The paths that take me to the Way of Saint James
In 1995, I came up with a travel itinerary for a ten-day visit to the Digestive Endoscopy Service from Profesor Claude Leguory at Clinique de l’Alma, in Paris. I used Madrid as my gateway to Europe.
The rest of my trip was to be done by train, crossing the Eastern Pyrenees and stopping in Cahors, a small town in the Southwest of France, capital of Lot Department. The city is located along the margins of River Lot and is known for its 2000 years tradition in Malbec grapes cultivation and in red wine production and commercialization.
I grew up listening to stories of an ancestor that was born in Cahors and would be responsible for the French branch of my Family tree in Brazil: Antoine Rouffies Lacaze, a carpenter and retired soldier who landed in Rio de Janeiro from Bordeaux in 1819 with his wife and two children.
He dedicated himself to carpentry in Largo da Carioca’s workshop up to 1823, when he moved to Ouvidor Street, 60.
There was little information passed down by generations about the period he lived in Brazil. The death of his firstborn child, Antoine Lacaze, with only 29 years old in Cantagalo left the widow Agatha Jeker – a Swiss Young lady – and three very young children and also reduced the legacy of values of his French genealogy.
Antoine is said to have returned to France for good between 1829 and 1831 with his wife and son, born in Rio de Janeiro, driven by his emotions regarding his patriotism.
Being the first descendant to visit Cahors after five generations, he wasn’t expecting the events that turned a touristic visit into a landmark for the beginning of a new extremely interesting hobby that would, later on, take over my scarce free time.
The choice of a place for lunch took us to a restaurant suggestively called Amazônia Brasil, owned by Jacques and Rosy Mazet on the margins of Lot River. As a French tradition, the dishes of this exotic “Cuisine Basilo Quercynole” were prepared with particular diligence in terms of presentation and taste, all in a rich tropical atmosphere.
Son of the town’s former mayor and fluent in Portuguese, M. Mazet took an interest in the story behind my visit and suggested we went to Cahors City Hall in the following morning.
From the visit to Archíves Municípales, where microforms with old documents from churches are kept, I met M. Jacques Marquès, a local genealogist that would be in charge of my research in Lot Department for over fifteen years. I have received hundreds of documents from him, many from the 17th century.
Having preliminary surveys in hand, I traveled to Paris with the mission of carrying out my first field trip!
At “Service historique de La Défense” (SHD) and the “centre d'archives du ministère de la Défense et des forces armées françaises” in Château de Vincennes facilities, I went to the information desk on the second floor in possession of personal data of my grandfather from five generations back. After no more than ten minutes, the person in charge was back with four big sheets of paper in perfect state. That is when my new activity was about to begin: the discovery of the Military Service Record of a charismatic character from my family’s history.
More than a document of particular importance in my ancestor’s life, I had a relic in my hands - something which was remarkably meaningful in a certain period in the history of France.
Bonaparte’s military recruiting machine was based on revolutionary methods. It was improved over the years and was imposed via effective compelling methods, operating with great efficiency between 1811 and 1813. Due to his demand, the Senate decreed the creation of twenty-two new Infantry Regiments on January 12th, 1812; which received numbers from 135º to 156º.
These were preliminary measures started in 1810 that aimed at preparing the country for a “private” war between Napoleon’s army against Alexander I’s army, the Russian Emperor. Napoleon expected to destroy him in an important battle in the countryside of Russia, since none of his plans involved advancing widely in that country.
The youth call brought thousands and reached hundreds of families. Many of them celebrated their recruiting, while others lamented their “luck”.
There were also Bonapartist enthusiasts, who experienced a frustration feeling for not fitting the profile specified for the conscripts.
Antoine Rouffies Lacaze, 34 years old at the time, was a remarkable Bonapartist!
He presented himself voluntarily to replace a conscript from Limonges and was taken to the "Fourrier de Voitigeurs" non-commissioned officer, joining then, the 141º Frontline Infantry Regiment of the 3rd French Army Corps under the command of the legendary Marshal Ney.
In 1812 he was billeted in Paris. He followed the French troops battle preparation to invade Russia. He watched the return of his compatriots after the debacle in Moscow and the French efforts to rebuild its army. He was part of the contingent displaced to Germany in the Spring of 1813, so as to keep the Empire territory.
On May 2nd, 2913, the Grande Armée - under Napoleon Bonaparte - fought the first of three battles against the Prussian-Russian army under Wittgenstein and Blücher. The French reached the lowlands near the German villages of Rahna, Kaja, Großgörschen and Kleingörschen, 14 km from Lützen.
The publications consulted did not bring details on this confrontation that victimized 18.000 French in the battlefield.
It was in a secondhand bookshop in New York that I found a copy of the book “La Manoeuvre de LÜTZEN 1813”, by Colonel Lanrezac, Professor at “L´École Supérieure de Guerre”, edited in Paris, in 1904. I bought it for 950 dollars as it is the only publication describing the movement of the troops during the victorious Battle of Lutzen.
The 3rd Army Corps under Marshal Ney was caught by surprise with the advance of the allied army and was damaged right at the beginning of the combat. Napoleon rushed to send all the available units to help Ney, among them, the 6th Corps of Mormont and the 5th Corps of Lauriston and Leipzig. During the battle, General Drouot brought together a battery of 80 cannons and controlled them to the center of the allies.
The allies infantry regiments were completely destroyed by the massive French artillery and they withdrew themselves from the battlefield.
Injured in combat, Antoine Rouffies Lacaze was hospitalized for three months at Landau’s Military Hospital in Germany. The after-effects caused by his war injuries led him to retire. He went back to Cahors, far from his fellows’ defeat in the Battle of Leipzig, Napoleon’s retreat to Paris, the abdication of the throne and his exile to Island Elba.
I came back to Brazil excited about the news!
The idea of developing a genealogic research built up. The work should be as comprehensive as possible and would aim at clarifying the reasons that brought four Europeans from different nationalities to Brazil. These people who would later contribute to the constitution of my family roots. To do so, I had to start the difficult task of selecting and hiring an advisory team able to provide me with documents from cities in Brazil, France, Switzerland and Italy.
As three of these people arrived in Brazil between 1808 and 1819, I selected a great number of publications from two exciting periods in History: The Napoleonic and Joanino period (when Brazil was governed by John I and III).
The fourth and last person would be studied later, since my Italian great-grandfather Francesco Pappaterra arrived in Fortaleza only in the second half of the 19th century.
With an ongoing and well-planned strategy to collect information, I traveled back to Europe in the following year to drive over 600km by car from Zurich – going past the Swiss cities of Solothurn, Erschwil and Baselv - up to the small town of Lutzen. In this German town city center, I found the “Schloss Lützen Museum”, a place dedicated to the two battles that gave the location its name: the one in 1632, during the 30 Years’ war and the one in 1813, in which Antoine Rouffies Lacaze took part. The exhibit of two big models, each with over 5.000 tin soldier miniatures occupying a whole floor, reflects the importance German people give to the preservation of the history of their lands. I collected a substantial amount of publications in the museum and bookshops around the town to be translated and then be able to extract the excerpts that would be interesting to shape my character’s life.
The field work was to continue for a few weeks later, when I arrived in Portugal to visit Oeiras, in Lisbon, at the estuary of Tagus River, land of my great-great grandfather, José Francisco da Silva! Right after that, I landed in Naples. Having the Vesuvius as my landscape for a long part of the road, after four hours I arrived in Maratea, Lagonegro, a town and comune in Basilicata, in the province of Potenza. The region is bordered by the Tyrrhenian Sea, land of my great-grandfather, Francesco Pappaterra!
In Oeiras we had some difficulties collecting documents of our interest in the local files and the ones transferred to The National Archive of Torre do Tombo. One of them was because, in 1785, 17 children named José Francisco were born in this location! That’s how families would show reverence to King Joseph I (José Francisco Antonio Inácio Norberto Agostinho).
The research in the Italian town City Hall has exceeded my expectations since I was able to find information about two past generations and even meet some distant relatives that still lived in the surroundings.
Twenty-one years have gone by and, quite honestly, there was no file connected to this family history that wasn’t examined exhaustively and thoroughly both in Europe and Brazil. The three initial branches: French, Swiss and Portuguese had the reason for their immigration cleared out in great detail and are presented in a specific computer software.
The Italian branch is not completely clear, though. I’m still searching for new elements to consolidate the atmosphere lived by the young son of a herdsman, a smart boy with fine taste who left Italy in his twenties and went abroad until he arrived in the North of Brazil and settled down in the city of Guaratinguetá, in São Paulo.
In the meantime, a genealogical tree was built with over 1178 people!
In 2013, I went back to Cahors in order to find a new thread in my genealogical net. I visited the Chateau de Mercuès – a XVIII century castle that served as the home of the Counts and Bishops of Cahors for seven centuries - for the second time.
Located five kilometers away from the city, this construction - which dominates Lot River valley - was turned into a hotel and maintains the Malbec wine production. The wine is kept in oak barrels under the castle. Such a special place!
My intuition for family roots did not lead me anywhere where I could discover more things in that place.
The subject seemed to have drained.
Hoping to find the unknown, I parked my car in front of the train station and started wandering around the city.
As I walked down Gambetta Boulevard, I found Rue Portail au Vent, stopped in front of the place where my ancestor lived, revered him briefly and went back to the main part of the street. Further ahead, I went through the narrow medieval streets and saw Valentré Bridge.
Also known as the Devil’s Bridge, it has a legend regarding its construction that amuses me. It’s said that due to the slow progress in the construction of the bridge, the desperate architect sought for the Devil’s help to finish it. In exchange, he would have to give the Devil his soul. When the bridge was nearly finished, the architect played a trick on him. He called the Devil and told him to take water to the top of the central tower using a sieve, aiming at ruining the mortar that would allow him to put the last stone into the bridge. Being unable to do so, the Devil couldn’t finish his work and therefore the architect saved his soul. In revenge, the Devil removes a stone from the bridge every night, so that bricklayers have to replace it every day.
Being acknowledged as UNESCO’s World Heritage in 1998, the bridge took seventy years to be built in the XIV Century and today is the symbol of Cahors.
From there, I moved on to Saint Étienne Cathedral!
The XI Century facade, built according to the austere and heavy Romantic style was modified over the centuries. With the arrival of Gothic architecture, which dominated constructions of many European cathedrals in the XVIII century, adaptations were made in the facade, which turned Cahors Cathedral into a piece without the essential purity that featured each of these architectural styles. If on the one hand, the facade looks odd, on the other hand its interior is inspiring!
The Catholic Church had its headquarters transferred from Rome to Avignon, in France, from 1309 to 1377, electing seven French Popes. In 1316, a shoemaker’s son from Cahors, Jacques d´Euse, who was born in 1244 and studied Medicine in Montpellier and Law in Paris. He was elected Pope John XXII and completed a papacy of 18 years!
I had entered that Cathedral a dozen times! It was the first to have its restoration complete, a highly qualified work that has extraordinarily enriched masterpieces of medieval artists!
To my mind, what was about to happen to me on this particular visit was the result of the experience I gained in identifying insights regarding past evidence from the research of the three first migratory directions, such as:
- the survey carried out to find all the documents from the Family Rouffies, Rouffies Lacaze and Lacaze recorded on the church books of Lot. Antoine Rouffies Lacaze’s heroic military journey. The findings pointing Caberets as his hometown, Cahors as his eldest’s son - Antoine Lacaze - hometown, and Saint Cirq Lapopie as my distant French ancestor’s home.
- the discovery of my great-great-great Swiss grandmother – Agatha Jeker’s - baptism certificate in the Marriage Qualification process found in the files of the Metropolitan Curia of Rio de Janeiro. As her parents’ names were recognized and her hometown was defined as Erschwil, it was possible to identify a historical mistake made by Portuguese authorities. On the passenger’s list of the ship called Heureux Voyage, which docked in Baia da Guanabara coming from Port of Den Helder in Amsterdam, Netherlands, on December 17th, 1819, little Agatha’s name (a nine-year-old at the time) was written as “Barbe Jeker”. The correction counted on the collaboration of Simon Lutz, a Swiss researcher and writer who mentions this fact on his book ¨ERSCHWIL¨- published in 2012. That allowed me to rescue my great-great grandmother back to her Swiss immigration history in Nova Friburgo, Rio de Janeiro, 1819.
- the way my great-great grandfather’s name José Francisco da Silva, Colonel Engineer, was found on the list of graduate students from the first group of the Royal Military Academy, created in 1810 by John VI. His biographic data was discovered in the Historial Archive of the Brazilian Army. Considering that his achievements and decorations were listed, we were able to trace his steps back from the time he left Oeiras to his retirement in Sesmaria das Águas Quentes, in Cantagalo surroundings.
I had only taken a few pictures from the Gothic cloister built at the back of the cathedral and was returning by walking on the side paths when I noticed some people discreetly entering it. They carried huge backpacks and walked calmly towards a round table on the opposite side of the entrance door, on the side that let to the nave. They talked to two workers for some minutes and left without showing any evident gesture of respect or admiration for the interior beauty of the Cathedral.
I walked down the center aisle and met an ecclesiastical worker who explained that since Middle Ages Cahors has been closely connected to the most ancient pilgrimage route to Saint Jacques de Compostela: Via Podiensis!
Tradition has it that the apostle James (Saint Jacques in French, Yacob in Hebrew and Santiago in Spanish) went out to preach the words of Christ in Galicia, Spain, right after His death. In 44 d.C. , he went back to Jerusalem and got beheaded by King Herodes.
According to the legend, two of his disciples got his mortal remains and shipped them back to Spain. After seven days, the ship docked in Iria Flavia, the capital of Galicia back then, where he was buried.
The cemetery had been abandoned for nice centuries when a hermit called Pelayo saw a meteor shower and was guided by the lights until the apostle’s grave. The place then got known as Compostela, from the Latin Campus Stellae (field of stars).
The news traveled around the globe and a legion of pilgrims started leaving the furthest corners of Europe to visit the grave of the great apostle James!
Historically, the first French pilgrimage route up to his grave happened in 950. That is when Bishop Godescalc gathered a Christian group and left the French city of Le-Puy-em-Valay, walking past Cahors up to Roncesvalles, in the Western Pyrenees, heading to the way of Saint James.
I was rather thrilled when I realized that the subject that had been unknown to me, up to that moment, had a huge historical and cultural importance!
However, what does that finding mean and why is this perception important in my genealogical research? Why are the Middle-Age Christian stories and legends meaningful to the French branch of my research? What kind of finding could I come across from this line of thought? I never doubted these perceptions and this one seemed expressive enough, thus, worth an attempt!
When I left Saint Étienne de Cahors Cathedral in that afternoon, I had made up my mind: I would take the route to the Way of St. James.
