Paris to the Pyrenees: From a Traveler’s Notebooks, post 5 To Vezelay from Sermizelles (not a disease)
These blog posts are taken directly from my notebooks. They contain much of the material that went into the final version of the surprise bestseller Paris to the Pyrenees: A Skeptic Pilgrim Walks the Way of Saint James.
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Part adventure story, part cultural history my book explores the phenomenon of pilgrimage along the centuries-old Way of Saint James in France—not in Spain. Starting in Paris then training to Northern Burgundy we trekked 750 miles south, an eccentric route taking 72 days on Roman roads and pilgrimage paths—a 1,100-year-old network of trails leading to the sanctuary of Saint James the Greater. It is best known as El Camino de Santiago de Compostela—“The Way” for short. The book includes 32 pages of evocative color photographs by Alison Harris. She has generously provided the images that appear with these posts.
What follows is unexpurgated, unedited material—the uncut version.
The paperback of Paris to the Pyrenees comes out in April 2014…
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Paris to the Pyrenees: From a Traveler’s Notebooks, post 5 To Vézelay from Sermizelles (not a disease)
We stopped at a station with no signs. A broken clock, benches spattered with pigeon droppings, and a collection of abandoned farm equipment suggested we were entering a rural time warp.
Several miles further south Alison spotted a billboard in a field. It advertised the “Musée des Voitures des Chefs d’État” at the Chateau de Monjalin. A museum dedicated to the vehicles owned by former heads of state? Worth the detour, I thought, paraphrasing the Michelin guides.
Then again, what kind of car had De Gaulle driven, and what did it say about him? The world was driven by the car culture. Only peregrine falcons and pilgrims seemed to be able to do without a set of wheels.
This was a great train ride. Long live the loss-leader branch lines of this world, I said to myself. If only all of the taxes I paid to the French government could go towards them and not Mirage fighters and useless aircraft carriers built to maintain prestige in the nuclear club…
The next throwback train station was named Lucy. The name transported me first to Desi Arnez and Lucille Ball in I Love Lucy then to Peanuts and risked sending me into a reverie with comic-strip word bubbles and dah-dA-dat-dA-dah-da-daaa-daaa theme music by Vince Gueraldi. However, the train had been rolling for nearly two hours, and I knew Lucy to be near our destination, Sermizelles, and even nearer another station, Voutenay, from which a hiking trail reportedly mounts direct to Vézelay in about 8 miles.
At Voutenay would there be a café? We’d been up since 5 a.m. My brain felt starved of caffeine. That was one addiction I wasn’t likely to kick.
Rain had begun to paint patterns on the train’s wide panoramic windows. Beyond them we could see the rolling, wooded hills and hedgerow-edged emerald pastures patented by the pre-Burgundian Celts several thousand years ago. The time had come for our first decision: Sermizelles or Voutenay? Coffee, said my brain. Now.
“Bonjour madame, do you happen to know if there’s a café in Voutenay?” I asked a woman with a bouquet of red roses, seated across from us on the train.
“Heavens, I’m so sorry, I don’t,” she said in a startled, pleasant voice. Her singsong accent hinted at rural, Burgundian roots. “I’m from Auxerre,” she explained, “but I’ve lived in Paris for so long…”
The conductor, the square-jawed young lion who had wanted to see my guidebook, and the clutch of chatty women-pilgrims also pleaded ignorance of cafés at Voutenay or Sermizelles.
“But if you’re going to Vézelay you must get off at Sermizelles,” insisted the woman from Paris who pronounced Auxerre “O-sair.” She said there was no trail from Voutenay.
The train entered a valley hemmed by frowning, pocked cliffs and soon followed what I knew from the Topo Guide to be the Cure River. White water ran under budding groves of willow and poplar. My eyes could smell the eddies and mossy roots through the safety glass. From “pretty” the scenery had quietly become gorgeous.
Sermizelles Mon Amour
The name of the station was not euphonic, suggesting a childhood disease or rash. Rain fell with springtime vigor as we detrained, and the temperature seemed a holdover from February. In other words it was pouring and freezing. This did not discourage Alison from trotting off to take a photograph of a dilapidated building. Decomposition fascinates her.
The small group of senior women pilgrims from the train marched past, joining a larger group waiting for them with a special bus. The bus and train pulled out. I glanced around and had already lost Alison.
In the parking lot where I stood, a pair of women hefted a backpack and wrestled it into the trunk of a hard-driven four-door Peugeot. One of the two looked to be in her twenties, was tall, gaunt and pale, and wore an expensive Barbour raincoat, the kind favored by the English horsey set. The other woman probably had seen the backside of 70 but seemed sturdy. She wore pearls over gardening clothes. Catholic, country gentry, I told myself, unable to mind my own business.
“Pardon me, do you know if there’s a café in the village?” I asked. “And where is the village anyway?”
The frail woman shook her elongated head and her swept-back long hair, a mane of the kind Mary Magdalene must have worn. “I’m not from here,” she said. The older of the two asked me to repeat my question, louder. She was hard of hearing. “No, there’s no village here and no café until you get to Saint-Père-sous-Vézelay,” she shouted.
That was 12 kilometers—about 8 miles—down the busy highway, a 2-hour walk in the rain on a truck route, without coffee. “We’re driving to Vézelay,” she shouted again, sounding charitable. “I suppose we could give you a ride. There are no taxis or buses at this time of year.”
I hesitated. “That would be cheating,” I said. “I’m sure it’s a lovely walk.” I repeated the sentence, louder, at the woman’s behest. She had forgotten to put on her hearing-aides.
“No it is not a particularly lovely walk, no indeed. It is dangerous. You’re better off walking from Vézelay on the pilgrim trail, but suit yourself…” The two began to get into the Peugeot.
“If you wait just one second I’ll get my wife,” I shouted, cupping my hands and shouting.
Several minutes later Alison and I piled our packs into the trunk and ourselves into the back of the battered car and rolled south. It was an unusual way to start a hike.
“Maiden aunt,” whispered Alison. “Confused, religious niece.”
I nodded.
We soon had reason to wonder if we would make it to Vézelay alive. The hard-of-hearing pilot shifted gears following her own logic. The tires were dangerously out of balance. She swerved down the center of the highway, shouting, distracted by conversation. Her wan niece spoke louder and louder as the transmission and engine whined, and the tires wiggled and thumped. The niece fiddled with the silver cross hanging from a chain around her neck and recounted her many-fold bureaucratic woes, lashing her Mary Magdalene hair out of the way for emphasis.
“I haven’t been unemployed long enough,” she yelled, alternately clutching the dashboard and strap above her head, touching her cross and tossing her mane. Her aunt avoided a speeding truck on a curve and the girl crossed herself and rolled her eyes. “I’ve explained it before,” the girl shouted, “one must be unemployed and on the RMI roll-call for at least one year before one may be hired with the government’s new labor contract…”
“France,” the older woman shouted. “It’s impossible, this government, the rioters…”
Alison appeared to be only mildly car sick.
Somehow we managed to switchback up through steep vineyards to the top of the hill without hitting anything. The maiden aunt, having ascertained which hotel we were staying in, stopped the car abruptly in the middle of the road, giving all of us whiplash. Other vehicles behind slammed on their brakes and honked. “There it is,” shouted the aunt, indicating a handsome building whose mossy roof sprouted dormers and chimneys. We thanked our benefactors, scrambled out and opened the trunk hoping to extract our packs.
“Jump!” shouted Alison as the car rolled back at us.
From the safety of the sidewalk we reached out, pulled out our packs and watched as, moments later, the maiden aunt and her unemployed, pious niece swerved into the sodden landscape.
I lifted my eyes. In the heavy rainfall I could not see the basilica of Mary Magdalene. From where we were it rose on the far end of the hogback mountain we’d looped up in the car.
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However, and what seemed more important, as we crossed the threshold of the Hôtel du Lion d’Or the smell of coffee wafted from the breakfast room. A welcoming innkeeper and a sculpted wooden effigy of Saint Jacques greeted us in the lobby. She wore a nicely tailored winter-weight pants suit, handed us our key and promised coffee as soon as we descended. Saint Jacques instead wore his signature upturned floppy hat. It looked startlingly like the kaki-colored cotton one Alison had on, bought at the Décathlon sports emporium in Paris.
Jacques seemed to be grinning at us with his varnished lips, winking with his large, slightly wall eyes. No, we were not the first to come to Vézelay to begin the Chemin de Saint Jacques de Compostelle—the Way of Saint James. Nor were we the first, or currently the only ones, to spend Easter weekend atop what the French call La Colline Éternelle—the Eternal Hill. The hotel was booked solid.
Watch a video about us walking the pilgrimage route in Paris
Please come back, blog post 6 is coming up soon…
Contemporary images of Vezelay and countryside for this post copyright Alison Harris
Listen to an interview about Paris to the Pyrenees with Jacki Lyden on NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday
Listen to David being interviewed by NPR Paris correspondent Eleanor Beardsley about the pilgrimage revival
Snippets of reviews/praise:
“Evocative and moving… Downie’s quest is unconventional in tone and spirit as well as route. A lively wordsmith, Downie brings a deep and impassioned knowledge of French history, culture, and language to this pilgrimage. He also brings something more, a longing that he himself can’t pin down at the beginning… they encounter a memorable succession of taciturn, deep-rooted local farmers and gregarious, transplanted-from-Paris innkeepers. They also encounter the multi-layered, interweaving pathways of French history, commerce, religion, and spirituality—and manage to tuck in a few sumptuous celebrations of French food and wine, too. The result is an extraordinary account that illuminates France past and present and casts a light on something even greater: the truth that, however we choose to label our journey, we are all pilgrims on a common quest, to answer why we wander life’s question-paved path.” (Don George – National Geographic Traveler)
“In the tradition of Patrick Leigh Fermor, David Downie takes off on foot. Such a rigorous, slow journey—the polar opposite of airport-to-airport travel—gives him the gift of time, and the chance to absorb, taste, and experience the places he sees. Downie’s adroit, learned, and ambitious book re-invigorates my sense of travel, taking me back to the happy knowledge that the world is still large, and history unfathomably deep.” (Frances Mayes, author of Under the Tuscan Sun)
“Profound. A witty and intelligent spin on the spiritual-journey motif.” (Kirkus Reviews)
Paris to the Pyrenees: A Skeptic Pilgrim Walks the Way of Saint James
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