Paris to the Pyrenees: A Skeptic Pilgrim Walks the Way of Saint James (34 page)

“And you think Catholicism is dead in France?” I’d asked.

“Oh, certainly. Without a doubt,” he’d answered, smiling like Jiminy Cricket. “However, Islam is on the rise; Islam, materialism, Nihilism, and Buddhism. Some say there are five million Frenchmen who embrace the way of the Buddha without even realizing it. But there are also five or six million Muslims, and it’s our atavistic fear of the Moors that’s getting the better of us.”

“Saint James the Moorslayer, to the rescue.”

“Indeed, you’re right to recall the saint’s
nom de guerre
, and you might wish to ask yourself why the Saint James pilgrimage has become so popular again.”

I shrugged before responding. “It isn’t popular around here, that’s for sure.”

“No, not here in Burgundy, not yet, but we already have Buddhism and Mary Magdalene and Brother Roger in Taizé. Elsewhere in France and Europe, the pilgrimage certainly is a success. You’ll see, if you make it to Le Puy en Velay and Roncesvalles. You’ll find thousands, tens of thousands of pilgrims on your route, the closer you get to Santiago de Compostela.”

I gulped, visibly uncomfortable. “Most of them are on a lark, recharging batteries, having a good time, I’ll bet. Either that, or how can Catholicism be dead?”

“Yes, of course, you’re surely right to ask, but I suspect you may be surprised by what you find, digging down into the subconscious of your fellow pilgrims. In any case, take my word for it, Catholicism is dead and buried in France, and who knows what will replace it, now that globalization is inevitable. Scientific racism, perhaps, or some kind of muddled-up blend of religion, a dash of the evangelical, a pinch of Buddhism, a drop of neo-Paganism. It will be amusing to see.”

“Have you ever been to northern California?” Alison asked. “It’s always ahead of the curve.”

BLURRED LINES

Given the bloodletting of the Wars of Religion, I suppose it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to us that Buxy was still thoroughly secular and devoted to the cult of the French Republic. There was no hint of a California-like fusion of religiosity and spirituality. Proof of this came at the bakery and tourist office, where no one seemed to know anything about the Way of Saint James, and had never before seen a pilgrim. We were the first in years, they said, in centuries, perhaps. When I pointed out that an outlying district of Buxy was marked on our map with the name “Saint-Jacques,” the unflappable tourist office manager seemed perplexed but not embarrassed. “It must be an error,” she said. “I’ll have to find out.”

After breakfast, we walked a few blocks east from our hotel to rue Saint-Jacques, which proved to be a narrow road that apparently once linked Buxy to Chalon-sur-Saône, a major pilgrimage site, as we knew.

“There are a lot of old stones around here,” said an elderly woman I buttonholed in the front yard of a house. She was referring to the ruins, she said, up and down the road. “I’ve never seen a pilgrim come by,” she confirmed, adjusting the thick frame of her glasses. “Good luck to you.”

I sensed from her expression and the way she thrust her hands into her housecoat that she was keeping something back. “Did anything unpleasant happen on this road a at 1,700 feet above sea level heoic, and long time ago?” I questioned. “Something during the Wars of Religion, perhaps?” She hesitated and then fluttered her large, rough hands.

“I was only a girl and don’t really recall,” she said. “The
ligne de démarcation
ran by here, and there was some unpleasant incident.”

“The
what
ran by here?”

“The border between Occupied and Free France. During the war.” She paused. “But you’d never know it, would you? There’s not a trace of it left.”

An hour later, as we huffed and puffed southwest up a steep grade, I couldn’t help thinking of the woman’s remark, and the phantom, Nazi-era borderline. During the war, the imaginary safety of “free” France lay to the south of us, the overt oppression of the Occupied Zone to the north. But as recent revelations had made plain, the free area ostensibly controlled by the puppet government in Vichy had been none too free. Vichy had not only collaborated with the Nazis; Vichy was itself zealously racist, anti-Résistance, and anti-semitic. Vichy simply wanted to exist in its own right as a nationalist entity, safe from war damage that might be caused by either side in the conflict. Perhaps that was less surprising than it might’ve been, given the traumas of the time and the fresh memory of World War One. What did give me pause for thought, however, was how thoroughly the line of demarcation had been obliterated. The ancient Roman road was still clearly visible on maps, and, in some places, across the landscape. The Vichy line, a scarlet letter drawn in relatively fresh ink, was invisible.

As we hiked along in silence, a thought nagged me, nipping from behind. Back in Buxy, the hotel manager—clearly of Protestant stock—had pronounced Catholicism dead in France. Was there a link between Rome, Catholicism, and Vichy and, similarly, between Protestantism, the cult of the Republic, the Résistance, and the ancient Gauls? The Romans had killed the Druids and their religion, and imposed the Emperor and then Catholicism. The Protestants had demanded a direct relationship with God, rebelling against the church hierarchy, and fighting bloody wars to win religious freedom. The Revolutionaries and founders of the secular French state had tried to destroy the church outright. Did the many dots join up, or was I reading too much into the landscape and the oft-changing aspirations of the French nation?

RUTTED ROADS AND SAINTED CUCKOLDS

Back up on the ridge, far above the Saône River Valley, a seemingly endless rank of high-tension power pylons marched along the rutted, ancient bed of the neolithic-Celtic-Roman-Saint-James road now known as GR-7. The trail followed the sizzling power lines south, and we made a noble effort to view the galvanized iron pylons and thick black cables with the same admiration we might show for Roman aqueducts, bridges, roads, and other ancient infrastructure. Why not? The pylons were beautiful in a way—tall, sleek, and symmetrical. They were merely the latest addition to a trail that for tens of thousands of years had been the path of least resistance, meaning it was already there whenever a new conqueror arrived to oppress the natives, from Megalithic Missionaries to Nazis. Rutted roads were not always bad. They saved time and energy. Why beat a new path if the old one did the job? So it was with infrastructure, technology, people, and religion.

Beyond a field where horses gorged themselves on daisies, the silhouette of a blue-caped Madonna seemed ready to leap off a cliff—or into the sky. A lightning rod ran down her back and into a pile of boulders that looked suspiciously like reclaimed pre?mime=image/jpg" class="svg1" alt="image"/>dChhistoric dolmens. Below them stretched the vineyards and rooftops of Saint-Vallerin. What effect did the Madonna and the neolithic dolmens have on the townspeople living at their feet, I couldn’t help wondering? Were the ancient objects
memento mori
or
vanitas
that whispered mortality? Or were they a comforting reminder of the antiquity and tenacious perseverance of civilization, drawing lightning into the ground? Did anyone down there remember the
ligne de démarcation
that also ran near the site?

Above the toy villages of Chenoves and Saules we strode, with turreted little châteaux below, amid pastures and woods and vineyards, and a range of low greeen hills curling southeast to cup the still-distant town of Cluny. Uncluttered, unjunked up, uncrowded, and unsung—the scenery kept us shuffling along happily despite cumulative fatigue, and a growing host of ghosts.

Approaching the nested village of Culles, we picked wild strawberries and waded through rock roses and irises and lilac, our eyes on the Romanesque steeple ahead. “Watch out for pilgrims,” I said. “I have a feeling we’ll see another, one of these days.” The words had barely escaped my lips when on the door of the first village house, we spotted a carved wooden cockleshell, clearly a recent, varnished addition to the property. Gentrification was under way. Pilgrims would soon follow.

The rutted road plowed through forests and fields, and as we neared Saint-Gengoux-le-National we heard the tinkling of wind chimes. A sign on what had once been a farmhouse, but was now an artist’s workshop, advertised handmade marbled paper. Oriental incense perfumed the spring air. You had to wonder. Out here, they were sure to get walk-by customers.

Below the sloping woods, pastures, and vineyards, in the narrow alleys of Saint-Gengoux-le-National, fallen stucco revealed Gothic arches and Romanesque columns in the walls of tumbledown houses. Pencil-tipped church towers poked up in a jumble that oozed atmosphere, like Buxy on the cusp of gentrification.

“Roman or medieval?” I asked. “Place your bets.”

We followed the crooked rue Cesarée and rue Jouvance, surprised by the bustle and tempted by the bakery scents. At the local tourist office, an efficient young female volunteer confirmed that Saint-Gengoux-le-National had been a late-imperial or Merovingian town and pilgrimage stopover. She knew nothing of the Résistance or
ligne de démarcation
, however. “The town used to be named Saint-Gengoux-le-Royal,” she said. “Then it became Jouvence during the Revolution—Jouvence was the original Merovingian name,” she said, getting fuddled. “Then it became Saint-Gengoux-le-Royal again with the Restoration of the monarchy. The ‘national’ was added after the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, when the Third Republic was created.” She handed us a stack of brochures. “Now you’ll want to know who the saint was, won’t you?”

We nodded. It proved to be a convoluted tale. As usual.

Unhappy Gengulphus of Burgundy was a devout knight and courtier, said the volunteer. He had the misfortune to marry a noble lady of insatiable sexual desires who was unfaithful to him countless times while he was off slaying dragons and infidels. Too kind-hearted to seek revenge by the usual means, and mortified by embarrassment, Gengulphus became a hermit in his castle at Avallon, in northern Burgundy. But one of his lustful wife’s lovers decided to take no chances. He murdered Gengulphus in the Year of Our Lord 760, thereby aiding Gengoux to become one of the few martyred saints whose task it is while studying Political Science at 9HCh to protect and soothe stilted lovers, cuckolds, separated spouses, and those trapped in “difficult” marriages.

“This would be a great place to spend a honeymoon,” I said, thanking the girl as we left, and taking Alison by the hand with proprietorial interest.

A wooden sign pointed to the ramparts, though we were hard pressed to miss them. On the outskirts of town was our B&B, a massive 1800s house backed by a shady garden. It had been a good day during which we’d crossed three survey maps. We’d walked as many miles as Madame Gengulphus reputedly had lovers between dawn and dusk on a busy day. She truly was diabolically insatiable.

FOUNTAINS OF JUVENILITY

Tall, distinguished yet not stand-offish, Jean-Luc Reumaux removed the pipe from his lips and greeted us as we entered the B&B’s garden gate. He wasn’t exactly “from” Saint-Gengoux, he said, though part of his family had been, generations ago. He’d spent boyhood summers in the vast old country house, he added, leading us up a gravel drive and onto the porch. Jean-Luc’s love for the place was contagious.

Our room had overstuffed armchairs, an armoir and desk, and was as cozy and old-fashioned as a Victorian inn. We washed up in a porcelain pedestal-sink down the hall, but decided to skip a nap and explore the house and garden instead. Jean-Luc and his soft-spoken wife Marie-Claude gentled us along, tiptoeing as they spoke. They’d “retired” here, Marie-Claude said, though Jean-Luc still commuted to Paris by TGV to work part-time in H.R. In reality, that meant almost fulltime, but who was counting? They’d reinvented themselves in retirement as innkeepers, after careers as professionals, only to discover that innkeeping was a lot of work. “I suppose we wouldn’t have been happy to be idle,” she mused. “It’s ironic. Jean-Luc was a personnel manager who had to fire hundreds of employees, and now he negotiates on behalf of workers facing layoffs.”

“It’s a booming business,” he remarked, “what with globalization and the Internet.” Marie-Claude smiled and sighed. Bad news was always good news for someone.

The house exuded sturdiness and simple good looks, from the patterned tiles and polished plank floors to the wide oak staircase and the fireplaces with stone surrounds. Knick-knacks perched on every flat surface. Jean-Luc’s aunt had been a painter and novelist, we learned, and had lived here to a ripe age. Her watercolors and drawings hung from every wall, showing scenes of medieval Saint-Gengoux—its towers and twisting alleys and splashing fountains—and the woods, vineyards, and farms sprinkled nearby. As dusk approached, Alison pulled a book from a shelf and directed me to a lounge chair under a shade tree, facing a ruined tower. The book was titled
L’Écho du Prieuré
and had been written by Madeleine Du Charme, the pseudonym used by Jean-Luc’s late aunt, he’d explained. The novel told the story of monks from the Cluny Abbey and their life at the Priory of Nollanges near Saint-Gengoux. Though well written, it wasn’t gripping enough to keep me awake. I dozed, listening to birds, bees, and the buzz of a distant sawmill, trying but failing to follow what Alison was reading. It seemed to hold some important truth about the village and life.

Jouvance, Alison said, meant “youth.” The name was given to the town over a thousand years ago because a miraculous fountain of youth gushed here in the days of yore, before unlucky Gengulphus came along. It wasn’t just any fountain of youth. Plunge the hand of your fiancée or wife into it and if she’ Mirage fighter jetdChd been unfaithful, the skin would peel off “like a glove.” Naturally every enlightened, trusting man for miles around herded his beloved to the fountain for, as everyone knows, that was indeed a Golden Age for women.

“Isn’t the Pope’s summer residence in Castel Gandolfo near Rome?” Alison asked. “And isn’t there a famous spring there that fills Lake Albano?” I shrugged in answer. She flipped another page, her voice rising. “Guess what: this is the same Gandolfo. Gengulphus is the Latin name.”