The Discovery of France (28 page)

These are probably the oldest routes in France. The
drailles
or drove roads were zones of transit rather than roads. Some were more than a hundred feet wide. In the first century
AD
, Pliny the Elder observed that ‘sheep in their thousands come from remote regions to feed on the thyme that covers the stony plains of Gallia Narbonensis’. The beasts had shaped the landscape and trodden out a network of long-distance tracks long before they were joined by upright apes. Some of the old pilgrim routes probably predate the saints. The annual miracle of fresh growth had drawn creatures in their thousands long before humans visited shrines and spas.

When the sun began to shrivel up the grass, almost a million sheep, goats and cows poured out of the plains of Provence. These enormous caravans created their own travelling atmosphere, filling the air with dust and leaving a trail of half-eaten vegetation. Several thousand sheep and goats, moving at an average speed of less than one mile an hour for two or three weeks, could bring a large part of
the country to a halt. Coach companies retimed departures to miss the flocks and herds that might occupy a bridge for half a day or block the narrow corridor along the Rhône.

Tales of transhumance tend to stress dramatic conflicts. There were some hostile villages whose land was laid waste by hungry sheep and trampled by cows, and where
gardes champêtres
were paid to walk alongside the animals until they left the region. When shepherds were prevented by epidemics from making the journey, some farmers ploughed over the drove roads and tried to claim the land. But when, in the early nineteenth century, proposals were made to impose legal restrictions on the herdsmen, very little evidence of animosity could be found. The benefit to communities along these routes is still evident in the hundred and nine place names that contain the word
fumade
(an area on which manure is spread): all these places occur along the drove roads and transhumance zones leading from Langue-doc and Provence, up into the Rouergue and the Auvergne.

Even without the passing tribute of manure, transhumance was not a curse. These land-going ocean liners of livestock were a magnificent sight. The National Museum of Popular Arts and Traditions in Paris has a beautiful display of bells and embroidered collars worn by the leading sheep of a transhumant flock (collected on a mission to the Alps in the early twentieth century). The most prized animals were decorated and dressed when they left for the mountains or when they were taken into church to be blessed. Cows were adorned with headdresses, flowers and flags, and sometimes with little wooden towers containing tiny bells that were thought to protect the herd from lightning.

A few sheep and cows strayed onto fields and gardens, but transhumant flocks were not a rabble. A strict order was observed. In front went the
menoun
(castrated male goats), then came all the other long-haired goats, the countless troop of sheep or cows and the magnificent white sheepdogs whom, it was said, ‘it is an honour to know’. Bringing up the rear were donkeys, carrying the shepherds’ belongings aand the lambs that were too small to keep up with their mothers.

On the summer pasture, the shepherds lived in
burons
– small chalets or stone huts, most of which were abandoned when irrigation, winter feed and the introduction of more specialized breeds put an
end to the prehistoric practice. Many stone
burons
can still be seen, but the commonest type of shepherd dwelling has disappeared entirely: a conical thatched hut on two or three wheels, as long as a man and slightly wider, with a shaft that was propped on a forked stick. This mobile haystack was turned so that the man could watch the animals with his rifle at the ready. Sometimes, a lone sheep was added to a herd in the hope that wolves would make off with the easy prey and leave the cows alone. But the sacrificial sheep was often protected by the herd, which formed a defensive circle when it smelled a wolf. By all accounts, the sheep themselves were not the aimless, skittish creatures of today. They were tough, scrawny, rough-woolled beasts who knew how to defend their mountain territory. In the high passes above Chamonix, opposing flocks of sheep had been known to form battle lines and to launch savage attacks on the enemy flock.

In early autumn, the herds and flocks returned to Provence and brought ‘a smile of life to the immensity of the desert’ (Mariéton). In the Pyrenees, the shepherds, ‘sun-tanned and looking more like Arabs than Frenchmen, walked along in groups in their picturesque costume’ (a wide beret, a bright-red vest or belt, a monkish cloak or a bulky sheepskin), ‘with ponies or mules transporting their equipment – a few ets, ropes and chains, and those big gleaming copper kettles in which they collect and curdle the milk’ (George Sand).

This descent from the mountains was the only time when chaos threatened the herds. Animals born in the high pastures had their first sight of the human world. As they funnelled into the teeming maze of a hamlet, they broke into a sweat and charged through the streets in a panic. Even Pyrenean sheepdogs, which were known to attack bears, found the discovery of civilization traumatic. In 1788, the scholar and politician Jean Dusaulx was exploring the Pyrenees. One morning, he was about to leave the village of Barèges when he was invited to watch a typical scene. A sheepdog had just been brought in from a remote district:

The nomadic instinct was stronger than fear. The declining sun and the lengthening shadows were shepherds that could not be disobeyed. In the Jura and the Vosges, where mountain people rented cows for the cheese-making season, it was often said that the animals knew exactly when to leave. City-dwellers who were accustomed to the feckless herds of northern fields or who had never seen more than half a dozen animals at a time thought this a charming peasant legend, but there are enough detailed descriptions of self-governing herds to suggest that the animals were more familiar with the geography and climate of the land than most human beings.

One October morning, when the air was colder and the grass less tender, a cow would start to amble down the mountainside. The cowherd packed his belongings and hung his bundle from the horns of the most trusted beast. One cow would take the lead and the rest would follow without trying to overtake. When the herd reached the valleys, and tracks began to appear to left and right, some of the animals would wander off towards a hamlet. As the herd thinned out, the cowherd stayed with the animals that came from his own village. And so it went on, until each animal had returned to its home and entered its part of the dwelling, like a farmer after a long day in the fields, to heat up the house for winter and to keep the humans company with its munching and snorting and its mighty smell, settling in for half a year of sloth and rumination, until something told it that the mountains were turning green and luscious again.

PART TWO

9

Maps

O
N THE EVENING OF
10 August 1792, a forty-two-year-old man was standing in the belfry of the collegiate church at Dammartin-en-Goële surrounded by various pieces of scientific equipment. He had been working steadily, hoping that no one on the square below would look up and see the glint of glass and metal. There was no time to lose. Like thousands of other monuments to tyranny and superstition, the church at Dammartin had been sold by the state. Any day now, it might be turned into a pile of masonry and antiques.

The man in the condemned belfry attached a blue and curiously lashless eye to his telescope and peered across the space now occupied by the Charles de Gaulle airport at the distant smudge of Paris. By now, his assistant should have left the city and climbed up through the vineyards and quarries to his roof-top observatory among the windmills of Montmartre. At a distance of twenty miles, the hill of Dammartin would appear as a tiny island in the darkening plains. The assistant should now be lighting a flare that would be projected across the intervening space by a parabolic mirror of the kind recently installed in the Cordouan lighthouse at the mouth of the Gironde.

The sky grew dark, but no light appeared. This was not a good start to one of the great expeditions of the new age. Yet there was a light, too reddish and diffuse and too far to the south to be coming from Montmartre. Something was burning in the heart of the city. An army of apprentices, artisans and National Guards, fuelled by rumours of conspiracy and invasion, and encouraged by the support of Citizen Robespierre, had marched from the Faubourg Saint-
Antoine and the ruins of the Bastille to the Tuileries Palace. As the palace courtyard filled up with pikes and red bonnets, shots were fired from the windows and the demonstration turned into a massacre. Eight hundred Swiss guards, palace servants and aristocrats were killed. Fire broke out in the Tuileries, and the red sky sent out its uninterpretable message to the surrounding countryside. In the circumstances, lighting a flare on Montmartre would have been an act of madness. It might be taken as a sign that the invading army of Prussians and Austrians was massing on the hills to the north of Paris.

After ordering his guards to cease fire, the King had walked down the garden steps at the rear of the palace and delivered himself to the Legislative Assembly. To comply with the obvious will of the people, the Assembly suspended him from duty. This ‘Second French Revolution’ was the end of the ancient monarchy. Five months later, in January 1793, just beyond the bottom of his garden, Louis XVI would be decapitated on the Place de la Concorde.

*

F
OURTEEN MONTHS BEFORE
, a small group of scientists and map-makers had gathered in a room at the Tuileries Palace. Louis XVI had known that this might be his last meeting. The coach that was to take him and his family to safety was being secretly prepared by a few trusted servants. They were to leave for Lorraine the next day. But an engrossing hobby has its own sense of time. The King was a skilled watchmaker. He was fascinated by the precision of maps and the modern art of cartography, and he knew the lasting importance of the project.

The scientists had come to explain and seek His Majesty’s approval for a truly revolutionary act. One of the scientists, Charles de Borda, had invented a repeating circle – two small telescopes fixed to independently rotating rings – which made it possible to measure the angle between two points with unprecedented accuracy. With this instrument, the meridian of the Paris Observatory was to be remeasured, all the way from Dunkirk to Barcelona. Once the latitudes of the starting and finishing points had been determined by astronomical observation, the size of the Earth itself would be known. A universal standard measurement would exist for the first time in history. This
holy grail of the Age of Reason would be France’s gift to the world: a single unit of measure which, as Condorcet said, would be ‘for all men, for all time’. The metre would measure exactly one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the Equator. The ‘king’s foot’ and all the other cranky measures that varied from one village to the next would be swept away forever. The free world and all its wares and produce would be measured only by the eternal laws of Nature, not by the length of a man’s arm, the appetite of a cow or the arbitrary decision of a despot. Louis XVI gave his blessing to the project and went back to preparing his escape.

The man who stood in the belfry at Dammartin that night in August 1792 was an astronomer from Amiens, which happens to lie close to the meridian. Jean-Baptiste Delambre had been appointed to lead the northern part of the expedition, from Dunkirk to Rodez (seven hundred and fifty kilometres). His colleague, Pierre Méchain, was to survey the shorter but more mountainous and partly uncharted section from Barcelona to Rodez (three hundred and thirty kilometres). They were to determine the meridian by triangulation. The principle is simple: take three clearly visible points – in this case, the Dammartin belfry, a roof in Montmartre and the church of Saint-Martin-du-Tertre. Next, using the repeating circle, find the angles of the triangle. Finally, measure the distance between two of the points using rulers. This provides the baseline, and elementary trigonometry gives the length of the other two sides.
²⁴
With the first triangle established, sightings taken from a fourth observation point allow the next, adjacent triangle to be calculated. The triangles can then go marching rigidly along the meridian until, at the other end, a second baseline is measured with rulers to verify the results.

Unfortunately, as Delambre discovered, Nature cloaked her immutable laws in change and used human beings to cover her tracks. Variables such as altitude, atmospheric refraction and the contraction and expansion of instruments in heat and cold were small matters compared to the human chaos. Delambre’s initial circumambulation
of Paris, at a distance of twenty-five to thirty kilometres from the centre, was a sobering glimpse of the struggle ahead. The supposedly unchanging French countryside was in a constant state of flux. Many of the triangulation points set up by earlier expeditions had vanished. Trees had grown up to hide the view; buildings had been moved; staircases in castle towers had crumbled away; churches had been bricked up or demolished.

The biggest obstacle was the fact that few people understood the fraternal and egalitarian nature of the project. At Montjay, Delambre’s observation platform was torn down by citizens exercising their new democratic right to destroy anything new. In the Orléans forest, he was able to build his platform only because the local people were busy elsewhere in the forest, demolishing ‘a stone pyramid called the Meridian which was built by the former seigneurs as a sign of their greatness’. (It was an obelisk commemorating Cassini’s survey of 1740.) Delambre was forced to give impromptu public talks to explain his mission: he was not a Prussian, his spyglass was not for spying and the letters of accreditation bearing the royal seal were not secret messages from Citizen Capet (formerly known as Louis XVI). At Saint-Denis, where the kings of France were buried, a crowd broke into his carriage and discovered the most suspicious-looking collection of objects they had ever seen.