At Home in France

by Ann Barry

  France is the land of pilgrimages, and I have always been fascinated by their history. Before I left for France, I resurrected my Canterbury Tales.

  Whan that April with his showres soote

  The droughte of Marche hath perced to the roote,

  And bathed every veyne in swich licour,

  Of which vertu engendred is the flowr;

  When Zephyrus eek with his sweete breeth

  Inspired hath in every holt and heeth

  The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne

  Hath in the Ram his halve cours yronne,

  And smale fowles maken melodye

  That sleepen al the night with open ye—

  So priketh hem Nature in hir corages—

  Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages.…

  When I read that last line, I was confused: I thought a pilgrimage was supposed to be a penitential exercise or an attempt to seek a cure for oneself or a relative. Or, on the lowest scale, a sentence for committing a civil offense, something like our system of community service in lieu of incarceration—and who would be longing to share the road with robbers, rapists, and murderers?

  I talked over the subject with Charles, who shed more light on the matter. In the eleventh century, he said, the practice of going on pilgrimages satisfied a deep need among adventurous, perhaps marginally literate, and pious folk. Christians venerated relics and believed that cures of body and soul could be achieved by arduous journeys to shrines where the remains of holy persons were kept. The growing number of monasteries fostered this trend, providing way stations where pilgrims could eat and sleep (and spend money). Competition between monasteries to attract pilgrims grew intense. Some pilgrimages, like that to St. James of Campostela in Northwestern Spain, became immensely popular and safer alternatives to the risky voyage to the Holy Land. The popular conception of pilgrimages is that they were undertaken in order to atone for some grave sin. Actually, although some of the harsher or more spectacular pilgrimages might have been performed as penance, the great majority seem to have been a mixture of personal devotion, fulfilling adventure, wanderlust, or mercantile opportunity. Sharing experiences, risks, and hardships must have built that same sense of solidarity, mutual confidence, fellow feeling, and occasional hilarity that twentieth-century man feels during a long bus ride or after a scary airplane landing.

  Most people who lived between the fourth and the fifteenth centuries never went more than a day’s walk away from their birthplace. To be a pilgrim one had to be able to leave behind occupation, home, and loved ones (pilgrims rarely traveled with their families). Peasants, farmers, serfs, and slaves, who weren’t free to leave, were unlikely to go on pilgrimage. More pilgrims came from among the single folk (young widows and widowers were much more common then), and from among town or city dwellers. They had heard travelers’ tales, and were itching to go themselves. Most pilgrims only went once in their lives, but eighteen months is a big chunk out of a life expectancy of thirty-five years. Wealthier pilgrims traveled in comfort; these could afford better food, horses or mules, and servants. Many others started and returned nearly penniless, depending on charity throughout their trip.

  Pilgrimages took many months and often years. You traveled light, with a bedroll, a staff, and a cloak. A scallop shell that pinned up the brim of your floppy felt hat told everyone you met that you were a pilgrim on the way to Campostela. Even today, the French call scallops the shells of St. James (coquilles St-Jacques). Pilgrims traveled singly or in bands of varying sizes. This de pended on how safe they felt the countryside was, whether they could keep up with the party, and whether they felt comfortable with each other. All across Southwestern France there are braided routes that the pilgrims followed from minor shrine to major site, all ending in a crossing of the Pyrenees into Spain.

  My pilgrimage to Provence was undertaken in unabashed wanderlust. I had only one slight upset with Charleston. It was in Avignon, which I found difficult to negotiate by car. I circled and circled and found nowhere to park on the street. At a sign for the Palais des Papes—the principal focus of my visit—I turned and found myself irrevocably committed to a dark underground garage. I resist underground garages at all costs. I fear I’ll lose track of the location of my car, that I’ll become trapped in a mechanized system I don’t comprehend. I am a person who balks at an automatic stamp machine—even one with instructions in English. But there was no retreat. I parked on a level where there was plenty of space and took my ticket from the automatic dispenser. CAISSE 3, the sign read. I emblazoned it on my mind. I rode the ascenseur with a British couple, who seemed equally at sea—“Darling, you will remember which ramp?” We were belched out of the elevator into a prisonlike concrete passageway that eventually led to a street behind the palais.

  In the center of its courtyard was a gargantuan Botero sculpture of a nude astride a bull, a hilarious affront to its venue. The entire building had been turned over to an extensive Botero exhibition—to the horror of a tour group of proper British ladies in summer frocks and flowery straw hats, who found it “shocking” and “disgusting.” I wandered through the great halls until lunchtime, de lighted that I’d stumbled on the irreligious Botero show. Then I took my carefully memorized circuitous route back to the ascenseur, congratulating myself when I found Caisse 3 and Charleston without difficulty. At the end of the spiraling ramp, I handed my ticket through the window to the man in the booth.

  “Vous n’avez pas payé?” he demanded, in a disapproving manner.

  But where was I to have paid?

  “Non,” I replied, the claustrophobic heat of the garage mounting.

  “Descendez,” he said in a tone used for children. This was a man who would exercise his authority to the hilt. He motioned to a machine on the opposite side of a concrete embankment.

  Two cars were now backed up behind me. I jumped from the car and followed him. He inserted my ticket into a slot in the machine and pointed to the fee registered. I fumbled through the change in my wallet and came up with an inexact amount. In aggravating slow motion, he took the coins from my sweating palm and dropped them in. The change rattled into the cup. I scooped it up and raced back to the car. There was not a honk from the patient line of cars, probably tourists like myself, dreading a similar humiliation. I drove out of the garage into the welcome light of day, my distrust in garage parking confirmed.

  Few places—the restaurant, the inn—remain fixed in my memory as time passes: I have to go to diaries to summon them up again. Les Hospitaliers, in Le Poët-Laval, which I’d read about in Pat Wells’s Food Lover’s Guide to France and which was a splurge, is one that will remain ineradicable. It encapsulates that Provence trip. The ho tel’s architecture merged with the crumbling white stonework that was the last vestige of this remote medieval mountain hamlet. The village was a Pompeii, with the hotel a phoenix rising from its ruin. This was the first place I’d ever visited in France where I literally could not go for a run—the road down was a sheer drop to the valley. There was a pool, sprinkled with flower petals from the surrounding trees, which I had to myself for a swim before dinner. My room overlooked the terrace, where a fir tree right out of a Van Gogh painting stood like a tall spear against the sky and morning glories spilled over hedges.

  To get to the separate restaurant, I had to climb up a steep rocky terrace to a great wooden door. It creaked as it opened onto a spectacular setting. The restaurant of creamy-white stone was semi-alfresco, with a view of the surrounding hills, hazy in the evening light. Flowers and candles adorned the tables. It was as serene as a monastery.

  I ordered a glass of champagne and chose the prix fixe menu. Here, as the view of the hills darkened, is what I had: the chef’s offering of an amuse-gueule (what we would call a cocktail snack but which wittily translates as “tease the mouth,” and specifically, the mouth of a ravenous animal), which was a puff of pâté à chou filled with crème fraîche atop a delicate chive cream sauce; an eggplant mousse in an airy cream sauc
e with a refreshing touch of mint; a salad of finely slivered avocado on delicate mixed greens, with olives and mounds of avocado mousse; for the main course, what was called a crespinet du pied de porc, molded balls of rich, gamy minced pork in a crisp casing, sweet and sticky, surrounded by tiny carmelized onions, bacon bits, and baby carrots; an unusal cheese course, a chèvre rôti redolent of anise and warming its bed of greens; and, finally, a reine de pommes, a warm slab of apple tart in a cidery sauce. I spent more on the wine than the entire meal: a 1985 Graves recommended by the wine steward, who enacted the classic and mesmerizing ritual—which I’ve so rarely seen—of testing the wine in a little silver cup (called a taste-vin) and holding the bottle to candlelight to check the sediment. It was a grand wine; at the end, he pointed to the sediment on the side of the bottle—a good sign. I received every bit as much solicitous attention as the elegant couple, apparently known to the maître d’, seated at the next table. I walked back to my room—no stars, portending a cloudy day—literally and figuratively on top of the world.

  Rosebushes lined the wine route. At first I assumed they simply reflected the Provencals’ love of flowers. But I later read that since roses are easily susceptible to rot, they warn viticulturists of impending disease to their vines. The fields were carpeted with genêts, buttercup-yellow wild-flowers with a powerful perfume. With the windows of Charleston open, and the ceaseless mistral sending rushes of air through the car, I was constantly inhaling the aroma. I took to stopping along the way to pick a few sprays of genêts, which I’d stick in a water glass in my hotel room, their scent my last sensation before sleep. The rolling yellow fields, the deep blue sky, brought Monet’s blue-and-yellow kitchen at Giverny to mind.

  Along the Cézanne route outside of Aix, to Mont-St-Victoire, the colors of the landscape became muted, austere. My art-history books came to life, and I recognized the places where Cezanne’s strivings to find “a harmony parallel to nature” were realized. I drove the route around the rugged limestone massif and circled back to Le Tholonet, where Cézanne had rented an old stone farmhouse in the last years of his life. Being within sight of St-Victoire, the circumstances of his death seemed particularly poignant: he’d gone out on one of his daily excursions to paint the mountain and was caught in a rainstorm. Burdened with his easel, he collapsed on the road and was eventually found by someone with a laundry cart. He died a week later.

  The mistral was maddening, a never-ending brewing storm. How do the Provencals endure this wind day in, day out? What would the winters be like? I asked Madame, as she anchored my tablecloth at an alfresco lunch; her smile and shrug seemed to say, “We all have our little crosses, but this is a small one to pay for being in paradise.” But after two weeks, I was itching to be free of it. The last day, as I headed back to Pech Farguet, I wondered at what point the mistral would vanish—would there be one instance when it was and the next instant not? I couldn’t say when—it was like waiting for a flower to bloom, or die—but at some point the car was no longer buffeted, the whistling stilled, and when I stepped out the door, it was as if the world had come to rest. Provence was behind me.

  Crossing the border of the Lot, I marveled again at the singular character of the region: the old stone houses with red-tiled roofs, the gentle landscape, the colors. The very air, it seemed, was unlike any other. I took a deep breath and drank it in. In all of France, I was reassured yet again, this was exactly where I wanted to be.

  14

  AN OLD FRIEND

  The following fall, my close friend Patsy O’Connell visited the house. Our friendship has been long and loyal. We grew up in adjacent neighborhoods and had gone to school together, all the way from first grade through college. We both had reclusive, pessimistic Irish fathers. I don’t recall our ever speaking of them to each other. Our mothers were Brownie leaders together. They were the center of our lives. We both had two much older siblings, sisters in Patsy’s case, brothers in mine, so that we shared the experience of having older parents and a more solitary upbringing. Only in her later years did Patsy become spontaneously generous—a streak of Irish miserliness of spirit overcome? Yet she is still somewhat shy about demonstrating—and receiving—physical affection. We formed a bond in those early years that underwent dramatic changes in our lives. During college, we segued into antithetical circles. Patsy got involved with a radical antiestablishment hippie crowd (she was arrested in one of the first sit-down protests against racial prejudice in a bank in St. Louis). I took a staid path: sorority, religious sodality, honors society (the be-good, don’t-rock-the-boat route). Yet we remained close friends. Our contrary worlds were almost an unspoken joke between us.

  Patsy joined the Peace Corps and subsequently taught in Africa for several years. Eventually she wound up back in St. Louis—the majority of her close friends were there—as the director of an adult-education program. She recently bought a three-story house in the historic renovated district of Souillard, near the waterfront, which she has filled with her collection of African art and a colorful array of folk art. Her married sister lives in New Jersey, however, and Patsy usually visits her once a year and stays over for a night in Brooklyn; I get back to St. Louis now and then to see her and other friends. Even though we’re far apart, I count her as one of my closest friends. And though we see each other infrequently, there’s a continuity. I couldn’t stand on more solid ground than with this woman I’ve known all my life. I invited her to France, assured that we’d travel well together: same interests, same rhythm. And we’d worn well.

  Being in France together would be special, since we’d have an extended period of time—five days—all to ourselves. I arrived several days early, on a Friday, and planned to pick up Patsy at the train station in Brive the following Monday (to save her the anxiety of having to switch trains to St-Denis).

  When I drove up to the station she was already standing on the steps. We hugged gleefully. Here we were, two old grade-school friends meeting in Brive! On the way out of town, we chattered madly, about Paris, her train ride, about the weather, about the route we’d be taking home. She adored Charleston. Such a typique way to get about! She was rhapsodic along the route to the house. Not far from Brive, there’s a particularly spectacular view of the château of Turenne, with the houses of the tiny village clustered at its base like children at their mother’s skirt (in fact, it had more than a thousand villages and numerous abbeys under its aegis). It was her first castle and I slowed to a crawl so that she could observe it at length.

  At the house, she dropped her luggage on the patio, stunned at the view. I basked in the moment: Patsy at my home in France at last. We’d been planning this trip for a long while.

  That evening we had champagne before the fire. I’d put together a special dinner: a potato gratin (a James Villas recipe that required about three hours of tending) and grilled duck breast in a port-and-orange sauce. We shared a bottle of wine and dropped happily in bed. Patsy had the upper bedroom. I slept in one of the two enormous chairs before the hearth, which had been built by Mr. Pinckney. These are capacious wooden chairs, with sturdy bright blue cushions (the color scheme of my house is a Monet-like blue and yellow, the same as Patsy’s old bedroom at home, I remembered). They have sloping backs, and long footrests that slide out from the bottom so that you can almost stretch out full-length. It’s somewhat like sleeping in a lounge chair. It was no sacrifice to be lulled to sleep by the dying embers of the fire.

  Patsy reflects her Irish heritage. She is plump and apple-cheeked, with large blue-green eyes and curly auburn hair, which she now dyes. She is wonderfully witty and talks a mile a minute; when she and her sister are together they carry on an overlapping dialogue, speaking and hearing at the same time. Patsy loves nothing more than a lively and nearly endless discussion. She has a big, cackling laugh, which erupts often. When she is pensive, she has a winsome way of pursing her lips as if to kiss. Patsy enjoys good food, which gave me no end of pleasure during her stay. Each morning I would d
rive down to the Bétaille bakery while she was showering. After the first morning, she always wanted both a croissant and a pain aux raisins, with coffee. She clucked over the food like a contented hen.

  I wanted to wow Patsy right off the bat. So, the first morning, we headed for Rocamadour, one of the most spectacular sights in the region. The village, seemingly defying gravity, is literally pinned to the face of a cliff over a gorge 1,640 feet below. Rocamadour was a major pilgrimage stop: according to the Michelin, thirty thousand people came on days of major pardon and plenary indulgence. Its fame grew as a result of miracles rewarding the faithful. On the way to Rocamadour, I told Patsy about the pilgrims’ route, just as Charles had told me, in storybook fashion.

  The arriving pilgrims, I said, entered the Haut-Quercy from the north. Perhaps a night or two in Tulle, and the hospitality of the abbot-bishop, would have whetted their desire to reach the shrine of the Black Virgin in Rocamadour. They would look forward to seeing Roland’s sword, and to hearing the blessed bell that rang to mark the saving of sailors in trouble on the sea, far to the west. A day’s walk would bring the ragged band to Aubazine, where, at the shrine of Blessed Stephen, they could receive blessings. Then they went south to the high castle of Turenne, where one of the most independent and powerful of French viscounts ruled, or perhaps by way of Collonges-la-Rouge, where amid orchards and vines, rich farmers made the land glow like the finest of medieval miniatures. The pilgrims would come to the towers of Curemonte or Martel, tiny fortified cities, each with active markets and ruled by a dozen noble families. Then down to the cliff-bound valley of the swift-flowing Dordogne, crossing at Carennac, or farther west at Gluges. On the way the pilgrims passed farmers driving plows pulled by teams of four oxen. They met up with monks hurrying from priory to monastery to grange. They occasionally saw knights or men-at-arms, but these violent folk were best avoided. There were no bridges on the Dordogne, which was uncrossable when it flooded, and the ferryman’s charge was probably very dear.