Paris to the Pyrenees: A Skeptic Pilgrim Walks the Way of Saint James (24 page)

FAITH WILL SET YOU FREE

passéisme incarnate.dCh" aid="9H64K">The crucifix stood perhaps forty feet high, its shaft and crossbeam fashioned from blocks of gray granite. Wind whistled past, blowing so loud I could hear nothing else, not the toy cars and trucks and trains in the valley far below, not even the tolling of Autun’s immense cathedral bells. Swinging in majestic Gothic towers, they were no more than a mile away as the swallow flies. The view from the monumental cross reached southeast over lowlands and a range of hills to the vineyards of the Sâone River Valley. But it was the phrase sculpted on the base of the monument that commanded my attention. Chiseled in Latin and French, it meant “Their faith set them free.” The words had been composed in 1944 by Monseigneur Lebrun, bishop of Autun, a thanksgiving for the city’s liberation by French and Allied troops. Autun came out practically unscathed. The cornerstone had been laid a year later, in September 1945, when Monseigneur Piguet, bishop of Clermont, had returned from the death camp of Dachau.

Leaning into the wind, I flashed back to our morning departure from Ferme de la Chassagne, the giant chestnut at the fork in the wheel-worn road, and the many ancient sites we’d tramped through on the way. Alison had spotted the pilings of a ruined Roman bridge under the rushing waters of the Arroux River, and from there onward the centurions had marched with us into Laizy, a place so old the fortresslike medieval pilgrim’s church and its fine 1400s canvasses seemed recent. The climb uphill through lemony firs from Laizy to where we now stood—accomplished, for me, in considerable pain from swollen ankle and knee—had been steeper than any so far. A small roadside crucifix in the middle of the forest, lost among symmetrical timber stands, had felt like it had been placed there for our benefit. A robin had peeped and fluttered from branch to crucifix as the chainsaws roared, drawing nearer. Loggers on powerful Quads had sped by us, the vehicles’ wide, knobbled tires throwing up mud and rocks.

It wasn’t just the physical workout and the weathering. It was above all the encounters, the streaming thoughts, the kaleidoscope of sights and smells and sounds along the way that simultaneously sapped and filled us with energy.

Françoise Gorlier’s breakfast—a fabulous feast of homemade jams, fresh-baked brioche, and fresh cottage cheese—was a long time ago. We’d covered ten roller-coaster miles. So while Alison methodically framed and shot the granite crucifix and the walled Emerald City below, I wolfed my pâté sandwiches. As hunger ebbed, the ambiguousness of the bishop’s sculpted motto came back to me.
Credentes liberati sunt
. Faith will set you free. Or, literally, the faithful are free. Free, with a little help from their friends. Meaning, among others, the Résistance fighters who were more often than not Communists, atheists, and anticlerical republicans and whose faith in a manmade utopia was certainly not that of the church. I clicked back mentally to the photos we’d seen in the Résistance Museum at Saint-Brisson, and the words of Robert Ducreux, the Résistant we’d met in Anost. He’d been here in Autun on those mid-September days of death and glory. Freedom? Had the bishop meant the freedom of the souls of those who’d died on battlefields and in concentration camps? Released from their mortal coils, had they flown heavenward—if nowhere else, in his mind? Perhaps it was enough to have faith while living, to live free in spirit. What a blessing that would be, more comforting even than atheism. Comforting until you asked yourself how God could allow Dachau, why a perfect God would want to play with his creatures, tempt and tease and punish or reward them, and set them at each other’s throats. How human God was, after all. want to light a candle9HCh

I stared at the tall stone cross, and thought of all the crosses we’d seen so far. It was a symbol, a powerful symbol, one I’d always cringed at when passing. Literalism was the problem, I now recognized, the thought coming not with a flash of lightning or a clashing of cymbals, but rather with a quiet revelation. Literal belief was what deadened belief systems. Did anyone literally believe there were winged angels, glowing saints, and an all-powerful creature shaped like a man watching from above?

Sadly, I knew the answer was yes. Patently there were many, starting with members of my own family, people I loved and respected but could no longer have a civil conversation with, so bent were they on proselytizing. But, at the same time, I had to wonder whether I’d been too literal in the opposite way all these years, whether my wayward life of gluttony and materialism had led me into a back street leading to the side door of—what? Perception? Tolerance?

MOATS IN YOUR EYE

The time had come to leave the hilltop and hike downhill into Autun. My legs were trembling from fatigue, and Alison shivered in the relentless, cold wind. As the trail passed behind the granite cross, one sweep of the eye took in placid pastureland, the cathedral’s lacy spires, and a ring of tall, forbidding walls conceived to keep enemies out and taxpayers in. Autun was a prototypical gated community.

An hour later, we got off the ridge trail and into the outskirts of the upper part of town. I paused to glance up and catch my breath. The Virgin Mary teetered atop a medieval spire within the city walls. She glanced down at us as we walked along what had once been the moat. The ramparts lay between us. They were mostly medieval, built atop Augustus Caesar’s bulwark, which was balanced atop earlier, cyclopean foundations, Druid rocks, petrified dinosaur bones, and primeval rocks spewed to the crust of the earth in the beginning of time. Poking out of the disintegrating ochre limestone blocks were wall flowers blooming sweetly, vying with garlands of ivy and tangled wild plum.

A practical jokester had apparently pulled up the drawbridge or blocked up the city gates. We wandered half a mile down the yellow brick moat, trying to get into Oz, and at last found the cobbled, curving way into upper Autun’s main square. In its center soared the spiky Gothic spires of Saint Lazare cathedral, a cross between a startled albino porcupine and knights in limestone armor, their lances pointed skyward.

“Viollet-le-Duc strikes again,” said Alison.

Before contemplating a visit to Saint Lazare, we set ourselves down at an outdoor café and, as the chill wind blew, tanked up on coffee. I felt dizzy. Or was it giddy? By now we’d covered something approaching thirteen miles, almost entirely on steep, slippery terrain, buffeted by cold gusts. Even Alison looked wan. She barely had the strength to give me a blow-by-blow account of the Old and New Testaments as they related to the sculptures depicting stories told above the cathedral’s southern doors. The doors and a tilting stairway faced our table, but the distance was such that all I could discern were worn lumps of stone.

Lumps of great beauty and art-historical significance, I learned. But before entering the portals, first we crossed the street and treated ourselves to the staggering, petrified displays at the Musée Rolin, a museum which turned out to be the headquarters of an association called the Société Eduenne. The setting was a rambling medieval-Renaissance townhouse cluttered with sarcophaguses and statuary. There was a startling three-horned bull and an extraordinary high-relief of Eve that might’ve been Art Dé at 1,700 feet above sea level st said.co but had actually struggled out of formlessness nine hundred years ago. Not to mention the Russian-doll Virgin with Christ hidden in her belly—the one that once reposed in the church of Anost, and was used in fertility and birthing rites. I stared at it long and with squinted eyes, trying to imagine the milk-and-diaper fertility rituals of old. But I was too tired to concentrate.

There were so many layers, so much to recall. And what, precisely, was the Société Eduenne, named for the Aedui tribe? How could its members possibly keep alive the Druidic flame of their ancient forebears, the mysterious Aedui, who’d been forced to relocate to Autun from Bibracte nearly two thousand years ago? Had everyone gone mad? The Druids were monsters, the Aedui pantheistic cannibals. It was too strange to be fictional.

We staggered back to the cathedral, and Alison positioned us directly under the main tympanum, so that we could better appreciate the sculptures. “Help,” I whispered, looking up now at the Bible chiseled in the tympanum’s worn stones. My eyes glazed over. Among the stylized sculpted flock of faithful, Alison spotted a pilgrim figure. This was the repository of Saint Lazare’s relics, after all, a pilgrimage site that long rivalled Vézelay and even Compostela. She described the stone pilgrim to me until I almost saw him with my mind’s eye, since my physical ones had given up trying. “Enough,” I begged her. “Give me Kmart and a parking lot.”

Foolhardy in my exhaustion, I sought refuge from the wind and the cathedral’s external wonders by holing up inside the nave, where I thought I could nap long enough to stay vertical until we got to our B&B. The sensation was that of stepping into a refrigerator large enough to swallow a small city. Columns soared from darkness toward filtered, ethereal light. Colors danced through the airborne stained glass, a fandango of human tableaux spinning with dust motes. At floor level, the sparkling motes waltzed with the vapor billowing from our wind-burned mouths. Live lilies and very old incense scented the air. A lone senior woman bustled in the gloom, removing burned candle stubs and dusting down silver-encrusted crucifixes, chalices, and other mysterious implements. Alison asked her if the canon of the cathedral was receiving visitors, and before we could say Jack Robinson or begin to admire the sculpted capitals in the Lapidary Room upstairs, a quiet middle-aged man appeared from the shadows and offered us his hand.

“Jacques,” he said softly. I staggered back at this apparition, staring at the floppy hat he clutched in his left hand.

“Up from Spain, are you?” I blurted. Jacques seemed perplexed. I was about to explain that I’d mistaken him for a saint, but thought better of it.

“You asked to see Chanoin Grivot,” he explained, in English. “My name is Jacques Vaud.”

OF CANONS AND LOST HEADS

We barely had time to exchange pleasantries with Jacques as we crossed from the cathedral and spiraled up a massive stone staircase to the canon’s residence, which is ensconced in a medieval townhouse. We sensed in our go-between a soulful, quiet, quizzical man, a believer whose melancholy face had been weathered by great storms. Chanoin Grivot instead appeared to be his opposite. Somehow I’d been expecting a big gun, but Denis Grivot, the celebrated canon of Autun’s Saint Lazare cathedral, proved to be more bon vivant than church militant. Even with a slight stoop attributable to his eighty-seven years, sixty of them spent running this extraordinary place of worship, Grivot appeared to stand about six-foot-eight. That made him a good foot taller than anyone else important stopover or starting point on fa n in the room.

“They haven’t figured out how to get rid of me,” Grivot joked in a breathy tenor, folding himself into an Empire chair at a polished Empire table and inviting us to do likewise. “In 1948,I found the head of Christ that’d been broken off and stolen from the tympanum,” he said, unprompted. “I was a mere vicar at the time, a young man.…”

Grivot recounted his tale with the tones of a bard used to embroidering his personal mythology. He paused to adjust his glasses, twisting around in exasperation, looking for something.

How plump, clean-shaven, and soft he seemed, at eighty-seven still a boy. “Lucette, leave the door open for Joseph,” he ordered, “and bring in something for these poor travelers to nibble and sip.” But it was more a plea than a command, and his housekeeper Lucette knew it. She pulled luxuriously on her Gauloise, cracked a dry smile, and answered the canon as she blew out a cloud of bluish smoke.

“Joseph is perfectly capable of scratching when he wants to come in,” Lucette said to the canon, shaking our hands silently. Nicotine exuded from her pores.

“Potato chips?” pouted Grivot. “Haven’t we anything more appropriate?”

“Though he would be loath to admit it, Chanoine Grivot enjoys junk food,” Lucette said in a husky smoker’s contralto.

“Only because it’s all we ever have.”

How long had Lucette been taking care of Denis Grivot? Decades? They made quite a pair. Their antics were framed by a suitably ecclesiastical setting: bookshelves and leather-bound volumes. On one wavy wall of the cavernous apartment, a plastic Virgin with tiny electric lights twinkled. “Sent by friends in China,” Lucette said, catching my eye.

Grivot picked up his tale where he’d left it. Lucette disappeared and reappeared with a bottle of white wine from Rully, a winemaking village on the nearby Côte Chalonnaise.

“Finally! Now don’t let’s argue, Lucette; pour, please, and be liberal.” He paused and turned to us. “She delights in forbidding me everything I crave. I was nursed on wine, my father was a grapegrower at Rully with nine children, I being the last. My mother received a medal for exemplary child-rearing. Where was I?”

Jacques Vaud glanced across the table. He winked at me. “How much did the head of Christ weigh, Chanoine?”

“Ah, yes, 20.75 kilos,” said the canon. “It was stashed away in the Musée Rolin and when I saw it I said, ‘That’s the head! Sculpted like the rest of the tympanum by Gislebertus in 1130!!’ And without further ado I climbed up and snatched it, hid it under my vestments and rushed to the cathedral. There I mounted a ladder nine meters high, climbing with the sculpture in my hands, to see if it was indeed the pilfered head of Christ. The ladder shook. I almost fell. The weight was tremendous. Do I save the head or my life, I asked myself, as I teetered. Oh, I have sinned, Lord almighty!”

Luckily for Grivot and the world, the ladder did not collapse. He saved his life and the 45-pound stone head too. It was restored to its rightful place atop Christ’s shoulders in the tympanum. Some months later, Grivot confessed his act of theft to the museum’s director, at the time a fellow priest. “Oh, he was vexed indeed,” Grivot said now, chortling, gulping his wine, his fingers plucking up chips and popping them into his large, soft mouth. “So many of the cathedraltext-align: justify; } p.indentedo’s treasures were stolen or sold off before and during the Revolution. Eve too was removed and then found—behind the walls of a pharmacy. Imagine that! Eve! I’m still looking for Adam,” he said, puffing from excitement and raising his eyebrows at Lucette. “I’m getting closer. We’ll find Adam soon enough.”