Read Paris to the Pyrenees: A Skeptic Pilgrim Walks the Way of Saint James Online

Authors: David Downie

Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #General, #Travel, #Europe, #France

Paris to the Pyrenees: A Skeptic Pilgrim Walks the Way of Saint James (6 page)

Why had she married me, I wondered? Quiet and mysterious, Alison’s large blue eyes and handsome, youthful exterior masked a secret world visible only through keyholes, or reflected by “back-bearings,” as the spymasters used to say—or in her moody black-and-white photographs, many of them studies in decline, decrepitude, and decomposition.

BLACK FOREST CAKE WALK

It was early afternoon by the time we lumbered into Hôtel de la Poste. We suddenly remembered we hadn’t eaten lunch. Actually, I’d been ravenous, and had gotten used to the gnawing sensation. It was like dieting on steroids.

Under the heading “time-warp,” on-line dictionaries and GPS-enabled apps might consider linking to Hôtel de la Poste, a combination café-hotel-tobacconist important stopover or starting point on fa n’s shop in Cure. But, I wagered as we stepped inside, causing a bell to tinkle, no computer or handheld electronic device has ever passed the threshold, and a link would be difficult to establish.

A pale-skinned woman of middle age with a carrot-colored permanent appeared from a back room and whispered hello. We saw from a receipt on the counter that her name was Madame Danielle Schwer. That sounded anything but Gallic and seemed a good omen.

In a corner of the room, a grandfather clock ticked. A real, living grandmother, Schwer’s mother-in-law, it transpired, padded through the semi-darkness around the red linoleum-topped wooden tables and bentwood bistro chairs. “You’ve come all the way from Vézelay already?” Danielle asked, taking refuge behind her counter, in case we really were crazies. She emanated vulnerability. Shameless and hungry, I confirmed that we’d hiked to Cure without finding fuel en route, and wondered if there were some way of conjuring a sandwich. “I only cook for hikers who can’t get into town,” she apologized. “But I guess I could make you an omelet, if that’s all right.”

“Praise be!” I exclaimed, clasping my hands together.

The mineral water Danielle brought us was gone within minutes. Our gulps and the plop-plop-plop of sweat accompanied the bubbles in the water, the ticking of the grandfather clock, and the shuffling of grandmother Schwer’s slippers. A buttery scent drifted in. My stomach roared as the omelet came out. A black sheepdog three feet high at the shoulder followed it, his nose in the air. “It’s mushroom omelet,” Danielle said. She seemed to be whispering again. “He’s Lucky. Lucky is very gentle, so don’t be afraid.” She pronounced the dog’s name “Look-E.”

Danielle wished us
bon appétit
and took up her post behind the bar. She tuned a radio, raising the volume of a crooner’s voice. It covered the sound of our feasting. We fell upon the omelet the way heroes fall on swords. Perfectly cooked and folded, it tasted of fresh egg and was bursting with parsley and baby-button mushrooms—from a can, but who cared? Somehow the flavor was incredibly delicious.

“I got the eggs from the neighbors,” Danielle confirmed. “They’re the real thing.”

You could tell. It was a treat, and Alison said so. “Where are the chickens?”

“Next door,” Danielle answered shyly. “I fear you’ll hear the rooster in the night.”

With drooping eyes Lucky watched us, slobbering. His tail swept like a rag-mop, keeping time with the clock and the warbling 1950s music. We asked about the village and the hotel’s history. The riverside manor we’d seen, Danielle said, was originally an abbey, a very old abbey built before the year 1000 “or something like that.” The same family had owned it since 1790. They were prominent. Danielle stiffened. “Not much else to tell. My in-laws bought the hotel in 1936. It hasn’t changed, except that my father-in-law and husband both died a few years ago.” She paused. A veil fell over her eyes. “The clock was here when they bought the place. It ran for seventy years. Then it stopped one day, just like that. The same way they did.”

I swallowed hard. A childhood earworm began to play in my head.
And the clock stopped, never to run again, when the old man died.…

The bell on the door tinkled and a client teetered in. He lifted his cap and said
Messieurs-Dames
as if he were important stopover or starting point on fa nappearing in a vintage movie. Ruddy-cheeked and past retirement, the man clutched two empty wine bottles. Danielle filled them with bulk red from a tap, slid two packs of cigarettes across the counter, and lightened the man’s wallet by fifteen euros. She waited until he had gone before asking us if we’d like coffee. “Several,” I said, “strong and black.”

Like the hotel’s other three bedrooms, ours didn’t overlook the scenic river valley. The window opened instead onto a muddy parking lot. Our room was simple—clean, functional, and compact, devised for the traveling salesmen and modest vacationers of old. We washed up in cold water and stared at the bed, tempted. But to walk the three-mile Roman road from Cure to the Château de Bazoches as we’d planned and make it back by nightfall, we would have to leave right away.

Astérix back at the history museum in Saint-Père-sous-Vézelay had marked a thin straight line on our map. It ran from the modern highway at Domecy-sur-Cure to the Château de Bazoches. That line was the Via Agrippa, the freeway of its day linking the once-important Roman cities of Autun and Sens. Danielle showed us a shortcut. “You won’t be muddying your boots on the Via Agrippa,” she said enigmatically, and watched until we had rounded the corner uphill.

We climbed through pastures alive with newborn lambs and anxious ewes. The lambs were cotton swabs, the ewes cotton balls. Their chorus of bah-bah-bah encouraged us onward into the rain. At the top of the rise, we found the high-power electric lines and turnoff Astérix had described.

As anyone who’s walked on the Via Appia Antica outside Rome knows, the thing about most ancient roads is they’re pretty straight, and they’ve been pilfered almost to oblivion—everything stolen or destroyed from the paving stones on up to the temples, monuments, and cemeteries. You’ve got to spur your imagination to see the vanished taverns and fortresses and pottery works that once lined them, and the tunic-clad workers and slaves, the plump patricians and battle-scarred warriors.

As we walked along the raised roadway, I understood the meaning of “straightedge” and “rectitude.” The Romans cut to the quick. It was clear why Danielle had mentioned a lack of mud. The road was in perfect condition, topped with compacted gravel, clear trenches on either side. Pilgrims and tradesmen had taken over from the Romans, apparently. Now forestry workers maintained the historic highway.

In thick woods near the château, we came across oaks as old as Mary Magdalene, towering mother trees with round shaggy heads high in the sky. Moss dripped from crumbled walls built of rough-hewn boulders. Behind the château loomed a chestnut tree as broad as a California redwood. I tried but couldn’t spread my arms wide enough to embrace it.

“Saint Martin’s or Wotan’s tree?” Alison teased.

“Both,” I said. “And Caesar’s too. A trinity tree!”

It may once have been a major thoroughfare, but the Via Agrippa is now the back way into Château de Bazoches, a major attraction. The medieval castle and a gabled 18th-century manor attached to it were besieged by tour-bus loads of visitors. We bought tickets and gazed at the 350-year-old Lebanon cypress growing on the panoramic terrace. It seemed a seedling compared to the trees we’d seen in back. The view took in the angular village church of Bazoches. Pilgrims once made it their first or last stop on The Way of Saint James.

The trapezoidal, turreted fortress of Bazoches was the favorite M">passéisme incarnate.dChresidence of military engineer Marquis Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban, born, so we learned, in 1633. For historians, the château is a secular pilgrimage site, restored and filled with period pieces, tapestries, maps, and books written by or dedicated to this remarkable, energetic genius. As shown in the portrait that stared at us in the great hall, Vauban was a big, blue-eyed man. He appeared to have had a quizzical nature, meaning he seemed to be asking those gazing up at him why the job hadn’t been finished. Which job? Why, clearly, the job of modernizing France, Vauban’s lifelong project.

With knees like pruned sycamore stumps, I followed Alison, limping and clomping through the château’s magnificent salons, smelling beeswax but not dust. I learned that, in a career spanning fifty years, Vauban built or rebuilt a hundred fortresses and thirty walled citadels scattered across what he termed
le Héxagon
—the hexagon-shaped territory of France. As King Louis XIV’s Maréchal or Field Marshal, he became the most successful general up to then in French history, and France’s most famous military hero until Napoléon Bonaparte. Like Caesar, Vauban spent much of his life immersed in politics and court intrigue but he was a thoughtful man with a mission in life, not your average court sycophant. I glanced from the windows of the château back toward Vézelay, wondering how he could tear himself away from this place, and realized that’s precisely what we needed to do unless we were planning to spend the night.

ETERNAL RETURNS

Marching back to Cure in the plentiful rain, three thoughts drummed in my head. The first was that while finitude clearly applied to all living things, some trees seemed to be pretty well immune to mortality. Second, and related to this, I couldn’t help noting how similar Vauban’s genealogical trees—displayed prominently in the château—were to the living giant oaks and chestnuts we were passing again on the Roman road. Vauban’s family had owned the château long before he inherited it in the late 1600s. His descendants, the Chastellux family, own it to this day, in a way perpetuating the great man, carrying forward both his professional and genetic heritage.

As the product of a family of itinerant mongrels, it was hard for me to imagine being rooted anywhere for eight hundred years or more. Much more, in the case of Bazoches: naturally enough, we soon learned, given its location abutting the Roman road, the château sits atop a Roman fortress. That also explained the unusual, trapezoidal shape. Who knows upon what the Romans built their fortress: a trapezoidal, Gallic village?

Third and more disconcertingly, I’d learned that Vauban wasn’t Louis XIV’s yes-man but rather he was a reformer, an idealistic urban planner and critic of the
ancien régime
. Written in secret, his visionary 1698
Projet d’une dixme royale
called upon plutocratic French aristocrats and clergymen to give up their tax-free status and institute a revolutionary system of proportional taxation. In his travels, Vauban had seen the misery and dangerous malcontent of the peasantry and city-dwellers packed into teeming slums. Greed and unequal income distribution threatened the kingdom, he wrote, foreseeing
le déluge
that in 1789 swept Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette to the guillotine. He believed the geographical and political unity of the nation had to be preserved for the good of mankind. To Vauban’s mind, France was the heir to Rome. Louis XIV was the new Caesar, a leader who could pull together France’s many nations—from the Flemish speakers of the north to the Basques of the south—just as Caesar had brought Gaul and N want to light a candle9HChorth Africa into the Roman Republic, albeit in its dying days. But Vauban’s subversive treatise was leaked to the king in 1706. Unsurprisingly, instead of thanking his loyal servant, and welcoming his plan, Louis condemned Vauban and sent him home a broken, embittered man. There was no Brutus in this story, but the fates of Vauban and Caesar were similar—stabbed in the back by the men they loved and trusted.

Vauban’s broken heart is no longer in Bazoches. Whatever was left of it after rotting for 102 years in a sarcophagus in the village church was removed to Les Invalides in Paris. Since 1809 it has reposed in a cenotaph—a funerary monument that does not contain a complete body. Apparently the obsession with relics and body parts survived the Enlightenment and French Revolution, infecting the otherwise anticlerical Napoléon Bonaparte, who lionized the tragic Vauban and wanted his heart to be nearby him in Paris, capital of the revolutionary French Empire.

With evening upon us, we tramped back into Cure past the bleating cotton balls and swabs. Had Vauban read the classical writers, Caesar in particular, I wondered? Caesar admiringly described un-take-able Gallic earthworks very much like those Vauban designed 1,700 years later to protect French strongholds, seemingly following to the letter the descriptions Caesar gives for their construction in
The Conquest of Gaul
. The two men shared much, despite the centuries separating them. A populist, though also a demagogue and dictator, Caesar, like Vauban, struggled against the oligarchs in an effort to make the dying Republic and budding Empire a better, safer place. The Republic was dead, Brutus’s murderous betrayal vain. Centuries later, as Rome slid toward the anarchy of Late Antiquity, many commentators laid equal blame for the decline on the Germanic hordes and the Empire’s greedy plutocrats and tax system, the system Caesar had tried to reform before it weakened the Empire beyond the point of return from wild income inequalities, the need for perpetual warfare and economic conquest, and a military-industrial complex ante literam. It sounded depressingly contemporary.

History doesn’t repeat itself, naturally, and individual experiences clearly do not recur. That would be too easy. So forget Nietzsche and his “eternal return.” But as I walked and pondered our current economic mess and our astronomical income inequality, the words of 19th-century French wit Alphonse Karr sprang unbidden to mind. They seemed even more appropriate than Nietzsche: “The more things change,” Karr wrote, “the more they stay the same.”

As we stepped into Hôtel de la Poste, my talking pedometer announced that we had covered 11.33 miles since Vézelay and burned 1,215 calories apiece. Alison’s old-fashioned, silent, German-built model put the figure at 14 miles. In either case, we had trudged long enough for our first full day. Our mushroom omelet was a distant memory.

Dripping and bespattered despite the mud-less Roman road, we paused at the threshold to the hotel’s dusky dining room. In it sat what looked like a large tortoise, placidly munching lettuce, sipping water, and gazing out of the windows as night filled the river valley.
“Bonsoir,”
said the tortoise. “You passed me this morning going up the grade from Saint-Père-sous-Vézelay.”

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