Paris to the Pyrenees: A Skeptic Pilgrim Walks the Way of Saint James (20 page)

THITHER, YONNE, AND RUBICON

Wildflowers and what looked like blooming yellow watercress filled a field at the crest. Someone had turned off the Yonne’s cascade, or perhaps all French rivers started this way—with a trickle.

The hill was steeper and higher than we’d imagined. Its name turned out to be Mont Prenéley and at 855 meters it was the Morvan’s second-highest peak after Haut Folin. That made it several heads taller than Mont Beuvray, which seemed within our grasp but was still five miles away as the crow flies.

We found a shady spot and stretched out near the puddle that would soon be the mighty Yonne River.

“Though it doesn’t look like one, this is the source of a major river, correct?” Alison nodded in answer. “This is also a sacred spot on the Mediterranean-Atlantic watershed, is it not? It’s on a mountaintop higher than Mont Beuvray, which is right over there. Doesn’t it stand to reason there’d be a lost city here, too?”

“Maybe they haven’t found it yet,” Alison remarked, riffling the pages of the history book she’d picked up. “That’s why it’s lost.”

A walking, talking Google, within minutes she’d analyzed key pages, and had a concise report on Mont Prenéley and the Yonne’s spring to share with me.

During archeological digs, three ancient temples had been unearthed here, Alison summarized, and many votive offerings had been found—everything from bronze ears to pins and buckles. The buckles were the famous safety pin-shaped “fibulae” used to fasten tunics and togas. At this and similar fountainheads in the Morvan, female natives would make pilgrimages to scoop up virginal water and sprinkle their breasts, praying for abundant milk. The odd thing was, this milk ritual had continued into the 20th century.

Alison raised an eyebrow. “Apparently the men would sprinkle priests with springwater to ensure good weather for crops.”

I was tempted to make a remark about sprinkling for penile enhancement but said, instead, “That’s a neat role-reversal. The Pagans probably got tired of being splashed with holy water, so they took revenge by sprinkling the priest once in a while.”

“You remember the church in Anost?”

“Who could forget Girart and Berthe de Roussillon, and my dud bone?”

“This book says there used to be a wooden statue of a Virgin in Anost. When you opened it up you found a smaller statue of Christ inside. Pregnant women would make a pilgrimage carrying a diaper, to ensure easy childbirth.” The statue had been removed from Anost and now reposed in the regional history museum in Autun, four days’ walk down the road.

From where we lay under the scented fir trees, the three temples were nowhere to be seen. I wondered if they, too, had been dismantled and packed off to a regional history museum. The book didn’t specify whether they were pre-Gallic, Gallic, Roman, or paleo-Christian temples. It was common to build your god’s shrine atop whatever was already there. Prehistoric fertility goddesses hidden in their sacred spots had morphed into lithe water nymphs—or Venus cupped by a marble scallop shell—ensconced in Pagan temples later transformed into churches. Likewise the “idols” of Paganism had given way to what the French called
Bonnes Dames
—the Virgins and M Saint-BrissondChadonnas and saints of Catholicism. During the French Revolution, the Virgin Mary morphed into Marianne, symbol to this day of the Republic. Now we had movie stars and athletes and CEOs to idolize, and tele-evangelists, Viagra and plastic surgery instead of springwater and priests—and for unregenerate materialists there were shopping malls as temples of consumerism.

“Shall we see what Caesar has to say?” Alison asked rhetorically. She flipped to Book VI and read about
The Customs and Institutions of the Gauls
. I closed my eyes and fell backwards in time.

As a nation the Gauls are extremely superstitious …
wrote Julius Caesar. He gave as an example the case of when people seriously ill or faced with the prospect of battle offered human sacrifice, employing Druids, the priest class. They believed the best way to save a man’s life was to
propitiate the god’s wrath by rendering another life in its place
.

“Didn’t you read that last night?”

“I’m just checking to see if you were awake.”

“Who could sleep with all those dead warriors underneath us? What was all that stuff you read to me about colossal images made of wickerwork?”

Alison found the entry and finished it. The limbs of these huge “burning men” made of wicker would routinely be filled with living men and
set on fire, and the victims burned to death
.

“Very civilized,” I remarked.

“It gets better.” Alison now declaimed in the style of Caesar.
Husbands have power of life and death over their wives.… When a high-born head of a family dies … if the circumstances of his death are suspicious, they examine his widow under torture, as we examine slaves; if her guilt is established, she is consigned to the flames and put to death with the most cruel torments …
Alison paused to editorialize. “I’m not sure I would’ve liked living back then.”

“Not sure?”

“Oh, here’s how the servants were rewarded for their services.” …
[S]laves and retainers known to have been beloved by their masters were burned with them …
. “And here’s something very modern,” she added. “Talk about freedom of the press.”
The magistrates suppress what they think it advisable to keep secret, and publish only what they deem it expedient for the people to know.…

“The more things change,” I sighed, “the more they sound like modern warfare and corporate communications, albeit with fewer burnings.” I stood up and stretched. “Let’s explore the mountaintop. Maybe we’ll find a temple.”

“Don’t you want to hear about heroic cannibalism? The Druids and their god of darkness, Dis? We haven’t even gotten to the part about the customs and institutions of the Germans, who make the Gauls sound like pacifists.”

BOEUF BOURGUIGNON A LA DUTCH

Whoever had found the buried temples of Mont Prenéley had done a good job covering up afterwards. We walked several miles through enchanting forests on a leafy, stone-flanked road that followed terraced contours. We had no doubts that the contours were abandoned, overgrown fields and not Gallic fortifications. No doubt at all. Sort of. En route we saw no creatures mythical, dead or living, save for the giant wolfhound and mongrel that awaited us on our return. They didn to someone at the mayorwe was ’t bother to bark this time.

After our lunch of miniature sandwiches, I was ready to eat anything, as long as it wasn’t the Gallic specialty of human flesh roasted in a wickerwork statue. As we stepped into our B&B, we could smell something wafting from the kitchen—a slow-cooked stew, perhaps. It was either
coq au vin
or … “How did you guess?” Hauke asked. He’d been slaving for at least half an hour to make the
boeuf bourguignon
, which generally requires half a day to cook, but not in Holland, apparently.

The immediate family, extended relations, and the two of us filled a long wooden table. The milk flowed, the stew disappeared amid talk of tulips, and before we knew it we had slept through the night and were back at the table for breakfast at dawn. This time, Josje was in charge. She whisked yeasty, fresh-baked bread to the assembled, famished masses. It looked suspiciously like other loaves we’d seen of late at other B&Bs.

“It comes out of a machine,” she admitted. “You put in the ingredients, flip a switch, and out it comes.” The nearest bakery was too far, she explained. It had become a familiar refrain. “I think everyone is getting a bread machine these days,” she concluded. “It’s maybe going to put the last bakeries out of business. I don’t like that. I’m not sure what to do about it.”

As we devoured the bread, another overnight guest appeared. She hadn’t eaten dinner with us. She, too, would be at Bibracte and the Museum of Celtic Civilization later today, she remarked, but was driving, not hiking there. “I’m going to curate a new museum near Clermont-Ferrand,” she explained, “and am traveling around the country visiting museums with similar themes, to learn what to do and what not to do.”

The future museum was to be dedicated to Gallo-Roman pottery, meaning earthenware from the 2nd century BC to the Merovingian period—around 500 AD. “Wasn’t Vercingétorix from Clermont-Ferrand?” I asked. The city’s name sounded familiar. “That’s where Michelin tires come from.”

“Precisely,” said the curator. “Everyone thinks Vercingétorix was from Bibracte, but he was actually an Arverni chieftain. The tribe gave its name to the Auvergne region of southern-central France. The museum is at the site of Gergovia not far from the Michelin tire plant. You’ve heard of Gergovia?”

Had we ever. Vercingétorix had defeated the Romans at Gergovia, Caesar’s worst setback in the conquest of Gaul. “How nice to have a museum in a place where the Gauls were victorious,” I remarked, sure the Michelin guidebooks would do everything in their power to promote the venture.

The timid curator told us about the tons of foundation stones and shards found at Gergovia, and seemed excited about bringing to light another chapter of the distant past. With bad-news Alésia and Bibracte, this new victory site would be an essential part of a trinity of Gallic antiquity.

As we prepared to say farewell, the term
passéisme
came to mind. Was the new museum yet another manifestation of the French obsession with the past, or a legitimate scientific endeavor whose aim was to use the past as a tool to understand the present—and the future? “You haven’t found any effigies of Janus, have you?”

The curator paused to think before shaking her head. “Why do you ask?”

“A silly pet theory of mine—about looking backwards and at 1,700 feet above sea level st said.forwards at the same time.”

As I wrestled on my boots, I reflected on why, over the years, I’d come to think of France as imbued with a “Janus culture,” a nation whose world-view, like the ancient god of thresholds, managed at the same time to look back and ahead. For us, there was no looking back today. It was B-Day—Bibracte Day.

SPRING FORWARD

Full of fresh yeast and good cheer, we set off between the breast-shaped mounts of Prenéley and Beuvray. It was a mild, breezy morning. As we walked under the shivering beeches, their leaves unfolded like puppy’s ears. The soil exhaled earthy, floral scents—of must, moss, honey, and mulch.

“The first real day of spring,” Alison sighed.

It was indeed, not on the calendar but in the air and earth. We could see spring unfolding, and feel it underfoot, the gentle but forceful arrival of new life, of sap rising and slumber stirring to wakefulness.

At a crossroads in the highway below Mont Beuvray, a pair of French hikers sat at the requisite crucifix and appeared to be struggling with their boots and blisters. Seemingly delighted for the opportunity to play Florence Nightingale, Alison asked if they needed band-aids, disinfectants, boot laces or anything else. “I’m carrying everything and have plenty to spare,” she offered. The couple stared blankly at her with that peculiarly Gallic mixture of bafflement, distrust, and disdain. Their expressions seemed to proclaim “oh god, a foreign do-gooder.”

“No,” the man grunted. “We don’t need anything.” His partner merely stared, like a stunned goose unable to quack.

“You’re very welcome,” I said. “Nice talking to you, and have a swell day.”

Our plan—my plan, foisted on Alison—was to cut east at the base of the mountain and follow the ancient Gallic trail to the Museum of Celtic Civilization, take a quick look, and then head to the summit, a sacred place not only to Bibractis but also to me, for my own, obscure reasons. Alison agreed to the plan, though she voiced skepticism about visiting the museum again. We’d spent hours examining its displays back in 2004, on assignment, and had come away underwhelmed.

“You’ll see,” I protested; “now that we’ve been reading Caesar and hiking across Gaul, you’ll enjoy it this time around.”

OF SNOW-BUNNIES AND SMELTERS

The museum of Celtic Civilization is nearly invisible from the outside, a long, low layercake of stone, metal, and glass hidden below a beech grove. We slipped by the crowds, checked our packs, and found the museum café. It was closed. Why open a café for Easter, with all those people to serve? That would involve far too much work.

A clutch of seniors watched a video on a flat-screen TV. We marvelled at the special effects. Snow rabbits bounded and mammoths roamed over the wind-blown, frosty steppes that surrounded Mont Beuvray in the year 18,000 BC. This was climate change with bells on. The next sequences showed thriving Bibracte before Caesar, the happy sound of hammers ringing out against metal. The late-Iron Age site looked startlingly like modern Vézelay, a handsome, fortified hilltown of the La Tène culture bustling with cheerful workers and merchants—the ideal Gallic Oppidum. Next in the show came the abandonment of Bibracte in favor of Augustus Caesar’s new city, Autun. Then images flickered past from the early Christian era and the building of the 7th-century Saint Martin chapel atop the sacred hM">passéisme incarnate.dChill, followed eight centuries later by a convent. Trees gradually crowded in and all trace of ancient Bibracte was lost … until the 19th century, when a wine merchant-turned-archeologist named Jacques-Gabriel Bulliot became convinced that phantom Bibracte lay atop Mont Beuvray.

“Better than you remembered, wasn’t it?” I asked hopefully. Alison demurred.

A map showing the territory of the Aedui tribe confirmed that it corresponds to the contemporary Morvan plus the Saône-et-Loire
département
, stretching from a village named Prégilbert to Mâcon. Alison remembered a thought she’d had and turned on me. “Did you plan our walk knowing we’d be crossing Aedui lands the whole time?”

“No,” I lied.

Had she said Aedui Land? It sounded good, like the name of an amusement park.

More videos, maps, and charts—and long lists of the sixty or so tribes associated with the area—told the tale of the mysterious Celts’ arrival and movement around what’s now Switzerland, Germany, Italy, and France, displacing the older residents, members of the so-called Halstatt Civilization, about which we’d read when in Marigny-l’Eglise. Over the centuries, the many different Celtic nations built Oppida hillforts across Europe, many similar in design. Having enslaved the locals, these tribes proceeded to slaughter and enslave each other, forming alliances with Rome or Germanic tribes when convenient. It did sound civilized and modern.