Paris to the Pyrenees: A Skeptic Pilgrim Walks the Way of Saint James (21 page)

Flanking the documentation, rows of display cases held reconstituted artifacts or copies of reconstituted artifacts. It was very exciting material if you were an archeologist. Apparently the Aedui were hot-headed bigshots, with many subject peoples beneath their callused heels. The word “Aedui” means “men of fire” in ancient Celtic, a fine complement to Bibractis, the Beaver Goddess’s water element. Aedui warriors kept serfs, whom the skeptical Caesar compared in his notes to Roman slaves, because of the miserable conditions in which they lived, their chattel status, and the ease with which they were dispatched, meaning tortured and killed.

Pulses and grains, hares and domesticated pigs, plus sheep and goats, were what the Aedui raised or hunted, ate, and—in the form of woolen cloth and salted meat—exported to Rome, along with raw tin, silver, gold, and lead and skilfully made metalwork. The names of nearby villages Villapourcain and Préporché to this day recall the Aedui’s love for things porcine, one panel explained.

“But in the Astérix comic books,” I noted, unable to hide my consternation, “they’re always roasting wild boar, not domestic pig, and drinking beer instead of wine.”

“There’s no wine in Brittany,” Alison said, “and that’s where Astérix is from.”

“Surely that’s a minor detail.”

At the time of Caesar’s assault on Bibracte, the tribe’s chief was Dumnorix, a man perhaps five feet tall, but fearless and adept, like his warrior brethren, at separating heads from shoulders using a finely crafted short sword. We admired the wax Dumnorix dummy on display—it came complete with dangling shorn enemy head—and then moved swiftly through other display areas, pausing to inspect an ancient fibula similar to the one we’d seen in the archeological museum at Saint-Père-sous-Vézelay, the pride of our guide, Astérix. Might our word “fib” be derived from fibula, I couldn’t help wondering. It meant something M">passéisme incarnate.dChstraight that is twisted into a new shape.

“That just about does it for the museum,” I remarked, stopping for one last glance at some broken earthenware. “Are we glad Caesar won?”

LOST & FOUND

Puzzlement accompanied us as we exited. The only surviving records of Bibracte were written by the bad guys—i.e., the victorious Romans. Much about the fabled site is speculation, from its age and extent to the origin of its name and the reasons for its demise. Also, there was plenty of room for skepticism about the Celts, their ethnicity, and the soundness of claims to a pan-European Celtic “civilization,” as opposed to, say, groupings of ever-warring, semi-nomadic tribes of mixed and mysterious origin.

While thousands of objects have reportedly been found atop Mont Beuvray, the museum’s collections appear to contain primarily documents and broken castoffs often unearthed at sites other than Bibracte. Had the Louvre or the museum of antiquities in Saint-Germain-en-Laye claimed the important finds, we wondered?

We’d heard rumors that about half the towering old beeches atop Mont Beuvray would soon be cut. They got in the way of archeology, it was said. No coherent image of the lost city’s urbanism could be formed while the ruins were cloaked by vegetation, claimed researchers. The inhabitants had been farmers, metalworkers, and merchants—or so it was thought. To build their Oppidum and encircle it with a double ring of timber-reinforced walls, they deforested the hilltop, because they needed about five hundred acres of mature woodland for building material. Unsurprisingly, Bibracte now appears to have covered almost exactly five hundred acres.

Population estimates have been revised upwards to about twenty thousand people at the time of Caesar. Modern-day Autun—founded by Augustus, not Julius Caesar—has seventeen thousand inhabitants. In other words, Bibracte was a very large city by ancient standards, and was probably Romanized long before Caesar arrived. One of the main activities was metallurgy. The soil still shows clear traces of contamination from heavy metals. To fuel their forges and foundries, the Gauls needed wood—wood and water. The springs were not merely used for sacrificial reasons, but for industry. It appears the site may have been abandoned in the 1st century AD because nearby resources became scarce, and industry uneconomical. They chopped themselves out of work, and polluted their environment.

OF FIBULAE AND FRANKS

Ever curious and open to knowledge, we signed on to take a guided tour. As we waited for the tour group to show up, I asked Alison if she’d seen this, and she asked me if I’d seen or heard that. This was our second visit to the site, after all, and we were nearly as baffled as before. Didn’t it seem odd there was no mention anywhere that heroic Vercingétorix mutilated, tortured, and killed those who refused to go along with him in his war against Rome? And what of the ritual human barbecues organized by those masters of wickerwork, the Druids, who also handled cremations and the
Fahrenheit 451
-style destruction of written records?

Funny, where in the displays was the part about heroic cannibalism? As I recalled, Vercingétorix’s fellow Arverni chieftain, Critognatus, had harrangued the besieged at Alésia suggesting they do as their ancestors had and “keep themselves alive by eating the flesh of those who were too old or too young to fight.” Or so claimed Julius Caesar. We probably just didn’t spot that citation among the display cases and waxworks.

Surely somewhere there had been a discussion to someone at the mayorwe was of the ritual hostage-taking, slavery, institutionalized wife-torture, and murder presented as “justice” which we’d read about in Caesar? We must’ve missed that, too.

It struck me as strange that the monstruous violence, cruelty, and military prowess of the Swiss-Celtic Helvetii and Germanic invaders was not mentioned either. It was this ferocity that, according to Caesar, had prompted the terrified Aedui—who were, after all, “friends of Rome”—to call upon Caesar for help. They did call Caesar in to help, didn’t they? Perhaps not. Who knows? You wouldn’t guess it from the museum displays. Caesar was the consummate villain.

Both of us wandered away feeling that the Bibracte museum of Celtic Civilization is none other than a Celtic curlicue of subtle propaganda, a golden fibula twisted with considerable artistry. The Celts were not only a great, ancient civilization predating Rome. They were also ethnically, culturally, and linguistically linked in a coherent, civilized manner from northern Italy via the heartland of France to Spain, Portugal, and the Low Countries—all core European Union members.

Somehow, in the museum’s extravaganza of rubble and rust, videos, maps, and wax dummies, the Celts of Britain and Ireland got short shrift, shorter even than Dumnorix, the shrimp local chieftain. These two English-speaking countries didn’t rate a mention, despite the reality that they were and still are the keepers of the Celtic flame. Even in Caesar’s day, that was known. To quote our tattered copy of
The Conquest of Gaul
I now pulled from Alison’s pack and leafed through to refresh my memory, “The Druidic doctrine is believed to have been found existing in Britain and thence imported into Gaul,” wrote Caesar. “[E]ven today those who want to make a profound study of it generally go to Britain for the purpose.”

Not, apparently, if they’re French and have a political agenda. For instance, a desire to build the European Union atop a solid Franco-German base, thereby marginalizing the rival, recalcitrant, perfidious United Kingdom. Never mind that the Anglos and their outsized American offspring had saved Franco-Celtic France from the Germanic hordes just as Caesar had, more than once.

History hemorrhages with ornate fibulae—history refashioned, bent, and gilded to elevate and mythologize the past, or comfort the troubled present. The subtlety in this case seemed remarkable, potentially on a par with the zigzags and loop-de-loops of France’s postwar rehabilitation of its role in the Occupation, and the necessary, even benign role supposedly played by Vichy. Was this an elaborate exercise in sanitizing dirty Franco-German laundry? It had François Mitterrand written all over it.

RUBBLE, RUBBLE, TOIL & TROUBLE

How to destroy the Gallic magic of Mont Beuvray more efficiently than Caesar or Saint Martin, that scourge of Paganism? Simple: cut down the trees and let the sun shine in. Expose buried foundations. Excavate sacred springs. Faithfully reconstruct ruins, re-erect city walls, and turn Bibracte into a Celtic theme park. Scientifically, of course.

Such were a few of the unfriendly thoughts that accompanied us as we hiked up the steep, coiling road toward the main city gate of Gaul’s landlocked Atlantis, following an official tour guide and her flock. Fifty-something years old, with dyed reddish hair, dry and wry of humor and voice, between puffs on her cigarette our guide seamlessly recited the site’s history, pausing at strategic points to go over information we’d read or seen in videos. The same information was repeated on large all-weather panels by the roadside, with drawing important stopover or starting point on fa ns and architectural renderings, plus selected quotes from
The Conquest of Gaul
in French and Latin.

There were several dozen of us in the group. We trailed along, everyone unabashedly enchanted, enjoying the scattered sun and shady glades of strangely twisted old trees—beeches whose lower branches had once been plaited to create boundary hedges, said the guide. Some looked like bentwood chairs, others like leafy couches. Though we’d been here before, I felt I was seeing Bibracte with virginal eyes, new eyes set in the orbits of a new man. For one thing, having shed fifty pounds since our last visit, the hike up seemed a breeze, despite my bad knee and back. My pulse raced as we passed through the reconstructed city walls. The guide stopped to read out Caesar’s description of the impressive technique used to build the so-called
murus gallicus
, a rampart of timber, stone, iron rods, and soil Caesar called “indestructible” by fire, sapping, undermining, or bombardment with a catapult. It was Caesar’s step-by-step notes that had made it possible for archeologists to identify the wall’s remains, and recreate a city gate that looked astonishingly like a vertical beaver’s dam. Did anyone else pick up on the irony in the guide’s voice? That the un-take-able wall had been taken? The ultimate uselessness of even a double rampart, the Maginot Line of its day?

“Ladies and gentlemen, if you look beyond my shoulder you’ll see Autun,” intoned the guide perfunctorily. She explained that Autun was about thirty kilometers south as the crow flies, at a lower altitude and therefore closer than Bibracte to vineyards and the Saône River, which flowed into the Rhône that rushed to the Mediterranean—“a direct link to Rome.” Rome. Again. I squinted. Anyone with normal vision would’ve seen the great walled city of Augustus Caesar spreading on the horizon away and below, and presumably would also have understood the topographical and geopolitical logic of resettling there, away from isolated, windy Bibracte. “The oldest and biggest forum in Gaul was here,” said the guide, waving her arms. “Recent excavations prove it.” This surprising fact had troubled some historians, because it meant Bibracte was thoroughly Romanized before Julius Caesar, making him slightly less a villain who had invaded and conquered. The discovery of an early Roman heritage reinforced accumulating evidence that the Gauls had borrowed much from more advanced Mediterranean cultures in the preceding centuries, through trade and exploration.

With a wave of her cigarette, our guide segued straight into my thoughts with the latest speculations on the mysterious uses of an almond-shaped pool of hewn stone. It sat in what had been the main street of the Iron Age settlement, a pool only a Greek, Etruscan, or Roman could’ve designed and built, apparently, given its geometric perfection. “Fertility rites,” she explained. “The shape is that of a vulva.”

Whoah, wasn’t that the favorite shape often assigned to Mary Magdalene? Several visitors tittered and made lurid quips. Someone asked about something they’d read on the Internet—that a Druidic seminary had been here, an institution of higher learning with forty thousand Druid cadets, supposedly destroyed in the 4th century AD by mobs of Christian fanatics. The guide exuded skepticism and nicotine, and said she had no knowledge of the claim, thinking it unlikely any school in the ancient world could possibly have housed anywhere near that number of students. “There’s a lot of unverified nonsense on the Web,” she snorted, and most of the group joined in laughing and grumbling about the unreliability of the Internet as a resource.

Feeling d rue Saint-Jacquesoic, and isconnected, Alison and I drifted away under the sheltering trees, leaving the guide and the dusty archeological digs behind. We’d heard plenty enough about mass drunkenness and the selling of Gallic slaves for wine, the thousands of amphorae and fibulae and car keys found, and knew that only twenty percent of the sprawling site had been dug up so far. God only knew how many more tons of ancient treasure and garbage lay hidden under the vegetation. Vegetation that would soon disappear.

The trees, the trees, I thought, glancing up through their contorted boughs and oval leaves, stopping to touch a thick, scarred gray trunk. Soon most of you will be gone. For science.

Taking off our packs, we sat in the hallowed beech grove atop the mountain and did damage control on ourselves and each other. I had no blisters, despite the walking, and neither did Alison. I unlaced my boots, took off my toxic socks, and soaked my feet in one of Bibractis’s springs, the one nearest Saint Martin’s rebuilt chapel—a fraud from the 1800s, but what did it matter? The scourge of Paganism had spun the Druids’ sacred tree around on this spot, had he? And now the archeologists were going to chop the trees down. The algae were warm and squishy between my toes. Mosquitoes were soon upon us.

What was it about this spot, I wondered, feeling lightheaded? The timelessness? The welling water and droning insects? The scent of the warm beech leaves and mulching beechnuts from last fall? Or was it that I knew questers had been coming here, worshipping someone or something, pleading, weeping, rejoicing, sacrificing, and hoping against hope that finitude wasn’t inevitable? Three or four thousand years’ worth of hopes, if the place was as old as Fontaines Salées. I closed my eyes and felt happy. Deeply, unspeakably happy.