Free Paris to the Pyrenees: A Skeptic Pilgrim Walks the Way of Saint James by David Downie

water and felt the kind of dizzy, falling sensation you get when you’ve looked at a computer screen too long, a sensation worsened, in my case, by eye problems. What a joy it was to be away from laptops, the Internet, and the New Paradigm.
    On the slippery uphill grade south of the creek, a sign dangled from a lichen-shagged tree. “Farmhouse B&B, go to the monument, turn right, 500 meters,” Alison read aloud, her head tilted back. The “monument” had to be the obelisk to the dead of the World Wars. In France there was no need to specify.
    “Lunch or coffee at the B&B,” I said brightly.
    Over the ridge we spotted something strange. A black cross had been painted on a freshly sawn tree trunk. String and yarn decorated the lower branches of a large fir tree, and rocks had been piled into a triangular mound. “Druids or a Satanic cult?” I wondered aloud, checking my pedometer and then marking our map.
    Alison shrugged. “Bored teenagers probably.”
    “Probably,” I repeated. “But what if?”
    “What if what? You think they’re neo-Druids? What about your mother, and her off-the-wall friends? They’re not dangerous.”
    This was true. Lunacy did not always indicate redneck-style violence. We picked up the pace and, at the five-mile point, my pedometer squawked in synthesized global-English. I looked down at my boots and noticed something. Belly-up in the road was a dead fish. In the middle of nowhere. On dry land. A fish? I studied the lowering clouds. “A flying trout,” I said. Alison pretended not to hear. “Fly fishing gone awry?”
    A few hundred yards later, entering Chastellux-sur-Cure, we came upon a washhouse. Spring water gushed into a basin where the womenfolk once did the laundry. I was about to plunge my cupped hands in and drink when I saw the school of fish. Mystery solved. Washing machines had spawned trout.
    Across the river valley half a mile as the fish flies, the turrets of Château de Chastellux rose majestically. A castle has been at Chastellux since at least 1116 and, according to our Topo Guide , it still belongs to cousins of the owners of Bazoches, a many-branched, well-rooted clan whose most celebrated member was and is Vauban. A recent forebear named François-Jean de Chastellux (1734–1788) fought in the American Revolution. He even wrote a memoir of his travels in America. Long out of print, the book was replaced in the mid-1800s by Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville’s evergreen Democracy in America . Democracy in America was sometimes notional: I couldn’t help wondering if in Tocqueville’s day chads had dangled from ballots, and the Supreme Court had been for sale. But that too was now ancient history. I preferred to think of eternity and finitude—and lunch. want to light a candle9HCh
    Crenellated and straight out of a Disney fantasy, chez Chastellux looked to be in good shape. We couldn’t help wondering if it, like Vézelay and a hundred other French monuments, had been Viollet-le-Duc’ed—meaning, restored beyond recognition by that indefatigable architect, friend of King Louis Philippe and, later, Napoléon III and his enthusiastic empress Eugénie. What would Walt Disney have done without Viollet-le-Duc? Whether or not you liked the Frenchman’s Romantic over-restorations, you had to admit that he, like Vauban, had been a tireless preserver of culture. Who even half his stature could France put forward today, Alison wondered aloud. The ensuing silence deafened me.
    “Better to be low-born and lucky,” I couldn’t help saying as we eyed the castle, “than high and mighty. Imagine owning a drafty pile like that and having strangers sauntering through your living room. It’s the only way to get a tax break and subsidies.”
    The truth was, I’d rather live in a reconverted barn and drive an old rust bucket than own a château and a Rolls. Owning things had never been my thing: I was perfectly happy with the pair of boots on my swelling feet, and