Coat of Arms of the city:
St.-Jean-Pied-de-Port, France

Do cities and townships in the USA have coats of arms?  Some towns offer a “Welcome to…” sign at the main road ornamented with the brands or logos of the organizations that paid for the sign.

What about the organizations and grassroots groups that don’t waste their resources on brand marketing?  I wonder which groups will replace the Rotary Club and the Union Sisters?

What do the symbols on the shield for St. Jean Pied de Port mean?  You can pursue the information offered on French Wikipedia.

The category for municipal heraldry in the USA needs more writers to develop content.

Still photo from film La Guerre des Demoiselles, directed by Jacques Nichet.
Image © Cinémathèque de Toulouse.

Later, I researched the historical event and found this fascinating book:   Forest Rites : the War of the Demoiselles in Nineteenth-century France by Peter Sahlins. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts,  1994.

Quotes from the book follow:

“Nineteenth-century peasantry in the Pyrenees. Certainly there are linguistic affiliations: sylva, for example, was the term used in the eastern Languedoc, as in medieval Europe, to designate the totality of forest lands, including brush and pastures.”

“But there is little explicit evidence to make claims about the symbolic meanings of the forest in local peasant culture, especially the identity of the forest as feminine. After all, the forest could be considered a male space, insofar as it was primarily men’s responsibility to gather firewood and building materials from the forest. Moreover, many of the supernatural creatures who inhabited the forest had masculine characteristics, not to mention the phallic possibilities of trees. “

“Yet the peasantry’s modes of exploiting the forests, their material techniques adapted to the harsh mountain environment, were clearly identified with a female space and as women’s work, for the male peasants “gardened” the forest. To the forest administration, this had the appearance of disorder and chaos. But to the peasantry, the forest was exploited in a mode that matched its material and symbolic characteristics: vitalistic, disorderly, and feminine.”

“The forests provided the food, wood, and timber essential to a peasant’s livelihood; they protected villages from rockslides and floods; they provided a source of cash income; and they gave protection, sites of refuge from the law. Forests were also inherently destructive.  The fact that women in the Pyrenees could inherit property and act as household heads in the public domain led to a certain notoriety not unlike that of the Demimonde. “

“The first reports of peasant men “armed and disguised as women” in the royal forests of Saint-Lary were near the district called the Castillonnais, several municipal pasture animals in the royal forests, against the restrictions on pasture animals in the royal forests.”

“But certain peasants of those same communes took matters into their own hands, chasing the royal charcoal-makers from the forests. By the last week in May, bands of men in the forest appeared regularly in their distinctive dress, cutting wood in prohibited areas and freely pasturing their herds of sheep without regard for the restrictions.  Men ‘entirely disguised as women,’ gathering to the sound of a seashell [conch shell], chased several forest guards from their houses with guns.  At Illartein, during the night of 27 June, and at Bordes, during the night of  [omission in the original 19th c. text], peasant rioters presented themselves as Demoiselles to the village innkeepers, warning them not to take in guards.”

In 1983, a film by director Jacques Nichet captures the rebellion of Pyrenees men and women in La Guerre des demoiselles shown in 2011 in a cultural Festival of Resistance.

Horse heads drawn on cave ceilings and walls by unknown human hands. These images are featured in Cave of Forgotten Dreams.

The Ariege region of the Pyrenees is riddled with caves.  Presumably many of them contain artifacts, fragments and possibly, paintings.

Nature journal reports the 1933 discovery of a magnificent horse drawn and colored on a cave wall.  ”The cave, to be known as La Grotte de la Bastide, is situated near the village of La Bastide, Hautes Pyrenees.”

During the Spring of 2013, the paleolithic paintings in caves at Niaux, France are the subject of a British Museum exhibition.  Niaux cave is south of Foix.  I walked through that region, visited a rustic museum near Mas d’Anzil containing tools and treasure of our human ancestors millennia ago.

Can’t make it to London for the exhibition?  Werner Herzog’s film Cave of Forgotten Dreams explores the brilliant paintings in caves at Chauvet  and other sites.  Archeology published this interview with Herzog when Cave of Forgotten Dreams was released in 2011.

Kiosk at Barbazan Spa.

Since the dawn of European tourism, the lure of enjoying spa waters at Cauterets, Barbazan and other Pyrenees mountain towns attracted visitors from Paris and beyond.

Bagneres-de-Bigorre at the base of Pic-du-Midi-de-Bigorre.

Bagnères-de-Bigorre, was made famous by Victorian travelers in search of diversion, healing waters and the fresh air cure. As I walked east across France, I saw in the distance, gleaming in the sunlight, the snow-capped mountain, one of the highest in the Pyrenees at 2,872 meters and the site of a world-reknown observatory.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the population of Bagnères-de-Bigorre was about 12,000 according to Cooks’ 1912 travel guide.  Before ski holidays were popular making it a year-round destination, the town swelled during the warm months with over 30,000 annual visitors in search of mountain hikes, gambling, spa cures and social interaction.

The curative waters drew healthy and sick visitors.  Cooks’ travel guide reports that the climate of Bagneres-de-Bigorre  is:  ”Mild and humid, invigorating owing to the high elevations.”  Other notes in the guide:  ”Ten bathing establishments.  Casino, parks, many hotels.  Tour operators offering excursions to Valley of Gripp, Valley Campan, and Pic-du-Midi-de-Bigorre“, then as now, the highest meteorological station in Europe.

A century ago, the climb up the Pic-du-Midi-de-Bigorre consumed the better part of two days, with horses and guides required.  Now, you hik or drive a car to a mid-point, then board a funicular that ascends the peak.

Gout, rheumatism and chronic disease, such as eczema and syphilis  drew people to towns like Cauterets, Eaux-Bonnes, Eaux-Chaudes, Luz-Saint-Sauveur and Bagnères-de-Bigorre  which nowadays offer blissful spa retreats.  Is it a surprise that Lourdes wanted its share of the money tourists spend?

Who is to say what Bernadette saw or thought she saw? Who can comment on the intentions of the pilgrims who took the hope cure at these shrines?  Surely the water and fresh air were beneficial.  Perhaps the sense of purpose and community encouraged the chronically ill to carry on. Undoubtedly Bernadette had a tough life and shed many tears.

E. M. Cioran, the Romanian-born French philosopher, writes in Tears and Saints, “The church was wrong to canonize so few women saints. Its misogyny and stinginess made me want to be more generous.  Any woman who sheds tears for love in loneliness is a saint.  The Church has never understood that saintly women are made of God’s tears.”  [Univ. Chicago Press, 1995, page 49].

Lourdes enjoyed rapid ascent of prosperity with the help of the enthusiastic journalist Henri Lasserre who in 1869 produced “Notre-Dame de Lourdes,” described by a reliable 21^st century Oxford historian as “the most romantic of stories.” [Lourdes, Body and Spirit in the Secular Age, Ruth Harris, Viking, 1999, p. 19].  The bishop overseeing the diocese steadfastly steered the religious political machine.

Meanwhile the nearby pilgrimage town Lestelle-Bettharam with its own grotto where apparitions of a heavenly woman had been seen by an adolescent girl long before Bernadette’s experiences, fell on hard times. There were no tourists in Lestelle-Bettharam when I arrived on foot in the rain and  sheltered at the Hotel de Touristes.  There was no line of waiting visitors for the local tourist attraction, a little train that chugs through the Bettharam cave.  The shrine and monastery were locked.

Brading, D.A. (2001).  Mexican Phoenix, Our Lady of Guadaloupe.  Cambridge:Cambridge U. Press. p. 36.

Field of Harvested Corn Stalks and Pyrénées Mts.
© L Peat O’Neil, 2000

The day’s route meandered through small villages and along corn fields.  At one hamlet on the east side of L’Adour River, not far from Vielle-Adour,  a woman tending her roses suggested I ask a neighbor two houses over to open the church for me.  The guardian of the church seemed a bit surprised.  Was I the first pilgrim-tourist to come this way on foot?  She fetched a classic iron key the size of a man’s shoe from a hook in the hallway of the family farmhouse.

We walked a few meters to the old church. A wooden Baptismal with a stone basin caught my eye.  The freestanding cabinet was circular with simple carving, sealed with its own small key.  Most of the building was in decay, with peeling paint and  warped marquetry.  It was cracking apart, like many rural churches with no congregations.  I followed her back to the farm and chatted briefly.  The husband had come in from the barn by then.  He was lean and bright eyed as all the farmers I met in the region.  They work every day and eat exceptionally well.

Small aircraft droned overhead occasionally, like the flyover sight-seers in the Grand Canyon.  Golden light in the late afternoon mandated that I stop to paint a bucolic scene — cornfields after harvest with stalks jutting at angles from the russet brown earth.  A little animal came close while I painted.  A field cat or a wild creature cat-sized crept out of the broken rows of corn stalks surprised by the silent human sitting on the dirt.

A pair of shoes. Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890)
Paris, 1886, canvas 37.5 x 45 cm
© Vincent van Gogh Foundation

Colors of Catalonia by Virginie Raguenaud

While I stayed in Ceret after my trek across France, I sketched near a group of visitors from California who painted en plain air all day, then ate and drank through the star-lit evenings.  My memorable visit was during early October after most of the vacationing European families had gone back home and the climate cooled to a shirt-sleeve degree.

Resources:

Ceret Tourism Office

The Colors of Catalonia — about the artists who lived and worked in Ceret and nearby seaside communities.

This artist based in Ceret offers classes.

Logo of the Fédération Française Randonnée Pédestre

Topographic maps and guides for walking in France are available at the online store run by the French Association for Hikers — Fédération Française de la Randonnée Pédestre.  The search function enables you to look by region, départment (regions in France) and by other parameters.

Pyrénées-Atlantiques  - Western region towards Atlantic Ocean

Hautes-Pyrénées - High Pyrénées in the central mountains

Pyrénées- Orientales - Eastern region near the Mediterranean Sea

Read more about the Pyrénées Mountains at http://www.PyreneesPilgrimage.com

Before investing in a set of topographic maps, plan a route so you can buy just the maps you need for the walk.  Further planning involves deciding the realistic distance you can cover in a day, increasing gradually from a gentle 15 kms (9.3 miles) per day up to perhaps 25 (15.5 miles) or 30 kms (18.6 miles)per day.

Research lodging options and locations where you plan to rest or explore local culture and archeology.  Explore side-trips by bus or rental car if you feel like taking a day or two away from the grind.  Although my experience was that once you leave the walking path for more than a day or two, it can be mentally difficult to return to the same level of energy and enthusiasm. This information hub will be helpful to anyone planning a journey on the Camino de Santiago de Compostello.

Road map of Western Pyrénées region.

If you plan to rent a GPS tool and service provider during your walking journey, examine the services closely.

Will content be in your language?  Are there extra changes for certain features or locations?