The Discovery of France (50 page)

The touring clubs were pioneers in the tradition of the eighteenth-century map-makers. They not only popularized obscure parts of France, they also discovered them. In 1882, two members of the Club Alpin stumbled on an amazing ‘city of stones’ in the wild uplands of the Causse Noir. The dolomitic rock formations that tower over the forest of oak and scrub like ruined skyscrapers are visible from a distance of several miles, though nothing on that site had ever been indicated on a map. The uninhabited chaos of columns and ravines was baptized Montpellier-le-Vieux, supposedly because local shepherds had named it after the only city they knew, though this was probably the result of a misunderstanding: the local name, ‘Lou Clapas’, simply means ‘heap of stones’, which also happened to be the derisive local name for Montpellier.

The discovery of the Old Heap of Stones was one of the early triumphs of the Club Alpin, a lost treasure reclaimed from the wild provinces. A scale model of ‘The Devil’s Citadel’ was made for the Exposition Universelle of 1889, where it intrigued the crowds who had come to see the Eiffel Tower. A year before, the English writer Matilda Betham-Edwards had seen the real thing when, at the age of fifty-three, she took a carriage from Le Rozier in the Tarn gorges and climbed the almost vertical road on the north wall of the Causse Noir to those ‘vast, flower-scented heights, nearly 3000 feet above the sea-level, swept clean by the pure air of half a dozen mountain chains’. She reached the mangy farm of Maubert and was shown around Montpellier-le-Vieux by the farmer, who was already contemplating a new career as an innkeeper.

Fortunately, Mrs Betham-Edwards had some good advice for the farmer and his young wife, who was ‘very bright, good-looking, amiable and intelligent’, ‘but sadly neglectful of her personal appearance, with locks unkempt and dress slatternly’. A French tourist was ensconced in the farmhouse with his guide, eating omelettes. Mrs Betham- Edwards had a vision of the future – a tablecloth spread for breakfast, the dunghill replaced by a flower garden, carpets and armchairs in the best bedrooms and even ‘trays, bells and door-fastenings’.

*

T
HE ROCKS
of Montpellier-le-Vieux now bear the gaudy names that were given to them by a Parisian lawyer, Édouard-Alfred Martel: Cyrano’s Nose, the Sphinx, the Badger’s Eyes, the Gate of Mycenae, etc. The ‘Columbus of the nether world’ was born at Pontoise near Paris in 1859. After a holiday with his parents in the Pyrenees, Martel became obsessed with the underground world of caves and grottos. Between 1888 and 1913, he made annual expeditions to remote parts of France and eventually to fourteen other countries, including Ireland and the United States. With his trusty assistant, a blacksmith called Louis Armand, he charted most of the caverns and subterranean labyrinths that still attract millions of visitors today: Dargilan, Padirac, the Aven Armand, the Abîme de Bramabiau. He hung from spinning rope ladders, stumbled over rock falls with a canoe on his head and a candle clenched between his teeth, and stood shivering in vast, iridescent caverns wearing a wool suit, a bowler hat and boots with holes to let the water out.

Martel was the popular hero of the new age of domestic exploration. He wrote dozens of books, most of which were bestsellers and only one of which,
Les Abîmes
, is still in print. His true-life tales were just as exciting as the fantasies of his favourite novelist, Jules Verne. This is his description of the descent of the Gouffre de Padirac:

British and American mountaineers had conquered the highest peaks in France; Martel restored some national pride by conquering the deepest depths. He saw himself as a patriotic salesman ‘conducting publicity campaigns for compatriots who possess an unexploited source of wealth in the natural beauties of their region’. These compatriots appear in his books as superstitious simpletons while Martel himself is the demystifying missionary, the magician from the Land of Technology who, with dazzling magnesium strips, lights the holes where the Devil used to lurk. An engraving in
Les Abîmes
shows him towering over his companions, standing in a niche like the Virgin of Lourdes, with a candle stuck to the brim of his hat.

A belief in subterranean demons did not prevent farmers from using these holes as waste-disposal chutes. What Martel dreaded most was the repulsive, gluey crunchiness at the bottom of the pits which he called ‘carcass soup’ and which local people harvested for use as fertilizer and pigment. Tales of quivering peasants warning of vengeful spirits are still trotted out in modern guidebooks. The real response to Martel’s explorations was less flattering. Hundreds of people would gather and turn the spectacle into a village fête. Snuffling dogs sent stones flying down the hole while violins and accordions made telephone communication impossible. Old women crossed themselves and wagged their fingers, saying, ‘You’ll get down there all right, my fine gentlemen, but you’ll never get out again’, or ‘
Y o dé nèsci de touto mèno
’ (‘fools come in all shapes and sizes’). Local men would ask Martel if he and his team had come to measure the hole ‘so that they can build one in their own
pays
’. Little did they know that their hole in the ground would one day be more valuable than a gold mine.

*

A
NYONE WHO HAS EXPLORED
a cavern or a gorge in France has probably walked along a ‘Sentier Martel’ or admired the view from
one of Martel’s ‘Points sublimes’. He discovered more than two hundred caverns and underground rivers and has had more sites named after him than most saints. But even Martel was amazed by the geological monster that came to light in 1905.

Just over a hundred years ago, when Paris had a Métro and the Eiffel Tower was showing signs of age, one of the natural wonders of the Old World was known only to a few woodcutters and carvers who saw no reason to share their knowledge of the local inconvenience with the outside world. The Grand Canyon of the Verdon runs for thirteen miles through the puzzling limestone landscape of the Pré-alpes de Castellane. Sixty miles to the south-west lies the second largest city in France. Many of the boxwood balls that arced through the air on the dusty malls of Marseille had begun life as gnarled stumps clinging to the edge of the longest and deepest canyon in Europe. Men from the hamlets on either side of the canyon lowered themselves into the chasm to cut the best wood for making
boules
while, two thousand feet below, the metallic-green Verdon rushed through its narrow gorge, scouring the gravel bed and carving out new caves.

At the eastern end of the canyon, the town of Castellane stands on a Roman road that joined the Durance to the Mediterranean and the Via Aurelia to the Via Domitia. Napoleon had passed through Castellane on his way back to Paris in 1815. At the western end of the canyon, the village of Moustiers-Sainte-Marie was famous for its glazed ceramics and the golden star that a crusader returning from the Holy Land had strung between two cliffs. Both places were described in guidebooks. Charles Bertram Black’s guide to the South of France in 1885 even mentioned a road between Castellane and Moustiers that he might have supposed to have existed when he looked at his map. Meanwhile, the Verdon Gorges remained completely unknown to the rest of the world.

It is almost as interesting to imagine
not
discovering the Verdon Gorges as it is to explore them. From the road that reaches Moustiers from the west, a spectacular wall of rock appears to the east. The evening sun sets a line of silver along its ridge and shows the wall to be quite thin: something obviously lies behind it. But no one who climbed up to Moustiers after crossing the wind-blasted Valensole
plain would have felt inclined to prolong the journey and to venture among the cliffs and ravines that slanted off into a poorly mapped region. Most travellers’ appetites for grand desolation would have been satisfied to the limit. The entrance to the canyon itself is so narrow as to be invisible even at a short distance, though the scene is now very hard to picture. In 1975, hydroelectric dams created the Lac de Sainte-Croix, submerging fourteen square miles and turning the hillside village of Bauduen into a lakeside resort.

One day in 1896, the people of Rougon, a hamlet near the north-eastern rim of the canyon, were amazed to see a small party of men with a donkey and a dismantled canoe. It was the first boat ever seen in the
pays
. The leader of the expedition, a naval engineer called Armand Janet, claimed to have come from the gorge itself, which seemed impossible. He had negotiated the river as far as the eastern entrance to the gorge, but after a terrifying encounter with the rapids his local guides had refused to continue and he was forced to abandon the attempt.

Nine years later, Édouard Martel was commissioned by the Minister of Agriculture to study the hydrology of the region. It was hoped that the river Verdon could be tamed and used to irrigate the parched fields of the Var and to ensure a supply of drinking water for Toulon and Marseille. Martel, accompanied by Armand Janet, Louis Armand, an agricultural engineer, a local teacher, two road-menders and several porters, sailed the entire length of the Verdon Gorges, naming features, taking photographs with the only camera that survived the torrent and surprisingly remaining alive. Two of the boats were smashed to pieces. It took the party three days to descend ten miles of the river. They finally emerged from the canyon at 10 a.m. on 14 August 1905, near the Roman bridge below Aiguines which has since been swallowed by the lake.

The following year, in the proceedings of the Geographical Society and in a popular magazine called
Le Tour du monde
, Martel described the expedition and revealed this ‘American wonder of France’ to the world, thirty-seven years after John Wesley Powell’s pioneering expedition through the Grand Canyon of the Colorado. His only regret was that this ‘new jewel in the rich crown of
la belle France
’
scarcely lent itself to tourism. As he suspected, the Verdon Gorges would ‘remain for a long time invisible or at least unvisitable’.

A road along the south rim of the gorges, accurately called the Corniche Sublime, was opened in 1947. The north road was completed in 1973. Both roads form an exhilarating circuit of sixty-two miles. The unknown, dangerous region now lies on the other side of the road, away from the canyon, where a valley slopes towards the hills on the part of the map. A few dusty tracks lead off into the scrub, across the Grand Plan de Canjuers, a karstic plateau riddled with sinkholes and underground streams. Sometimes, a cloud of dust can be seen rising from the hills, and a traveller who walks a short distance into the bushes, beyond the warning signs, may catch sight of some of the camouflaged denizens of the Canjuers military zone.

*

T
HE DISCOVERY OF
the Verdon Gorges was also a revelation of the nation’s ignorance of itself. Until 1906, the most spectacular geographical feature in France might as well have existed in a different dimension; yet, all around the rim of the canyon, Martel and Janet had found farm animals drinking at pools, ‘ruins whose history is unknown’ and, in the canyon itself, wreckage washed down by the torrent – planks of wood from mills and cabins, and even ‘a footbridge from who knows where’.

The ‘newly discovered marvel’ had been known about for centuries. When the first accurate map was made, it was littered with place names which, like the stratified rocks, trace a long journey back in time. Martel’s Jules Verne-inspired names were only the latest layer of colour: the Plateau des Fossiles, the Voûte d’Émeraude (Emerald Vault), the Étroit de la Quille (Skittle Strait). Some of the older names had acquired a modern patina: the farm originally known as Bourogne had turned into Boulogne, and the bridge at the hamlet of Soleis had become the falsely mysterious Pont-de-Soleils (Bridge of Suns).

Despite the French spelling, the original Occitan forms were clearly visible and testified to the long struggle of people with the land: the Baumes-Fères (Wild Caverns), le Maugué (Bad Ford), the
Pas de Vaumale (Bad Valley Pass). A stable in the hills above the eastern entrance to the canyon had once been a sanctuary of the Knights Templar. Its name, Saint Maymes, was derived from the Roman Maximus. Further west, ‘Saint Maurice’ was probably the Christianized form of a pagan word for ‘marsh’. There were few other saints’ names, suggesting that human habitation in the gorges predated the Roman roads – if they were indeed Roman – that ran to the west and east of the canyon.

The oldest names of all had been worn away to a few airy vowels. ‘Ayen’, the name of a pass on the northern rim, has no known origin. It may be the echo of a Gaulish word for ‘rock’ (
aginn
), used by the Iron Age people whose tombs were later discovered at Soleis, or a lone relic of an unrecorded language that was spoken when the river was still carving out its chasm.