Paris to the Pyrenees: A Skeptic Pilgrim Walks the Way of Saint James (38 page)

We hiked out feeling we’d been cheated, and walked thoughtfully downhill into the Val Lamartinien. Apparently it wasn’t just the Abbot of Cluny who favored the area, to escape monkish intrigue and cultivate spirituality. Evidently this was also home to the famous Romantic poet, politician, and serial philanderer Alphonse Marie Louis Prat de Lamartine, still a local hero almost a century and a half after penning his last lines. Lamartine is required reading for French high schoolers. He wrote the kind of florid verse punctuated with
Oh!
and
Alas!
, and though his following has diminished, he certainly had a good run of it.

At the bottom of the Val Lamartinien, we crossed the
Voie Verte
and spotted a cryptic, hand-painted sign in someone’s front yard.
Lamartine did
NOT
sleep here
, it said, presumably because he slept everywhere else—with the consorts of many, many other men. Sle Mirage fighter jetdChep was what we both needed, not to mention a meal, and while we were at it, I could use a new body too. I wasn’t going to make it any farther today, and, with a feeling of regret and foreboding, I said so to Alison.

Luckily, minutes later we arrived at our hotel, le Relais du Mâconnais, an old-style roadhouse next to the
Voie Verte
on what used to be the main highway—until the N79 Expressway replaced it, running along the south side of the valley. Gone were the trucks and cars and trains of old. A creek curled lazily through the hotel’s backyard. We barely had time to listen to its sing-song chant. I opened our windows, stretched out, and snored so loudly that the neighbors knocked on our door to complain.

IT’S A LONG WAY TO SOLUTRÉ

Dawn broke resplendent the following morning. As we hiked toward the expressway in tenuous, pinkish light, I shook my head in admiration and disbelief, remembering our dinner. The hotel may have been old-country simplicity itself, but our meal at le Relais du Mâconnais had been sumptuous and eclectic, served in designer surroundings seemingly imported whole from Sydney or San Francisco. It confirmed long-held suspicions that the French really are the heirs of Imperial Rome and the Baroque. With soothing music lifting our forks, and a hostess in an elegant tailleur serving us, we’d worked our way through half a dozen bite-sized courses, our legs twitching under the table from exhaustion, our wrinkled clothes impossibly inappropriate to the swank setting. First came tuna and eggplant “carpaccio,” followed by a snail lightly battered and fried tempura-style, surrounded by dabs of spring turnip purée. As if they’d known we were heading to Spain, they’d trotted out a Pyrenees lamb with stuffed, fried artichokes, and finished us off with suckling pig and mushrooms—Japanese mushrooms, braised and served in a tall crystal glass.

“You must try the local chèvre,” said the smiling proprietor, Monsieur Lannuel, a stout, pale-skinned man who said he was of Norman extraction. But as it transpired, more than mere goat’s-milk cheese awaited on the platter. Before we could rise and climb back to our room, out came a savory-sweet “pre-dessert” conjured from salted butter and chocolate cream, forced into a cigar-shaped cookie and poised atop a dollop of chocolate mousse. Unbidden, the strawberry
millefeuille
floated across the dining room toward us, as ethereal as the warbling pseudo-Celtic music on the sound system.

“We’ll burn off that chocolate mousse in no time,” I said now, guiltily, as we reached the expressway on the south side of the valley and walked through an underpass.

But Alison patently wasn’t worried about maintaining or losing weight, nor was she listening to me. She could eat a whole spit-roasted mammoth and an iceberg of chocolate and not gain an ounce. “Just a second,” she commanded, in the familiar, authoritative tone she used when working. She stopped halfway into the underpass to take a photo of graffiti sprayed on the walls.

“Génération Mitterrand 45 millions de nouveaux pauvres.”

The “Mitterrand Generation” had been the former president’s last campaign slogan, way back in what, 1988? Forty-five million “new poor?” I puzzled over the cryptic graffiti. Did it suggest that François Mitterrand had bankrupted the country? What really interested me wasn’t the message itself, but the fact that more than a decade after his death, and two decades after the slogan had been invented, Frenchmen were still talking about François Mitterrand. You couldn’t escape him?mime=image/jpg" class="svg1" alt="image"/>dCh, any more than you could escape his arch rival Charles de Gaulle.

Sologny was the name of the handsome village part way up the south side of Val Lamartinien. From the Romanesque church, dedicated to Saint Vincent, protector of winemakers, the view of the vineyards, expressway, and TGV line was remarkable. The traffic and trains of old were no longer in the bottom of the valley on the east side. It was the south’s turn to live with blight and noise for a century or two.

Over the next ridge, we entered the land of fossils—1970s cars driven by octogenarians, antique American tractors rusting in millennial vineyards, and houses built of fossil rock, the kind of rock I’d seen and tripped over a few days earlier near Buxy. “Saint James would love it here,” I remarked, laying my hand on a giant scallop shell encased in a fossil-rock threshold. The contrast with the tract homes nearby could not have been more complete.

We pulled into Pierreclos in time to resupply and have coffee in what might have been the smokiest café in France. Luckily the sun was out, the temperature back to summertime levels, and we sipped our espressos outdoors. The café was called Auberge du Poète, which seemed a good name, since Pierreclos was Alphonse Marie Louis Prat de Lamartine’s second home.

On the way up to Pierreclos château, an address Lamartine knew well, we passed a variety store. There was François Mitterrand again. He stared out at us from a rack of postcards, his head floating above the Roche de Solutré. “Popular image, that,” I said. “Do you have a feeling François Maurice Adrien Marie Mitterrand has been following us?”

“Like Caesar and Vercingétorix?”

“Exactly. And Buddha. Funny, you haven’t mentioned Saint James.”

Before reaching the château we stopped for a snack on a panoramic bench near an alley of mossy, carefully clipped linden trees. I paused before sinking my teeth into a pear, removing the sticker that said “Chile.” The baker had told us that the crust of the quiche we’d bought was made with Canadian flour, and that the bacon inside was from Hungary. The mineral water was Italian, the chocolate Swiss. I thought of the vaguely Japanese-Australian meal we’d enjoyed at the neo-Druidic-Buddhist Relais du Mâconnais, and wondered just how notional was the Frenchness of French food and “French identity.”

Rising high over the end of the linden-tree-lined alley was a hulking medieval castle with a colorful patterned roof of glazed tiles and an impressive array of turrets and towers. Trying not to slip back into my old habit of feeling jaded and world-weary, I forced myself to admire the château and pronounce it exceptionally attractive. It was not “run down,” but rather atmospherically down at the heel. The gates stood open, so we wandered into a rock-paved courtyard. Clearly, Pierreclos was now a winery. Potential customers were welcome to visit the premises and taste the wines, provided they took a tour. A sign encouraged us to ring a large bell mounted high on a wall in the courtyard. This required a vigorous yank of an iron handle attached to a long, hand-forged iron chain. I pulled once, twice, three times but the bell would not ring. So I yanked a fourth time, throwing my body and soul into it. As the bell clanged, my back screamed in pain. I stood frozen, my arm raised, unable to move. “Now I’ve done it,” I whispered in terror, knowing that I’d revived the damage I’d done when I fell weeks earlier in the Gorges de la Canche. “Please come over and do something about my back or I’ll look like the Statue of Liberty forever.?mime=image/jpg" class="svg1" alt="image"/>dCh”

As I stood in the courtyard, clearly paralyzed and in pain, a young woman’s head popped out of a window far above. The head peered down at us, and, understandably, expressed surprise at seeing two raggedy backpackers wrestling, trying to unlock my lower vertebrae. “Coming,” she barked. She reappeared and stood at the threshold to the kitchen, watching us with undisguised bafflement.

“That’s quite a bell-pull,” I said, as the woman beckoned us indoors. She tore two tickets off a stack and raised her index finger, untroubled by my irony.

“Start out there, in the garden, come back in, go down there, go straight, left, back to the staircase, up to the second floor and into the room on the left and then into the one on the right.” She paused long enough to draw breath. “Enjoy your visit. If you’d like to see the medieval vaulted cellar and taste the wine, shout when you’re ready.” Her smile was wooden. It made me think of Saint Joan of Arc and the sculptures we’d seen of other fierce French women with hard features. We backed out of the room carefully.

“Care” was the operative word. Alison ran her eyes over me. “You’ve really done in your back.”

“Nonsense,” I protested, crabbing across the garden to the ruined chapel, then admiring the apse and tower—they always seemed to survive. Ever since the village of Ougy near Cormatin I understood why: wealth had built them. There was no nave left. The peasants had done a rush-job. Alison caught up with me and frowned.

“Can you walk the rest of the way to our B&B?” she asked.

“Oh, sure,” I said. “No worries.” The B&B was in a village called La Grange du Bois, still about three or four miles away, at the top of a ridge. “Let’s just finish visiting the château, and maybe my back will sort itself out.”

In my fulsome imagination, the castle of Pierreclos seemed of the type inhabited by Bela Lugosi and Lon Chaney, cast as Dracula and The Mummy. Our footfalls echoed. Bats and birds took to wing. “Remind you of anything?” I asked. “The peeling wallpaper and dust?”

“Rully wasn’t nearly this sinister,” Alison remarked.

The kitchen of the château seemed to be the size of several tract homes. The fireplace looked big enough to park an SUV in, and was equipped with what may be the world’s largest and most complicated mechanical rotisserie, a contraption of strange beauty made of cast iron, with cables and weights and clockwork gears in varying sizes. “No doubt devised for spit-roasting a whole Charolais beef,” I observed.

“For a whole wild boar,” said Alison, pointing at a dead one on the kitchen table. We both gasped, recoiling. Then Alison giggled, which proved contagious.

Laughter is supposed to be spiritually nourishing, but it made my back ache. “I’d like to know who the taxidermist was,” I managed to say, propelling myself forward as if handcuffed from behind in an attempt to straighten up my back.

Alison studied the photocopied page which the humorless caretaker had hurriedly handed us with our tickets. Of all the properties in and near Val Lamartinien, Alison said, giving me an edited version, Pierreclos was the favorite of Alphonse such-and-such de Lamartine. A dust-blackened plaster bust of him greeted us in an otherwise empty salon. As we shuffled by, I realized that Lamartine’s effigy had been made to look not like Vercingétorix buts head floating above the Roche de Solutré.edo Caesar. He was wearing Imperial Roman clothes, and was modeled on a bust from the Capitoline Museum in Rome. I couldn’t help wondering for the first time in my life what had become of the head of Caesar I’d made years ago, in Miss Nelson’s dreaded Latin class. At least I wasn’t having that recurrent dream anymore, a sign, perhaps, that I’d gotten Caesar out of my system?

Pierreclos was Lamartine’s favorite castle, we learned, though he had his own château, which still stands, over the hill to the east, near the expressway we’d passed. He also owned yet another château to the west, near the lake of Saint-Point. But we had reason to wonder how much time he’d spent in any single residence.

Alison said she’d go ahead and see if it was worth it for me to climb upstairs. She blazed a trail through the dust, up a wide spiraling staircase, which had been conceived for horses. I followed, slowly, and caught up with her in the poet’s study on the second floor. Through a hole in one of the walls, a pair of birds hopped back and forth, then flew around the room, panicked to see us. We batted at the dust motes the birds stirred up, and I gasped again, this time at a grinning, lifesized waxwork of Lamartine sitting behind a desk. He was wearing mid-19th-century clothing, the kind seen in costume dramas. A black bow tie wound around his neck, and a long housecoat hung low. Its color had faded to Confederate gray. Lamartine held a quill pen between his wax fingers and seemed pleased with himself.

Perhaps I would be too, I reflected, had I managed to thrill the French nation with the kind of verse he’d quilled. But I suspected there were other, saltier reasons for his grin. Lamartine had conquered the hearts of innumerable demoiselles and ladies, which might also explain his longevity as a poet. Among his lovers was the wife of Pierreclos’s impotent lord. With madame, the poet produced an heir, which may have been the object of the gallant exercise. The lady of Pierreclos, previously thought to be barren, was pleased, because it proved her fecundity, and the cuckolded lord acquiesced, because he now had a son. Lamartine had done his duty again, in the best Romantic style. Nowadays the unhappy couple would have visited a sperm bank, picked out a genetic profile, and deprived generations of a fine, salacious story that had the great merit of a happy ending.

SUNSET OF THE IDOLS AT SOLUTRÉ

How we managed to climb the steep, switchback roads and trails from Pierreclos to the ridge and then hike south to La Grange du Bois, past ancient chestnut trees and prehistoric rock piles, is a Druidic mystery. Perhaps it was the beneficial effect of the imported Chilean pear I’d eaten for lunch, the second dose of Ibuprofen I took before leaving the castle, or the inner chant
I think I know I can I think I know I can
. Somehow, driven by mis-remembered metaphors from childhood and primordial urges, we pushed and dragged ourselves to the gate of the B&B, talked our way past the horse-sized guard dog, and sank into a pair of plastic chairs for a long, thoughtful meditation upon our contingency plans.