Paris to the Pyrenees: A Skeptic Pilgrim Walks the Way of Saint James (13 page)

It’s said that after Mitterrand left London, a furious de Gaulle exclaimed something like “That man should be eliminated.”

The two men’s rivalry continued into the postwar period. De Gaulle still distrusted Mitterrand, who’d morphed by then from a Vichy Catholic of aristocratic lineage into a Résistance hero and spokesman for the budding new socialism of the late 1940s. Mitterrand’s brand of
socialisme
turned out to be old-fashioned prewar patriarchal Statism wrapped in pink, but the nation only discovered that years later, after he became president in 1981 and ruled the country like a monarch for fourteen years. That is gross simplification, I had to remind myself, contemplating the forest beyond the dining room’s picture windows. French politics are a deep, dark, tangled wood populated by wily, cynical beasts. The odd thing is, more than a decade after his death in 1996, François Mitterrand remains a hero, especially in the Morvan. Perhaps, I told myself as we headed downstairs to bed, perhaps he was an authentic hero and his boosters know something we don’t, something witnesses would have their throats slit to back up.

DOMINE, QUAD VADIS?

As dawn tickled us with pink fingers, Alison announced she was determined to see Dun-les-Places, one of the area’s martyr villages. Over breakfast, Huub said it was only 800 meters out of our way. That meant half a mile in each direction, an added mile on the already long day we’d planned. But I, too, was curious. So we backtracked and detoured. To avoid the main highway, we took a dirt road southwest. Half an hour and one and a half miles later we spied the village. Between us and it rose a cloud of buzzing dust. The dust sounded like a swarm of stirred bees. There were no bees. They were Quads, their motors revving. Since we had strayed from the pilgrim’s route, I had no right to object. We stood aside. As they passed, I thought I recognized the wary-eyed black teenager who’d fallen off his raft into the Cure River the day before. The riders were helmeted. I couldn’t be sure.

“Did you see how slowly they drove by?” Alison asked, trying to calm me. “One of them even waved.”

So had a certain number of Nazis, probably, as they flew overhead during the war, smiling and waving as their bombs fell merrily to earth. Had Picasso been here then, he’d have painted another
Guernica
.

The Luftwaffe and Nazi armored columns bombed and shelled and burned Dun-les-Places for three days, from June 26 to June 28, 1944. The Allies had just landed in Normandy. The events were invisibly linked. In preparation for the landings, the Résistance and Allied “special forces” had stepped up attacks in the Morvan. For each attack, there was a Nazi reprisal.

Proud and pigheaded, after the war the French rebuilt martyr villages like Dun, and all these years later you could still tell: they were ugly and haunted.

Huub had mentioned that the late Danielle Mitterrand, the former president’s widow, reportedly a bona fide
Résistante
born and brought up in Cluny, had made a yearly pilgrimage to Saint-Brisson and Dun-les-Places. The monument upon which Danielle would place her wreath each year lists the names of those who died in the monstrous Nazi attacks. In front of the monument is a massive 19 rue Saint-Jacquesoic, and th-century church built of granite. Behind the monument, a weathered, sculpted cross sits atop a hewn block—probably a recycled pre-Celtic standing stone. Nearby rise two obelisks. The collection of carved stonework seemed to cover about four thousand years of credence—and bloodletting.

Empty stood the square and empty the church. It felt remarkably outsized. My footsteps echoed as I walked around the ambulatory looking for signs of Saint James. I found none. However, Alison was at last able to light a taper, for whom and for what purpose I wasn’t aware.

On the main highway into town, two tall, pneumatic, brightly colored balloon-banners wiggled in the breeze, looking like giant condoms and advertising a Japanese motorcycle manufacturer and exciting Quad excursions. This was the phoenix that had arisen from Dun’s ashes.

HAM SANDWICHES AND BARBED WIRE

Around noon, as we crested a clear-cut mountain en route to our hotel for the night at Lac des Settons, Alison detoured down a logging road where a teenage boy on a motocross racing bike revved his steed. Click. Bzzz. Immortalized on cellulose film and in pixels. The site was not scenic. Logging rarely is. An unseasonably hot sun drove steam up from the trashed forest floor and its row upon symmetrical row of Douglas fir stumps.

Beyond the stumps and the rutted logging road we came upon a refuge, la Maison forestière du Breuil. Flanking it was an observation tower, a murky pond, and a deer park surrounded by a tall wire fence. The enclosure looked like a misplaced petting zoo, its occupants half a dozen tame, tired stags with mottled coats. One of them had blue eyes. The eyes followed us. The stag licked himself like a dog and seemed to be asking what on earth we were staring at. I asked myself the same question, and wondered what on earth this so-called “park” was all about, other than commercial timberland, off-road vehicles, and miserable penned animals.

Happily, the trail zigzagged down and away to a lush river valley. We found a dreamy picnic spot on an island surrounded by rapids. Moss grew mattress-thick. The fir trees were tall, spaced at random, and seemed noble with their lichen beards. Our surveyor’s map gave the place-name: Port des Épines. It sounded familiar. I checked our picnic bag. The bottles we’d bought at Dun were labeled Épines spring water. The creek’s name, however, was not Épine but Vignan, which explained the absence of a mineral water bottling plant.

The setting reminded me of Little Yosemite Park in California, and a backpacking trip I took in the summer of 1975. The principal difference between then and now, there and here, beyond the salt in my formerly pepper hair, appeared to be the lack of bears. Also, on the riverbank stood a fairly impressive pre-Celtic dolmen. A dolmen is a horizontal slab of stone—this one about the length of a compact car—propped up by smaller stones. Dolmens, like their phallic counterparts, the menhirs or standing stones, served some unknown sacral function in prehistory. This particular stone was not blood-stained. It looked suspiciously well placed and in good condition. But it might well have been authentic.

Perhaps the sunshine and fatigue were to blame. We both started to laugh. The shared, ludicrous vision of park rangers and a crew of Astérix lookalikes manhandling the huge stone slabs gave both of us the giggles. Had they meant to create a Druid theme park?

Our hilarity was short-lived. The motocross band that roared by us as we climbed the next hill seemed hell-bent on caffeine. I attempted to calm my nerves with deep breathing, but the stench of two-stroke oil interfered. When it dissipated, the scent of fre to someone at the mayorwe was sh clear cuts and sappy fir returned.

The motor-sportsmen seemed to be everywhere. A few miles south in a field near the town of Gouloux, an ageing, blue-cheeked farmer in a worn suit-jacket doffed his cap at our approach and returned our greeting. He explained that he was retired, like most of the area’s inhabitants. He’d come out to look at his cows, now officially owned by his son. “The law says I can’t raise them or I’ll forfeit part of my pension,” he said quietly.

The cattle he spoke to—between words with us—were of the Nivernais or Charolais breed, he explained. The choice of appellation depended, he said, on whether you were a native of the Nièvre
département
—he pointed down at the ground—or the Charolais region. This he indicated by a wave of his hand at the mountainous south. The cattle’s official name was a bone of contention in this border area. “So I just call them
race blanche,”
he said philosophically—white breed.

The odd thing was half of his white-breed cows were brownish. “They’re mixed, not on purpose but because it just happens,” he said. He seemed to blush, but it was hard to tell because of his bristly, sun-rouged complexion. The breed always bred clear after a few seasons, he added. The white hide was like the root stock of a fruit tree or a grapevine. Sooner or later it returned to its wild base.

“Seen anyone go by on a motorcycle?” he asked, his friendly manner changing. “I’d like to string barbed wire across the trail and get those …” he refrained himself from strong language. “When you’re old you can’t jump clear of them. So you just stand there and hope they slow down.” I told him I’d been contemplating piano wire or heavy-duty fishing line strung strategically at helmet level. The farmer seemed surprised. “Sabotage?” His eyes flashed, and he crouched instinctively, glancing around. Then he shook his head and straightened up. “No. It might hurt a hiker or a child.” Without further ado he nodded good-bye, put his cap back on, and spoke to his brownish-white cows.

Half a mile later, the trail reached a two-lane highway. Several cars were parked there. They had Belgian license plates, and Quads on trailers hitched behind. I couldn’t help thinking that it was people such as these who fueled the oil addiction, people who perhaps unwittingly drove the West toward the geopolitics of war. Clearly, this wasn’t a great day for spirituality.

On the edge of the parking lot, the sun beat down on a menhir-style monument. It wasn’t the usual monument to the dead of the World Wars. Erected in 1995, it commemorated a local legionnaire named Gabriel Léger, one of only 15 French survivors of the 1845 Battle of Sidi-Brahim, in Algeria. That was when France invaded and set up a colony in Algeria that lasted until the 1960s. Apparently the man’s family and former “chasseurs”—French army units who’d fought in the Algerian War—had paid for the memorial.

“Touching to remember Monsieur Léger after 160 years or so,” I remarked. “You don’t think this has anything to do with the National Front, do you?”

Alison’s eyebrows seemed to rise unbidden halfway up her forehead. Some extreme rightwing veterans of the Algerian War, many of them associated with the National Front, a political party, were in the forefront of anti-immigration, racist politics in France. “Very touching indeed,” she agreed. “Shall we keep moving? Something about this place gives me the creeps.”

In the Algerian War, “only” 30,000 Frenchmen died. The estimated 360,000 Algerian-French soldiers, the countless Algerian freedom fighters and civilians killed, were rarely mentioned. With 35,000
communes
in France, each with an obelisk-shaped war memorial, that meant there would be fewer than one “real French” name per obelisk to commemorate this colonial war the nation has yet to face up to. It is France’s Vietnam and Iraq combined, a bad, ugly war that will continue to divide the nation until the French admit the horrors they committed in the name of colonial power.

We hiked another half hour or so, until the sight of a cow-sized wooden clog hanging on the main street of Gouloux stopped us short. The clog signaled the world-famous Musée de la saboterie, which I naively assumed was a museum of sabotage: this was the heartland of the French Résistance, after all. It turned out to be a workshop with vintage tools and a boutique selling clogs—
sabots
. We peeked in at the riveting displays. “I suppose,” I couldn’t help saying with malicious disappointment, “that if you threw a clog in the works, it would slow down any machine.”

Naturally, no one was around to sell us a ticket. This was another dreary, half-abandoned village. We picked up a brochure and kept walking. But the going was slow. I soon realized why I was so tired. We’d added three miles to our itinerary with our morning detour to charming Dun-les-Places.

Dragging myself up a hill, I pulled over into a shady thicket. Cattle and two water troughs stood in the pasture behind. “We could fill our bottles here,” I said. Then I did a double take. I stood up and pointed. The troughs looked very much like the parachuted supply canisters we’d seen in the Musée de la Résistance. These had been cut in two with a torch. I couldn’t help wondering how many canisters like it were rusting away in the woods, some, perhaps, still filled with dynamite or guns or chewing gum, condoms, spreadable SPAM, and cigarettes.

Several hours later, having gotten lost twice, we emerged from the deep, dark forest, staggered past a mini-golf course, and limped down to Lac des Settons. Despite the Quads, it had been a long, mostly lovely day, and the effort now seemed worth it.

Three things immediately struck me as marvelous. First, the
lac
looked like a real lake, not a reservoir. Second, pedal-boats, sailboats, and vintage steamers were out, transforming the scene framed by lakeside cafés into an Impressionist canvas, and I had not expected a Renoir in the Morvan. Third, at the western end of the lake rose an impressive dam. It looked like the granite rampart of a fortified city, with a citadel on one end, and a watchtower toward the middle. It seemed taller than a towering fir and longer than an aircraft carrier. I couldn’t help punning, “I’ll be damned.”

I had phoned ahead from our last lodging to ask for directions. As instructed, we crossed the causeway looking for our hotel. A weathered plaque midway across, near a crucifix and Madonna, informed anyone who cared to know that the dam had been inaugurated on May 15, 1858. That was the heyday of the Second Empire, when Napoléon III had ruled France. It explained the hewn granite paving on the causeway, the elegant ironwork, the Paris-style lampposts and attention to detail throughout. The same kind of Second Empire workmanship had made Paris’s parks magical retreats within the capital. The only thing that seemed missing here was a toy train station. I wondered if steam engines had ever puffed their way along the lake, and whether Renoir or his companions had arrived with easel and paints and worked from our hotel. If only at 1,700 feet above sea level st said.we could find our hotel.

We were somewhat fatigued after eight hours of up-and-down hiking. Neither of us could get a bead on the elusive Hôtel Les Grillons du Morvan and, as usual, the natives weren’t much help. We made two distress phone calls, and the instructions given by the panting, breathless voice on the other end led us back over the dam twice. The granite was beginning to feel unattractive underfoot. After a third call, we realized that one of the hotel’s owners assumed we were coming from the south, while the other thought we were coming from the east, though we’d stated in several languages that we’d be arriving from the north. Sunset was upon us. Our hearts sank the farther we walked away from the sparkling lakeshore. We’d hoped to stay in a lakeside room.