Paris to the Pyrenees: A Skeptic Pilgrim Walks the Way of Saint James (15 page)

I sighed, watching the girls dance, all smiles and sass. What future would they forge for themselves in the Cité des Néfliers? It’s hard to grow up with fear and hatred in your heart, no matter what the color of your skin.

An hour later, we were still talking with Sylvie and the girls. The boys huddled across the yard, glowering and eavesdropping. The one who’d been upstairs in the shower room appeared. He signaled meekly. Now I recognized him. He was the kid I’d helped out of the river. He’d also been among the helmeted kids on the obnoxious Quads near Dun-les-Places. I waved back.

“Yeah, we did rafting and Quads,” confirmed another of the dance trio, a girl whose dream it was, she said, to become an air hostess.

“But the thing we liked best was the cows,” said the third girl.

Sylvie explained that these children had never seen a cow before. Or a horse. Or a field. Though born only minutes from downtown Paris in the Cité des Néfliers, they’d never been beyond their housing project, and were equally unacquainted with the City of Light. I asked the first girl if she knew what a
néflier
was. She shook her head. So did the others. I called over the boys and asked them. They shrugged.

“It’s a kind of funny-looking fruit tree,” I said. “It has small, brownish-orange fruits that are mostly seed. We call them loquats in California. The English call them medlars.”

None had known that their housing project was named Loquat City, a baffling discovery.

“The only thing to do is tear down the projects and start over again,” said Sylvie. “The problem isn’t money or racism; it’s isolation.” Sylvie had never experienced prejudice or racism, she claimed. She and her parents had spoken little French when they arrived. But they’d integrated, studied, found work, and were happy. She considered herself French, no hyphen needed. “The problem with juvenile delinquency is purely individual,” she added. “Most kids in those places are normal. They just don’t think they’re French, but they’re not African either, I can tell you. And though they come from poor families, they think life should be served to them on a platter.” She shrugged. “In my humble opinion, the worst thing the government did was abolish the draft in the mid 1990s. Is it a coincidence that that’s when the rioting and all the Islamic fundamentalism started? Before that, people were forced to mix, to rub shoulders, and to work.”

I turned to the Tina-doppelganger. She was listening intently. “Are you French?” I asked. She made a face but didn’t answer me. “I’ve got a French passport,” I volunteered, “but I’ve also got a problem with pronunciation. Could you help me with a very difficult French name that only the French seem able to say properly?” I got out my digital recorder. “It’s something like Vercingét … Vércint.…”M">passéisme incarnate.dCh

“Vercingétorix?” she asked, pronouncing the Gallic warrior’s name with ease. She rattled off a brief history of the Gauls, confirmed she thought me crazy, and then declaimed “Vercingétorix, Vercingé-torix, Ver-cin-gé-to-rix” in flawless French. I played it back to everyone’s delight, and played back the woman at the Résistance museum, and the donkey near Saint-André-en-Morvan.

“You pass the test,” I said. “Very French.”

We listened several more times, the kids rolling over themselves, laughing, repeating
Vercingétorix, Vercingé-tor-ix
and
Jules César
.

SPRINGS ETERNAL

When the baker had been a boy those many years ago—the distant 1990s—the Cure River rose majestic from these hills and tumbled into Lac des Settons. Or so he claimed.

I wanted to see the geyser where our tap water in Paris came from. I wanted to find a water nymph or beaver goddess, a medallion, woolly mammoth tusk, or olifant. We would just have to hike those few extra miles to the Source de la Cure.

Lost already as we hiked down a lonely dirt road behind the hostel, we passed the umpteenth roadside crucifix. This one was made of wood, not stone or iron, and had a niche carved out of it in which sat a plastic Madonna statuette, protected by a wire grate. Behind the Madonna spread swampy woodlands. “Here we are,” I said brightly. The woods were called Le Bois de Cure. Our trail plunged into them like a knife in water.

Half an hour later, we stopped to study the photocopied section of surveyor’s map. By now we should’ve been up to our waists in water at the Sources de la Cure. But it took us a good twenty minutes more of wandering to find the small wooden sign by the logging road pointing into thick forest.

The ancient Gallic trail made famous by Caesar’s
Conquest of Gaul
lay just beyond the Cure’s putative fountainhead. That made sense. Vercingétorix and his fearless men would’ve needed a watering hole. But there was no sign of water. I scampered and slid into the underbrush. At the bottom of a ravine, a trickle of water welled. The Cure was a leak, a hole in the leafy forest floor. I rinsed my fingertips, wished the water
au revoir
in Paris, and couldn’t help looking around for votive offerings left for Bibractis, the damp-eyed goddess of the springs.

“Maybe it gets waist-high a little farther along,” I said hopefully as we hiked back to the hostel. “The water table must’ve fallen, like my arches.”

CHRISTMAS IN APRIL

Because there was no food at the hostel, that evening we tramped for miles, famished and rattle-boned, through scented Christmas-tree plantations on the Roman road from l’Huis Prunelle toward Planchez and dinner. Plastic pots with knee-high conifers peppered the hills. As night fell, I feared we’d have to settle for ham-on-baguette sandwiches at the first café, if we could find a café, and then slog back feeling our way in the dark. Naturally I’d forgotten to bring our flashlight, and felt not only stupid but also irresponsible.

At 7 P.M., we found ourselves on Avenue François Mitterrand, in the center of the narcoleptic “martyr” village of Planchez. It too had been destroyed by the Nazis and rebuilt in haste. The Restaurant-Hôtel le Relais des Lacs appeared before our eyes. A mirage? We knocked the mud off our boots, tidied our want to light a candle9HChclothes, and succeeded in rousing a chambermaid. It was early for dinner, she said, eyeing us. The Morvan was not the maid’s native land. She seemed glad to alternate English with her rough French, and said her home in Istanbul did feel rather distant.

We had the place to ourselves. All the better, since we were underdressed and musky. This looked like a serious provincial gourmet restaurant, with starched gray and blue tablecloths, blue candles in silver candlestick holders, and oversized wine glasses. A prim hostess busied herself. There had been a change in ownership, she said. The new boss was a mysterious-sounding Parisian named Philippe Morinay. Another Philippe?

Plied with bite-sized delicacies to keep us from swooning, soon we were into serious gluttony, of the kind I’d long excelled at but had foresworn. There was no need to diet, though, when walking twenty miles a day, I told myself, ordering rack of lamb with roasted garlic, leek tops, carrots, and a caloric, unctuous potato casserole. Alison opted for the whole roast squab. It barely had time to alight before she polished it off. So much for the baguette sandwich.

As we enjoyed our pudding-like
fondants au chocolat
dessert, a contingent of Belgians arrived, already lubricated and broadcasting the scent of hoppy beer. Caesar had skirmished with the Belgae, the fierce Celtic ancestors of our fellow diners. Two thousand years ago, they’d swept swords-drawn from Germany into Holland, Belgium, and France, dragging behind wagonloads of womenfolk and children, terrorizing, looting, and eventually taking over and melding with the locals. Now they spoke passable French, arrived natty in luxury cars, and bore thick wallets. Everyone seemed happy.

I glanced at the clock. It was 8:30 P.M., the start of dinner for most Europeans. We eavesdropped and divined that François Mitterrand had stopped here many times during his regularly scheduled Burgundian Résistance pilgrimages. From our hostess we learned Mitterrand was polite and
correct
—wonderful French understatement meaning “okay” when “great” is needed. But my attention span began to slip as the many miles on our meters tugged down my eyelids.

Dapper, tanned, and radiating ease, the establishment’s owner Monsieur Morinay surveyed the dining room. He wondered why we were lodged in the dreary municipal hostel when he had thirty rooms upstairs. We hadn’t known of his hotel, I explained. When he heard we had no flashlight and had already walked twenty miles, he gallantly offered to drive us back. It was a long walk but a short ride. Very short, it transpired.

En route at 100-plus kph, the dashing Morinay talked nonstop and solved a riddle that had perplexed me all evening. What were a glitzy guy and a restaurant with blue candles doing in an isolated village like Planchez? “Nothing to do with Druids or spirituality, is it?” I asked. He chuckled. He too had grown tired of the stress of the Paris area, he said. The allure of the Morvan and the tourist-rich lakes of Setton and Pannecière appealed to his business sense and love of sailing.

This was disappointing news. Here was another urban refugee. “You’ve moved to the mountains to sail?” I gripped the armrests of the car as we slid around a corner. “This looks like Christmas-tree heaven, not the French Riviera.”

“It’s the live Christmas-tree capital of Europe,” Morinay chuckled again. “From late October to Christmas Eve, this road is bumper-to-bumper with trucks. The plantations extend all around. They work around the clock.” He pointed to floodlights, now dark, and a trucking important stopover or starting point on fa n facility.

I blinked, thinking of Santa Claus and Roman roads and how, during the Empire, relay teams of oyster-runners had carried baskets of exotic bivalves from Brittany to Rome in a mere four days. It was taking us a lot longer than that to hike across the Morvan. How long did it take a Christmas tree from Planchez to reach Paris? A matter of hours, Philippe said proudly. I stifled the temptation to express concern for the way the magnificent forest of the Druids had become a trashed tree plantation. At least it was still a forest of some kind.

Like magic, the car skidded to a halt. The next moment, the hostel loomed dark and quiet before us. We hit our bunks and awoke before dawn to the barking of dogs. “I’m not sure why,” I said, rubbing my eyes, “but this time I dreamed of pearls and gladiators and François Mitterrand.”

IT’S SOCRATES, SHERLOCK

After many embraces and handshakes and promises to meet up with the project kids again at the Cité des Néfliers, of whom we had grown unexpectedly fond, we hiked away from l’Huis Prunelle heading for Anost, saluted the caged Madonna and the fountain-head of the Cure River, and picked up the Bibracte-to-Alésia Gallic trail that Vercingétorix had used to escape from Caesar in 52 BC. Morning sun brushed the tips of the fir trees. The air smelled of lemon and spices. We had many miles to hike today, but I looked forward to experiencing firsthand a slice of Gallo-Roman history.

Nowadays the Gauls’ ancient road goes by the name Route Forestière des Potrons. It looks much like any other logging road, attractive in parts where mature trees grow, scruffy in others. There are no monuments on it to Vercingétorix or Caesar, and the signage is minimal. To appreciate it, you need to come equipped with a sense of history, a good map, and a love of forestry cycles.

We knew from reading that in the ancient world, the woods were solid beech at altitudes of over 700 meters—about 2,200 feet above sea level. Mixed beech and oak and ash grew at lower levels. But for the last century, Douglas fir has taken over.
Les Doog-lass
, as the Burgundians call them, grow like proverbial weeds. They’re handsome trees in a random, natural setting. Commercial timber plantations of tightly packed, precision-aligned Douglas firs are lightless and sinister, however, like the insides of abandoned industrial plants, or freeway underpasses.

We climbed Mont Martin with great anticipation, hoping to find some trace of Vercingétorix, and came instead upon stacks of freshly felled firs. Some had trunks as thick as wine barrels and appeared to be centuries old. Stripped of their branches, they looked like beached whales. I sat atop one, waiting for Alison and enlightenment. To kill time, I counted the tree’s growth rings and suddenly felt very old.

Impossible, I muttered. I recounted, unable to believe I was older than the tree by five years. No wonder the species had won out. To grow this large, a beech needs twice as long—a century or more. The thought of living to be a hundred filled me with dread. It meant I wasn’t even halfway there. When Dante wrote in
The Inferno
of being lost in a deep dark forest “in the middle of our life’s journey” he was talking about being thirty or thirty-five years old, the age of a mid-life crisis back in the early 1300s. We weren’t even halfway across Burgundy, either, I reflected, though our hike wasn’t Dantesque, not in the sense of seeing the tortures of the damned and learning what the fear of God really meant. The poet had evolved during his journey, had come out a better man—having placed his enemies somewhere to someone at the mayorwe was within the circles of Hell. Was I evolving or still meandering in Limbo?

Alison waved at me from a hundred yards away. It was a warning wave, I could tell. Earlier, we’d both heard the whine of motocross bikes. Now I understood. Her signal meant she would capture the bikers with her camera. I tempered my rage by remembering the kids from the Cité des Néfliers. No, I told myself, I would not want
their
heads lopped off by piano wire.

Moments later, four motorcycles flew by, spraying gravel and dirt. One popped a wheelie, making his mount rear up on its back wheel, like the boy on the Quad in Vézelay. Weren’t they talented at channeling their testosterone? All four riders wore expensive leather body suits and shiny, multi-colored helmets with corporate logos writ large, the heraldry of our day.

Silence returned and a mile south, in what appeared to be the middle of nowhere, and probably was, we came upon a wild boar park. It resembled the deer park of the day before yesterday, except that here we saw no animals, only their tracks and traces—polished tree trunks and trenches dug with tusks. An arrow pointed down a logging road to something called Maquis Socrate. We recognized the name from Mitterrand’s Résistance museum in Saint Brisson.