Paris to the Pyrenees: A Skeptic Pilgrim Walks the Way of Saint James (8 page)

“Food we can do without,” I grumbled. “We have to find water.” I stalked among the houses thinking, they’ve pulled up the drawbridge.

“They’re afraid of us,” Alison said, amused.

Granted, I could understand someone fleeing at the sight of me—the dark hair, perpetual six o’clock shadow, the trucker’s hat and big black mountaineering glasses. But Alison? With her silvery hair, dangling cameras and ready smile, she might indeed inspire terror in a mouse, but a Frenchman?

I caught sight of a woman villager who hadn’t run away in time. Leaning over the garden wall, I held up our water bottle, trying to look and sound meek. “We’re pilgrims,” I pleaded. “The café is closed, we have no food or water, please let us refill our water bottles.”

The woman blushed the color of a red delicious—par-blind as I am, even I could see that. “Who is it?” questioned a worried voice from inside the house. A man came out and goggled at us—unexpected outsiders.

“They’re pilgrims, and the café is closed,” said the woman. “It’s typical.”

The man looked up wryly. “Hold on,” he said. “We’ll get you some water.” He stood guard while the woman disappeared. Presently she returned with a bottle. By then the man had told us his family came from the village, though he’d grown up in the big city. Paris and the Morvan were tied by an umbilical cord, he explained, practically repeating the tortoise’s words, because of the wet-nurses and foundlings of yore. Over the last century, most
morvandiaux
emigrants had found work in the City of Light but lived with one foot in their village. “Out-of-season people aren’t used to visitors,” he added by way of apology. “They’re not mean, just shy.”

“And distrustful,” snorted his wife. “I’m not from the Morvan and can’t get used to it. No one talks. People say Parisians are unwelcoming?” She peered at us. “I have half a frozen baguette,” she seemed to remember. “And some cheese. Otherwise what will you eat? There’s nothing for miles around. Nothing. And no one else is likely to offer you anything.”

The energetic
Parisienne
came back with bread, cheese, and, since I’d already finished the bottle she’d given us, more water. Our gratitude was boundless and sincere. We waved and made to leave. But the man kept talking. There were three hundred people left in the
commune
—the territory covered administratively by the village, he said. It was five miles square. In other words: vast. His mother, he said, was in a retirement home nearby. It took three hours to get here by car from Paris, because of the traffic. And he gave us a detailed account of the shortcuts to take, and places to stop en route to shop.

“It’s good to talk to someone,” he said, winding up his tale with a reluctant smile. “The minute we get here, it’s total isolation.”

We thanked the couple again and walked south, thinking aloud about isolation and poverty. Once upon a time, the Morvan had survived thanks to breast milk and foundlings. Now it was retirees. The newly want to light a candle9HChbred and the nearly dead. By the looks of them, this pair of seniors was pretty spry. The village was lucky to have them.

DRUIDS AND FLYING FISH

At the bottom of an erosion-sculpted valley rushed a clear creek called Le Saloir. We crossed on a wooden footbridge. Mossy boulders and budding trees stood on both banks. It was a perfect spot for Druids—the priest-class of ancient Gaul. Where were the Druids of today? Did they drive farm vehicles or live in Paris and own holiday homes in the Morvan?

Allegedly, the proto-Impressionist painter Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot painted upon these banks, inspired by Saloir Creek and its ruined millhouse. It was hard to tear ourselves away. I stared into the swirling, sparkling water and felt the kind of dizzy, falling sensation you get when you’ve looked at a computer screen too long, a sensation worsened, in my case, by eye problems. What a joy it was to be away from laptops, the Internet, and the New Paradigm.

On the slippery uphill grade south of the creek, a sign dangled from a lichen-shagged tree. “Farmhouse B&B, go to the monument, turn right, 500 meters,” Alison read aloud, her head tilted back. The “monument” had to be the obelisk to the dead of the World Wars. In France there was no need to specify.

“Lunch or coffee at the B&B,” I said brightly.

Over the ridge we spotted something strange. A black cross had been painted on a freshly sawn tree trunk. String and yarn decorated the lower branches of a large fir tree, and rocks had been piled into a triangular mound. “Druids or a Satanic cult?” I wondered aloud, checking my pedometer and then marking our map.

Alison shrugged. “Bored teenagers probably.”

“Probably,” I repeated. “But what if?”

“What if what? You think they’re neo-Druids? What about your mother, and her off-the-wall friends? They’re not dangerous.”

This was true. Lunacy did not always indicate redneck-style violence. We picked up the pace and, at the five-mile point, my pedometer squawked in synthesized global-English. I looked down at my boots and noticed something. Belly-up in the road was a dead fish. In the middle of nowhere. On dry land. A fish? I studied the lowering clouds. “A flying trout,” I said. Alison pretended not to hear. “Fly fishing gone awry?”

A few hundred yards later, entering Chastellux-sur-Cure, we came upon a washhouse. Spring water gushed into a basin where the womenfolk once did the laundry. I was about to plunge my cupped hands in and drink when I saw the school of fish. Mystery solved. Washing machines had spawned trout.

Across the river valley half a mile as the fish flies, the turrets of Château de Chastellux rose majestically. A castle has been at Chastellux since at least 1116 and, according to our
Topo Guide
, it still belongs to cousins of the owners of Bazoches, a many-branched, well-rooted clan whose most celebrated member was and is Vauban. A recent forebear named François-Jean de Chastellux (1734–1788) fought in the American Revolution. He even wrote a memoir of his travels in America. Long out of print, the book was replaced in the mid-1800s by Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville’s evergreen
Democracy in America
. Democracy in America was sometimes notional: I couldn’t help wondering if in Tocqueville’s day chads had dangled from ballots, and the Supreme Court had been for sale. But that too was now ancient history. I preferred to think of eternity and finitude—and lunch. want to light a candle9HCh

Crenellated and straight out of a Disney fantasy, chez Chastellux looked to be in good shape. We couldn’t help wondering if it, like Vézelay and a hundred other French monuments, had been Viollet-le-Duc’ed—meaning, restored beyond recognition by that indefatigable architect, friend of King Louis Philippe and, later, Napoléon III and his enthusiastic empress Eugénie. What would Walt Disney have done without Viollet-le-Duc? Whether or not you liked the Frenchman’s Romantic over-restorations, you had to admit that he, like Vauban, had been a tireless preserver of culture. Who even half his stature could France put forward today, Alison wondered aloud. The ensuing silence deafened me.

“Better to be low-born and lucky,” I couldn’t help saying as we eyed the castle, “than high and mighty. Imagine owning a drafty pile like that and having strangers sauntering through your living room. It’s the only way to get a tax break and subsidies.”

The truth was, I’d rather live in a reconverted barn and drive an old rust bucket than own a château and a Rolls. Owning things had never been my thing: I was perfectly happy with the pair of boots on my swelling feet, and the sweater, raincoat, and poncho I was wearing. The poncho was essential. April? It was as cold as the lower reaches of Dante’s Inferno, and wet and windy too, and we were both fairly hungry by now.

We hadn’t actually expected anyone to answer the telephone or the door at the farmhouse B&B. And no one did. With grim satisfaction we gazed upon our
petit Paris
picnic before digging in. Defrosted camembert never tasted so good. For dessert we made Toblerone chocolate-and-baguette sandwiches, shivered under the rain, and felt footloose and free, glad to be rootless wanderers. All was well in this, about the best of all possible worlds. Except for one thing: there was no coffee. My head ached already.

OF LIGHT & DARKNESS & CAFFEINE-STARVED BRAINS

For a plateau, the Morvan certainly felt hilly. Up and down we hiked, from one ridge and deep, encased creek-bed to another. When at last we crested a rise higher than others and intersected with the “GR Tour du Morvan” hiking trail, we knew what watery body lay below us.

The Lac du Crescent is a good-sized reservoir holding fourteen million cubic meters of water, according to the literature. This tidbit was meaningless to me and possibly others unfamiliar with cubic meters by the million. This particular Crescent Lake was something I ought to be familiar with, however. Not only does it generate electricity for Paris. It also stabilizes the Seine’s flow, ensuring that in summer the river doesn’t run dry, and in winter stays within its UNESCO World Heritage Site banks and out of our cellar. We also drink its contents.

The view troubled me. The reservoir seemed low, almost empty. And this was the rainy season. Perhaps a postmodern Doomsday had snuck up on us in the night, and the water-table had dropped beyond recovery? Had we reached the drippy tipping point? More likely, we were headed into another dry spell and heat-wave. The one in 2003 had killed 30,000 Europeans and devastated agriculture and forestry. The prospect of another roasting, parched summer brought to mind climate change, which led my enfeebled brain onto SUVs, Kyoto, and home—meaning California. Members of my family owned SUVs. I loved my whacky family but not their gas-guzzling cars.

Increasingly dizzy from lack of coffee, we decided to rest where the panorama embraced the muddy reservoir and green slopes cupping it. Among friends, I sometimes refer to Alison as my seeing-eye wife. She reads to me Saint-BrissondCh because my eye-power is limited. Essentially I’m a Mr. Magoo, James Thurber’s stumbling, bespectacled hero. We spread a poncho on the grass, got out our Caesar, and drank deep from our water bottles. I wondered if any of the liquid in them had come from Lac du Crescent, and if the millions of cubic meters below would get to our sink in Paris before we did. Alison reminded me that on average, by the time it passed through our spigots, Paris’s water had been filtered by the kidneys of five human beings living upstream. With that thirst-quenching thought in mind, she found where we’d left off in
The Conquest of Gaul
, and began to read aloud.

In the year 58 BC, Caesar reminded us, the Helvetii—a Germanic-Celtic tribe in what’s now Switzerland—crossed into Gaul looking for greener pastures. They joined other marauding tribes to wreak havoc on local Celts, including the Aedui, who were “friends of Rome” and happened to live in this part of Burgundy. These soft, victim-Celts, led by a chieftain named Dumnorix, called Caesar in to quell the invaders—or so Julius claimed.

When they could no longer sustain the Roman charges
, Alison read,
the Helvetii resumed their retreat.…

As I gazed over the countryside, my mind’s eye followed the hedgerows through sunny pastures and shadowy woods. Caesar and his legions had galloped by long before the reservoir had been built, before the Gauls’ virgin woods had been felled with the efficiency of a Weyerhaeuser. It was an ancient, layered, complex landscape. The more you read and queried, the more you realized that the foundations, the lowest layers of the Morvan’s saga, were strife, hunger, bloodshed, and a nightmare existence.

Some documents found in the Helvetian camp were brought to Caesar
, Alison continued,
a register of the names of all the emigrants
.

The total of fighting-age men, plus women, children, and old men, came to 368,000, Caesar noted,
comprising 263,000 Helvetii, 36,000 Tulingi, 14,000 Latovici, 23,000 Rauraci, and 32,000 Boii … a census was taken of those who returned home, and the number was found to be 110,000
.

I asked Alison to re-read the paragraph. Then I subtracted 110,000 from 368,000. That came to 258,000 dead or enslaved. In a single battle? Even if the count was off, even if only one tenth of that number had died, it was still a massacre of unimaginable proportions.

This seemed to me a two-headed revelation. First, I’d never known that body counts were important in Antiquity, and wondered now whether the Romans had sent out messengers to tell families their loved ones had died. Caesar doesn’t mention the tally of dead Romans and mercenaries, only that of the enemy.

The second revelation was that Caesar, too, outsourced to security contractors and shied away from showing or talking about body bags. The parallels to modern warfare and public relations were uncanny.

But to return to the Helvetii—our modern-day Swiss—and a peculiar irony of history, it suddenly struck me that the infallible pope, heir to Caesar and the divine-right emperors that followed him, is guarded by none other than Swiss guards.

Alison read several more pages, but the rain had gotten going again and the book was getting wet. No sooner had we packed and started walking than a Mirage fighter jet appeared, a dart on the horizon. It roared toward us, its black silhouette piercing the cloudy gray sky. Within seconds it was overhead, a hundred yards above us. Instinctively I ducked. The heat of the jet’s flames seemed to singe mM">passéisme incarnate.dChy hair. The crackling, hoarse thunder deafened us. “Jesus
J.,”
I blurted. “Good thing we’re not superstitious.”

“Superstitious? You think someone is listening?”

Of course not. No one was watching or listening to us. The Mirages were merely engaged in low-fly exercises. The French did them daily, flexing their muscles, swinging the slingshot, one eye on the arms market, the other on the global Goliath in Washington, D.C. Precisely because the Morvan is depopulated, no one complains about low-flying fighter jets; and when they do,
tant pis!
Too bad, and so what?

For the next hour I barely noticed the gentle sylvan scenery. It was hard to believe that in this gorgeous backwater, a place tourists will kill to visit, the natives had experienced millennia of misery. Theirs was a heritage of blood. They’d bred canon-fodder for the Great War of 1914–1918. Hundreds of thousands had perished. Long before that, their Celtic ancestors had suckled spear-fodder—the warriors and drudges Caesar described, men sent out for slaughter by pitiless Druids and head-hunting tribal chieftains. The rule back then was burn your village before your enemy could take it. Burn and fight, or flee before superior force. Few straggled. Those left behind would be hideously tortured and disfigured, skewered alive or enslaved by the newcomers—either rival tribesmen or the Romans, who were charitable in comparison.