by Susie Kelly
Notre Dame en Vaux is really very lovely. The stained glass windows threw shafts of dappled colours into puddles on the floor; by a magnificent vaulted ceiling surmounts three tiers of arches stacked upon each other like a wedding cake. There was not another soul there. I stood in the warm beam of the rainbow colours with my eyes closed listening to the silence and feeling the atmosphere. For the first time that I could recall I felt comfortable and safe in a church – like a human being rather than a sinner. Despite its towering gothic construction, this church did not seem to me at all sinister or oppressive, but peaceful and rather cosy. If Terry hadn’t been waiting with the bicycles I would have been comfortable sitting in there for a couple of hours. That was certainly a new and very unexpected experience for me. Untouched by religion, but moved by the beauty and peace of the building.
When I rejoined Terry, he was watching a young pigeon huddled beside one of the buttresses. It was too young to fly, and looked at us hopefully, but there was nothing we could do except trust that its mother, who was watching from a nearby tree, would tend to it until it could manage to fend for itself, and that Notre Dame would take good care of it.
The staff at the campsite were very pleasant, and the sanitary facilities, the yardstick by which I rated the places we stayed, were impeccable. Beside the large lake families of ducks swam around in circles, and grey geese patrolled the lawns. Dozens of grubby-looking goslings, still wearing their adolescent fuzzy plumage, cropped at the daisies under the protective eyes of their parents, who hissed and stuck out their tongues if they thought we were getting too close to their offspring. After a long, refreshing shower we lay on the grass, reading, and both fell asleep in the sun. Later, we were woken by a persistent croaking. A pair of pretty mallard ducks were next to the tent, marching backwards and forwards, and poking their heads through the flaps, plainly expecting to be fed. They enjoyed the croissants we gave them, and when they had reluctantly accepted that there was nothing else on offer they waddled away to a nearby caravan to try their luck there. Next morning, they woke us up quite early, trying to burrow through the fabric of the tent in search of breakfast.
Whilst we’d enjoyed our relaxing interlude in Châlons and found the Châlonnais friendly and helpful – apart from the ophthalmologist’s secretary – the royal escapees were less fortunate.
By the time they arrived from Etoges, although several hours behind schedule they must nevertheless have been confident that they were winning their game. They had covered more than half the distance between Paris and their destination of Montmédy, where loyalist supporters awaited them. But luck was running against them and at Châlons their situation began deteriorating inexorably.
When they stopped to change horses the splendid carriage and smartly liveried servants naturally attracted interest. Spectators were surprised that the passengers did not climb out to relax as people normally did, especially on a roasting summer day. Word buzzed through Châlons that the King and Queen had just passed through, heading eastwards. Although no attempt was made to stop them, they had certainly been recognised.
Continuing on their way and expecting soon to be met by a military escort, by the time they reached Sainte Mènehould, the dragoons who had been waiting for them had given up and drunk themselves silly. But the vigilant and very Republican local postmaster, M. Drouet, watching the great carriage and noting the excessively deferential behaviour of the driver towards the passengers, guessed their identities. He galloped ahead to Varennes, where he alerted the citizenry that the royals were trying to flee the country. By the time the carriage arrived at Varennes, the roads were barricaded and, tantalisingly close to safety, the refugees were captured. Their dream of freedom was over, and their worst nightmares were just about to begin.
The royal family spent the night in the grocery shop of the aptly named M. Sauce. Louis did almost nothing to help himself and his family, accepting his situation stoically, unable to make up his mind, or uninterested enough to take a possible escape route proposed by the Duc de Choisel. He did at least have the presence of mind to ask for a bottle of wine and some bread and cheese. He was not a man to let adversity spoil his appetite.
Surrounded by a hostile mob of several thousand people, the next morning the prisoners and their captors set off back to Paris. Every attempt by members of the party to buy more time in the hope of a last-minute rescue failed, and the carriage turned back towards the west. The cavalry that could have rescued them arrived just half an hour after they left Varennes. Once again, time had conspired against them. A royal supporter who approached the carriage was shot and hacked to death by the crowd, his severed head waved aloft on a pike.
After having been ignominiously chased out of Sainte Ménehould, the captured royals “shaken, exhausted, broken” found themselves back in Châlons, still a solidly royalist town, where they were greeted by the mayor, and wined and dined in fitting style. However, the vicious crowd that had accompanied them from Varennes recruited others, and the next morning they interrupted Louis while he was at Mass. Screaming threats and insults, they forced the family to leave in haste. They set off on their way back to Paris.
Our next stop was Reims.
OUR ROUTE
Online map of France – zoom in NE of Paris
ROYAL ROUTE
CHAPTER NINE
Tunnel Trauma, Nocturnal Noise
“Go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence.” Max Ehrman: Desiderata
The mouth of hell
ORIGINALLY we had planned to stay a second day in Châlons and cycle directly from there to Reims, a distance of thirty miles, but because of the extreme heat we had changed our plans and decided to head instead to Val de Vesle about twelve miles south-west of Reims and spend the night there. Terry planned the route and we picked up at the small town of Condé-sur-Marne, just west of Châlons-en-Champagne, the canal de l’Aisne à la Marne.
Canals are very wonderful. Wild creatures live in and beside them; interesting craft sail upon them; there is no traffic beside them, and they are flat and usually shaded by trees, which suited me very nicely. I had been gradually training Terry to slow his pace, but as somebody who is by nature always moving at high speed it had taken some time for him to accept that we were not involved in a race, either with each other, or with anybody else. There was no need to hurry. Indeed there was no purpose in hurrying. This was a holiday, not a contest to see how fast we could finish it. I could not maintain twenty miles an hour, and I didn’t want to anyway. Somewhere between fifteen and twenty was comfortable for me, and meant that we could hold a conversation as we went along. Sometimes he forgot and speeded up and cycled far ahead, only slowing down when he realised he was talking to himself.
The towpath was shady and cool. A pair of herons kept flying fifty feet in front of us, landing, and then taking off as we closed on them, for about fifteen minutes. It was as if, in their rather solemn way, they were playing with us. At a lock we stopped to talk to the crew of a 40-foot Danish yacht with her mast down, waiting for the water to rise. They had spent the past month motoring here from Denmark. Like us, they had been very disappointed in the weather until the previous day, and while it had been bad enough for us in the tent, in a small boat in the water it must have been thoroughly miserable. Still, their Viking blood probably helped.
We were pedalling along smoothly and effortlessly when the towpath began to deteriorate. Its smoothness became bumpy. Stones jutted up; ruts developed, then potholes. There were rocky patches, and sandy patches. It did not have the appearance of a path that was very much used. In fact it no longer had a path-like appearance at all. Unlike Terry’s mountain bike my machine is not designed for bumping around on rough surfaces. It does not have that kind of suspension. Each time we struck a rut or a bump the whole bike jolted and shuddered; I was bucked out of the saddle, and my feet flew off the pedals.
“Terry, this doesn’t look right to me.”
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��Come on,” he called. “Just follow me. It’s fine.”
The red panniers leapt wildly up and down as he bounced ahead, and I knew quite well that it wasn’t fine at all and that it was almost certain to get worse, which it did.
We shortly arrived at a ten-foot high chain link fence blocking our route. A sign on the fence said: ‘NO ENTRY’.
Terry pushed open a door in the fence.
“I really don’t think we should ….”
But he was already wheeling his bike through.
To our left was a flight of high stone steps, some 30 of them, rising at an angle of about 45°. To our right was the canal. Between them, the entrance to a tunnel, which also bore a “NO ENTRY” message. Over the bridge, a man looked down on us from an office.
“Terry,” I said, very firmly. “I am not going into that tunnel.”
“Let me go ahead and have a look,” he said.
While he did so I tried to think of any way to somehow heave the bikes up the steps, and later wheel them down the other side, without killing ourselves. I couldn’t.
“It’s not very long, and you can see the light at the other end,” Terry called. “Just have a look.”
Peering into the tunnel I estimated that the distance to the daylight visible at the other end was 200 yards, or 300 at most.
With very great reluctance but faced with the alternative of having to backtrack all the way to Condé-sur-Marne and find a different route, I followed Terry through the tunnel’s entrance. I would scuttle quickly through, and we’d be out at the other end in a few minutes.
Between the arched wall of the tunnel and the water was a three-foot-wide path. This path was blocked by a heavy wooden platform about twelve feet long, on small metal wheels, sitting on a narrow iron railway track. I’ve no idea what it originally transported, but it was in our way and we somehow had to get past it. While I braced the platform to stop it rolling away Terry heaved the bikes onto, over and off it, and then we began making our way towards the distant light. In places the path was gritty and filled our trainers with sharp little stones. In other places it was muddy and slippery, and in those places that were neither gritty nor muddy, it was cobbled and bumpy. There were the metal rails to contend with, too. We pushed for several minutes, as the light at the far end grew no nearer, and the light from the entrance grew dimmer, until we were in near darkness. Three feet isn’t much width for a plump person and a heavy-laden bike, and frequently the pedals struck against my leg. The tunnel eerily echoed my curses. We lit the lamps on our handlebars; by their weak glimmer I marvelled at the construction of the tunnel; the way every brick fitted perfectly into its neighbours in an elegant arch, and how it was somehow supporting a heavy road above it with all its traffic. Then I started to wonder how long it had been there, and how long tunnels generally lasted before they might show signs of collapse; and while thinking about time in general, I thought about how long we had been trudging, and how the tunnel’s end seemed much further than I had expected, and how long this tunnel could possibly be. It was starting to make me feel angry for being so long.
“Isn’t this great!” called Terry. “Imagine during the war – there must have been all sorts of things going on in here.” He kept stopping to peer into niches cut at intervals into the wall.
“Keep going,” I urged him. “Stop stopping.”
Apart from the rattling of the bikes, it was weirdly quiet. Still the light at the end was barely larger than the pinprick it had been when we set out so long ago. It was cold, and damp, and dark and spooky. What if there were giant eels, or huge slimy things that lived in the waters, which might reach their tentacles up over the edge of the path and wind around our ankles to pull us in? Then an even more alarming thought – what if there was a portcullis at the end of the tunnel? What if it slammed down just as we reached it? There was no room to turn around on the path; we’d be trapped. And then – what if there had been a matching portcullis at the entrance? What if the man in the office had seen us ignoring the two ‘NO ENTRY’ signs, and was going to teach us a lesson and imprison us in the tunnel? Even in the cold I began to sweat, and snapped at Terry to get a move on.
Suddenly the previously still waters began slapping and slurping against the side of the path. Something was moving. When the whole tunnel was unexpectedly flooded with light, my tattered nerves gave way, and I screamed. Terry jumped. We felt like characters from a James Bond film, trapped in the glare by the forces of SMERSH or SPECTRE. A loud purring noise came from behind, and looking round we saw a very large motor cruiser gliding towards us. The width of the boat spanned the canal, and the pilot’s head almost touched the ceiling of the tunnel. He seemed to be laughing as he waved to us, no doubt thinking: “English, obviously. Crazy!”
He floated off towards the distant speck of light, momentarily obscured it, and then as suddenly and unexpectedly as they had come on, the lights went off, and we were plunged into complete blackness.
It took Terry a moment to find his flashlight, while I froze, afraid to move forward. We’d been in the tunnel 40 minutes, and I was steaming with fury and shivering with fear; it seemed we were never going to reach the end. Blood tickled my leg from several abrasions caused by the pedals, and trickled into my trainers to join the grit, sand and mud they had been collecting. A new thought struck me: what if, when we reached the end, there was no way forward? Why would there be – it was a no entry place. There must be a reason for that. What would we do? Whatever it was, I knew I was not going back. I’d rather abandon the bike and swim to the other side.
By the time we finally reached daylight, we’d been plodding through the tunnel for seventy minutes. Seventy minutes of ankle cracking, footsore, fearful tunnel trekking. On the opposite bank two old boys were fishing; they gave us no more than a cursory glance. Ahead, on our side of the canal the rail tracks continued for about fifteen yards, and then disappeared into a head-high thicket of brambles and stinging nettles. There was no sign of a path.
I snatched the map from Terry, and traced our route with my finger. The Mont-de-Billy tunnel is one and a half miles in length.
“You knew, didn’t you? You bloody well knew!”
He had the grace to look embarrassed.
“Yes, but it did save us a long, hot and boring ride on the road. And anyway, you did it. What are you worrying about?”
“What I’m worrying about is the fact that having arrived here, there’s nowhere to go!”
That wasn’t quite true – there was a similar flight of stone steps to the one at the other end of the tunnel, equally insurmountable with bikes.
“You brought us here, now you find a way out,” I snarled.
Undaunted, he stamped down a rough path through the undergrowth, and after about fifty yards we found our way up a bank and onto a woodland track which led back to the canal a while later. Although completely overgrown and bumpy, we managed somehow to ride on the track, even if the very long grass sometimes tangled itself in the spokes and brought the bikes to a halt. We met a family of black swans, two parents and three cygnets, a friendly little bunch, obviously well used to humans. They cheeped softly and clambered out of the water to enjoy a handful of crumbs and then posed obligingly to have their photos taken.
Because of our unplanned detour through the woods we had no idea where we were. There were no distinguishing features, just trees, grass and the canal. It was very hot, so we were pleased and relieved when we arrived at a bridge bearing the sign “Camping 400m.”
It is no reflection on the delightful small town of Val-de-Vesle that some of France’s most lurid crimes and murders took place in the immediate vicinity. Notorious serial killer Pierre Chanal, an adjutant at Mourmelon military barracks, seven miles away, was suspected of the sadistic murders of the eight young conscripts from the barracks, between 1980 and 1987, who became known as “The Missing of Mourmelon.” The scandalous ineptitude of the authorities in their handling of the case and the fact that Chanal was able,
in 2003 while on trial in Reims, to commit suicide in his cell and thus thwart justice, outraged the public and in particular the families of his supposed victims, and made the case a cause célèbre.
In 2008, the ‘Ogre of Ardennes’, Michel Fourniret was brought to trial and confessed to seven murders. He and his accomplice wife were both given life sentences. One of his victims was a 20-year-old girl whose body was found, coincidentally, at Mourmelon barracks in 1987.
In 1989 the body of a 30-year-old woman was found at Villers-Allerand, ten miles west of Val-de-Vesle. She had been strangled and beaten to death by homeless sociopath Francis Heaulme, suspected of killing at least 40 people. He is currently serving several consecutive life sentences plus an extra 30 years.
The 1980s seemed to have been a busy time for homicidal maniacs in the area.
Now the fact that these unhappy events occurred within just a few miles of Val-de-Vesle should not deter those looking for an excellent campsite with beautiful mature trees and a really luxurious sanitary block; and as far as I know, it’s the nearest campsite to Reims. The showers are squeaky-clean and so spacious you could turn cartwheels in them if that’s what you feel like doing. I just wanted to stand under a stream of hot water and wash away the dust of the day and the memory of the tunnel. That is what I was doing when just outside the door I heard an urgent, exasperated male voice and a quivering female one. The man was definitely annoyed, and the woman plainly distressed. Their discussion went on for several minutes. I dried and dressed, and poked my head around the door to ask if they needed help. The man leapt towards the exit as if he’d been scalded, stammering that he was only trying to help his wife understand the showers. She thought they were lavatories. I said that I’d look after her, and he shot out of the door leaving a poor old lady gazing at me for reassurance, like a baby bird asking for food.