Paris to the Pyrenees: A Skeptic Pilgrim Walks the Way of Saint James (29 page)

Somewhere between the rib-eye steaks and the wheel-sized cheese platter, Eva Fage’s earlier remarks about “the French character” welled up in my mind. While driving us to Mount Rome, she’d shared her thoughts with us. “Old-fashioned,” “fuddy duddy,” and
passéiste
were terms that seemed to apply not only to the restaurant, but much else we’d seen so far in Burgundy. Yet Eva had provocatively disagreed, defining the French approach to culture and history as
tabula rasa
—the Latin motto meaning “clean slate.” It also meant blanket destruction or cancellation. Her theory was that the Romans had destroyed the Gauls’ language, culture, institutions, and cities. Then, barbarians had wiped out the adopted Gallo-Romans’ culture and institutions. The church eventually erased the last traces of Paganism, and French Revolutionaries had scrubbed out everything precious to the ancien régime, from the royalty to the clergy, from religious art and architecture to popular festivals and saints’ days. France’s was actually a tragic, dark history of rapine, wrack, and ruin.

The theory appeared at first glance to conflict with my own, which I’d begun to think of as the Janus Principle. But the more I reflected, the more the two theories appeared to be complementary. The
tabula
was never truly
rasa
, just as a re-usable CD or DVD bears traces of earlier “writing.” The
tabula rasa
was more a palimpsest, a many-layered thing, written and rewritten. French society in each age was certainly racked by violent upheavals, but it was always divided almost equally between the preservers and destroyers, between those who liked dark, shady lanes and ruins to those who preferred highways and sunshine, from the Gauls to the Futurists. That included contemporary “neo-liberals” who wanted to throw out the Gallic baby with the global bath water, destroying French “protectionist” institutions in imitation of America and Britain. The innovators-versus-the-preservers was an ongoing struggle, a millennial wrestling match, and it was guaranteed to run and run.

After all, the French had the TGV, Mirage fighter jets, and extremely sophisticated high-tech devices of all kinds, plus some of the world’s most advanced medical techniques and scientific equipment, not to mention more nuclear power plants and nuclear technology than any other country except the United States.
Passéisme
was only part of the picture. We Mirage fighter jetdCh forward-looking Americans had almost totally lost our sense of history and had systematically destroyed our past, excelling at high tech and actually building the futuristic cities the Europeans had imagined. Yet we had the worst trains in the Western world, rusting bridges and leaky dikes, an electoral system from the 1700s, and we still used Fahrenheit, inches, and ounces. No one would dare call Americans
passéistes
.

“It’s complicated,” I sighed to myself, too tired to work out the equation.

“What’s complicated?” Alison’s knife was poised over the pungent, creamy center of a 70-percent-fat Brillat-Savarin cheese, the most luscious, fatty, caloric, and delicious cheese known to man.

“France, the French, America, history, the things that drive us. It’s all wonderfully complicated,” I said. “Even the cheese platter. Look at it. There are dozens of cheeses. No wonder de Gaulle said it was impossible to govern a country with two hundred cheeses.”

Before leaving the restaurant to meet Eva outside, I stopped by the restrooms, and felt Providence calling. The wallpaper above the urinal bore a scallop-shell motif. I stared at it for a long time. Whether it was an incitation to march onward all the way to Compostela in Spain, or simply meant L’Ouillette was a site of gastronomic pilgrimage, I was unsure. Back at the B&B, Eva Fage confirmed that there wasn’t a single fast-food restaurant within miles, and that, at least in the food department, Janus was still winning out over
tabula rasa
.

THE “WHERE’S MY STUFF” SOCIETY

The topics that kept us company the next day as we marched along the sluggish but beautiful tree-lined Canal du Centre were digital tabula rasa of everything that was analog, from Internet chat rooms and budding social media, to wiki-everything, bloggers, podcasters, even the delivery-tracking feature, the “where’s my stuff” button on
Amazon.com.
The previous night, we’d slept like stones. While discoursing with Eva over breakfast on the topic of individual isolation and youth culture in the electronic age, we’d each drunk about a quart of coffee and orange juice and eaten thousands of calories. In her curiously optimistic way, Eva had lamented what she thought of as the spoiled, single-child family, and the neutered, sanitized, virtual-reality world offered by the digital age—an age of pixels and screens and earbuds and photo-cellphones and unlimited downloads of everything you ever wanted but probably didn’t need. Where, she wondered, was the human contact, the faith, hope, and charity that once taught children the virtues of selflessness and altruism? Where in this electronic, self-satisfied orgy did anyone learn that virtue is its own reward, with no payback necessary?

A refugee from the Age of Ideology, someone who’d escaped an Orwellian, totalitarian world behind the Iron Curtain, Eva was a lover of risk-taking, unsubsidized, passionate, hands-on, idealistic outgoing personality types. The coldness of computers and the Web turned her off. That was why contemporary French society, it seemed to her, rewarded the wrong behavior patterns: passivity, fear, welfare-lust, world-weariness, cynicism, and navel-gazing or voyeurism. Though we weren’t privy to her family situation, Eva appeared to have first-hand knowledge of the problem. We’d reluctantly agreed with much of what she said, but in doing so felt technophobic and middle-aged. Digital tabula rasa, I couldn’t help thinking, would turn out to be like all the other attempts at wiping the slate clean—only a partial success. Something from the old analogs head floating above the Roche de Solutré.edo world would persist. Not everyone would clamor for in-vitro fertilization, for instance, or downloaded pornography. Sex firsthand had an excellent chance of surviving well into the 21st century, as did food and wine and the quest for understanding. Our meandering could not be digitalized and, as the neo-Buddhist Philippe had pointed out way back at our B&B in Marigny, nothing was pointless.

A cruise boat glided by as we clicked our heels and rolled forward onto our toes, following the paved towpath flanking the canal. Nothing magical happened. Instead of waiting passively to be transported, we hit the merciless asphalt road again, and soon enough found ourselves in soleful Chagny, a small, homely town at the junction of the Canal du Centre and the slow-flowing Saône River. It was May Day. On every street corner, sellers of lilies-of-the-valley hawked their blooms.

Chagny’s rust-belt industries had departed decades ago, leaving tourism, winemaking, and discount big-box outlets to pick up the slack. Leprous stucco flaked off the damp-looking houses. We were at the bottom of a valley, and the topography was reliably flat. We walked past a handful of fast-food joints and nicotine-scented parimutuel bars. Groups of youths sat astride motor scooters and smoked cigarettes, their cellphones chirping.

“Tabula rasa,” I remarked, “the sooner the better.”

The scarred façade of the church of Saint Éloi was cracked open and seemed on the verge of collapse. Inside, a lone organist played haunting music. The air was scented by lilies and sprays of other fragrant spring flowers. A cockleshell holy water font confirmed that we were on the medieval Saint James pilgrimage route, the once-important branch from Autun to Chalon-sur-Saône. We were now a mere 863 kilometers—about 540 miles—by freeways to the Pyrenees. On hiking trails it was much longer, another two months’ walk. But the distance no longer seemed daunting.

In the middle of the square between the church and an abandoned funeral parlor stood what looked like a rusting dumpster. I circled it, holding an empty plastic bottle and bakery bag, brushing off croissant crumbs from my windbreaker and looking for an opening, so that I could throw away my garbage.

“It isn’t for trash,” a white-haired woman called out from her garden, facing the dumpster. “It looks like a trash bin, and everyone throws tomatoes at it, and everyone hates it, including me, because they moved the crucifix that used to stand here; but it’s an artwork. We tried to get the authorities to take it away and put the cross back, but they won’t.”

Judging by the encrusted tomato seeds, gashes, and graffiti, the woman’s report was accurate. On a plaque I read the artwork’s title, “Octagon for Saint Éloi,” a date, 1991, and the name of the artist. Richard Serra? There must be some mistake.

As it turns out, the artwork had been commissioned by François Mitterrand and his culture minister, Jack Lang, to commemorate the defunct steelworks of nearby Le Creusot. “Octagon for Saint Éloi” is solid steel, though not stainless. It weighs fifty-seven tons, and stands as tall as a roadside crucifix. Tabula rasa wasn’t going to be easy. Maybe that’s why successive governments had declined to remove it, despite the locals’ loathing of art imposed from above by Paris.

With relief and another ten thousand clicks of our heels, we rejoined the canal, picnicked among the abandoned industrial plants, crossed a floodplain scattered with tract homes, and took the main asphalt road into sleepy Rully, where we’d reserved a room for the night. The v Mirage fighter jetdChillagers might well be trying to sleep after working in vineyards since dawn, I reflected. But the young men on roaring, spluttering dirt bikes circling the winemaking village’s main square made napping impossible.

In most other ways, however, sleep had come to Rully as it has come to much of rural France. The butcher’s shop, bakery, and grocery, not to mention the church, were shuttered. Had the newly built shopping malls and discount outlets of Chagny and Chalon-sur-Saône already put the town’s stores out of business? The new religion of consumerism required a new forum, the mall. I said so to Alison with something like righteous wrath, as if I had lived the life of an ascetic, reclusive monk, and never shopped at Kmart or CostCo or bought digitally from
Amazon.com.

“That’s another interesting theory you have there,” Alison remarked. “The problem with it is, today is May Day. It’s a holiday, and it’s also lunch time. So you might not be able to extrapolate about the death of rural France or the relationship of ancient Gaul to Rome and modern consumerism from this random sample.”

My badly shaved, wind-burned cheeks hid a spreading blush. She did know how to take the stuffing out of me.

Slightly crumpled, I was pleased to see that our hotel was open and packed with customers, despite its unpronounceable name, Le Vendangerot. The word felt like saltwater taffy in my mouth.

The creaking stairs, groaning planks, and squeaking hinges suggested a pre-modern construction date. Our room tunneled back in time, through the linoleum of the 1950s to the wood and bevelled mirrors of some indefinable yesteryear. It was another objective correlative of France’s layer-cake civilization, a palimpsest, not a tabula rasa, of décor. A robin perched on the windowsill and watched us through the fluttering lace curtains. We stretched out and, lulled by birdsong and motorcycle engines, woke up two hours later, refreshed and ready to explore.

HIGH PRIESTS OF THE AEDUI

The familiar blue-and-yellow scallop-shell signage led us back across Rully to the church. By some miracle, it was open now. Praying pilgrims were few. We had the sanctuary to ourselves. It reminded me of others like it, several hundred of them, churches rebuilt and enlarged during the 1800s’ war against the twin foes of phylloxera and the secular materialism of the industrial age.

A sheet of paper gathering dust on a worm-eaten table provided local statistics. In 1966, there were 541 parishes and 527 priests, average age 51, in the Saône-et-Loire
département
, claimed the compiler of the statistics. In 1987, the figures were 541 parishes and 388 priests, average age 64. By 2006, the 541 parishes had been folded into 50, presided over by 213 priests, average age 72.

A faded newspaper clipping on the same table reported the words of Monseigneur Rolland Minnerath, who welcomed the new cardinal, Benoit Rivière, wishing him a “happy and vigorous, energetic apostolic ministry in Aeduan country.”

“Aeduan country?” Alison asked, reading the sentence aloud. “Do they mean the Saône-et-Loire and the Aedui tribe?”

I couldn’t help smiling. “The Gauls are alive and among us, like Jesus at Easter. The territory of the Aedui extended to Mâcon. Why be surprised that local clergymen still evoke the memory of a cannibalistic Pagan tribe crushed by Caesar two thousand years ago? And remember, Julius Caesar was declared ‘divine’ by the Senate. Augustus Caesar was later considered divine par at 1,700 feet above sea level heoic, and tly because he supposedly foretold and possibly was himself the Messiah. Remember Vergil’s little story about a child who will be born and usher in the Golden Age? Who led Dante through the Inferno? Vergil did! Vergil wasn’t punished in the worst part of Hell. He was in Limbo, along with many of the great classical figures, and the innocent, unborn babies. Because he foretold the coming of Christ in the guise of Augustus.”

Alison blinked and sighed, waiting for me to run out of breath. “So where is Augustus in the Divine Comedy? In Limbo with Vergil, or in a hotter part of Hell?”

“That’s complicated,” I said. “The worst part of Hell was frozen, not flaming.”

“You really should have become a professor or a politician, or maybe a lawyer.”

“Nonsense,” I objected. “I’m a fabulist by profession, and it’s a noble profession. Let me finish my thought train before you derail me again. What is the fatal flaw—in the eyes of the French clergy—the flaw in our divine, putatively Christ-like ancient Romans, who were just coincidentally the inventors of the Pontifex Maximus—the Pontiff? I’ll tell you what. They weren’t Gallic! It’s downright shocking. Even the Catholic priests here are infected by nationalistic neo-Druidism.”