Paris to the Pyrenees: A Skeptic Pilgrim Walks the Way of Saint James (37 page)

She turned the page, closing the book, and lit another candle.

ABBEY ROAD

A prosperous town of about five thousand inhabitants, Cluny spills its stone buildings from a rise to the bottom of the Grosne Valley, named for the same small, sinuous river we’d seen at Cormatin. The goddess of abundance has sprinkled the bowl of hillocks and vales around Cluny with a cornucopia of ticky-tacky tract homes, but I kept my eyes on the monk’s road as we marched in from a suburb portentously named Clos Saint-Hugues.

What used to be a main rthe time was n

MY CLUNYSIAN CUP FLOWS OVER

The Ochier Museum is a stonework-encrusted Renaissance town-house also known as the Palais Jean de Bourbon. It stands directly behind the hotel where we were staying, which was convenient, given the wet, muggy weather. Though I could’ve spent another hour peering at the 3-D scale replica of Cluny, circa 1100 AD, we were encouraged by sharp elbows and sopping, braying toddlers to move on and view the abbey’s salvaged treasures, kept elsewhere in the palace. So down a spiral staircase we went into a cellar, where displays ranged from capitals delicately carved with infernal monsters, to sculpted windowsills and inlaid pavements. It was hard to imagine anyone taking a pickaxe to them. Then again, it was hard to imagine how rapacious, arrogant, and cruel the Abbé de Cluny and his followers must have been. Revolutions don’t come from nowhere.

The heavy rain and unusual heat suggested that we’d eased from May into an August thunderstorm. We were glad to get into the ruins of the abbey, a moody, dank grotto with pitted dirt floors and moldy stones, more conducive to to someone at the mayort said. Druidic magic than Catholic prayer. The dust stuck in my throat. Pigeons winged across the transept into the tower topping it. The sheer size of the place when whole must’ve been daunting. A video with special effects, and several scale models set up near the cloister, helped us along, but I had to strain my mind’s eye to imagine that, when it was completed in 1130, the main church was over four hundred feet long. Its width was such that it accommodated processional floats and thousands of faithful side-by-side, under a lofty cupola. Not only cardinals and popes but kings had paid their respects here.

Discipline and Draconian law were what made Cluny thrive. Admixed with greed and power-lust, they also brought down the abbey. Eschewing manual labor, hundreds of resident upper-echelon monks did little else than attend holy offices, seven per day, praying and meditating, shuffling paperwork, and imbibing their daily ration of a “single beaker of wine.” A Clunysian beaker held one liter, we learned, meaning a modern 750 centiliter bottle’s worth and another third of a bottle too. It was less than an amphora, but more than what doctors recommend, and the thought of wine at breakfast, lunch, and dinner made my liver ache. Not everyone lolled around getting drunk, however. Thousands of lesser lay brothers and peasants toiled to supply the monks’ worldly wants.

Ahead, the compound’s medieval mill tower and granary rose over the rooftops. They were spared the Revolutionary axe and wrecker’s ball because experts had judged them to be useful civic buildings. The granary’s upstairs hall held several remarkable vestiges of the abbey, including a set of 11th-century capitals salvaged from the nave and rearranged in a semicircle. Reportedly, they’re the earliest surviving Romanesque sculptures in Burgundy, gracefully sculpted with garlands and curls and monsters. But it was the granary’s ribbed wooden ceiling that gave me a neck ache. I couldn’t help gazing up astonished, like Jonas in the belly of the whale, or, more precisely, as if we’d had a large wooden ship turned over on us. That was how such ceilings and roofs had originally been devised by Norman invaders: build walls and flip a boat over on them.

We joined other visitors atop the Tour des Fromages, one of the abbey’s original watchtowers, to take in the view. Having studied the museum’s scale map of medieval Cluny, I was pleased to see a familiar pattern in the streets. Russ Schleipmann’s visual memorization technique took hold of me. “Look at the view, close your eyes, and try to reconstruct it,” I heard him whispering into my mind’s ear. I blinked. The nave appeared, its broken columns reminiscent of the Roman Forum, and there was the cobbled, winding street we’d hiked into town on yesterday, lined by gaily painted leaners—one antique house leaning on and propping up the next. And there were the dreamy-eyed kids and the crazed Irishman from Dublin via Taizé, and the silly-looking pilgrims in their black capes and three-cornered hats, two of them, a couple, with staffs and cockleshells and a leather canteen. I shook my head and opened my eyes.

“Did you see what I saw in my mind’s eye?”

Alison joined me on the west side of the tower and peered down. “Is it Carnival?”

“Pilgrims!” exclaimed a fellow tourist as she leaned from the crenellated gap next to me. “Look! Real pilgrims!” The young woman rushed for the staircase. I couldn’t help wincing, and feeling unregenerate.

“That’s what awaits us on GR-65,” Alison said, “once we make it to Le Puy-en-Velay.”

“Pilgrims in silly outf important stopover or starting point on ate was its?” Oh, dear. The prospect of hiking five hundred miles with “spiritual” people in fancy dress filled me with dread. “We’re not wearing pilgrims’ gear,” I said, “nor am I displaying my cockleshell from Utah Beach or other spiritual paraphernalia, so we don’t look like pilgrims, we’re not playing the pilgrim game, and no one will mistake us for pilgrims, no matter what we have in our hearts and souls.” I paused long enough for Alison to take several dozen more digital pictures. “Was that quote you read me back in the chapel at Collonges written by Brother Roger of Taizé?”

She smiled, her cheeks pinking. “You may not have a lot in common with his followers,” Alison said, “but don’t throw out the monk with the holy water.”

This was the second pun she’d made in less than a week, and it rattled me. The more I became like her, the more she became like me. That was not necessarily good news.

Loudspeakers mounted on the façades along Cluny’s shopping streets played the kind of dentist-office music French provincials appear to enjoy. The window-shoppers and gentrifiers were out, spending to the beat. Where had the quiet meditation, the spirituality, disappeared to? Could anyone ascend the ladder of enlightenment in this now thoroughly materialistic town? I twitched uncomfortably at the thought of what might happen to Cluny once it celebrated the thousandth anniversary of the abbey’s founding. The specter of Beaune appeared before my inner eye.

At an old-fashioned tobacco shop off the main drag, we bought several copies of an egregious postcard showing the cliffs of Solutré with an effigy of François Mitterrand floating in the sky above like the Holy Ghost. Apparently the former president not only imagined himself to be Vercingétorix reincarnate, he was also symbolic of the Trinity, and the primordial Frenchman, the hunter-gatherer of the Solutrian Phase of the Upper Paleolithic.

The time had come for us to leave Cluny. I wasn’t confident I could make it much further: it was the revenge of the Gorges de la Canche where I’d wrecked both knees and back. But I said nothing to Alison, took an extra-strong dose of Ibuprofen, and gritted my teeth, realizing that we’d failed to find a dentist or a physiotherapist. No one was available in Cluny at the drop of a hat, not even a pilgrim’s tricornered one. Perhaps a practitioner would turn up down the road, in a bigger city such as Mâcon.

A SKULL AND CROSSED BONES

Humpbacked and not intended for vehicular traffic, the medieval Pont de la Levée conveyed us out of Cluny and over the Grosne River, which was swollen by spring rain. The temperature had dropped again, even faster than the dollar. It was glove weather, but we had no gloves. I turned to say farewell to the abbey, catching lovely, reassuring glimpses of steeples and round-tiled roofs, the roofs of Rome in southern Burgundy.

The Abbot of Cluny was not one to mortify the flesh. In the heat of summer, he and his ecclesiastical court retreated from their stuffy, fortified compound in the Grosne Valley to an airy country house on hills at Berzé-la-Ville, which is where we were headed that morning. One of the Roman roads from Cluny to Mâcon, upgraded by monks, ran from Pont de la Levée to Berzé, branching to other historic, protohistoric, and prehistoric sites including Azé, Blanot, and Igé, renowned for their grottoes and châteaux. As we climbed out of the valley, we discovered that the ancient road was now little more than a rutted dirt farm track. It led into deep, dripping forests of mature firs, their tips tender and pale green. I’ds head floating above the Roche de Solutré.edo looked at our maps closely, and knew that the Buddhist community at Sancé was just over the hill, but the road felt like a slice of the Morvan, and I expected to see a pile of Druid rocks at any moment.

Amid the trees, a muddy spot on the north side of the trail stopped our snail-like progress. It was marked not with one or two, but with dozens, perhaps hundreds, of improvised crosses. Twigs, feathers, branches, and straws were tied together with twine, shoelaces, twist-ties, yarn, or electrical wire. Each cross was different. Many had fallen over. Some stuck out of the mud, or dangled from branches. I checked our map again, and found the water-drop symbol and the words “Fontaine des Croix.”

Fountainhead of the Crosses was apt indeed. The wind blew and rain fell. I put away the map, shivering. With the tip of my boot I cleared a patch of stinging nettles near the spring. Beneath them were more crosses, and the source of the spring. Water welled up. I used a fallen fir branch to push thick ferns aside. Hidden in a niche above the spring was a candle in the shape of the Virgin Mary. Something white, jagged, and hard lay nearby. “We may have found the relics of Mary Magdalene,” I remarked, clearing away more nettles. A pile of bones and a broken skull emerged. “Satanic rites again?”

“It’s probably the Grail of Saint Nazaire stolen from Autun,” Alison said. “Remember Canon Grivot’s story?”

“Or the bishop from Marseille, the one they thought was Nazaire.” We stared at each other. “I know,” I said, “it gives you the creeps. It gives
me
the creeps.”

“What’ll we do?”

“Take pictures, and show them to the authorities. Don’t touch the bones.” I backed off, thinking again of the stolen relics of Autun and Vézelay, and the murdered couple back in the village of Saint-Yan. “On second thought, let’s get out of here before some Romanian cross-builders from Taizé show up, knives drawn. Or neo-Druids. Or whatever—militant Buddhists from Sancé.”

“Just a second,” Alison blurted, fiddling with her camera. “Buddhists don’t revere bones and make crosses, and they’re not dangerous.”

“All fanatics are dangerous, especially those whose job it is to persecute fanatics.”

“I’ve got to take some pictures before we leave. Put your boot by the skull for scale.”

Wincing at the prospect, I shuffled back to the muddy nettle patch. Ten minutes later, Alison was still clicking away. My boots were wet, my hands numb. Rain ran down the back of my neck. “Do you think that might be enough? Doesn’t the place give you the creeps?”

“Not when I’m photographing. Only before, and after.”

We practically ran uphill, out of the forest, and, once over the ridge, stopped to gaze down at a medieval castle. No one had followed us, dead or alive. The high-rise housing developments of Mâcon were a distant backdrop to the east, the hogback silhouettes of Vergisson and Solutré, the most famous mountains of southern Burgundy, lay due south of us. As panoramas go, you couldn’t get much better. Even the east-west expressway, the Route Centre Europe Atlantique N79, appeared elegant, a concrete span on 200-foot pylons, bridging the valley. A TGV raced alongside the expressway, glinting. The wind blew south toward Solutré. We heard nothing but the patter of rain on our ponchos.

Nearing the celebrated castles head floating above the Roche de Solutré.edo of Berzé-le-Chatel on a steep, narrow road, Alison began counting out loud. “Thirteen towers and turrets,” she said, running out of fingers. “Wasn’t this the place we read about, where they walled up a man and a bull? What an awful story. Why are men such beasts?”

“What was the story?” I asked, trying to recall. “The lord of Berzé-le-Chatel wagered a fellow nobleman that a peasant locked in a dungeon could outlive a bull locked in the same dungeon and both left to starve or die of thirst?”

“One on each floor,” Alison said. I asked her if she remembered who’d won. “Neither. Can you imagine the agony, the suffering?”

As we got to within a hundred yards of the castle, I wondered which of the towers or turrets had been used to starve the peasant and bull. There were too many to choose from. I re-counted them as we passed. Alison was right: thirteen, and three rings of walls. Certainly, Berzé-le-Chatel wasn’t the Disney type of fairytale castle, but rather a gloomy, forbidding fortress at least a thousand years old, astride the Roman road. It still belonged to a single family. Were they descended from the sadistic lord?

Around the château spread steep vineyards. Reportedly they were the fountainhead of the Mâcon area’s Chardonnay grape variety, and they’d been planted here long before loved-to-death Chardonnay took over California, Australia, New Zealand, and the rest of the winegrowing planet, giving rise to the reverse snobbery of ABC:
Anything But Chardonnay
. That was nonsense. The finest white wines of Burgundy and Champagne were made with Chardonnay. “We are a strange species,” I couldn’t help remarking. “We unwittingly send the French phylloxera, and then 150 years later turn their Chardonnay into soda pop wine.”

For the last two hundred years, the Abbot of Cluny’s former residence at the next village, Berzé-la-Ville, has been in private hands. Tall stone walls keep the curious out. Abutting the mansion, the so-called “Monk’s Chapel” is also privately owned, but open to paying visitors. It’s decorated with landmark Romanesque frescoes from the 11th century, painted about the time the peasant and bull were starving to death up the road at the château. I bought us tickets, slid out from under my pack, and found a seat in the pews. It felt like we were back in Beaune. The fresco-painter’s flair for halos, expressive hands, and meaningful, mournful glances was moving, and the art-historical value of the site inestimable. But the clinical quality of the experience, the amalgamation of religion and commerce, overwhelmed the deeper feelings the frescoes were intended to inspire.