Paris to the Pyrenees: A Skeptic Pilgrim Walks the Way of Saint James (26 page)

What the imaginary dispatch failed to report was, in the hours before the conveyance appeared, we’d clicked our heels, checked into our hotel, showered, napped, and limped back onto the cobbled streets of Beaune. It felt like a Burgundian theme park, a model of prosperity and order.

Disciples of Bacchus founded ancient Belenos nearly two thousand years ago. Since then, Beaune has grown ramparts around at 1,700 feet above sea level ero introducits concentric rings of streets. The streets are studded with medieval churches, Renaissance townhouses, and other landmarks, the most celebrated of which is Les Hospices. A prototype hospicehospital-cum-winery built in the 1400s, the building spreads around courtyards under gabled roofs topped with brilliant glazed tiles. This is the site of the annual November wine auction, during which actors and other celebrities promote Beaune and its wine for charity. It struck me as unusual that an institution long associated with the pain and suffering of the infirm should be given over to Hollywood-style glitz.

Walt Disney probably loved Beaune. It merges Mainstreet France and Fairytale Castle, but is in fact a real town, not a cardboard imitation. Beaune seemed all the more surprising to us now for its apparent lack of authenticity.

“Coffee,” Alison yawned, beating me to the word. “I guess I didn’t have enough this morning.”

“Admit it,” I yawned back, taking her by the arm and leading her across the street, once the elephant train had silently passed. “We overdid it yesterday, and need a rest before we start across wine country.”

Alison modulated her voice. “Would you like to spend an extra day in Beaune?”

“In Beaune?” I glanced at the window-shoppers slurping the season’s first ice cream cones and peering into the windows of fashion boutiques. Musicians played on street corners. Visitors lined up at the Hospices and a self-styled Museum of Wine nearby. It wasn’t really a museum, but rather a wine-tasting center and wine shop in the Convent of the Cordeliers. Somewhere down a banner-draped street, a public-address system blared advertisements in French and English. In the window of a wine shop, a single fake bottle of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti wore a price tag equivalent to the average annual income of about five billion of the planet’s inhabitants.

So, to answer Alison’s question, clearly in our questing frame of mind, Beaune was wasted on us and we would not be spending an extra day here.

Caffeine soon dissipated our cloistered mood. Alison herded me to the medieval ramparts to get the blood flowing, and then into the cavernous church of Notre-Dame de Beaune to cool me off.

Every significant building in town seemed to be signposted with a date, like a vintage bottle of wine. Notre-Dame was no exception. It had been built from the 12th to 16th centuries. A contemporary banner strung over the door promised
Ravivez votre Mariage
. Instinctively we scrutinized each other. Did our marriage need reviving? Was this walk putting a Lazarus bounce back into our nineteen-year union? I could feel my left eyebrow rising. After hiking all day every day, there wasn’t a great deal of zip left over to get a rise out of anyone. Perhaps the resuscitation would come later, on our return? Or would it, like so many aspects of our journey, manifest itself metaphorically?

Displayed inside the incense-scented Gothic church was a celebrated Black Virgin, so classified not by race, but because of the dark wood she was carved from, made even darker by staining from the oily fingers of the faithful. She wasn’t nearly as renowned as her counterpart at Rocamadour in the southwest of France, the one that helped bring composer Francis Poulenc back to the faith. Beaune’s Madonna was less primitive than the one in Rocamadour. The setting was also less dramatic. We stared at her and tried to filter out the voices of tourists and the camera flashes. Postcards and souvenirs beckoned from a stand.

A pious woman at the information desk directed us to a stained-glass window depict to someone at the mayort said.ing Beaune’s martyr, Saint Floscel. I asked her to spell and pronounce the name. “Floscel was very young when he died,” she said acidly. I couldn’t help thinking that her face looked distressingly like a baked Granny Smith. “We have Floscel’s jawbone,” she added. My eyes followed her sinewy finger to a reliquary.

“What special properties does the jawbone possess?” Alison inquired earnestly.

The woman said she wasn’t aware of particular powers. “That’s not what veneration is about,” she added, her mouth disappearing and reappearing amid arid folds. “It’s a question of culture and history and faith.”

“Of course,” Alison agreed.

“Of course,” I echoed.

Yes, I thought with grim satisfaction, remembering Lucette and Canon Grivot’s words. The relic-veneration business has evolved into the historico-cultural-enogastronomical tour business, turning places like Beaune into 21st-century pilgrimage sites. Easy to consume and navigate, they come with good signage, full-color postcards, wine-tasting tours in deconsecrated chapels, Plexiglas tourist trains, and sound-and-light extravaganzas.

BEAUNE VOYAGE

As we headed for the vineyards of the Côte de Beaune in morning sunlight, I couldn’t help reprimanding myself. The weather was chilly, but that wasn’t why Beaune left me cold. We’d had a fairly good time. We’d seen a martyr’s jawbone and, later, in the Hospices, the preserved heart of the hospital’s benefactor, François Brunet de Montforard. We’d been suitably impressed by the architecture. The ceiling of the former dormitory, built like an overturned wooden ship, boasted delicate, decorated ribbing and cross-timbers. We’d been genuinely moved and disturbed by the many-paneled polyptych in the museum. The painting had started life in the 1400s as an altarpiece, and its nine panels showing
The Last Judgment
, painted by Flemish master Roger van der Weyden, had stifled my irreverence. The nails and thorns and blood, the tortures undergone and the tears wept, were eerily contemporary and spoke all languages, uniting religions and creeds, including atheism.

On a lighter note, we’d slept in a comfortable room at l’Hôtel du Cêdre, and had enjoyed an extravagant meal consisting of snails and frogs’ legs in buttery cream sauce, exquisite spring lamb, and ripe cheeses, accompanied by a bottle of vintage wine.

Beyond Beaune’s ramparts and nondescript suburbs, we paused for a last look. “What a relief,” Alison said.

“Are we misfits? People would kill to be doing what we’re doing. What’s wrong with us?”

“Maybe we’re discovering what’s right with us,” Alison said cryptically.

Leafless, the vineyards of the Côte de Beaune spread before us. Again, I felt like a misfit. As we hiked into the terraced rows of Chardonnay and Pinot Noir grapes, the first words and images that sprang to mind were “cemetery” and “Normandy landings.” For the first time in days, I felt in my red windbreaker for my misshapen cockleshell from Utah Beach. Perfectly aligned, the vines held up by cement posts looked to me like gnarled black Christs on white crosses marching to infinity—or finitude. Here and there, a pale grape bud struggled to open. Forget Disney and Nietzsche. What would Walt Whitman say? There wasn’t a blade of grass to be seen, and not a single weed. Wasn’t green the color of hope? Or did it represent faith s head floating above the Roche de Solutré.edoor charity? I couldn’t remember. I’d never really understood why any sentient human being needed to be instructed to be charitable, why charity didn’t come naturally, without Saint Paul lecturing the Corinthians. Yes, I had read the Bible, not in church or Sunday school, but while studying Political Science at the University of California at Berkeley.

Despite herbicides, the hillsides would soon burst back to life, the grape leaves unfurling. Given the almost-zero church attendance in Burgundy, it was probably the only resurrection that mattered in wine country.

The familiar scallop shells and other signs marked our route, obviating the need for maps. According to the Council of Europe, our trail was an offshoot of the Way of Saint James. The local tourist board called it “la Route des Grands Crus.” If the regional tourist board was to be trusted, we were about to follow “la Route des Moines,” not Des Moines, Iowa, but rather the medieval monks of Cluny and other winemaking Burgundian abbeys. In their cowled brown habits, the monks had spread the art of transforming grapes, ostensibly to supply “true drink” ready for transubstantiation into Christ’s blood. Clearly, the monks had excelled at their job of making sacramental wine. But they and their ways had come and gone. So too had the Wars of Religion, the divine-right kings of France supposedly descended from Caesar, Clovis, and Charlemagne, and the devastating Revolution of 1789. Only the vines and the drink made of their fermented fruit had survived, enriching Burgundy, perhaps to excess.

VIRGINS AND ROCK FARMS

Wild lilac, fruit trees, and wall flowers sprang from the sun-bleached vineyards edged by walls of golden stone. The walls were stained by bluish copper sulfate. They parceled the hillsides neatly. Working in one plot marked “Premier Cru—Les Vignes Franches” were three grape-growers. They finished rooting out an old vine and prepared to plant a new one. I couldn’t help asking where the rootstock came from.

“America,” said one of the growers. Middle-aged and gruff, the roadmap of burst capillaries on his cheeks spoke volumes about his devotion to his profession. “Phylloxera killed our vines over a hundred years ago. Every rootstock in France is grown from American vines.” He paused to scrutinize us.
“Eh oui
, all good things come from America, starting with phylloxera.”

Did I detect irony? Though his apparent goal was to make us uncomfortable, the strategy failed. I smiled back relentlessly. “How in the world did you guess we were American? What I meant to ask you was, is there some kind of wholesale nursery for grapevines in Burgundy, or do you buy direct from America?”

Abashed by reverse irony, the man waved the trunk of the old grapevine and told us there were several dozen specialized root-stock suppliers, most of them in Provence, but the biggest of all was in the Savoie region. Everyone in Burgundy got their vines from the Savoie.

We said goodbye and in less than an hour were hiking downhill into Pommard. It looked remarkably like a winegrowing village should, with low stone houses wrapped by balconies, and small, no-nonsense gardens. The wineries and warehouses stood out back. The air was scented by sulfur. We’d been breathing it in the vineyards, and my head was beginning to throb. Organic grape-growing did not appear to be popular hereabouts. “Tradition” was what the winegrowers clung to. Tradition meant the 1950s chemical-warfare style of horticulture.

I knew from having read it somewhere that Thomas Jefferson’s wine supplier was a certain Monsieur Parent of Pommard. B confirmed thatoic, and y now Parent would be at least the great, great, great-grandparent of anyone still running the family business. Beyond the ungainly church and fountain on the main square, a sign pointed to the Parent winery. We knocked and rang but no one answered, which was for the best. Coffee is what I needed, not wine. By the looks of it, no coffee would be available in Pommard. And it wasn’t.

Borne along by a cool breeze, we blew into neighboring Volnay. A high-tech tractor stood by the roadside. Mounted on it was a large tank of clear chemicals. “Nice of them to do the weeding,” I remarked, my throat parched and eyes stinging. Alison spluttered. Her lips had gone the bluish color of copper sulfate. Either she’d succumbed to the vineyard treatments, or she was cold and hungry.

As if by sympathetic magic, the noon siren blew in distant Beaune and was echoed by a bell tolling from the church belfry. My stomach growled, turning my thoughts to finding an uncontaminated spot for our picnic. Volnay’s small square, shaded by clipped, leafless trees and set above a sea of chemically blasted vines, seemed a good place to enjoy our cheese sandwiches, apples, and water. The cold was intense. Alison’s teeth chattered relentlessly. The sound of her splitting molar was audible to me several feet away.

“Ouch!” she yelped. Granted, the local baguette wasn’t as tender as some, though it didn’t seem tough enough to break a tooth. “That dentist,” she muttered, trying to separate the shattered tooth from the lead filling.

After vain attempts at finding a villager or functioning telephone booth, we decided to hike as quickly as possible to Auxey-Duresses, the next village, and seek a dentist. To get there in a hurry, we’d have to walk on the highway. Otherwise, we could follow our trail to the ridge and expect to walk for several hours. Alison decided that a broken tooth wouldn’t kill her, whereas a speeding truck, tractor, car, or tour bus might.

From nestled village and groomed vines we found ourselves in a Mediterranean microclimate atop the hill. Lilacs vied with contorted pines. The scent of wall flowers gradually replaced that of the pesticides, and the meandering trail curled unexpectedly to the feet of an imposing Madonna. Standing high on a pedestal above the vineyards, she wore robes of royal blue and white and didn’t look much like Catherine Deneuve, whose effigy was long used as the model for Marianne. The sun was bright, glinting off the Virgin’s white cloak. I couldn’t be sure, but Notre-Dame des Vignes appeared to be weeping rusted tears. A plaque stated that she’d been erected here on September 17, 1871 to protect the vines:
Posuerunt me custodem in vineis
, Cant 1.5.

Relics and veneration were in vogue at the time, weapons in the fight against phylloxera, the vine-destroying aphid that changed the world. I repeated the thought to myself. “The aphid that changed the world.” It sounded like the title of a SciFi flic.

Despite phylloxera’s tick-like appearance when first born, the button-sized insect had struck like winged lightning. In a matter of decades,
Phylloxera Daktulosphaira vitifoliae
had crept and wriggled and flown across Europe from the contaminated American soil unwittingly shipped in the 1850s with plant samples from the East Coast to England. It crossed the Channel mysteriously, perhaps in produce shipments or by flying with its own little wings, to France, Italy, Spain, Germany, and Eastern Europe, devastating vineyards everywhere. Nine in ten European winegrowing areas were affected.