History of French village still speaks to us today

In September, I’ve had the chance to make the very best kind of Pottsville-Paris connection. I paid a visit to my sister Jane Graup who, for a month, has left Schuylkill County to take up residence in southwest France. She is living in Sorèze, a village located between the cities of Toulouse and Albi, in a region rich in wine, good food, beauty and history.

Sorèze sits at the foot of Montagne noire, Black Mountain, whose crest and slopes were inhabited from prehistoric times until the 13th century. The Romans, who settled in the region, recognized the strategic importance of the mountain and established on its crest an oppidum, an enclosed mountaintop fortress offering protection and a 360° view over the surrounding countryside. Early in the 13th century, the fortress was destroyed and the remaining population moved to the foot of the mountain, to the small village of Sorèze, clustered around a Benedictine Abbey founded in the 8th century.

All that happened long ago. Today Sorèze is a sleepy place where shutters are closed at dusk and the village streets, turned over to a pack of wild cats that insolently stare down the rare passer-by from atop municipal garbage cans. The village also has an elegant hotel with a vast park, housed in what was once a royal military academy. There is an elementary school, a pharmacy, three doctors, a very well-stocked supermarket, restaurants, cafés and, of course, bakeries where crusty baguettes are baked daily for the village’s 2,700 inhabitants.

On the whole, Sorèze seems a very pleasant place to live if you like to turn in early and rise at dawn, which, based on street noises, is what most people do. Early in the morning, they hurry alongside the imposing stone buildings of the royal academy and past the half-timbered façades of houses lining the narrow streets, stone and wood invested with hundreds of years of history.

Tourists with time to linger can stop to read commemorative plaques dedicated to village notables, a quaint version of local history. Or they can climb to the top of Black Mountain, where events eight centuries old still resonate today.

There they’ll find the ruins of the oppidum, destroyed at the beginning of the 13th century. At that time, southwest France was in turmoil, the explosive mix of religion and politics having led to war. Divided in two, France had a king in the north and, in the south, in a region known as Languedoc, many powerful and independent lords ruling over wealthy city-states. In the north, the king managed to subdue his vassals; in Languedoc, the aristocracy escaped his control. Embracing heretical beliefs, they also escaped the control of the Catholic Church.

One of those lords, the Count of Toulouse, refused to obey an emissary of the Pope sent to demand obedience to the Church’s teachings. The count was excommunicated. The papal emissary was murdered. In 1208, in response, Pope Innocent III called for a crusade against this new kind of “infidel,” men and women who claimed to be Christian but who rejected the sacraments and the pomp of the Catholic Church. Once they became victims of persecution, residents of the rich cities of the South sought refuge in a string of mountain fortresses stretching across Languedoc, from the Rhone River west to the Pyrenees Mountains.

The crusaders sent to fight them received the same favors from the pope as those who had fought in the Holy Land. This time, they did not cross the sea to Jerusalem but set about destroying the mountain citadels, joining forces with powerful local bishops and archbishops, more warrior than priest.

In that way, the mountaintop fortress above Sorèze was reduced to rubble. With its high walls and its panoramic view, it had the potential to become a refuge for heretics seeking to flee the marauding crusaders, mostly barons from northern France.

While travelling with my sister, I was constantly reminded of this long ago conflict between the Catholic Church and a group of heretics desirous to return to a purer form of Christianity. Though today they are known as “Cathars,” a term derived from the Greek word for purity, they called themselves “good men” and “good women,” sometimes they simply called themselves “friends.” They had no churches or sacraments outside of the laying on of hands. And as they considered dying a liberation from the evils of this world, they resisted, literally, to the death.

Many Cathars were members of the aristocracy, many were protected by powerful lords and though the pretext for fighting was religion, politics played an equally important role. In 1226 the French King Louis VIII undertook a second crusade against the seemingly unconquerable heretics, meeting with partial success: the powerful cities of Languedoc fell under royal control.

In the end Church and King were victorious and this is still reflected in architecture and in the lay of the land. The city of Albi, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, became a stronghold of an aggressive and triumphant Church. Both its massive archbishop’s palace and its cathedral, more fortress than church, attest to this. Nearby in the Pyrenees Mountains, many rocky peaks are crowned by the ruins of a fortress, once home to defiant heretics.

One of the last to fall was Montségur. In 1244, after a ten-month siege, 10,000 royal troops could finally claim victory against the 100 warriors and several hundred heretics who inhabited the citadel. Those who renounced their faith were spared. The more than 200 who did not were burned to death. Legend has it they willingly mounted their funeral pyre.

A century later, another crusade traversed France. This one, known as “the Shepherd’s Crusade,” was led by shepherds and vagrants who, in the name of their god, went on a rampage, killing Jews and destroying more than 100 Jewish communities in the South of France. Religious turmoil also marked the second half of the 16th century, when bloody conflicts divided French Catholics and Protestants during a series of eight religious wars.

While with my sister, checking the news, I read about modern warriors killing and destroying in the name of yet another god. Now as then, religion and politics do not mix. History has shown us, over and over again, what lethal partners they make. Meanwhile, I have the joy of my sister’s company as we eat, drink, and be merry, for we never know what tomorrow may hold…

'Highway 61 Revisted'

I’ve done a lot of driving on PA Route 61 in the past few weeks and I’ve probably had some experiences readers can identify with. I drove into a wrong lane, alive to tell the tale because there was no oncoming traffic, I missed the exits for some of the new jug handles and had to turn around in parking lots. I’ve had trucks from construction sites cross my path as if I weren’t even there, and of course, I’ve learned to slalom through the narrow corridors, some enclosed, some not, that make up the transition road between ‘old 61’ and the new improved highway everyone is hoping for.

I’m on vacation, visiting family and friends and probably, hopefully, in a year from now, the next time I visit, the new highway will be done. In the meanwhile, just like everybody else, I sit, motor idling, stuck in a traffic jam.

In some ways, believe it or not, I like it. Car-life, as I call it, is a novelty for me. In France I don’t own a car (though as readers know, I have a hard-earned driver’s licence). I take the crowded, smelly metro to work and instead of loading groceries into the trunk, I fill a personal shopping cart, a ‘caddie,’ that I wheel along the sidewalks between the supermarket and my home. Then I sling the handle of the caddie onto one shoulder and lug the thing up seven flights of stairs… Yes, car-life has definite appeal.

I’m someone who has had what you might call a chequered driving history. I didn’t get my first licence till I was 21, the age at which I also had my first accident, in the Penn State Schuylkill parking lot. Moving around, living in cities, I let my licence expire and had to take the test again in 1987, before I moved to France, where I found out my US licence was not valid. I did not get my French licence till 2011 and now I proudly possess two because, since 1987, I’ve kept my Pennsylvania licence up to date.

This summer, I’m getting used to driving. Perhaps it is my rental car, a black Impala, sporty and speedy, that has made me feel more confident. Perhaps it is the life I am living, the discoveries I am making, thanks to the freedom of being able to take to the road. In fact, not only am I revisiting ‘Highway 61’ (I thank Bob Dylan for the title), I’m getting to know Schuylkill County in an entirely different way.

I’ve gone south. I’ve moved to southern Schuylkill. I am living in the shadow of Hawk Mountain, not far from the banks of the Little Schuylkill and I feel like I’m in one of the most beautiful places in the world. I have my own ‘little place’ (it’s bigger than my Paris apartment), I’m the summer resident of Summer Valley Guest House, operated by Carolyn and Gene Bonkoski, and I couldn’t ask for better hosts. Outside my bedroom window, I see green fields and trees and most days, I also see Charlie and Rio, the Bonkoski’s horses, who enjoy carrots, apples and watermelon rind as treats.

From the living room, I see the sun rise over Hawk Mountain and, thanks to my black Impala, I often go there to walk the mountain trails and sit at North Lookout, scanning the sky for hawks and eagles, catching glimpses of beautiful song birds as well. There, my sister and I spotted a scarlet tanager; along the Little Schuylkill, I’ve seen indigo buntings, gold finches, tufted titmice and catbirds.

Most of the year, I live in Paris. When I tell people, they exclaim at my good luck: the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, Notre Dame, all that beauty, all that culture at your disposal every day. They forget I also take the metro, go to work and carry my groceries up all those stairs: metro, boulot, dodo, as the French say: metro, work, and straight to bed. I wish I could take advantage of more of that beauty and culture. Just as I wish I could have more green…

In southern Schuylkill it surrounds me and I feel better, breathe better, even look better living in the midst of it. But as I write, rain is falling and outside, green leaves are shivering on the trees. Already there’s a hint of autumn in the air. The leaves will change color, they will fall, and inevitably winter will come. Perhaps I’d change my tune about my southern Schuylkill experience if I had to weather a Pennsylvania winter or two.

For the moment, I’m entranced. Travelling just a few miles to the other side of Route 61, I park my car at the new boat launch in Auburn and set out on the bike trail to its end, where I take a gravel road to the railroad tracks. I cross a bridge over the Schuylkill and then head down a path into the woods. Above my head, there is an abandoned railroad trestle. I walk beneath it. On the other side, there is a steep path that cuts up to a section of the Bartram Trail, that one day soon will continue from Pottsville all the way to Philadelphia.

I follow it for a stretch, stopping at a pond where I disturb a blue heron. It gracefully takes to the air, its image reflected, along with the surrounding pines, in the perfect stillness of the pool.

Soon I return to France, after a golden summer, one of the best and the calmest I’ve had in years. For that, I’ve also my two yoga teachers to thank, Beth Shields of Pottsville, and Pamela Gyory of Kempton. I discovered Pamela, her yoga classes, and her beautiful 'Forget-me-not' bed and breakfast, thanks again to my black Impala, that has carried me up and over Hawk Mountain, one of the most beautiful summertime drives around.

I used to live in the South of France, on the Riviera, to be exact, and in the summer, the coast highway, the final stretch of France’s legendary Nationale 7—the American equivalent would be Route 66—was one long string of cars crawling between Cannes and the Italian border. When it rained, the highway would flood in spots, as would the campgrounds located so close to the road that the drone of cicadas was drowned out by traffic noise.

The South of France or southern Schuylkill? For my summer vacation, I’ve made my choice…

George Catlin, coal-region painter, inventor of 'Indian Gallery' he took to Paris...

When I was a child, a favorite family excursion was a visit to the Reading Museum and its surrounding park, where my sisters and I liked to feed the ducks, throwing stale bread from the foot bridges into pretty shaded streams. We also wandered in the museum, in those days an old-fashioned kind of place, with yellowed walls and dimly lit displays.

Upstairs there was an art gallery, where I saw my first painting by the French painter Corot, a bank of willows dipping their branches into the River Seine, a small painting but powerful enough to awaken in me an early fascination with all things French.

Downstairs, behind glass, in display cases that filled the center of the gallery, sat or stood American Indians, as we called them in those days, life-sized mannequins in native dress, surrounded by the artefacts that were the tools of their daily life. Along the walls, there were displays of arrowheads, beads, pottery, coins, too many objects, all too small, to hold the interest of a child like me.

The museum was never crowded and this gallery was a quiet place, where the mannequins, frozen in time, indifferent to the faces pressed close to the glass, mournfully tended fires or raised an arrow in the direction of an invisible prey.

I haven’t visited the Reading Museum in many years and I do not know if those Indian mannequins still haunt the first-floor gallery, silent reminders of a way of life destroyed. Enclosed in glass, unreachable, untouchable, they are reminders of a time when such exhibits represented a kind of Noah’s ark, keeping alive the last vestiges of a dying civilization in the face of Manifest Destiny.

One man responsible for such exhibits was George Catlin, Wilkes Barre native, painter of native American life, explorer, ethnographer, entrepreneur and showman, originator of the type of display I saw at the Reading Museum as a child.

Born in 1796, raised in what was still the wilderness of the Wyoming Valley, where only twenty years earlier, a bloody battle had taken place between the Oneidas and American soldiers, George Catlin was raised on tales about the Indians that had once inhabited his family’s land. An avid hunter even as a child, he roamed fields and woods with his single-barrel shotgun, shooting at small game, hoping to one day bring down his first deer.

On one such outing, aiming at the coveted deer, the boy heard a shot before he had the time to fire and saw the deer fall to the ground. From the brush emerged an Indian who tied its feet together and threw it on his back, smiling at young Catlin before he disappeared among the trees.

The man, an Oneida who was camping near the Catlin farm, had walked all the way from Lake Cayuga, in New York state, to visit the ground where his ancestors had fallen in battle. After smoking a peace pipe with George’s father, he shared his venison with the family, congratulating young Catlin on his hunting skills.

Was it that incident, recorded by Catlin in his memoirs, that planted the seed, that gave him the fever, to go West, to live among the Indians, especially the Iowas and the Ojibwas, to record in vivid detail every aspect of their way of life? Destined by family tradition to be a lawyer, a gentleman farmer, a pillar of the community, responsible for the welfare of the growing city of Wilkes Barre, he gave it all up to study painting. Then, rather than paint the popular society portraits of his day, he devoted brush and palette to the feathers and war paint of the great warriors of the American plains.

When he was 32-years-old, in 1828, Catlin began defining the project that would become his “Indian Gallery,” a testimony to the native Americans among whom he lived while recording their lives. At that time, the idea of collecting Indian artefacts was not new. In fact, the US Department of Indian Affairs had an extensive collection and even invited Indians to Washington to perform native dances and display their skills.

Yet, the West remained a land of conquest and when Andrew Jackson entered the White House in 1828, collecting took a backseat to an upsurge in warfare. For Catlin, this became an opportunity to pursue a passion, born in childhood, that would continue to the end of his life. Through painting and collecting, he hoped to salvage the remnants of a slowing dying part of humanity.

A year later, he headed West, where he painted, collected, and befriended his subjects. After creating a substantial body of work, he returned East, joined by some of his Indian friends, hoping to solicit public interest in his living and artistic testimony, but the interest was just not there. At a time of aggressive westward expansion, Indians were the enemy and few Americans wanted to pay to see Catlin’s museum, the Indian Gallery.

But on the other side of the Atlantic, in London and Paris, Catlin found his public. In 1841, speaking in front of the Royal Institution in London, he proclaimed his desire to create a “museum of humanity,” devoted to all human races and animal species in decline. At Egyptian Hall, an immense exhibition space, he displayed his painting and his collections, while live Indians formed “frozen theatrical groups,” holding the same pose for hours.

Loading his collections, living and inanimate, on a boat, moving on to Paris, he took that city by storm, attracting the artistic and intellectual elite, impatient to rub elbows with the “savages,” hoping to catch a glimmer of the purity of primitive life.

Between 1839 and 1850, Catlin successfully travelled Europe with his “museum of humanity,” but then he went bust. When he had set out on his expedition, the word “museum” was still a kind of “catch-all” term, that took in circus sideshows, wax museums, exhibits of “living specimens,” as well as the serious art collections that were beginning to take form at the British Museum in London or at the Louvre. By the end of the decade, “serious” museums had won out and the European public had grown tired of Catlin’s travelling show, preferring universal expositions, like the World’s Fair that took place in London’s Crystal Palace in 1851.

Catlin died penniless in 1872, still sketching Indian life, devoted to his Indian Gallery to the end. In 1879, his collections were saved from destruction by the Smithsonian Institute. Not until 2002, in Washington D.C., was there an exhibit worthy of Catlin’s work and of his mission to preserve the last vestiges of the cultures of the native American peoples he loved.