Paris to the Pyrenees: A Skeptic Pilgrim Walks the Way of Saint James (19 page)

The whole of the cavalry, numbering 15,000, was ordered to concentrate immediately at Bibracte …
Alison read aloud, carefully enunciating. She paused to point at the skylight and the hills just south of us, to drive home the fact that we were there, meaning here.
If Caesar saw the cavalry in difficulties anywhere … he moved up some of the infantry … dislodged some of the enemy, and chased them with heavy loss to a river where Vercingétorix’s infantry was posted.…

“A river Saint-BrissondCh,” I asked, “this river, you think?”

Alison’s eyes grew wider. “Maybe,” she whispered.

As I lay in bed, listening to Caesar’s words and the sound of the creek beyond our open skylight, I couldn’t help speculating. Many of the bloody events described in the book had taken place in the mountains and valleys around us, perhaps in Crot Morin itself, on this spot. The house might be built on a battlefield, or a Gallic sacred site where the Druids would propitiate the god’s wrath by rendering another life in its place, a favorite pastime.

“We’d better get some sleep,” I said. “Leave the gore for tomorrow, and remind me to tell you about that bust of Caesar I made when I was a teenager.”

Alison switched off the light. But we both tossed and turned through the night. When we awoke at dawn, Alison said she’d dreamed of Roman soldiers and heard them marching in the garden. I’d dreamed of Vercingétorix, Mitterrand, and Nazi torturers, and had relived again my nightmare argument with Miss Nelson, my old Latin teacher, about Cicero and Sissero, and wheny, weedy, wiki, her gooey southern accent spoiling the pronunciation and, decades later, still filling me with disgust.

Stretching luxuriously before getting out of bed, I was relieved to hear birds, cows, and babbling water. The cold air blew in, scented by fresh flowers from the nursery next door. I glanced out at the brook behind the B&B. It was not flowing with human blood, and Miss Nelson was nowhere to be seen.

Before we could make it downstairs to breakfast, the soulful Denis had left, missing the café au lait served in big bowls, and Florence’s hot, butter-lashed homemade bread and trio of jams—tangy green tomato, rich banana-and-rhubarb, and tart white gooseberry.

Given my aching back and knee, it was a good thing we didn’t have nearly as far to walk today, our plan being to get as close to Bibracte as we could, and hike there early the following morning. On Georges’s and Bernadette’s recommendation, we changed trails and followed “GR Tour du Morvan”—the tortoise’s trail—planning to stop at the village of Glux-en-Glenne. Georges said they’d had lunch the day before at a café there run by a Dutchman. If we walked that way, there would be no need to ask Florence to prepare a picnic, which meant we would save carrying several pounds, and might avoid having to eat another baguette-and-ham sandwich. I’d lost plenty of weight for the time being. My pants were baggy and kept slipping down. We deserved a good, solid lunch.

Our new route curled through the valley and across the creek, skirting the Bois du Roi. It turned out to be a dense forest the Burgundian dukes handed over to the kings of France in 1477. That seemed far too recent to be interesting. Why search for relics only five hundred years old?

My neck had begun to ache almost as badly as my knee, and I now knew why. Ever since Fontaines Salées, I’d been scouring the trails for neolithic statuettes, shards, arrowheads, coins, bones, and other tokens of the past. Thinking back to various inner monologues and outward conversations, I wondered what the strip malls of Los Angeles, Salt Lake City, and Santa Rosa, California, would look like in two thousand years. Would pilgrims and wanderers scuff the tufted tarmac looking for traces of Arbie’s and KFC? Would the surveyor’s maps of the future show sections of “ancient Interstate 5” and the automobile cemeteries known in those bygone days as “junk yards”?

I stooped to examine a rock that looked like a ntext-align: justify; } p.indentedoeolithic tool, but decided it wasn’t
neo
anything, just lithic.

We skirted several farmhouses in scenic spots where the Hounds of the Baskervilles bayed and leaped, restrained by chains. Rural slums the world round resemble each other. Requisite components are chained dogs, farm vehicles rusting in fields, broken children’s toys, half-burned slash piles, screaming babies, tired mothers and unshaved fathers glowering from behind screen doors. I was glad hunting season had ended, and that there was no NRA in France.

The trail climbed steadily, curving around a bowl as it entered Glux-en-Glenne. How on earth were we to pronounce the name? Did Parisians and locals fight over the silent “x,” and did anyone bother pronouncing the double consonant? But there was no one to ask. The site and views were splendid, and as quiet as Caesar’s grave. Actually, we knew well that Caesar had been murdered and buried in Rome, Vercingétorix too. Six years after the fall of Bibracte and Alésia, Caesar had dragged Vercingétorix in chains to the Eternal City and paraded him before roaring crowds. He’d had the valiant Gaul strangled to death in the dread Mamertine Prison, the same dungeon where Saint Peter was imprisoned a century later, or so it’s claimed. Violence unto the violent: a pithy motto true to this day.

Caesar and Vercingétorix may not have fallen here, but we knew from our readings that the green fields of Glux-en-Glenne were fertilized by the bones of countless lesser Romans and Celts. The Bibracte-to-Alésia trail runs through Glux, as does the Roman road-cum-pilgrim’s route. The village’s proximity to Bibracte has won Glux a large barrel of pork, in the form of the Centre Archéologique Européen. At this ultra-modern archeological research center, in a handsome, minimalist structure built during Mitterrand’s presidency, teams of European Union archeologists analyze the thousands of objects unearthed at Bibracte each year.

We hadn’t really expected to find anything for lunch. It wasn’t done in the Morvan. So we weren’t surprised when the Petite Auberge, the lunch spot run by one of the region’s twenty thousand Dutchmen, was closed. “But Georges and Bernadette,” I started to say.

“Remember the tortoise,” quoth Alison.

“All this hiking makes me hungry,” I said, trying to overcome my disappointment. “I wonder how many calories we burned charging up that hill like Roman infantrymen.” I reached for my talking pedometer-cum-calorie meter. It had gone silent this morning. I’d last heard it at the rural slum several miles back. I performed a fruitless strip search on myself. “The pedometer will be a find for future archeologists,” I announced.

“What a shame,” Alison said coyly. She couldn’t hide her pleasure. “Would you like to wear mine? It doesn’t talk but may actually be more accurate.”

I shook my head. Alison had hated the talking pedometer from the minute she heard it. One fewer gadget to think about, I consoled myself. Who needed to know how many miles, minutes, seconds, and calories were accumulating or burning off? I wanted to walk the walk, not talk the talk, or hear a machine talk the walk, either. If I could live without e-mail and my laptop, I could do without the pedometer. “And another thing,” I said, experiencing a small epiphany: “I’ve noticed that my eyes hurt less even though I’m spending more time in daylight.”

Alison smiled, sincere now. “You haven’t complained of a caffeine headache in a couple of days, either.” at 1,700 feet above sea level st said.

I was glad she’d used the word “complain.” It put my flawless character in perspective. What she didn’t know was, my twisted knee had swollen into something resembling a Red Delicious, and my backbone crackled like one of the many electrified cattle fences we’d passed. I hadn’t
complained
. The boon from this pain was, one form of discomfort had driven out the other. Instead of eye pain, I had knee pain and backache. Stoicism was the best way forward.

Though we’d entered only a handful of churches and lit one candle so far, the pilgrimage appeared to be paying off in unexpected ways. For one thing, I was feeling distinctly less anticlerical, having discovered the delights of resting in dark, quiet churches, and our readings of Caesar reminded me of why the Roman Empire had slowly collapsed and gradually been replaced by a system of Christian governance at least marginally less brutal. Now that I was on the road to enlightenment and self-knowledge, I wondered if self-mastery would follow.

TIPTOE THROUGH THE TULIPS

Because we’d changed our route, our B&B at a hamlet called Anverse turned out to be closer than anticipated, only about a mile and a half west of Glux-en-Glenne. As we approached it, a wolfhound stood in the middle of the one-lane road. West of the wolfhound lay the only chance we might have of finding lunch.

“Nice boy,” I said. The dog’s large, baleful eyes followed us. He seemed less dangerous than the smaller, snippety mutt that raced out, teeth bared. It was a familiar village welcoming committee. I held up my digital recorder thinking, this may be the last entry before it’s chewed up with my hand. The police inspectors will hear us as we’re torn limb from limb.

Alison spoke gently to the dogs. For a moment, she seemed to have gained the powers of Saint Francis. The beasts backed off, fell silent, and watched us pass. “They sense fear,” she said, sounding oracular. This was not news to me, an American mongrel raised among the vicious mutts of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district. I held my tongue and marched on.

A few houses west, we stopped to watch a vintage tractor piloted by a curmudgeonly farmer. They huffed and puffed in unison, churning up the soil in a sloping kitchen garden. When the pair neared the road, I waved. The farmer turned off the engine and sat there staring at us grumpily without saying anything. “We’re looking for the B&B,” I explained, stating the obvious. He jerked his thumb at a sign. It was a big sign and you’d have to be blind to miss it. I am only par-blind, but I was also tired and distracted by hunger. “So sorry,” I said, unable to keep the irony out of my voice. “You must get people talking at you all the time out here. At least once a month, huh? By the way, how old is that tractor?”

“Built in 1953,” he blurted, leaning forward. “American.” He paused to grin. “No electronics. Always works.” He restarted the engine and held up his hand in salute. A plume of diesel smoke rose above him.

The view of Mont Beuvray from the road to our B&B, propitiously named “Aux Sources de l’Yonne,” was about as good as views get, and I felt happy despite the farmer’s predictable rebuff. The B&B was in a restored farmhouse. It felt like a piece of Holland lifted from flat tulip fields and forced with gardening gum boots into hilly, Celtic soil. It was flanked by a mini-campground. Many Dutchmen reportedly love trailers, campers, and tents, and are famous in France for hauling with them everything needed for a holiday or an entire lifetime abroad rue Saint-Jacquesoic, and , including food, furniture, and plumbing. Cynics and disgruntled French merchants ascribe this to a penchant for parsimony, but I’m convinced it’s atavistic and goes back to the days of the nomadic Frankish-Germanic-Scandinavian tribes that swept in by wagon and settled the swamplands we now refer to as the Low Countries. I shared my epiphany with Alison.

“For goodness sakes,” she said. “Can’t you stop with your pet theories? The Dutch are cheap, that’s all, and it drives the French crazy, because the French are misers too and hate it when the Dutch outdo them.”

As usual, she was correct. But two rebuffs within ten minutes was too much for me. I sulked silently as we neared the farmhouse.

Several hues of hydrangea and tulip brightened the terraced back yard, with its above-ground swimming pool and knotty pine trailer. There we found our hosts, Josje and Hauke Lageweg. They were surrounded by blond children, blond parents, and blond in-laws, all with names I promptly forgot and in any case would not have been able to pronounce. We were hours earlier than the normal check-in time for a B&B. Alison and I went out of our way to apologize, alternating between French and English, both of which the Dutch couple spoke fluently. I wondered aloud if we might break bread with them, given the dearth, not to say non-existence, of walkable options when it came to food, which we did not possess in our own right.

“You mean you’d like some lunch?” asked Josje. Her manner was straightforward, brusque, even, but I sympathized. It was unusually hot. She had her in-laws to coddle, and her kids were home on Easter break. Who needed pilgrims showing up at lunchtime?

Graciously the family included us in their frugal repast. The plate of diminutive ham and cheese sandwiches and glasses of milk whisked us back to the Netherlands. Josje, it turned out, is a professional guide and often works at Bibracte, the region’s main tourist attraction. She also confirmed what we’d heard earlier about the demographic appeal of the Morvan, one key to understanding the Dutch “invasion” of recent years. The other key is, or was, the price: compared to northern Europe, property in Burgundy had long been cheap. Naturally, the arrival of tens of thousands of Dutch, Swiss, Belgians, Danes, and British has driven up values. But for people like the Lagewegs, who bought their rundown farm in the 1990s, the ticket seemed ridiculously low.

Wisely, the family chose one of the more scenic spots to plant their bulbs, with views in every direction across hills and valleys. “No, I haven’t found any valuable coins or statues,” Josje remarked unbidden. The name of the B&B, she added, also unprompted, comes from the springs that give rise to the Yonne River, the single biggest tributary to the Seine. We were standing on the Atlantic-Mediterranean watershed, she noted. On the north side of the hill the water formed the Yonne and Seine and flowed into the Atlantic. On the south side, and on the adjoining Mont Beuvray across the valley, the water flowed into the Saône and joined the Rhône, rolling into the Mediterranean. It was, of course, a sacred spot.

“Of course,” we agreed.

“The spring is up there,” noted Josje, pointing with the accuracy of the professional tour guide. “Did you see the dogs? They won’t bite. Turn left and go up to the top of the mountain.”

We got the message. Happily, we were glad to vacate the premises and eager to add to our collection of marshy mountaintop meadows—and continue our reading of Caesar. So we pocketed our copy of
The Conquest of Gaul
, borrowed a at 1,700 feet above sea level st said. pair of books on local history, and backtracked, weightless, to the wolfhound and mutt.