They are inspired, perhaps, by the circus of commercial athleticism that descends on the Pyrenees and the Alps every summer: the Tour de France, a.k.a. La Grande Boucle (The Large Loop, or The Big Buckle). Although sketchy in its reputation as a pharmacological proving ground, the Tour is nonetheless an impressive, if not lunatic, spectacle, especially in its mountain stages, those that are labeled hors catégorie (beyond categorization) because of their sadistic level of difficulty. The Iseran Pass is one such stage, where scores of sinewy supermen weave in and out of a gaggle of ambulances, police vans, companion cars plastered with advertisements, cameramen riding shotgun on motorcycles, and the shouted encouragements of the thousands who line the roadside, risking life and limb for a glimpse of the greats inching up the slope. Overhead, helicopters clatter incessantly through the clouds of exhaust and dust raised by the raucous procession.
The race is about as bucolic as Times Square. About two decades ago, it passed close to my home in rural southern France, near the Pyrenees. The picturesque road leading from the foothills of those mountains, shaded by tall plane trees, had become a linear campground for thousands of cycling buffs. The men played boules or sat in folding plastic chairs with their wives, sipping pastis. There was a distinct holiday feeling in the air, of shared passion, unusual for this lonely but beautiful landscape of peach orchards and vineyards.
The proceedings got underway with the arrival of the advertising caravan, its music blaring through the trees. This exceedingly weird feature of the Tour has been around since the 1930s (the race itself dates from 1903). The caravan consists of dozens and dozens of garishly decorated vehicles, emblazoned with logos or toting outsize anthropomorphic mascots, all in the service of promoting some enterprise or product. The variety of the advertisers astounds: banks, insurance companies, candy makers, bakers of industrial baguettes, mineral-water suppliers, supermarkets, offtrack betting services, and on and on. The students manning these vehicles showered us with commercial samples and branded caps and T-shirts, all tossed toward the outstretched arms of the spectators lining the road three deep.
And then it was gone as suddenly as it had come. We resumed our waiting. The advertising caravan precedes the peloton of riders by about two hours or so. About ninety minutes in, we heard the choppers and regained our places by the roadside. The racers were near.
The first of the police vehicles blew past us, then a couple of satellite trucks. Loud cheering could be heard farther up the roadway, and then, suddenly, the hullabaloo was upon us. Helicopters, cameramen, motorcycles, and then the multicolored packs of riders, sleek and aerodynamic and traveling at great speed on this flat stretch of road. Some of the cyclists were only inches apart, a heart-stopping sight. The leader overall of the race, wearing the coveted yellow jersey, eventually streaked by, which made the excited onlookers redouble their roaring and shouts of encouragement in French, Spanish, and Catalan. People leaned in, as if wanting to touch the speeding gods, but they flashed past, indifferent to the adulation. At last the trailing companion vehicles sped by, and the roadway was again empty, quiet. We then headed to our cars, only to get into a massive traffic jam.
Memories of that distant summer afternoon come to me as I make my way up to the high pass. The Iseran is not the most celebrated of the Alpine stages of the Tour—that honor would go, arguably, to the Alpe d’Huez to the west and to Mont Ventoux at the gates of Provence—but its majesty is undeniable. We pass the Pont St. Charles, a desolate expanse of tundra bracketed on both sides by cold, gray rock walls several hundred meters tall. And then, by some miracle, the dawdling camper in front of me pulls off the road and comes to a halt in a sliver of a turnout. My irritation at the Dutchman turns to admiration, for I do not have the guts to park my vehicle a few centimeters from the void. The camper’s disappearance does not mean that I have the road to myself. At irregular intervals, I am overtaken by motorcyclists gunning their engines and rounding the curves at blistering speeds. I notice that the bikers are always organized by nationality. First come the Italians, a few minutes later the Germans, and then the French, the last again dangling their right legs in the Gallic gesture of gratitude for giving way to them.
At a turn called the Tête d’Arolley, there is a sufficiently large and reassuring parking lot for the cowardly. I pull over, skip across the roadway, and head up a hundred meters or so to an orientation table at a scenic lookout. The almost-360-degree panorama boggles the senses. A chaos of snow and gray rock surrounds the viewer in all directions, looking impenetrable and menacing. Or unearthly. I feel that I could be on Mars, so inhospitable is the vista. The table informs me that I am looking at Mont Pourri, the Aiguille du Franchet, the Aiguille du Dôme, the Pointe de la Bailletta, and the Tsanteleina massif. It also informs, in opaque technical language more suited to a French doctoral candidate, that these peaks were formed at entirely different times and that some of the rock has metamorphosed under the enormous seismic pressure. I am, in fact, beholding geologist Richard Fortey’s messy lasagne. Difficult as it is to grasp, this panoply of stone, in appearance so stolid and monolithic, is actually a variegated sea of rock in constant, chaotic motion over unimaginable stretches of time. The ranges have been straining up and against each other for millions of years, and continue to do so. The only response can be awe.
The Iseran Pass is visible much farther up, close to a straggling cloud. I had hoped for an Alpine pasture in bloom, alive with gentian and edelweiss, but the approach is a forbidding scree of gravel, with great banks of snow in the upper reaches. The only thing resembling vegetation are the many crisscrossing cables of ski lifts overhead, like lianas awaiting the passage of some high-altitude Tarzan, yodeling as he swings his way home to Switzerland.
The view from the pass itself is unremarkable, as the road goes between two peaks, thus obstructing a wider perspective. A group of Dutch bikers sit on the ground smoking. What is the collective noun for Dutch bikers? I don’t know, so I write tulip in my notebook. Although one can hardly begrudge them the cheap high of a smoke in the oxygen-deprived air, this particular tulip is astonishingly rude in other ways. The leader of the pack has parked his alpha hog directly in front of the stone marker indicating the name and altitude of the pass. Hikers, cyclists, drivers—none can take the requisite picture of themselves before the milestone. The damned Dutch Harley is in the way. I find this particularly frustrating for the cyclists and hikers; they, after all, expended muscle and grit to get to this point, instead of sitting on their backside—like me—and letting internal combustion do the work.
A few timid entreaties are made to the mute tulip on the ground, but the only response is the creaking of their leather jackets. Being Dutch, it is quite possible that they do not even notice the annoyance they are causing. Strike that—it is not possible, it is certain. Just as we cannot see the heaving and shifting of the mountains, they seem unable to distinguish the movements of their fellow humans. Perplexed, I move a few hundred paces from the standoff and am surprised to see, far below in a snowy vale to the east, a ski lift in operation. Perhaps this is where the demigods with whom I shared breakfast are spending the day.
A deafening roar signals the imminent departure of the sociopathic bikers. By the time I arrive back at the pass marker, iPads are being gleefully retrieved from saddlebags and rucksacks. There is a complicit feeling in the air, a collective post-tulip sigh of relief. I oblige several groups and couples by accepting their proffered devices and taking their pictures, thinking wistfully about how much I admire their youth and vigor. But with one couple, I realize with a start that they are much older than I, perhaps in their late sixties or early seventies, beaming in Day-Glo spandex beside their bicycles. Damn these Europeans!
Chastened and feeling morally and physically flabby, I undertake the descent from the Iseran Pass to the Maurienne Valley. The road is steeper than on the Tarentaise side, the curves more pinched. Intimations of inadequacy are replaced by intimations of mortality, as I repeatedly dow
nshift to make the grade. Going downhill is definitely scarier than going uphill. At points, the roadway is pitched dramatically, so one has the odd impression that the mountains ahead are somehow lying on their sides. And always, there are those overtaking me. A bratwurst of German bikers, a delivery truck, an enraged local—and now even the cyclists, whizzing headlong at tremendous speed. I keep an eye out for Granny and Gramps Day-Glo, praying that they won’t pass me. But they do, on a hairpin I take in second gear, racing ahead of my muscle car like golden-age jackrabbits.
It is time to slink out of Savoy.
_______
* To be accurate in the pecking order of all things Parisian, this nickname is more often given to Deauville, a coastal resort in Normandy.
4. MONT CENIS PASS
HELL HATH NO FURY like a contraried French functionary. I have arrived in the tourist office of the small town of Lanslebourg in search of information about the pass I am about to cross. Breakfast was taken at a picturesque village café in the company of a French biker couple from Colmar, in Alsace, whose early morning beery bonhomie led me to believe this was a particularly jolly corner of the country. Lanslebourg disabuses me of that notion.
The two female staffers in the tourist office are whaling on a male visitor, whose spluttering attempts to get in a word edgewise meet with failure. Neither whispering model nor shopkeeper budgerigar, their form of discourse is an explosion of indignation perfected by French public servants. As far as I can gather, the object of their ire returned to the office to complain that they had directed him to a crummy restaurant or hotel and to insinuate that they had done so because a family member or boyfriend owned the place. I consider this standard operating procedure at tourist offices but am wise enough to keep my mouth shut. The dread pedantry of the offended functionary fills the air, with such expressions as déontologie professionnelle (ethics) and règles de bonne conduite (good behavior) coming fast and furious. The two trill a duet of joyous disdain. Recognizing defeat when I see it, I grab a couple of brochures off the rack and close the door on the scene. My presence has gone entirely unnoticed.
Outside I take a deep breath and examine the great green wall of forested mountains to the east. In only one place does it relent, exhibiting a declivity at the summit ridge in the form of the letter V, perhaps a natural hint at the word via, or, given the military associations of this gap, a tantalizing suggestion of victory. My inner protractor gauges the angle of the V to be forty or forty-five degrees, constituting a veritable invitation to marauding armies. The invitation of this pass, the Mont Cenis, and its fellows throughout the great Alpine ranges, has been accepted many times. Carthaginians, Celts, Lombards, Carolingians, Germans, French, Swiss, Huns, Goths, and others sniffing the wealth to be pillaged beyond the southern side of the slopes have been reliably pouring through the mountains since Antiquity. The Alps talk a good game—seeming to mock the wayfarer with their forbidding appearance—but in reality they have collapsed repeatedly like a house of cards before any determined intruder. In the chapter entitled “Concerning the Defence of Hard Passages” of his 1614 Historie of the World, Sir Walter Raleigh wrote witheringly, “… have the Alpes given way to Armies breaking into Italie? Yea, where shall we finde that ever they kept out one invadour? … What shall we say of those mountains which lock up whole regions in such sort, as they leave but one Gate open?”
The most porous of these gates have been, from west to east, Mont Cenis, Great St. Bernard, Simplon, Gotthard, and Brenner. These great passes have seen the ascent and descent of armies, sometimes in the dead of winter, all in the name of conquest and plunder. The loss of men and matériel are a constant in accounts of these passages, yet the tall mountains never made any belligerent leader quail. The common foot soldier is expendable, went the reasoning, so the formidable Alps would take their human toll, but the bulk of the army would survive.
Perhaps the only armed forces to escape this dreary logic were the Swiss. At home on the heights and possessed of a thorough knowledge of their dangers and traps, the Swiss citizen militias marched smartly over the passes and emerged to wreak havoc in the plains below. In the Middle Ages, armed with long and sharp pikes, the Swiss barreled into enemy forces like deadly hedgehogs, seemingly unstoppable. And often, their enemies were enemies in name only—anxious kings and dukes hired them as mercenaries, so fearsome was their efficiency. In Hamlet, King Claudius calls out for his “Switzers” to protect him from hostile intruders. Gunpowder eventually put paid to Swiss invulnerability, but their past as fierce pikemen-for-hire lives on in their role as a Swiss Guard defending Vatican City.
One of the most notorious gates of the Alps is the Mont Cenis Pass, which links France’s Savoy to Italy’s Piedmont. It served nonmilitary purposes as well. As the House of Savoy, first centered in Chambéry (France) then in Turin, controlled lands on both sides of the pass from the eleventh to the nineteenth centuries, Mont Cenis outranked the Great St. Bernard as the busiest traverse of the western Alps, making the Savoyards happy for hundreds of years from the tolls collected from merchants and pilgrims. Of the latter, the Romeward bound followed a route called the Via Francigena over Mont Cenis, their numbers swelling into the tens of thousands during Jubilee years, when throwing coins into the coffers of the Eternal City’s churches guaranteed a remission of one’s sins. (This lucrative celebration, held every twenty-five years, began in 1300. Its success was so striking that Dante Alighieri chose to set his Divina Commedia in the thronged Rome of Holy Week in that year.)
The ascent commences. The road is long and winding but broad and easy. In one pasture, about two dozen black cows rest side by side in the grass at the edge of the asphalt, looking out at my passing vehicle like worldly patrons at a sidewalk café. As I head up through the tall trees, I remember that it was on this slope, not at St. Moritz or at Chamonix, that the passion for winter sports first took hold. As early as 1500, peasants used alder branches, called arcosses, tied together to sled down from the pass to Lanslebourg, the town of this morning’s irate tourism hostesses. Someone eventually equipped these sledges with chairs (chaises) mounted on rudimentary runners, and the five-kilometer descent from the pass could be effected in about ten minutes, thanks to the steering skill of the guides. In 1581, the philosopher Michel de Montaigne made the journey and judged it “interesting,” “without danger”—and cheap.
By the 1700s, wealthy English travelers on the Grand Tour came to spend time at Lanslebourg. The novelty of sliding down a steep slope thus predates the development of the ski industry. Aristocrats, delighted at the sensation of safe but titillating speed, sledded down to the town two or three times a day, flashing through the larch trees on a narrow track and yelping with fright at sudden turns. In the pre-railroad age, people had seldom traveled this fast. The locals, equally delighted at this source of easy income, took to honing their sledges to increase speed and making the passage back up to the top less onerous with the help of donkeys and mules. By the mid-eighteenth century, a stop at Lanslebourg had become commonplace, leavening the heavy diet of culture absorption with a week of plain old fun.
But the pass was not, contrary to what Montaigne declared, entirely without danger. In November 1739, the son of British Prime Minister Robert Walpole watched in horror as his lap dog, named Tory, was abducted by a wolf on the Mont Cenis, snatched from alongside his chaise, never to be seen again. One wonders how his traveling companion, Thomas Gray, a poet destined for fame for his “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” consoled his heartbroken friend. With a lecture on the brevity of canine life, perhaps.
At last I clear the trees and come to the grassy expanses of the storied pass. Mont Cenis may be said to be the Platonic Ideal of a mountain pass: bare green slopes above, another glorious teal-colored lake below, a modernist pyramidal chapel, crumbling fortresses, and a surrounding panorama of snow-flecked peaks. Three handsome artworks adorn the pass itself, near the sign indicating its altitude of 2,083 meters. These works consist of
rectangles of purplish metal anchored against the winds by piles of large stones held fast by mesh. In the upper portions of the rectangles, three parades are shown in silhouette, cut out of the metal: the first, depicting a general riding a rearing elephant followed by a few lesser pachyderms; the second, a short man on horseback wearing a bicorne hat followed by his infantry; the last, a line of speeding cyclists. Of the three, the last two are undisputed. The Tour de France has indeed come this way several times, and Napoleon most definitely did as well—the roadway traversing the pass is his handiwork. In the first decade of the nineteenth century, his engineers came across the old ashes of a tremendous fire thought to have given the place its name: from Mont des Cendres (Mount of Ashes), it is but a small step in dialect to Mont Cenis.
The first monument is more problematic: Did the Carthaginian general Hannibal make his famous Alpine crossing at Mont Cenis, en route to further mischief in Italy? Napoleon believed this was the place, and who are the French tourist authorities to doubt the emperor? Others are less sure, and over the years alternate routes have gained favor, the results of lively arguments authored by professional and amateur historians claiming to have divined the definitive answer. One of the strongest rivals to Mont Cenis lies to the north, the Little St. Bernard Pass, which links Bourg-Saint-Maurice to Courmayeur, Italy. We do know that Hannibal spent a night in what is now Albertville before setting off for the mountains with his men, mules, and sixty elephants. Our main sources for this episode of the Second Punic War (i.e., between Carthage and Rome) are Polybius, a scholar writing a generation after the events of 218 BCE, and Livy, a historian writing some two centuries after the fact. Of the two, Polybius is thought the more trustworthy, Livy the livelier. Another important source, Appian of Alexandria, wrote his histories in the second century CE. Unfortunately, none of the three indicate the name of the pass Hannibal used.
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