It gives me a cheap thrill to think that you’d start reading this article in order to discover—with admiration or contempt—which towns and cities in France limit their cooperation with the national government in enforcing immigration laws. You might be imaging a bistro where lawless lefties confront national thugs. Or a wine region where baguette-wielding winegrowers are protecting grape-picking Syrians and Somalis against soldiers in riot gear. Would you then be inclined to visit such a place? Or would you immediately despise it?

How exciting to think that a travel article of mine could be read with admiration or contempt. But at the risk of disappointing anyone, and of ruining my chances of this piece launching a lengthy Reddit thread, let’s have another look at that title.

Villes Sanctuaires en France, the network in question, translates as Sanctuary Cities in France. The words align. But the concept does not. There are no trumped-up stand-offs in these towns and cities. French authorities have indeed stepped up operations to net undocumented migrants and would-be immigrants who’ve overstayed their visa, including a few gently reminded post-Brexit Brits. But round-ups, deportation and resistance are unlikely to occur in the peaceable destinations in France’s Villes Sanctuaires network. What makes them like-minded is a different kind of sanctuary.

Here, sanctuaire refers to a sanctuary in the sense of a shrine, “a place in which devotion is paid to a saint or deity,” to quote Merriam-Webster. Villes Sanctuaires en France therefore brings together villages, towns and cities in France that have shrines—Catholic, at that—that can be visited by the general public.

But wait, wait!

Before clicking away because candle-lighting pilgrims are less Instagrammable than baguette-wielding winegrowers, let me tell you one of my favorite aspects of travel in the secular nation in France: You can just as easily visit these sanctuaries and shrines for the heck, the fun, or the creepiness of it—I do—as you can out of a sense of spirituality, hope or devotion—others do. You can visit them, as I do, out of pure curiosity, out of an in interest in history or architecture, and to observe how people visit shrines. Or don’t visit the shrine at all when in these sanctuary cities, because the municipalities mentioned here also pay tribute to the gods of beauty, construction, gastronomy, wine, nature, even meaning, whatever that may mean. And here’s the best part: respectful as we must be when visiting a shrine that doesn’t speak to us spiritually, we don’t have to fake adoration, because blasphemy is not a crime in France. Praise be!

For the 18 municipalities within the Villes Sanctuaires network, the shrine or sanctuary is only half the picture. The site’s pious handlers work in tandem with local tourist officials, who also seek to promote other aspects of tourism within the municipality and in the surrounding region. Each member-municipality tells a different story in which the spiritual retreat or Catholic pilgrimage site or otherwise sanctified structure can lead to explorations regarding other heritage sites, gastronomy, wine, hiking, and nature—or vice versa.

France today is a secular state not a Christian or Catholic country. Its culture is a mixed bag that doesn’t stem from the history of a once-dominant religion. Yet the history of Christian, particularly Catholic, dominance in France has left major physical markers. Among them, a fascinating, photogenic and/or curious variety of heritage sites that the traveler is invited to encounter. Christianity’s religious and political history in France also includes a record of harms, dangers and abuses that are also worth examining. Thankfully, one is no longer forced to or expected to honor religiously inspired historical sites or the shrines of these sanctuary cities in specific ways, yet all are accessible to visitors whatever one’s views. By contrast, travelers are highly unlikely to visit a synagogue or mosque or temple if they don’t identify with the associated religion. Even travelers who do identify rarely visit those, whereas the vast majority of non-Catholics visitors to France will enter a church. Think Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral.

Pilgrims and wayfarers, reverent and irreverent

For the purposes of this article, let’s use both portions of Merriam-Webster’s definition of a pilgrim: 1: one who journeys in foreign lands: wayfarer. 2: one who travels to a shrine or holy place as a devotee.

The Villes Sanctuaires en France network was created in 1994, not as a direct promotional tool so much as a way for municipal tourist officials and overseers of shrines and sanctuaries to exchange information and learn from each other regarding the welcoming of religious and non-religious pilgrims. Only recently, in December 2025, did the association hold its first organized press workshop.

The event took place in Paris at the religious guest house attached to Sacré Coeur Basilica in Montmartre. Entrance to the hotel is from behind the basilica on a street named for the Chevalier de la Barre. The chevalier was a nobleman who was arrested then tortured and executed in 1766, at the age of 20, because he vandalized a wooden crucifix and failed to take his hat off when a religious procession went by, along with other impious, blasphemous acts. He immediately came to be seen as a secular martyr for the Enlightenment against the dangers of religious intolerance of Church and its bedmate State. Laws today sanction those who incite hate and violence, whether with respect to religion or other matters, while the Chevalier de la Barre remains a symbol of the right to irreverence with respect to something some consider sacred.

It isn’t at all ironic that the street near the Catholic holy site is named after the ill-fated young fellow. Instead, the street was baptized in honor of la Barre at a time when Sacré Coeur was under construction, during the political tug-of-war between Catholic and anticlerical forces in France. While the church rose with one vision of French society, the naming of the street and a statue to la Barre (located in what is now a dog park nearby) were intentional reminders of changing social priorities.

Together, the street and the church, the young nobleman and the devout pilgrim, the charming grey cobblestones and the massive white dome, coexist today as attractive reminders of how travelers—whatever kind of pilgrim they may be, whatever reverent or irreverent thoughts they may have—can experience, learn from and share it all.

The Sanctuary Cities network naturally plays the spiritual card in promoting tourism—unless it’s the tourist card in promoting spirituality—but these villages, towns and cities needn’t be seen as religious destinations alone. Whether you consider yourself a religious pilgrim or a wayfarer in a foreign land, or both at once, or sometimes one, sometimes another; whether you’re a theist (aficionado of a god that does or doesn’t act on human affairs) or a nontheist; whether you go in for blasphemy, heresy, dogma, or the smell of incense; whether you consider yourself spiritual or not; whether you wish that this article had been about deportation or resistance, now that you’ve come this far in, stay with me as I present the 18 current members of the network of Sanctuary Cities in France.

Municipalities in the Sanctuary Cities network vary from world-renown destinations to little-known village.

Among the most famous of these Sanctuary Cities is Lourdes, a town of 13,800 whose shrines attract 3 million visitors per year. Lourdes is primarily known as a spiritual destination relative to sainted Bernadette Soubirous (1844-1879), who is said to have had 18 sightings of Mary from February to July 1858. Personally, I’ve little curiosity about Bernadette herself, but the spirit moves me to visit Lourdes soon so as to witness the Bernadette phenomenon up close and because Lourdes makes for an excellent starting point for exploration in the Pyrenees. There’s a visitable fortress just above the town. A funicular goes to the summit of the Pic du Jer. Further from town, another funicular goes to the even more impressive summit of the Pic du Midi, and there are numerous trails for hiking expeditions in the region. (Stay tuned for my 2026 Lourdes article.)

The photogenic tidal island of Mont Saint Michel is another major destination among these Sanctuary Cities.

While you don’t need to carry an all-knowing deity in your thoughts to be curious about the place, I encourage all travels to delve into the fascinating religious, architectural, technological and geopolitical history of the site, whether through reading or by hiring a specialized local guide, even if only to understand the successive eras of construction on the mount, culminating with the 13th-century portion known as “the Marvel.” I suspect that, unlike visitors to Lourdes, only a small percentage of the millions who come each year to Mont Saint Michel is aware that the mount maintains an active Catholic community—the men and women of the Monastic Fraternities of Jerusalem. In the village and hard to spot among the souvenir shops and pricey omelets, the House of Pilgrims is a sanctuary for visitors who seek churchly hospitality.

Nevers, population 33,000, is located on the edge of two major travel and touring routes and receives relatively few foreign visitors. It’s on the inner edge Burgundy but without vineyards to draw wine travelers, and it’s the starting point for the 415-mile Loire by Bike route but cyclists largely pedal along paths further downstream. Religious pilgrims, however, know Nevers as the place to marvel at the body of Bernadette of Lourdes. Why aren’t her remains in Lourdes to greet the 3 million visitors there? Because Bernadette of Lourdes joined the Sisters of Charity and lived her short life as a nun in Nevers, where she died at the age of 35. Personally, I’m not planning a trip to Nevers just for that, though I do soon expect to take in the embalmed sight. I’ll also check out the Ducal Palace, have a peek in at the earthenware museum, find a potter to visit, and seek out a lively bistro or good restaurant. I enjoy the sense of discovery of exploring a bypassed town with an eclectic mix of offerings with an eye to encountering something or someone that sparks my interest. (Again, stay tuned for an upcoming article.)

Further south in Burgundy, Paray-le-Monial’s Sacré Coeur (Sacred Heart) Basilica represents Romanesque architectural splendor to Catholic and non-Catholic visitors alike. The former may specifically come to embrace their sense of the Sacred Heart. It was in this town that Margaret-Marie Alacoque claimed to have had three visitations from Jesus from 1673 to 1675, revealing his heart and its meaning to her on the third. The basilica therefore welcomes a significant influx of religious pilgrims. They may or may not also be gastronomic pilgrims, interested in Charolais beef. Charolais is common in much of France but the massive Charolais breed of cattle has its origins in this region and is named for the town of Charolles, eight miles east.

Spirituality needn’t be the main draw of a town or city in the sanctuary network. Wine can be the magnet, at least it is for me when I think of Cahors, which stands out in the wine world as the primary home for malbec in France. Whether you prefer your wine blended, blessed or 100% malbec, or don’t drink at all, no visitor venturing this deep into the country would skip the city’s key heritage sight: the 900-year-old Saint Etienne (Saint Stephen) Cathedral. Within the bowels of the cathedral awaits the Holy Headdress, venerated as the supposed head covering placed on Jesus as he was wrapped in a shroud for burial. Some will stand before it in awe and adoration. Others will raise an eyebrow, shake their head, and think “Oh, the things that people will believe.” But all visitors check it out. Beyond the malbec, the cathedral and the old town, it is the House of Pilgrims at the convent of Vaylats that gives Cahors sanctuary status and provides hospitality for hikers on the Way of Saint James of Compostela.

Sometimes the distinction between religious and non-religious pilgrim-tourists is blurred because they’re all following the same path. That’s the case at Rocamadour, one of the most visually stunning of these Villes Sanctuaires due to way the village hugs the canyon wall. Rocamodour is just over an hour’s drive north of Cahors or east of Sarlat. Visitors of all stripe climb the 216 steps to the sanctuary, then gaze upon the Black Virgin, a little statue with a large reputation.

Brive-la-Gaillarde, just over an hour’s drive north of Rocamadour, is better known for its rugby team than for its caves of Saint Anthony of Padua. But there it is, a sanctuary dedicated to the patron saint of all things lost and found.

Many trains to Bayeux and the D-Day Landing Zone of Normandy stop in the sanctuary town of Lisieux. Looking out the window as the train approaches the station, you see an immense basilica on the hill, its architecture inspired by Paris’s Sacré Coeur. The basilica honors Thérèse Martin (1873-1897), better known as Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. I’m not suggesting that any but the most Teresian travelers take time from their brief tour of the Landing Zone to visit Lisieux, but it’s nice to know what you’re looking at as you pass by on the train.

Teresa’s sainthood marks much of the lower half of Normandy. Her devout parents, the canonized couple Louis and Zélie Martin, lived in Alençon, and their shrine there brings that town into the fold of Sanctuary Cities. Alençon is, however, better known in knitting circles for its lace-making history, as presented in its Lace Museum.

Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer’s annual pilgrimage in May attracts Romani from throughout Europe and tourists from far and wide into the Camargue Regional Park. Yet for most visitors, it’s the natural sensations of its marshes and bottomlands that set the Camargue apart along the Mediterranean.

Most foreign travelers would be surprised to learn that the Loire River, which evokes royal chateaux and easy-going biking along its east-west flow, starts deep in an off-track area of southern France and builds up strength on a northerly flow. Le Puy-en-Velay, population 19,000, in the Haute-Loire (Upper Loire) department, is the first city along the river’s course. Its geographical location and the presence of an ancient shrine to Mary earned it a major place on the map for medieval pilgrims arriving from the east and northeast on the Way of Saint James. Le Puy’s Notre-Dame Cathedral, its monumental statue of Notre-Dame de France, and its nearby volcanic chimney topped with a chapel round out its major Christian sights. But a foreign traveler is unlikely to come here unless interested in exploring the striking natural surroundings of this former volcanic region.

The sanctuary village of Souvigny also has a remarkable Romanesque church, along with the history of the first house of Bourbon—Bourbon as in future kings of France not corn whiskey. Souvigny is a 15-minute drive from the city of Moulins, home to the National Costume Center.

Then there are a handful of more obscure sanctuary villages and towns in the network: Lalouvesc, a remote village in Ardèche; Ars-sur-Formans, which sits quietly between the Beaujolais vineyards and Lyon; Cotignac in the backcountry of Provence; Sainte-Anne-d’Auray in Brittany; Vendeville near the northern tip of France, and La Salette, at nearly 6000 feet in the Alps. Non-religious pilgrims visiting the sanctuaries and shrines there will especially find the opportunity to commune with nature in various shapes and forms in the surrounding area.

See the official site for this network of sanctuary cities for more information about the shrines, sanctuaries, and points of interest of all kinds in and near these villages, towns and cities.

© 2025, Gary Lee Kraut

The post A Traveler’s Guide to Sanctuary Cities in France appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

Western Hérault is such an uncommon destination in southwest France that I was surprised when a Facebook friend posted a photo taken from the exact spot where I’d stood to take a similar picture two weeks earlier: on a bridge with a view of the town of Olargues and the Devil’s Bridge over the Juar River.

“Hey, Sarah,” I commented, “I was just there!,” and I posted my own shot, the one shown at the top of this article.

Sarah—that’s Sarah Diligenti, president of the Alliance Française of Washington, D.C.—was even more surprised. She, at least, had grown up in southwest France, in Toulouse, and had hiked those hills during her university years. She’d posted her photo during a bittersweet homecoming vacation; it her first return to western Hérault since the death of her mother in a nursing home there in 1994. She’d come to go hiking and to rediscover the area’s landscapes. But what possibly could have brought me to the region, let alone to that very same bridge? she asked.

There was no re to my discovery of the area, I told her. It was my first trip to the western portion of the department of Hérault. I’d only recently heard of the Orb Valley, my main destination within that area, and before going I’d had to zoom way in on the map to even read the unrecognizable names of the towns and villages I would visit: Boussagues, La Tour-sur-Orb, Colombières-sur-Orb, Gervais-sur-Mare, Villemagne-L’Argenitière, Olargues.

What had drawn me to the area wasn’t only that it represented the chance to discover a corner of France that I’d never visited before—a quest that increasingly takes me to remote areas—but, more importantly, the opportunity to meet a group of men and women who devote countless hours trying to preserve and promote an array of unspectacular cultural heritage sites that few would notice if abandoned altogether. I’d been invited, along with several other journalists, by Patrimoines Hérault Tourisme (PHT), a federation of local non-profit associations in a zone that has been largely bypassed and often ignored since the extinction of its industries in the 20th century. PHT recognizes that individually its members have little touristic, economic and cultural weight, but together, like Dr. Seuss’s Whos of Whoville, they may be able to draw attention to their territory.

Once Sarah Diligenti and I had explained to each other our respective reasons for being on that lesser-traveled bridge, she asked if I’d be interested in making co-presentation to the Alliance Française of D.C. via Zoom to talk about that little-visited area of Hérault that captivated us in very different ways. She would speak about her experiences and encounters; I would speak about mine. Certainly, I said. The video near the bottom of this article is a recording of that presentation.

… And Why You Should Meet Them

Meeting people who are dedicated to preserving heritage sites, no matter how off-track or seemingly insignificant those sites may be, is essential to understanding local and regional history and the layers of grassroot, economic and political efforts required to preserve them. One needn’t be a preservationist, or even have a prior interest in the site itself, to reap the rewards of such encounters. Meeting local residents with deep personal roots is always interesting, and meeting residents with a passion for their locality, whatever their (or your) point of view, is invariably a major marker of memorable travels. Furthermore, once you’ve shown yourself to be a curious traveler, that same resident may then introduce you to local chefs, winegrowers and other flavor-enhancers, as in the case of my visit.

Considering their territory ignored by regional and departmental tourist officials and other economic actors, the small non-profit associations that comprise PHT began banding together in 2020 with the aim of connecting and enhancing the building blocks for the touristic and economic development of the sparsely inhabited hills and valleys Hérault’s upper cantons. The federation’s co-founders Daniel Pierson, the owner of a Renaissance mansion that’s open to the public in a mostly medieval village, and Brother Marie-Pâques, a priest and monk overseeing the restoration of a medieval chapel, continue to be its main driving forces along with Annick Jeanjean, Linday Hancox and others whom I refer to in my presentation as “the heroes of heritage sites of western Herault.” (Hérault and héros [heroes] are pronounced quite similarly in French.) There are now 14 non-profit associations within the federation, each overseeing a small piece of the overall puzzle of heritage sites in western Hérault: an old lime kiln, a castle ruin, a toy museum, a church organ, an old mill, a museum of local traditions, and others.

Seen from a distance and given the diversity of civil, religious and industrial heritage sites that they represent, the men and women of Patrimoines Hérault Tourisme appear to form an improbable alliance. But from up close, they add up to a portrait of the history and current challenges and potential of this territory.

PHT states that western Hérault currently represents only 3% of that in the overall department of Hérault. Montpellier, the department’s capital, and the coast are the Hérault’s primary destinations, with Saint Guilhem le Désert being the rare cultural destination for those heading into the hills.

Tourist officials headquartered in Montpellier see western Hérault as a “green” destination, meaning for outdoor activities. Indeed, its hills, valleys, rivers and streams lend themselves to hiking, as Sarah Diligenti so well describes in her portion of the presentation. But PHT wishes those officials would also talk up the area’s heritage sites.

Patrimoine Hérault Tourisme is well aware that the touristic and economic development of the territory isn’t solely in the hands of local heritage associations seeking to preserve their obscure and/or remote sites. The Whos of this Whoville are therefore in constant search of partners among the economic actors and potential economic actors in the zone: hotels, B&Bs, winegrowers (vineyards of the Languedoc appellation Faugères), restaurant owners, artists and artisans, etc., in order to strengthen networks and make their voices heard. But nothing moves far in France without the local and departmental political will to direct subsidies and taxes so they’ve tried to get the area’s small-town mayors to lend their voices as well. Whether the political, economic and non-profit movers and shakers can come together audibly remains to be seen—rather, heard.

The folks I met from Patrimoine Hérault Tourisme are just a few examples of the heroes of heritage sites in France. There are thousands of them throughout the country. As I say, the sites they wish to preserve may seem insignificant at first glance, you may even think the devotion of the individuals in these associations quaint or misplaced or self-serving, but seeing the sites and meeting those who would preserve and promote them will allow you reap that great reward of travel to uncommon destinations: the opportunity to meet men and women who are deeply rooted there, who deeply care about their (natural, economic and historical) environment and who warmly, earnestly wish to share it with you.

And then when I post a picture of a view that I imagine myself to be the first non-local to view in centuries, you’ll write to me, “Hey, Gary, I was just there!”

The presentation

The video below launches at 29’46”, the beginning of my 40-minute presentation of February 17, 2022, to the Alliance Française of Washington, D.C. Move the cursor back to the start of the video to also hear Sarah’s presentation about certain historical aspects and hiking in the region.

In 2021 I organized and emceed for the Association des Journalistes du Patrimoine, France’s association of heritage journalistes, a presentation via Zoom of the work of Patrimoines Hérault Tourisme. A recording of that presentation, conducted in French, can be viewed here.

Post note: Several years after this article was published, Patrimoines Hérault Tourisme desolved as a federation, however the individual associations that comprised it continue their remarkable work.

If you go

Lodging

L’Ortensia, an attractive B&B and restaurant overlooking Saint-Gervais-sur-Mare.
Château de Colombières sur Orb in Colombières-sur-Orb. Weekly rental in a gîte on the property of Thérèse Salavin, the village’s mayor.
The Avène Hydrotherapy Center, a 4-star hotel and spa/treatment center operated by the Pierre Fabre Group.
Le Belleville, also a brasserie, in Lamalou les Bains.

Restaurants

La Forge in Bédarieux.
Le Bouchon d’Orb and Le Château de Lunas in Lunas.
Auberge de Madale and La Mécanique des Frères Bonano in Colombières-sur-Orb.
Le Village des Sources in Ceilhes.
L’Ocre Rouge in Hérépian.
Les Marronniers in Lamalou-les-Bains.
Chez Bourrel, also a hotel, in Truscas (Avène).

© 2022, Gary Lee Kraut

The post The Heroes of Heritage Sites in Western Hérault (video) appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

Watch below the wide-ranging video interview with Kristen Grauer, the U.S. Consul General in Marseille, conducted by France Revisited’s Gary Lee Kraut on October 8, 2021. (With apologies for pronouncing Madame Consul General’s title as “counsel” instead of “consul.”) Also see further below Marseille & les Américains, a documentary produced with assistance by the consulate about the U.S. presence in southeastern France during and immediately after WWII, from August 1944 until early 1946.

Timeline for the 25-minute video interview
00:00 – Introduction and Kristen Grauer’s background as a career diplomat with the U.S. Department of State.
02:33 – How does the U.S. Consulate General in Marseille help Americans in southern France and Monaco? Lost passports, missing persons, natural disasters and civil unrest.
08:18 – Will the U.S. Consulate get me out of jail if I’m arrested?
10:07 – The U.S. Consulate’s involvement in American economic development.
12:21 – The consulate and the U.S. Sixth Fleet.
13:14 – Operation Dragoon and the invasion of southern France, “the Second D-Day,” in August 1944. (See further information about the landing and about Marseille and the Americans at the bottom of this page.)
17:03 – Kristen Grauer speaks about American WWII heroes Varian Fry, who helped writers, artists and other anti-nazis flee persecution in Europe (the square in front of the consulate has been renamed in his honor) and Vice Consul Hiram Bingham, who bypassed the official policies of the United States in order to provide visas and passports to allow many to obtain visas allowing them escape France.
19:11 – Kristen Grauer’s travels in and impressions of southern France and Monaco.
22:34 – Does Kristen Grauer enjoy the anise-flavored spirit pastis and the rosé wines of Provence? Does she play pétanque?

Kristen Graeur is a career diplomat who previously served in France as the economic officer at the American Embassy in Paris (2010-2013). She most recently served at the U.S. Department of State as the Deputy Director in the Economic Bureau’s Office of Economic Policy and Public Diplomacy. Earlier in her career, she completed tours as an embassy economic officer in Baghdad, Iraq, and Moscow, Russia, and as a political officer in Monrovia, Liberia and Cotonou, Benin. As a career diplomat rather than a political appointee, her assignments don’t necessarily follow the election cycle. She has held her current position as Consul General in Marseille, a 3-year assignment, since the summer of 2020. She is a graduate of the University of Michigan, completed a mid-career Master of Science in National Resource Strategy at the U.S. National Defense University’s Eisenhower School, and is a graduate of the Foreign Service Institute’s long-term economic course. She is married and has two sons.

The U.S. Consulate General in Marseille covers southern France (Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur and Occitanie), Corsica and Monaco. For more information about services provided by the consulate, including its location and contact information, see here.

Operations Dragoon 1944 and Marseille & the Americans

Even among the millions who’ve toured the D-Day Beaches in Normandy, few American visitors to France are aware of the second major D-Day landing in France during the summer of 1944. Code-named Operation Dragoon, it involved the amphibious invasion on August 15, 1944 by the U.S. Seventh Army on a stretch of the Riviera just west of Saint Tropez.

After penetrating inland, forces veered west toward the Rhone Valley. Free French forces then entered the scene to capture the ports of Toulon and Marseille. Led by the Americans, together they pushing German forces to withdraw from the south. Within four weeks, the U.S. forces that had entered from the Riviera linked up with some of those that had earlier entered from Normandy to continue their northern and eastern drive.

Travelers to the region can visit the Rhone American Cemetery in Draguinan, 25 miles from the coast. It’s the burial site of 851 servicemen, with an additional 294 names inscribed on the Wall of the Missing.

After the southern landing and for the following two years, there were major American bases between Marseille and Aix-en-Provence through which two million soldiers would transit. The Consulate General assisted in the creation of a documentary about that American presence. The 4-part documentary entitled Marseille & les Américains is available in French and in English. Here’s Part 1 of the English version.

The Consulate General in Marseille also recently supported an upcoming film on Jamaican-American Harlem Renaissance author Claude Mckay who lived in Marseille from 1924-1929.

The post Video Interview: Kristen Grauer, U.S. Consul General in Marseille appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

Corinne LaBalme saw only the dark side of Pierre Soulages, France’s most celebrated living artist, until she visited his namesake museum in Rodez, Aveyron, and saw the light.

Pierre Soulages is the rare artist who’s been able to attend his own centenary celebrations. Born in 1919, he’s been prolific enough to have filled countless retrospectives around the world last year. But age alone doesn’t explain why prices for his work have reached dizzying heights, as his work entitled “200 x 166 cm 14 mars 1960,” which sold for 9.6 million euros (about 10.5 million dollars) in November 2019. (When it comes to Soulages titles it’s just the facts: size and date completed.) There is something extraordinary about his work, though I didn’t realize it until I visited his namesake museum in Rodez, his birthplace in the Aveyron department of central southern France.

Soulages is best known for working within the realm of outrenoir, which is often translated in English as “ultra-black” or “beyond black.” He coined the word in 1979 to describe paintings that he coated in thick black pigment before meticulously raking them into shape with masonry tools generally used on grout and mortar.

“The vehicle is light, not black,” the artist has explained numerous times. “Black is a violent color, it imposes itself, it dominates, it’s the original color.”

Nevertheless, his Darth Vader-ish canvases never imposed themselves on me. While they were instantly recognizable in contemporary art exhibits, my own magpie attention was always diverted by the turquoise Hockney swimming pools or the neon Warhols that flanked them. Once you’ve seen one big Soulages, you’ve seen them all, I thought.

Wrong.

It took a press trip to Rodez, a town so isolated in the volcanic plateaux of central France that the “fast” trains from Paris take seven hours to get there, to alter my perception of Soulages’ outrenoir. Seeing mass quantities of his paintings in a building that was purpose-built to show them off can be a mind-bending, magical and quasi-religious experience—my Come-to-Gesso experience.

In 2005, Soulages donated 500 of his works to the municipality of Rodez. (He now resides in Sète, the nearest Mediterranean town to Rodez.) Until the completion of the museum in 2014, Rodez’s sole main architectural claim to fame was its red sandstone Notre-Dame Cathedral (1276-1531). The museum, designed by the Catalan architectural firm of RCR, now also holds a claim. It consists of five slightly tippy parallelepiped boxes set in a 7.4-acre garden in the center of town. Its rusty Corton steel façade echoes the red sandstone of the Gothic cathedral that stands 600 yards away. (In 2017 the firm won the Pritzker Architecture Prize.)

As the artist has repeatedly told interviewers, his outrenoir painting are all about the light. Yet when I’ve seen his work in group shows, the industrial lumens that make Motherwells and Pollocks sparkle and shine left Soulages looking like the designated driver at the art party. Soulages painting don’t photograph well either. They need to be experienced in motion i.e. the motion of the viewer.

The cavernous museum in Rodez, with its darkened rooms and large windows, allows the paintings to come alive while revealing their secrets. A canvas that appears from one angle to be somber as a moonless night in an urban blackout will from another angle burst into an array of molten golden shimmers.

It’s hard to say more about the outrenoir gold seam. It’s about as close to alchemy as anything yet seen on earth and thus, it has to be seen to be believed. His giant canvases with black motifs on a white field photograph much better but it’s only “in person” that you can detect the tiny splotches of dark paint which could have been easily whited out. People often compare these paintings to Chinese calligraphy, a simile that the artist has denied, yet there is a certain Eastern “drips happen” serenity of these paintings.

For a 100-year-old artist who’s been top of his game for decades, Soulages’ personal bio is surprisingly slim and uneventful. No escapades in Tahiti, no (recorded) drunken revels, no Picasso-esque psycho-drama. Soulages has even stayed married to the same woman, Colette Llaurens, since 1940! That means an 80th wedding anniversary this year, an accomplishment in itself.

Soulages’ instant success and seamless speed towards super-stardom leads me to think of him as the anti-Van Gogh. As a journalist who has had an achingly hard time trying to get a first novel published, 80 years of success is irritatingly hard to fathom. Accepted into Paris’s prestigious Ecoles des Beaux Arts in 1937, Soulages dropped out before day one after deciding that art school had nothing to teach him. After WWII, he was rejected from one salon (count it: one) and then became the undisputed star of his next group show in 1947. By the early 1950s, he’d exhibited in the Guggenheim, the Tate, MOMA, the Phillips in Washington, as well as museums and galleries in Rio, Copenhagen, Paris, etc., and the honors and recognition never stopped.

Even though painters naturally prefer pigment to prose, Pierre Soulages is more cryptic than most. When asked about his outrenoir oeuvre in the December 2019 issue of Connaissance des Arts magazine, he replied: Le mot outrenoir permet de ne pas se limiter au phénomene optique car voir les reflets sur une surface noir, c’est un phénomene optique. (The word outrenoir makes it possible to not limit oneself to the optical phenomenon because seeing the reflections on a black surface is an optical phenomenon.)

While maddeningly opaque in both French and English, this response would make perfect sense on Dagobah: Black see you not, Luke Skywalker. Light it must have to reveal the Force.

The events of 2020 have made the world seem like one huge black hole. Is there no better time to embrace the dark and find the light that lies within it? Pierre Soulages may not be the original Jedi Knight, but his artwork is certainly what I need right now.

Musée Pierre Soulages. Jardin du Foirail, avenue Victor Hugo, 12000 Rodez. Tel: 05 65 73 82 60. Hours: 9 am to 9 pm. Closed Monday. July and August: Open 7 days. Café Michel Bras on premises.

Note: The museum re-opened after Corona lockdown on May 21st. Masks will be obligatory until further notice. Through October 31, the museum will present a temporary exhibition entitled Femmes Années 50 that showcases the abstract works of Sonia Delaunay, Joan Mitchell, Geneviève Asse, Pierrette Bloch, Shirley Goldfarb and others.

© 2020, Corinne LaBalme for France Revisited

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For most Parisians, the granite plateaus of the Aubrac—a mountainous region of central France famed for the pampered cows and sheep that flourish on its austere, volcanic terrain—is flyover country. Or a source of food.

One need only spend a few days in Paris to encounter some of the food products from the region: Aubrac steak, raw-milk Laguiole cheese and crumbly Roquefort cheese. The finest steel to cut into these gourmet delicacies is forged right next to the remote and isolated pastures from which these products come.

Folklore says that specialized cutlery was first produced in the workshops of the village of Laguiole for cowherds and shepherds in the 12th century. But the modern era of Laguiole cutlery began in 1828 when Casimir-Antoine Moulin set up the town’s first purpose-built workshop. The distinctive “Shepherd’s Cross” design on the handles—so that a knife plunged in the ground could serve as an ad hoc altar—dates from those early days. By the end of the century, the Laguiole knife it was on its way to becoming the Swiss army knife of France, with three distinct parts: a blade, a corkscrew and a trocar, a pointy surgical instrument used to pierce the stomachs of cows and sheep afflicted with deadly bloat. The addition of the corkscrew is attributed to the diaspora of the local unemployed population to Paris, where opportunities in café and restaurant businesses were developing.

The craft tradition all but disappeared in the wake of the First World War. Production was mostly just a memory when in 1985, the mayor of Laguiole sought to revive the industry, along with the help of Aubrac-bred entrepreneurs Gilbert et Jean-Louis Costes (best known for their fashion-forward Paris hotels, restaurants and cafés).

Age-old craftsmanship collides with high design at Forge de Laguiole. The new look of knifedom is embodied by the factory designed by architect Philippe Starck. Postmodern architects Denise Scott-Brown and Robert Venturi divided commercial structures into “decorated sheds” (metal box with a prominent logos) and “ducks” (buildings where the function or product is advertised by its form, e.g. a burger joint that’s shaped like a burger), so with a 20-meter aluminum knife blade sticking out of its roof, the Forge de Laguiole fulfills both criteria.

Visitors enter through the boutique filled with showcases of dazzling steel blades accented by sleek handles fashioned from highly polished olive, juniper, cedar, ash, ebony and pistachio wood; semi-precious stone; compressed fabric, and, remarkably, varnished sand which is, amazingly, dishwasher-proof. Horn from Aubrac cattle is also used. No animals are slaughtered for their horns.

Prices begin over 100€ per knife, which may sound intimidating, but these are handmade items designed to last forever. A single knife may require days of work, and at full capacity, the Forge de Laguiole can only manufacture 200 items a day.

Visitors with tinnitus may be wise to abstain from entering the workshops, where tours and demonstrations are offered in July and August. (The boutique remains open most of the year, so off-season visitors can peek through glass windows opening onto the workshops even when there are no tours.) The hammering, polishing and sanding is so noisy that all employees wear earplugs. As might be expected in any enterprise touched by Costes sense of style, the artisans are issued hyper-chic black uniforms. Those who work in ateliers where shards of steel are flying around are decked out in metallic aprons that practically scream “Paco Rabanne.”

Almost like a feudal guild, the team spirit is tangible at Forge de Laguiole. Some employees prefer to specialize in one aspect of production while others enjoy contributing a panoply of different skills. Like Jedi knights fashioning their own light sabers, all employees, even those in administrative posts, learn to assemble a pocket knife in a rite of passage.

Once you’ve watched the welders, woodworkers and polishers at work, you’ll retreat to the boutique and examine the merchandise with even greater respect. In addition to producing traditional knives and corkscrews with the totemic bumblebee insignia (which local legend associates, apparently erroneously, with Napoleon Bonaparte’s appreciation of the town residents), Forge de Laguiole has enlisted contemporary design icons for unique cutlery. Among them, Jean-Michel Wilmotte designed knives with sleek acrylic resin handles in six fluorescent colors and Andrée Putman styled matte-finish knives with cylindrical, Art Deco-ish ebony or ash handles.

While the three-part Laguiole knife can still be found, there’s less of a call for a trocar, but modern consumers may want a specialized gourmet knife. To satisfy them, La Forge de Laguiole has worked closely with Michelin-starred chefs such as Sebastien Bras, Anne-Sophie Pic, Cyril Lignac and Gérald Passédat on specific products. This has allowed the Forge de Laguiole artisans to solve some of the thornier cutlery conundrums of the 21st century by creating, for example, a knife that can cleanly slice soft goat cheese and another for your millefeuille pastry.

There is no governmental, regional or artisanal certification connected with Laguiole knives, so at present it is perfectly legal to sell a “Laguiole” knife that was fully or partially manufactured overseas. Contrary to popular belief in many collectible sites, that bumblebee over the hinge is not a trademark guarantee. So while there’s currently no such thing as a counterfeit Laguiole, there’s a certain authenticity to have one made in the town of Laguiole.

The direction of La Forge fashions all parts of its knives on the premises and would like to see a strict regulation for regional production, as would the other Laguiole ateliers in town. Several other thriving ateliers creating both traditional and contemporary cutlery also offer tours.

Forge de Laguiole. Route de l’Aubrac, BP 9. 12210 Laguiole. Tel.: 05.65.48.43.34. La Forge de Laguiole also has boutiques in Paris (29 rue Boissy d’Anglas, 8th arr.), Toulouse (24 rue des Arts) and Rodez (3 rue Pénavayer).

Laguiole Tourist Office. Place de la Mairie, 12210 Laguiole. Tel.: 05 65 44 35 94. They also provide information about visiting the surrounding zone of Aubrac.

Food & Lodging

In Laguiole, Sebastian Bras presides over a luxury hotel complex, whose kitchen has fluctuated between two and three Michelin stars ever since his father created the now legendary gargouillou, a salad that resembles a flower arrangement. It’s one of the vegan gourmet musts of France. It may be even harder to procure a table at the family-run, roadside diner Le Relais de la Vitarelle in Montpeyroux, where Laurent Falguier’s short-but-sweet daily menu is almost sure to include tender Aubrac steak, the house charcuterie and creamy, cheese-laced Aligot mashed potatoes. LaBa Hôtel (Laguiole/Buenos Aires), has four cozy bedrooms and a tiny restaurant with a killer wine-list.

To learn about Laguiole cheese, visit the cheerful Jeune Montagne Co Op where it’s made. Marcillac is the local wine, made with the fer servadou (aka mansois) grape varietal. It’s a hearty, spicy red wine that stands up to local rustic fare.

Getting There

If you aren’t already on an exploration of the deep center of France, traveling to Laguiole is a commitment that will entail some mountain driving. The nearest city is Rodez, 33 miles southwest, capital of Aveyron, a department in the Occitania region. Setting out for Rodez from Paris by train would take some grit since it’s nearly a seven-hour ride. If looking to reach Aveyron directly from Paris, consider instead a cheerful airline named Amelia after the pioneering aviator Amelia Earhart, whose plane disappeared somewhere over the South Pacific in 1937, to whisk you to Rodez from Orly Airport in roughly an hour. (Rodez is home to the Soulages Museum, a destination in its own right, dedicated to the work of France’s most celebrated living artist, who turned 100 in December 2019. An article about the museum and the artist will be published soon on France Revisited.)

Alternative starting points for an approach to Laguiole are Toulouse to the southeast, Montpellier to the southwest and Clermont-Ferrand to the north. Laguiole is a 2-3-hour drive from any of those cities, though there is so many rural and small-town discoveries to be made along the way that the drive is more likely to take a few days.

© 2020, Corinne LaBalme for France Revisited.

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* * *

The south of France is not generally associated with the Holocaust. But for many of the more than 6,500 Jews deported from the German provinces of Baden-Wurttemberg and the Palatinate during a single night in October 1940, the journey to Auschwitz passed that way. Among those rounded up was the family of Paul Niedermann, a boy of twelve at time, who would later become my friend.

I had first met Paul in 1978 when I was living in Bry-sur-Marne, where he had a small photo business. We became good friends, but I never knew that he was a Holocaust survivor until 1987, when he was called upon to provide testimony at Klaus Barbie’s trial for crimes against humanity. Prior to that, he never spoke of it: I didn’t even know that he was Jewish. The closest he ever came to revealing anything about what he had lived through before that was one day in the course of a conversation we had, when he mentioned that he had had “a difficult childhood.” At the time I didn’t know what he meant by that, and I didn’t press him for details.

What happened is this: during the night of October 22-23, 1940, Paul and his family were removed from their home and taken to the train station in Karlsruhe, where they and hundreds of other Jewish citizens were held for 24 hours. Then they were loaded onto trains and sent to an internment camp at Gurs, near Pau in the south of France. At the time this was in the unoccupied part of France, under the control of the Vichy Government.

In March of the following year, Paul and his family were transferred from Gurs to another internment camp, at Rivesaltes, near Perpignan. From there his parents were sent to Auschwitz, where they both perished.

Before his parents were sent to Auschwitz, Paul and his younger brother Arnold had been rescued from Rivesaltes by Vivette Hermann (later known as Vivette Samuel), who was working with an organization called OSE (Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants) to save the lives of Jewish children. A Quaker group had worked out an arrangement with the U.S. government for the United States to accept five convoys of refugee children. Through this arrangement Arnold was given the chance to go the U.S., where their mother’s sister lived: however, the Quakers were unable to send Paul since, under the terms of the agreement, only children under the age of 12 could be admitted. Thus Paul, at 14, was given the responsibility, as “head of the family,” to decide whether Arnold should go to the U.S., or stay with him in France. “I didn’t think about it too long. I gave my consent,” he says. His parents were gone, he knew not where. And it would be 14 years before he would see his brother again.

For the next couple of years Paul lived as a fugitive, hiding and being hidden in a series of safe places in France and Switzerland, including the children’s home in Isieu that was raided by the Gestapo on April 6, 1944, shortly after he had left there. Of the 44 Jewish children and seven adult caregivers who were arrested, only one survived deportation. Most were killed at Auschwitz.

After the war Paul made his life in France, but took frequent trips to the United States to spend time with his brother in California, and his aunt.

In 1992 Paul learned that his brother was in possession of a box of letters that his mother had written from Gurs and Rivesaltes to her sister in Baltimore. Arnold could not bear to read them, and for many years Paul couldn’t either. Arnold passed away in 2000. Paul eventually decided that he would allow these letters to become part of the public record of the Holocaust. Beginning in 2007 he read them all and translated them into French. They were published in a bilingual (German/French) hardcover edition, Briefe einer badisch-jüdischen Familie aus französischen Internierungslagern / Lettres d’une famille juive du Pays de Bade internée dans les camps en France  (Info Verlag, 2011; separate German and French editions have also been published).

One of the most impressive things about Paul is that despite all he went through he has never succumbed to bitterness. Another is his level of energy: since 1987, he has spent most of his time traveling and witnessing to school, church, and other groups in France and in Germany. He has also appeared in several documentaries, and a recording of his oral history is in the collection of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He takes very seriously the responsibility of telling his story, a responsibility that he feels more acutely as the number of Holocaust survivors still living dwindles.

What follows are his answers to my questions, which I have translated from the original French.

Janet Hulstrand: You lost your parents at an early age, and in a particularly terrible way. But what are some of the happy memories you have of your parents and grandparents, and of Karlsruhe before it was taken over by the Nazis?

Paul Neidermann: Certainly a childhood and adolescence in Nazi Germany was not easy for a Jewish child, but we were a very close family. Inside the shelter of our home, my childhood always seemed normal to me.

My family was observant, and we didn’t have any problems in this regard. Before the Nazis came into power, we were very well integrated into the city, and we had both Jewish and non-Jewish friends. I started school in 1933, and I was the only Jewish child in my class. The city of Karlsruhe, which was relatively young, had never had a ghetto, so Jews lived all over the city.

J.H.: You celebrated your bar mitzvah in the internment camp at Gurs. How did you manage to do that, and what was it like?

P.N.: I spent the first two weeks at Gurs in “Block K,” the women’s barracks, because my mother, being a good Jewish mother, didn’t want to let my little brother and me out of her sight. But when I turned 13 I was considered an adult and was transferred to Block E, where my father was.

Back in Germany I had been preparing for my bar mitzvah. A rabbi had saved a scroll of the Torah, and that is how the ceremony took place in Block E, with my father and grandfather, along with many other people I didn’t know—including the rabbi. There certainly was no special meal, and there were no gifts! At the time I didn’t think much about it—our concern at the time was first and foremost to survive.

J.H.: Can you tell the story of how you came to have the picture of your mother that is on the front cover of your book?

P.N.: We were transferred from Gurs to a camp at Rivesaltes, and it was in that camp that I stole the photo of my mother. The director of the barracks had sent me to deliver the roll call list to the director of the camp. When I was there, I saw a big box full of photos near the door. My family was always interested in photography, so I was curious about the pictures. I impulsively grabbed a handful of photos without looking at them. Back in my barracks I looked to see what I had gotten, and I saw that my mother was in one of the photos I had taken, there in the front row, waiting for soup to be distributed. Two weeks later, she went to Auschwitz, where she was killed. This photo is certainly the most precious of all the treasures I’ve been able to save from oblivion.

J.H.: I knew you for a long time before I ever knew about your experiences as a child during the war. What made you decide to begin sharing these life experiences with others?

P.N.: For a long time I wasn’t able to talk about what I had gone through. I had a real block about it. But I was called as a witness in the Klaus Barbie trial in 1987. [Ed note: Barbie was the notorious head of the Gestapo in Lyons. It was because Paul had been a resident at the safe house in Izieu that he was called as a witness for the prosecution in Barbie’s trial.]

The prosecutor, Pierre Truche, a wonderful jurist, questioned me about the smallest details without emotion. For him, I was just another witness. But for me he was kind of a “shrink,” without his knowing it. At the trial there were thousands of people who heard my story. Afterward many invited me to speak, mainly in schools. I’ve continued to go over all of what happened in my head now, and that’s how I became the witness of my own story, which is of course a part of the larger History of the Holocaust.

J.H.: How do you feel about the generation of Germans who allowed the rise of Nazism to take hold?

P.N.: During the war, everything German was the Enemy. But afterward, I realized that hate is a completely sterile emotion, and that you can’t build anything on this foundation. The criminals of that time are all dead now, and I have no quarrel with those who were born afterward. That allows me to speak to young Germans and also Frenchmen and women, to bear witness to what was possible and still is, unfortunately. I tell young people today that they must be involved in such a way that these things can never happen again!

J.H.: Many people who suffered as much from hatred as you and your family did come away from the experience embittered. While it is easy to understand how this can happen, and I believe it is wrong to blame victims of hatred who do end up this way, you have taken a different path. How did you come up with the courage, strength and compassion to retain your essential human kindness and compassion, and your positive attitude about life?

P.N.: More than anything, I believe that I owe my optimism and especially my positive attitude to my parents, who made me who I am. I thank them for this every day.

J.H.: You have received many awards and accolades for your work as a witness to the Holocaust. Can you tell us about some of them? Is there one of them that is particularly meaningful to you?

P.N.: My work as a witness has been widely recognized. I might mention the Federal Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. I’ve also been given the opportunity to tell my story in both Protestant and Catholic churches: all these are signs of respect for the Jewish communities in France and Germany. But I am especially proud of an abundant correspondence I have had with German and French youth, who have proved to me that I’m not “preaching in the desert.” I am very happy to be able to continue this important work, even at 86 years of age. Somebody has to do the job!

© 2014

Acknowledgement by Janet Hulstrand: Because of his dedicated efforts as a witness, Paul’s story has been given fairly broad exposure in France and in Germany. When I asked if he would be willing to share his story with an English-speaking audience, he readily accepted. I am grateful for the time and thought he put into answering my questions. I am also grateful to Gary Lee Kraut for the opportunity to bring Paul’s story and outlook to an American audience.

Janet Hulstrand is a writer, editor and teacher of writing and literature based in Silver Spring, Maryland.  She teaches Paris: A Literary Adventure each summer in Paris for the Education Abroad program at Queens College, CUNY, and literature classes at Politics & Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C. She writes the blog Writing from the Heart, Reading for the Road.  She has also profiled the American poet James A. Emanuel for France Revisited in two articles found here and here.

For another France Revisited article about deportations and the Shoah see Jewish Paris: The Deportation Memorial, the Shoah Memorial and the Holocaust Center.

The post Paul Niedermann: Interview with a Holocaust Survivor and Witness in France appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

* * *

The largest plane tree in France sits like a beloved grandfather in the square in Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert, an ancient village in the Hérault Valley, 27 miles west of Montpellier. Children race around its massive trunk and stop to drink from the multiple spouts of the nearby fountain topped by Liberty. Adults sit in its shade to chat. It’s a beautiful, comfortable spot whose history runs deep, but it was not on our itinerary as we originally skirted this part of the valley on our way from Provence to Toulouse.

A chance encounter with a shop keeper in Pézenas, a wine town among the vineyards between Montpellier and Béziers, however, made us change directions and head north into the Hérault Gorges. The shopkeeper’s excitement about the beauty and history of the village convinced me and my husband that a detour would reward us with a memorable stay. She was right, and at the time we did not realize that we would come face to face with sublime architecture, some of which could be found just a short drive from our home in Pennsylvania.

Approached from the south along the Herault River, Saint-Guilhem-le-Desert is heralded by a striking series of bridges, including the medieval Pont du Diable, arched high above a steep gorge lined with grey-white rocks that look as if they had been drizzled down the cliff.

The village itself is surrounded by chalky limestone mountains stippled with green shrubs. Embedded in the hills are the remains of a Visigoth fortress and a dusty old mule path, portions of which have been traveled for centuries by pilgrims following the sign of the shell that marks routes of the Way of Saint James leading to the cathedral in Santiago de Compostella in Spain where the remains of St. James the Greater are said to be buried. Today this path also affords walkers day hikes that begin at the edge of the village on the rue du Bout-du-Monde, the street of the end of the world.

The graceful, rounded apse of the Abbey of Gellone dominates the pale buildings with tiled roofs that emerged as we drove past a gentle flow of the Verdus, a stream that keeps the area verdant as it runs toward the Herault River. We parked the car and walked a narrow street that led to the main square. Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert can be filled with tourists, but as with any well-known site, arriving off-season allows for less hindered signs of the past and of local life.

Those signs were already clear from the hotel room we found, from which we could hear the bells of the abbey, the greetings of residents on the pavement and watch an old dog make his way from the direction of the square toward the welcome of a water bowl.

As we meandered through the cobbled streets of the village we spotted scallop shells embedded in fountains and near doorways as signs of welcome for pilgrims traveling the Way of Saint James. We wondered if these doors opened as readily today to pilgrims as they had in past centuries.

We were charmed by the personalized doors and windows that reflect the artists who reside in the village; we were also struck by a few handmade signs protesting the possession of the original cloister from the Monastery of Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. One poster advertised a meeting where a speaker would ask the question “Qui a Vendu Le Cloitre aux Americains?” Who sold the cloister to the Americans?

The Cloisters, in northern Manhattan, is the branch of The Metropolitan Museum of Art dedicated to the art and architecture of Medieval Europe. It sits majestically atop a hill in a lush 66-acre park with wonderful views of the Hudson River. The impressive monastery-like building is, according to the museum’s website, “not a copy of any specific medieval structure but is rather an ensemble informed by a selection of historical precedents, with a deliberate combination of ecclesiastical and secular spaces arranged in chronological order.” The Cloisters developed out of an impressive collection of cloister sections and other medieval art accumulated by American sculptor George Grey Barnard early in the 20th century. That collection was later acquired and curated at the Fort Tryon site through the donation of land and funding by John D. Rockefeller. Among the highlights of its ecclesiastical spaces is a cloister, one of five, created with 140 fragments from the cloister of the Monastery of Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert that, according to the museum, Barnard had discovered being used as “grape arbor supports and ornaments in the garden of a justice of the peace in nearby Aniane.”

The monastery in Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert dates to the 9th century when it was founded by Guilhem, Count of Toulouse and grandson of the Duke of Aquitaine. Guilhem was a cousin of Charlemagne and noted in his time as one of the emperor’s most valorous knights for his battles against the Saracens of Spain. For centuries that followed Troubadours sang about his bravery. Charlemagne presented him with a piece of the Holy Cross (it was an age of relics) that he brought with him when he came to establish a home and a monastery in 804 in the remote region that would eventually bear his name, Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert. (“Le Désert” refers not the geography but to the absence of people in the area at the time.) The relic helped make the Abbey of Gellone an important stopping point for pilgrims on the road to Compostella, and it remains there to this day. Despite his life as a warrior, Guilhem was deeply religious and spent his final years at the monastery as a monk from 806 until his death in 812.

Thanks to the traffic of pilgrims, the monastery prospered and most of the Abbey of Gellone visited today dates from the 11th century when it was rebuilt in the Romanesque style. Like many monasteries in France it eventually suffered from the vicissitudes of faith and politics. It was pillaged during the Wars of Religion and vandalized during the French Revolution, losing both furnishings and architectural elements. Each historical trauma, whether natural (e.g. floods) or man-made, led to more decay, and by the 19th century parts of the abbey were dispersed throughout the region, including sections of the cloister later purchased by Barnard.

The interior of the abbey conveys an intimacy and warmth due in part to the variegated rustic tones of the stone. The vault of the soaring apse is punctuated by three high windows that represent the Trinity, and an ornate marble and glass altar presents a stunning contrast with the simplicity of architectural line. Near the altar rests what are said to be the remains of Saint Guilhem and the relic of the Holy Cross given to him by Charlemagne. There are lovely spaces within the abbey, one of which houses an 18th-century organ. The abbey has an atmosphere that suggests mystery and evokes contemplation. It is also a perfect venue for intimate musical performances such as the string and flute ensemble we attended during our visit. The cloister that was rebuilt in the second half of the 20th century, which includes a few original columns, also affords a quiet retreat.

The village of Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert appears to flow from the monastery. The narrow streets that begin at the portal of the abbey on the square seem a natural path to the beauty of the tight houses and the chalky tops of the mountains that appear beyond their roofline. An approach to the village offers a lovely view of the rounded apse symmetrically flanked by the round exterior walls of two smaller curved vaults and bordered by a low wall encasing a small garden. The exterior of the monastery, however, does not convey the serenity of the interior. Evidence of the tumultuous past is reflected in the monastery’s outer surfaces in color variation, patched walls, and solid sections that seem almost fortress-like. Still, there is a sense of calm and history as you walk between trees and flowers and enjoy time along a quiet path.

* * *

We drove to The Cloisters Museum in the fall on a radiant day much like the one that welcomed us to Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert. The museum rises from the topmost height of lushly wooded Fort Tryon Park on which it occupies four acres. It conveys medieval perfection through its stone tower, unmarred arches, metal steeple atop a spire such as those found on village churches in the south of France, and the graceful curve of an 11th-century apse from a church in Spain. It may be “an ensemble informed by a selection of historical precedents” but the total effect of The Cloisters is that you have arrived at another time and place. Cobbled paths wind up a hill toward the powerful stone structure, and visitors step into remarkable spaces that belie the 21st century. The statuary, paintings, tapestries and other artifacts humanize the medieval world. Coming so close to medieval art within authentic stone chapels and chambers and gazing into the faces of sublimely painted wooden sculptures makes a connection to ancient life that is transformational.

Four of the cloisters at the museum have outdoor settings with skillfully tended gardens. Everything appears natural and free; the eruption of color and texture suggest a rustic landscape, but the reality is far more calculated. The Cuxa Cloister from a Benedictine Monastery near the Pyrenees in Spain is breathtaking; stone pathways, flowers, trees, and dense foliage frame pink marble columns, a central fountain and low tiled roofs. It is a realization of how we imagine a medieval cloister to have looked and felt.

The reconstructed cloister from the Monastery of Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert at The Cloisters is an interior space with a high glass ceiling for natural light and lovely arched windows that overlook the Hudson River behind one side of the cloister. A few potted plants and some large vessels from the period dot the hard pebbled courtyard. The columns are stunning, set in pairs to support the arched stone of the installation. They vary in both the shape of the columns and design of the capitals. Some of the columns are rounded, others hexagonal, still others are ornate with waves from top to bottom, and some are wide and fully sculpted. The capitals are carved with exquisite renderings of acanthus leaves, vines, flowers, honeycombed patterns and both animal and human figures. The passageways behind the columns suggest a sense of contemplation with stone benches for reflection. Care has clearly been taken to respect the extraordinary craftsmanship in the stonework and gracefully echo the serenity of a monastic setting.

I wanted to love this cloister, but I could not. I felt the artifice of museum lighting despite the open ceiling, and I begrudged the closed space that made it more of an exhibit than a setting where imagination might take you back in time. Viewing the columns from multiple perspectives, I tried to place them mentally at the peaceful Monastery of Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert, among the trees and flowers, the passageways to the abbey, the prayers of monks and the footsteps of approaching pilgrims. I wanted to see them not as individual elements of interest but as an essential part of an idea, a purpose, a commitment to the necessity of contemplation and prayer. Instead, despite the splendor of The Cloisters and my appreciation for how it celebrates the beauty and humanity of medieval life, makes it accessible to so many and preserves it for the future,  I found myself wishing I had attended the lecture that answered the question, “Who sold the cloister to the Americans?”

© 2013, Elizabeth Esris

Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert, population 265 (2012 figure), is located in the department of Hérault in the region of Languedoc-Roussillon. The village’s official website, which also provides information about the surrounding Hérault Valley, can be found here.  Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert is a member of the association Les Plus Beaux Villages de France.

The Cloisters Museum and Gardens, Fort Tyron Park, New York, New York 10040. The website for The Cloisters contains a wealth of information. In exploring the site you will discover photos that show Barnard’s collection as it was originally displayed in New York City. Worth accessing are wonderful videos that detail the history and construction of the museum in Fort Tryon as well as detailed videos that focus specifically on the reconstructed cloisters, including further information about the cloister from Saint-Guilhem-Le-Désert.

Elizabeth Esris is a teacher and writer. Her poetry has appeared in Wild River Review, Bucks County Writer, and Women Writers. She wrote the libretto for Elegy For A Prince with composer Sergia Cervetti which premiered in excerpts at New York City Opera’s VOX Opera Showcase in 2007. She and Cervetti also collaborated on a one-act chamber opera, YUM!, a celebration of wine, food, and friendship. She teaches English and creative writing at Central Bucks High School South (Pennsylvania).

Other work by Elizabeth Esris on France Revisited include this article and poem about the Luberon and this article and poem about the Abbey of Senanque.

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There was a simpler time, when a man was put out of his misery with a particular kind of long, pointed dagger that fit nicely under the slits in his armor around his neck or under his armpit or through his coat of mail. They are called misericordes and stilettos, and a number of them are on display among the collection of medieval weaponry and armor at the Fort Saint Elme which overlooks the Mediterranean on a hill between Collioure and Port-Vendres, just north of Banyuls and the Spanish border.

The site of Fort Saint Elme has been a strategic position since the 9th century, first as a watchtower keeping an eye out for invaders from the sea then as a border position between the Kingdom of France and the Kingdom of Aragon/Catalonia/Spain or the Spanish portion of the Holy Roman Empire. After centuries of shifting rule in Roussillon, the region was finally integrated within the French crown with the Treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659, after which the defenses at Fort Saint Elme were reinforced to guard against Spanish attack.

The fort has among its weaponry a collection of stilettos and misericordes that were used by the troops of Charles Quint, Holy Roman Emperor and sworn enemy of the Kings of France Francis I and Henri II, during battles on the Italian front and in the north of France.

Misericordes and stilettos were specifically created to kill adversaries protected by armor and coats of mail. Their sleek design allowed them to slip between or even perforate the metal plates of armor.

The medieval stiletto is a dagger about 6 to 8 inches long with a thin triangular blade designed to pierce a coat of mail and strike a man’s chest, preferably his heart. If the adversary didn’t die immediately the wound would likely be deep enough that it wouldn’t heal and would prove mortal.

The stiletto was also the arm of predilection for assassins and traitors because it could easily be hidden inside a sleeve or under a coat or, for the fashionable assassin in northern climes, a fur hand-warming muff.

The misericorde, with a blade about 6 to 14 inches long, about 1.5 to 3 inches at his base, resembles a wide knife. Ideal, then, for slitting an adversary’s throat by passing through openings and links in his armor, such as the gorget at the neck, around which the misericorde could be thrust to open the throat like a tin can.

The misericorde (or misericord) was both an arm for killing and a cry to keep from being killed. The word means “mercy.” “Miséricorde” was what a combatant who has been struck to the ground would cry out when he saw a blade drawing to his throat. It was supposed to save him as it meant that he was asking for mercy and giving himself up as a hostage who could then be held for ransom. Unless of course the fellow with the dagger was deaf, as was the case of one Claude de Beaumont who, on January 5, 1477, during the Battle of Nancy, coldly killed the Duke of Burgundy Charles the Bold without hearing that the latter was wounded and crying “Miséricorde.”

By extension of the cry for mercy, soldiers gave name misericorde* to the arm that was used on the battlefield to finish off a severely wounded man who might otherwise be left to die in agony. God, it was said, granted his misericorde / mercy / pardon to he who, in delivering the mercy stroke, the coup de grâce, mercy stroke, recognized his guilt by so killing another.

How that would work with the contemporary tools of character assassination in the name of righteousness is anyone’s guess.

Fort Saint Elme, between Collioure and Port-Vendres in the region of Roussillon. Tel. 06 62 64 11 76 or 06 64 61 82 42. Open April -Sept. 10:30am-7pm, Oct.-Nov. 11 2:30-7pm. 6€, 3€ for students.

* Another type of merciful misericord is the wooden (or otherwise) projection from an upturned church seat that allows congregants to remain partially seated during standing worship.

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* * *

The horizon shot upwards as my horse and I sank into the ground.  Suddenly, I was seeing the trees and sky of southern France from a different perspective. Like an elevator that had suddenly broken free of its cable, I had taken a quick trip down. Although still mounted, my feet were resting on the earth–and under the earth–muddy, swampy earth. My horse, Iadj, a plucky, pure white Arabian horse, in one easy, carefree step, had sunk up to his lovely shoulder into a bog.

“Get off, get off!” I heard my husband shout.

Stunned, I had remained frozen in place. I leaped off, pulling the reins over the horse’s head.

Now on solid ground, I could see my mount was half buried. I tried to clear the way in front of him with my hands, but I was only swirling around a thick, slimy stew. Not liquid enough to swim in, and too deep for the horse to touch bottom.

Iadj, the white Arabian, heaved forward, rising up a little.

“Yes,” I thought, he’ll grab solid ground!” But his effort just took him forward–farther from shore and even deeper. Fear gripped me–now his hind quarters were solidly entrenched. This reservoir was not a pond to quench my horse’s thirst; it appeared, rather, that it was to be his grave.

Dave and I were riding alone in a remote area in the huge stretch of parkland in the Languedoc-Rousillon region of France. Earlier in the day and yesterday we had exchanged greetings with people hiking the same trails we followed, often an older couple, usually French but sometimes English or German. They carried walking sticks and wore zip-off khakis. But today we hadn’t seen another person for hours. Up until the moment Iadj lifted his hoof off a solid bank to place it into a daylit nightmare, this solitude had been part of the pleasure of our explorations in the region.

Charly and Nicole from the Ferme Equestre, where we’d rented our horses for the week, had provided us with two well-mannered and willing mounts, a series of maps, and reservations at an assortment of inns, farms, and lodges. This was our third day of leaning forward over our horses’ withers as they carried us to mountain-top vistas and down again on steep rocky tracks. We hiked alongside our steeds when the trail was too difficult. Dark narrow paths through woodland opened up into sunny fields of cerulean flowers where we dismounted to open and then close behind us pasture gates. Footpaths along clear quiet streams led us to 17th-century mountainside villages where church bells rang over the steady beat of our horse’s hooves. On this day we had looked forward to tying our horses in the courtyard of the ruins of the 10th-century Castle of Puylaurens, where they would rest while we walked under still-standing stone archways to view the valley below through ancient windows built into a wall fused to a cliff.

Our biggest problem to date had been getting lost for almost two hours on our first day out. Being lost was something we’d done quite a bit the year before, when we took this trip for the first time. And although the trail was to deviate a bit this year, it hadn’t yet, and we had no real excuse for losing our way. Instead of concentrating on the trail, our attention was on the countryside, where cows grazed contentedly in clover covered pastures and dogs looked after recalcitrant sheep on steep hillsides. The forest pathways were green and cool, but also a bit confusing: getting lost then finding our way took time. We neglected to anticipate the concern yesterday evening’s host and hostess would have for us as sunset approached. Worried, they had called Charly, who then became worried himself because of course, we should not be lost—he knew we’d been here before and must know our way.

We should have known our way today also, but a small stream, not much more than a trickle, crossed the path ahead and Dave and I differed in our recollections. He did not remember crossing water here, so we pulled off the trail to discuss it. There was a sign that was perfect for tying the horse’s reins while we examined our map. The sign was next to a small pond. My horse, unbeknownst me, was expecting a drink, because he knew very well where the path went: it did cross the stream and that brook was one of the places the horses quenched their thirst while carrying tourists like ourselves over the mountain trail. So while Dave was tying his horse to the wooden sign, my horse was eyeing the pond. I dropped the reins on his neck and allowed him to mosey over for a drink. He lowered his head and took a few steps forward. One step too many took us right off the solid edge of land and into the mire. “Baignade Interdite” is what the sign said: NO SWIMMING”.

Now Charly would really have something to worry about. Calling his wife was the only sensible call we could make. Nicole spoke English fairly well, and she could call some kind of emergency crew. Would we have cell phone signal on this mountain top, will Nicole be home, and would she understand the English word for “bog”? I tried to remember the French word for “mud.” My mind raced as the horse thrashed in the muck. What should I do? What if Nicole doesn’t answer. Should I call someone else? Who? Years ago I’d seen on television a horse stuck in a bog. They pulled it out with an enormous crane. Would someone have a crane? Neither one of us knew the French equivalent of 911*.

I doubted if there was a road or village nearby, but if I reached someone, what would we say? “Vin rouge, s’il vous plaît?” My French is basic. How could I express this situation? “Uh, excuse me, but my horse is at this very moment drowning in a bog—can you send a winch or something?—Well, actually, no, I don’t have any idea where I am….lots trees, and oh, yeah—muddy water.” How does one say “drowning” in French? I wished desperately for someone to come by. Where were the trekkers? It seemed clear that this lovely Arabian horse, mine for a week, was in great danger.

My hand reached for the cell phone as Iadj surged forward again. I could see the horse gather his strength. He rose above the mire, moving forward several feet, but when he landed he was on his side, almost his back—his legs kicking in the air. He twisted and then he was back in the original vertical position. His hindquarters didn’t look right—it appeared as if his legs were twisted beneath the muck. All that struggling made me fear a broken leg. One hip looked bad, pushed up. I could only hope this leg was safe, but resting on higher ground, while the rest of him was deeper into the muck.

He now stayed still for what seemed a very long time, his head and neck stretched along the top of the surface. I’d never seen a horse in such an awkward position. His body was so deep in the ground that his chin was cradled by the earth. Was he resting again, or had he given up? Each advance had taken a great deal of energy. He was closer to the far shore now. Perhaps he could make it. Only six years old, he was very fit from traveling five or six hours a day on steep, challenging terrain. But this was taking a great deal out of him; he appeared spent.

His next effort took him closer to the far edge of the pool. And the leg that had seemed strangely poised must have been well positioned, not broken, giving him something to push off with. Now when he lurched forward again he almost reached the shore.

He rested again. If he could raise himself enough, he could touch the edge. But the side here was steep. I had the reins; I had to do something. I could guide him to the best spot. He was very close to the steep, rocky side. I had never seen a horse scramble up something so vertical. If I guided him to the left a bit, it seemed to be a more gradual climb. But was the ground firm or more swamp?

I guided him hesitantly towards the more gradual climb and he followed, but he, too, was uncertain. One forefoot reached forward, only to drop down into the morass. It would have to be the steep side.

Neither Dave nor I could imagine how much longer he could struggle before exhaustion took over, or his heart gave out. I moved the reins to the right, and I don’t know whether he took my cue or just saw for himself he wasn’t going to make it the other way, but he changed his course in mid-leap.

Suddenly, his front feet were touching the solid ground of the bank. Scrambling, a hind leg gained purchase. He was almost vertical now, his legs moving furiously; climbing, sliding—a leg would land, only to slip after dislodging a rock. For a few moments he seemed to be scrambling in the air and it didn’t seem possible he’d reach the top. I thought he would slide back into the quagmire, maybe this time forever. But providence was with me and this horse because suddenly he seemed to gain a strong foothold.

“He’s OK!” my husband shouted.

I wasn’t so certain. This horse had been thrashing about—he seemed twisted beneath the surface. I feared the vision of him rising from the soup of the bog with a dangling leg, broken, the end for this lovely horse who tried so hard, bursting out of one deadly dilemma only to meet another.

He stood. He took a step. He shook himself and mud flew everywhere, but he seemed to be alright.

Happy to be slapped with showering sludge, relief washed over me like a river. And it was going to take a fairly deep river to clean this horse. This pretty white horse was now completely brown. The small patch of white on the side of his head and neck that hadn’t been enveloped in the bog were now splashed with muck from when he had shaken his body.

I threw off his saddle and saddlebags—everything was coated with a thick layer of gritty loam. He shook again and the white patch where his saddle had been became less white. My clothing was splattered, my shoes squishy.

Now that Iadj was safe, I had a new goal—get him cleaned up before anyone saw him. This was cowardly and dishonest of me, and I must admit my husband did not agree with my duplicity, but the moment relief washed away fear a new emotion sprang forth in my breast: embarrassment.

I didn’t want to have to explain how I almost killed this horse to the people who were already puzzled about why we had gotten lost on a route we’d traveled before. They had provided us with maps and detailed instructions written in both French and English and numbers we could call on our cell phone. In addition, hopefully unbeknownst to them, we had a handheld GPS which we couldn’t figure out how to use. And now we had nearly drowned their horse right next to a “No Swimming” sign. I was mortified by my ineptitude, my adrenaline was still high. I now had a new mission: deceit.

I fashioned a halter from a lead rope and washed the bridle in the creek, the same creek that we were meant to cross and that Iadj was meant to drink from. I took off my grimy tell-tale shirt and replaced it with one in my saddle bag that had remained reasonably protected. I used the soiled shirt to carry water between the creek and the horse who rested quietly while my husband held him.

It took an hour and a half to get him close to clean. As brown rivulets flowed off, several bloody spots appeared on his legs. All minor cuts and scrapes—probably caused by his own flailing hooves during his struggle.

While I cleaned, other people finally appeared: it was an older couple wearing zip-off trousers. They raised their walking sticks in our direction. “Bonjour!” they called out in a German accent. “Bonjour!” I replied with bravado.

Clean and rested, we set off, and Iadj seemed happy to be traveling on solid ground again. I experienced my final bit of relief as we moved off into a steady trot, with none of the head bobbing that would indicate a limp and therefore an injury. We rode through thickly wooded trails until we reached a clearing from where we looked down upon the red roof tops of a town in the valley and then rode through an old stone village, grey except for the brilliant blue shutters framing each window.

In our desire to arrive on schedule to our evening’s abode and keep our adventure a secret, we made up lost time by skipping our last route direction; the climb to the castle. We took the road below, and the silhouette of Puylaurens, high on the hill above us, shadowed our path for a long while. We watched the sun descend behind its maze of old stone walls. The magic of an early evening in a beautiful place pulled us back to the pleasures of our vacation. My horse walked with a spring in his step and his white coat shone against the dark of the mountains beyond.

© 2012, Judy Kashoff.

Judy and Dave Kashoff have been traveling extensively around the world since 2008. Rather than wait for the proverbial golden years, they rented out their house in a suburb of Philadelphia, dropped their cats off with Dave’s mother, kissed their two grown children good-bye, and set off for what they thought would be a year of travels by boat, by bike, by horse, by foot, by kayak and by golly let’s just do it! Four years on they are still at it.

*Editor’s note: 911 actually does work from mobile phones in France. It’s immediately transferred to the European emergency number 112. The more common numbers in France, however, are 17 for the police and 18 for the fire department and for other accidents and emergencies such as the one told here.

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***

The view didn’t seem entirely real as I approached the sanctuaries of Rocamadour. Perhaps that’s because in addition to the natural drama of the way the sanctuaries are set into the cliffs above the Alzou River, Rocamadour has long stood in a shadowy zone between history and legend.

I’d been riding along the valley from the south. Between brief rain showers a spring sunrise illuminated the gray cliffs and the cité réligieuse. I thought that this combination of light, shadows, rocks, walls and mists would allow for exceptional photos for the Dordogne cycling guidebook I was preparing at the time.

The view of the cliff and the sanctuaries that hug it may have influenced a few movie set, including Raiders of the Lost Ark, but this is the real deal, and like much of history, what actually happened here seems more farfetched than fiction.

My own arrival was more like a scene from “Around the World in 80 days.” I’d flown in from Orlando two days before, taken public transportation from Charles de Gaulle Airport to the Paris Gare d’Austerlitz train station, had lunch next to the Jardin de Plantes, then taken the 4-hour train south to Brive la Gaillard. On arrival, I rented a micro van large enough to carry my luggage and bicycle, and off I drove to a small hotel in Souillac. The next morning, I rented a bike and took a first ride to Sarlat.

These cliffs facing south and some water from the Alzou, even though most of it is underground, is a lot like the area around the caves at Lascaux north of here. So Cro-Magnon, or even Neanderthal, groups could have lived here, plus Ice-Age bison and ibex. But what I would be seeing soon was more recent, 1,000 years old, though the legends date them back further.

And on up the valley I cycled.

Then came that slow (most are slow for me) climb up and through the two short tunnels to the castle level of Rocamadour.

From the top I could see the three levels of Rocamadour: the village at the base, the seven sanctuaries hugging the cliffs at the middle, and here at the top the medieval fortified castle that protected the pilgrims.

I locked my bike near the inclined elevator, stored my helmet inside the ticket kiosk with the cashier, and took the incline down to the village level. From there I would take the 216 steps of the Grand Staircase to the sanctuaries, with a few stories along the way.

The Roc part of Rocamadour refers to these rocks or cliffs. Amadour apparently comes from the hermit Amadour, who became St. Amadour.

Of the many versions of the identity of Amadour, my favorite is that he was actually Zacchaeus, the chief tax collector of Jericho, husband of Veronica, and that he once had Jesus as his houseguest. Zacchaeus and Veronica, disciples of Jesus, were eventually persecuted and driven out of Palestine. They followed the shore of the Mediterranean in a delicate skiff guided by an angel. After a journey halfway around the Mediterranean, they landed in southwestern Gaul, now southwestern France. There they met Martial, also a disciple of Jesus and spreading the Gospel in the region. The couple traveled to Rome and witnessed the martyrdoms of fellow saints Peter and Paul. After Veronica passed away, Zacchaeus returned to Gaul and constructed a chapel above the Alzou Valley. He lived in a cave as a hermit before he died.

There were a number of modern-day pilgrims ready to ascend the Grand Staircase. The group was quiet as the prepared to pass the Stations of the Cross indicated along the ascent.

Zacchaeus was buried next to the chapel he’d built. In the twelfth century, the nearby faithful started calling him St. Amadour, or Amator, though some say that the name refers to the fourth-century bishop Amatre of Auxerre. Whatever the case, in 1166 a body was uncovered near the very same chapel in such a remarkable state of preservation that people believed it could only be that of a saint.

In the Middle Ages, religious institutions thrived on possessing a piece a saint. During the twelfth century, every religious community across France wanted to give pilgrims a reason to stop for supplies, rest and exchange news. Much like drawing tourists, receiving pilgrims was good for the economy for that community. The major pilgrimage in Western Europe at the time was the journey to Santiago de Compostela in western Spain, site of the relics of St. James. Rich or poor, almost everyone that undertook a thousand mile pilgrimage had the means to complete it.

The discovery of St. Amadour’s well-preserved remains led to Rocamadour becoming a destination for pilgrims and a major stop on the route to Santiago de Compostela. The Rocamadour community prospered. But during the sixteenth-century Wars of Religion that pitted Protestants against Catholics, Protestants burned those remains, and an emboldened knight bashed the bones with a battleaxe. In spite of that desecration, there were remnants, and they are now in the St. Amadour Crypt below the Basilica of St. Sauveur.

It was now my turn to climb the Grand Staircase, passing along the way the faithful at the Stations of the Cross. Traditionally, pilgrims would climb the staircase on their knees, though few do so today.

Even on foot I needed to rest by the time I arrived at the sanctuary level. No rush; the chance to take in the view while recovering (rapidly, thanks to cycling) before going down into St. Amadour’s Crypt below Notre-Dame Chapel.

A sign stated that Bishop St. Martial had lived in the third century, further complicating the history of Rocamadour. Some say that the faithful were referring to St. Amator or bishop Amatre. There isn’t much hard data to go on. Relics of the day were currency with little or no authentication. And beatification was as messy as the Lehman bankruptcy or the Greek tax collection system.

I climbed up to the Notre-Dame Chapel.

Here in this dark church, also called Chapelle Miraculeuse, is the celebrated Vierge Noir (Black Madonna). Legend has it that Zacchaeus (St. Amadour) carved her from local black walnut. I read in Helen Martin’s guide to the area that the Black Virgin was greatly venerated in the Middle Ages, most fervently in the 12th century. Honored for her assistance in fertility and childbirth, she was an heir to pre-Christian views of a mother-god.

Coming out of the Chapel one sees a diagonal gash in the cliff face high above our heads. It’s a mark that legend says was left by Durandal, the sword of Roland.

Roland was a military leader fighting for Emperor Charlemagne in the eighth century. Roland is the subject of many legends in Europe and this how the France’s eleventh-century The Song of Roland puts it: Roland was retreating from a battle in Spain through the Pyrenees when his force was ambushed here by the Basques. The battle went against him. He had a horn named Oliphaunt that he then blew hoping for help from the Emperor. And he had a sword named Durandal. It was embedded with Christian relics and was considered to be unbreakable. With defeat imminent, Roland didn’t want Durandal to fall into the hands of the enemy. He tried to destroy it himself but as I said it was unbreakable. Finally, the Archangel Gabriel arrived. He took Durandal and threw it high and away. The sword struck the cliffs above the Alzou Valley, where it stays impaled to this day. The slash in the cliff to the left of the Chapel is where Durandal struck.

I followed a steep path back up to the ticket kiosk, recovered my helmet and bike, took a last photo, and set off for further adventures, including a bottle of Cahors vin noir in the evening.

– Text and photos © Walter Judson Moore, 2011.

Walter Judson Moore is the author of five cycling guidebooks to France and four companion queue sheets in print and as downloads. His guide “Dordogne Valleys and Villages” includes the area covered by this article. His work is available on Amazon and other online booksellers, as well as directly (and personally signed) from the author, who may be reached at wjmoore@tampabay.rr.com.

For further information on Rocamadour and the departments of Lot and Dordogne

Rocamadour Tourist Office
Lot Tourist Office (department includes Rocamadour and Cahors)
Dordogne Tourist Office  (department includes Périgueux, Bergerac and Sarlat)
*Helen Martin’s Lot: Travels Through a Limestone Landscape in Southwest France. Moho Books, 2008 rev. ed.

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