The Discovery of France (31 page)
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Authors: Graham Robb
Having no paths to follow but the beds of torrents, and finding no habitation, we became lost after passing the spot where our guide informed us that the Beast of the Gévaudan had been killed.
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Meanwhile, the light was failing and we were beginning to wonder how we would spend the night among these arid hills when we spotted a house on the far side of a deep gorge.
The house was called La Bastide. It appears on the Cassini map, on an isolated stretch of road, as a little square building marked ‘la Bastide – cabaret’. Though the roof was blown off by gales in 2004, the sunken stone vaults of the original ground floor can still be seen. It was here that Thiébault and his comrades spent the night. The inn was deserted apart from two shifty-looking women. After discovering a trapdoor in the floor of their bedroom, the officers barricaded themselves in and slept in their clothes. At daybreak, they asked for the bill and were charged one louis (twenty-four francs) for bed and a stingy omelette. (Twenty-four francs would have bought a cow’s milk for a year.)
‘One louis! Are you mad?’
‘Faith, you have no cause for complaint. No one did you any harm.’
‘Who the devil’s talking about harm? I was referring to the price.’
. . . As we were leaving through the courtyard gate, we found ourselves face to face with two armed men coming along the route we had taken the day before. Behind them, at a thousand paces, were several other men, also armed. . . . We spurred our horses and set off at a full trot. The walls of the house covered our departure and we were out of range before they could decide what to do.
Despite the map’s misleading and potentially lethal depiction of the road system, Cassini was criticized – presumably by people who never left home – for showing only major highways and omitting all the secondary routes. He explained that roads ‘changed with the seasons’. A map that claimed to show everything was a public menace, encouraging travellers to venture where none should go without a guide to point out ‘the hollow ways and the precipices’. Yet Cassini’s own geometers were clearly over-optimistic. People travelling from Toulouse to Bordeaux must have wondered what had happened to the (fictitious) bridges at Verdun and Tonneins, and some travellers in the Alps must have been disappointed when they found that the only way to continue on the road marked ‘Grand Chemin de France au Piémont’ was to have the carriage dismantled and loaded onto the back of a mule.
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HIS, THEN, WAS THE
visible state of France at the dawn of the nineteenth century: a slightly misleading cartographic masterpiece produced by expeditions that had set off from Paris more than half a century before. Cassini IV was never able to revise the map on which his family had spent part of its fortune. The plates from which it was printed were confiscated by the Revolutionary government and never returned. Cassini was evicted from his home, the Observatory, accused of aiming cannon (telescopes) at the people of Paris and sent to prison, where he described himself as ‘an ex-living person’. He might have agreed with Baudelaire that ‘nations have great men only in spite of themselves’.
Though it expropriated the map of France, the state showed little interest in charting its domain. The chief concern of the military surveyors was the perimeter of the country. This, however, presented
two serious problems. The first was the lack of reliable measurements of altitude. The 1659 Treaty of the Pyrenees defined the frontier between France and Spain as ‘the crest of the Pyrenees’, but more than two centuries passed before the snowy battlements were measured accurately and the people of the high Pyrenees found out whether they were Spanish or French.
The second problem was a fear that frontier maps would effectively hand the keys of the fortress to the enemies of France. This is why the Cassini map ends abruptly at the old borders, omitting Nice (the homeland of Cassini I), Savoy, Corsica and, because it lay too far off the Vendée coast to fit onto the sheet, the Île d’Yeu. France itself looks like an island. Beyond the borders, apart from a few Notre- Dames floating in space, a tiny spit of land labelled ‘Douvres’ (Dover) and some loose ends of road, there is nothing. In the Alps, the edge of the world is hemmed with mountains. The only hints of the other side are a few intriguing captions: ‘[Col de la] Traversette: hole made by human hands which passes through the mountain’. In the Pyrenees, the land drops suddenly into a bottomless abyss and a line of jagged peaks guards the perimeter like a row of fence posts.
However, these shortcomings were trivial compared to those of earlier maps. Despite official interference and lack of funding, the Cassini map was a national treasure. It shed light on the dark domestic interior and had a huge effect on French society. It replaced the Parisian image of a featureless expanse of fields and forests with a Romantic sense of
la France profonde
. It opened up the country to the imagination and provided clues to the worlds that lay beyond the road network. Before Cassini, most maps for travellers covered only a narrow strip of land a mile or two on either side of a river or a road. Most of them, like the 1775 Paris–Reims ‘historical and topographical description’, showed little more than a traveller would have seen through a carriage window on a rainy day. The idea was simply to provide some instructive entertainment on the long journey. The map was not allowed to speak for itself; it was an illustration of the text:
Aubervilliers: The inhabitants decided that vegetables would be more profitable than wine, because of the proximity of Paris. Thus,
almost all their land is under cultivation. . . . All the inhabitants are very hard-working.
Vaubuin [Vauxbuin, a suburb of Soissons]: Its position is somewhat aquatic as it is surrounded by mountains [sic] on almost all sides.
Sermoise and environs: The eye scarce has time to rest on an object in the landscape ere it spies another no less worthy of attention.
Typically, the ‘eye’ had seen very little of what was shown on the map. Until Cassini, much of what appeared to be known about the provinces was based on second-hand reports. Even the government inspector of historic monuments, Prosper Mérimée, was partly dependent on hearsay when planning his tours of inspection in the 1830s:
I have often heard tell of a very ancient monument that lies somewhere in the mountains to the south-west of Perpignan. Some say that it is a mosque, others that it is a church of the Knights Templar. I have also been told that it’s a hovel in such a ruinous state that no one can tell when it was built. Whatever the case, it must be worth an excursion of three or four days on horseback.
Thanks to Cassini, Mérimée could at least confirm the existence and check the location of this mysterious temple. (It was the star-shaped eleventh-century church at Plane`s, known locally as ‘the Mosque’.)
Few people actually owned the Cassini map: it was very expensive,
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and only a few hundred copies of each sheet were printed. Map-reading was a rare skill: no one felt that their intelligence was insulted if a geographical writer pointed out that two places which lay close together on the map might in reality be several hours apart. The important thing was the knowledge that the map existed. Many of the professional and accidental explorers who appear later in this book had traced the meandering rivers, spelled out the unfamiliar names and peered at the little symbols. Some of the sheets were cut into rectangles and pasted onto a piece of cloth that could be folded up. They could then be stored in small boxes and kept in a bookcase.
A complete set can be seen in the library of the Château de Vizille near Grenoble, disguised as a row of books. The folded sheets could also be taken on journeys. In his account of a trip to the Rhineland in 1839, Victor Hugo proudly mentions his portable Cassini: ‘I took the diligence to Soissons. It was quite empty, which, between ourselves, did not displease me. I was able to spread out my Cassini sheets on the seat of the coupé.’
In a poet’s mind, the map itself was a luminous landscape. Without his Cassini sheets, Hugo’s account might have lacked some of its picturesque details. The sheet for Soissons gave him the name of the tiny hamlet of La Folie. It also showed the steel-blue bend of the river Aisne and the little clumps of red paint that made Soissons look like an exotic flower head. When he wrote up his account by the light of a candle in the inn, the landscape he had seen through the twilight gloom would rise from the map like a vision:
As I drew near to Soissons, it was growing dark. Night was already opening her smoke-filled hand in that enchanting valley where the road dives down after the hamlet of La Folie . . . Yet through the mists that lumbered across the countryside, one could still make out the clump of walls, roofs and buildings that is Soissons, half-inserted in the steel crescent of the Aisne like a sheaf that the sickle is about to cut.
Cassini’s geometers marked the end of the pioneer stage of French exploration and helped to launch the age of mass discovery. Like the fleeing heroine of George Sand’s
Nanon
, who memorizes the Cassini map she sees in a house at Limoges before venturing into the wilderness of the Brande, travellers could now strike out across country and know more or less where they were going. Gaps and errors inspired new maps, and by the mid-nineteenth century there were signs of map mania, with popular magazines explaining how to chart one’s own little corner of the country. The English custom of wandering about the countryside, getting pleasantly lost among the hedgerows, was catching on in France.
Village steeples were no longer just the totem poles of tiny
pays
. They were coordinates in a network that stretched beyond the horizon, and marked a more lively relationship between the landscape
and the mind. The steeple at Illiers, in the plains south-west of Chartres, which had served as a triangulation point in the early 1750s, reappeared in fictional form in Marcel Proust’s Combray. Triangulation had drawn new lines across the land and prepared the way for other, less definable explorations:
At a bend in the road, I suddenly experienced that special pleasure that resembles no other when I saw the two steeples of Martinville lit by the setting sun and apparently being moved about by the motion of our carriage and the twists and turns of the road, and then the steeple of Vieuxvicq which, though separated from the other two by a hill and a valley and placed on higher ground in the distance, appeared to be standing right next to them.
In noticing and registering the shape of their spires, the shifting of their lines and the lighting of their surface by the sun, I felt that I was leaving part of my impression unexplored and that something lay behind that movement and that light – something that they seemed at once to contain and to conceal.
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NLIKE THESE TOPOGRAPHICAL
journeys into the mind, the great scientific expeditions that followed Cassini’s and Delambre’s are known only from their findings: maps of agricultural practice in the different
pays
of France, collections of folk songs and tribal lore and catalogues of ethnic types (see p. 316). The Swiss botanist Pyrame de Candolle spent six years (1806–12) studying the flora of France and discovered hundreds of plants that were previously unknown in France and hundreds more unknown anywhere in the world. Charles de Tourtoulon and the Languedocian poet Octavien Bringuier travelled one thousand miles in circles and cul-de-sacs to trace two hundred and fifty miles of the line that divided Oc and Oïl (p. 60), from a hamlet near Soulac on the Atlantic coast, to the region of Guéret, on the masons’ route to Paris.
The greatest expedition of all – in size if not in brilliance – was the successor to Cassini’s seventy-year-long survey. In 1818, military surveyors started work on the new map of France known as the
Carte de l’état-major
((equivalent to the British Ordnance Survey, which began in 1791). It employed seventy-five officers at a time, plus a
small army of draughtsmen, engravers and, eventually, photographers. The first sheet (Paris) appeared in 1821 and the last (Corte, northern Corsica) in 1880, by which time the first sheets were out of date. Army officers working in teams and in a slightly more cosmopolitan world were less vulnerable than Cassini’s pioneers, but since many of the officers had never wanted to be assigned to the map in the first place, it was still a heroic undertaking. They braved the heat of the treeless Landes and squinted through the haze at hills of sand that changed position from one month to the next; they bivouacked on freezing mountains, waiting for the clouds to lift; they lay in bed with dysentery and fever in places where nothing ever happened, and devoted months of work to measurements they knew might turn out to be less than accurate. Not all those explorers knew the satisfaction of a job well done.
If enough information had survived, one expedition in particular would deserve a book to itself. It was described in suitably epic terms in 1843, eight years after the ground work was completed:
Always on foot, heading out across country in all weathers, exposed to every sort of misadventure, following the capricious trail of subterranean strata and unable to devise their itinerary, as ordinary tourists do, according to the availability of accommodation, even the most intrepid mineral hunters were exhausted after a few months of this arduous pursuit. MM. Dufrénoy and Élie de Beaumont, resting only in winter to organize their materials, withstood the ordeal for ten years, from 1825 to 1835. In the course of their minute investigations, they traced out on French soil a route of more than twenty thousand leagues [fifty-six thousand miles]. And they not only studied France to its limits, they tracked the mineral formations that extend across our territory into neighbouring lands – England, Belgium, Germany, Italy and Spain.
The geological map of France had its origins in a faintly disturbing discovery made by the naturalist-Étienne Guettard. In the 1740s, he had noticed that the ‘subterranean geography’ of northern France appeared to be very similar to that of southern England. Deep down, the Channel was not the great barrier that it seemed. Guettard then formed a bold hypothesis: northern terrains formed ‘broad, continu
ous bands arranged concentrically around the capital’: ‘If my conjecture was correct, I should find in other provinces, at roughly the same distance from Paris, what I had seen in Lower Poitou and the intervening provinces’.