by Timothy Egan
A month or so later, I was in the confessional, which was supposed to be a witness protection booth, the sinner shielded by anonymity and a screen. At the end of reciting my list of offenses, I mentioned to Father Schwemin that I might have been the one who trampled the tulips while playing kickball.
“Egan—you worthless piece of shit!”
You wonder why I haven’t been to confession since. Now you know.
* * *
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MY RETURN TO THE REIMS CATHEDRAL, on a Sunday morning, is much better. How did I not notice the stained-glass windows of Marc Chagall, the great Jewish artist of dreamy spirituality? Is there a more sublime fusion of sunlight and panes, of twentieth century and twelfth? Mass with Gregorian chants and music is under way. I join about seventy people in the pews behind a side altar. I can’t explain much of what is going on in these ritual flourishes, dating to Clovis’s day. But it’s very hypnotic. The priest, who is black, as are most of the worshippers, faces us and holds his hands at a calming distance. It is—dare I say—most welcoming. I take it as an invitation to pray, and I offer up another plea to stall the cancer that is killing my sister-in-law.
Still, no Holy Ampulla. I was misinformed yet again. The sacred vial is actually next door in the former bishop’s residence, the Palace of Tau, according to a church employee who stamps my pilgrim passport. After threading through a banquet hall once used for postcoronation feasts, into rooms where royalty slept and plotted, then bigger rooms where bishops slept and plotted, anterooms stuffed with tapestries of nobles and sculptures of same, I arrive at a red-walled gallery in the rear of the palace. At the center, under very thick glass, overseen by a guard, is the reliquary holding the Holy Ampulla. At last! You can’t see the oil, or what is left of the shattered vial. What you see is a small, gold-lined treasure chest, with a dove on top, and carvings of kings, popes, and cherubs all around, also in gold. It’s a piece of art, very Baroque. What is left inside has no power, for the last king of France from the unbroken line was beheaded by his own people in 1793. The oil did him no good. The ampulla is memory in a golden box, the years layered with meaning until myth became mist.
While the ampulla is a letdown, Reims is not. Outside, on the cathedral steps of the west façade, I lock eyes with the Smiling Angel. She is life-sized plus and pretty, carved of soft stone, wings at rest, slender arms under a tunic, a pageboy haircut. Almost eight hundred years ago, someone was allowed to chisel a figure that would stand out among the 2,307 statues of this cathedral—singular, because of the expression. A smile. When the Germans bombed Reims during the Great War, the head was knocked off the angel. It fell to the ground and broke into pieces. A monk scooped it up and put it in safekeeping. The restored head looks unblemished today, aglow in the sun, a more lasting image of the city of kings than the flourishes of royalty anointed with oil from God. But you wonder, looking at the big angelic grin surrounded by all the columns of facial solemnity and the trappings of the place where kings were crowned—why is she smiling? Clearly, she knows or represents something that we don’t, something that the anointed monarchs never did. That’s the best-kept secret of Reims.
ELEVEN
THE HIGHEST USE OF MONKS
It would be a stretch to say that Sigeric’s millennia-old route to Rome leads a pilgrim straight to the Avenue de Champagne in Épernay, eighteen miles from Reims. But not by much. The mortal remnants of Helena, mother of Constantine and finder of the cross on which Christ was crucified, were once stored in the same church where Dom Pérignon is buried. Faithful masses hiked through undulating vineyards just off the Via Francigena in search of something miraculous from the sainted mom of Rome’s first Christian emperor. Now, very few people kneel at the longtime rest home of her relics, most of which were scattered after the French Revolution. Fewer still could say who Helena is. But I have never seen so many pilgrims of a different sort in one place in France, all radiantly happy to be meditating on the fine points of the life ambition of a seventeenth-century Benedictine. Like them, I’ve come to find out what I can of the founding father of sparkling wine, a man who put all his monastic energy into a masterpiece.
“Come quickly! I am drinking the stars.”
Dom Pérignon’s statue is outside the gates of Moët & Chandon. And so I assume that this burnished house of bubbly is the keeper of his story. Those words of discovery are part of that story. I wait, along with two dozen other people from all parts of the world, to go underground into the tunnels beneath us. This room feels like a waiting area of a Rodeo Drive plastic surgeon’s office: the cream-colored walls, the white marble floors, the perfect-looking hostesses offering rose-scented mineral water and speaking in hushed Jackie Kennedy tones. We stare at portraits on the walls of men in wigs and high collars, until an immaculately styled woman with an iPad emerges to call out names. This must have been what it was like to board the Concorde back in the era of supersonic luxury travel.
“Follow me. I will take you to the cellar.”
Some cellar: seventeen miles of caves and tunnels carved into beige-colored chalk. The temperature today is 35 degrees cooler underground than above. The walls are moist to the touch, the sweat of Bacchus, producing humidity that is perfect for the slow development of the most famous wine in the world. Deeper into the darkened labyrinth we go, past horizontally stacked bottles laden with dust, bottles behind cages, bottles that haven’t seen daylight for a century. If something has to get better with age, it might as well be champagne. Churchill drank it every day, a half liter for lunch, and went deep into debt to his wine merchant over a lifetime in which he consumed about 42,000 bottles. But then Churchill started his day with whiskey and soda—“mouthwash,” he called it—and always had some alcohol in his bloodstream. Napoleon rarely marched off to battle without hundreds of cases of Moët & Chandon in tow. “I drink champagne when I win,” he said, “and I drink champagne when I lose.” The emperor’s private vault here is intact. The wine bottled as the Dom Pérignon label was the first cuvée de prestige from this house, a 1921 vintage. It can sit ten years or more in the cellar before being released. In mediocre harvests, when the pinot noir and chardonnay grapes have been challenged by weather, no vintage is produced. The Dom himself hand-selected his fruit, and could taste which vineyards they came from with his eyes closed.
Monks made wine for Mass, for subsistence, and yes, for truth—in vino veritas were words to live by. A vow of poverty did not prevent overindulgence. “It was, and is, the luxury and greed of our Christian world, displayed in our feasting and drunkenness, that has made the Muslims hate us,” wrote William of Newburgh, the twelfth-century Augustinian cleric. The abbeys founded by the colonizing Brother Bernard were known for their deep-stocked wine cellars. Wherever his followers went, they pushed the frontier of fermentation.
But it was the humble Dom who would break barriers. Jesuit-educated, Pierre Pérignon took his vows at the age of eighteen. Making wine would consume him until his death at seventy-six. Whether he “invented” champagne is questionable. Benedictine monks in the Languedoc were making juice with bubbles by the mid-sixteenth century, and he was known to visit them. What the Dom did was refine a process, méthode champenoise. The cellar master’s wines went through a second fermentation in bottles sealed in cork and wax, slow-releasing carbon dioxide without shattering the glass. He was also very particular about his grapes from the monastery’s thirty acres, blending unusual combinations, aggressively pruning the vines to get the best fruit, and trellising for maximum sunshine in the oft-soggy Champagne country. While waiting for the perfect moment to harvest, nobody was allowed to taste the grapes but him. In the cellar, bottles were turned by hand, one-eighth of a circle at a time, to move the sediment around and ensure crystalline clarity.
At the end of this narrative of hard earth and time, when we emerge from the dark warren of wine to the bright Moët tasting room, you feel a reverence for the man who devoted
his life to the grape. You feel grateful, also, that monks’ pastimes evolved over the years, from self-flagellation to warmongering to manuscript illuminating to winemaking. I’m surprised, though, at the answer from our guide to a final question: Dom Pérignon never worked at Moët. For that matter, he had no connection to this house of sparkling wine. It was started in 1743—almost thirty years after his death. The prominent statue out front, the premier bottles bearing his name, select vintages selling for two thousand dollars or more—he’s been co-opted. The monk who took a vow of poverty would be appalled at this tasting room. It’s gold and brass and glitter, a bling-blast of Moët branding. It feels a little tawdry.
To pay my proper respects to Pérignon, I get a lift from a fellow champagne pilgrim up the hill from the valley in which Épernay sits, to Hautvillers. This is the site of the abbey where the Dom spent most of his life, founded in 650 by Irish monks. During the Revolution, the compound fell apart after the monastery was nationalized. It’s been restored, at least the church has, in large part because of Moët’s corporate benevolence. You wonder if at some point they may dechristianize the Dom himself. The holy man of champagne is buried at the foot of the altar, under a black marble gravestone embedded in the floor, next to a placard: “Ici repose Dom Pierre Pérignon, cellerier de l’abbaye.” Like the monks at Saint-Omer, toiling in silence for years to produce a book that might lift a mind to higher things, his labors were a form of prayer—doing something good and well and dutifully until it was close to perfect, a tribute to the creator. He found meaning by having a great purpose in life. On this cloudless and searing day, there’s quite a crowd seeking a few minutes with the grave of a Catholic cleric in little Hautvillers. Three centuries after the monk’s death, he’s been able to do what other members of his faith have not—get people lined up to go to church.
TWELVE
NAPOLEON WAS BULLIED HERE
June brings no relief from the heat. And now there’s a chance of late-afternoon thunderstorms. That is, bolt-heaving, sky-cracking, fat-raindrop-pissing late-afternoon thunderstorms. It’s about twenty miles from Épernay to Châlons-en-Champagne. I can’t carry enough water, and after Carlo’s story of the horse piss in his bottle, I can’t count on the kindness of strangers either. My big toes are wrapped in thin gauze to prevent blisters. I’ve got duct tape on my heels, a trick I learned from an ex-Marine while climbing Mount Rainier. He used it on his severed limb, where the skin met the prosthetic above the knee. I could stay among these vineyards forever. By comparison, heaven sounds tedious, a space for souls without edge, albeit with the bonus of no crotch chafing. This is something even the pope has acknowledged, as he mused at a recent appearance: “Some may say, ‘Isn’t it a little boring being there for all eternity?’” Well, yes. On the whole, I’d rather be in Champagne. But I have to move. A pilgrim has no choice.
I’m making decent progress, traveling south and east, through a small part of the world that holds so many little unknowns, despite being one of the most known places on earth. But spiritually, I haven’t gotten very far. If anything, I’m going in the other direction—doubts and disgust at so much of the history. I don’t expect an aha moment, to be struck like Saul on the road to Damascus. Still, that stiff shot of no-bullshit spirituality would go a long way at this point.
Here’s my problem: the deeper you unravel the layers of this faith, the more trouble you find. I respect the best thinkers of Christianity. Augustine is a maddening old fool with a beautiful mind. Once you get past his calluses of sexual guilt, he’s brilliant. I’m using one of his best-known lines as a mantra: “The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.” My objections have been noted, most having to do with theological rejection of the sublime aspects of human nature. And women. They haven’t figured out women at all. As for harnessing the gospel of Jesus into a vehicle for war—you can’t just continue to explain that away. If it happened a couple of times, fine. Free will, bad judgment, cynical manipulation, the motivation of martyrdom, and all that. But this pattern repeats itself over and over, the Christian God in service of countless cruelties.
I’m impressed by what the early Christians did, against all odds. Their devotion to spreading a philosophy that gave meaning to their time on earth, while looking beyond themselves, is inspiring. There was no advantage, early on, to average people in abandoning an established set of deities in favor of a God of love and sacrifice. Conversion was a positive, emotional thing in its purest, noncoercive form. It’s what William of Saint-Thierry wrote in the twelfth century, that the spirit, if allowed to breathe, will tend toward higher things. And I’ve been moved by small things seen along the way: defiant acts of charity from Catholics in Calais, the tomb for disabled children in Saint-Omer, the search for perfection by monks in Hautvillers, and the former scriptorium in the flatlands of Flanders. I haven’t given up on this pope, and won’t, especially now that he’s facing some trouble from the doctrine monitors. What did Steve Jobs say? Don’t be trapped by dogma, which he defined as “living with the results of other people’s thinking.” The Roman Catholic curia is geologic compression of other people’s thinking, settled over the centuries.
I take to heart the pope’s recent advice. “Allow yourself to be amazed,” he said. “Do we let ourselves be surprised? Because the encounter with the Lord is always a living encounter, not an encounter at a museum.” That, in essence, is the great challenge of Christianity in the Western world: to prove that it has a beating heart and not just a dead past. To that end, I will try to be more understanding of faith as a living thing, evident in the everyday along the Via Francigena. But for now, I’m making very little forward progress.
* * *
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THE MORNING IS A DISASTER. While trying to find the way back to the signed V.F. route out of Reims, I make several terrible decisions, all in the interest of cutting time. I take one wrong turn out of a roundabout and lose two hours. I rely on the robo-woman of Google Maps and she mispronounces a key street, leading me to a life-threatening detour. There’s another option: the train to Châlons-en-Champagne takes forty minutes. And it’s on time.
So now I’m in a completely different part of France, and very well hydrated, thank you. Vines still tangle toward the sun on south-facing slopes. But there are more wooded areas, forests of poplar, oak, and beech. Other crops, mostly grains, are straining to stand in the withering heat. And more hills. And more water, the aged sloth of the Marne and its canals wrapped around Châlons, a city of 50,000. What stands out in the main square of this town is a huddle of handsome, half-timbered houses—exteriors of exposed structural beams, wearing the bra on the outside, as it were. A sleepy farmers’ market is finishing up nearby. The strawberries! Small, red on the inside, a juice-burst when you bite into one. With a fistful of Gruyère in one hand and a packet of berries in the other, I follow signage to one of the oldest paths in Europe: the Via Agrippa, at least twice the age of the V.F.
It’s a pleasure, though certainly no achievement, to add my footprints to those that have touched these smooth stones over the last 2,100 years—all the sandaled centurions, hooded pilgrims, and traveling merchants. The Agrippa, the Roman road from Milan to the north coast of France, was one of the main arteries of a network connecting the cities of Gaul. And it says quite a bit about the Empire’s engineering skills that by the year 1500, as the historian William Manchester noted, “the roads built by the Romans were still the best in Europe.” I once stood history-struck in the ruts made by wagon wheels over the Oregon Trail, in the Snake River plateau of Idaho. Touching the Via Agrippa for the first time is similar, with another 1,900 years of time-layered sensation to contemplate.
The high, singing voices of children draw me to another square. In the same place where Bernard of Clairvaux urged Christians to wage war against infidels in the Holy Land, about a hundred kids are lined up in the shade of a church, rehearsing a concert. Half the children, at lea
st, are brown- or black-skinned, something I didn’t expect to find in this old settlement, far from the bigger cities. At the prompt of a guitar-playing music teacher, one girl steps up to a microphone and sings “Black or White,” in English.
* * *
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THOSE KIDS IN THE SQUARE have it so much better than young Napoleon Bonaparte did in Brienne-le-Château, the next stop on the Via Francigena. After an overnight in Châlons, a train, a bus, and a short hike got me to the arched entrance of his military school, now a museum. The town is dominated by and named for the château, a mini-Versailles on a hill lording over the three thousand people who live below. The boy was just shy of his tenth birthday in 1779, a slender child with a thick Corsican accent, when he left home for Brienne’s isolated military school. For the next five years, under strict Catholic rule, he would sleep on a straw mattress with a single blanket in an unheated room just large enough to hold the cot. Mass was mandatory every morning, as was evening prayer. His teachers were Benedictine monks, the same order that put me up for the night in Wisques. Napoleon resented their authority, developing an early contempt for religious men with power. Despite his studies in the faith—or more likely, because of them—it was here that he started to doubt the divinity of Christ. It did not make logical sense to Napoleon that someone could be both God and man, though he would later be given a title somewhat close to that. He studied history, math, Latin, practiced fencing and gardening, and learned how to defend himself—a necessity.
“I was the poorest of my classmates,” Napoleon wrote. “They had pocket money. I never had any.” One of the letters on display here is a note to his father. “I am tired of exhibiting indigence and seeing the smiles of insolent scholars who are only superior to me by reason of their fortune.” The other boys berated him for his accent and his looks, calling him “straw nose.” But his provincial tongue, his size, his relative poverty, his loneliness—they shaped the man who would return to Brienne as Emperor of France in 1805, and spend the night in the château on the hill. That would show them.
