the valley of the Ebro and Gaul. How great the division is only those
can believe who have seen with their own eyes the meadows and the deep
orchards of Bearn, and then, after a painful crossing of the hills,
have come upon the burnt deserts of Aragon. The road from the one to
the other, the administrative road which bound Spain to Gaul, which
connected Cæsaraugusta with Tolosa, that is, Saragossa with Toulouse,
was a Roman Highway, called "the High Pyrenean," the highest and most
central of the two main passes. It had, as I have said, Toulouse for
its northern terminus, Saragossa for its southern. It had for two
mountain towns, or depots, at the foot of either climb, Oloron, the
town of the Ilurones, on the north; on the south the Bishop's town of
Jaca. It had for its last outpost just before the last steep Urdos,
the Forum Ligneum, to the north; to the south a cluster of huts and
a station, whose Roman name has not come down to us, but which since
the barbarian invasions has been called "Canfranc." This great road,
like so many throughout the Empire, fell. You may yet trace its
structure in those places where it is not identical with the modern
way, but with the close of the Empire, and on nearly to our own time
its surface was left unrepaired. Armies used it, as they used all the
great Roman roads of the north and west, till the Twelfth Century. The
Merovingians crossed it in their raids to the Ebro; Charlemagne sent
men down it in the advance upon (and failure before) Saragossa--the
expedition whose retreat was clinched by the destruction of his
rearguard and the death of Roland in Roncesvalles. It was still a gate
for armies when the reconquest of Spain from the Mohammedan began.
Jaca was free before any other town of the Central North, Huesca fell
before the first Crusade was fought, Saragossa before the second.
Bearn, and indeed all Christendom, still used that high notch until
the new civilisation of the Middle Ages had set in with the Twelfth
Century, but from that beginning till our own time it was more and more
forgotten. Spain, reconquered, corresponded with Europe by the sea.
The two land roads that bound the Peninsula to Christendom ran round
either end of the Pyrenean Chain. The central pass was abandoned when
the great development of French roads, which was the work of Louis
XIV, was imitated--most imperfectly--by his grandson in Madrid, it
was the road by Burgos, Vittoria, and Bayonne that was renewed; the
commercial energy of the Catalans in the same generation opened the
Perthuis, broke into the Roussillon, and connected Barcelona with
Perpignan and with Narbonne. But Aragon, the pivot and centre of the
old Reconquest, Saragossa, the main town of the Roman communication
with the north, lay off the two tracks of travel, half forgot Europe
and by Europe were ill-remembered. It was Napoleon, or, to be more
accurate, the Revolutionary Crusade, which reopened the central pass,
and here, as in so many other places, began the return to Roman things.
While the armies of the Empire, with their train and their artillery,
were still tied to the sea road from the Roussillon, a small force
without guns passed up the old Roman road (now come to be called the
"Somport"), marched over its silent grasses, wading the Arroyos, the
bridges over which had long since fallen in, appeared suddenly before
Jaca, occupied that citadel, and pursued the way to Saragossa, there
to join the main army and to lay a siege memorable beyond all modern
sieges for an heroic defence. Buonaparte seized the advantage of that
passage. He desired a road over which artillery could go. It was one
of twenty which he so desired over the mountain ranges of Europe, and
which a full century has barely seen completed; for within four years
of his resolution his supremacy was broken at Leipsic and destroyed
at Waterloo. The Third Empire continued the tradition; the road was
carried up on the French side of the pass, but the universal power of
1808 was gone and the Spanish approach was neglected. It was not till
the other day, till our own generation, that the full work was done,
and that the great street from Toulouse to Saragossa right over the
hills was once more open to the full power of travel. Yet travel failed
it. In the meanwhile the railways had come; they had followed the coast
roads, and the main line from Madrid to Paris ran tortuously through
the mountains of Castile and turned twenty times in the labyrinth of
Basque Valleys, between Vittoria and Irun. Saragossa was still upon one
side; Aragon still remained remote; the new road was empty beneath the
cliffs of its great hills.
To all this exception in Europe I had grown so used that I took
pleasure, during each of my yearly passages over this road, in noting
its loneliness, and in considering how the noise of this chief
way between the south and the north had been silenced for so many
centuries. The absence of men and of public knowledge was a perpetual,
a renewed, and a permanent curiosity. There are many sites in Europe
once peopled now lonely, once famous and now ignored, but this place
seemed to be especially eccentric, and to have passed from something
which had long been like the Æmilian Way or the stages of the Rhone
Valley to something as untouched as the uplands of Cheviot or the moors
of the West Riding over Ribble and above Airedale--very lonely places.
This year I found that the last change had come. Far down the Gave
d'Aspe, in the gorge where Abdurrahman led the Mohammedan invasion
into Gaul, there came loud thunders, for all the world as though
it were really thundering on the gloomy shoulders of Anie, so many
thousand feet beyond the clouds. Then, as I neared the head of the vale
I saw Man at it. He was at it in swarms. He had dammed the torrent; he
had fixed great turbine tubes, and he had begun the Hole in the Hill.
For just the few miles of the ridge itself there was still silence--as
there is still silence above the Gothard on the high road--but up from
the Spanish valley, rolling up from it as it had rolled down the Val
d'Aspe, came again the human thunder, and when the road had fallen its
two thousand feet and touched the water of the River Aragon, there
again was Man in great numbers working like an ant, burrowing under
the terrible Garganta and determined upon his Hole in the Hill. The
two tunnels will meet when each has accomplished three or four miles,
and the work will be done. There will be a straight way from Paris to
Madrid; the Pyrenees will have lost their unbroken line; the Roman
scheme will have re-arisen; Saragossa will come forward again into the
list of great European cities, and people will hear of Aragon. I do not
know whether to be glad--seeing such proof that Europe always returns
to itself--or sorry.
ON TWO TOWNS
The wide countrysides of Europe sum themselves up in central cities:
municipalities inheriting from Rome. The lesser towns group round the
larger; the bishops of the lesser suffragan to metropolitan of the
greater cities, as it was fixed in the Roman order which Constantine
inherited from Diocletian and which everywhere stamps the West with the
framework of the Fourth Century. These great cities are not only the
heads and inspirers of their provinces, they are also the gathering
places of armies; the contrast and the fellowship between them is
especially seen when either is the capital of a wide plain below a
mountain range. Then each becomes the depot and the goal in turn of
invading forces, each stands for the national fortunes upon either side
of the passes. So, for the great Alps, you have Augsburg and Milan; so
for the Vosges, Strasburg and Nancy; so for the Pyrenees, Saragossa and
Toulouse.
No two cities in Europe are more representative of their provinces or
stand better for symbolising the nature of their land. From the towers
of each the long line of the Pyrenees may be traced, especially in
early autumn mornings when the sky is clear with the approaching cold
and when the first snow has fallen upon the summits. From Toulouse the
dark Northern escarpment runs along the southern horizon in a wall,
surprisingly level and seeming tiny in its long stretch or belt of
grey; from Saragossa, much further off and more rarely the white strips
and patches can be caught behind the nearer foothills, the whole in a
glare of sunlight full upon it, like a desert tilted up; you just see
them over dry, treeless plains, and immediately the sun rises they are
lost in the hot haze. The Pyrenees thus stand between the two cities
and belong to each, and the legends of the mountain regard now one,
now the other, or, as in the Song of Roland, both combined (for the
Horn of Roland as he died was heard southward in Saragossa, northward
in Toulouse), and the smoke of each may just be seen or guessed from
certain heights, from passes that look southward into Aragon or
northward into Aquitaine.
Alone of the central bishoprics of these hills they are united
by a road, and have so been united for two thousand years.
Characteristically, in the true spirit of the Pyrenees, there is but
that one great road between them. It takes men, and has taken them
since the legions made it, up by Huesca and Jaca and so over the
Summus Pyrenæus, the "Somsport," then down by the deep valley of Bearn
to Oloron, to Pau, to Tarbes, and down the river bank to Toulouse.
All the armies have taken it. Through this paved gap went the first
Frankish kings, still wild, wandering South for spoil, and through
it in a tide poured the Mohammedan host that so nearly seized upon
Europe. All such marchings brought up under the walls of one or other
of the cities: Saragossa for ever besieged from the North, Toulouse
beating off the raids from the South, fight similar wars. Each has
its river, and the river of each is the life of the two provinces on
either slope of the mountains; the Ebro of Aragon, the Garonne of
Aquitaine. Each has its port: the one Barcelona, the other Bordeaux;
and in each valley there is separation of thought and custom--something
like hostility--between the inland city and the commerce of the sea.
Each was for long the centre of a nation, each afforded the title of a
great house. Aragon was built up under its princes, from that remote
age when the chieftain of a few mountain clans began to fight his
way South against the infidels till the light grew strong upon the
Twelfth Century and Alphonso fixed himself and the Faith upon the Ebro.
Toulouse grew under its counts to be almost a nation, ruling everything
from the Cevennes to the Pyrenees, and making a rallying place,
schools, law courts, and an imperial middle for all the fields of the
Garonne.
So far the parallel between these twin cities holds; but the test of
any appreciation of them is contrast.
The landscape of Saragossa is a baked plain, ill-watered and reflecting
up to heaven the fierce sun of Spain like a plate of bronze. The
landscape of Toulouse is of fields and meadows with many trees. The
Ebro trickles under the great bridge of Saragossa for weeks together;
then perhaps dies altogether, becoming rather a stagnant pool or two
than a river; then, in spate, rises high and threatens the piles,
roaring against them, and suddenly sinks again. The Garonne runs in
a broad, even stream, shallow, but full and never lacking water; it
is already placid as it sweeps under the great bridge of Toulouse.
Saragossa became the capital of a true kingdom whose language,
traditions, and above all whose chivalrous aristocracy were its own.
Toulouse went under in the false adventure of the Albigensian schism.
Saragossa was Mohammedan, a sort of northern bastion of Islam, till
far into the development of the Middle Ages: it did not re-enter
Christendom till 1118. The First Crusade was long past, England was
all Norman, while yet this city was governed by Asiatic ideas in
contempt of Europe. Toulouse, always Christian, rose against the unity
of Christendom. Saragossa in those struggles got a great hero and his
legend, a man who fighting now for Islam and now for us built up an
epic, the Cid Campeador, the "Challenger." Toulouse has no heroes.
Saragossa became a pivot of steadfast faith, round which turned
and on which reposed the reconquest of Spain by men of our race.
Toulouse was--and to-day still is--perpetually seeking new things and
divergence in Europe: a sort of smouldering fire. To-day full of
denials of things sacred yesterday, dogma, the family, property, all
the foundations. Saragossa lies indifferent, ready to become (as it is
becoming) more wealthy and careless of these philosophical quarrels.
The great churches of the two towns are in violent contrast too. At
Toulouse these are all of one pattern and old. The place where St.
Saturninus, the evangelist of the city, died--the church of the "Toro,"
the Bull (for a bull dragged him to death through the streets of the
city)--is of small Roman brick, plain, steadfast. The vast cathedral
to which his body was translated is of that same brick, and all the
arches are Roman, round and small. The Dominican Church is the same; a
stranger sometimes takes one for the other. In Saragossa the cathedral
is stamped with the fervour of the reconquest. It is crammed with
detail and with infinite carving. It is very dark, high and silent, and
at the same time, with its wealth of creation and of figures, magical.
Toulouse has no monument of faith other than those similar early
simple and huge temples. Saragossa has the colour, the tinsel, and the
gorgeousness of the late Renaissance in the gilded Basilica of the
Pilar.
Religion, which is at once the maker and the expression of States,
differs utterly in mood between one city and the other. In Toulouse
there is war. The men who deny and the men who affirm are at it with
all the weapons of our time, as six hundred years ago they were at it
with swords. You buy a newspaper, and ten to one the leading article
will be an affirmation or a denial of the creed--signed by some famous
name. In Saragossa you may buy newspapers for a month and get nothing
but the common news, two days old. Mass is crammed at Toulouse, empty
in Saragossa. There are enemies of the Mass in power at Toulouse,
numerous, vigilant, convinced. In Saragossa a few eccentrics or none.
Toulouse would persecute one way or the other had it a power separate
from the State. Saragossa was always tolerant; of its few murders
one was the popular murder of an Inquisitor. There is something that
sleeps in Saragossa for all its liveliness and wealth and air. There is
something that wakes and prowls in Toulouse for all its ancient walls
and green things growing upon ruins as they grew in Rome.
These are the two cities as I know them. Often upon a height upon the
Pyrenees I have thought how one lay beneath me to the left, the other
to the right, the end of a chance journey. All human tracks from the
mountains seem to lead down like water-courses to one or the other
place, and travel flows of its own weight to the sunlit market-place of
Saragossa or to the Capitol of Toulouse from every saddle in the hills.
You may be in the Cerdagne (which is Catalan) or in Roncesvalles (which
is Basque), but if you are on foot and wish to go far the roads will
bring you insensibly to the great town on the Ebro; you may be as far
west as St. Jean-Pied-de-Port or as far east as Ax, but on the northern
slope insensibly you will be driven to Toulouse. The two cities are the
reservoirs of life on either slope of the hills, and each holds, as it
were, a number of threads, which are paths and roads radiating out to
the high crossings of the chain.
And, as I consider the two towns, whether near them as I lately was
or here at home, I find almost as great a pleasure in imagining their
future as in remembering their long past and the sharp picture of their
present time. The Provinces of Europe develop, but they do not change
their identity. If it be paradoxical to suggest a wealthy Saragossa and
a fanatical Toulouse, yet it is not out of keeping with the revolutions
of Europe. Saragossa is on the road to wealth in a country which is
rapidly accumulating; Toulouse is well on the road to fanaticism and
religious war. One can see Toulouse with great artists and fierce
rhetoric standing out against some reaction of thought in the Republic
or captured by the flame that has set fire to Lourdes; one can see
Saragossa dragged into the orbit of Barcelona, drifting with the rising
wealth of Mediterranean commerce, forgetting altars, and sharing the
mere opulence of the Catalans. Such thought leads one to fantastic
guesses; it is provoked by the modern character of these two great,
unwritten, ill-known Pyrenean towns in one of which the chief quarrel
of our time is so actively pursued, in the other of which lies all the
new promise of Spain. And that reminds me. Saragossa has no song of
its own; Toulouse has one called "If the Garonne had only wished, she
might."
So much for Saragossa and Toulouse.
THE JUDGMENT OF ROBESPIERRE
"It is of little profit," said Robespierre severely, "that we should
debate what may or may not come to pass in that time. You speak of more
than a hundred years, and of a season when the youngest child before us
shall have long been dead, and his child, too, perhaps be dead after
him; and for that matter, even if it profited us, it would not be to
the service of God, for we must say what is true and defend it. As for
the rest, no man is master of destiny."
He was about to make an allusion to the people of Epirus and to a
discovery of theirs which he had read in the classics upon this
subject, when St. Just interrupted, as was his way, with burning eyes
and a sort of high, rhetorical facility which gave all his young words
such amazing power. He was sitting in an attitude one might have
thought listless, so lightly did his delicate hand lean upon his knee,
save that all thought of carelessness left one when one watched the
intensity of his face. And he repeated a phrase which its rhythm has
made famous, "The things we have said will never be lost on earth."
It was in the weeks after Fleurus. Charlotte Robespierre, ill-tempered
and silent, sat like a sort of guardian of the room upon the little
sofa by the western wall of it, the darkest side. Couthon was there,
the cripple, his face permanently stretched by pain, and there also,
almost foreign--English or Italian one might have said from their
length--shone the delicate features of Fouché, his thin lips firm and
inevitably ironical.
Paris was glorious. There was a festivity in the sky of that July, a
cool air in the sunlit streets, and that sort of clear sound which
comes up from the gulfs of the narrow ways when Paris in summer is at
the full of its life. The sunlight upon the courtyard shone reflected
from the white walls of it into the darkness of the little room where
the friends sat talking together before they should go down to the
Parliament. In the shed outside was the noise of their host, the
carpenter, sawing. A very quiet and respectful young man, the son of
the house and secretary to Robespierre, ventured an opinion. He had
a wooden leg and his expression was not intelligent. When these two
generations of men had passed, he said, the Goddess Liberty would be
firm upon her throne. It would be the chief advantage of the passage
of time that men would forget all the old days of slavery, and that
the evil thing which the Revolution was occupied in destroying would
be remembered only as a sort of nightmare of humanity. The insolent
palaces which might remind men of their tyrants will have been pulled
down long ago, and their gew-gaws of pictures have been left to
moulder. He foresaw and was about to describe at some length the reign
of Virtue and Equality among men, when Robespierre interrupted him
severely in his high voice and bade him not to pirouette upon the stump
of his wooden leg, which wore the carpet of the Citizen his father, and
was, moreover, an ungainly gesture. He further told him with increased
severity that the arts in a State of free men would always be decently
cherished, for but a few weeks before he had been delighted to sit for
his portrait to M. Greuze.
There was a little silence following this reprimand.
"If it be of any moment to you," he continued, "I can, I think, tell
you some things certainly that society will hold. For they have
invariably accompanied liberty in her majestic march. Men will respect
the labour and the property of others, and the power of peace and war
will reside with the people. It is to this," he added earnestly, "that
I have given my chief efforts, and I believe I have placed it upon a
secure foundation. What I am most afraid of," he mused, "is the power
that may be put into the hands of representatives. But that again will
be tamed by long usage. I shall soon see to it that the places of
meeting are made largely public, and I have drafted a design whereby
it shall be death, or at least exile, to plan so much as a municipal
building for the meetings of municipal bodies unless the galleries
permit a full view of the debate, and accommodate a number of citizens
not less than five times the total number of the elected. It would
be better," he sighed in conclusion, "that a law should compel at
intervals great meetings in the open, and should punish by the loss of
civic power all those who did not attend, unless, indeed, they had been
given leave of absence by some magistrate."
St. Just was weary of the war, and asked him how long it would continue.
"It will continue," said Robespierre firmly, and in the tone of a man
who can speak more definitely of near things than of distant, "it will
continue until the winter at least, upon which occasion I design...."
At this point Charlotte, whose temper was not improved by such
discourses, abruptly left them. They heard the sharp hurrying of her
footsteps cross the flags of the courtyard; she was going up to her own
room overlooking the street. Fouché smiled.
"You smile, Fouché," said Robespierre, displaying very obvious
irritation, "because you think, as politicians do, that war is an
unaccountable thing. Let me tell you that reason here is much stronger
than chance, and that the forces opposed to us are already convinced
of liberty. I have before me" (he pulled out his little brown book
from his pocket) "a list of pamphlets recently distributed beyond the
frontiers, and a very good estimate of the numbers of their readers."
Fouché restrained his smile; he was a man capable of self-control to
any limit. He leant his long, delicate, refined head upon the tapering
fingers of his left hand, and listened with great apparent interest to
what the Master was saying. The sawing in the courtyard without ceased,
and his host, the carpenter, entered in that reverential way which
marks the sentiment of religion, and very silently took a distant chair
to listen to the Master's discourse. Couthon shifted himself in his
place to relieve his crippled members, and Robespierre continued--
"Nothing endures unless it be based upon Virtue, but though Virtue
tends to corrupt with time, and though Liberty is rather for what the
fanatics have called 'angels' than for men, yet if men's chains are
broken it has great chance of permanence and of effect upon the public.
I have upon this matter," he continued, pulling out of a pocket a
shagreen case and from that case a pair of spectacles, "certain notes
that will not be without interest for you."
Fouché sighed while Robespierre was seeking among a group of
neatly-folded papers for what he had to read. His host, the carpenter,
bent forward to hear as a man might bend forward to hear the reading
of the Gospel. He even had an odd instinct to stand up and listen with
bowed head. St. Just was thinking of other things. And certainly any
modern man looking on would have been compelled to watch St. Just's
deep and luminous eyes. He had already forgotten the future, and once
again he was thinking of the wars. He had begun to take pleasure in
the charges. A moment might have made him, from the poet that he was,
a soldier; and while the high thin voice of the little man Robespierre
went on with appropriate gestures, describing the permanence of Virtue
in a free State, he clearly saw what he had seen but a few days before
from the lines: the houses of the beleaguered city against the June
dawn, and he heard the bugles.
Robespierre had begun: "The sentiment of property which is native in
man proceeds from what he gives to Nature by his toil, and this is
respected by all, yet even property itself cannot be thought secure
until Virtue be there to guarantee it, no laws can make up for its
absence. It is Virtue, therefore, upon which even this essential,
without which society cannot be, reposes. And Virtue which will cause
a poor man to be equal with the rich, while the one regards the other
without envy upon the one side, without contempt upon the other."
For a full quarter of an hour Robespierre went on, and Couthon, as a
matter of ritual, and the master of the house as a matter of religion,
listened: the one as a matter of course, the other ardently. And when
he had finished his little peroration, when he had taken off those
spectacles and wiped them, when he had turned upon them his pale,
small, watchful, grey-green eyes, he noted that Fouché alone had
been inconstant. Fouché had his back turned and was looking out of a
window. A boy who passed through the courtyard whistling, carrying a
short ladder, looked at the window for a moment and saw the aquiline,
refined face covered with laughter. The boy thought that laughter
merely friendly. He waved his hand and smiled an answer, and Fouché saw
in that boy the generation that should arise. He composed his features
and turned them once more towards the room. Before Robespierre could
speak sharply, as he meant to speak, and complain of such inattention,
he said in a clear, well-modulated voice, that he had never heard
those sentences before. Was Robespierre to pronounce them that day in
Parliament?
"I shall do so," said Robespierre, "if I am permitted by the President
to speak. If not, I will reserve my remarks for another occasion."
He pulled out a fat little round watch prettily enamelled, touched
the lace at his wrists, settled the order of his stock, and said as a
schoolmaster might say it to young St. Just: "Are you not coming with
me?"
St. Just, startled suddenly like a man awakened, thought of the hour,
remembered the Parliament, and went out with his friend.
Fouché with his hand to his chin crossed the courtyard and went up the
stairs to that part of the house which overlooked the Rue St. Honoré.
He had something to say to Charlotte. Couthon, who was hungry, remained
to lunch, but he found his hosts dull and a little ill-tempered. He
could not fill the void that had been left by Robespierre.
_Richard Clay & Sons, Limited, London and Bungay._