MY MEMORY of religious processions from childhood is of ragged, windswept affairs. Mournful marches through shuttered Sunday streets, mumbled prayers, a huddled, introverted crowd, rain. So when I come across one in Paris, I am frankly surprised.
Despite the preponderance of glorious church architecture, I think of Paris as a determinedly secular city. But every Good Friday, the Way of the Cross is re-enacted on the Rue Mouffetard in the heart of the Latin Quarter.
Cobbled and narrow, the Rue Mouffetard winds its way gently up to Place du Panthéon. It was once the main route into Lutece, as Paris was called in Roman times. The Way of the Cross starts at the parish church of Saint-Medard, at the bottom of the street. Ordinary people carry the plain wooden cross for a stage of the hour-long journey. The cross-carriers – there are always two – are drawn from the crowd and come in all shapes. There’s the portly balding man with bum-bag and cycling helmet dangling from his waist, the slight teenage girl with glasses and skin that seems too pale for the blazing sun, a South American Indian in jeans, rumpled shirt and flip-flops.
Halting at the many intersections on Rue Mouffetard – the Latin quarter is a warren of small streets – the priest reads excerpts from the Passion followed by a meditation, lamenting the secularisation of 21st-century society. Never more evident than on this street, which boasts dozens of small restaurants offering tourist “formules” – three-course dinners for €10 – souvenir shops, fruit and cheese stalls, and little boutiques, their goods and wares spilling on to the kerb in racks and baskets.
Happy hour specials abound, the wafting smells of take-away food come in waves as the pilgrims stop for the third station – Jesus falls for the first time. As well as being a tourist haunt, the street is within spitting distance of the Sorbonne. An American student, fresh from the launderette, with his canvas sack of clothes, strays into the middle of the crowd unwittingly and stops to stare at the spectacle, bemused. Like him, this is how I came across the Chemin de Croix – the only difference is that as he lumbers off, I decide to join.
Unlike the straggly processions of my youth, the Paris version seems stylish and highly organised, an event. Discreet marshals and young men in T-shirts carry amplification units on their backs on rucksack frames so that the faithful at the back of the hundreds-strong crowd can hear the proceedings. The gendarmes, too, are in evidence. A policewoman on a bicycle blows her whistle fiercely as she goes ahead to clear the route.
The ever-moving singing and genuflecting procession has to battle against the blare of record shops or the Moroccan music from couscous establishments. A homeless man, who looks like he’s just woken up, shouts angrily as the crowd passes but my French isn’t up to translating, except to recognise that it’s derogatory. A boutique owner in floral print and leggings, behind dark shades, pouts in Gallic fashion and turns back into her shop. Creased old ladies, skin like walnuts, peer down from windows on the upper storeys. When Paris was Lutece, legions of Roman soldiers must have passed along this route while gimlet-eyed natives watched them like this, wary, doubting, unimpressed. Only a few coiffed Parisian matrons ignore the proceedings. They steer their shopping trolleys with the determination of rally-drivers, intent on getting to the épicerie before it closes. But even they are forced to creep along by the walls as the pilgrims fill the entire street.
Jesus is stripped of his clothes. The tenth station coincides with the picturesque Place de Contrescarpe, a Parisian square that comes straight from fiction with a fountain in the centre, cafes and bars leaning into it, marble tables and wicker chairs set out in adult play-pens on the pavement. Here the secular and the Christian worlds collide. Tourists snap vigorously or hold up camera phones almost in veneration as the pious drop to their knees. Diners pause in mid-bite of their croque- monsieurs as the procession snakes around the square, coming to a halt outside the Café Delmas, haunt of Ernest Hemingway. He lived just off the square on Rue Cardinal Lemoine (where Joyce finished Ulysses) and described the cafe as a cesspit. No cesspit now, the diners nurse glasses of red and smoke desultorily, as the faithful pass by.
As Rue Mouffetard runs into Rue Descartes (I think therefore I am), Jesus is nailed to the cross. Under fading wisteria, and some welcome shade from the blazing 24 degree heat, the destination is within sight. Saint Etienne de Mont is an exquisite Gothic church in the shadow of the giant dome of the Panthéon, perhaps the French republic’s most impressive secular monument. Here the great writers and philosophers, the heroes of revolutions are entombed.
The crowd presses into the pews for the 14th and final station – Jesus is put in the tomb. A young black woman standing in front of me suddenly folds and gracefully sinks, fainting in the humid press of the church. A group of friends and strangers forms a concerned tableau around her. They fan her vigorously with leaflets. Is it the heat, or has she been overcome by religious ecstasy like a fasting penitent of old? I feel the need for air myself and step out into the brash glare. My thoughts turn to Cafe Delmas and lunch.