Paris to the Pyrenees: A Skeptic Pilgrim Walks the Way of Saint James (25 page)

Joseph the cat wandered in, rubbing himself on our legs. The sun began to set, its rays slanting across the study, until they fell on the blinking plastic Virgin from China. Somehow the bottle of Rully had evaporated and Lucette declined to get another—too much was bad for the canon, she said, quietly triumphant.

Just as I was about to slip into the land of dreamy dreams, I heard Alison asking Grivot provocatively whether he thought the act of pilgrimage was egotistical. It seemed, after all, self-indulgent, an apparently pointless meander. Grivot stopped fishing for potato chips, taken aback.

“Egotistical? Pilgrimage? No. Never. Heavens, no. Why? It is one way to know thyself, and, through that inward knowledge, to know God.”

“You walk with yourself,” Jacques Vaud said softly, “but that does not mean you walk selfishly. Serendipity plays a part. You never know what you’ll discover. I walked and rode on horseback once down the pilgrimage trail.…”

We didn’t have time to ponder Jacques’s words or ask for details. Grivot interrupted. He was eager to hear his own voice again. Excitedly, he recounted how during the Occupation he’d ridden a bicycle from Brest on the Atlantic coast all the way back to Autun, his own personal pilgrimage, and how he’d covered the Saint James route many times by car. “Alas, I’ve never had time to walk more than a few short sections,” he added. I asked if he’d noticed a surge in pilgrims in recent years. He faced Lucette and lifted one eyebrow into a circumflex, pointing a long, plump finger at the bottle. “We don’t get many pilgrims here,” he said. “There used to be a regular pilgrimage from Chalon-sur-Saône to Autun.”

Chalon was a river port on the Saône and had been used as a beachhead by Caesar’s invading Romans. Once Gaul was within the Empire’s orbit, Rome had shipped wine up the Rhône to the Saône. From Mâcon and Chalon the Roman colonists had converted the Gauls into “the slaves of Bacchus.” Eventually the church had taken over from the Gallo-Roman governors. Chalon and Autun had become important religious sites, with cathedrals and relics. The Roman roads had evolved into pilgrimage routes. But over time, the mainlines to Rome and Compostela had veered west, bypassing sleepy Autun just as the autoroute and TGV highspeed train line now bypassed it.

“We no longer have relics,” Grivot remarked with disgust. “In 2002, thieves stole the Grail of Saint Nazaire. One day they stole the skull of Saint Philibert from the abbey in Tournus, a little further south on the Saône River. The very next day they came here and stole our relics. They stole the relics of Mary Magdalene from Vézelay, too. For some sort of cultish black magic ritual, I suppose. Sooner or later I’ll catch the ringleader,” Grivot said, rising up in his chair, his right arm shaking. “You know what I’ll do? I’ll cut off his head and put it in the place of the relics he stole!”

“Chanoine, don’t excite yourself,” Lucette reprimanded. “His blood pressure gets very high.”

“Hah!” the canon yelped. “What the malefactors don’t know is they probably got a fake anyway! Serves them right! Yes rue Saint-Jacquesoic, and , indeed, there was a mixup centuries ago. In 1120, the bishop of Autun, Étienne de Bagé, ordered the skull of Saint Lazare to be moved here from the original cathedral across the street, but he wound up with the cranium of a rather nasty fellow from Marseille also named Lazare!”

“Oh, my,” Lucette exclaimed.

“Do people really believe in the power of relics nowadays?” I couldn’t help asking.

“Do they?” Grivot paused, but not for long. “Perhaps. They certainly did once upon a time,” he said.

“Someone stole them,” Jacques noted. “Someone still believes in their powers.”

“Surely it’s not the relics that count,” Lucette insisted, “it’s the intention of those who come to revere them, to pray and hope. So whether it’s Lazare or Nazaire or any other relic, it doesn’t matter. Relics aren’t needed, only spiritual intentions and faith.”

“Naturally,” Jacques agreed. “Of course you’re right.”

Grivot shrugged and batted at invisible gnats. “There are a hundred fingers of Saint John out there,” he said, pursing his lips. “Hundreds of them.”

I felt myself drifting as Grivot explained the church’s reticence regarding relics. As the sun set and the study filled with Lucette’s acrid smoke, canon Grivot told us in minute detail of his sixty years of studying the cathedral and the history of Autun, of the dozens of books he’d written, and of his role in carrying on the cathedral school and choir. I felt Alison’s fingers pinching my thigh under the table and bestirred myself.

It was dark by the time Jacques walked us back down the snail-shell staircase of the canon’s residence and led us to the cathedral. Even the cold wind couldn’t revive me. Before we entered, Alison pointed up at the head of Christ and the pilgrim figure she’d spotted earlier. “You see a pilgrim?” Jacques asked. “Are you sure?” On cue, floodlights flickered to life, illuminating the cathedral’s exterior. After a moment of silent scrutiny, Jacques turned to Alison, his face beaming. “And to think, all these years I’ve lived here, and I never noticed the pilgrim.”

I couldn’t help wondering how much the pilgrim figure on the tympanum weighed, and how long it would be before my head rested on a feather pillow. Jacques Vaud began a polite postmortem of the canon’s tales. But I could take no more. I was beyond replete.

LOOKING WITHOUT SEEING

Was it Picasso who said “I don’t seek, I find”? But surely the Bible commanded “Seek and thou shalt find”? Who was right? Both, perhaps. Or neither.

Such were my thoughts at dawn as I recalled Jacques Vaud’s delight at discovering the pilgrim figure on the tympanum, a thing of beauty he’d looked at a thousand times—looked at without seeing. Until, serendipitously, observant Alison with fresh eyes, the accidental pilgrim, had come along and recognized a fellow traveler, this one carved in stone.

Lying in bed at the B&B, I struggled to keep my eyes open in dawn’s semidarkness. The other lessons provided by our encounter with Jacques and Grivot appeared to be several. First, don’t plan everything in life, because not everything is in your control; and second, sometimes when you let go, you grow in unexpected ways and meet extraordinary people. Just let go and drift, see where life takes you. Specialtext-align: justify; } p.indentedoization? Certainly. An excellent thing. Grivot was an object lesson in the strength of it—sixty years of his dedication had saved a school and produced thirty books that unraveled the mysteries of Autun. But specialization also meant sacrifice. Like Grivot, you missed the wide, wonderful world—you missed walking to Compostela, marrying, changing directions and careers and your views on history, life, faith.

Hadn’t there been another lesson? The third and last lesson of the evening was the one that confirmed my nearly fifty years of observing those who thrive and grow ripe and wrinkled with the fullness of a long life. The lesson was simple. The bigger your ego, the longer you were likely to live.

A bird trilled on our windowsill. I opened my eyes again and glanced up at the cathedral ceiling of our room, wondering where we were. Eventually I realized we’d somehow made it to a B&B late last night, and were somewhere on the outskirts of town. The smell of coffee and croissants wafted up to our room. It was a gorgeous room. I’d been far too tired after our meeting with Canon Grivot and our unplanned dinner with Jacques Vaud and his wife to notice how grand our lodgings were.

During our ritual pre-breakfast stretching session, three swallows flew into our room, pirouetted around Alison’s head, and darted back out. A good omen? I certainly hoped so.

As our host Peter poured coffee for us, he told us he was Danish and had been a clothing designer based in Amsterdam before reinventing himself as an innkeeper. His understated taste shone through in the minimalist décor done in shades of pale green, and also in the collections of silver, carafes, and glasswork arranged like so many Morandi still lifes. Some people painted. Others wrote poetry. Peter was an artful nester.

Alison abruptly left the table. She was suffering from Grivot’s Revenge—one glass too many of Rully. Out for the count, she retreated to our room. We both needed a day off from being pilgrims.

Peter and I took our coffee mugs into the garden, where he showed me the foundations of what had probably been a Merovingian abbey. I wondered aloud what would happen if the archeologists decided to do a Bibracte to Peter’s private paradise. “Oh, dear,” he said, blanching, “what a nightmare that would be.” I could see he regretted telling me his secret.

Talk of Bibracte led us down winding roads to Rome and the Catholic Church, and, before we said farewell later that morning, Peter had shared a peculiar, Danish perspective on Western European culture, social democracy, religion, and the meaning of the loaded word “barbarian.”

As the child of a Pagan Mediterranean mother and an atheistic American father of distant Scottish descent, I’d never really thought much about Germanic and Scandinavian history and myths and how they might lie at the root of both Protestantism and modern social-democracy. I’d failed to consider how offensive it might be to the gentle descendants of Vikings to have their ancestors tarred with the brush of barbarianism. To Peter’s mind, the nomadic, unruly ancient tribal traditions of Nordic peoples had gotten a bum rap. It was another case of the victor’s version of history. No one had the monopoly on cruelty and violence, he said, acknowledging the live burials, ritual immolation, torture, and so on, practiced by his ancestors. “But we’ve moved on, haven’t we? We don’t live in the past.”

Astonishingly, Peter thought, the French were still stuck in their Gallo-Roman mold. What he meant was, they were slaves of linear logic, the Gallo-Roman laws and traditions that had become Napoleonic and then at 1,700 feet above sea level st said. modern French laws and traditions, the Cartesian world view of right and wrong, symmetry and order, belonging and exclusion. This explained why the French demanded assimilation to their culture—the submission to Frenchness, the French language, French customs, the French model, and the so-called republican values of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. Mere integration wasn’t enough. “If you don’t embrace them and abandon your own culture and values and language, they hate you,” Peter summed up. “We Nordic peoples and the British and many North Americans who’re the product of a different tribal reality, and who rejected Rome’s gods and Catholicism’s single God in favor of democratic Protestantism, for us the model is tolerance and integration, not assimilation. Who’s to say that they—the Romans and Gallo-Romans—weren’t the real barbarians?”

Later, as I revisited Autun’s ruined Roman amphitheater—a scallop shell of tiered stone scooped from the hillside, grass-grown and topped by budding horse chestnut trees—Peter’s words came back to me, sounding particularly pertinent. Once, this amphitheater had been the biggest in Gaul, with seating for twelve thousand spectators. The spot was quiet and empty now, the artaround. I thre

ificial lake facing it uncluttered by the rowboats of summer. But I recalled one hot August day a few years back, when Alison and I had passed through Autun and stumbled upon chariot races being held in the amphitheater. There’d been clouds of dust, horses neighing and galloping, cardboard and plastic swords waving. Warriors in papier-maché helmets had clashed to the sound of tinny trumpets. Thousands of tourists and locals had cheered and shouted, as if the at a football match, or the Coliseum, with lions and Christians on the bill. As with most French historical spectacles, the kitsch was palpable, with ham actors declaiming incomprehensibly, recreating not history but the 1960s sword-and-sandals movies they’d seen—
Ben Hur, Spartacus
, or
Hercules and the Mongol Maidens
.

Standing alone now amid the amphitheater’s gray stones, I smiled inwardly at the fundamental tragicomedy of the French historical obsession. Were the French really French? There was no such thing. The Gauls had been violent interlopers from the east—Mongols before their time. They in turn were beaten and subsumed by the hodgepodge called Rome. As self-styled Gallo-Romans, they̵y’d been

PART TWO

TRUE DRINK

ACROSS WINE COUNTRY

FROM BEAUNE TO MÂCON

For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink …

—
John 6:55
                   

BEAUNE APPÉTIT

“Jump!” I shouted, pulling Alison out of the way. The tourist train rolled silently up on us. The pilot sounded a tinny horn. Headlines flashed before my eyes:

American Pilgrim Struck Dead by Plexiglas Elephant Train Dateline
: Beaune, France, wine capital of Burgundy
.

Eyewitness reports say American photographer Alison Harris was struck and killed by a crowded tourist conveyance one block from Beaune’s Hôtel Dieu, also known as Les Hospices de Beaune. Harris, a longtime resident of France, was on a cross-country pilgrimage. She was said to have been tired and distracted. Her husband David Downie, also a pilgrim, though of an unorthodox kind, was present when the accident occurred. Downie confirmed that Harris had spent the previous day in the company of an 87-year-old clergyman in Autun and had “Possibly drunk too much white wine.”