presented by my skeleton key. Behind door number one lay this! Behind door number two lay that! Behind door number three stood – a pilgrim!
We met again at breakfast. ‘Bonjour, Madame,’ he greeted me. ‘Je suis un pèlerin.’ So you are, I thought.
He’d been driven to conversation with me because the locals – a fearsome pack of middle-aged men drinking strong coffee and beer at the bar, grunting to one another from their gullets – had confiscated the newspaper he had been reading while he’d gone to pick up his staff, which had fallen with a clatter. In between bites of local peach jam spread on a baguette, he told me he was walking the entire pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela. My eyes widened in honour. ‘In pieces, Madame,’ he specified. ‘I shall get no medal for speed. Last fall I walked from Le Puy en Velay to Conques in ten days. Now, this spring, I am walking from Conques to Moissac. I give my feet a rest in summer and winter. There are whole peach-halves in this confiture,’ he concluded, fishing one out of the pot with a spoon.
I wished him well. I had guessed he was a pilgrim on account of his outfit – a wide-brimmed hat and staff have been pilgrimage accoutrements since the Middle Ages – and because Cajarc lies on one of the branches of the great pilgrimage way. There are four principal routes of spiritual drainage across France, all of which converge in the Pyrenees. One route begins in Paris and travels through Tours and Bordeaux; another starts at Vézelay in Burgundy – home of my Pig-Snouted Ethiopians – and continues through Limoges and Périgueux; a third takes the southernmost route, starting in Arles and winding through Montpellier and Toulouse; and the last one, called the Via Podiensis, sets out where my friend began, at Le Puy en Velay in the Massif Central, and passes through Espalion, Conques, Figeac, Cajarc, Cahors and Moissac. The Via Podiensis is also known as the GR 65, ‘GR’ standing for Grande Randonnée, one of France’s meticulously well-marked, long-distance hiking paths, a map of which the Cajarc pilgrim had spread on his breakfast table in lieu of the missing newspaper.
So many well-trodden routes converging on one place suggest a very great destination at the end, and so Compostela was, and is yet. The allure began when the Apostle James, or in Spanish, Santiago, appeared to Charlemagne in a dream in which he revealed the location of his body, inconveniently buried in infidel-occupied Spain. Charlemagne tried to beat back the Moors, but failed; after Galicia was freed nearly two centuries later, pilgrims began flocking to James’s tomb in Compostela. There were other pilgrimage options for medieval travellers as well, Jerusalem being the holiest, but also the farthest; Rome was next in line of importance, with the bodies of two saints, Peter and Paul; after that, Compostela was the only other site in Europe to boast an entire Apostle (other churches had bits and pieces in reliquaries, but they didn’t match the glamour of an intact corpse whose owner had actually walked with Christ).
The Compostela pilgrimage was enthusiastically promoted by French abbots, who welcomed the revenue and prestige brought by masses of pilgrims travelling through French territory, not to mention the opportunity to shift attention from Rome. Its popularity also drew upon proto-tourist attractions along the route: the new Romanesque churches going up in southern France, with their beautiful, terrifying, bizarre sculpture – some abbeys also had powerful relics of their own – and the battlefield of Roncevalles in the Pyrenees, where Charlemagne’s nephew, the folk-hero Roland, had died in battle. By the 1130s the pilgrimage was established enough to have its own ‘guidebook’, which offered opinionated advice on just about everything.
‘The Navarese bark like dogs’, complained the anonymous, Francophile author. Kingsley Porter wrote that from The Pilgrim’s Guide, which is actually a portion of a manuscript called the Callistine Codex, ‘We learn the characteristics of various nations – which peoples were kindly, which treacherous, which dirty; where the wine was good, and where the food was bad; where rivers could be forded; and where inns or hospices afforded shelter for the night.’
For most Western Europeans the pilgrimage took a year to undertake. Set out at the end of winter, travel in spring, arrive in summer, retrace your steps in autumn, return with the first snow. If, of course, you returned at all (if you didn’t show up within one year, the compulsory will made out for you by your parish priest was promptly acted upon). The pilgrimage was attractive to all social classes – rich people eventually paid others to walk for them – but for the most part Compostela pilgrims were poor peasants and serfs, usually elderly and therefore expendable to their lords. These people walked an average of fifteen miles a day, often in hopes of curing pre-existing ailments. They were endemically cheated by toll-takers and moneychangers, beset by bandits, and at the mercy of river ferrymen who sometimes purposely sank boats in order to loot their drowned customers. They suffered from heat stroke on unshaded Spanish roads (French roads were purposely lined with trees on one side, to provide comfort). And they were trapped in late spring blizzards crossing the Pyrenees – an event I knew a thing or two about, having crept in my car from France to Andorra through the Pas de la Casa in April. The two-lane road had writhed in an agony of curves as snow slicked the surface and low clouds clamped visibility down to about ten feet. It was perhaps more treacherous in a car than on foot – accidents littered the shoulders – but unlike foot-travellers, at least I could turn up the heat.
Despite the litany of hazards, pilgrims went to Compostela. They went in droves, ushering in a boom in the medieval shoemaker’s trade, their only protection a deterrent that sprang from the same fountainhead as their own incentive: fear of eternal damnation. It was a grievous sin to harm one of St James’s faithful, who were identified by costume and an insignia – the scallop shell – which has been the symbol of the Compostela pilgrimage since the eleventh century.
The pilgrimage to Santiago, to the home of St James, was above all an expression of optimism. In a world that recognized no causality other than God’s or the Devil’s constant meddling – illness was the work of the latter, good luck of the former – one’s future in both life and death depended on the beneficence of otherworldly forces. St James had the power to intercede on a supplicant’s behalf, especially that of a pilgrim who had given a year of his life and crossed the better part of a continent to honour the saint in his resting place. James was powerful; he had been Christ’s disciple; he was a reminder that all was not lost. Through his bones shone a chink of light within the theological shadow of near-certain damnation. The pilgrimage ultimately attested to the tenacity of human hope.
The path of the GR 65 ruts the emotional landscape of the Rouergue and Quercy. It’s not on my Michelin map, but the chemin falls like a latitude line across people’s lives. It has been a constant for over a thousand years, and thus a directional anchor. ‘Oh, you’re looking for the dolmen? Go to the pilgrimage road, and turn left.’ Or, ‘You can buy tweezers in the Pharmacie de l’Europe. It’s the one near the bridge, on the Road.’
The Chemin de St Jacques is also an attitude line; it is impossible not to perceive its presence – the westbound direction laden with spiritual urgency, the eastbound with equal measures of relief and disappointment – as a yardstick for one’s own journeys. Everyone who travels in the territory must at some point wonder how a pilgrimage differs from a mere journey. Must one be travelling on the soul’s business, to address God, or can a pilgrimage be more prosaic? Does spiritual business necessarily involve God?
I was rather unproductively pondering these questions as I approached the village of Conques, in the Rouergue; specifically, I had been mulling over the idea of an incomplete pilgrimage, which is how I fancied my travels. I was setting out to visit Romanesque sites on a branch of the pilgrimage road in southwest France, but defying the historical and spiritual tug of its destination, in Spain. Few roads lead nowhere, and this one had one of the most famous endpoints in European history. Even the stars of the Rouergat sky formed directional arrows, reproaching me for my stillness (it is said that the Milky Way leads to Compostela, the ‘Starry Field’ in the west). What did it mean to be more concerned with a segment of the chemin than its conclusion? A wilful choice of body over soul?
I
