Paris to the Pyrenees: A Skeptic Pilgrim Walks the Way of Saint James (17 page)

Poulenc was a fallen Catholic, uncomfortable with his faith. It’s said he rediscovered God at the shrine of the Black Virgin of Rocamadour and bolstered his faith while here in Anost. Was it the wild woods, the rain, or the antiquity of the site that restored him to the church? Perhaps the presence of pious Girart and Berthe in the parish church, or the rare pilgrim passing under his windows had some effect? More probably the rapprochement arose from Poulenc’s proximity to finitude, and the creeping realization shared by many imperfect creatures that the end is nigh and fertilizing the forest doesn’t sound like a promising career move. Better a starry sky and shepherds than a compost heap.

Anost’s current celebrity inhabitant is the Falstaffian innkeeper René Fortin. He and his wife Catherine appear to own everything in town, including the hotel we were lodging in, and the restaurant we were about to dine in. A sign outside the establishment informed impatient clients that René “is alive and well and resting, a true
Morvandiau.
” We had not yet seen René in the flesh but somehow felt we knew him.

A dozen local boozers propped up the bar in a blue-gray Gauloise fog. On a wooden table sat a gift. The barman wore a tuxedo and bowtie. Had we stumbled into a party? A golden-handshake dinner or village fête, with locals in fancy dress? Some of the group looked crusty, like lumberjacks; others were clearly white-collar workers on vacation.

A pair of large human Cheshire Cats smiled at us as we entered. Conversation stopped to allow the locals to observe us. We threaded past, holding our breath. Once the merrymakers determined we were out of earshot, the party resumed. We took the farthest possible table, next to a window, in a vain attempt to avoid the smoke Saint-BrissondCh. The bartender was also our waiter.

“That’s quite a Gauloise barbecue you’ve got going in there,” I said.

“No nonsmoking section yet, darling,” he chirped. “This isn’t Paris.”

A large diamond stud in his left earlobe sparkled, suggesting the contrary. Lithe and stylish, he swerved between the tables and seemed to have mistaken La Galvache for a Parisian nightclub. I asked if the robust couple in the entrance were the celebrated Mr. and Mrs. René Fortin.

“How did you guess?” he quipped. “Monsieur Fortin does look a little like Sherlock Holmes, doesn’t he?”

There couldn’t have been a greater contrast between our bouncy, ironic waiter and the restaurant’s clientele and owners. The décor, comfortingly provincial, circa 1970, with wall sconces and white tablecloths, matched the sumptuous, creamy food.

“Either they’re local bureaucrats or lumber merchants,” I ventured, nodding toward the group in the bar. “It’s a retirement party.”

“Maybe one is Monsieur Naudet,” Alison speculated. “It’s definitely a birthday party.”

They finished their volatile aperitifs, moved from the bar into the dining room and switched to bottles of vintage Vosne-Romanée from a big-name vineyard in Burgundy’s Côte d’Or. No expense was being spared. Eventually, the birthday boy stood, opened a card and, much to our surprise, declaimed a poem by Charles Baudelaire.

Old Paris is gone
… he quoted.
No human heart changes half as fast as a city’s face.…

It was as if a truck driver in South Dakota had suddenly quoted Walt Whitman. Garrison Keillor would’ve felt right at home.

So, the birthday boy was from Paris, or had worked there and retired to the Morvan? I could see they would keep us guessing.

Our waiter grimaced when asked for bottled mineral water. He brought out a pitcher of Anost’s best, from a local spring. “I can’t speak for the rest of what we offer, but the water is good,” he quipped. Then he noted that there used to be too much of a good thing—Anost averaged 1,500 millimeters of rain a year, making it one of France’s wettest spots. “It used to rain every day, but now it’s only every two or three days, hardly any rain at all.” Precipitation was down fifty percent over the last decade, he claimed. “We risk becoming normal, like everywhere else, a desert, practically.”

OF LOGS AND TURQUOISE UNDIES

Today was going to be a very long and challenging day. We’d reserved a room at a place called Crot Morin, near Mont Beuvray, site of Bibracte, the “Lost City” of the Gauls. I estimated we’d be hiking for about ten hours.

An hour south of Anost near Bussy, Alison spotted a wood pile worthy of the Guggenheim or Whitney—a work of land art. She paused to photograph the meticulously stacked logs and kindling. No sooner had she raised her camera than out of a farmhouse popped a squint-eyed lumberjack. He cradled his jaw and wondered aloud why anyone in his right mind would want to immortalize the stuff he’d cut and would soon burn.

We took the opportunity to get the lowdown from him on the forestry situation. We’d heard an official version at the Morvan’s park headquarters and had read widely about environmental issues in newspapers and guidebooks to someone at the mayorwe was . Here was the vox populi.

Douglas firs “ripen” on average in a mere thirty years, said the lumberjack, and therefore have replaced other commercial timber species, not to mention native trees. Three other types of European fir, and some broadleaf forests, have survived against the odds. The
Office National des Fôrets
manages French forests private and communal nationwide, and auctions off lots to be “harvested” by the big timber companies. Few smalltime operators are left. The majors come in with state-of-the-art equipment, the same kind used in Siberia and the Amazon: towering machines designed to clamp, saw, lift, trim, and stack trees with admirable speed. Outsized trailer trucks with built-in cranes pick up the logs stacked at “platforms.” The nature of the equipment explains why clear-cutting has replaced traditional select-cutting. Gone are the little old lumberjacks with their little old chainsaws, tractors, and local lumbermills.

That was excellent for free trade, I remarked, but as we’d heard from Morvan park officers, the heavy machinery reconfigured forest roads and lands, simultaneously causing soil compaction and erosion. The streams were clogged with silt, which was hard on everything from crayfish to trout and vacationing swimmers, and probably didn’t do much for the quality of our Paris drinking water, either.

I had to wonder whether the Paul Bunyan-style chop, drag, and float had been any less damaging. The lumberjack shrugged. “It’d be hard to imagine anything worse than what’s going on now,” he said cheerfully. “I’d call it a disaster.”

We walked on toward the hamlet of Athez, pronounced Ahthay, which sounded comfortingly like
athée
, meaning “atheist.”

At the top of the next forest ridge, cloaked by mossy trees and boulders, we stopped for a picnic. We’d bought baguettes from the bakery in Anost and, for a change, Alison had picked out an unusual filling: pig tongues in aspic. The tongues were braised in seasonings, split open, and conserved in aspic—and looked like dead slugs or the pickled organs of saints.

“Tongues of fire,” I said, puzzled by Alison’s choice. “I’ve seen these displayed in reliquaries in better churches in Rome,” I added, “and have always wondered what they tasted like.” Alison rolled her eyes. I braced myself, but neither a tongue nor eye lashing was forthcoming.

Perched on rocks in the thin shade of a beech tree, we were about to taste the tongues when the air was rent. “Another Mirage?” I asked, looking up. No, it was not a fighter aircraft but rather Alison’s high-tech hiking pants. They had burst open, splitting down the seams, as spectacular an event as it was unexpected: Alison runs to raw bone and muscle. Her turquoise underwear seemed to scream from under the shredded pants.

“I must’ve put on weight,” she said, twisting and turning and trying to figure out what to do. She did not have spare pants with her. My extras were far too big.

“At least we’re not likely to run into crowds out here,” she said. No sooner had the words left her lips than a pair of hikers appeared.

“Don’t stand up,” I whispered.

The young men huffed and puffed, held up their hands in salute, and without stopping said
bonjour!
It’s not a French habit, we’d learned, to stop for a chat unless forced. It’s not manly. Vercingétorix never indulged in chit-chat with strangers.

OnM">passéisme incarnate.dChce they’d disappeared, we feasted on the heavenly pig tongues, which were at least as tender, and considerably tastier, than beef tongue. I couldn’t help staring at Alison’s turquoise undies.

“Kmart,” she said, “in Santa Rosa, near the hospital. Remember?”

How could I forget? She’d bought them on a visit to California, and had chosen the brightest colors and snazziest designs, largely because her niece had told her to stop wearing “granny undies.”

“What would Jessica say now?” Alison laughed.

I thought of the Kmart outlet and how the prim woman at the check-out stand had averted her eyes from the undies, and asked us if we would please scan in our purchases. “We’re instructing clients on how to do self-check out,” the woman had said. “The procedure is very easy.”

We followed her instructions, all three of us aware that her job was to put herself and coworkers out of a job, and that her smile and restrained gestures were being captured on video.

Upon our boulder with our pig-tongue sandwiches in hand, I thought now about the frightened courtesy of the Kmart check-out woman and the plucky brusqueness of her French counterparts—proud, prickly workers protected by unions, the kind that fought for such things as debilitating obligatory retirement benefits, enervating health care, and those subversive paid vacations and other unnecessary things we’d wisely eliminated back home. We were worlds apart, France and America, despite globalization. But how much longer would the throwbacks here in Europe wedded to the “welfare state” be able to hold out? There was nothing like a global financial crisis and recession to put them out of their misery.

PAST PERFECT

Another Roman road—this time the one from Autun to Orléans—appeared near the village of Roussillon-en-Morvan. We hadn’t planned to hike through it to get to our B&B at Crot Morin. Intersecting the village on the straightaway was another long-distance hiking route, the “GR Tour du Morvan.” That was the trail the tortoise-woman of Cure was following.

Somehow, despite our peerless map-reading skills, we got turned around not once but twice, and wound up on the umbrella-swirled terrace of a café on Roussillon’s main square. Alison sat down quickly, hiding her torn pants. Around us, weathered houses and a many-times rebuilt manor propped each other up.

A serendipitous realization struck as we sipped our espressos. About 1,200 years ago, Roussillon-en-Morvan had been home to none other than Girart de Roussillon, the by now familiar pious founder of Vézelay, the Christian knight who somehow, despite being born in the wrong century, got drafted by the author of
Song of Roland
to die in the Pyrenees alongside the fearless Roland and the Peers of France, not to mention Charlemagne, who would have been a bicentenarian, with a long white beard. But unlike Roland, Charlemagne did not die at Roncevaux, and there was plenty of documentation about his life. French history was confusing enough when it was told straight. When its own chroniclers scrambled things for political purposes, it was impossible to follow.

For once, the innkeeper who served us was friendly, and he gladly confirmed these little-known facts of misinformation as he filled us with a second round of strong coffee. “Girart de Roussillon would not have been born yet,” he noted. “You must never look for linear logic in legend.”

Another over-educated provincial, the innkeeperM">passéisme incarnate.dCh also confirmed our suspicions that he was a
néo-rural
, a reformed Parisian, slightly better versed in
The Song of Roland
than your average countryman. He and his partner had moved to the village recently, hoping to take advantage of the Morvan’s natural beauty and live a semi-retired lifestyle.

“We wanted out of the big city,” he continued, “and we thought we’d have plenty of time to take walks, but we’re far too busy.” He was out of breath as he said these words and mopped his brow. A voice from within the restaurant summoned him. He dashed away, never to be seen again, not by us, anyway.

Another customer shading herself from the unexpected sun also admitted to being a recently recycled refugee from urban civilization. She too was busier than expected, forced daily to drive long distances. “In the countryside everything is spread out,” she said, as if that could be a revelation. “There are a lot of things you don’t think of when you decide to leave the city.”

With these wise words in mind, and coffee in our bloodstreams, we figured out what had befallen us. Because of lack of caffeine, we’d strayed down the wrong GR route—the tortoise route. Now we were off our maps, though not completely lost.

“It’s that-a-way,” Alison said, pointing south with one hand while holding her pants together with the other.

“Right,” I agreed with moderate skepticism. “I mean left.” I switched on my digital recorder, played Donkey Hotey for us, and limped along, braying with the kind of laughter which can only be induced by physical exhaustion.

A PAIN IN THE BACK

At a hotel-restaurant called Auberge de la Canche on the main modern highway to Autun, we stopped to ask directions for the third time. Alison stayed outside, hiding her torn pants and turquoise undies. I said, “I’m afraid we’re lost,” and the waiter retorted, “You’re not lost, you’re here. You’re found!”

Throaty laughter rose from the tables around us in the restaurant’s old-fashioned dining room. It was the kind of place where French hunters gather to drink amphoras of wine and devour wild boar with Vercingétorix sauce. “Next time you’ll come here on purpose, not by mistake,” added the waiter. The laughter rose again, as if from a tin can.

Why did I get the impression he’d recited these lines before?

After more good-natured banter, I once again asked the young man to show us how to get back onto our map. “Better get another map,” he quipped. “We’re not on this one.”