filled me with joy.

HIP HOP RAPTURE

Dawn’s fingers were at it again, tickling the lake as we trooped south along the western shore, heading for a municipal hostel about fifteen miles south in the middle of nowhere. All was still and idyllic and too lovely to be real. Wavelets lapped, ducks and geese quacked—and then the gardeners at a lakeside villa set to work with leaf-blowers and gas-powered hedge trimmers.

As I’d noticed time and again on our walk, the trouble with silence is, it’s fragile, easily shattered and quickly forgotten. Cities have no place for it. Once gone, no one knows what it sounds like. Silence has a sound, as the song suggests. A rounded, vibrating three-dimensionality.

My personal pilgrimage was starting to feel more like a quest for silence than anything else.

The Cure River is the principal source for Lac des Settons. But as we discovered by walking its length, many small creeks drain from the hills into its waters. We crossed a swampy spot and at one point I thought I saw the nibbled, piled workmanship of the region’s notorious wild beavers. They not only build dams. They chew up cabins, telephone poles, and anything else vaguely wooden they can get their teeth into.

When you stopped to think of it, the lake itself, and the Morvan’s other reservoirs, were in fact the results of beavering. No wonder the Celts worshipped the Beaver Goddess, Bibractis. She must’ve been a toothsome lass, able to fell trees with strong incisors, and control the course of streams with her tail. Every civilization needed water, and in one like the Celts’, dependent upon wood for fuel, defense, and housing, you could do worse for protection than hire a beaver.

Wild narcissus rimmed lovely meadows, accompanying us on our woodsy climb past the hamlet of La Chaise toward hilltop l’Huis Prunelle, where we’d reserved bunks for the night. We found the predictable crucifix at a crossroads and followed signs to what’s called a
Gîte communal
. As far as we knew, the hostel was the only lodging for miles around.

“Do you hear what I hear?” Alison asked.

I cocked my head. Something thumped. Techno? Gangsta Rap? “Oh, boy,” I sighed.

The surreal quality of the scene awaiting us at the top of the rise took us both by surprise. In the hostel’s yard, a boombox blared. Three large rear ends jiggled, hopped, circled, and swayed side by side in mesmerizing rythym. The posteriors belonged to three large, beaming female adolescents whose ancestry suggested not Vercingétorix but rather the Queen of Sheba.

Seven pairs of hiking boots lined the rim of a wellhead in the hostel’s yard. On a blanket spread upon the dazzling green lawn sat a woman slighter than the girls, of adult age, possibly thirty years old. She cupped her hands and shouted. The volume came down and the manager of the refuge appeared, a young Frenchman barely out of adolescence, his cheeks prickling with the kind of patchy stubble no designer would lay claim to.

Our dormitortext-align: justify; } p.indentedoy room offered military-style bunks, a writing table, and a lovely view. The boombox thundered again. “You’re the only ones in this room,” shouted the manager. “There’ll be a family next door. The group of kids is on the other side of the showers. It’ll be quiet—no music at night.”

We took a tour of the Spartan facilities. A Franco-African teenager was busy with a rubber squeegee, drying the floor of the shower room. He looked familiar. But I couldn’t place his face.

“It’s Craig,” I said moments later. “My nephew in Los Angeles. That kid has the exact same facial expression.”

Alison seemed unconvinced. “Could be,” she waffled. “What’s really surprising is the girl, the one dancing in the middle of the group. She looks like your niece Tina. Tina listens to that music and is built like her.” Admittedly it was a jarring taste of home and family so far away.

Back outside, the dancers had paused. Two boys stood nearby, awkward and gawky. One was as pale as a Charolais—or Nivernais—bull while the other was as black as the dancing girls. We said hello and nodded. I couldn’t help staring at the girl in the middle of the threesome. She did look startlingly like the problem adolescent Tina, my sister’s daughter, now adult and thoroughly delightful. I wondered if the girl also wore a stud through her tongue, gorged herself on junk food, and drove an SUV, as Tina once had. Probably not. This child was too young to drive. The multi-ethnic, multi-racial group seemed an accurate reflection of the reality of modern France. Certain nationalistic French may fancy themselves the descendants of Vercingétorix, but in fact the country is now a fondue or perhaps a
salade mixte
of nationalities, in much the same way as America.

It was only mid-afternoon, but it occurred to me that something was missing from the picture, something which could cause pain later. “Nope, no restaurant here,” said the manager, fumbling with a rumpled pack of cigarettes. “People who don’t bring food with them usually eat in Planchez.” He pointed. “It’s four kilometers that way by road.” That made eight kilometers round trip. Five extra, unexpected miles.

Together we went into his office, found a detailed survey map, and traced a path to food in Planchez. “You can take the shortcut on the Roman road,” he said, trying to sound encouraging. “I’ll phone and make sure the restaurant is open.” That was nice of him. And, yes, there was a Roman road nearby, clearly marked on the map as
Voie romaine
. It ran part of the way to the restaurant.

The chain-smoking manager turned out to be an avid hiker. He was twenty-four years old, had worked for ten years as a baker’s assistant and then reinvented himself. “No bakeries around here anymore,” he coughed. On his map I traced the Cure River until it disappeared under a blue water-drop symbol. Was this the fountainhead, the source? “The source of the Cure is a couple kilometers from here in the opposite direction,” he confirmed. Then he told me exactly how to get to the sacred fountainhead, reminiscing along his garrulous way. “Must be climate change,” he surmised; “the water used to be waist-high when I was a boy.”

“You mean five years ago?”

He blushed. “Ten or fifteen years ago you could swim in the river. Now.…”

“And what’s this?” I tapped the map.

“The Bibracte-to-Alésia hiking trailtext-align: justify; } p.indentedo,” he said. “Have you heard of Vercingétorix?”

“Vercingétorix?”

Somehow the Gallic warrior’s route didn’t appear on my map, so the manager made a photocopy of his. If we took the Gallic road from the Source de la Cure, he suggested, with a slight detour we could catch the GR-13 pilgrimage route again a few miles further on. “You can walk in the footsteps of the Gauls,” he added, his eyes twinkling.

BEAVERS, MEDLARS, AND VER-CIN-GÉ-TORIX

The woman on the blanket was named Sylvie and she came, she said, from a small village in Côte d’Ivoire—Ivory Coast. She’d lived in France for over half her twenty-seven years and was an
éducatrice spéciale
, a remedial, special-needs instructor. Her charges were the six kids we’d seen with the boombox. They came from a “problem” housing unit on the southeastern side of Paris. It was called La Cité des Néfliers.

“A little mixed up but basically good,” Sylvie said. “The girls are doing a Hip Hop performance next week, so they’re rehearsing.”

The girl who looked like my niece plonked herself down on the wellhead next to the boots. She asked what we were doing here.

“Walking across France,” I said.

“You’re
walking?
Why don’t you drive or take a bus?”

Sylvie laughed. “They’re pilgrims.”

“What’s that?”

I showed our maps and
Topo Guide
, and explained what a pilgrim was. “From here,” I said, “to here.” I started to tell her about Caesar, Vercingétorix, Saint James, and the pilgrim’s route. Her eyes widened.

“You
must
be crazy,” she blurted, bursting out with laughter. “Aren’t you kind of old to be doing that?”

Uncanny. She even sounded like Tina. The intonation was identical.

We chuckled at her words. She was right. It
was
crazy to walk across France. And we were, I realized, over thirty years older than she, fossils in comparison.

“How far did you walk today?” she asked.

I showed her the map and Lac des Settons. She whistled backwards as only the French can do, sucking air.

“Do you want to walk with us to the source of the Cure River?” I showed her the map. “There’s an ancient Gallic road—right here. The manager says it’s only two kilometers. That’s four, roundtrip. A breeze.”

The girl’s eyes widened. “You’re going to walk
more?
No way. Walk?”

“And tonight we have to walk another four kilometers to get dinner. Each way.”

She hooted, bounded up, and called over her dance partners. “These people are out of their minds,” she said. “I’m joking, of course.” She batted her eyelashes at her instructor.

A shiver ran down my sciatic nerve. It was Tina. A doppelganger. That was the very same expression and playful, irreverent tone Tina had used when I told her by telephone about our hike. Was this child a distant cousin of Tina’s long-dead father, Albert Oates, alias the Cyclops? The Harlem gangster who’d made good in San Francisco’s Haitext-align: justify; } p.indentedoght-Ashbury, by marrying a nice, mixed-up middle-class girl with a clotted-cream complexion and a misguided sense of social justice? Albert the Cyclops was a Black Panther, bloated from drink and scarred from street fights, who wore bottle-bottom glasses that seemed to enlarge and merge his angry eyes. What my smart, pretty older sister had seen in him, I would never understand. But she’d had the smarts and the courage to leave him and take the kids with her as soon as she could. When the Cyclops had dropped dead from cardiac arrest aged thirty-five, I’d danced a jig to celebrate. Happily, all that was ancient history.