by Timothy Egan
No one disputes this. But it took more than four hundred years for the faith to find its conscience on these crimes. In 1995, Pope John Paul II said he was sorry for the massacre of French Protestants—not just Wassy but all the murderous rampages of the Wars of Religion. He issued a formal Vatican apology, aimed specifically at France. Five years later, the pope made a more sweeping apology for two thousand years of violence and persecution—against Protestants throughout Europe, Jews, women, heretics, so-called Gypsies. From the altar of St. Peter’s Basilica, the ailing pope, trembling with symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, pleaded for forgiveness. It was the latest attempt to heal some historic wounds. He had already apologized for the Crusades, centuries of anti-Semitism, and the Inquisition.
In Arras, when I saw what twentieth-century German Christians had done to the cathedral of twentieth-century French Christians, I was disgusted by the destructive intensity. It was mindless, devoid of anything but dark-hearted malice. But at least there the fight was not over individual interpretations of Christianity. And the violence was mechanical—lobbing shell after shell at a faceless target on a hill. Here in Wassy, some man of faith, no doubt with a family of his own, believing himself to be in God’s good graces, had to look into the terror-stricken face of a two-year-old before running a lance into the child’s heart.
How this is any different from what Shiites do to Sunni today, I don’t know. Certainly, not all wars are fought over religion. But this one in France—so named because of the sectarian nature of the conflict—was a particularly insane variant of organized violence in the name of God. Protestants believe in the risen Christ, as do Catholics. Protestants believe in the Trinity, as do Catholics. Protestants believe in the life-affirming power of the New Testament, as do Catholics. They differ over the control that the highest clerical authorities have over the souls of Christians. It’s certainly not a small beef, but it’s also not worth the loss of a single life. Faith does not fare well in this argument; organized religion, even less so.
I won’t ask where was God in the Wassy Barn, going back to the first question I encountered on the Via Francigena, at Saint Martin’s in Canterbury. God had been called to the barn at the start of the service. If God stuck around for what happened at the end, God would feel, like me, lost.
FOURTEEN
WANDERINGS
Red roofs and steeples, rolled hay and Gallo-Roman ruins. Paths of crushed white rock, leading to a forest or a listless town. Cyclists on cell phones, pedaling next to canals, on their way to a postcard. Deer browsing in predawn fields. Gray herons working platform nests in old trees, twigs stacked and twined in fine avian carpentry. Dogs barking with an accent and an attitude. Vines crawling over arched doorways, dripping grapes just starting to form into fruit. A dying village, its butchers gone and boulangeries buttoned up, its école shuttered after the children left and were not replaced by new ones, still has one live château on its fringe. And in front are shrubs pruned to a military butch cut, at the foot of a garden so formal the roses blush when they bloom.
There is nothing of real significance to see in the countryside that lies within the Haute-Marne, in the French heartland, and not enough time to take it all in. It is sixty-nine miles between Brienne-le-Château and Langres. In between is a part of Europe set to a different clock. The mornings are the best, everything new and slightly dewy. Just before dusk, clouds replace the white heat of the sky, thicken and bruise and threaten to break with pellets of rain, but never do. Thunder rolls over the countryside, noisy and menacing, like those dogs, but without a bite. I learn about hidden places to stay in towns that time has passed over. In Brienne is a gîte-pèlerin behind the big château, a traveler’s bed going for ten euros a night. In Châteauvillain the mairie will give you a key to a simple flat, and let it go at that. If you come into one of these half-empty hamlets and cannot locate a place to stay, the mairie must put you up somewhere. Failing that, you go to what is usually the oldest building and knock. A pilgrim can always find a roof.
The River Aube flows to a town that hugs its banks. And there you get a croque monsieur and a beer and wonder what you were doing all your life without them. The homes are handsome and elderly, exuding domestic dignity. Clairvaux Abbey, once the largest monastery in the world, is just down another road. That is the place where Brother Bernard started his empire, in the hidden fold of a great forest in the twelfth century. I tour the part of it that’s open to the public. Lay brothers, two hundred to a room, slept on stone floors marked with their scratches, tallies of wages owed. The Cistercians dug a pond in the shape of a cross and filled it with fish. They brooded in a square of scraggly grass, a sunless cloister enclosed by high walls. After the Revolution, the compound was seized and made into a prison—the largest in the Napoleonic era. If the Champagne shrine to Dom Pérignon represents an evolved use of monks, the prison built out of Bernard’s fortress seems equally fitting as a logical end to his authoritarian ethos. The poor soul who inspired Hugo’s Les Misérables was shackled there. So was Carlos the Jackal. Today, Clairvaux is filled with inmates still, the bulk of the old monastery serving as a maximum-security prison. I’m happy to leave it.
Among the curiosities along the way are dovecotes. I’d seen them in the English countryside, and here and there in rural France, but had no idea of their purpose. They are little outbuildings, usually brick or stone, with small windows and even smaller doors. Many are circular, topped by slate roofs. Dovecotes were shelters for domesticated pigeons—apartment buildings for birds. During the Revolution, dovecotes were torn down by rural mobs. The peasants hated them, complaining that the birds of the rich ravaged the fields of the poor—flying thieves, as they were known. The meat of young pigeons is quite tender, a delicacy. I once ordered the dish by accident. When I asked the waiter for an explanation of the plat du jour, he said, a “leeetle birdie.” And when I asked him what kind of leeetle birdie, he said, “The kind that shit on tourists in Par-ee.”
Langres appears in the distance on an imposing rise, and is well fortified behind its ramparts. The town is some miles away when I first catch sight of it. I pass the second half of a day thinking about something an ex-priest said in Seattle, during that Search for Meaning festival in the dead of winter. He told us the human brain lacks the capacity to understand God. The divine is beyond us. Unfathomable. This, from a man who spent most of his life in deep theological thought and debate, and then became a psychiatrist, and now dabbles in Buddhism and other spiritual hybrids. It would take several hundred more years, or maybe several thousand, for people to evolve to the point where they could comprehend God, he said. At the end of his talk, I asked the ex-priest his age. He said he was seventy-eight. So, by his own calculations, he would die in a fog of ignorance.
I don’t have another dozen lives to wait around. For now, I’ve got Langres, hometown of the philosopher Diderot, on the horizon. The low road leads to higher ground, a place that helped give flight to the Enlightenment. Diderot rejected God, after a long attempt to locate him in unlikely places. He tried to find sustenance for the soul by looking at much of what is venerated along the Via Francigena—much of what I’ve seen to date—as a fiction. But many others, in the big middle part of the trail just ahead of me, chose to lose the church but keep their faith in the founder. In the process, they nearly brought down Catholicism.
II
LOST
LAND OF HERETICS AND HEROES
FIFTEEN
THE HOLLOWED HOUSE OF LIGHT
He was precocious, everyone saw that in Denis Diderot. He could talk as fast as he could think. The Jesuits found him brilliant but troublesome. Keep him in the church, they said, and one day he might be pope. Before he could shave, the hair on his head was cut in the tonsured bowl of a young seminarian, and off he went to an enclosure of theology. It could not hold him. Out of college, looking like a young Liam Neeson, he met Jean-Jacques Rousseau at a coffeehouse in Paris and argued
with him, mostly productively, for fifteen years. Their ideas sailed across the Atlantic and landed in the heads of a band of brothers who would forge the first major country founded on Enlightenment thought, the United States of America. Diderot could unpack a mathematical equation. He wrote plays that filled theaters, and a book of philosophy that landed him in prison. He wanted to know all of it, to experience all of it, and then to share all of it. He spent almost thirty years assembling the world’s knowledge for his Encyclopédie. And yet, in many quarters of France, he is best known—still—for a single offhand remark: “Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.”
Langres, Diderot’s home, is a town on a crown of civic high-mindedness. First planted by a pre-Roman tribe as a fortress in the clouds, it is undisturbed by time, or much of anything else except for a gendarme who followed me to my hotel out of boredom. Langres is just one existential question short of being Diderot Disneyland, which only the French could pull off. Is there any place in the States given over to a philosopher? And what a delicious geographic irony to have an ancient religious trail to Rome run right through a town that fostered so much thought to refute religion. You want Age of Reason? Langres is a City of Reason. Diderot’s name is attached to a street, a pavilion, a statue, a college, and the House of Enlightenment—the Maison des Lumières Denis Diderot. But not the cheese. The regional fromage, soft and cylindrical like a large marshmallow, belongs to Langres, controlled under appellation-of-origin rules more detailed than the owner’s manual of a Volvo.
I check into a former abbey, first mentioned in a scribe’s aside in the year 834, the Hôtel Le Cheval Blanc. I’m greeted with a glass of champagne and a menu, for this ancient inn is a foodie destination, and the friendly owner has only a few seats left for tonight’s dinner. I reserve a place at the table for later, and settle into a room with vaulted ceilings, a hint of faded frescoes, and a view to a countryside of forests, farms, and a large lake, well below the plateau.
Before there was the philosophy theme, or even that soft cheese, Langres existed because it was a natural place for self-defense. Its ramparts are intact, more than five miles of fortifications, giving Langres one of the largest continuous city walls in Europe—or so they say at the tourist office, where I get my pilgrim stamp and a fistful of Diderot brochures. And I did not know—though it is self-evident—that Langres has been consistently rated one of the most beautiful towns in France.
I skip the walls. They’re impressive—twelve towers, seven gates, with expansive views fifteen hundred feet down. But I’ve seen enough mortared medieval flanks for the time being. Instead, I follow the Diderot trail to his statue, in Place Diderot. The placement is exquisite. Just behind him is the 870-year-old Langres cathedral, lasting symbol of his lifetime foe. And in front of him is the U-shaped compound that used to be the Jesuit institution he attended. It’s now a school named for Diderot. He appears to be looking down on it, which, if you put him in the context of his eighteenth-century youth, would make sense.
To say that Diderot resisted conventional thought is a vast understatement. He created a body of original thought. And those ideas, refined in dozens of fat volumes, threatened the world order. Oh, for the pre-Twitter days, when it took something more than a word fart by a president who never opens a book to turn the world upside down. You read Diderot now and can’t find anything that sounds subversive. He was a skeptic and a rationalist—basically, prove it, and I’ll believe it. He despised superstition and the charlatans who practiced it. He thought God should be freed from closed spaces. “Men have banished God from their company and have hidden him in a sanctuary; the walls of a temple shut him in, he has no existence beyond.” Sounds like something a pilgrim would say. After he wrote those words, his book of essays was burned under orders from Paris. And after he wrote Philosophical Thoughts, his first original work, he was jailed for expanding on said thoughts.
“If you impose silence on me about religion and government, I shall have nothing to talk about,” he said. He was allowed to continue talking.
He went from devout Catholic, to deist, to atheist. The middle stop would have found him at the same watering hole as American founders Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Paine, who called Christianity a fable. Diderot’s ruminations on liberty, tolerance, and rational self-interest formed a big current of thought that flowed into the Enlightenment bible of the American Constitution. Deists believe in a single God who created the universe and then walked away. To a deist, prayer is meaningless. God does not interfere. God’s design, power, and wisdom are seen in nature. Scripture is useless.
But perhaps because of the time he spent in prison for the crime of deep thinking, or because his sister, a nun, died at a young age in a convent, Diderot eventually rejected all religion. He died five years before the storming of the Bastille, and so he never lived to see the fresh-air part of the French Revolution, when his beliefs were written into a new set of civic commandments, the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.
* * *
—
AT DINNER, I’m seated outside on the terrace. In the spirit of Diderot’s insatiable appetite, I decide to go for the full French experience. I’ve been eating at bistros and bars, mostly soups with baguettes, hearty stews, lots of roasted chicken and spring vegetables. On the menu tonight: frogs, in a sauce of onions and white wine. Not frog legs, but the whole slain amphibian. Sorry, Kermit. There’s a duck terrine offering, with enough fat to narrow the carotid artery. It comes with “trumpets of death,” as my English-translation menu explains. Qu’est-ce que c’est trumpets of death? Chanterelles, I’m told. Ah, yes. But maybe the translation mistake extends to the harvesting. Not worth the risk. Snail gratin—meh. I can’t work up an appetite for something I’ve been throwing out of my garden and feeding to the crows. Emulsion of crustaceans. Sounds vaguely industrial. At last, I spot something recognizable: foie gras with porcini mushrooms. I feel a tinge of guilt, knowing how those goose livers were fattened. Would a true pilgrim eat foie gras? The question answers itself, garçon, and bring a half liter of the local red wine with it, s’il vous plaît. People aren’t allowed to smoke indoors in this country anymore, thankfully. And another mainstay, the bidet, has disappeared in the places where I’ve stayed from Pas-de-Calais to the Haute-Marne. But food procured from mud or torture farms never goes out of style in France.
* * *
—
MORNING IN LANGRES reminds me of dawn in Laon—the crisp choreography of routine, the rituals of retail display an art form in itself. I’ve got another day here, which is much needed. While walking down a short hill on the path to Langres, just before the final climb to town, I slipped and tore something in my right leg. I heard a distinct popping sound, and felt a snap. I blame it on cramping and the heat, leaving me vulnerable to injury. Today, my quad is bruised and gnarly looking, and there’s a little dip where one of the muscles used to be. I can walk, and it doesn’t hurt unless I stretch, but I should not be carrying a pack fifteen to twenty miles a day. The sensible thing to do would be to take advantage of the remarkably efficient, world-class, and free medical care that is available in this advanced country. But I’m a guy, so I’ll just ignore it until it’s too late.
I’m at the House of Enlightenment when the big entrance gates swing open and have the place to myself for the first hour. The garden is formal and fussed over, too anal for my tastes. The three-story maison, built in the sixteenth century, is light and glorious in service of the faith of reason. It’s a nice break, after spending so many hours in darkened Gothic churches full of body parts and paintings of mutilated saints. There are ten rooms, each a showcase of the Enlightenment, telling the story of a monumental thinker and his influence on the world. Diderot was the Leonardo da Vinci of France. He took as his life task “to observe nature, reflect on it, and experiment with it.” One space shows his curious mind at work, his scribbles, dr
awings, letters, and notes-to-self. Another salon reveals his interest in theater, the plays he authored and critiqued, and in music as well. The purpose of art, he wrote, was “to make virtue attractive, vice odious, ridicule forceful.”
His technical side gets a room of its own, his minor inventions, typographic designs, printing and binding, cutlery. And then there’s his magnum opus, the Encyclopédie. Diderot was the coeditor. He sought out the best thinkers in Europe and had them explain the universe. All twenty-eight volumes of text and engraved plates are stacked and opened to many a random page in the maison. The frontispiece is a drawing of an orgiastic, pseudo-religious moment, with angelic, half-clad female figures representing truth, reason, and philosophy, their exposed breasts bathed in light. From asparagus to wax making, from chemistry to metaphysics, in 71,818 articles, here is the result of an attempt “to assemble the knowledge scattered over the face of the earth,” he wrote.
It presents as a masterpiece, the Google of its age without the pop-ups. And yet, church and state found the Encyclopédie seditious. As Jefferson noted, clerics “dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of daylight.” The first few volumes were condemned by the Vatican and temporarily banned by royal decree. What could possibly scare them? Let’s have a look: under the letter A are listings for agriculture, astronomy, and—ah, here we go—atheism. The entry is a cogent argument against the existence of God, limited in that it’s no more provable than the argument for the existence of God. The pope confined that volume to the Index of Prohibited Books, which was a thing until 1966, and also a surefire ticket to bestseller lists. In papal banishment, Diderot was in good company, joining Voltaire, Galileo, and John Milton. Also among the exiles were philosophers John Locke and Jean-Paul Sartre, the historian Edward Gibbon, the early Protestant theologian John Calvin. Further publications of the Encyclopédie were circulated quietly to avoid seizure by agents of the Crown. Benjamin Franklin, the publisher and polymath, was dazzled by the work and tried to get exclusive rights to sell the volumes in the American colonies. Diderot found a patron in Catherine the Great, the inquisitive empress of Russia. More significantly, his publication fed the young minds of the French Revolution.
