Paris to the Pyrenees: A Skeptic Pilgrim Walks the Way of Saint James by David Downie Page A

her. Go ahead and flunk me, go ahead and—
    “Wake up,” Alison whispered, nudging me. “It’s dinnertime. They’re waiting downstairs.”
    GETTING TO KNOW YOU
    In France, a chambre d’hôtes is what we’d call a B&B. When the establishment also serves dinner, table d’hôtes is tacked on. We no longer have an equivalent in America or England. Our hostelries and inns of old must have been something like a chambre d’hôtes-table d’hôtes —unpretentious hospitality in the family home, with everyone around the table. It’s literally potluck: you never know who you’re going to meet and what you’re going to eat.
    We’d been promised a mixed salad, pork roast, and homemade fruit pie. Philippe and Armelle unexpectedly eclipsed themselves. There wasn’t room at the dining table and, more urgently, four-month-old Victor cried for his supper.
    “Victory,” Philippe joked, coin purses of fatigue under his eyes.
    The company was mixed—a global mix. It included an outspoken Swiss couple employed in high tech and their trio of lively children, and a diminutive but talkative French computer scientist, his large, trumpet-throated Taiwanese wife, and their sonorous offspring. The Franco-Taiwanese were the proud owners of the SUV I’d seen earlier. All our fellow guests were smart and curious, the adults especially so once lubricated by Pinot Noir.
    Chit-chat swerved into serious talk of politics and religion—the twin taboos. The Swiss man said friends of his had walked the Compostela pilgrimage. “Not for religious reasons, but to see whether they should marry and have children. If they could get along while hiking for months, they could weather any storm.”
    “It is reportedly wearing,” the Swiss wife chimed in, sizing us up like specimens in a Petri dish. “Very wearing. What precisely are you expecting to get out of it?”
    Alison turned away, pouring wine for another guest. I was slightly taken aback by the woman’s mercantilist nature, but didn’t want to be impolite. I remembered a saying a pilgrim in Paris had taught me. It ran something like, “You need three weeks to get into a pilgrimage, the first for your legs, the second for your mind, the third for your spirit.” We’d only been hiking a few days. I’d already shared my innermost secrets with the two Philippes, and didn’t feel like being interrogated by this angular Swiss woman. “I’m not sure we’re expecting to get anything; we’re hoping to be pleasantly surprised,” I said at last, more defensively than I’d meant to. “Just having the time and space to think, and get back in shape, would be enough for me; so if anything else comes in the bargain, that’ll be great.”text-align: justify; } p.indentedo
    With dainty fingers flying, the French computer genius said he was happy to be a materialist, a scientist, and a believer in technology. “It’s the only thing we can truly hope will save us from the messes we’ve made.” He steered us away from Compostela and, his cheeks flushed with wine, gave us a disquisition on the labor issues behind recurrent French strikes. His wife from Taipei provided a potted history of Taiwan. It sounded strangely similar in points to the history of France, with tensions between First Nation activists and waves of mainland Chinese “invaders.” It was the Gauls and Romans, and the Franks and Germans, all over again, on the other side of the world. What terrified the Taiwanese nation, she said, was the prospect of rule from Beijing, which appeared to be increasingly the de facto reality.
    Eventually, when our fellow diners had established their intellectual credentials and sent the children to play in the living room, they turned to us again. Their vigorous curiosity could not be ignored. We contributed a few anodyne anecdotes about freelance life in Paris, and ran through our maverick hiking itinerary, which threw all of them off course, and reignited the question of religion and science. It