Paris to the Pyrenees: A Skeptic Pilgrim Walks the Way of Saint James (35 page)

“Cuckoldry has never gone out of fashion,” I said. “Have you ever wondered if youth and infidelity are mirror images? You know, as in philandering keeps you young? Look at Henri IV,
le Vert Galant
. The Evergreen Galavanter is what they called him. Henri ate raw garlic and drank white wine from dawn to dusk, sired fifty-four bastards, would have lived to be old had he not been assassinated, and is beloved to this day. Not to mention that paragon of morality, François Maurice Adrien Marie Mitterrand, our much-lamented late president. The case studies are infinite in number. Philandering is the national sport in France. It must be good for the health.”

Alison turned her patented gimlet eye on me. “That’s not what the fountain of youth is at all,” she said. “This is the fountain of youth.” She spread her arms, puckered, and scooted nearer to finish the sentence: “A loving relationship and peace and quiet.”

As if demons were listening, several cars rolled up the gravel lane to the house and disgorged a dozen occupants, including five children. The kids tore into the garden, shouting, scrambling, and tumbling. I shared Alison’s wry look and kissed our rejuvenating, quiet evening good-bye.

QUAIL EGGS AND AN EGYPTIAN CRANE

Our hostess Marie-Claude’s quiet enthusiasm shone through in her cooking. The lentil-and-quail-egg salad, roast pork, and homemade apple pie were generously served and delicious. Despite the sixteen mouths to feed, there was plenty to go around and dizzying conversation on tap. Our dozen fellow guests were in Saint-Gengoux for a wedding party, they explained. I wondered aloud if they would be stopping by the fountain of youthful infidelity for a premarital checkup. Alison stomped on my foot when I began to tell them about Gengulphus and the peeling of women’s skin. The rest of the evening was a blur.

To say that we awoke would suggest we’d slept. The wedding party’s comings and goings into the early hours made for serialized napping, not real sleep. I felt like an omelette being flipped in a frying pan as I turned over and over and over again in our bed. At dawn we awoke for the final time, to the plaintive cry of a mysterious bird. It sounded like a peacock blowing a trumpet, and in our punch-drunk state we thought it might be Gengulphus announcing the second coming, or the arrival of the primordial Buddha. Over a ropey breakfast we learned that the trumpet-bird belonged to a neighboring farmer and was none other than a very large, very venerable Egyptian crane, resident in Saint-Gengoux for the last thirty-five years. The unusual pet had slowly won the affection of its lonely owner, replacing several dearly departed members of the owner’s family. “It shares its master’s table,” said Marie-Claude, the teabags large under her bloodshot eyes. I imagined the crane with a napkin around its neck, supping and conversing with the farmer, and hoped the old bird would live as long as an elephant. “Did you two sleep at all?” Marie-Claude asked. “We’re terribly sorry for the disturbance. That’s the problem with wedding parties.” important stopover or starting point on ate was

“We slept like babies,” Alison lied.

I wrinkled my face into something resembling a smile, and spread homemade raspberry jam on Marie-Claude’s buttery croissants. “Oh, yes,” I murmured, yawning until my own bags pushed my eyeballs backwards. “We feel like little children this morning, completely rejuvenated.”

ON THE RIGHT TRACK

Passenger and freight service on the Sâone Valley trunk line was suspended in the 1970s, driven out of business by trucks and private cars. The last train from Mâcon to Cluny, Cormatin, Saint-Gengoux, Buxy, and Chalon-sur-Sâone had, nonetheless, left its tracks and railbed behind. The tracks rusted and the beds grew weeds until someone had the bright idea in the late 1990s of turning the former right-of-way into a linear park, dubbed
la Voie Verte
. The Green Way somehow sounded better in French.

The straightness of the
Voie Verte
reminded me more of the Canal du Centre than the Way of Saint James, and so did the occasional rusting, tumbledown factory by the wayside, flanked by tract housing projects. Unlike the canal, however, the former railway bed wasn’t shady or cool. After leaving Saint-Gengoux, we walked swiftly along it for the first few hours, until the asphalt softened underfoot, and the sun was high in the sky, illuminating the strange, seemingly endless yet narrowing perspective ahead and behind. Like the boulevards of Paris, or the avenues of New York City, the straightaway appeared to the eye to close down on itself. You could only see so far before the sides converged. It was an optical illusion, a phenomenon familiar in cities to photographers, architects, and urban planners. I’d never experienced it before in the countryside. The disquieting sensation of finite infinity took hold of me and would not let go. How different were the meandering, leafy paths and twisting roads of other ages, the ones we’d walked on so far. Paradoxically, the
Voie Verte
felt like the offspring of Rome, of rectilinear logic, industrialization, standardization, and commerce. But it had done its time, and was now given over to quiet cyclists, rollerskaters, and the rare pilgrim on a seemingly pointless meander.

Despite the straightness and full sunlight, Alison disappeared from view. I assumed she was behind me. Digital photography was turning out to be dangerous. It transformed analog white rabbits and hares into trigger-happy tortoises, which was fine in most circumstances, but not when it meant roasting under a merciless sun. I marched on alone, confident she would show up sooner or, more likely, later. We’d agreed to stop for lunch in Cormatin, and visit the château, before continuing on to Salornay-sur-Guye to spend the night. In the meantime, an offramp led me from the
Voie Verte
to the nearby hamlet of Malay. A little further on, I stopped at neighboring Ougy, where the peaky campanile of the Romanesque church was roofed in stone. Though obtuse, I’d noticed how each Romanesque church in Burgundy is subtly different. The earliest types, from before the year 1000 AD, have herringbone brick patterns, the later ones Lombard-style bands and arches of stone and brick. It also helps to read up on the subject, which I had, at the B&B in Saint-Gengoux.

All of Burgundy’s Romanesque churches were affiliated with the abbey at Cluny. The mothership church, the biggest outside Rome, had spawned thousands of franchises. Each reflected the organization of medieval society. The tall, fortified belltowers were paid for by the local lords and erected by stonemasons. They were still generally in good repair after a thousand years of service. The clergy had paid for the rounded, equally sturdy apses at 1,700 feet above sea level heoic, and , and they, too, were in fine shape. Peasants had built the barnlike naves, working overtime after milking the goats and plowing the fields and cutting the woods and giving most of what they’d eked out to the lords and the clergy. That explained not only the French Revolution, but also why the naves are often in less good repair than the apses and belltowers.

In search of shade and enlightenment, I took off my pack and sat on a pew under the barrel-vaulted nave at Ougy’s church, resting my aching eyeballs and back. Staring out at me was a crusty 12th-century fresco of Saint Philippe, and a naïf, contemporary, handwritten plea scrawled on a piece of cardboard. I got up close enough to read the curlicue script. It stated that the
commune
of Ougy-and-Malay, with 219 inhabitants, has two landmark churches it can’t afford to maintain. “Give,” was the message. “Open your wallets.” To locals, whether pious or
républicain
, the historic “patrimony” of heritage sites is both a blessing and a curse. I dropped a euro into the collection box, put my billed cap back on, and hiked back into the sunlight, expecting to see Alison at any moment.

She was nowhere ahead or behind. Another mile south, and still on the
Voie Verte
, a noisy frog pond and grassgrown passenger platforms marked the former location of the railroad station of Cormatin. Seeing an exit, I got off the railway line again and headed into the village.

Cormatin is the kind of place that would be easy to get used to, I said to myself, as I bought an apple turnover at the bakery and ate it lustily while limping under shade trees to a pleasant café. A pharmacy, a grocery, butcher’s shop and bakery, and one of the country’s great châteaux, not to mention antique shops and other sellers of useless but amusing paraphernalia, all housed in handsome landmark buildings with trees out front and yards out back—such was the village of Cormatin. I sipped my espresso and felt at peace. There was no way for Alison to get past me without being seen. She couldn’t have gotten lost on the straightest hiking trail in France, a feat requiring genuine talent and cardinal-point dyslexia. Had she been run over by a speeding skater?

I drank my second coffee, drummed my fingers, and eventually decided to take a tour of the château on my own.

CHÂTEAU OF A DOUBT

The grounds of Cormatin Château seemed considerably dreamier than any dream I’d had in recent decades. Out of nowhere appeared the meandering Grosne River, pronounced “groan,” but in no way indicative of the site’s character. Conveniently the river embraced the site, providing a natural moat, doubled with a man-made one about eight hundred years ago by the Du Blé d’Huxelles family. They and their forebears were the original military governors of the district, and later climbed socially to the height of royal courtiers in Versailles.

The three-story, L-shaped residence rose ahead of me down a leafy alley of hedges and trees, past a clump of fortified outbuildings and a tidy kitchen garden the size of several tennis courts. On the north side of the property, the side I was expecting to see Alison appear on at any moment, spread geometrical parterres of lawn, lavender, and boxwood. Punctuating them were wispy beeches or pyramidal, clipped yews. The boxwood labyrinth exuded intoxicating scents. Overlooking the maze of its foliage was an elevated view-point built atop a birdhouse, which had been made to look like a neoclassical temple. Several large, lively parrots fluttered around as I walked by them on a spiral staircase, and stopped to gaze over the landscape. Around the garden looped another rings head floating above the Roche de Solutré.edo of the Grosne River. Beyond the river ran the
Voie Verte
. It was empty.

In a reflecting pool the castle’s golden stones shimmered. They were dressed up with white stucco on the garden-side façades. The effect was stunning, so much so that I collapsed into a garden chair under a beech tree and decided to wait again for Alison.

An hour later, and increasingly worried, I entered the château and found myself surrounded by a tour group. Built in the early 1600s on 12th-century foundations, this was, said the tour guide, the archetype of the Henri IV-Louis XIII style, a tasteful blend of late Renaissance Italianate and Dutch, with slate-covered mansards, gables, and turrets. A dozen of us stood shoulder to shoulder in an airy, vaulted stone staircase of impressive proportions, and then tramped through a succession of dazzling salons,
cabinets
, bedrooms, and madame’s celebrated boudoir. Alison was still nowhere to be seen. To say that I was worried would be understatement. However, after over two decades of waiting for Alison—a true female Godot—I had learned to master my anxiety.

Many of the château’s rooms were what might be termed a floor-to-ceiling feast of 1620s décor. The grotesques, allegories, and painted landscapes sparkled with gold leaf and liquefied lapis lazuli, reportedly the most extensive and best-preserved wall decorations of their kind in the country, according to the tour guide. She was a serious young woman, an art historian, and I could tell she would not go in for the usual folksy, dumbed-down promulgation of information. This was high culture and as rare as an authentic native Burgundian snail or frog’s leg.

Nearly as fascinating as the many-limbed genealogical trees, and the accomplishments of the châteaux’s illustrious owners, was the story of the property’s restoration. It was an object lesson in the political power of culture, and the paradoxically forward-looking variety of
passéisme
once prevalent in France. In 1980, a trio of art historian-librarians with modest means bought the château, which had seen no upkeep since 1914. They paid a mere one million francs, about $150,000 at the time, suspecting that beneath the grime lay treasures. They were right, and earned themselves the privilege of spending the next twenty-odd years and about $2.3 million fixing things up. Luckily, matching funds came from the government, thanks largely to friends in high places, one of whom had François Mitterrand’s imperial ear. Once the trio of new owners had removed over-painting and driven out the woodworms, they turned to digging and shifted twelve thousand square meters of soil from the moats. The number meant nothing to me, but it sounded impressive. They also rebuilt 360 linear meters of bastions, which by my reckoning came out to nearly four hundred yards, or four football fields in length, and then recreated the gardens, reclaiming swamps and fields, basing their work on original plans drawn up by Louis XIII’s royal gardener. His name escaped me.

In reality, said the guide, Mitterrand-style largesse was a thing of the past. Subsidies for heritage sites such as Cormatin had dried up, and the government now spent more propping up a single soccer club in Lyon than it did on the entirety of its four thousand landmark buildings. “Art is something humanity invented in order to turn the mind toward eternity,” she said, quoting André Malraux, France’s first culture minister, appointed by De Gaulle in the early 1960s. Perhaps, to some, soccer was too. Luckily that wasn’t my table.

Except for kitchen appliances too heavy to steal, the original furniture had been auctioned by previous owners, most of them penurious heirs while studying Political Science at 9HCh of the Du Blé d’Huxelles. An inventory dated 1643 helped the trio of restorers to refurnish accurately. They opted to maintain a layered reality, with the best of each century. Upwards of sixty thousand paying visitors tour the château yearly, and the owners have the additional privilege of telling their tale in great detail to each and every one of them.