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  One of the villages was full of decaying houses. They had stripped walls, exposed rafters, and bedrooms sat on scaffolding. The last house boasted a new door and a new doorway, but everything else was rubble, as if the earth had flinched and levelled it. For a while I explored the debris, stepping over a drawer of baby’s clothes and a tractor buried in breezeblocks, until a chained Alsatian began barking at me and I turned away.

  Later that day I passed a wind farm. From far off the turbines resembled trees struck by lightning, with bleached and barkless trunks. Closer, I heard the air dragging through their blades like the cry of geese. As I approached, the sun emerged from between the clouds and angled shadows spun the snow. Watching the fields turning, I felt the sunlight cold against my skin and the jagged edges of the wind. So I stood there with hands on hips, the breath pouring stunned from my chest. Then I went south from the Marne and left the plains behind.

  That sense of wonder could not last: it soon gave way to drudgery. When I came to the hill country above the River Aube, I found a forest being cut down. My route followed a logging trail wide as a dual carriageway and the rutted remains of a footpath. The slopes were pitted with tree stumps, sawdust and woodpeel mixing in the sodden earth to make a black mud that swallowed the boots from my feet.

  Around teatime, as the sky grew heavy with snow, I passed an old hunting cabin that smelt of moss and turf, lumber and mould. Then I joined another logging trail, this one sinking towards the Val d’Absinthe.

  It was early evening when I reached the valley floor. The trail ended with a brick wall, worn away in parts. Beyond I could see sentry posts and chain-link fencing, barbed wire and concrete cellblocks, and beyond that a vast abbey, its buildings low, its windows barred. Although my map called this site L’Abbaye de Clairvaux, the last monks left two centuries ago. Clairvaux was now a prison.

  The abbey was once the leading religious house in France, but under Napoleon it was turned into a work camp for thousands of common-law criminals and a high-security jail for the country’s political prisoners. Since then its cells have hosted militant socialists, far-right radicals, anarchists, terrorists and revolutionaries. Which is why, in the second half of the nineteenth century, Clairvaux was home to Prince Peter Kropotkin.

  Kropotkin was born in Moscow in 1842, a minor member of the Rurik dynasty – the kings of medieval Rus. In his twenties he became an officer in the Imperial Army, carrying out surveys of Siberia and Manchuria, and exploring Scandinavia for the Russian Geographical Society. Aged thirty he declared himself an anarchist and joined a socialist literary society known as the Circle of Tchaikovsky. Two years later he was imprisoned for spreading revolutionary propaganda and locked in a fortress outside St Petersburg. He escaped and fled to Geneva, where he lived until 1881. Then he was expelled from Switzerland and shortly after, in France, was arrested for his membership of subversive organizations and sentenced to five years in Clairvaux.

  Kropotkin’s memoir, In Russian and French Prisons, gives a detailed account of these experiences. During his stay the former abbey contained between fourteen hundred and two thousand inmates. The main compound was crowded with metalworks manufacturing iron beds and iron furniture, looking glasses and picture frames, as well as workshops for weaving velvet, broadcloth and linen, gristmills for grinding grain, and yards for cutting limestone, sandstone and chalk. Four steam engines powered the site, running day and night, filling the valley with the noise of machinery and the smoke from a hundred chimneys. Kropotkin likened it to an industrial town.

  What’s remarkable about this description is how closely the inmates’ lives mimicked those of monks. Prisoners slept in dormitories, wore identical grey clothes, ate mostly bread and vegetables, and worked six days a week – with breaks for prayer and study. They even followed a rule of silence.

  All this had existed at Clairvaux from the start.

  The abbey was founded in 1115 by a young nobleman called Bernard, the star monk of the Cistercian Order. Bernard was famed for his fanatical austerity, and he shaped the abbey in his image. Set in a remote valley, surrounded by fen and forest, the architecture was stark, the discipline harsh, and the daily routine relentless. Monks woke at four, worked six or seven hours a day, spent the same amount of time in worship, and often went without food or sleep.

  Severe though it sounds, this mixture of contemplation and manual labour was popular. Before Bernard, the Cistercians were begging for alms, but by the end of his life they were the fastest-growing order in Europe. The order’s emphasis on self-sufficiency turned its brothers into craftsmen, livestock breeders and engineers, while their monasteries became thriving farms and factories. Some used waterwheels to crush wheat, sift flour, full wool, tan hides and cut wood, while others contained mines and smelting works, with blacksmiths to cast lead piping and lead roofing, or forge iron tools, iron fittings, kitchenware, horseshoes and ploughshares.

  For Bernard the work had a clear moral purpose. Manual labour kept the monks humble and the cloister cut off. And, by forsaking the world, the Cistercians set the clearest course for salvation.

  Peter Kropotkin believed the opposite was true. Deny freedom of choice and you do not encourage virtue, but destroy it. In a pamphlet titled Prisons and their Moral Influence on Prisoners, the prince wrote that ‘in prisons, as in monasteries, everything is done to shut down a man’s will’. His memoir went further, comparing the prisoners at Clairvaux to machines. It’s an acute metaphor for the circumscribed life at a nineteenth-century jail or a medieval monastery, with their industrial output and mechanical approach to morality, yet there is an important difference between the two institutions. True, by joining the Cistercians a monk was giving up his will, but unlike a prisoner, he had chosen to do so. Circling the prison walls that afternoon, I could not understand why anyone would make this choice. Nonetheless, as I discovered during my stay here, pilgrimage was part of the answer.

  Kropotkin was released from Clairvaux early, thanks in part to a young radical called Georges Clemenceau. He ended up living in the London suburb of Bromley, where he wrote a series of books making the scientific case for anarchism. Then, following the February Revolution of 1917, he returned to Russia. After forty years in exile he was greeted like a hero – flags flying, crowds cheering and a job offer as minister of education. However, believing a stateless society was at hand, he said no.

  A few months later the Bolsheviks seized power and Kropotkin’s life work was, in his own word, ‘buried’.

  It took half an hour to reach the prison gates. The facade was dressed stone, cut crudely like an army barracks or the stables of a stately home. There was no light from the windows of grey glass, but a house on the opposite side of the road gave off a warm glow. This was a hostel for the visiting families of prisoners. Inside I found a guestroom with low ceilings and exposed brickwork, where a woman sat watching television. She wore a glossy shell suit and her right leg was resting on a chair, the ankle bandaged.

  I put down my rucksack and explained why I was here. The woman made a face. ‘Jerusalem? Stop it! For how many days?’

  ‘Three weeks.’

  ‘On foot? All on foot?’

  ‘Canterbury, Calais, Arras, Reims, Châlons-en-Champagne—’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘Do you want to come with me?’

  She gestured her ankle. ‘Stop it!’

  Her name was Eva. She had bleached hair and bright make-up that made her whole face look puffy. When I asked about the injury, she explained that she was dancing, she was drinking, she was an idiot. Eva was here to see her son, Mathis. He was almost my age, she said, almost my height, and had been training as a mechanic until he was sent to Clairvaux. While Eva told me this, she held a hand to her mouth. At first I thought she was surprised by the coincidence, upset even, until I realized with a sting of embarrassment that she was smirking. I had arrived at the hostel dressed for skiing and claimed to be walking to Jerusalem. She was not hiding tears, bu
t laughter.

  ‘You want the nuns?’ Eva asked, lifting herself from the sofa with a crutch. ‘Next door. They live next door.’ She removed a pack of cigarettes from her bag. ‘Just to smoke they make me go outside. Like a prison. Every time I want a cigarette: Outside Eva. Go outside!’

  The nuns were waiting for me in the kitchen, a cramped room with a wood-burning cooker taking up most of the space. They were both small, both plump, and both generous to the point of recklessness. They reminded me of doves, feathered in grey wool and white blouses, fluttering round the room and cooing at one another.

  Sr Marie-Bertille was in her seventies, with fluffy hair and a pointed mouth. She had been in charge of the guesthouse for twenty-eight years. ‘We’ve never had a pilgrim in winter,’ she said, removing jam jars and biscuit tins from the cupboards.

  ‘There was one,’ said Sr Anne-Christine, who was warming a pan of milk on the hotplate. She was younger, gentler, and when she spoke she slowed her sentences as if talking to a toddler. ‘Last year. Or the year before. In November.’

  ‘I remember!’ said Sr Marie-Bertille. ‘He was following Joan of Arc through France.’

  ‘Joan of Arc?’ I asked.

  Sr Marie-Bertille nodded. ‘She came here. Dressed as a man.’

  ‘She stopped at the abbey on her way to meet the king,’ said Sr Anne-Christine.

  ‘But,’ Sr Marie-Bertille continued, now emptying plates from a cupboard, ‘I think our pilgrim was mad.’

  ‘They called La Pucelle mad too,’ said Sr Anne-Christine.

  I asked if any other famous pilgrims had visited the abbey.

  ‘Everyone came to Clairvaux,’ said Sr Anne-Christine. ‘Popes, princes, saints.’

  ‘They never wanted to leave,’ said Sr Marie-Bertille, now removing apples and oranges from the fruit bowl. ‘They came here to die.’

  At last Sr Marie-Bertille found what she was looking for: a tin with a picture of a lemon tree on the outside and, on the inside, a lemon cake wrapped in parchment paper. She cut three slices of cake, Sr Anne-Christine mixed three mugs of cocoa, and then we sat together at the kitchen table. However, the cooker’s fire must have gone out, because the milk was barely heated and chocolate powder clumped on the surface. Sr Marie-Bertille wailed at each lukewarm sip, until Sr Anne-Christine bundled the mugs into the microwave, perching on the edge of her seat as she waited for the chime.

  ‘Is it difficult running the guesthouse?’ I asked when the cocoa was ready.

  ‘We try to welcome everybody,’ said Sr Anne-Christine. ‘Also, we try to keep a Christian house. Sometimes, to have both, it’s very difficult.’

  ‘We are always full at the weekends,’ said Sr Marie-Bertille. ‘Friday to Monday, no space anywhere. Children on the beds, children on the sofas, I open a drawer and – my goodness! – more children.’

  ‘Sometimes our guests are angry. Sometimes they argue, or they ask for too much.’

  ‘This weekend the families came from Tunisia. All afternoon their mothers were cooking in the kitchen, and then they laid down blankets and sat on the floor, eating with their hands.’ Sr Marie-Bertille lifted a piece of lemon cake from her plate. ‘With their hands!’

  ‘Why don’t you live in a convent?’ I asked. ‘No guests, no prisoners.’

  Sr Anne-Christine shook her head. ‘When I have a holiday, I make a retreat. Five days, six days, and I am bored. It’s tranquil, yes, but my calling is here at Clairvaux.’

  ‘And the pilgrims!’ cried Sr Marie-Bertille. ‘Every summer more pilgrims! Last year seventy, seventy-five – from France, from Italy, Belgium, even Canada.’ They were groups and couples mostly, walking the Via Francigena in two-week sections, or four-week stretches, or walking the whole thing in a three-month slog.

  I asked the reason more people were going on pilgrimage.

  ‘Perhaps they want to meet strangers,’ said Sr Anne-Christine. ‘Or perhaps they want to be alone.’

  I tried again: ‘But fewer people go to church. Fewer people become priests or nuns.’

  Sr Marie-Bertille sealed the cake tin and put the jam jars back in the cupboard. ‘Pilgrim, monk, they are all the same. They want to learn what they believe.’

  They want to learn what they believe. That phrase stayed with me for the rest of the evening. As I sat with the nuns and listened to stories of pilgrims past. As I sat with Eva and listened to the weather forecast (roads, railway lines, schools – all closing down in the snow). I was still thinking about it as I stood by the door, watching fresh powder brush the prison walls with white. The idea made me feel vulnerable, as if testing some unspoken motive.

  Clairvaux’s entrance was lit from every angle. Leaving the hostel and approaching the abbey, I tried to imagine a route over the high walls, through the locked gates, into the great silence. And I tried to imagine the sounds beneath the silence: the hum of a generator, the shudder of plumbing, the insect buzz of a sodium lamp, and a prayer whispered along a corridor like sand on a flagstone floor. And the footsteps of monks, echoing round the courtyards. And the plainchant etched into the ancient air.

  Eight hundred and eighty-four years before me, one spring afternoon, an English pilgrim called Philip arrived at Clairvaux. He had recently left Lincolnshire, where he was a canon, to journey to Jerusalem. At this point the abbey was little more than a collection of wooden huts, and Philip planned to stop for just one night. Instead he abandoned his pilgrimage and joined the monks.

  To understand why, we need to go back another century.

  At the end of the first millennium, the last pagan power in central Europe – Hungary – converted to Christianity. In 1018 the country’s king, Stephen I, opened his borders to pilgrims. Around the same date the Balkans were conquered by Byzantine forces and, for the first time since the Roman Empire, there was an overland route to Jerusalem. Until this point only those who could afford to travel by boat were able to visit the Holy Land. Now people from any class could make the trip. Mass pilgrimages began leaving from France and Germany, journeying to Jerusalem on donkey, horseback and foot. By the end of the century entire armies were setting out for the city, and once the crusader states had been established, the pilgrim traffic was constant.

  Religious travel within Europe was also on the rise, thanks to the growing number of Benedictine monasteries. They provided the infrastructure for popular pilgrimage and encouraged the practice among the laity. Cluny, the most important Benedictine foundation, even used its network of religious houses to promote routes such as the Camino de Santiago.

  These two callings still resembled each other. Before leaving home medieval pilgrims would prostrate themselves at the altar of their church, lying face down in the exact pose that a novice adopts when taking his or her vows. While on the road every hour was spent in walking or worship. They kept to the liturgical timetable, owned only what they could carry, and gave up all domestic responsibility. Obedience, poverty, and chastity.

  Bernard of Clairvaux claimed that monastic life was also a pilgrimage. Even though a monk’s body remained in one place, he travelled with his heart. And a monastery was a prison with open doors, he wrote, where the brothers were held by their love of God.

  Penance was what linked all this together. Cluniac monasteries encouraged lay pilgrimage by emphasizing the penitential rewards of a trip to Santiago or Rome. Cistercian monasteries went one better, insisting that life in the cloister brought the best chance of salvation. However, facing the abbey entrance that evening, I struggled to imagine the savage sense of guilt that drew medieval monks to this place. Even if pilgrimage and monastic life were two expressions of the same impulse, as Sr Marie-Bertille claimed, I was no closer to understanding that impulse. Instead I was standing before a locked gate, shivering and confused in the winter dark. So I turned indoors, said goodnight to Eva and went upstairs to bed.

  My room was on the second floor, high enough to see over the prison walls. A prayer card had been placed on the pillow, with an image of Ber
nard kneeling beneath the Virgin Mary. Standing by the window, I watched snowflakes drifting onto the prison’s watchtowers and cellblocks, onto the church, chapter house and cloister. The flakes twinkled as they fell, yellow and red, copper and brass.

  After Philip cut short his pilgrimage, Bernard sent a letter to the Bishop of Lincoln explaining what had happened. He joked that the canon reached his destination sooner than expected: ‘He has entered into the Holy City [. . .] This is Jerusalem.’

  The abbot’s argument was borrowed from St Augustine, who was in two minds about pilgrimage. On the one hand, Augustine understood life as a spiritual voyage. His Confessions is filled with images of exile and homecoming, while City of God argues that man is a stranger in this world, finding rest only when he returns to heaven. On the other hand, Augustine believed that we approach the divine with our hearts rather than our feet. Worship, not wandering, brings us closer to God.

  At Clairvaux every moment was spent in worship. Not just the time in church, or at study and prayer, but the long hours of chopping wood, tilling fields, cleaning, mending and building. Even the monks’ austerity was a form of devotion, channelling their desires towards the divine. Bernard once wrote that, through constant discipline, he had freed his soul – liberavi animam meam – but it was the liberty of surrender rather than strength.

  For Peter Kropotkin, to efface the will was to bind a man. For Bernard it broke the chains. He taught that a monk could see the City of God without ever leaving the cloister: This is Jerusalem. Which is why Dante chose the abbot as his final guide in The Divine Comedy, leading the pilgrim poet through the highest realms of heaven. And why, on coming to Clairvaux, young Philip never went anywhere else again.