Not far from Paris, there’s a great place to monkey around.
I AM NO LOVER OF FORESTS, THE BIRCH MAZES OF THE Adirondacks, the hideous brush-choked ravines of the Cascades, the gauntlet of squat taiga enfilading the Alaska Highway—such woods have always seemed to me landscapes of gloom, brewed up by Darwin’s mutative riot at its most careless. Even the open lodgepole and ponderosa stands of my boyhood Colorado served only as glades of passage, gateways to the bursting promise that timberline laid bare.
But Fontainebleau is a forest I can love. Thirty miles southeast of Paris, bisected by the roaring Autoroute du Soleil, Bleau—as the climbers call it—should not be confused with wilderness. From about 1130 to 1840, the forest was the hunting ground for the rulers of France. The palace of Fontainebleau, exceeded in magnificence only by Versailles, served for centuries as the swankiest hunting lodge in the world; thus the 62,000 acres of surrounding woods are crisscrossed with hand-cobbled carriage roads that meet in puzzling carrefours in the middle of nowhere.
Despite its name—an antique contraction of fontaine de belle eau—the forest is all but waterless, a desert out of which pines, oaks, beeches, and wild cherry trees somehow connive to spring. Aeons flooded the plain with limestone; millennial rains wore this softer stuff away, leaving woods strewn with grotesque sandstone monuments up to 50 feet high. The homely taxonomy of English calls such an assemblage a “boulder pile”; in French, it forms a chaos.
During the last hundred years, many of the best mountaineers in the world, from Pierre Allan to Guido Magnone to Catherine Destivelle, found in Bleau a nursery for their youth and a Sorbonne for their maturity. Today Parisian office workers routinely shut off their word processors at 5:30 and careen down the autoroute for an evening’s sport at Bleau. No major city in the world has a more genial rock garden so close at hand.
On my last visit to Fontainebleau I discovered the ideal way to apprehend the place. Shunning the thronged cafés that edge toward the palace, I alighted in the one-street town of Barbizon, at the Hôtellerie du Bas-Bréau [formerly the Hôtel Siron]. The very same inn had, in the 19th century, sheltered the salon of a lively gang of painters who trooped daily into the forest, armed with canvas and easel.
Most people understand the Bleau’s sandstone is unique and doesn’t need any manipulation. You’ll find big slopes, tiny edges, soft pockets—any kind of hold you could imagine, with a very pleasant feel. When you climb at Fontainebleau you rarely rip up your fingertips, but after three or four days your skin is as pink and soft as a baby’s, so worn that you cannot touch anything.
—Baptiste Briand, “The Magic Forest,” Climbing
No group of artists has fallen into a moldier neglect than the Barbizon School: Corot, Millet, Theodore Rousseau, and their lesser-known cronies. Often they are damned with the faint praise of serving as “precursors to the Impressionists.” To my mind, however, the savage woodland epiphanies of Corot are far more powerful than Seurat’s picnics. Sleeping at the Bas-Bréu, visiting the small museums housed in the ateliers of Millet and Rousseau, venturing into the forest, I began to see Fontainebleau through the painters’ eyes, to recover the revolutionary fervor with which their landscapes teem.
These were the first Europeans who dared to paint for nature’s sake, rather than as a backdrop for mythology or history. Trees, rocks, light, and shade—these made as noble a subject as the martyrdoms of saints, declared Rousseau. The Barbizon paintings seize upon the disorder of nature: ancient oaks are tortured by the twisting agonies of arboreal thirst; even a restful clearing brims with fathomless mysteries. So dark are their canvasses that the artists’ detractors accused them of painting with prune juice.
Yet what a raucous, hedonistic band the Barbizon School was! Coyly, the painters posted a sign in the salon declaring, “Under pain of fine, visitors are forbidden to excite the artists.” Yet by moonlight, they marched with their admirers into the forest to the tread of trumpets, built campfires in caves, drank flagons of wine, and made love all night. Their number included Lazare Bruandet, gentle as a lamb while he painted but a great brawler when drunk, who accosted strangers at the Siron and once threw his wife out the window; Stamati Bulgari, the eccentric military hero who held a parasol while he painted; and Rousseau, the nervous insomniac, whose passion for the forest amounted to a private religion. When King Louis Philippe ordered 15 million pines, not native to Fontainebleau, to be planted there in regimental rows, Rousseau organized expeditions into the woods to tear the trees up by the roots.
Steeped in these 19th-century glimmerings, I set out into the woods each day on my own excursions. In my pack I stuffed a loaf of hearty bread, cheese, and a bottle of wine. For many a lazy hour I followed the blue dots of the old Denecourt trails, named after Claude-François Denecourt, who had been a soldier under Napoleon before he settled near Fontainebleau in 1832 and set out to handcraft sentiers that eschewed the rectangular logic of the king’s roads in favor of winding tours.
Denecourt’s paths seek out every chaos in the forest: they deliberately scuttle through natural tunnels, or corkscrew around a handsome boulder, or linger on a ledge with a view of acres and acres of sand. Coming upon caves in which outlaws and hermits and society’s castoffs once lived, I recaptured the medieval fear of the forest as a dangerous, alien place.
Every day I chose a bouldering circuit, Bleau’s specialty. Each circuit contains a numbered sequence of boulder problems, as many as 70 or 80, that weave in and out of a particular chaos. The rocks are neatly painted with tiny arrows, numbers, and parenthesized dots indicating a jump. Color-coordinated by difficulty, the circuits range from the yellow peu difficile to the fiendish black extrêmement difficile. In the United States, eco-vigilantes would have squelched such desecration of the scenery before it got started; at Fontainebleau, the circuits integrate the human and the natural, as do the formal gardens of the palace.
I had lost for good, I thought, the urge to boulder: at stateside crags, the scene reeks for me of chalk-dust and ego and painful calisthenics. But Bleau reawakened a sense of play. On a warm, windy day, with no one else in sight, I puttered through the 71 problems on the blue (difficile) circuit at Manoury: I tackled the Mustard Pot and the Camembert Traverse, was stumped by the Drunkard’s Arête and the Subway Handle, but managed Toto’s Slide.
Then I lounged on a sandstone table and opened a bottle of wine. Rousseau’s gnarled oaks swayed in the breeze, and Corot’s umbrageous glooms flickered on the periphery. As the Beaujolais worked its charm, I lapsed into wistfulness, ruing the eternal injustice of having been born too late.
David Roberts is the author of thirteen books including A Newer World: Kit Carson, John C. Frémont, and the Claiming of the American West, True Summit: What Really Happened on the Legendary Ascent of Annapurna, and Once They Moved Like the Wind: Cochise, Geronimo, and the Apache Wars. He was also responsible for the rediscovery of the lost Arctic classic In the Land of White Death, by Valerian Albanov, published in English for the first time in 2000.
For centuries the Fontainebleau forest had a very bad reputation. It was synonymous with darkness and fear, inhabited by demons, dwarves, and witches. Eventually, kings came to hunt in the forest, but people still avoided it, except the brigands, who would hide behind trees to ambush the unwary, cut their throats, and steal their money. At the beginning of the 19th century, entrepreneurs took interest in the rocks of the Fontainebleau woods, finding useful materials to pave muddy roads. The soft sandstone was easily cut, and many quarries were created. The woods lost their dark reputation. Writers, poets, and painters started to praise the Fontainebleau’s forest. Footpaths were created and more and more people walked the woods, sometimes sleeping under the oddly shaped rocks. At the start of this century the first serious scramblers approached the rocks, and Fontainebleau climbing was born.
—Baptiste Briand, “The Magic Forest,” Climbing