The Best Travel Writing 2011 - James O'Reilly [47]
One afternoon in Lamarche, the closest town where I can do grocery shopping, I pull over when I see a beautiful gothic steeple rising up from behind a tall stone wall. It appears to be a chapel of some sort. I find a place where the wall has crumbled and push through the brambles to make my way in, then stand, mouth agape, at the scene before me. I am standing in thick, deep mud, on the expansive property of an imposing chateau with two wings. With a large black thundercloud hanging ominously above it, this is exactly what a “haunted house” looks like in every child’s imagination. There are several magnificent outbuildings, including the spectacular gothic chapel. But the property is now a morass of mud and junkyard and cow pasture. I climb over old motors and rusted washing machines to get a better look at the gothic chapel, its spires piercing the gray and threatening sky above. It is adorned with intricate carved stone flourishes. Through its crumbling arches, it is stuffed full of hay. The hay is propped up by marble gravestones from the cemetery next door. A cow lies in the muck beneath the chapel, lord of the most stately hayloft in the world. Other white cows stand about, up to their bovine knees in thick black mud, lowing at my arrival. We stand for many minutes, staring coldly at each other, each finding the other an equally unwelcome intrusion. A second outbuilding with a round turret decomposes in abandonment, its stone wall collapsed in on itself. It’s a disturbing scene, this forsaken estate which clearly was once quite majestic. Certainly once upon a time, horse-drawn carriages rode up this lane to deliver ladies in their Parisian fineries to this country estate. The image is incongruous with this swampy junkyard overrun with stray cats and dirty cattle. It’s a tragedy. How could they let it get this way? When did they stop caring? But then, one could easily ask me the same question. I imagine it crept up on them, just as it crept up on me. I snap photographs, then leave.
I only go to Domrémy-la-Pucelle, Joan of Arc’s birthplace, because that’s what one does as a tourist in this region. I figure I’ll pop in, check it out, check it off my list. But it shifts something in me. Watching a video about her life in the small museum adjacent to her house, I feel deeply connected to her isolation, the sense of her difficulty as a woman. She spent her childhood a loner and a dreamer, walking through the woods. Later, after she left her family and went into battle, she spent nights alone, always in armor and male clothing against a sea of dark figures who tried to sexually assault her while she slept. I taste her loneliness. I walk through her tiny childhood home, put my hands on the modest walls of her bedroom, see the hearth where she sat with her family. Somehow, I never really grasped her as a real person before. I saw her only as a mythical icon. Seeing where she actually lived changes all that. I go inside the village church where she heard the voices of angels that told her to fight for France, to don armor and lead an army of men to defeat the British and take back her country. Whether or not it was divine intervention or mental illness that produced the voices, I marvel at the injustice she endured and her unwavering resolution, even when her former allies offered her up on a platter after she led them to victory. Sold out by the very people she had saved, imprisoned and sexually harassed in her cell by guards, sleep deprived, forced to endure months of twelve-hour days of relentless interrogation in a trial designed solely for the purpose of tripping her up in semantics and trick questions, she never capitulated.