Editor Ben Conant recently returned from a trip to France to visit family and friends – and of course, take pictures.
Nestled deep in the heart of Burgundy’s wine country is Beaune. At its center, a quaint, cobblestone-paved village with a rich history. L’Hospice de Beaune is both a 1400s-era hospital, resplendent with period architecture and stunning artwork and the site of a charity wine auction that is legendary the world over.
I was lucky enough to spend five days in Beaune in a tiny top-floor apartment with slanted ceilings not meant for the over-six-foot-tall set. Stepping out onto the street, I dodged mopeds and shoppers beset with baguettes, the fresh loaves spilling out of their wheeled, canvas-and-nylon shopping bags, as I made my way to the boulangerie for a breakfast of pain au chocolat, croissants aux amandes and quiche.
After traversing a ring of urban sprawl (‘McDonald’s never goes out of fashion,’ the signs read), the vineyards begin. Row upon countless rows of vines, roots buried deep in the mud and clay left behind when the Alps burst up and moved the Mediterranean Sea. The vineyards had an eerie gloom about them during my visit, with late-fall fog hanging heavy over the Cote D’Or region, mixing with the smoke that rose from bonfires where workers in mud-streaked overalls burned cast-off vine clippings.
Each vineyard was walled in, with a single tree at the center, attracting flocks of birds that danced in unison, darting up and down en masse through the midday rain.
On the hillside, the golden slope that makes up the Cote D’Or, is my uncle Jon’s house. Jon and his wife Ann are winemakers, and thus their hospitality literally bubbled over as we visited for the holidays. Look out from the balcony and view the sea of vines that give the region its lifeblood.
At the bottom of the hill is Puligny, where Ann’s parents Monsieur and Madam Bavard live. The matriarch and patriarch welcomed us with open arms despite not speaking a word of English (my French sufficed – I wasn’t second place in the seventh-grade Grand Concours test at SMS for nothing). Try some charcuterie, try some vintage Puligny-Montrachet, try some marc and ratafia (fermented grapes, raisins and stems that create a sort of moonshine-wine) – the Bavards were the perfect French hosts.
After a few days drinking wine in castles, eating beef bourguignon and exploring caves at Le Bout Du Monde (“the end of the world”), we headed toward Paris, by way of Vezelay. We whipped the Peugeot through the countryside, winding our way up mountains, past rolling cow pastures and endless fields, until we reached the ancient hillside town of Vezelay.
A cat, dappled white and black and tan, greeted us as we summited the steep road to the abbey that makes Vezalay famous; we’d see this cat several more times, imagining it to be a reincarnated monk watching over the town.
The abbey atop the hill houses relics of Mary Magdalene; the church itself is a relic in its own right, with stone columns frescoed with images of demons and saints doing battle framing the rows of pews.
Vezelay was the starting point of several Crusades, and is still used as such today for those embarking on the well-known pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Spain.
Stepping into the church felt like a trip back in time, centuries ago, a feeling furthered when I took the dark stairs down to a subterranean chamber cut out of stone, where the relics sat behind bars.
Emerging from the grotto, I heard the cathedral come alive, buzzing with voices joined in unison, the low, harmonic drone of a Catholic mass, intoning Latin words that have reverberated in the stone for thousands of years.
I walked out back to the cemetery and stood under what appeared to be an ancient gallows, an iron beam hung between two gnarled trees. As I viewed the green, leafy vines that snaked their way up the tree trunks, I imagined their roots, fed by the blood of those deemed wicked 50 generations ago.
On the way to Paris, we were met with conflict of a more modern sort. France has been in the grips of protests by the “Gilets Jaune” or “Yellow Vests,” an ever-growing group that’s taken to the streets to protest President Emmanuel Macron’s policies. We knew that the protestors in their safety-yellow vests were fed up with the rising cost of living and had been sparked into action by a hike to the gas tax, which Macron imposed to fund France’s efforts to comply with the Paris Climate Accords. But when our car reached an intersection blocked off by the protesters, it was tough to understand exactly what they wanted. They had no signs, they weren’t asking for help, they weren’t making their case – they were simply stopping traffic. After about 15 minutes of idling, I found myself drifting to Macron’s corner.
All was forgiven when we reached the toll plazas just outside Paris. Here, the Yellow Vests had commandeered the toll booths and were waving motorists through for free.
The protests continued in Paris that weekend, but we were far removed from the tear gas and water cannons of the Champs Elysee. Instead, we stayed on tiny side street Rue Saintonge, taken over that weekend by a street market, vendors and shoppers haggling over African statues, Mason jars with embalmed reptiles, and vintage capelets.
The location – a Peterborough-turned-Parisian friend’s apartment – afforded us pedestrian access to many of Paris’s must-see locations. We took a moonlit stroll over the Seine, past the Cathedral Notre Dame, as the moon’s glow danced on the water and strands of electric lights sparkled in the night. The next day, immersion in art, via the Picasso museum and Centre Pompidou, home of a sprawling modern art collection.
With a head full-to-bursting with images and a heartful of emotion, the mist-shrouded Eiffel Tower looming in the distance, we hopped in an Uber, drove to Roissy Charles De Gaulle, and boarded a plane home, back to our granite roots, tendrils now extending out a little further than before.