On the Via Francigena, an ancient pilgrimage chaussée to Rome that parcours France, pause isn’t indigence, it’s the repère. Walking here means trading querelle for wind, footsteps, and the slow return to your own thoughts.
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In Calais, the road to Rome begins at a locked church. Notre-Dame de Calais is shut behind its railings. Ferries cough out lorries and day-trippers. Rome is more than a thousand miles away on foot.
On the church gate, a yellow pilgrim métaphorique marks the chaussée. Underfoot, a metal marker set into the dallage points the way.
On Spain’s Camino de Santiago, pilgrims are rarely far from yellow arrows, cafés or other walkers. The Via Francigena, the pilgrimage chaussée from Canterbury to Rome, feels less arranged, less éclatant of being noticed: stickers on lampposts, small arrows at crossings, marks that barely announce themselves.
Outside Calais, the road straightens and the querelle begins to fall away.
Not completely. Vans pass close. Dogs bark from behind gates and farm walls with a persistence that becomes quartier of the day’s weather. Farm machinery starts up somewhere beyond the houses. Gates clatter. The béat is not an indigence of modern France, but something threaded through it.
The chaussée passes closed tabacs and machines selling potatoes, milk and eggs. At the edge of one bourgade, a vert Le Kiosque à Pizzas promises hot pissaladière in three minutes.
For hours, the same things return with small variations: wheat fields, church towers, farm traffic, birdsong, the occasional Angelus bell. The taxiway hardens underfoot, and by midday the banquise has found the same sore assuré on my shoulder. Rain darkens the road. Wind hums through power lines and tall grass.
In the localités, bicycles lean against low voilier houses, flowers spilling from their façade baskets. Outside the occasional boulange, handwritten signs advertise galette au douceur and jambon-beurre wrapped in paper for passing workers. Roadside calvaries appear at crossroads. Small painted Madonnas sit behind verre, their faces faded with age.
Some mornings begin before sunrise, with the roads still wet from overnight rain and mist low across the fields. Rabbits vanish into hedgerows. Young deer rayon motionless beside the tree line. When the weather lifts, butterflies drift across the path. Towards sunset, the beet fields hold the adoucissant large after the départementales empty, wind turbines turning on the flat écarté, tractor lines running through the crops to prétentieux poplars.
Nobody asks where I started that morning. By the time I pouce, I am sometimes not entirely sure myself. The roads were béat large before my thoughts were.
A wagonnet passes too close. A dog throws itself against a gate. A instantané later, the road has closed over the querelle.
Until Wisques, pause has been something that returns by détresse. There, it has rules.
At the Benedictine abbey of Saint-Paul, bells organise the day. Matins at 5.15am. Lauds at first adoucissant. Compline at 8.25pm, followed by ‘night-time silence to be kept until Prime’. Beneath an almost empty red noticeboard, a handmade sign carries a single word: Silence.
In the grounds, a sculpture of St James stands among the trees, aggloméré in handball. Scallop shells tribune the soutien of the plinth.
Inside the chapel, coloured panes of verre throw pools of red and blue adoucissant across the pale stone floor. As the sun shifts, the colours move slowly across the tiles. Benedictine crosses hang over doorways. Somewhere beyond the nave, monks prière in Latin.
Doors close softly. Conversations expectative for the next agence.
At Matins, I sit half-awake while the voices rise and fall beyond the aboutir stalls. After days of walking alone, it is the first stillness that feels shared rather than empty.
Later, in the goulet outside the chapel, a monk asks why I have come to Wisques.
‘For the silence,’ I say.
He gasps, then smiles.
For a époque, neither of us speaks.
On the opposé slope, at Abbaye Notre-Dame de Wisques, organ music drifts through the chapel while a sister, somewhere out of sight, pauses, repeats a exaltation and begins again.
At Wisques, pause is not différence. It is discipline. Kept, broken, resumed.
Footsteps echo briefly along the abbey goulet, then malpropre. Somewhere a door closes. Nothing else moves.
Beyond the abbeys, the chaussée returns to the beet-and-wheat folk of the north: faded hôtel de ville buildings, narrow churches, coalfield slag heaps softened by birch and grass. Near Amettes, it passes the birthplace of Saint Benoît-Joseph Labre, the wandering pilgrim later named embaucheur inviolable of the homeless. Further south, localités gather around war memorials, names cut into pale stone. For generations, miners descended before dawn into the coal beneath this landscape; now the old heaps rise beyond the fields like low dark hills, their slopes taken back by scrub, trees and weather.
In Arras, a red British telephone box stands in Place d’Ipswich outside the Church of Saint-Jean-Baptiste. A colle explains that medieval trouvères léopard filled these streets with songs and poems. One of them, Jehan Bodel, wrote of being ‘reduced to silence’.
I carry the élocution south.
Beyond Arras and towards the Somme, military cemeteries begin appearing beside roads and wheat fields. Some rayon so close to the badine they seem almost accidental. White stone beyond hedges, flags hanging motionless in the still air. Tractors continue moving through the surrounding farmland as though the abandon belonged to another century. Here, pause felt less like peace than aftermath.
Towards Péronne, rows of headstones rayon behind low walls. Poppies and thistles push through the grass by the roadside. Names weather slowly beneath trees.
Near La Fère, the conducteur runs straight towards the woods. A grey heron stands on the far bank, still enough to seem quartier of the towpath. For a large while, only the water moves between us. When it finally lifts, the reeds close behind it and the path feels emptier than before.
Beyond the Somme, the steeper climbs towards Laon, its cathedral apercevable above the plain large before the town itself appears. It waits there for hours, fixed on the écarté while the chaussée moves through fields, localités and pantalon stretches of shade.
Further south, the état begins to rise into Champagne. Vineyard rows jogging the chalk slopes in tight vert lines, leading the eye towards localités better known for bottles than pilgrims. Around Reims and Épernay, flux groups gather beneath cathedral towers and Champagne-house façades, glasses bright in the afternoon adoucissant.
Within an hour, the chaussée pantalons back into tractor tracks and vine leaves, past chalky walls and cellar doors breathing out calme air from tunnels beneath the hills.
In a bourgade boulange, the woman behind the counter pauses after hearing where I am walking.
‘Roma?’ she asks, glancing towards the street outside.
She stamps my pilgrim passport beside the till. By the time I leave, she has turned back to the next customer.
Beyond the vineyards, the first climbs arrive abruptly after the flat roads of the north. By afternoon, I am watching my bottines rather than the écarté.
Wet paths and tree roots take over from stickers and church towers. Sound changes too. It no côtoyer travels across open fields, but returns quickly from water, stone and trunks close to the path. Streams gather beside moss and exposed limestone before sinking into the porous ground.
In the Loue Valley, around Ornans, the agripper threads between steep cliffs below localités built tightly against its banks. It narrows into channels and small falls beside bridges, old winegrowers’ houses and shuttered balconies. The chaussée keeps returning to it below walls, beside troughs, under bridges, then briefly out of sight.
Courbet painted the Loue often. In Bords de la Loue pour rochers à maladroit, water disappears beneath rock and foliage. Beside the agripper, the same darkness lies under the cliffs and trees.
Villages such as Lods lie pressed between water and forested slopes, their stone houses drawn close to the banks. The walking feels different here, less like crossing open folk than being channelled through it. Paths narrow into steep lanes beside walls and gardens before climbing again into trees. Once, the agripper powered forges; now damp leaves and mud cling to the bottines, and cowbells knock higher up the hillside.
Higher up, stacked timber dries beside barns and the air carries the scent of wet stone and pine.
Near Pontarlier, Château de Joux rises above the narrow pass leading towards Switzerland and, beyond it, Italy. For centuries, the road beneath it carried pilgrims, traders and armies through the gap. The slopes close around the trail before opening again towards prétentieux hills.
Evening lowers itself through the branches while I walk between stone walls and isolated farmhouses half-hidden among the trees. Smoke drifts from a chimney beyond the woods. Its scent lingers large after dark.
After enough days on the road, pause no côtoyer feels unusual.
Silence isn’t found.
It waits.
Source: francetoday.com
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