The Pope in a paper hat

The Pope, before or after stopping off at Grisolles. I didn't take this picture.

So what was the Pope doing in Grisolles anyway? And why had he been locked up south of Paris?

I began wondering whether going round Grisolles had been a good idea. It was just a place on the way to other places and now here I was trying to fathom out a mystery I didn't know existed. But that is the peril and delight of riding a bike, that it gets you into mental and geographical corners you'd never suspected.

The one thing I'm sure of is that Popes have different names in different countries. The current chap is called something Latin in Italy. Here in France he's Benoît. In English-speaking countries he's Benedict. In Germany he must be even more interesting because suddenly the Germans have a pontiff with a regional accent, like a Pope from Chicago or Tyneside.

Anyway, Pie VII was Pius VII in English. He is the only Pope to have been crowned with a paper hat.

Pius had the bad luck to have his turn just as Napoléon was going round the world snaffling bits for France. One of those bits was northern Italy, including the Vatican. All the papal hardware was in Rome but the bishops didn't care to collect it and so they crowned Pius in Venice, wearing a papier-mâché tiara.

Napoléon was upset that the Pope wouldn't allow one of his relatives to divorce. He was even more upset that the Pope wouldn't agree to the French church's becoming independent. The Pope dug his heels in and Napoléon sent the army to winkle him out of bed. His Holiness got carted off to Fontainebleau, not a bad place to be prisoner because it was a royal château, and Napoléon went off to lose a war against the Russians.

The Pope stayed at Fontainebleau for a year and a half, never leaving his apartment, always addressing Napoléon as "my dear boy", which annoyed Bonaparte no end. The Russian defeat

Fontainebleau: if ever the president wants to lock me up here, I would put up little resistance. You know why it was built in the first place? To give the king and his friends a little pied-à-terre in the countryside to escape the pestilence and stinking streets of Paris.

Where the Pope stayed at Fontainebleau. He never left his apartment and always called Napoléon "my dear boy." The Emperor wasn't amused.

ended it all. Napoléon no longer had enough troops to occupy Rome, just as not having troops to occupy Louisianie led to French America being sold to the Americans, and he told the Pope to clear off and stop eating his food.

Why the Pope stopped at Grisolles and stayed with a Monsieur Maubisson, I don't know. I found out that Napoléon had stayed there, in the town anyway, six years earlier after going to sort out the Spanish. Maybe the two men exchanged addresses.

By the way, if you ever wonder why, taking backway trains from France to Spain, you have to change at the frontier, that's also Napoléon's doing. The Pyrenees are nature's way of discouraging the French and Spanish from bickering. Nevertheless they have done plenty of that over the years and so, when the Spanish built rail lines to meet French lines coming up the other side, they built them to a different width. International co-operation was all pretty good but the Spanish were darned if they were going to be invaded by train.

Funny the things you find out on a bike ride, isn't it?

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