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A MIDSUMMER DRIVE THROUGH THE PYRENEES
by
EDWIN ASA DIX, M.A.
Ex-Fellow in History of the College of New Jersey at Princeton
Illustrated
New York & London
G.P. Putnam's Sons
The Knickerbocker Press
1890
[Illustration: A DIFFICULT BIT ON THE ROUTE THERMALE.]
"How comes it to pass," wondered a traveler, over twenty years ago,
"that, when the American people think it worth while to pay a visit to
Europe almost exclusively to see Switzerland and Italy; when in 1860
twenty-one thousand Americans visited Rome and only seven thousand
English; so few should think it worth while to visit the Pyrenees? It is
certainly the only civilized country we have visited without finding
Americans there before us. Is it accident or caprice, or part of a
system of leaving it to the last,--which 'last' never comes? The feast
is provided,--where are the guests? The French Pyrenees form one of the
loveliest gardens in Europe and a perfect place for a summer holiday.
'La beauté ici est sereine et le plaisir est pur.'"
The query is still unanswered to-day. The stream of summer journeyings
to Europe has swollen to a river; it has overflowed to the Arctic Ocean,
to the Baltic, to the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. The Pyrenees--a
garden not only, but a land of sterner scenery as well,--almost alone
remain by our nation of travelers unvisited and unknown.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
IN PERSPECTIVE
CHAPTER II.
A BISCAYAN BEACH
CHAPTER III.
BAYONNE, THE INVINCIBLE
CHAPTER IV.
SAINT JOHN OF LIGHT
CHAPTER V.
THE CITY OF THE ARROW-PIERCED SAINT
CHAPTER VI.
AN OLD SPANISH MINIATURE
CHAPTER VII.
AN ERA IN TWILIGHT
CHAPTER VIII.
"THE LITTLE PARIS OF THE SOUTH,"
CHAPTER IX.
THE WARM WATERS AND THE PEAK OF THE SOUTH
CHAPTER X.
THE GOOD WATERS OF THE ARQUEBUSADE
CHAPTER XI.
OVER THE HIGHWAY OF THE HOT SPRINGS
CHAPTER XII.
MIRRORS AND MOUNTAINS
CHAPTER XIII.
A COLOSSEUM OF THE GODS
CHAPTER XIV.
THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW
CHAPTER XV.
THE VALLEY OF THE SUN
CHAPTER XVI.
THE INTERLAKEN OF THE PYRENEES
CHAPTER XVII.
OUT TOWARD THE PLAIN
ILLUSTRATIONS.
A DIFFICULT BIT ON THE ROUTE THERMALE, FRONTISPIECE
BEACH AND VILLA EUGÉNIE AT BIARRITZ
"HERE TOO ARE THE FISHERMEN'S CABINS,"
EN CACOLET
A BAYONNE ARCADE
A CONSPICUOUS ENTRY INTO ST. JEAN DE LUZ
THE CAMERA AT THE CUSTOM-HOUSE
A DISILLUSIONIZING LEGEND
THE LEGEND AS REFRAIN
A BÉARNAIS MARKET-WOMAN
A SYMBOL OF VENGEANCE
DULL PROSPECTS AT GABAS
CAILLOU IN COSTUME
THE BELLES AND DAMES OF GOUST
ROAD-MENDERS ON THE PASS
"ACCOUTRED AS SHE IS, SHE PLUNGES IN,"
"THE TOWN IS WAITING FOR THE DILIGENCE,"
A CAFÉ CONJURING-SCENE
LAC DE GAUBE AND VIGNEMALE
ONE CORNER OF THE OMNIBUS
THE CIRQUE OF GAVARNIE FROM THE CHAOS
THE INN-YARD AT GRIP
"THERE IS NAUGHT OF THE PRETENTIOUS ABOUT THE HOTEL D'ANGLETERRE,"
PIC DE LA PIQUE, AND PATH TO THE PORT DE VÉNASQUE
THE EVENING FÊTE AT BIGORRE
MAP.
RELIEF-MAP OF THE CENTRAL PYRENEES.
CHAPTER I.
IN PERSPECTIVE.
"In fortune's empire blindly thus we go;
We wander after pathless destiny,
Whose dark resorts since prudence cannot know,
In vain it would provide for what shall be."
A trip to the Pyrenees is not in the Grand Tour. It is not even in any
southerly extension of the Grand Tour. A proposition to exploit them
meets a dubious reception. Pictures arise of desolate gorges; of lonely
roads and dangerous trails; of dismal roadside inns, where, when you
halt for the night, a "repulsive-looking landlord receives the unhappy
man, exchanges a look of ferocious intelligence with the driver,"--and
the usual melodramatic midnight carnage probably ensues. The Pyrenees
seem to echo the motto of their old counts, "_Touches-y, si tu l'oses_!"
the name seems to stand vaguely for untested discomforts, for clouds and
chasms, and Spanish banditti in blood-red _capas_; to be, in a word, a
symbol of an undiscovered country which would but doubtfully reward a
resolve to discover.
Yet there is a fascination in the project, as we discuss a summer tour.
There, we know, are mountains whose sides are nearly Alpine, whose
shoulders are of snow and glacier, whose heads rise to ten and eleven
thousand feet above the sea. There, we know, must be savage
scenery,--ravines, cliffs, ice-rivers, as in the Alps; valleys and
streams and fair pastures as well, and a richer southern sunlight over
the uplands; besides a people less warped by tourists, intensely
tenacious of the past, and still tingling with their old local love of
country,--a people with whom, "to be a Béarnais is greater than to be a
Frenchman."
To visit the Pyrenees, too, will be almost to live again in the Middle
Ages. The Roman, the Moor, the Paladin, Froissart, Henry of Navarre,
have marked the region both in romance and in soberer fact. Its valleys
have individual histories; its aged towns and castles, stirring
biographies. The provinces on its northern flanks, once a centre, a
nucleus, of old French chivalry, are saturated with mediæval adventure.
One visits the Alps to be in the tide of travel, to find health in the
air, to feel the religion of noble mountains. In the Pyrenees is all
this, and more,--the present and the past as well. As we call down the
shades of old chroniclers from the dust of upper library tiers, we grow
more and more in desire of a closer acquaintance. Cæsar, Charlemagne,
Roland, the Black Prince, Gaston Phoebus, Montgomery and knightly King
Henry stand in ghostly armor and beckon us on.
II.
Facts of detail prove farther to seek. We inquire almost in vain for
travelers' notes on the Pyrenees. Those who had written on Spanish
travel spoke of the range admiringly. But these authors, we find,
invariably, only passed by the eastern extremity, or the western, of the
great mountain wall; the mountains themselves they did not visit. Search
in the large libraries brings out a few scant volumes of Pyrenean
travel, but all, with two or three exceptions, bear date within the
first three-fifths of the century. It is with books, often, as with the
_Furançon_, the wine of the Pyrenees, and with certain other vintages:
age improves them only up to a certain limit; when put away longer than
a generation, they lose value.
Taine's glowing _Tour_,[1] itself made nearly thirty years ago, is a
delight, almost a marvel; the style, the torrent of simile, the vivid
thought, rank it as a classic. But M. Taine's is less a book of travel
than a work of art; in the iridescence of the descriptions, you lose the
reflection of the things described. Even hand-books, the way-clearing
lictors of travel, prove, as to the Pyrenees region, first scarce and
then scanty. The few we unearth in the stores are armed only with the
usual perfunctory fasces of facts,--cording information into stiff,
labeled bunches, marshaling details into cramped and characterless
order, scrutinizing the ground with a microscope, never surveying it in
bird's-eye view. Two recent novels we eagerly buy, hearing that their
scenes are laid in that vicinity; but each merely speaks, in easy
omniscience, of the "distant chain of blue mountains," or of the
"far-off snow-peaks outlined against the horizon," and the fiction
proves hardly worth sifting for so little fact. Plainly the Pyrenees
lack the voluminous literature of the Alps. Plainly we shall have, in
part, to grope our way. The grooves of Anglo-Saxon travel are many and
deep, lined increasingly with English speech and customs; but they have
not yet been cut into these Spanish mountains.
[1] _Voyage aux Pyrénées_.
The search enlarges the horizon, however. The lonely roads we learn to
qualify in thought with occasional branches of railway; the dangerous
trails, with certain cultivated highways; the dismal road-side inns,
with spasmodic hotels, some even named confidently as "palatial." We
read of spas and springs and French society, more than of chasms and
banditti. We realize in surprise that over all the past of these
mountains flows now in bracing contrast the easy, laughing tide of
modern French fashion,--life so different in detail, so like in kind, to
the day of trapping and tourney.
It is enough:
"Now are we fix'd, and now we will depart,
Never to come again till what we seek
Be found."
III.
Difficulties always lessen after a decision. I casually question a
doughty Colonel, who has been an indefatigable traveler; he has twice
girdled the earth, and has many times cross-hatched Spain; he has not
been to the Pyrenees, but heartily urges the trip. He assures me that
the banditti there have become, he believes, comparatively few; that
they now rarely slit their captives' ears, and that present quotations
for ransoms, so he hears, are ruling very low, much lower than at any
previous epoch. Thus comforted, we interview other traveled friends; but
our goal is to all an unvisited district. We find no kindly Old
Travelers returned from Pyrenees soil, to counsel us, advise us, and
inflict well-meant and inordinate itineraries upon us. At least, then,
we are not alone in our ignorance; it is evident that our knowledge of
the region is not blamably less than that of others, and that the
Pyrenees are in literal fact a land untrodden by Americans.
Questions of accessibility now arise. It seems a far cry from Paris to
the doors of Spain. The Pyrenees are not on the way to Italy, as are the
Alps. They are not on the way around the world, as are the Mountains of
Lebanon and the Sierras. They are not strictly on the way even to Spain.
But we consider. Our country men are streaming to Europe, quick-eyed for
unhackneyed routes, throwing over the continent new and endless
net-works of silver trails. They travel three full days to reach the
Norway fjords, and five in addition to see the high noon of midnight.
They journey a day and night to Berlin, and forty-two hours
consecutively after, without wayside interest, to visit the City of the
Great Czar; if they persevere toward the Kremlin, and around by
"Warsaw's waste of ruin," they will have counted a week in a railway
compartment. Constantinople and Athens lie two thousand miles away,
Naples and Granada nearly as far; all sought, even in summer, though
quivering in the tropics' livid heat. We came round to our Pyrenees: it
needs from Paris but nine hours to Bordeaux, with coigns of vantage
between; in four hours from Bordeaux, you are by the waters of the Bay
of Biscay, or in six, in the centre of the Pyrenees chain.
IV.
And so _La Champagne_ leaves its long wake across the Atlantic, and we
journey down from Paris to the little city of the Maid of Orleans;
wander to Tours, the approximate scene of the great Saracenic defeat;
drive along the quays of Bordeaux, and visit its vineyards and finally
come on, in the luxurious cars of the _Midi_ line, to the shores of
Cantabria and the popular watering-place of Biarritz.