A TOUR THROUGH THE PYRENEES
By Hippolyte Adolphe Taine
Translated by J. Safford Fiske
With Illustrations by Gustave Dorè
New York Henry Holt And Company 1875
[Illustration: 011]
[Illustration: 013]
The Publishers take pleasure in acknowledging their indebtedness to Mr.
Henry Blackburn for valuable hints in the arrangement of this volume.
CONTENTS.
BOOK I.--THE COAST.
PAGE
CHAPTER I.--BORDEAUX.--ROY AN...................3
“ II.--LES LANDES.--BAYONNE..............12
“ III.--BIARRITZ.--SAINT-JEAN-DE-LUZ.....35
BOOK II.--THE VALLEY OF OSSAU.
CHAPTER I. --DAX.--OR THEZ.....................57
“ II.--PAU.............................85
“ III.--EAUX-BONNES...................117
“ IV.--LANDSCAPES.....................138
“ V.--EA UX-CHAUDES...................169
“ VI.--THE INHABITANTS.................186
BOOK III.--THE VALLEY OF LUZ.
CHAPTER I.--ON THE WAY TO LUZ.................225
“ II.--LUZ..............................250
“ III.--SAINT-SAUVEUR.--BAREGES.........266
“ IV.--CAUTERE..........................290
“ V.--SAINT-SATIN.......................315
“ VI.--GAVARNIE.........................326
“ VII.--THE BERGONZ.--THE PIC DU MIDI...352
“ VIII.--PLANTS AND ANIMALS.............367
BOOK. IV.--BAGNÈRES AND LUCHON.
CHAPTER I.--FROM LUZ TO BAGNÈRES-DE-BIGORRE...389
“ II.--BAGNÈRES-DE-BIGORRE..............412
“ III.--THE PEOPLE......................420
“ IV--THE ROAD TO BAGNÈRES-DE-LUCHON....468
“ V--LUCHON.............................485
“ VI.--TOULOUSE.........................509
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
PAGE
THE PINES.....................................003
THE RIVER AFTER A STORM.......................005
THE PINES NEAR ROYAN..........................007
THE BROAD RIVER...............................009
BORDEAUX......................................010
TAIL-PIECE....................................011
LES LANDES....................................012
LES LANDES (SECOND VIEW)......................014
TAIL-PIECE....................................016
A STREET IN BAYONNE...........................017
BAYONNE HARBOR................................019
PÉ DE PUYANE..................................022
THE BURNING CASTLE............................025
HEAD-PIECE....................................035
THE PIERCED ROCK..............................036
TAIL-PIECE....................................039
THE VILLA EUGENIE.............................040
CLIFFS NEAR SAINT-JEAN-DE-LUZ.................042
COAST NEAR SAINT-JEAN-DE-LUZ..................045
TAIL-PIECE....................................046
LOUIS XIV. AND ANNE OF AUSTRIA................047
THE POLITENESS OF TO-DAY......................048
THE POLITENESS OF OTHER DAYS..................049
“JE VOUS LE RENDS.”...........................053
A SPLENDID CREATION...........................054
DAX...........................................057
DAX (SECOND VIEW).............................059
CASTLE OF ORTHEZ..............................061
FROISSART.....................................062
A HOME OF LEGENDS.............................063
“THAT STOUT CORNIFIC DOCTOR”..................066
COUNT DE FOIX AT SUPPER.......................068
THE COUNT DE FOIX’S HOSPITALITY...............071
A FRENCH “CONDUCTOR”..........................072
“FOR HEAVEN’S SAKE DO NOT KILL GASTON”........074
GASTON IN THE TOWER OF ORTHEZ.................076
COUNT DE FOIX.................................077
TAILPIECE.....................................078
CHAPTER-HEADING...............................079
THE VALLEY OF OSSAU...........................082
A DESTRUCTION OK SENTIMENT....................084
AVENUE OF THE CHATEAU AT PAU..................085
ARMS OF HENRY IV..............................087
COURT OF THE CHATEAU AT PAU...................088
PAU...........................................090
JEANNE D’ALBRET...............................092
A MORNING’S SPORT.............................094
IN THE STREETS Of EAUSE.......................097
SULLY.........................................100
MARGUERITE OK NAVARRE.........................104
ENTERTAINING THE LADIES.......................106
THE PARK AT PAU...............................108
PROTRACTING A REVERIE.........................109
PIC DU MIDI OSSAU.............................111
AN EXHORTATION................................113
NEAR GAN......................................114
THE VALLEY OK OSSAU...........................115
ROAD TO EAUX BONNES...........................116
THE PROMENADE.................................117
NEAR EAUX BONNES..............................118
A RAINY DAY AT EAUX BONNES....................119
TAKING THE WATERS.............................121
TAKING THE WATERS (SECOND VIEW)...............122
“MUSIC HAITI CHARMS”..........................123
A NATIVE GENIUS...............................125
DOLCE FAR NIENTE.............................126
OUR AMATEURS..................................127
THE BEECHES...................................128
THE SUMMIT OF THE GER.........................131
TAIL-PIECE....................................133
THE ART OK PLEASURE...........................134
THE “JEU DU CANARD”...........................135
PLEASURE WITHOUT THE ART......................137
“A LANDSCAPE”.................................138
EXCELSIOR.....................................139
THE VALENTIN FALLS AT DISCOO..................140
CASCADE OF THE VALENTIN.......................142
PATH TO THE GORGE OF THE SERPENT..............144
THE GAVE......................................146
A DISTANT TALE................................148
SOLITUDE......................................150
A WATER POWER.................................152
THE MIGHTY STREAM.............................155
‘PAPI’........................................157
A TOO DISTANT LANDSCAPE.......................159
A VANTAGE-POINT...............................161
THE PEAKS.....................................163
ABOVE GABAS...................................166
“TO HIM WHO, IN LOVE OF NATURE”...............168
AMONG THE CLOUDS..............................169
ROUTE TO EAUX CHAUDES.........................170
ON THE ROAD TO EAUX CHAUDES...................172
“A WILD AND SUNNY NEST”.......................174
“COLD AND SAD”................................175
NEAR EAUX CHAUDES.............................177
“EGYPT BEFORE THE COMING OF WARRIORS”.........182
SOMEBODY’S JOVE...............................185
THE INHABITANTS...............................186
FIDDLERS THREE................................187
“A SORT OF ROUNDELAY”.........................189
“THEY CLUMSILY BENT THE KNEE”.................192
“FIVE OR SIX OLD WOMEN”.......................194
THE PEAK OF THE GER...........................196
MEETING A LADY................................200
A STOCK-DEALER................................200
YOUR OBEDIENT SERVANT.........................201
DISINTERESTED HOSPITALITY.....................201
AN AMATEUR SKETCH.............................203
THE DEATH OF ROLAND...........................206
“A WELL-TO-DO PEASANT”........................207
CHIVALRIC WAR.................................209
SCIENTIFIC WAR................................209
THE BATTLE OF RONCEVAUX.......................212
“WHEN FIGHTING IS TO BE DONE”.................214
HENRY OF BEARN................................215
“AT THE HEAD OF THE ARMY”.....................217
“VERY DARING”.................................219
MLLE. DE SÉGUR................................220
GASSION’S BOB-TAIL............................222
ON THE WAY TO LUZ.............................225
A SMILING COUNTRY.............................226
“WHAT WE ALL HEARD THIS NIGHT”.-..............228
ORTHON’S TRANSFORMATION.......................234
LETTING THE DOGS LOOSE........................235
“THE RACE OF FAMILIARS AND FAIRIES”...........237
A BROODING SUPERSTITION,......................238
CHAPEL OF LESTELLE............................240
NEAR LOURDES..................................242
GORGE OF PIERREFITTE..........................244
“HEAVY CLOUDS ROSE IN THE SKY”................248
THE GORGE OPENED UP...........................249
OLD HOUSE OF THE TEMPLARS AT LUZ..............250
RUIN OF A CHATEAU NEAR LUZ....................253
MAX GETS FROM THE DESERT AS MUCH AS HE CAN....257
THE VALLEY OF LUZ.............................259
PROGRESS......................................261
SAINT-PIERRE..................................263
“THIS HEIGHT IS A DESERT”.....................264
“NO ONE COMES”................................265
THE MEDIAEVAL TOURISTS........................266
SAINT-SAUVEUR.................................267
THE GAVE AT SUNSET............................272
RUNNING WATERS................................274
“THE POPLARS RISE ONE ABOVE ANOTHER”..........275
BAREGES.......................................277
THE MILITARY HOSPITAL.........................278
TAIL-PIECE....................................279
THE MRS.......................................283
“OUT FROM THE CIVIL WARS”.....................287
“THESE OLD WASTED MOUNTAINS”..................288
MADAME DE MAINTENON...........................289
A FEW BLANDISHMENTS...........................290
THE PATIENTS OF THE OLDEN TIME................291
THE LAKE OF GAUBE.............................293
DIANA.........................................295
NEAR PONT D’ESPAGNE...........................299
STORM AT CAUTERETS............................302
VALLEY OF THE GAVE IN A STORM.................304
NEAR THE LAKE OF GAUISE.......................307
CAUTERET’S....................................311
THE FOAMING GAVE..............................313
HENRY IV AND FRANCIS I........................314
A FRESHETT IN THE MOUNTAINS..................315
“A HORRIBLE WORLD”............................316
ABBEY OF SAINT-SAVIN..........................318
CASCADE OF CERLSEY, NEAR PONT D’ESPAGNE.......320
PRAYER........................................325
ENJOYING HIE SCENERY..........................326
A MOUNTAIN FUNERAL............................328
BRIDGE AT SCIA................................330
VILLAGE OF GEDRES.............................333
CHAOS.........................................337
“THE TUMBLED ROCKS”...........................339
SIECHEUR......................................342
THE MOUNTAIN SIDE.............................343
THE FRECHE DE ROLAND..........................344
THE AMPHITHEATRE NEAR GAVARNIE................346
“THE THIRTEENTH CASCADE ON THE LEFT”..........347
THE CASCADE AS SEEN FROM THE INN..............349
RECIPROCITY...................................351
THE APPRECIATIVE..............................352
ASCENT OF THE BERGONZ.........................354
THE EAGLES....................................355
MONT PERDU....................................359
AN EARLY INHABITANT...........................362
SCENERY DURING AN ASCENT......................365
“ALLEZ DOUCEMENT; ALLEZ TOUJOURS”.............366
A STIMULATING DREAM...........................367
THE PINES.....................................369
A SHOWER IN A FOREST OF BRUSH-FIRS............373
CONTEMPLATION.................................376
A POOR DANCER.................................377
“THE ISARD DWELLS ABOVE THE BEAR”.............378
AN ARGUMENT...................................379
A HERD OF GOATS...............................381
“THE HAPPIEST ANIMAL IN CREATION”.............383
DISTINGUISHED NATIVES.........................386
IN MOUNT CAMPANA..............................389
DE BÉNAC IN EGYPT.............................390
“THEY TRAVERSED A WALL OF CLOUDS”.............395
“MORNING DAWNED”..............................396
“THE HALL WAS FULL”...........................398
“STRANGE IMAGES ROSE IN HIS BRAIN”...........400
BÉNAC A HERMIT................................403
BEYOND LOURDES................................404
CITY OF TORBES................................406
MEPHISTOPHELES................................411
BAGNÈRES DE-BIGORRE...........................412
ONE OF THE FIRST PATRONS......................419
SOCIETY.......................................420
AN OLD CAMPAIGNER.............................422
A YOUNG CAMPAIGNER............................422
A MAN OF PEACE................................422
A MODEL MAN...................................423
IN DANGER.............................:.......424
VARIOUS TOURISTS..............................428
THE LAC D’OO..................................431
TOURISTS COMME IL FAUT........................434
FAMILY TOURISTS...............................435
DINING TOURISTS...............................436
LEARNED TOURISTS..............................438
A MAN OF ESPRIT...............................444
CONNOISSEURS..................................446
BEETHOVEN.....................................447
A SERENADER...................................454
A HISTORIAN...................................456
A PROFESSIONAL CHARACTER......................458
THE PLEASURES OF WINTER.......................461
A DISCUSSION WITHIN BOUNDS....................463
HEAVEN........................................464
THE SOURCE OF THINGS..........................466
GRACE AT MEAT.................................467
THE REST OF THE WEARY.........................468
AT THE HOTEL OF THE GREAT SUN.................470
NEAR LUCHON...................................473
CHAPELLE AND LACHAUMONT.......................476
VALLEY OF LUCHON..............................481
URBS IN REVRE.................................484
HEAD-PIECE....................................485
A TALENTED FAMILY.............................487
LUCHON........................................491
BAGNERES......................................493
“ALL WAS IN HARMONY”..........................495
NEAR CASTEL-VIEIL.............................497
RUINS OF CASTEL-VIEIL.........................499
THE MALADETTA.................................503
“THESE MOUNTAIN SKELETONS”....................505
“A CLEFT IN THE ETERNAL ROCK”.................507
TAIL-PIECE....................................508
HEAD-PIECE....................................509
ST. BERTRAND DE COMINGES......................510
TOULOUSE......................................512
SAINT SERININE AT TOULOUSE....................515
CHURCH OF ST. ETIENNE, TOULOUSE...............519
THE MUSEUM AT TOULOUSE........................521
DATUR HORA QUIETI.............................523
TO MARCELIN.
(EMILE PLANAT.)
This, my dear Marcelin, is a trip to the Pyrenees; I have been there,
and that is a praiseworthy circumstance; many writers, including some of
the longest-winded, have described these scenes without leaving home.
And yet I have serious shortcomings to confess, and am deeply humbled
thereat. I have not been the first to scale any inaccessible mountain;
I have broken neither leg nor arm; I have not been eaten by the bears;
I have neither saved any English heiress from being swept away by the
Gave, nor yet have I married one; I have not been present at a single
duel; my experiences include no tragic encounter with brigands or
smugglers. I have walked much, and talked a little, and now I recount
the pleasures of my eyes and ears. What sort of a man can he be who
comes home from a long absence bringing all his limbs with him, is not
the least in the world a hero, and yet does not blush to confess it? In
this book I have talked as if with thee. There is a Marcelin whom the
public knows, a shrewd critic, a caustic wit, the lover and delineator
of every worldly elegance; there is another Marcelin, known to but three
or four, a learned and thoughtful man. If there are any good ideas in
this work, half of them belong to him; to him, then, I restore them.
H. TAINE.
BOOK I. THE COAST.
{003}
[Illustration: 027]
CHAPTER I. BORDE A UX.--ROY AN.
I.
The river is so fine, that before going to Bayonne I have come down as
far as Royan. Ships heavy with white sails ascend slowly on both sides
of the boat. At each gust of wind they incline like idle birds, lifting
their long wing and showing their black belly. They run slantwise, then
come back; one would say that they felt the better for being in this
great fresh-water harbor; they loiter in it and enjoy its peace after
leaving the wrath and inclemency of the ocean. The banks, fringed with
pale verdure, glide right and left, far away to the verge of heaven; the
river is broad like a sea; at this distance you might think you saw two
hedges; the trees dimly lift their delicate shapes in a robe of
bluish gauze; here and there great pines raise their umbrellas on the
{004}vapory horizon, where all is confused and vanishing; there is an
inexpressible sweetness in these first hues of the timid day, softened
still by the fog which exhales from the deep river. As for the river
itself, its waters stretch out joyous and splendid; the rising sun pours
upon its breast a long streamlet of gold; the breeze covers it with
scales; its eddies stretch themselves, and tremble like an awaking
serpent, and, when the billow heaves them, you seem to see the striped
flanks, the taw-ney cuirass of a leviathan.
Indeed, at such moments it seems that the water must live and feel; it
has a strange look, when it comes, transparent and sombre, to stretch
itself upon a beach of pebbles; it turns about them as if uneasy
and irritated; it beats them with its wavelets; it covers them, then
retires, then comes back again with a sort of languid writhing and
mysterious lovingness; its snaky eddies, its little crests suddenly
beaten down or broken, its wave, sloping, shining, then all at once
blackened, resembles the flashes of passion in an impatient mother, who
hovers incessantly and anxiously about her children, and covers them,
not knowing what she wants and what fears. Presently a cloud has covered
the heavens, and the wind has risen. In a moment the river has assumed
the aspect of a crafty and savage animal. It hollowed itself, and
{005}showed its livid belly; it came against the keel with convulsive
starts, hugged it, and dashed against it, as if to try its force; as far
as one could see, its waves lifted themselves and crowded together, like
the muscles upon a chest; over the flank of the waves passed flashes
with sinister smiles; the mast groaned, and the trees bent shivering,
like a nerveless crowd before the wrath of a fearful beast.
[Illustration: 029]
Then all was hushed; the sun has burst forth, the waves were smoothed,
you now saw only a laughing expanse; spun out over this polished back a
thousand greenish tresses sported wantonly; the light rested on it, like
a diaphanous mantle; it followed the supple movements and the twisting
of those liquid arms; it folded around {006}them, behind them, its
radiant, azure robe; it took their caprices and their mobile colors; the
river meanwhile, slumbrous in its great, peaceful bed, was stretched out
at the feet of the hills, which looked down upon it, like it immovable
and eternal.
[Illustration: 031]
II.
The boat is made fast to a boom, under a pile of white houses: it is
Royan.
Here already are the sea and the dunes; the right of the village is
buried under a mass of sand; there are crumbling hills, little dreary
valleys, where you are lost as if in the desert; no sound, no movement,
no life; scanty, leafless vegetation dots the moving soil, and its
filaments fall like sickly hairs; small shells, white and empty, cling
to these in chaplets, and, wherever the foot is set, they crack with a
sound like a cricket’s chirp; this place is the ossuary of some wretched
maritime tribe. One tree alone can live here, the pine, a wild creature,
inhabitant of the forests and sterile coasts; there is a whole colony
of them here; they crowd together fraternally, and cover the sand with
their brown lamels; the monotonous breeze which sifts through them
forever awakes their murmur; thus they chant in a plaintive fashion, but
with a far softer and more harmonious voice {008} {009} than the other
trees; this voice resembles the grating of the cicadæ when in August
they sing with all their heart among the stalks of the ripened wheat.
[Illustration: 033]
At the left of the village, a footpath winds to the summit of a wasted
bank, among billows of standing grasses. The river is so broad that the
other shore is not distinguishable. The sea, its neighbor, imparts
its refluence; its long undulations come one after another against the
coast, and pour their little cascades of foam upon the sand; then the
water retires, running down the slope until it meets a new wave coming
up which covers it; these billows are never wearied, and their come and
go remind one of the regular {010}breathing of a slumbering child. For
night has fallen, the tints of purple grow brown and fade away.
The river goes to rest in the soft, vague shadow; scarcely, at long
intervals, a remnant glimmer is reflected from a slanting wave;
obscurity drowns everything in its vapory dust; the drowsy eye vainly
searches in this mist some visible point, and distinguishes at last,
like a dim star, the lighthouse of Cordouan.
III.
[Illustration: 034]
The next evening, a fresh sea-breeze has brought us to Bordeaux. The
enormous city heaps its monumental houses along the river like bastions;
the red sky is embattled by their coping. They on one hand, the bridge
on the other, protect, with a double line, the port where the vessels
{011}are crowded together like a flock of gulls; those graceful hulls,
those tapering masts, those sails swollen or floating, weave the
labyrinth of their movements and forms upon the magnificent purple of
the sunset. The sun sinks down into the midst of the river and sets it
all ablaze; the black rigging, the round hulls, stand out against its
conflagration, and look like jewels of jet set in gold. {012}
CHAPTER II. LES LANDES.--BA YONNE.
Around Bordeaux are smiling hills, varied horizons, fresh valleys,
a river peopled by incessant navigation, a succession of cities and
villages harmoniously planted upon the declivities or in the plains,
everywhere the richest verdure, the luxury of nature and civilization,
the earth and man vying with each other to enrich and decorate the
happiest valley of France. Below Bordeaux a flat soil, marshes, sand; a
land which goes on growing poorer, villages continually, less frequent,
ere long the desert. I like the desert as well.
Pine woods pass to the right and to the left, silent and wan.{013}{014}
[Illustration: 038]
{015}Each tree bears on its side the scar of wounds where the woodmen have
set flowing the resinous blood which chokes it; the powerful liquor
still ascends into its limbs with the sap, exhales by its slimy shoots
and by its cleft skin; a sharp aromatic odor fills the air.
Beyond, the monotonous plain of the ferns, bathed in light, stretches
away as far as the eye can reach. Their green fans expand beneath the
sun which colors, but does not cause them to fade. Upon the horizon a
few scattered trees lift their slender columns. You see now and then the
silhouette of a herdsman on his stilts, inert and standing like a sick
heron. Wild horses are grazing half hid in the herbage. As the
train passes, they abruptly lift their great startled eyes and stand
motionless, uneasy at the noise that has troubled their solitude. Man
does not fare well here,--he dies or degenerates; but it is the country
of animals, and especially of plants. They abound in this desert,
free, certain of living. Our pretty, cutup valleys are but poor things
alongside of these immense spaces, leagues upon leagues of marshy or
dry vegetation, a level country, where nature, elsewhere troubled and
tortured by men, still vegetates as in primeval days with a calm equal
to its grandeur. The sun needs these savannas in order properly to
spread out its light; from the rising exhalation, you feel that the
whole plain is {016} fermenting under its force; and the eyes filled
by the limitless horizon divine the secret labor by which this ocean of
rank verdure renews and nourishes itself.
Night without a moon has come on. The peaceful stars shine like points
of flame; the whole air is filled with a blue and tender light,
which seems to sleep in the network of vapor wherein it lies. The eye
penetrates it without apprehending anything. At long intervals, in this
twilight, a wood confusedly marks its spot, like a rock at the bottom of
a lake; everywhere around are vague depths, veiled and floating forms,
indistinct and fantastic creatures melting into each other, fields that
look like a billowy sea, clumps of trees that you might take for summer
clouds,--the whole graceful chaos of commingled phantoms, of things of
the night. The mind floats here as on a fleeting stream, and nothing
seems to it real, in this dream, but the pools which reflect the stars
and make on earth a second heaven.
[Illustration: 040]
{017}
Bayonne is a gay city, original and half Spanish. On all sides are men
in velvet vest and small-clothes; you hear the sharp, sonorous music
of the tongue spoken beyond the mountains. Squatty arcades border the
principal streets; there is need of shade under such a sun.
A pretty episcopal palace, in its modern elegance, makes the ugly
cathedral still uglier. The poor, abortive monument piteously lifts its
belfry, that for three centuries has remained but a stump. Booths are
stuck in its hollows, after the manner of warts; here and there they
have laid on a rude plaster of stone. The old invalid is a sad spectacle
alongside of the new houses and busy shops which crowd around its grimy
flanks. {018}I was quite troubled at this decrepitude, and when once
I had entered, I became still more melancholy. Darkness fell from the
vault like a winding-sheet; I could make out nothing but o o worm-eaten
pillars, smoke-darkened pictures, expanses of greenish wall. Two fresh
toilettes that I met increased the contrast; nothing could shock one
more in this place than rose-colored ribbons.
I was looking upon the spectre of the middle ages; how opposed to it are
the security and abundance of modern life! Those sombre vaults, those
slender columns, those rose windows, blood-dyed, called up dreams and
emotions which are now impossible for us. You should feel here what men
felt six hundred years ago, when they swarmed forth from their hovels,
from their unpaved, six-feet-wide streets, sinks of uncleanness, and
reeking with fever and leprosy; when their unclad bodies, undermined by
famine, sent a thin blood to their brutish brains; when wars, atrocious
laws, and legends of sorcery filled their dreams with vivid and
melancholy images; when over the bedizened draperies, over the riddles
of painted glass, the rose windows, like a conflagration or an aureole,
poured their transfigured rays.
These are the remembrances of fever and ecstasy: to get rid of them I
have come out to the port; it is a long alley of old trees at the side
of {019}the Adour. Here all is gay and picturesque. Serious oxen, with
lowered heads, drag the beams that are being unloaded. Rope-makers, girt
with a wisp of hemp, walk backward tightening their threads, and twining
their ever-growing cable. The ships in file are made fast at the quay;
the slender cordage outlines its labyrinth against the sky, and the
sailors hang in it hooked on like spiders in their web. Great casks,
bales, pieces of wood are strewn pell-mell over the flags.
[Illustration: 43]
You are pleased to feel that man is working and prosperous. And here
nature too is as happy as man. The broad silver river unrolls itself
under the radiance of the morning. Slender clouds throw out on the azure
their band of mother-of-pearl. The sky is like an arch of lapis-lazuli.
Its vault rests on the confines of the flood which advances waveless and
effortless, under the glitter of its peaceful undulations, between two
ranges of declivity, {020}away to a hill where pine-woods of a tender
green slope down to meet it, as graceful as itself. The tide meanwhile
rises, and the leaves on the oaks begin to shine, and to whisper under
the feeble wind off the sea.
III.
It rains: the inn is insupportable. It is stifling under the arcades; I
am bored at the café, and am acquainted with nobody. The sole resource
is to go to the library. That is closed.
Fortunately the librarian takes pity on me, and opens for me. Better
yet, he brings me all sorts of charters and old books; he is both very
learned and very amiable, explains everything to me, guides, informs
and installs me. Here I am then in a corner, alone at a table, with the
documents of a fine and thoroughly enjoyable history; it is a pastoral
of the middle ages. I have nothing better to do than to tell it over for
my own benefit.
Pé de Puyane was a brave man and a skilful sailor, who in his day was
Mayor of Bayonne and admiral; but he was harsh with his men, like all
who have managed vessels, and would any day rather fell a man than take
off his cap. He had long waged war against the seamen of Normandy, and
on one occasion he hung seventy of them to his yards, cheek {021}by jowl
with some dogs. He hoisted on his galleys red flags signifying death
and no quarter, and led to the battle of Ecluse the great Genoese ship
_Christophle_, and managed his hands so well that no Frenchman escaped;
for they were all drowned or killed, and the two admirals, Quieret and
Bahuchet, having surrendered themselves, Bahuchet had a cord tightened
around his neck, while Quieret had his throat cut. That was good
management; for the more one kills of his enemies, the less he has of
them. For this reason, the people of Bayonne, on his return, entertained
him with such a noise, such a clatter of horns, of cornets, of drums and
all sorts of instruments, that it would have been impossible on that day
to hear even the thunder of God.
It happened that the Basques would no longer pay the tax upon cider,
which was brewed at Bayonne for sale in their country. Pe de Puyane said
that the merchants of the city should carry them no more, and that, if
any one carried them any, he should have his hand cut off. Pierre Cambo,
indeed, a poor man, having carted two hogsheads of it by night, was led
out upon the market-place, before Notre Dame de Saint-Léon, which was
then building, and had his hand amputated, and the veins afterwards
stopped with red-hot irons; after that he was driven in a tumbrel
throughout the city, {022}which was an excellent example; for the
smaller folk should always do the bidding of men in high position.
[Illustration: 046]
Afterwards, Pé de Puyane having assembled the hundred peers in the
town-house, showed them that the Basques being traitors, rebels toward
the seigniory of Bayonne, should no longer keep the franchises which
had been granted them; that the seigniory of Bayonne, possessing the
sovereignty of the sea, might with justice impose a tax in all the
places to which the sea rose, as if they were in its port, and that
accordingly the Basques should henceforth {023}pay for passing to
Villefranche, to the bridge of the Nive, the limit of high tide. All
cried out that that was but just, and Pé de Puyane declared the toll to
the Basques; but they all fell to laughing, saying they were not dogs of
sailors like the mayor’s subjects. Then having come in force, they beat
the bridgemen, and left three of them for dead.
Pé said nothing, for he was no great talker; but he clinched his teeth,
and looked so terribly around him, that none dared ask him what he would
do, nor urge him on, nor indeed breathe a word. From the first Saturday
in April to the middle of August, several men were beaten, as well
Bayonnais as Basques, but still war was not declared, and, when they
talked of it to the mayor, he turned his back.
The twenty-fourth day of August, many noblemen among the Basques, and
several young people, good leapers and dancers, came to the castle of
Miot for the festival of Saint Bartholomew. They feasted and showed off
the whole day, and the young people who jumped the pole, with their red
sashes and white breeches, appeared adroit and handsome. That night came
a man who talked low to the mayor, and he, who ordinarily wore a grave
and judicial air, suddenly had eyes as bright as those of a youth who
sees the coming of his bride. He went down his staircase with four
bounds, led out a band of old sailors who were come one by one,
covertly, {024}into the lower hall, and set out by dark night with
several of the wardens, having closed the gates of the city for fear
that some traitor, such as there are everywhere, should go before them.
Having arrived at the castle they found the drawbridge down and the
postern open, so confident and unsuspecting were the Basques, and
entered, cutlasses drawn and pikes forward, into the great hall. There
were killed seven young men who had barricaded themselves behind tables,
and would there make sport with their dirks; but the good halberds, well
pointed and sharp as they were, soon silenced them. The others, having
closed the gates from within, thought that they would have power to
defend themselves or time to flee; but the Bayonne marines, with their
great axes, hewed down the planks, and split the first brains which
happened to be near. The mayor, seeing that the Basques were tightly
girt with their red sashes, went about saying (for he was usually
facetious on days of battle): “Lard these fine gallants for me; forward
the spit into their flesh justicoats;” and in fact the spits went
forward, so that all were perforated and opened, some through and
through, so that you might have seen daylight through them, and that the
hall half an hour after was full of pale and red bodies, several bent
over benches, others in a pile in the corners, some with their noses
glued to the table like drunkards, {025} so that a Bayonnais, looking
at them, said: “This is the veal market.” Many, pricked from behind, had
leaped through the windows, and were found next morning, with cleft head
or broken spine, in the ditches.
[Illustration: 049]
There remained only five men alive, noblemen, two named d’Urtubie,
two de Saint-Pé, and one, de Lahet, whom the mayor had set aside as
a precious commodity; then, having sent some one to open the gates of
Bayonne and command the people to come, he ordered them to set fire to
the castle. It was a fine sight, for the castle burned from midnight
until morning; as each turret, wall or floor fell, the people,
delighted, raised a great shout. {026}There were volleys of sparks in
the smoke and flames that stopped short, then began again suddenly, as
at public rejoicings; so that the warden, an honorable advocate, and
a great literary man, uttered this saying: “Fine festival for Bayonne
folk; for the Basques great barbecue of hogs.”
The castle being burned, the mayor said to the five noblemen that he
wished to deal with them with all friendliness, and that they should
themselves be judges, if the tide came as far as the bridge; then he
had them fastened two by two to the arches until the tide should rise,
assuring them that they were in a good place for seeing. The people
were all on the bridge and along the banks, watching the swelling of
the flood. Little by little it mounted to their breasts, then to their
necks, and they threw back their heads so as to lift their mouths a
little higher. The people laughed aloud, calling out to them that the
time for drinking had come, as with the monks at matins, and that they
would have enough for the rest of their days. Then the water entered the
mouth and nose of the three who were lowest; their throats gurgled
as when bottles are filled, and the people applauded, saying that the
drunkards swallowed too fast, and were going to strangle themselves out
of pure greediness. There remained only the two men, {027}d’Urtubie,
bound to the principal arch, father and son, the son a little lower
down. When the father saw his child choking, he stretched out his arms
with such force that a cord broke: but that was all, and the hemp cut
into his flesh without his being able to get any further. Those above,
seeing that the youth’s eyes were rolling, while the veins on his
forehead were purple and swollen, and that the water bubbled around him
with his hiccough, called him baby, and asked why he had sucked so hard,
and if nurse was not coming soon to put him to bed. At this the father
cried out like a wolf, spat into the air at them, and called them
butchers and cowards. That offended them so that they began throwing
stones at him with such sure aim that his white head was soon reddened
and his right eye gushed out; it was small loss to him, for shortly
after, the mounting wave shut up the other. When the water was gone
down, the mayor commanded that the five bodies, which hung with necks
twisted and limp, should be left a testimony to the Basques that the
water of Bayonne did come up to the bridge, and that the toll was justly
due from them. He then returned home amidst the acclamations of his
people, who were delighted that they had so good a mayor, a sensible
man, a great lover of justice, quick in wise enterprises, and who
rendered to every man his due. {028}.
As he was setting out, he had put sixty men at the entrance of
the bridge, in the toll-tower, ordering them to look out well for
themselves, and warning them that the Basques would not be slow in
seeking to avenge themselves. But they flattered themselves that
they still had at least one good night, and they busied their throats
mightily with emptying flagons. Towards the middle of the night, there
being no moon, came up about two hundred Basques; for they are alert
as the antelope,* and their runners had awakened that morning more than
twenty villages in the Soule with the story of fire and drowning. The
younger men, with several older heads, had set out forthwith by crooked
circuitous paths, barefoot, that they might make no noise, well armed
with cutlasses, crampoons and several slender rope-ladders; and, adroit
as foxes, they had stolen to the base of the tower, to a place on the
eastern side where it plunges straight down to the bed of the river, a
real quagmire, so that here there was no guard, and the rolling of the
water on the pebbles might drown their slight noise, should they make
any. They fixed their crampoons in the crannies of the stones, and,
little by little, Jean Amacho, a man from Béhobie, a noted hunter
of{029}mountain beasts, climbed upon the battlements of the first wall,
then, having steadied a pole against a window of the tower, he entered
and hooked on two ladders; the others mounted in their turn, until there
were about fifty of them; and new men were constantly coming, as many as
the ladders would bear, noiselessly striding over the window-sill.
* Alertes comme des izards--The isard, or y’sard, is the
chamois-antelope of the Pyrenees, often called a chamois.--
Translator.
They were in a little, low ante-room, and from thence, in the great hall
of the first floor, six steps below them, they beheld the Bayonnais, of
whom there were but three in this place, two asleep, and a third who
had just waked up and was rubbing his eyes, with his back turned to the
small door of the ante-room. Jean Amacho gave a sign to the two men who
had mounted immediately after him, and all jumped together with a single
leap, and so nicely that, at the same moment, their three knives pierced
the throats of the Bayonnais, who, bowing their limbs, sank without a
cry to the ground. The other Basques then came in, and waited at the
verge of the great balustraded staircase leading into the lower hall
where were the Bayonnais, some in a heap sleeping near the fireplace,
others calling out and sharpset at feasting.
One of these feeling that his hair was moist, lifted his head, saw some
little red streams running from between the joists of the ceiling,
and began to laugh, saying that the greedy fellows up there could no
{030}longer hold their cups, and were wasting good wine, which was very
wrong of them. But finding that this wine was quite warm, he took some
on his finger, then touched his tongue, and saw, by the insipid taste,
that it was blood. He proclaimed this aloud, and the Bayonnais starting
up grasped their pikes and ran for the staircase. Thereupon the Basques
who had waited, not being sufficiently numerous, wished to recover the
moment and rushed forth; but the first comers felt the point of the
pikes, and were lifted, just as bundles of hay are spitted on the forks
to be thrown into a loft; then the Bayonnais, holding themselves close
together, and bristling in front with pikes, began to mount.
Just then a valiant Basque, Antoine Chaho, and two others with him,
dropped down along the wall, lizard fashion, making a cover of dead
bodies; and gliding between the great legs of the sailors of Bayonne,
began work with their knives upon their hamstrings; so that the
Bayonnais, wedged in the stairway, and embarrassed by the men and the
pikes that were falling crosswise, could neither get on nor wield their
spits with such nicety. At this moment, Jean Amacho and several young
Basques, having espied their moment, leaped more than twenty feet clear
into the middle of the hall, to a place where no halberds were ready,
and began cutting throats with great promptness, then, thrown upon their
{031}knees, fell to ripping open bellies; they killed far more than they
lost, because they had deft hands, while many were well padded with wool
and wore leather shirts, and besides, the handles to their knives were
wound with cord and did not slip. Moreover the Basques from above,
who now numbered more than a hundred, rolled down the staircase like a
torrent of goats; new ones came up every moment, and in every corner of
the hall, man to man, they began to run each other through.
There died Jean Amacho in a sad enough fashion, and from no fault of his
own; for after he had cut the throat of a Bayonnais,--his ordinary mode
of killing, and, indeed, the best of all,--he held his head too near,
and the jet from the two great veins of the neck spirted into his face
like the froth from a jar of perry as it is uncorked, and suddenly shut
up both his eyes; accordingly he was unable to avoid a Bayonnais who was
at his left; the fellow planted his dagger in Jean’s back, who spit out
blood, and died a minute after.
But the Bayonnais, who were less numerous and less adroit, could make
no stand, and at the end of half an hour there remained only a dozen of
them, driven into a corner near a little cellar where were kept the jugs
and bottles. In order the sooner to reduce these, the Basques gathered
together the pikes, and began driving through this heap of men; {032}and
the Bayonnais, as anybody will on feeling an iron point prick through
his skin, stepped back and rolled together into the cellar. Just at this
moment the torches went out, and the Basques, in order not to wound
each other, dressed the whole armful of pikes, and harpooned at random
forward into the cellar during more than a quarter of an hour, so as
to make sure that no Bayonnais remained alive; and thus, when all was
become tranquil, and the torches were relighted, and they looked in,
they saw that the cellar resembled a pork-butcher’s chopping-block, the
bodies being cut in twenty places, and separated from their heads, and
the limbs being confusedly thrown together, till only salt was wanting
to make a salting-tub of the place.
But the younger of the Basques, although there was nothing more to kill,
rolled their eyes all around the hall, grinding their teeth like hounds
after the quarry; they cried aloud continually, trembling in their limbs
and clenching their fingers after the handles of their daggers; several,
wounded and whitelipped, no longer felt their wounds or their loss of
blood, remained crouching beside the man they had last killed, and then
involuntarily leaped to their feet. One or two laughed with the fixity
of madmen, and varied this with a hoarse roar; and there was in the room
such a mist of carnage that any one seeing {033}them reeling or howling
thus, might have believed them drunk with wine.
At sunrise, when they had loosed the five drowned men from the arches,
they cast all the Bayonnais upon the current of the stream, and said
that they might go down thus to their sea, and that this cartful of dead
flesh was such toll as the Basques would pay. The congealed wounds were
opened again by the coldness of the water; it was a fine sight: by means
of the blood that flowed, the river blushed red as a morning sky.
After this the Basques and the men of Bayonne fought several years more,
man against man, band against band; and many brave men died on both
sides. At the end, the two parties agreed to submit to the arbitration
of Bernard Ezi, _Sire d’Albret._ The lord of Albret said that the men
of Bayonne, since they had made the first attack, were in fault; he
ordained that in future the Basques should pay no toll, that, on the
contrary, the city of Bayonne should pay them fifteen hundred new golden
crowns and should establish ten priestly prebendaryships, which should
cost four thousand old crowns of the first coinage of France, of good
gold and loyal weight, for the repose of the souls of the five gentlemen
drowned without confession, which, perchance, were in purgatory, and
had need of many masses in order to get out. But the Basques {034}were
unwilling that Pê de Puyane, the mayor, should be included in this
peace, either he or his sons, and they reserved the right to pursue
them until they had taken vengeance on his flesh and his race. The mayor
retired to Bordeaux, to the house of the Prince of Wales, of whom he
was a great friend and good servant, and during two o o years did not
go outside of the city, excepting three or four times, well steeled, and
attended by men-at-arms. But one day, when he had gone to see a vineyard
he had bought, he withdrew a little from his troop to lift a great black
vine-stock which was falling into the ditch; a moment after, his men
heard a little sharp cry, like that of a thrush caught in a snare; when
they had run up they saw Pé de Puyane dead, with a knife a fathom long
which had entered by the armpit where he was unprotected by his cuirass.
His elder son, Sebastian, who had fled to Toulouse, was killed by
Augustin de Lahet, nephew of the man who was drowned; the other, Hugues,
survived and founded a family, since, having gone by sea to England,
he remained there, and received from King Edward a knight’s fief. But
neither he nor his children ever returned into Gascony; they did wisely,
for they would have found their grave-diggers there. {035}
[Illustration: 059]
CHAPTER III. BIARRITZ.--SAINT-JEAN-DE-LUZ.
I.
Half a league off, at the turning of a road, may be seen a hill of a
singular blue: it is the sea. Then you descend, by a winding route, to
the village.
A melancholy village, with the taint of hotels, white and regular, cafés
and signs, ranged by stages upon the arid coast; for grass, patches of
poor starveling turf; for trees, frail tamarisks which cling shivering
to the earth; for harbor, a beach and two empty creeks. The smaller
conceals in its sandy recess two barks without masts, without sails, to
all appearance abandoned.
The waters consume the coast; great pieces of earth and stone, hardened
by their shock, fifty feet away from the shore, lift their brown and
yellow spine, worn, raked, gnawed, jagged, scooped out {036}by the wave,
resembling a troop of stranded whales. The billow barks or bellows in
their hollow bowels, in their deep yawning jaws; then, after they have
engulfed it, they vomit it forth in jets and foam against the lofty
shining waves that forever return to the assault. Shells and polished
pebbles are incrusted upon their head. Here furzes have rooted their
patient stems and the confusion of their thorns; this hairy mantle is
the only one capable of clinging to their flanks, and of standing out
against the spray of the sea.
[Illustration: 060]
To the left, a train of ploughed and emaciated rocks stretches out in
a promontory as far as an {037}arcade of hardened beach, which the high
tides have opened, and whence on three sides the eye looks down upon the
ocean. Under the whistling north wind it bristles with violet waves; the
passing clouds marble it with still more sombre spots; as far as the eye
can reach is a sickly agitation of wan waves, chopping and disjointed,
a sort of moving skin that trembles, wrenched by an inward fever;
occasionally a streak of foam crossing them marks a more violent shock.
Here and there, between the intervals of the clouds, the light cuts out
a few sea-green fields upon the uniform plain; their tawny lustre,
their unhealthy color, add to the strangeness and to the limits of the
horizon. These sinister changing lights, these tin-like reflections upon
a leaden swell, these white scoriæ clinging to the rocks, this slimy
aspect of the waves suggest a gigantic crucible in which the metal
bubbles and gleams.
But toward evening the air clears up and the wind falls. The Spanish
coast is visible, and its chain of mountains softened by distance. The
long dentation undulates away out of sight, and its misty pyramids at
the last vanish in the west, between the sky and the ocean. The sea
smiles in its blue robe, fringed with silver, wrinkled by the last puff
of the breeze; it trembles still, but with pleasure, and spreads out its
lustrous, many-hued silk, {038}with voluptuous caprices beneath the sun
that warms it. Meanwhile a few serene clouds poise above it their down
of snow; the transparency of the air bathes them in angelic glory, and
their motionless flight suggests the souls in Dante stayed in ecstasy at
the entrance of paradise.
It is night; I have come up to a solitary esplanade where is a cross,
and whence is visible the sea and the coast. The coast, black, sprinkled
with lights, sinks and rises in indistinct hillocks. The sea mutters and
rolls with hollow voice. Occasionally, in the midst of this threatening
breathing comes a hoarse hiccough, as if the slumbering wild beast were
waking up; you cannot make it out, but from a nameless something that
is sombre and moving, you divine a monstrous, palpitating back; in its
presence man is like a child before the lair of a leviathan. Who assures
us that it will continue to tolerate us to-morrow? On land we feel
ourselves master; there our hand finds everywhere its traces; it has
transformed everything and put everything to its service; the soil
now-a-days is a kitchen-garden, the forests a grove, the rivers
trenches, Nature is a nurse and a servant. But here still exists
something ferocious and untamable. The ocean has preserved its liberty
and its omnipotence; one of its billows would drown our hive; over
there in America its bed lifts itself; it will {039}crush us without a
thought; it has done it and will do it again; just now it slumbers, and
we live clinging to its flank without dreaming that it sometimes wants
to turn itself about.
[Illustration: 063]
II. {040}
There is a light-house to the north of the village, an esplanade of
beach and prickly plants. Vegetation here is as rough as the ocean.
[Illustration: 064]
Do not look to the left; the pickets of soldiers, the huts of the
bathers, the ennuyés, the children, the invalids, the drying linen, it
is all as melancholy as a caserne and a hospital. But at the foot of the
light-house the beautiful green waves hollow themselves and scale the
rocks, scattering upon the wind their plume of foam; the billows come
up to the assault and mount one upon another, as agile and hardy as
charging horsemen; the caverns rumble; the breeze whispers with a happy
sound; it enters the breast and expands the muscles; you fill your lungs
with the invigorating saltness of the sea. {041}Farther on, ascending
towards the north, are paths creeping along the cliffs. At the bottom of
the last, solitude opens out; everything human has disappeared; neither
houses, nor culture, nor verdure. It is here as in the first ages, at a
time when man had not yet appeared, and when the water, the stone, and
the sand were the sole inhabitants of the universe. The coast stretches
into the vapor its long strip of polished sand; the gilded beach
undulates softly and opens its hollows to the ripples of the sea. Each
ripple comes up foamy at first, then insensibly smooths itself, leaves
behind it the flocks of its white fleece, and goes to sleep upon the
shore it has kissed. Meanwhile another approaches, and beyond that again
a new one, then a whole troop, striping the bluish water with embroidery
of silver. They whisper low, and you scarcely hear them under the outcry
of the distant billows; nowhere is the beach so sweet, so smiling--the
land softens its embrace the better to receive and caress those darling
creatures, which are, as it were, the little children of the sea.
III.
It has rained all night; but this morning a brisk wind has dried the
earth; and I have come along the coast to Saint-Jean-de-Luz. {042}
[Illustration: 066]
Everywhere the wasted cliffs drop perpendicularly down; dreary hillocks,
crumbling sand; miserable grasses that strike their filaments into the
moving soil; streamlets that vainly wind and are choked, pushed back
by the sea; tortured inlets, and naked strands. The ocean tears and
depopulates its beach. Everything suffers from the neighborhood of the
old tyrant. As you contemplate here its aspect and its work, the antique
superstitions seem true. It is a melancholy and hostile god, forever
thundering, sinister, sudden in caprice, whom nothing appeases, nothing
subdues, who chafes at being kept back from the land, {043}embraces it
impatiently, feels it and shakes it, and to-morrow may recapture it
or break it in pieces. Its violent waves start convulsively and twist
themselves, clashing like the heads of a great troop of wild horses;
a sort of grizzling mane streams on the edge of the black horizon; the
gulls scream; they are seen darting down into the valley that is scooped
out between two surges, then reappearing; they turn and look strangely
at you with their pale eyes. One would say that they are delighted with
this tumult and are awaiting a prey.
A little farther on, a poor hut hides itself in a bay. Three children
ragged, with naked legs, were playing there in a stream that was
overflown. A great moth, clogged by the rain, had fallen into a hole.
They conducted the water to it with their feet, and dabbled in the cold
mud; the rain fell in showers on the poor creature, which vainly beat
its wings; they laughed boisterously, stumbling about and holding on to
each other with their red hands. At that age and amidst such privation
nothing more was wanting to make them happy.
The road ascends and descends, winding on high hills which denote the
neighborhood of the Pyrenees. The sea reappears at each turn, and it is
a singular spectacle, this suddenly lowered horizon, and that greenish
triangle broadening toward {044}heaven. Two or three villages stretch
along the route, their houses dropping down the heights like flights of
stairs. From the white houses the women come out in black gown and veil
to go to mass. The sombre color announces Spain. The men, in velvet
vests, crowd to the public house and drink coffee in silence. Poor
houses, a poor country; under a shed I have seen them cooking, in the
guise of bread, cakes of maize and barley. This destitution is always
touching. What is it that a day-laborer has gained by our thirty
centuries of civilization? Yet he has gained, and when we accuse
ourselves, it is because we forget history. He no longer has the
small-pox, or the leprosy; he no longer dies of hunger, as in the
sixteenth century, under Montluc; he is no longer burned as a witch, as
happened indeed under Henry IV. here in this very place; he can, if he
is a soldier, learn to read, become an officer; he has coffee, sugar,
linen. Our descendants will say that that is but little; our fathers
would have said that it is a good deal.
St. Jean-de-Luz is a little old city with narrow streets, to-day silent
and decaying; its mariners once fought the Normans for the king
of England; thirty or forty ships went out every year for the
whale-fishery. Now-a-days the harbor is empty; this terrible Biscayan
sea has thrice broken down its dike. Against this roaring surge, heaped
up all {045}the way from America, no work of man holds out. The water
was engulfed in the channel and came like a race-horse high as the
quays, lashing the bridges, shaking its crests, grooving its wave; then
it thundered heavily into the basins, sometimes with leaps so abrupt
that it fell over the parapets like a mill-dam, and flooded the lower
part of the houses. One poor boat danced in a corner at the end of a
rope; no seamen, no rigging, no cordage; such is this celebrated harbor.
They say, however, that half a league away, there are five or six barks
in a creek.
[Illustration: 069]
From the dike the tumult of the high tide was visible. A massive wall of
black clouds girt the horizon; the sun blazed through a crevice like a
fire through the mouth of a furnace, and overflowed {046}upon the billow
its conflagration of ferruginous flames. The sea leaped like a maniac
at the entrance of the harbor, smitten by a band of invisible rocks, and
joined with its white line the two horns of the coast. The waves came
up fifteen feet high against the beach, then, undermined by the falling
water, fell head foremost, desperate, with frightful howling; they
returned however to the assault, and mounted each minute higher, leaving
on the beach their carpet of snowy foam, and fleeing with the slight
shivering of a swarm of ants foraging among dry leaves. Finally one of
them came wetting the feet of the men who were watching from the top of
the dike. Happily, it was the last; the city is twenty feet below, and
would be only a mass of ruins if some great tide were urged on by a
hurricane.
[Illustration: 070]
IV. {047}
A noble hotel, with broad halls, and grand antique apartments, displays
itself at the corner of the first basin facing the sea. Anne of Austria
lodged there in 1660, at the time of the marriage of Louis XIV.
[Illustration: 071]
Above a chimney is still to be seen the portrait of a princess in the
garb of a goddess. Were they not goddesses? A tapestried bridge went
from this house to the little church, sombre and splendid, traversed by
balconies of black oak, and {048}loaded with glittering reliquaries. The
married pair passed through it between two hedges of Swiss and bedizened
guards, the king all embroidered with gold, with a hat ornamented
with diamonds; the queen in a mantle of violet velvet sprinkled with
fleur-de-lis, and, underneath, a habit of white brocade studded with
precious stones, a crown upon her head.
[Illustration: 072]
There was nothing but processions, entries, pomps and parades. Who of us
now-a-days would wish to be a grand seigneur on condition of performing
at this rate? The weariness {049}of rank would do away with the
pleasures of rank; one would lose all patience at being an embroidered
manikin, always exposed to public view and on exhibition. Then, that was
the whole of life. When M. de Créqui was going to carry to the infanta
the presents of the king, “he had sixty persons in livery in his suite,
with a great number of noblemen and many friends.”
[Illustration: 073]
The eyes took delight in this splendor. Pride was more akin to vanity,
enjoyments were more on the surface. They needed to display their
power in order to feel it. The courtly life had applied the mind to
ceremonies. They {050}learned to dance, as now-a-days to reflect; they
passed whole years at the academy; they studied with extreme seriousness
and attention the art of bowing, of advancing the foot, of holding
themselves erect, of playing with the sword, of setting the cane
properly; the obligation of living in public constrained them to it; it
was the sign of their rank and education; they proved in this way their
alliances, their world, their place with the king, their title. Better
yet, it was the poetry of the time. A fine manner of bowing is a fine
thing; it recalled a thousand souvenirs of authority and of ease, just
as in Greece an attitude recalled a thousand souvenirs of war and the
gymnasium; a slight inclination of the neck, a limb nobly extended, a
smile complaisant and calm, an ample trailing petticoat with majestic
folds, filled the soul with lofty and courtly thoughts, and these great
lords were the first to enjoy the spectacle they afforded. “I went
to carry my offering,” said Mlle. de Montpensier, “and performed my
_révérences_ as did no one else of the company; I found myself suitable
enough for ceremonial days; my person held its place there as my name in
the world.” These words explain the infinite attention that was given to
questions of precedence and to ceremonies; Mademoiselle is inexhaustible
on this point; she talks like an upholsterer and a chamberlain; she is
{051}uneasy to know at what precise moment the Spanish grandees take off
their hats; if the king of Spain will kiss the queen-mother or will only
embrace her: these important interests trouble her. In fact, at that
time they were important interests. Rank did not depend, as in a
democracy, upon proved worth, on acquired glory, on power exercised
or riches displayed, but upon visible prerogatives transmitted by
inheritance or granted by the king: so that they fought for a tabouret
or a mantle, as now-a-days for a place or for a million. Among other
treacheries they plotted to lodge Mademoiselle’s sisters with the queen.
“The proposition displeased me; they would have eaten with her always,
which I did not. That roused my pride. I was desperate at that moment.”
The warfare was yet greater when it came to the marriage. “It occurred
to somebody that it was necessary to carry an offering to the queen, so
I could not bear her train, and it must be my sisters who would carry it
with Mme. de Carignan. As soon as there was talk of bearing trains, the
Duke de Roquelaure had offered to carry mine. They sought for dukes to
carry those of my sisters, and, as not one was willing to do it, Mme.
de Saugeon cried aloud that Madame would be in despair at this
distinction.” What happiness to walk first upon the tapestried bridge,
the train held up by a duke, while, the {052}others go shamefully
behind, with a train, but without a duke! But suddenly others put in a
claim. Mme. d’Uzès comes running up in a fright: it is question of an
atrocious usurpation. “The princess palatine will have a train; will you
not put a stop to that?” They get together; they go to the king; they
represent to him the enormity of the deed: the king forbids this new
train as usurping and criminal, and the princess, who weeps and storms,
declares that she will not be present at the marriage if they deprive
her of her appendix. Alas! all human prosperity has its reverses;
Mademoiselle, so happy in the matter of trains, could not get to kiss
the queen, and, at this interdict, she remained all day plunged in
the deepest grief. But, you see, the pursuits of rank had been, from
infancy, her sole concern; she had wanted to marry all the princes in
the world, and ever in vain; the person mattered little to her. First
the cardinal infante, the reverse of an Amadis; at the age of dreams, on
the threshold of youth, among the vague visions and first enchantments
of love, she chose this old churl in a ruff to enthrone herself with
him, in a fine arm-chair, in the government of the Low Countries. Then
Philip IV. of Spain; the emperor Ferdinand, the arch-duke: negotiating
with them herself, exposing her envoy to the risk of hanging. Then the
king of Hungary, the future king of {053}England, Louis XIV., Monsieur,
the king of Portugal.
[Illustration: 77]
Who could count them? At a pinch, she went to work in advance: the
princess of Condé being ill, then in the family way, this romantic head
fancied that the prince was going to become a widower, and wanted to
retain him for a husband. No one took this hand that she had stretched
to all Europe. In vain she fired cannon in the Fronde; she remained
to the end an adventuress, a state puppet, a weathercock, occasionally
exiled, twenty times a widow, but always before the wedding, carrying
over the whole of France the weariness and imaginations {054}of her
involuntary celibacy. At last Lauzun appeared; to marry her, and
secretly at that, cost him the half of his wealth; the king drew the
dowry of his bastard from the misalliance of his cousin. It was an
exemplary household: she scratched him: he beat her.--We laugh at
these pretensions and bickerings, at these mischances and aristocratic
quarrels; our turn will come, rest assured of that; our democracy too
affords matter of laughter: our black coat is, like their embroidered
coat, laced with the ridiculous; we have envy, melancholy, the want of
moderation and of politeness, the heroes of George Sand, of Victor Hugo
and of Balzac. In fact, what does it matter?
“Sifflez-moi librement; je vous le rends, mes frères.” So talked
Voltaire, who gave to all the world at once the charter of equality and
gayety.
[Illustration: 78]
BOOK II. THE VALLEY OF OSSA
{057}
[Illustration: 81]
CHAPTER I. DAX.--ORTHEZ.
I.
I saw Dax in passing, and I recall only two rows of white walls of
staring brightness, into which low doorways here and there sank their
black arches with a strange relief. An old and thoroughly forbidding
cathedral bristled its bell-turrets and dentations in the midst of the
pomp of nature and the joyousness of the light, as if the soil, burst
open, had once put forth out of its lava a heap of crystallized sulphur.
The postilion, a good fellow, takes up a poor woman on the way, and
sets her beside him on his seat. What gay people! They sing in
patois,--there, they are singing now. The conductor joins {058}in, then
one of the people in the impériale. They laugh with their whole heart;
their eyes sparkle. How far we are from the north! In all these southern
folk there is _verve_; occasionally poverty, fatigue, anxiety crush
it; at the least opening, it Gushes forth like living water in full
sunlight.
This poor woman amuses me. She is fifty years old, without shoes,
garments in shreds, and not a sou in her pocket. She talks familiarly
with a stout, well-dressed gentleman, who is behind her. No humility;
she believes herself the equal of the whole world. Gayety is like a
spring rendering the soul elastic; the people bend but rise again. An
Englishman would be scandalized. Several of them have said to me that
the French nation have no sentiment of respect. That is why we no longer
have an aristocracy.
[Illustration: 83]
The chain of the mountains undulates to the left, bluish and like a
long stratum of clouds. The rich valley resembles a great basin full to
overflowing of fruit-trees and maize. White clouds hover slowly in the
depths of heaven, like a flock of tranquil swans. The eye rests on the
down of their sides, and turns with pleasure upon the roundness of their
noble forms. They sail in a troop, carried on by the south wind, with an
even flight, like a family of blissful gods, and from up above they seem
to look with tenderness upon the beautiful earth which they protect and
are going to nourish. {059} {060} {061}
II.
Orthez, in the fourteenth century, was a capital; of this grandeur there
remains but the wreck: ruined walls and the high tower of the castle
hung with ivy. The counts of Foix had there a little state, almost
independent, proudly planted between the realms of France, England and
Spain. The people have gained in something, I know; they no longer
hate their neighbors, and they live at peace; they receive from Paris
inventions and news; peace, trade and well-being are increased. They
have, however, lost in something; instead of thirty active thinking
capitals, there are thirty provincial cities, {062}torpid and docile.
The women long for a hat, the men go to smoke at a café; that is
their life; they scrape together a few empty old ideas from imbecile
newspapers. In old times they had thoughts on politics and courts of
love.
III.
[Illustration: 86]
The good Froissart came here in the year 1388, having ridden and chatted
about arms all along the route with the chevalier Messire Espaing de
Lyon; he lodged in the inn of the Beautiful Hostess, which was then
called the hotel of the Moon. The count Gaston Phoebus sent in all haste
to seek him: “for he was the lord who of all the world the most gladly
entertained the stranger in order to hear the news.” Froissart passed
twelve weeks in his hotel: “for they made him good cheer and fed well
his horses, and in all things also ordered well.”
Froissart is a child, and sometimes an old child. At that time thought
was expanding, as in Greece {063}in the time of Herodotus. But, while we
feel that in Greece it is going on to unfold itself to the very end, we
discover here that an obstacle checks it: there is a knot in the tree;
the arrested sap can mount no higher. This knot is scholasticism.
[Illustration: 87]
For, during three centuries already they had written in verse, and for
two centuries in prose; after this long culture, see what a historian is
Froissart. One morning he mounts on horseback with several valets,
under a beautiful sun, and gallops onward; {064}a lord meets him whom
he accosts: “Sir, what is this castle?” The other tells him about the
sieges, and what grand sword-thrusts were there exchanged. “Holy Mary,”
cried Froissart, “but your words please me and do me a deal of good,
while you tell them off to me! And you shall not lose them, for all
shall be set in remembrance and chronicled in the history which I am
pursuing.” Then he has explained to himself the kindred of the seigneur,
his alliances, how his friends and enemies have lived and are dead, and
the whole skein of the adventures interwoven during two centuries and
in three countries. “And as soon as I had alighted at the hotels, on the
road that we were following together, I wrote them down, were it evening
or morning, for the better memory of them in times to come; for there
is no such exact retentive as writing.” All is found here, the pell-mell
and the hundred shifts of the conversations, the reflections, the
little accidents of the journey. An old squire recounts to him mountain
legends, how Pierre de Beam, having once killed an enormous bear,
could no longer sleep in peace, but thenceforward he awaked each night,
“making such a noise and such clatter that it seemed that all the devils
in hell should have carried away everything and were inside with him.”
Froissart judges that this bear was perhaps a knight turned {065}into
a beast for some misdeed; cites in support the story of Actæon, an
“accomplished and pretty knight who was changed into a stag.” Thus goes
his life and thus his history is composed; it resembles a tapestry
of the period, brilliant and varied, full of hunting, of tournaments,
battles and processions. He gives himself and his hearers the pleasure
of imagining ceremonies and adventures; no other idea, or rather no
idea. Of criticism, general considerations, reasoning upon man or
society, counsels or forecast, there is no trace; it is a herald at arms
who seeks to please curious eyes, the warlike spirit and the empty minds
of robust knights, great eaters, lovers of thumps and pomps. Is it not
strange, this barrenness of reason! In Greece, at the end of an hundred
years, Thucydides, Plato and Xenophon, philosophy and science had
appeared. By way of climax, read the verses of Froissart, those ballads,
roundelays and virelays that he recited of evenings to the Count de
Foix, “who took great solace in hearing them indeed,” the old rubbish of
decadence, worn, affected allegories, the garrulousness of a broken-down
pedant who amuses himself in composing wearisome turns of address. And
the rest are all alike. Charles d’Orleans has a sort of faded grace and
nothing-more, Christine de Pisan but an official solemnity.
Such feeble spirits want the force to give birth to {066}general ideas;
they are bowed down under the weight of those which have been hooked on
to them.
[Illustration: 90]
The cause is not far to seek; think of that stout cornific * doctor with
leaden eyes, a confrère of Froissart, if you like, but how different! He
holds in his hand his manual of canon-law, Peter the Lombard, a treatise
on the syllogism. For ten hours a day he disputes in Baralipton on the
_hicaeity_.
* Cornificien, a name given by Jean of Sarisberg to those
who disfigured dialectics by their extravagant, cornus
arguments.--Translator.
As soon as he became hoarse, he dipped {067}his nose again into his
yellow folio; his syllogisms and quiddities ended by making him stupid;
he knew nothing about things or dared not consider them; he only wielded
words, shook formulas together, bruised his own head, lost all common
sense, and reasoned like a machine for Latin verses.* What a master for
the sons of noblemen, and for keen poetic minds, and what an education
was this labyrinth of dry logic and extravagant scholasticism. Tired,
disgusted, irritated, stupefied, they forgot the ugly dream as soon as
possible, ran in the open air, and thought only of the chase, of war and
the ladies; they were not so foolish as to turn their eyes a second time
towards their crabbed litany; if they did come back to it, that was out
of vanity; they wanted to set some Latin fable in their songs, or some
learned abstraction, without comprehending a word of it, donning it for
fashion’s sake, as the ermine of learning. With us of today, general
ideas spring up in every mind,--living and flourishing ones; among the
laity of that time their root was cut off, and among the clergy there
remained of them but a fagot of dead wood. And so mankind was only
the better fitted for the life of the body and more capable of violent
passions; with regard to this the style of Froissart, {068}artless as it
is, deceives us. We think we are listening to the pretty garrulousness
of a child at play; beneath this prattle we must distinguish the rude
voice of the combatants, bear-hunters and hunters of men too, and the
broad, coarse hospitality of feudal manners.
* See the discourse of Jean Petit on the assassination of
the Duke of Orleans.
[Illustration: 92]
At midnight the Count of Foix came to supper in the great hall. “Before
him went twelve lighted torches, borne by twelve valets: and the same
twelve torches were held before his table and gave much light unto
the hall, which was full of knights and squires; and always there were
plenty of tables laid out for any person who chose to sup.” It must have
been an {069}astonishing sight, to see those furrowed faces and powerful
frames, with their furred robes and their justicoats streaked under
the wavering flashes of the torches. One Christmas day, going into his
gallery, he saw that there was but a small fire, and spoke of it aloud.
Thereupon a knight, Ernauton d’Espagne, having looked out of the window,
saw in the court a number of asses with “billets of wood for the use of
the house. He seized the largest of these asses with his load, threw him
over his shoulders and carried him up stairs” (there were twenty-four
steps), “pushing through the crowd of knights and squires who were round
the chimney, and flung ass and load, with his feet upward, on the dogs
of the hearth, to the delight of the count, and the astonishment of
all.” Here are the laughter and the amusement of barbaric giants. They
wanted noise, and songs proportioned to it. Froissart tells of a banquet
when bishops, counts, abbés, knights, nearly one hundred in number, were
seated at table. “There were very many minstrels in the hall, as well
those belonging to the count as to the strangers, who, at their leisure,
played away their minstrelsy. Those of the duke de Touraine played so
loud and so well that the count clothed them ‘with cloth of gold trimmed
with ermine.’”
“This count,” says Froissart, “reigned prudently; {070}in all things
he was so perfect that one could not praise him too much. No great
contemporary prince could compare with him in sense, honor and wisdom.”
In that case the great princes of the day were not worth much. With
justice and humanity, the good Froissart scarcely troubles himself; he
finds murder perfectly natural; indeed, it was the custom; they were no
more astonished at it, than at a snap of the jaws in a wolf. Man then
resembled a beast of prey, and when a beast of prey has eaten up a
sheep nobody is scandalized thereby. This excellent Count de Foix was
an assassin, not once only, but ten times. For example, he coveted the
castle of Lourdes, and so sent for the captain, Pierre Ernault, who had
received it in trust for the prince of Wales. Pierre Ernault “became
very thoughtful and doubtful whether to go or not.” At last he went, and
the count demanded from him the castle of Lourdes. The knight thought
awhile what answer to make. However, having well considered, he said:
“My lord, in truth I owe you faith and homage, for I am a poor knight of
your blood and country; but as for the castle of Lourdes, I will never
surrender it to you. You have sent for me, and you may therefore do with
me as you please. I hold the castle of Lourdes from the king of England,
who has placed me there; and to no other person but {071}to him will
I ever surrender it.” The Count de Foix, on hearing this answer, was
exceedingly wroth, and said, as he drew his dagger, “Ho, ho, dost thou
then say so? By this head, thou hast not said it for nothing.” And, as
he uttered these words, he struck him foully with the dagger, so that he
wounded him severely in five places, and none of the barons or knights
dared to interfere.
[Illustration: 95]
The knight replied, “Ha, ha, my lord, this is not gentle treatment;
you sent for me here, and are murdering me.” Having received these
five strokes from the dagger, the count ordered him to be cast into the
dungeon, which was done; and there he died, for he was ill-cured of his
wounds. This dominance of sudden passion, this violence {072}of first
impulse, this flesh and blood emotion, and abrupt appeal to physical
force, are cropping out continually in the people. At the slightest
insult their eyes kindle and blows fall like hail.
[Illustration: 096]
As we were leaving Dax, a diligence passed ours, grazing one of the
horses. The conductor leaped down from his seat, a stake in his
hand, and was going to fell his _confrèr_. Those lords lived and felt
something like our conductors, and the Count de Foix was such an one.
I beg pardon of the conductors; I wrong them grievously. The count,
not having the fear of the police before his eyes, came at once not to
fisticuffs, but to stabs. His son Gaston, while on a visit to the king
of Navarre, received a black powder which, according to the king, must
forever reconcile {073}the count and his wife; the youth took the powder
in a little bag and concealed it in his breast; one day his bastard
brother, Yvain, saw the bag while playing with him, wanted to have it,
and afterward denounced him to the count. At this the count “began to
have suspicions, for he was full of fancies,” and remained so until
dinner-time, very thoughtful, haunted and harassed by sombre imaginings.
Those stormy brains, filled by warfare and danger with dismal images,
hastened to tumult and tempest. The youth came, and began to serve the
dishes, tasting the meats, as was usual when the notion of poison was
not far from any mind. The count cast his eyes upon him and saw the
strings of the bag; the sight fired his veins and made his blood boil;
he seized the youth, undid his pourpoint, cut the strings of the bag,
and strewed some of the powder over a slice of bread, while the poor
youth turned pale with fear, and began to tremble exceedingly. Then he
called one of his dogs to him, and gave it him to eat. “The instant the
dog had eaten a morsel his eyes rolled round in his head, and he died.”
The count said nothing, but rose suddenly, and seizing his knife, threw
himself upon his son. But the knights rushed in between them: “For God’s
sake, my lord, do not be too hasty, but make further inquiries before
you do any ill to your son.” {074}
[Illustration: 098]
The count heaped malediction and insult upon the youth, then suddenly
leaped over the table, knife in hand, and fell upon him like a wild
beast. But the knights and the squires fell upon their knees before him
weeping, and saying: “Ah, ah! my lord, for Heaven’s sake do not kill
Gaston; you have no other child.” With great difficulty he restrained
himself, doubtless thinking that it was prudent to see if no one else
had a part in the matter, and put the youth into the tower at Orthez.
He investigated then, but in a singular fashion, as if he were a
famished wolf, wedded to a single idea, bruising himself against it
mechanically and brutally, through murder and outcry, killing blindly
and without reflecting that his killing is of no use to him. He had many
of those who served his {075}son arrested, and “put to death not less
than fifteen after they had suffered the torture; and the reason he gave
was, that it was impossible but they must have been acquainted with the
secrets of his son, and they ought to have informed him by saying, ‘My
lord, Gaston wears constantly on his breast a bag of such and such a
form.’ This they did not do and suffered a terrible death for it;
which was a pity, for there were not in all Gascony such handsome or
well-appointed squires.”
When this search had proved useless he fell back upon his son; he
sent for the nobles, the prelates and all the principal persons of
his country, related the affair to them, and told them that it was his
intention to put the youth to death. But they would not agree to
this, and said that the country had need of an heir for its better
preservation and defence; “and would not quit Orthez until the count had
assured them that Gaston should not be put to death, so great was their
affection for him.” Still the youth remained in the tower of Orthez,
“where was little light,” always lying alone, unwilling to eat, “cursing
the hour that ever he was born or begotten, that he should come to such
an end.” On the tenth day the jailer saw all the meats that had been
served in a corner, and went and told it to the count. The count was
again enraged, like a beast of prey who encounters a {076}remnant of
resistance after it has once been satiated; “without saying a word,” he
came to the prison, holding by the point a small knife with which he
was cleaning his nails. Then striking his fist upon his son’s throat, he
pushed him rudely as he said: “Ha, traitor, why dost thou not eat?”
and went away without saying more. His knife had touched an artery; the
youth frightened and wan, turned without a word to the other side of the
bed, shed his blood and died.
[Illustration: 100]
The count was grieved beyond measure when he heard this, for those
violent natures felt only with excess and by contrasts; he had himself
shaven and clothed in black. “The body of the youth was borne, with
tears and lamentations, to the church of the Augustine Friars at Orthez,
where it was buried.” * But such murders left an ill-healed {077}wound
in the heart; the dull pain remained, and from time to time some dark
shadow crossed the tumult of the banquets. This is why the count never
again felt such perfect joy as before.
* The passages from Froissart are from the version of Thomas
Johnes. New York: J. Winchester, New World Press.
[Illustration: 101]
It was a sad time; there is hardly another in which one would have
lived so unwillingly. Poetry was imbecile, chivalry was falling into
brigandage, religion suffered degradation, the State, disjointed,
was crumbling away; the nation, ground down by king, by nobles and by
Englishmen, struggled for {078}a hundred years in a slough, between the
dying middle-age and the modern era which was not yet opened. And yet a
man like Ernauton must have experienced a unique and splendid joy when,
planted like a Hercules upon his two feet, feeling his shirt of mail
upon his breast, he pierced through a hedge of pikes, and wielded his
great sword in the sunlight.
[Illustration: 102]
IV {079}
[Illustration: 103]
Nothing can be pleasanter than to journey alone in an unknown country,
without a definite end, without recent cares; all little thoughts are
blotted out. Do I know whether this field belongs to Peter or to Paul;
whether the engineer is at war with the prefect, or if there is any
dispute over a projected canal or road? I am happy indeed in know-all
that; happier still in first time, finding fresh {080}sensations, and
not being troubled by comparisons and souvenirs. I can consider things
through-general views, no longer regarding the soil as made the most of
by mankind, can forget the useful, think only of the beautiful, and feel
the movement of forms and the expression of colors.
The very road seems beautiful to me. What an air of resignation in those
old elms. They bud and spread forth in branches, from head to foot, they
have such a desire for life, even under this dust. Then come lustrous
plane trees, tossing their beautiful and regular leaves. White bindweed,
blue campanulas, hang at the edge of the ditches. Is it not strange that
these pretty creatures remain so solitary, that they should be fated to
die to-morrow, that they should scarcely have looked upon us an instant;
that their beauty should have flourished only for its two seconds of
admiration? They too have their world, this people of high grasses
bending over on themselves; these lizards which wave the thicket of the
herbs; these gilded wasps that hum in their chalices. This world here is
well worth ours, and I find them happy in opening thus, then in closing
their pale eyes to the peaceful whisper of the wind.
The road, as far as the eye can reach, curves and lifts anew its white
girdle around the hills; this {081}{082}{083}sinuous movement is of
infinite sweetness; the long riband tightens to their figure their veil
of fair harvests or their robe of green meadows.
[Illustration: 106]
These slopes and roundnesses are as expressive as human forms; but how
much more varied, how much stranger and richer in attitudes? Those there
on the horizon, almost hid behind a troop of others, smile dimly in
their timidness, under their crown of vapory gauze; they form a round on
the brink of heaven, a fleeting round that the least disturbance of the
air would put out of sight, and which yet regards with tenderness the
fretted creatures lost in its bosom. Others, their neighbors, rudely
dint the soil with their haunches and their brown slopes; the human
structure here half peeps forth, then disappears under the mineral
barbarism; here are the children of another age, ever powerful, severe
still, unknown and antique races, whose mysterious history the mind
searches without willing it. Tawny moors filled with herds mount upon
their flanks to the summits; splendid meadows sparkle upon their back.
Some among these plunge abruptly away down into depths where they
disgorge the streams that they accumulate, and where is gathered all
the heat of the burning vault which shines above under the most generous
sun. It, meanwhile, embraces and broods over the country; from woods,
plains, hills, the great soul of {084}vegetation starts forth mounting
to meet its rays.
Here your neighbor, who is engaged in a warm dispute, pulls your sleeve,
crying: “The gigot at Orthez doesn’t give cramps in the stomach, does
it, sir?”
You start; then in another moment you turn your nose toward the window.
But the sensation has disappeared: the mutton of Dax has blotted out
everything. The meadows are so many kilogrammes of unmown hay, the trees
are so many feet of timber, and the herds are only walking beefsteaks.
{085}
[Illustration: 110]
CHAPTER II. PAU.
I.
Pau is a pretty city, neat, of gay appearance; but the highway is paved
with little round stones, the side-walks with small sharp pebbles: so
the horses walk on the heads of nails and foot-passengers on the points
of them. From Bordeaux to Toulouse such is the usage, such the pavement.
At the end of five minutes, your feet tell you in the most intelligible
manner that you are two hundred leagues away from Paris.
You meet wagons loaded with wood, of rustic {086}simplicity, the
invention of which goes back to the time of Vercingetorix, but the only
thing capable of climbing and descending the stony escarpments of the
mountains. They are composed of the trunk of a tree placed across the
axles and sustaining two oblique hurdles; they are drawn by two great
whitish oxen, decked with a piece of hanging cloth, a net of thread upon
the head and crowned with ferns, all to shield them from the gray flies.
This suggests food for thought; for the skin of man is far more tender
than that of the ox, and the gray flies have sworn no peace with our
kind. Before the oxen ordinarily marches a peasant, of a distrustful and
cunning air, armed with a long switch, and dressed in white woollen vest
and brown breeches; behind the wagon comes a little bare-footed boy,
very wide awake and very ragged, whose old velvet cap falls like the
head of a wrinkled mushroom, and who stops struck with admiration at the
magnificent aspect of the diligence.
Those are the true countrymen of Henry IV. As to the pretty ladies in
gauzy hats, whose swelling and rustling robes graze the horns of the
motionless oxen as they pass, you must not look at them; they would
carry your imagination back to the Boulevard de Gand, and you would have
gone two hundred leagues only to remain in the same place. I am here on
purpose to visit the sixteenth {087}century; one makes a journey for the
sake of changing, not place, but ideas. Point out to a Parisian the
gate by which Henry IV. entered Paris; he will have great difficulty
in calling up the armor, the halberts and the whole victorious and
tumultuous procession that l’Etoile describes: it is because he passed
by there to-day on such and such business, that yesterday he met there
a friend, while last year he looked upon this gate in the midst of a
public festival.
[Illustration: 112]
All these thoughts hurry along with the force of habit, repelling and
stifling the historic spectacle which was going to lift itself into full
light and unroll itself before the mind. Set down the same man in Pau:
there he knows neither hotels, nor people, nor shops; his imagination,
out of its element, may run at random; no known object will trip him up
and make him fall into the cares of interest, the passion of to-day;
he enters into the past as a matter of course, and walks there as if at
home, at his ease. It was eight o’clock in the morning; not a visitor at
the castle, no one in the courts nor on the terrace; I should not have
been too much astonished at meeting the Béarnais, “that lusty gallant,
that very devil,” who {088}was sharp enough to get for himself the name
of “the good king.”
His chateau is very irregular; it is only when seen from the valley
that any grace and harmony can be found in it. Above two rows of pointed
roofs and old houses, it stands out alone against the sky and gazes
upon the valley in the distance; two bell-turrets project from the front
toward the west; the oblong body follows, and two massive brick towers
close the line with their esplanades and battlements. It is connected
with the city by a narrow old bridge, by a broad modern one with the
park, and the foot of its terrace is bathed by a dark but lovely stream.
Near at hand, this arrangement disappears; a fifth tower upon the north
side deranges the symmetry.
[Illustration: 113]
The great egg-shaped court is a mosaic of {089}{090}{091}incongruous
masonry; above the porch, a wall of pebbles from the Gave, and of red
bricks crossed like a tapestry design; opposite, fixed to the wall, a
row of medallions in stone; upon the sides, doors of every form and age;
dormer windows, windows square, pointed, embattled, with stone mullions
garlanded with elaborate reliefs. This masquerade of styles troubles the
mind, yet not unpleasantly; it is unpretending and artless; each century
has built according to its own fancy, without concerning itself about
its neighbor.
[Illustration: 115]
On the first floor is shown a great tortoise-shell, which was the cradle
of Henry IV. Carved chests, dressing-tables, tapestries, clocks of
that day, the bed and arm-chair of Jeanne d’Albret, a complete set of
furniture in the taste of the Renaissance striking and sombre, painfully
labored yet magnificent in style, carrying the mind at once back toward
that age of force and effort, of boldness in invention, of unbridled
pleasures and terrible toil, of sensuality and of heroism. Jeanne
d’Albret, mother of Henry IV., crossed France in order that she might,
according to her promise, be confined in this castle. “A princess,” says
d’Aubigné, “having nothing of the woman about her but the sex, a soul
entirely given to manly things, a mind mighty in great affairs, a heart
unconquerable by adversity.”{092}
II.
She sang an old Bearnese song when she brought him into the world. They
say that the aged grandfather rubbed the lips of the new-born child with
a clove of garlic, poured into his mouth a few drops of Jurançon wine,
and carried him away in his dressing-gown.
[Illustration: 117]
The child was born in the chamber which opens into the tower of Mazères,
on the south-west corner. “His grandfather took him away from his
father and mother, and would have this child brought up at his door,
reproaching his daughter and his son-in-law with having lost several of
their children through French luxuries. And, indeed, he brought him up
in the Bearnese manner, that is, bareheaded and barefoot, often with no
{093}more nicety than is shown in the bringing up of children among
the peasantry. This odd resolution was successful, and formed a body
in which heat and cold, unmeasured toil and all sorts of troubles were
unable to produce any change, thus apportioning his nourishment to his
condition, as though God wished at that time to prepare a sure
remedy and a firm heart of steel against the iron knots of our dire
calamities.”
His mother, a warm and severe Calvinist, when he was fifteen years old,
led him through the Catholic army to la Rochelle, and gave him to her
followers as their general. At sixteen years old, at the combat of
Arnay-le-Duc, he led the first charge of cavalry. What an education and
what men! Their descendants were just now passing in the streets, going
to school to compose Latin verses and recite the pastorals of Massillon.
Those old wars are the most poetic in French history; they were made
for pleasure rather than interest. It was a chase in which adventures,
dangers, emotions were found, in which men lived in the sunlight, on
horseback, amidst flashes of fire, and where the body, as well as the
soul, had its {094}enjoyment and its exercise. Henry carries it on as
briskly as a dance, with a Gascon’s fire and a soldier’s ardor, with
abrupt sallies, and pursuing his point against the enemy as with the
ladies. This is no spectacle of great masses of well-disciplined men,
coming heavily into collision and falling by thousands on the field,
according to the rules of good tactics. The king leaves Pau or Nérac
with a little troop, picks up the neighboring garrisons on his way,
scales a fortress, intercepts a body of arquebusiers as they pass,
extricates himself pistol in hand from the midst of a hostile troop, and
returns to the feet of Mlle. de Tignonville.
[Illustration: 119]
They arrange their plan from day to day; nothing is done unless
unexpectedly and by chance. Enterprises are strokes of fortune. Here is
one which Sully had recounted by his secretary; I like to listen to old
words among old monuments, and to feel the mutual fitness of objects and
of style: {095}”The king of Navarre formed the design of seizing on the
city of Eause, which, by good right, was his, and where he had chance of
fine fortune; for deeming that the inhabitants, who had not been willing
to receive a garrison, should have respect for his person, who was their
lord, he determined to march all day long in order to enter in with few
people, so as to create no alarm, and, indeed, having taken only fifteen
or sixteen of you, gentlemen, who placed yourselves nearest to him,
among whom were you, with simple cuirasses under your hunting tunics,
two swords and two pistols, he surprised the gate of the city and
entered in before they of the guard were able to take up arms. But one
of these gave the alarm to him who was sentinel at the portal, and he
cut the cord in the slide of the portcullis, so that it fell immediately
almost on the croup of your horse and that of your cousin, M. de Béthune
the elder, and hindered the troop which was coming up on the gallop from
entering, so that the king and you fifteen or sixteen alone remained
shut up in this city, where all the people, being armed, fell upon you
in divers troops and at divers times, while the tocsin rang furiously,
and a cry of ‘_Arm, arm!’ and ‘Kill, Kill!_ resounded on all
sides,--seeing which, the king of Navarre, from the first troop which
came up, some fifty strong, in part well, in part ill armed, {096}he,
I say, marching, pistol in hand, straight at them, called out to you:
‘Come now, my friends, my comrades; it is here that you must show
courage and resolution, for thereon depends our safety; let each one
then follow me and do as I do, and not fire until the pistol touches.’
At the same time, hearing three or four cry out: ‘Fire at that scarlet
tunic, at that white plume, for it is the king of Navarre,’ he charged
on them so impetuously that, without firing more than five or six times,
they took fright and withdrew in several troops. Others in like manner
came against you three or four times; but as soon as they saw that
they were broken, they fired a few times and turned away until, having
rallied nearly two hundred together, they forced you to gain a doorway,
and two of you went up to give a signal to the rest of the troop
that the king was there, and that the gate must be burst open, as the
draw-bridge had not been raised. Whereupon each one began working, and
then several among that populace who loved the king, and others who
feared to offend him, began raising a tumult in his favor; finally,
after a few arquebusades and pistol-shots from both sides, there arose
such dissension among them, some crying, ‘We must yield;’ others, ‘We
must defend ourselves;’ that the irresolution afforded means and
time for opening the gates, and for all the troops to present {097}
{098}themselves, at the head of whom the king placed himself, and saw
most of the peoples fleeing and the consuls with their chaperons crying:
‘Sire, we are your subjects and your peculiar servants. Alas! allow not
the sacking of this city, which is yours, on account of the madness of a
few worthless fellows, who should be driven out. He placed himself, I
said, at the head to prevent pillage: thus there was committed neither
violence, nor disorder, nor any other punishment, except that four, who
had fired at the white plume, were hung, to the joy of all the other
inhabitants, who thought not that they should be quiet on such ood
terms.”{099}
[Illustration: 122]
At Cahors he burst in the two gates with petard and axe, and fought five
days and five nights in the city, carrying house after house. Are not
these chivalric adventures and poetry in action? “So, so, cavaliers,”
cried the Catholics at Marmande; “a pistol-shot for love of the
mistress; for your court is too full of lovely ladies to know any lack
of them.” Henry escaped like a true paladin, and lost his victory at
Contras in order to carry to the beautiful Corisandre the flags that he
had taken. To act, to dare, to enjoy, to expend force and trouble like
a prodigal, to be given up to the present sensation, be forever urged
by passions forever lively, support and {100}search the extremes of all
contrasts, that was the life of the sixteenth century. Henry at Fontenay
“worked in the trenches with pick and mattock.” On his return there was
nothing but feasting.
[Illustration: 125]
“We came together,” says Marguerite, “to take walks in company, either
in a lovely garden where are long alleys of cypress and laurel, or in
the park which I had caused to be made, in alleys three thousand paces
long, which border the river; and the rest of the day was spent in all
sorts of suitable pleasures, a ball ordinarily filling the afternoon and
the evening.” The grave Sully “took {101}a mistress like the rest.” In
visiting the restored dining-hall, you repeople it involuntarily
with the sumptuous costumes described by Brantôme: ladies “clad in
orange-color and gold lace, robes of cloth of silver, of crisped cloth
of gold, stuffs perfectly stiff with ornaments and embroidery. Queen
Marguerite in a robe of flesh-colored Spanish velvet, heavily loaded
with gold lace, so decked out with plumes and precious stones as nothing
ever was before.” I said to M. de Ronsard: “Do you not seem to see this
beautiful queen, in such guise, appearing as the lovely Aurora, when
she is going to spring up before the day, with her beautiful pale face,
bordered with its ruby and carnation color?” At the ball in the evening,
she loved to dance “the _pavane_ of Spain and the Italian _pazzemano._
The passages in this were so well danced, the steps so judiciously
conducted, the rests so beautifully made, that you knew not which most
to admire, the beautiful manner of dancing, or the majesty of the steps,
representing now gayety, now a fine and grave disdain.”
You may well believe that the good king was not sparing of sport.
“Il fut de ses sujets le vainqueur et le père”
The maids of honor of Marguerite could bear witness to this; hence
intrigues, quarrels and {102}conjugal comedies, one of which is very
prettily and very artlessly told by the queen; Mlle. de Fosseuse was the
heroine. “The pain seized her one morning, at the break of day, while
in bed in the chamber of the maids, and she sent for my physician and
begged him to go and inform the king my husband, which he did. We were
in bed in the same chamber, but in separate beds, according to our
custom. When the physician gave him this bit of news, he was in great
trouble, not knowing what to do, fearful on the one hand lest she should
be discovered, and on the other lest she should want help, for he loved
her dearly. He determined, finally, to confess all to me, and to beg me
go to her assistance, for he knew well that, whatever might have passed,
he should always find me ready to serve him in anything that could
please him. He opens my curtain and says to me: ‘Dearest, I have
concealed from you one thing which I must confess to you: I beg you to
excuse me for it, and not to remember all that I have said to you on
this subject. But oblige me so much as to get up at once, and go to the
assistance of Fosseuse, who is very ill; I am sure that you would not
wish, when you see her in that condition, to resent what is past. You
know how much I love her; I beg that you will oblige me in this matter.’
I {103}told him that I honored him too much to be offended with anything
coming from him. That I would be off and do as if it were my daughter;
that in the mean time he should go to the chase and take everybody with
him, so that no talk of it should be heard.
“I had her promptly removed from the chamber of the maids and put into
a chamber apart, with my physician and women to wait upon her, and gave
her my best assistance. God willed that it should be only a daughter,
which moreover was dead. After the delivery, she was carried to the
chamber of the maids, where, though all possible discretion was used,
they could not prevent the report from spreading throughout the castle.
When the king my husband was returned from the chase, he went to see her
according to his custom; she begged him that I would come to see her, as
I was accustomed to visit all my maids when they were ill, thinking to
stop by this means the spread of the report. The king my husband came
into the chamber and found that I had gone to bed again, for I was tired
with getting up so early, and with the trouble I had had in rendering
her assistance. He begged that I would get up and go to see her; I
told him that I had done so when she had need of my aid, but now she no
longer had occasion for it; that if I went there, I should reveal rather
than {104}cloak the truth, and that everybody would point their finger
at me. He was seriously vexed with me, and this was far from pleasant to
me, for it seemed that I had not deserved such a recompense for what I
had done in the morning. She often put him into similar mood toward me.”
[Illustration: 129]
Compassionate souls, who admire the complaisance of the queen, do not
pity her too much: she punished the king, by imitating him, at Usson and
elsewhere.
And yet Pan was a lesser Geneva. Amidst these violences and this
voluptuousness, devotion {105}was warm; they went to sermons or to the
church, with the same air as to the battle-field or the rendezvous. This
is because religion then was not a virtue, but a passion. In such case,
the neighboring passions, instead of extinguishing it, only inflame; the
heart overflows on that side as on the others. When the lazzarone has
stabbed his enemy, he finds a second pleasure, says Beyle, in prating
about his anger, alongside a wire grating in a great box of black wood.
The Hindoo that gets excited and howls at the feast of Juggernaut, to
the hubbub of fifty thousand tom-toms, the American Methodist who weeps
and cries aloud his sins in a revival, feels something the same sort
of pleasure as an Italian enthusiast at the opera. That explains and
reconciles the zeal and the gallantry of Marguerite.
“They only allowed me,” said she, “to have mass said in a little chapel
not more than three or four paces long, which, narrow as it was, was
full when there were seven or eight of us there. So when they wanted
to say mass, they raised the bridge of the castle, for fear that the
Catholics of the country, who had no exercise of their religion, should
hear of it; for they had an infinite desire to assist at the holy
sacrifice, of which they had been deprived for several years. And,
urged by this sacred desire, the inhabitants of Pau found {106}means, at
Whitsuntide, before the bridge was raised, to enter the castle, and slip
into the chapel, where they were not discovered until toward the end
of mass, when, half opening the door to let in one of my people, some
Huguenots who were spying round the door perceived them, and went to
tell it to le Pin, secretary of the king my husband, and he sent there
some guards of the king my husband, who, dragging them forth and beating
them in my presence, carried them off to prison, where they remained a
long time, and paid a heavy fine.”
[Illustration: 131]
The little chapel has disappeared, I believe, since the castle and the
whole country were {107}restored to the Catholic worship. Besides,
this treatment arose from humanity: Saint-Pont, at Macon, “afforded the
ladies, as they went out from the banquets that he gave, the pleasure
of seeing a certain number of prisoners leap off from the bridge.” Such
were these men, extreme in everything, in fanaticism, in pleasure, in
violence; never did the fountain of desires flow fuller and deeper;
never did more vigorous passions unfold themselves with more of sap and
greenness. Walking through these silent halls, disturbed from time
to time by fair invalids or pale young consumptives who walk there, I
fancied that enervation of the inner nature came from the enervation of
the bodies. We spend our time within doors, taken up with discussions,
reflections and reading; the gentleness of manners removes dangers from
us, and industrial progress fatigues. They lived in the open air,
ever following the chase and in war. “Queen Catherine was very fond of
riding, up to the age of sixty and more, and of making great and active
journeys, even after she had often fallen, to the great injury of her
body, for she was several times so far hurt as to break her leg and
wound her head.” The rude exercises hardened their nerves; their warmer
blood, stirred by incessant peril, urged upon the brain impetuous
caprices; they made history, while we write it. {108}
III.
[Illustration: 133]
The park is a great wood on a hill, embedded among meadows and harvests.
You walk in long solitary alleys, under colonnades of superb oaks, while
to the left the lofty stems of the copses mount in close ranks upon the
back of the hill. The fog was not yet lifted; there was no motion in the
air; not a corner of blue sky, not a sound in all the country. The song
of a bird came for an instant from the midst of the ash-trees, then
sadly ceased. Is that then the sky of the south, and was it necessary to
come to the happy country of the Béarnais to find such {109}melancholy
impressions? A little by-way brought us to a bank of the Gave: in a long
pool of water was growing an army of reeds twice the height of a man;
their grayish spikes and their trembling leaves bent and whispered under
the wind; a wild flower near by shed a vanilla perfume. We gazed on the
broad country, the ranges of rounded hills, the silent plain under the
dull dome of the sky. Three hundred paces away the Gave rolls between
marshalled banks, which it has covered with sand; in the midst of the
waters may be seen the moss-grown piles of a ruined bridge. One is at
ease here, and yet at the bottom of the heart one feels a vague unrest;
the soul is softened and loses itself in melancholy and tender revery.
Suddenly the clock strikes, and one has to go and prepare to take his
soup between two commercial travellers.
[Illustration: 134]
IV. {110}
To-day the sun shines. On my way to the _Place Nationale_, I remarked a
poor, half-ruined church, which had been turned into a coachhouse;
they have fastened upon it a carrier’s sign. The arcades, in small gray
stones, still round themselves with an elegant boldness; beneath are
stowed away carts and casks and pieces of wood; here and there workmen
were handling wheels. A broad ray of light fell upon a pile of straw,
and made the sombre corners seem yet darker; the pictures that one meets
with outweigh those one has come to seek.
From the esplanade which is opposite, the whole valley and the mountains
beyond may be seen; this first sight of a southern sun, as it breaks
from the rainy mists, is admirable; a sheet of white light stretches
from one horizon to another without meeting a single cloud. The heart
expands in this immense space; the very air is festal; the dazzled eyes
close beneath the brightness which deluges them and which runs over,
radiated from the burning dome of heaven. The current of the river
sparkles like a girdle of jewels; the chains of hills, yesterday
veiled and damp, extend at their own sweet will beneath the warming,
penetrating rays, and mount range upon range to spread out their
{111}green robe to the sun. In the distance, the blue Pyrenees look
like a bank of clouds; the air that bathes them shapes them into aerial
forms, vapory phantoms, the farthest of which vanish in the canescent
horizon--dim contours, that might be taken for a fugitive sketch from
the lightest of pencils.
[Illustration: 136]
In the midst of the serrate chain the peak du _Midi d’ Ossau_ lifts its
abrupt cone; at this distance, forms are softened, colors are blended,
the Pyrenees are only the graceful bordering of a smiling landscape and
of the magnificent sky. There is nothing imposing about them nor severe;
the beauty here is serene, and the pleasure pure. {112}
The statue of Henry IV., with an inscription in Latin and in patois, is
on the esplanade; the armor is finished so perfectly that it might make
an armorer jealous. But why does the king wear so sad an air? His neck
is ill at ease on his shoulders; his features are small and full of
care; he has lost his gayety, his spirit, his confidence in his fortune,
his proud bearing. His air is neither that of a great nor a good man,
nor of a man of intellect; his face is discontented, and one would say
that he was bored with Pau. I am not sure that he was wrong: and yet the
city passes for agreeable; the climate is very mild, and invalids who
fear the cold pass the winter in it. Balls are given in the clubs; the
English abound, and it is well known that in the matter of cookery, of
beds and inns, these people are the first reformers in the universe.
They would have done well in reforming the vehicles: the rickety little
diligences of the country are drawn by gaunt jades which descend the
hills on a walk, and make stops in the ascent. All encouragements of the
whip are thrown away on their backs; you could not bear them any grudge
on that account, so piteous is their appearance, with their ridgy
backbones, hanging ears, and shrunken bellies. The coachman rises on his
{113}seat, pulls the reins, waves his arms, bawls and storms, clambers
down and up again; his is a rude calling, but he has a soul like his
calling. His passengers are of small consequence to him; he treats them
as useful packages, a necessary counterpoise over which he has rights.
At the foot of a mountain, the machine got its wheel into a ditch and
tilted over; every one leaped out after the manner of Panurge’s sheep.
[Illustration: 138]
He went running from one to another to get them back, especially
exhorting the people from the impériale, and pointing out to them the
danger to the vehicle, which was leaning back, and so needed ballast in
front. They however remained cool, and went on afoot, while he followed
grumbling and abusing their selfishness. {114}
VI.
The harvests, pale in the north, here wave with a reflex of reddish
gold. A warmer sun makes the vigorous verdure shine more richly; the
stalks of maize spring from the earth like discharges of rockets, and
their strong, wrinkled leaves fall over in plumes; such burning rays
are needed to urge the sap through those gross fibres and gild the massy
spike.
[Illustration: 139]
Toward Gan, the hills, over which undulates the road, draw nearer
together, and you travel on through little green valleys, planted with
ash and alder in clusters, according to the caprices of the slopes, and
with their feet bathed in living water; a pellucid stream borders the
road, with waters {115}sombre and hurried under the cover of the trees,
and then, by fits and starts, brilliant and blue as the sky. Four times
in the course of a league it encounters a mill, leaps and foams, then
resumes its course, hurried and stealthy; during two leagues we have its
company, half hid among the trees that it nourishes, and breathing the
freshness it exhales. In these gorges, water is the mother of all life
and the nurse of all beauty.
[Illustration: 140]
At Louvie the valley of Ossau opens up between two mountains covered
with brushwood, bald in places, spotted with moss and heather from which
the rocks peep out like bones, while the flanks start forth in grayish
embossments or bend in dark crevices. The plain of the harvests and
meadows buries itself in the anfractuosities as if in creeks; its
contour folds itself about each new mass; it essays to scale the lower
ridges, and stops, vanquished by the barren rock. We go through three or
four hamlets whitened by dust, whose roofs shine {116}with a dull color
like tarnished lead. Then the horizon is shut off; Mount Gourzy, robed
in forests, bars the route; beyond and above, like a second barrier, the
peak of the Ger lifts its bald head, silvered with snows. The carriage
slowly scales an acclivity which winds upon the flank of the mountain;
at the turn of a rock, in the shelter of a small gorge, may be seen Eaux
Bonnes.
[Illustration: 141]
{117}
[Illustration: 142]
CHAPTER III. EA UX BONNES.
I.
I thought that here I should find the country; a village like a hundred
others, with long roofs of thatch or tiles, with crannied walls and
shaky doors, and in the courts a pell-mell of carts with fagots,
and tools, and domestic animals, in short, the whole picturesque and
charming unconstraint of country life. I find a Paris street and the
promenades of the Bois de Boulogne.
Never was country less countrified: you skirt a row of houses drawn
up in line, like a row of soldiers when carrying arms, all pierced
regularly with regular windows, decked with signs and posters, bordered
by a side-walk, and having the disagreeably decent aspect of _hotels
garnis._ These uniform buildings, mathematical lines, this disciplined
and formal architecture make a laughable contrast with the {118}green
ridges that flank them. It seems grotesque that a little warm water
should have imported into these mountain hollows civilization and the
cuisine.
[Illustration: 143]
This singular village tries every year to extend itself, and with great
difficulty, so straitened and stifled is it in its ravine; they break
the rock, they open trenches on the declivity, they suspend houses over
the torrent, they stick others, as it were, to the side of the mountain,
they pile up their chimneys even to the roots of the beech-trees; thus
they construct behind the principal street a melancholy lane {119}which
dips down or raises itself as it can, muddy, steep, half filled with
temporary stalls and wooden wine-shops, lodging-places of artisans and
guides; at last it drops down to the Gave, into a nook decked out with
drying linen, which is washed in the same place with the hogs.
[Illustration: 144]
Of all places in the world, Eaux Bonnes is the most unpleasant on a
rainy day, and rainy days are frequent there; the clouds are engulfed
between two walls of the valley of Ossau, and crawl slowly {120}along
half way up the height; the summits disappear, the floating masses come
together, accumulate because the gorge has no outlet, and fall in fine
cold rain. The village becomes a prison; the fog creeps to the earth,
envelopes the houses, extinguishes the light already obscured by the
mountain; the English might think themselves in London.
The visitors look through the window-panes at the jumbled forms of
the trees, the water that drips from the leaves, the mourning of the
shivering and humid woods; they listen to the gallop of belated riders,
who return with clinging and pendent skirts, like fine birds with their
plumage disordered by the rain; they try whist in their despondency;
some go down to the reading-room and ask for the most blood-stained
pages of Paul Féval or Frédéric Souliê; they can read nothing but the
gloomiest dramas; they discover leanings towards suicide in themselves,
and construct the theory of assassination. They look at the clock and
bethink themselves that the doctor has ordered them to drink three times
a day; then they button up their overcoats with an air of resignation,
and climb the long, stiff slope of the streaming road; the lines of
umbrellas and soaked mantles are a pitiable spectacle; they come,
splashing through the water, and seat themselves in the drinking-hall.
Each one takes his syrup-flask from its numbered place on a sort {121}of
étagère, and the throng of the drinkers form in line about the tap. For
the rest, patience is soon acquired here; amid such idleness the mind
goes to sleep, the fog puts an end to ideas, and you follow the crowd
mechanically; you act only at the instigation of others, and you look at
objects without receiving from them any reaction.
[Illustration: 146]
After the first glass, you wait an hour before taking another; meanwhile
you march up and down, elbowed by the dense groups, who drag themselves
laboriously along between the columns. Not a seat to be had, except two
wooden benches where the ladies sit, with their feet resting upon the
damp stones: the economy of the administration supposes that the weather
is always fine. Wearied and dejected faces pass before the eyes without
awaking any interest. For the twentieth time you look over {122}the
marble trinkets, the shop with razors and scissors, a map that hangs on
the wall. What is there that one is not capable of on a rainy day,
if obliged to keep moving for an hour between four walls, amidst the
buzzing of two hundred people? You study the posters, contemplate
assiduously some figures which pretend to represent the manners of the
country: these are elegant and rosy shepherds, who lead to the dance
smiling shepherdesses rosier than themselves. You stretch your neck
out at the door only to see a gloomy passage where invalids are soaking
their feet in a trough of warm water, all in a row like school-children
on cleaning and excursion days. After these distractions you return to
your lodging, and find yourselves tête-à-tête, in close conversation
with your chest of drawers and your light-stand.
[Illustration: 147]
{123}
II.
People who have any appetite take refuge at the table; they did not
count upon the musicians. First we saw a blind man come in, a heavy,
thick-headed Spaniard, then the violinists of the country, then another
blind man. They play pot-pourris of waltzes, country dances, bits from
operas, strung one upon another, galloping along, above the note or
below it, with admirable fearlessness, despoiling every repertory in
their musical race. The next day we had three Germans, tall as towers,
stiff as stones, perfectly phlegmatic, playing without a gesture and
passing the plate without a word; at least they play in time.
[Illustration: 148]
On the third day the musicians of {124}a neighboring village appeared,
a violin and flageolet; they executed their piece with such energy and
discord, in tones so piercing, so long-drawn-out and rending, that, by
universal consent, they were put out doors. They began again under the
windows.
A good appetite is a consolation for all ills; so much the worse if you
will, or so much the better for humanity. It is necessary to bear up
against the tediousness, the rain and the music of Eaux Bonnes. The
renewed blood then bears gayety to the brain, and the body persuades
the soul that everything is for the best in the best of worlds. You will
have pity on those poor musicians as you leave the table; Voltaire
has proved that an easy digestion induces compassion, and that a good
stomach gives a good heart. Between forty and fifty years of age, a man
is handsome when, after dinner, he folds up his napkin and begins his
indispensable promenade. He walks with legs apart, chest out, resting
heavily on his stick, his cheeks colored by a slight warmth, humming
between his teeth some old refrain of his youth; it seems to him that
the universe is brought nicely together; he smiles and is bland, he is
the first to reach you his hand. What machines we are! Yet why complain
of it? My good neighbor would tell you that you have the key of your
mechanism; {125}turn the spring toward the side of happiness. This may
be kitchen philosophy,--very well. He who practised it did not trouble
himself about the name.
[Illustration: 150]
{126}
III.
[Illustration: 151]
On sunny days, we live in the open air. A sort of yard, called the
English garden, stretches between the street and the mountain, carpeted
with a poor turf, withered and full of holes; the ladies constitute it
their drawing-room and work there; the dandies, lying on several chairs
at once, read their journal and proudly smoke their cigar; the little
girls, in embroidered pantalons, chatter with coquettish gestures and
graceful little ways; they are trying in advance the parts they will
play as lovely dolls. But for the red cassocks of the little jumping
peasants, the aspect is that of the Champs Elysees. You leave this spot
by beautiful shaded walks which mount in zigzags upon the flanks of the
two {127}mountains, one above the torrent, the other above the city;
toward noon, numbers of bathers may be met here lying upon the heather,
nearly all with a novel in hand.
[Illustration: 152]
These lovers of the country resemble the banker who loved concerts; he
enjoyed them because then he could calculate his dividends. Pardon these
hapless creatures; they are punished for knowing how to read and not
knowing how to look about.
IV.
Anomalous beeches sustain the slopes here; no description can give
an idea of these stunted colossi, eight feet high, and round which
{128}three men could not reach. Beaten back by the wind that desolates
the declivity, their sap has been accumulating for centuries in huge,
stunted, twisted and interlaced branches; all embossed with knots
misshapen and blackened, they stretch and coil themselves fantastically,
like limbs swollen by disease and distended by a supreme effort.
[Illustration: 153]
Through the split bark may be seen the vegetable muscles enrolling
themselves about the trunk, and crushing each other like the limbs of
wrestlers. These squat torsos, half overthrown, almost horizontal, lean
toward the plain; but their feet bury themselves among the rocks with
such ties, that {129}sooner than break that forest of roots, one might
tear out a side of the mountain. Now and then a trunk, rotted by water,
breaks open, hideously eventerated; the edges of the wound spread
farther apart with every year; they wear no longer the shape of trees,
and yet they live, and cannot be conquered by winter, by their slope,
nor by time, but boldly put forth into their native air their whitish
shoots. If, under the shades of evening, you pass by the tortured tops
and yawning trunks of these old inhabitants of the mountains, when the
wind is beating the branches, you seem to hear a hollow plaint, extorted
by a century’s toil; these strange forms recall the fantastic creatures
of the old Scandinavian mythology. You think on the giants imprisoned by
fate, between walls that contracted day by day, and bent them down and
lessened them, and then returned them to the light, after a thousand
years of torture, furious, misshapen and dwarfed.
V.
Toward four o’clock the cavalcades return; the small horses of the
country are gentle, and gallop without too much effort; far away in the
sunlight gleam the white and luminous veils of the ladies; nothing is
more graceful than a pretty woman on horseback, when she is neither
{130}imprisoned in a black riding-habit, nor topped with a chimney-pot
hat. Nobody here wears this funereal, poverty-stricken English costume;
in a gay country people assume gay colors; the sun is a oood counsellor.
It is forbidden to return at a gallop, o which is reason enough why
everybody should return at that gait. Ah, the great art of imitating the
coming in of the cattle! They bend in the saddle, the highway resounds,
the windows quiver, they sweep proudly before the saunterers who stop to
gaze; it is a triumph; the administration of Eaux Bonnes does not know
the human heart, especially the heart of woman.
In the evening, everybody meets on a level promenade; it is a flat road
half a league long, cut in the mountain of Gourzy. The remainder of the
country is nothing but steeps and precipices; any one who for eight days
has known the fatigue of climbing bent double, of stumbling down hill,
of studying the laws of equilibrium while flat on his back, will find it
agreeable to walk on level ground, and to move his feet freely without
thinking of his head; it gives a perfectly new sensation of security and
ease.
[Illustration: 156]
The road winds along a wooded hill-side, furrowed by winter torrents
into whitish ravines; a few wasted springs slip away under the stones
in their stream beds, and cover them with climbing plants; you walk
under the {131}{132}{133}massive beeches, then skirt along an inclined
plane, peopled with ferns, where feed the tinkling herds; the heat has
abated, the air is soft, a perfume of healthy and wild verdure reaches
you on the lightest breeze; fair white-robed promenaders pass by in the
twilight with ruffles of lace and floating muslins that rise and flutter
like the wings of a bird. Every day we went to a seat upon a rock at
the end of this road; from there, through the whole valley of Ossau,
you follow the torrent grown into a river; the rich valley, a mosaic of
yellow harvests and green fields, broadly opens out to the confines of
the landscape, and allows the eye to lose itself in the dim distance of
Béarn. From each side three mountains strike out their feet towards the
river, and cause the outline of the plain to rise and fall in waves; the
furthest slope down like pyramids, and their pale blue declivities stand
out upon the rosy zone of the dim sky. In the depth of the gorges it
is already dark; but turn around and you may see the summit of the Ger,
gleaming with a soft carnation cherishing the last smile of the sun.
[Illustration: 158]
{134}
[Illustration: 159]
VI.
On Sunday a procession of fine toilets goes up toward the church. This
church is a round box, of stone and plaster, built for fifty persons but
made to hold two hundred. Every half-hour the tide of the faithful
ebbs and flows. Invalid priests abound and say as many masses as may be
wanted: everything at Eaux Bonnes suffers for want of room; they form in
line for prayers as for drinking, and are as crowded at the chapel as at
the tap.
Occasionally a purveyor of public pleasures undertakes the duty of
enlivening the afternoon; an eloquent poster announces the _jeu du
canard_. They fasten a perch to a tree, a cord to the perch, and a duck
to the cord; the most serious-minded people follow the preparation with
marked interest. I have seen men who yawn at the opera form a ring,
under a hot sun, for a whole hour in order to witness the decapitation
of the poor hanging creature. If you are generous-minded and greedy
{135}of sensations in addition, you give two sous to a small boy; in
consideration of which he has his eyes bandaged, is made to turn round
and round, has an old sabre given to him, and is pushed forward, in the
midst of the laughter and outcry of the spectators.
[Illustration: 160]
“Right! left! halloo! strike! forward!” he knows not which to heed, and
cuts away into the air. If by rare chance he hits the creature, if by
rarer chance he strikes the neck, or if, indeed, he takes off the head
by miracle, he carries off the duck to have it cooked, and eat it. The
public is not exacting in matter of amusement. If it were announced that
a mouse was to drown itself in a pool, they would run as if to a fire.
{136}“Why not?” said my neighbor, an odd, abrupt sort of man: “This is
a tragedy and a perfectly regular one; see if it has not all the classic
parts. First, the exposition; the instruments of torture that are
displayed, the crowd which comes together, the distance that is marked,
the animal that is fastened up. It is a protasis of the complex order,
as M. Lysidas used to say. Secondly, the action; every time that a small
boy starts, you are in suspense, you rise on tip-toe, your heart leaps,
you are as interested in the pendent animal as in a fellow-creature.
Do you say that the action is always the same? Simplicity is the
characteristic of great works, and this one is after the Indian style.
Thirdly, the catastrophe; if ever it was bloody it is so here. As to the
passions, they are those demanded by Aristotle, terror and pity. See how
shiveringly the poor creature lifts its head, when it feels the current
of air from the sword! With what a lamentable and resigned look it
awaits the stroke! The chorus of spectators takes part in the action,
praises or blames, just as in the antique tragedy. In short, the public
is right in being amused, and pleasure is never wrong.”
“You talk like la Harpe; this duck would accept his lot in patience, if
he could hear you. And the ball, what do you say of that?”
“It is worth as much as the one at the Hôtel de {137}France with fine
people; our dancing is nothing but walking, a pretext for conversation.
Look how the servants and the guides dance; such cuts and pigeon wings!
they go into it from pure fun, with all their heart, they feel the
pleasure of motion, the impulse of their muscles; this is the true dance
invented by joy and the need of physical activity. These fellows fall to
and handle each other like timbers. That great girl there is servant at
my hotel; say, does not that tall figure, that serious air, that proud
attitude, recall the statues of antiquity? Force and health are always
the first of beauties. Do you think that the languid graces, the
conventional smiles of our quadrilles would bring together all this
crowd? We get further away from Nature with every day; our life is all
in the brain, and we spend our time in composing and listening to set
phrases. See how I am uttering them now; to-morrow, I turn over a new
leaf, buy a stout stick, put on gaiters and tramp over the country. You
do the same; let each go his own way, and try not to come together.”
[Illustration: 162]
{138}
[Illustration: 163]
CHAPTER IV. LANDSCAPES.
I.
I have determined to find some pleasure in my walks; have come out alone
by the first path that offered itself, and walk straight on as chance
may lead. Provided you have noted two or three prominent points, you
are sure of finding the way back. You can now enjoy the unexpected, and
discover the country. To know where you are going and by what way is
certain boredom; the imagination deflowers the landscape in advance. It
works and builds according to its own pleasure; then when you reach
your goal all must be overturned; that spoils your disposition; the mind
keeps its bent, and the beauty it has fancied prejudices that which it
sees; it fails to understand {139}this, because it is already taken up
with another. I suffered a most grievous disenchantment when I saw the
sea for the first time: it was a morning in autumn; flecks of purplish
cloud dappled the sky; a gentle breeze covered the sea with little
uniform waves. I seemed to see one of those long stretches of beet-root
that are found in the environs of Paris, intersected by patches of green
cabbages and bands of russet barley. The distant sails looked like the
wings of homeward-bound pigeons. The view seemed to me confined; the
artists, in their pictures, had represented the sea as greater. It was
three days before I could get back the sensation of immensity.
[Illustration: 164]
{140}
II.
The course of the Valentin is nothing but a long fall between multitudes
of rocks. All along the _promenade Eynard,_ for half a league, you may
hear it rumbling under your feet.
[Illustration: 165]
At the bridge of Discoo, its standing-ground fails it altogether; it
falls into an amphitheatre, from shelf to shelf, in jets that cross each
other and mingle their flakes of foam; then under an arcade of rocks and
stones, it eddies in deep basins, whose edges it has polished, and
where the grayish emerald of its waters diffuses a soft and peaceful
reflection.
[Illustration: 167]
{141}
{142}{143}Suddenly it makes a leap of thirty feet in three dark masses,
and rolls in silver spray down a funnel of verdure. A fine dew gushes
over the turf and gives life to it, and its rolling pearls sparkle as
they glide along the leaves. Our northern fields afford no notion of
such vividness; this unceasing coolness with this fiery sun is needed in
order to paint the vegetable robe with such a magnificent hue.
I saw a great, wooded mountain-side stretch sloping away before me; the
noonday sun beat down upon it; the mass of white rays pierced
through the vault of the trees; the leaves glowed in splendor, either
transparent or radiated. Over all this lighted slope no shadow could be
distinguished; a warm, luminous evaporation covered all, like the
white veil of a woman. I have often since seen this strange garb of the
mountains, especially towards evening; the bluish atmosphere enclosed in
the gorges becomes visible; it grows thick, it imprisons the light and
makes it palpable. The eye delights in penetrating into the fair network
of gold that envelopes the ridges, sensitive to the softness and depth
of it; the salient edges lose their hardness, the harsh contours are
softened; it is heaven, descending and lending its veil to cover
the nakedness of the savage daughters of the earth. Pardon me these
metaphors; I appear, {144}perhaps, to be studying turns of expression,
and yet I am only recounting my sensations.
From this place a meadow-path leads to the gorge of the Serpent: this
is a gigantic notch in the perpendicular mountain. The brook that
runs through it crawls along overborne by heaped-up blocks; its bed is
nothing but a ruin.
[Illustration: 169]
You ascend along a crumbling pathway, clinging to the stems of box and
to the edges of rocks; frightened lizards start off like an arrow, and
cower in the clefts of slaty slabs. A leaden sun inflames the bluish
rocks; the reflected rays make the air like a furnace. In this parched
chaos the only life is that of the water, which glides, murmuring,
beneath the stones. At the bottom of the ravine the mountain abruptly
lifts its vertical wall to the height of two hundred feet; the water
drops in long white threads along this polished wall, and turns its
reddish tint to brown; during the whole fall it does not quit the cliff,
but clings to it like silvery {145}tresses, or a pendent garland of
convolvulus. A fine broad basin stays it for an instant at the foot of
the mountain, and then discharges it in a streamlet into the bog.{146}
[Illustration: 171]
{147}
These mountain streams are unlike those of the plains; nothing sullies
them; they never have any other bed than sand or naked stone. However
deep they may be, you may count their blue pebbles; they are transparent
as the air. Rivers have no other diversity than that of their banks;
their regular course, their mass always gives the same sensation; the
Gave, on the other hand, is a forever-changing spectacle; the human face
has not more marked, more diverse expressions. When the water, green
and profound, sleeps beneath the rocks, its emerald eyes wear the
treacherous look of a naiad who would charm the passer-by only to drown
him; then, wanton that it is, leaps blindly between the rocks, turns
its bed topsy-turvy, rises aloft in a tempest of foam, dashes itself
impotently and furiously into spray against the bowlder that has
vanquished it. Three steps further on, it subsides and goes frisking
capriciously alongside the bank in changing eddies, braided with bands
of light and shade, twisting voluptuously like an adder. When the rock
of its bed is broad and smooth, it spreads out, veined with rose and
azure, smilingly offering its level glass to the whole {148}mass of the
sunlight. Over the bending plants, it threads its silent way in lines
straight and tense as in a bundle of rushes, and with the spring and
swiftness of a flying trout. When it falls opposite the sun, the hues
of the rainbow may be seen trembling in its crystal threads, vanishing,
reappearing, an aerial work, a sylph of light, alongside which a bee’s
wine would seem coarse, and which fairy fingers would in vain strive to
equal.
[Illustration: 173]
Seen in the distance, the whole Gave is only a storm of silvered falls,
intersected by splendid blue expanses. Fiery and joyful youth, useless
and full of poetry; to-morrow that troubled wave will receive the filth
{149}of cities, and quays of stone will imprison its course by way of
regulation.
III.
At the bottom of an ice-cold gorge rolls the cascade of Larresecq. It
does not deserve its renown: it is a sort of dilapidated stairway with a
dirty stream, lost among stones and shifting earth, awkwardly scrambling
down it; but, in getting there, you pass by a profound steep-edged
hollow, where the torrent rolls along swallowed up in the caverns it
has scooped out, obstructed by the trunks of the trees that it uproots.
Overhead, lordly oaks meet in arcades; the shrubs steep their roots far
below in the turbulent stream. No sunlight penetrates into this dark
ravine; the Gave pierces its way through, unseen and icy. At the outlet
where it streams forth, you hear its hoarse outcry; it is struggling
among the rocks that choke it: one might fancy-it a bull stricken by the
pangs of death.
This valley is solitary and out of the world; it is without culture;
no tourists, not even herdsmen are to be found; three or four cows,
perhaps, are there, busily cropping the herbage. Other gorges at the
sides of the road and in the mountain of Gourzy are still wilder. There
the faint trace of an {150}ancient pathway may with difficulty be made
out.
[Illustration: 175]
Can anything be sweeter than the certainty of being alone? In any widely
known spot, you are in constant dread of an incursion of tourists; the
hallooing of guides, the loud-voiced admiration, the bustle, whether of
fastening horses, or of unpacking provisions, or of airing opinions, all
disturb the budding sensation; civilization recovers its hold {151}upon
you. But here, what security and what silence! nothing that recalls man;
the landscape is just what it has been these six thousand years: the
grass grows useless and free as on the first day; no birds among the
branches; only now and then may be heard the far-off cry of a soaring
hawk. Here and there the face of a huge, projecting rock patches with a
dark shade the uniform plane of the trees: it is a virgin wilderness in
its severe beauty. The soul fancies that it recognizes unknown friends
of long ago; the forms and colors are in secret harmony with it; when it
finds these pure, and that it enjoys them unmixed with outside thought,
it feels that it is entering into its inmost and calmest depth--a
sensation so simple, after the tumult of our ordinary thoughts, is like
the gentle murmur of an Æolian harp after the hubbub of a ball.
IV.
Going down the Valentin, on the slope of the _Montagne Verte_, I found
landscapes less austere. You reach the right bank of the Gave d’Ossau.
A pretty streamlet slips down the mountain, encased between two walls
of rounded stones all purple with poppies and wild mallows. Its fall has
been turned to account in driving rows {152}of saws incessantly back and
forth over blocks of marble. A tall, bare-footed girl, in rags, ladles
up sand and water for wetting the machine; by the aid of the sand the
iron blade eats away the block.
[Illustration: 177]
A foot-path follows the river bank, lined with houses, huge oaks and
fields of Indian corn; on the other side is an arid reach of pebbly
shore, where children are paddling near some hogs {153}asleep in the
sand; on the transparent wave, flocks of ducks rock with the undulations
of the current: it is the country and culture after solitude and the
desert. The pathway winds through a plantation of osiers and willows;
the long, waving stalks that love the rivers, the pale pendent foliage,
are infinitely graceful to eyes accustomed to the intense green of the
mountains. On the right may be seen the narrow rocky ways that lead to
the hamlets scattered over the slopes. The houses there lean their backs
against the mountain, shelved one above another, so as to look down upon
the valley. At noon the people are all absent. Every door is closed;
three or four old women, who alone are left in the village, are
spreading grain upon the level rock which forms the street or esplanade.
What more singular than this long, natural flag-stone, carpeted with
gilded heads of grain. The dark and narrow church ordinarily rises from
a terraced yard, enclosed by a low wall; the bell-tower is white and
square, with a slated spire. Under the porch may be read a few epitaphs
carved in the stone; these, for the most part, are the names of invalids
who have died at Eaux Bonnes; I remarked those of two brothers. To
die so far from home and alone! It is touching to read these words of
sympathy graven upon a tomb; this sunlight is so sweet! the {154}valley
so beautiful! you seem to breathe health in the air; you want to live;
one wishes, as the old poet says, “Se réjouir longtemps de sa force et
de sa jeunesse.” The love of life is imparted with the love of light.
How often, beneath the gloomy northern sky, do we form a similar desire?
At the turn of the mountain is the entrance into an oak wood that rises
on one of the declivities. These lofty, roomy forests give to the south
shade without coolness. High up, among the trunks, shines a patch of
blue sky; light and shade dapple the gray moss like a silken design upon
a velvet ground. A heavy, warm air, loaded with vegetable emanations,
rises to the face; it fills the chest and affects the head like wine.
The monotonous sound of the cricket and the grasshopper comes from
wheat-land and meadow, from mountain and from plain; you feel that
living myriads are at work among the heather and under the thatch; and
in the veins, where ferments the blood, courses a vague sensation of
comfort, the uncertain state between sleeping and dreaming, which steeps
the soul in animal life and stifles thought under the dull impressions
of the senses. You stretch yourself out, and are content with merely
living; you feel not the passage of the hours, but are happy in the
present moment, without a thought for past or future; you gaze upon
{155}the slender sprigs of moss, the grayish spikes of the grasses, the
long ribands of the shining herbs; you follow the course of an insect
striving to get over a thicket of turf, and clambering up and down in
the labyrinth of its stalks. Why not confess that you have become a
child again and are amused with the least of sights? What is the country
but a means of returning to our earliest youth, of finding again that
faculty of happiness, that state of deep attention, that indifference to
everything but pleasure and the present sensation, that facile joy which
is a brimming spring ready to overflow at the least impulse? I passed an
hour beside a squadron of ants who were dragging the body of a big fly
across a stone. They were bent upon the dismemberment of the vanquished;
at each leg a little workwoman, in a black bodice, pulled and worked
with all her might; the rest held the body in place. I never saw efforts
more fearful; at times their prey rolled off the stone; then they had
to begin over again. At last, fatigued by the toils of war, and wanting
power to cut up and carry off the prey, they resigned themselves to
eating it on the spot. {156}
V.
The view from Mount Gourzy is much admired; the traveller is informed
that he will see the whole plain of Beam as far as Pau. I am obliged to
take the word of the guide-book for it; I found clouds at the summit and
saw nothing but the fog. At the end of the forest that covers the first
slope lay some enormous trees, half rotten, and already whitened with
moss. Some mummies of pine trees were left standing; but their pyramids
of branches showed a shattered side. Old oaks split open as high up as
a man’s head, crowned their wound with mushrooms and red strawberries.
From the manner in which the ground is strewn it might be called a
battle-field laid waste by bullets; it is the herdsmen who, for mere
amusement, set fire to the trees.
My neighbor, the tourist, told me next day that I had not lost much,
and gave me a dissertation against the views from mountain-tops. He is
a resolute traveller, a great lover of painting, very odd, however,
and accustomed to believing nothing but himself, enthusiastic reasoner,
violent in his opinions and fruitful in paradox. He is a singular man;
at fifty, he is as active as if he were but twenty. He is dry, nervous,
always well and alert, his legs {157}forever in motion, his head
fermenting with some idea which has just sprung up in his brain and
which during two days will appear to him the finest in the world. He is
always under way and a hundred paces ahead of others, seeking truth with
rash boldness, even to loving danger, finding pleasure in contradicting
and being contradicted, and now and then deceived by his militant
and adventurous spirit. He has nothing to hamper him; neither wife,
children, place nor ambition. I like him, notwithstanding his want of
moderation, because he is sincere; bit by bit he has told me his life,
and I have found out his tastes; his name is Paul, and he was left, at
the age of twenty, without parents and with an income of twelve thousand
francs.
[Illustration: 182]
From experience of himself and of the world, he judged that an
occupation, an office or a household would weary him, and he has
remained free. He found that amusements failed to amuse, and he gave up
pleasures; he says that suppers give him the headache, that play makes
him nervous, that a respectable mistress ties a man down, and a hired
mistress disgusts him. So he has turned {158}his attention to travelling
and reading. “It is only water, if you will,” said he, “but that is
better than your doctored wine: at least, it is better for my stomach.”
Besides, he finds himself comfortable under his system, and maintains
that tastes such as his grow with age, that, in short, the most sensible
of senses, the most capable of new and various pleasures is the brain.
He confesses that he is dainty in respect of ideas, slightly selfish,
and that he looks upon the world merely as a spectator, as if it were a
theatre of marionettes. I grant that he is a thoroughly good fellow at
heart, usually good-humored, careful not to step on the toes of others,
at times calculated to cheer them up, and that, at least, he has
the habit of remaining modestly and quietly in his corner. We have
philosophized beyond measure between ourselves, or rather against
one another; you may skip the following pages if you are not fond of
dissertations.
He could not bear to have people go up a mountain in order to look down
on the plain.
“They don’t know what they are doing,” said he. “It is an absurdity of
perspective. It is destroying a landscape for the better enjoyment of
it. At such a distance there are neither forms nor colors. The heights
are mere molehills, the villages are spots, the rivers are lines drawn
by a pen. The objects are all lost in one grayish tint; the contrast
{159}of lights and shades is blotted out; everything is diminished; you
make out a multitude of imperceptible objects,--a mere Liliputian world.
And thereupon you cry out at the magnificence! Does a painter ever take
it into his head to scale a height in order to copy the score of leagues
of ground that may be seen from thence?”
[Illustration: 184]
“That is good only for a land-surveyor. The basins, highways, tillage,
are all seen as in an atlas. Do you go then in search of a map? A
landscape is a picture; you should put yourself at the point of sight.
But no; the beauty is all ciphered mathematically; it is calculated
that an elevation of a thousand feet makes it a thousand times more
beautiful. The operation is admirable, and its only fault is that it
is absurd, and that it leads through a great deal of fatigue to
immeasurable boredom.” {160}But the tourists, when once at the summit,
are carried away with enthusiasm.
“Pure cowardice--they are afraid of being accused of dryness, and of
being thought prosy; everybody now-a-days has a sublime soul, and
a sublime soul is condemned to notes of admiration. There are still
sheep-like minds, who take their admirations on trust and get excited
out of mere imitation. My neighbor says that this is fine, the
book thinks so too; I have paid to come up, I ought to be charmed;
accordingly I am. I was one day on a mountain with a family to whom the
guide pointed out an indistinct bluish line, saying, ‘There is
Toulouse!’ The father, with sparkling eyes, repeated to the son, ‘There
is Toulouse!’ And he, at sight of so much joy, cried with transport,
‘There is Toulouse!’ They learned to feel the beautiful, as any one
learns to bow, through family tradition. It is so that artists are
formed, and that the great aspects of Nature imprint forever upon the
soul solemn emotions.”
Then an ascent is an error of taste?
“Not at all; if the plain is ugly, seen from above, the mountains
themselves are beautiful; and indeed they are beautiful only from above.
When you are in the valley they overwhelm you; you cannot take them in,
you see only one side of them, you cannot appreciate their height nor
their size. One {161}thousand feet and ten thousand are all the same
to you; the spectator is like an ant in a well; at one moment distance
blots out the beauty; the next, it is proximity does away with the
grandeur.”
[Illustration: 186]
“From the top of a peak, on the other hand, the mountains proportion
themselves to our organs, the eye wanders over the ridges and takes in
their whole; our mind comprehends them, because our body dominates them.
Go to Saint-Sauveur, to {162}Bareges; you will see that those monstrous
masses have as expressive a physiognomy, and represent as well-defined
an idea as a tree or an animal. Here you have found nothing but pretty
details; the ensemble is tiresome.”
You talk of this country as a sick man of his doctor. What have you to
say then against these mountains?
“That they have no marked character; they have neither the austerity of
bald peaks nor the lovely roundings of wooded hills. These fragments
of grayish verdure, this poor mantle of stunted box pierced by the
projecting bones of the rock, those scattered patches of yellowish moss,
resemble rags; I like to have a person either naked or clothed, and do
not like your tatterdemalion. The very forms are wanting in grandeur,
the valleys are neither abrupt nor smiling. I do not find the
perpendicular walls, the broad glaciers, the heaps of bald and jagged
summits which are seen further on. The country does not amount to much
either as plain or mountain; it should either be put forward or held
back.”
You give advice to Nature.
[Illustration: 188]
“Why not? She has her uncertainties and incongruities like any one else.
She is not a god, but an artist whose genius inspires him to-day and
to-morrow lets him down again. A landscape in {163}{164}{165}order to
be beautiful must have all its parts stamped with the common idea and
contributing to produce a single sensation. If it gives the lie here
to what it says yonder, it destroys itself, and the spectator is in the
presence of nothing but a mass of senseless objects. What though these
objects be coarse, dirty, vulgar? provided they make up a whole by their
harmony, and that they agree in giving us a single impression, we are
pleased.”
So that a court-yard, a worm-eaten hut, a parched and melancholy plain,
may be as beautiful as the sublimest mountain.
“Certainly. You know the fields of the Flemish painters, how flat they
are; you are never tired of looking at them. Take something that
is still more trivial, an interior of Van Ostade; an old peasant is
sharpening a chopping-knife in the corner, the mother is swaddling her
nursling, three or four brats are rolling about among the tools, the
kettles and benches; a row of hams is ranged in the chimney, and the
great old bed is displayed in the background under its red curtains.
What could be more common! But all these good people have an air of
peaceful contentment; the babies are warm and easy in the over-wide
breeches, glossy antiques transmitted from generation to generation.
There must have been habits of security and abundance, for a scattered
household to lie {166}pellmell on the ground in this fashion; this
comfort must have lasted from father to son, for the furniture to have
assumed that sombre color and all the hues to harmonize. There is not an
object here that does not point to the unconstraint of an easygoing life
and uniform good-nature. If this mutual fitness of the parts is the mark
of fine painting, why not of fine nature? Real or fancied, the object
is the same; I praise or I blame one with as good right as the other,
because the practice or the violation of the same rules produces in me
the same enjoyment or the same displeasure.”
[Illustration: 191]
ABOVE GABAS.
Mountains then may have another beauty than that of grandeur? {167}“Yes,
since they sometimes have a different expression. Look at that little
isolated chain, against which the _Thermes_ support themselves: nobody
climbs it; it possesses neither great trees, nor naked rocks, nor points
of view. And yet I experienced a genuine pleasure there yesterday; you
follow the sharp backbone of the mountain that protrudes its vertebrae
through its meagre coating of earth; the poor but thickset turf,
sunburnt and beaten by the wind, forms a carpet firmly sewn with
tenacious threads; the half-dried mosses, the knotty heaths strike their
stubborn roots down between the clefts of the rock; the stunted
firs creep along, twisting their horizontal trunks. An aromatic and
penetrating odor, concentrated and drawn forth by the heat, comes from
all these mountain plants. You feel that they are engaged in an eternal
struggle against a barren soil, a dry wind, and a shower of fiery
rays, driven back upon themselves, hardened to all inclemencies, and
determined to live. This expression is the soul of the landscape; now,
given so many varied expressions, you have so many different beauties,
so many chords of passion are stirred. The pleasure consists in seeing
this soul. If you cannot distinguish it, or if it be wanting, a mountain
will make upon you precisely the effect of a heap of pebbles.”
That is an attack on the tourists; to-morrow I {168}will test your
reasoning in the gorge of Eaux-Chaudes, and see if it is right. {169}
[Illustration: 194]
CHAPTER V. EAUX-CHAUDE S.
I.
On the north of the valley of Ossau is a cleft; it is the way to
Eaux-Chaudes. An entire skirt of the mountain was torn out in order to
open it; the wind eddies through the hollows of this chilly pass; the
precipitous cut, of a dark iron-color, lifts its formidable mass as
if to overwhelm the passerby; upon the rocky wall opposite are perched
twisted trees in rows, and their thin, feathery tops wave strangely
among the reddish projections. The highway overhangs the Gave which
eddies five hundred feet below. It is the stream which has hollowed out
this prodigious groove, coming back again and again {170}to the attack,
and for whole centuries together; two rows of huge rounded niches mark
the lowering of its bed, and the ages of its toil; the day seems to grow
dark as you enter; it is only a strip of sky that can be seen above the
head.
[Illustration: 195]
On the right, a range of giant cones rises into relief against the
intense azure; their bellies crowd one upon another and protrude in
rounded masses; but their lofty peaks swing upward with a dash, with
a gigantic sort of flight, towards the sublime dome whence
streams the day. {171}
[Illustration: 197]
{172}{173}The light of August falls on the stony escarpments,
upon the broken walls, where the rock, damasked and engraven, gleams
like an oriental cuirass. Leprous spots of moss are there incrusted;
stems of dried box dangle wretchedly in the crannies; but they are
lost sight of in such heroic nakedness: the ruddy or blackened colossi
display themselves in triumph in the splendor of the heavens.
Between two channelled granite towers stretches the little village of
Eaux-Chaudes. But who, here, pays any attention to the village? All
thought is taken up by the mountains. The eastern chain, abruptly cut
off, drops perpendicularly like the wall of a citadel; at the summit, a
thousand feet above the highway, are esplanades expanding in forests
and meadows, a crown green and moist, whence cascades ooze forth by the
hundred. They wind broken and flaky along the breast of the mountain,
like necklaces of pearls told off between the fingers, bathing the feet
of the lustrous oaks, deluging the bowlders with their tempest, then at
last spreading themselves out in long beds where the level rock lures
them to sleep.
The wall of granite falls away; at the east, an amphitheatre of forests
suddenly opens up. On all sides, as far as the eye can reach, the
mountains are {174}loaded with wood to the very top; several of them
rise, in all their blackness, into the heart of the light, and their
fringe of trees bristles against the pale sky. The charming cup of
verdure rounds its gilded margin, then drops into hollows, overflowing
with birch and oak, with tender, changeable hues that lend additional
sweetness to the mists of morning. Not a hamlet is to be seen, no smoke,
no culture; it is a wild and sunny nest, no doubt like to the valley
that, on the finest day of the happiest springtide of the universe,
received the first man.
[Illustration: 199]
The highway makes a turn, and everything changes. The old troop of
parched mountains reappears with a threatening air. One of them {175}in
the west is crumbling, shattered as if by a cyclopean hammer. It is
strewn with squared blocks, dark vertebræ snatched from its spine;
the head is wanting, and the monstrous bones, crushed and in disorder,
scattered to the brink of the Gave, announce some ancient defeat.
Another lying opposite, with a dreary air, extends its bald back a
league away; in vain you go on or change your view: it is always there,
always huge and melancholy. Its naked granite suffers neither tree nor
spot of verdure; a few patches of snow alone whiten the hollows in its
sides, and its monotonous ridge shifts sadly its lines, blotting out
half the sky with its bastions.
Gabas is a hamlet in a barren plain. The torrent here rumbles underneath
glaciers and among shattered tree-trunks; it descends, lost at
the bottom of the declivity, between colonnades of pines, the mute
inhabitants of the gorge. The silence and constraint contrast with the
desperate leaps of the snowy water. It is cold here, and everything is
sad; only, on the horizon may be seen the Pic du Midi in its splendor,
lifting its two jagged piles of tawny gray into the serene light.
[Illustration: 200]
{176}II.
In spite of myself I have been dreaming here of the antique gods, sons
of Greece, and made in the likeness of their country. They were born in
a similar country, and they spring to life again here in ourselves, with
the sentiments which gave birth to them.
I imagine idle and curious herdsmen, of fresh and infantile souls, not
yet possessed by the authority of a neighboring civilization and
an established dogma, but active, hardy, and poets by nature. They
dream--and of what, if not of the huge beings that all day long besiege
their eyes? How fantastical are those jagged heads, those bruised and
heaped-up bodies, those twisted shoulders! What unknown monsters, what
melancholy, misshapen race, alien to humanity! By what-dread travail has
the earth brought them forth from her womb, and what contests have
their blasted heads sustained amidst clouds and thunderbolts! They still
threaten to-day; the eagles and the vultures are alone welcome to sound
their depths. They love not man; their bowlders lie in wait to roll upon
him, so soon as he shall violate their solitudes. With a shiver they
hurl upon his harvests a tide of rocks; they have but to gather up a
storm in order to drown him like an ant. {177}
[Illustration: 202]
{178}
{179}How changeable is their face, but always to be dreaded! What
lightnings their summits hurl among the creeping fogs! That flash causes
fear like the eye of some tyrant god, seen for a moment, then hid again.
There are mountains that weep, amidst their gloomy bogs, and their tears
trickle down their aged cheeks with a hollow sob, betwixt pines that
rustle and whisper sorrowfully, as if pitying that eternal mourning.
Others, seated in a ring, bathe their feet in lakes the color of steel,
and which no wind ever ruffles; they are happy in such calm, and gaze
into the virgin wave at their silver helmet. How mysterious are they at
night, and what evil thoughts do they turn over in winter, when wrapped
in their shroud of snow! But in the broad day and in summer, with what
buoyancy and how glorified rises their forehead to the sublimest heights
of air, into pure and radiant realms, into light, to their own native
country. All scarred and monstrous though they be, they are still the
gods of the earth, and they have aspired to be gods of heaven.
But lo, where comes a second race, lovely and almost human, the choir
of the nymphs, fleeting and melting creatures who are daughters of those
misshapen colossuses. How comes it that they have begotten them? No one
knows; the birth {180}of the gods, full of mystery, eludes mortal eye.
Some say that their first pearl has been seen to ooze from an herb, or
from a cranny beneath the glaciers, in the uplands. But they have dwelt
long in the paternal bowels; some, burning ones, keep the memory of that
inner furnace whose bubbling they have looked upon, and which, from
time to time, still makes the ground to tremble; others, icy cold, have
crossed the eternal winter that whitens the summits. At the outset,
all retain the fire of their race; dishevelled, screaming, raving, they
bruise themselves against the rocks, they cleave the valleys, sweep away
trees, struggle and are sullied. What transport is here--maidenly and
bacchanal! But, once they have reached the smooth beds which the rounded
rock spreads out for them, they smile, they hush themselves in sleep, or
they sport. Their deep eyes of liquid emerald have their flashes. Their
bodies bow and rise again; in the vapors of morning, in sudden falls,
their water swells, soft and satiny as a woman’s breast. With what
tenderness, what delicately wild quiverings they caress the bended
flowers, the shoots of fragrant thyme that thrive between two rocky
edges on the bank! Then with sudden caprice they plunge deep down in
a cavern, and scream and writhe as mad and wayward as any child. What
happiness in spreading {181}out thus to the sun! What strange gayety,
or what divine tranquillity, in that transparent wave as it laughs or
eddies! Neither the eye nor the diamond has that changeful clearness,
those burning and glaucous reflections, those inward tremblings
of pleasure or of anxiety; women though they are, they are indeed
goddesses. Without more than human might, would they have availed,
with their soft wave, to wear these hard cliffs, to bore through these
impregnable barriers? And by what secret virtue do they know, they, so
innocent of aspect, how at one time to torture and slay him who drinks,
and, again, to heal the infirm and the invalid? They hate the one and
love the other, and, like their fathers, they bestow life and death at
their pleasure.
Such is the poetry of the pagan world, of the childhood of mankind; thus
each one framed it for himself, in the dawn of things, at the awaking of
imagination and conscience, long before the age when reflection set up
defined worship and studied dogmas. Among the dreams that blossomed in
the morning of the world, I love only those of Ionia.
Hereupon Paul became vexed, and called me a classicist: “You are all
like that! You take one step forward into an idea, and then stop short
like cowards. Come now; there are a hundred Olympuses {182}in Egypt, in
Iceland, in India. Each one of those landscapes is an aspect of Nature;
each of those Gods is one of the forms in which man has expressed his
idea of Nature. Admire the god by the same standard as the landscape;
the onion of Egypt is worth as much as Olympian Jove.” That is too
strong, yet I take you at your word; you shall stand by your assertion,
and extract a god from your onion.
[Illustration: 207]
“This very instant; but first transport yourself to Egypt, before the
coming of warriors and priests, upon the river-ooze, among savages half
naked in the mire, half drowned in water, half burned by the sun. What
a sight is that of this great black shore steaming under the heat, where
{183}crocodiles and writhing fish lash the waters of the pools! Myriads
of mosquitoes buzz in the air; large-leaved plants lift their tangled
mass; the earth ferments and teems with life; the brain grows giddy with
the heavy exhalations, and man, made restless, shudders as he feels in
the air and coursing through his limbs the generative virtue by whose
means everything multiplies and grows green. A year ago nothing grew on
this ooze: what a change! There springs from it a tall, straight reed,
with shining thongs, the stem, swollen with juices, striking deep into
the slime; with every day it expands and changes: green at the outset,
it reddens like the sun behind the mists. Unceasingly does this child of
the ooze suck therefrom juices and force; the earth broods over it and
commits to it its every virtue. See it now, how, of its own accord,
it lifts itself half-way, and at last wholly, and warms in the sun
its scaly belly filled with an acrid blood; blood that boils, and so
exuberant that it bursts the triple skin and oozes through the wound!
What a strange life! and by what miracle is it that the point of the
summit becomes a plume and a parasol? Those who first gathered it wept,
as though some poison had burned their eyes; but in the winter-time,
when fish fails, it rejoices him who meets it. Those enormous heaped-up
globes, are they not the hundred breasts of the great nurse, {184}mother
Earth? New ones reappear as often as the waters retire; there is some
divine force hidden beneath those scales. May it never fail to return!
The crocodile is god, because it devours us; the ichneumon is god,
because it saves us; the onion is god, because it nourishes us.”
The onion is god, and Paul is its prophet; you shall have some this
evening, with white sauce. But, my dear friend, you frighten me; you
blot out with one stroke three thousand years of history. You put on
one level races of artists and races of visionaries, savage tribes
and civilized nations. I like the crocodile and the onion, but I
like Jupiter and Diana better. The Greeks have invented the arts and
sciences; the Egyptians have only left some heaps of ashlar-work. A
block of granite is not as good as either Aristotle or Homer. They
are everywhere the first who, through clear reasoning, have reached a
conception of justice and have made science. Then, however evil our
time may be, it surpasses many another. Your grotesque and oriental
hallucinations are beautiful, at a distance however; I am willing to
contemplate them, but not to submit to them. Now-a-days we have no
poetry, be it so; but we appreciate the poetry of others. If our museum
is poor, we have the museums of all ages and all nations. Do you know
what I get from your theories? Three times a {185}month they will save
me four francs; I shall find fairy-land in them, and shall have no
further occasion for going to the opera.
[Illustration: 210]
[Illustration: 211]
CHAPTER VI. THE INHABITANTS.
I.
{186}On the eighth of August, at nine o’clock in the morning, the
piercing note of a flageolet was to be heard at half a league’s distance
from Eaux-Bonnes, and the bathers set out for Aas. The way there is by
a narrow road cut in the Montagne Verte, and overhung with lavender and
bunches of wild flowers. We entered upon a street six feet in width:
it is the main street. Scarlet-capped children, wondering at their own
magnificence, stood bolt upright in the doorways and looked on us in
silent admiration. The public square, at the side of the lavatory, is as
large as a small room; {187}it is here that dances take place.
[Illustration: 212]
Two hogsheads had been set up, two planks upon the hogsheads, two chairs
upon the planks, and on the chairs two musicians, the whole surmounted
by two splendid blue umbrellas which did service as parasols; for the
sky was brazen, and there was not a tree on the square.
The whole formed an exceedingly pretty and original picture. Under
the roof of the lavatory, a {188}group of old women leaned against the
pillars in talk; a crystal stream gushed forth and ran down the
slated gutter; three small children stood motionless, with wide-open,
questioning eyes. The young men were at exercise in the pathway, playing
at base. Above the esplanade, on points of rock forming shelves, the
women looked down on the dance, in holiday costume; a great scarlet
hood, a body embroidered in silver, or in silk with violet flowers; a
yellow, long-fringed shawl; a black petticoat hanging in folds, close to
the figure, and white woollen gaiters. These strong colors, the lavished
red, the reflexes of the silk under a dazzling light, were delightful.
About the two hogsheads was wheeling, with a supple, measured movement,
a sort of roundelay, to an odd and monotonous air terminated by a shrill
false note of startling effect. A youth in woollen vest and breeches led
the band; the young girls moved gravely, without talking or laughing;
their little sisters at the end of the file took great pains in
practising the step, and the line of purple _capulets_ slowly waved like
a crown of peonies. Occasionally the leader of the dance gave a sudden
bound with a savage cry, and recalled to our mind that we were in the
land of bears, in the very heart of the mountains.
Paul was there under his umbrella, wagging his {189}great beard with a
look of delight. Had he been able, he would have followed the dance.
[Illustration: 214]
“Was I right? Is there a single things here out of harmony with the
rest, and which the sun, the climate, the soil, do not make suitable?
These people are poets. They must have been in love with the light to
have invented these splendid costumes. Never would a northern sun have
inspired this feast of color; their costume harmonizes with their
sky. In Flanders, they would look like mountebanks; here they are as
beautiful as their country. You no longer notice the ugly features, the
sunburnt faces, the thick, knotty hands that yesterday offended you; the
sun enlivens the brilliancy of the dresses, and in that golden splendor
all ugliness disappears. I have seen people who {190}laughed at the
music; ‘the air is monotonous,’ they say, ‘contrary to all rule, it has
no ending; those notes are false.’ At Paris, that may be; but here, no.
Have you remarked that wild and original expression? How it suits
the landscape! That air could have sprung up nowhere but among the
mountains. The frou-frou of the tambourine is as the languid voice
of the wind when it coasts the narrow valleys; the shrill tone of the
flageolet is the whistling of the breeze when it is heard on the naked
summits; that final note is the cry of a hawk in the depths of the air;
the mountain sounds too are recognizable, hardly transformed by the
rhythm of the song. And then the dance is as primitive, as natural, as
suitable to the country as the music: they go wheeling about hand in
hand. What could be more simple! It is thus that the children do at
their play. The step is supple and slow; that is as the mountaineer
walks; you know by experience that you must not be in too much haste if
you would climb, and that here the stiff strides of a town-bred man will
bring him to the ground. That leap, that seems to you so strange, is
one of their habits, hence one of their pleasures. To make up a festival
they have chosen what they found agreeable among the things to which
their eyes, ears, and legs were habituated. Is not this festival then
the most national, the {191}truest, the most harmonious, and hence the
most beautiful that can be imagined?”
II.
Laruns is a market-town. Instead of a hogshead there were four times two
hogsheads and as many musicians, all playing together, and each one
a different portion of the same air. This clatter excepted and a few
magnificent pairs of velvet breeches, the festival was the same as that
at Aas. What we go there to see is the procession.
At first everybody attends vespers; the women in the sombre nave of the
church, the men in a gallery, the small boys in a second gallery higher
up, under the eye of a frowning schoolmaster. The young girls, kneeling
close to the gratings of the choir, repeated _Ave Marias_, to which the
deep voice of the congregation responded; their clear, metallic voices
formed a pretty contrast to the hollow buzzing of the resounding
responses. Some wolfish-looking old mountaineers, from thirty miles
away, made the blackened wood of the balustrade creak as they clumsily
bent the knee. A twilight fell on the dense crowd, and made yet darker
the expression of those energetic countenances. One might have fancied
himself in the sixteenth {192}century. Meanwhile the little bells
chattered joyously with their shrill voices, and made all possible
noise, like a roost full of fowls at the top of the white tower.
[Illustration: 217]
At the end of an hour, the procession arranged itself very artistically
and went forth. The first part of the cortege was amusing: two rows of
little scapegraces in red vests, their hands clasped over their bellies,
in order to keep their book in {193}place, tried to give themselves an
air of compunction, and looked at each other out of the corners of their
eyes in a manner truly comical. This band of masquerading monkeys was
led by a jolly stout priest, whose folded bands, cuffs, and hanging
laces fluttered and waved like wings. Then a sorry beadle, in a soiled
_douanier’s_ coat; then a fine maire in uniform, with his sword at his
side; then two long seminarians, two plump little priests, a banner
of the Virgin, finally all the douaniers and all the gendarmes of the
country; in short, all the grandeurs, all the splendors, all the actors
of civilization.
The Barbarians however were more beautiful: it was the procession of men
and women who, taper in hand, filed by during three-quarters of an
hour. I saw in it true Henry IV. faces, with the severe and intelligent
expression, the proud and serious bearing, the large features of his
contemporaries. Especially there were some old herdsmen in russet
great-coats of hairy felt, their brows not wrinkled but farrowed,
bronzed and burned by the sun, their glances savage as those of a wild
beast, worthy of having lived in the time of Charlemagne. Surely those
who defied Roland were not more savage in physiognomy. Finally appeared
five or six old women, the like of whom I could never have imagined:
a hooded cloak of white woollen {194}stuff enfolded them like a
bed-blanket; only the swarthy countenance was visible, their eyes deep
and fierce like the she-wolf’s, their mumbling lips, that seemed to
be muttering spells. They called to mind involuntarily the witches in
Macbeth; the mind was transported a hundred leagues away from cities,
into barren gorges, beneath lone glaciers where the herdsmen pass whole
months amidst the snows of winter, near to the growling bears, without
hearing one human word, with no other companions than the gaunt peaks
and the dreary fir-trees. They have borrowed from solitude something of
its aspect.
[Illustration: 219]
{195}
[Illustration: 221]
{196}
III.
{197}The Ossalais, however, have ordinarily a gentle, intelligent,
and somewhat sad physiognomy. The soil is too poor to impart to their
countenance that expression of impatient vivacity and lively spirit
that the wine of the south and the easy life give to their neighbors of
Languedoc. Three-score leagues in a carriage prove that the soil
moulds the type. A little farther up, in the Cantal, a country of
chest-nut-trees, where the people fill themselves with a hearty
nourishment, you will see countenances red with sluggish blood and set
with a thick beard, fleshy, heavy-limbed bodies, massive machines for
labor. Here the men are thin and pale; their bones project, and their
large features are weatherbeaten like those of their mountains. An
endless struggle against the soil has stunted the women as well as the
plants; it has left in their eyes a vague expression of melancholy and
reflection. Thus the incessant impressions of body and soul in the long
run modify body and soul; the race moulds the individual, the country
moulds the race. A degree of heat in the air and of inclination in the
ground is the first cause of our faculties and of our passions.
Disinterestedness is not a mountain virtue. In a poor country, the first
want is want of money. {198}The dispute is to know whether they shall
consider strangers as a prey or a harvest; both opinions are true:
we are a prey which every year yields a harvest. Here is an incident,
trifling, but capable of showing the dexterity and the ardor with which
they will skin a flint.
One day Paul told his servant to sew another button upon his trousers.
An hour after she brings in the trousers, and, with an undecided,
anxious air, as if fearing the effect of her demand: “It is a sou,” said
she. I will explain later how great a sum the sou is in this place.
Paul draws out a sou in silence and gives it to her. Jeannette retires
on tip-toe as far as the door, thinks better of it, returns, takes
up the trousers and shows the button: “Ah! that is a fine button! (A
pause.) I did not find _that_ in my box. (Another and a longer pause.)
I bought that at the grocer’s; it costs a sou!” She draws herself up
anxiously; the proprietor of the trousers, still without speaking, gives
a second sou.
It is clear that she has struck upon a mine of sous. Jeannette goes out,
and a moment after reopens the door. She has resolved on her course,
and in a shrill, piercing voice, with admirable volubility: “I had no
thread; I had to buy some thread; I used a good deal of thread; good
thread, too. The button won’t come off. I sewed it on {199}fast: it cost
a sou.” Paul pushes across the table the third sou.
Two hours later, Jeannette, who has been pondering on the matter,
reappears. She prepares breakfast with the greatest possible care; she
takes pains to wipe the least spot, she lowers her voice, she walks
noiselessly, she is charming in her little attentions; then she says,
putting forth all sorts of obsequious graces: “I ought not to lose
anything, you would not want me to lose anything; the cloth was harsh, I
broke the point of my needle; I did not know it a while ago, I have just
noticed it; it cost a sou.”
Paul drew out the fourth sou, saying with his serious air: “Cheer up,
Jeannette; you will keep a good house, my child; happy the husband who
shall lead you, pure and blushing, beneath the roof of his ancestors;
you may go and brush the trousers.”
Beggars swarm. I have never met a child between the ages of four and
fifteen years who did not ask alms of me; all the inhabitants follow
this trade. No one is ashamed of it. You look at any one of the little
girls, scarcely able to walk, seated at their threshold busy in eating
an apple: they come stumbling along with their hands stretched out
towards you. You find in a valley a young herdsman with his cows; he
comes up and asks {200}you for a trifle. A tall girl goes by with a
fagot on her head; she stops and asks a trifle of you.
[Illustration: 225]
A peasant is at work on the road. “I am making a good road for you,”
says he; “give me just a trifle.” A band of scapegraces are playing at
the end of a promenade; as soon as they see you, they take each other
by the hand, begin the dance of the country, and end by collecting the
usual trifle. And so it is throughout the Pyrenees. {201}
[Illustration: 225]
And they are merchants as well as beggars. You rarely pass along the
street without being accosted by a guide who offers you his services and
begs you to give him the preference. If you are seated on the hillside,
three or four children come dropping out of the sky, bringing you
butterflies, stones, curious plants, bouquets of flowers.
If you go near a dairy, the proprietor comes out with a porringer of
milk, and will sell it to you in spite of yourself. One day as I was
looking at a young bull, the drover proposed to me to buy it.
This greediness is not offensive. I once went up the brook of la Soude,
behind Eaux-Bonnes: it is a sort of tumbledown staircase which for three
leagues winds among the box in a parched ravine. You have to clamber
over pointed rocks, jump from point to point, balance yourself along
narrow ledges, climb zigzag up the scarped slopes covered with rolling
stones. The foot-path is enough to frighten the goats. You bruise your
feet on it, and at every step {202}run the risk of getting a sprain. I
met there some young women and girls of twenty, all barefooted, carrying
to the village, one a block of marble in her basket, another three sacks
of charcoal fastened together, another five or six heavy planks; the
way is nine miles long, under a mid-day sun; and nine miles for the home
journey: for this they are paid ten sous.
Like the beggars and the merchants, they are very crafty and very
polite. Poverty forces men to calculate and to please; they take off
their cap as soon as you speak to them and smile complaisantly; their
manners are never brutal or artless. The proverb says very truly: “False
and courteous Béarnais.” You recall to mind the caressing manners and
the perfect skill of their Henry IV.; he knew how to play on everybody
and offend nobody. In this respect, as in many others, he was a
true Béarnais. With the aid of necessity, I have seen them trump up
geological disquisitions. In the middle of July there was a sort of
earthquake; a report was spread that an old wall had fallen down;
in truth the windows had shaken as if a great wagon were passing by.
Immediately half of the bathers quitted their lodgings: a hundred and
fifty persons fled from Cauterets in two days; travellers in their
night-shirts ran to the stable to fasten on their carriages, and to
light themselves carried away the {203}hotel lantern. The peasants shook
their heads compassionately and said to me: “You see, sir, they are
going from the frying-pan into the fire; if there is an earthquake, the
plain will open, and they will fall into the crevices, whereas here the
mountain is solid, and would keep them safe as a house.”
That same Jeannette who already holds so honorable place in my history,
shall furnish an example of the polite caution and the over-scrupulous
reserve in which they wrap themselves when they are afraid that they
shall be compromised. The master had drawn the neighboring church, and
wanted to judge of his work after the manner of Molière.
“Do you recognize that, Jeanette.”
“Ah! monsieur, did you do that?”
“What have I copied here?”
“Ah! monsieur, it is very beautiful.”
[Illustration: 228]
{204}“But still, tell me what it is there.”
She takes the paper, turns it over and over again, looks at the artist
with a dazed air and says nothing.
“Is it a mill or a church?”
“Yes, indeed.”
“Is it the church of Laruns?”
“Ah! it’s very beautiful.”
You could never get her beyond that.
IV.
We had a wish to know if the fathers were equal to the sons; and we have
found the history of Bearn in a fine red folio, composed in the year
1640, by Master Pierre de Marca, a Béarnais, counsellor of the king
in his state and privy councils, and president in his court of the
parliament of Navarre; the whole ornamented with a magnificent engraving
representing the conquest of the Golden Fleece. Pierre de Marca makes
several important discoveries in his book, among others, that of two
kings of Navarre, personages of the ninth century, until then unknown:
Séméno Ennéconis, and En-néco Séménonis.
Although filled with respect for Sémêno Ennéconis and Enneco Semenonis,
we are desperately wearied with the recital of the suits, the robberies
{205}and the genealogies of all the illustrious unknown. Paul maintains
that learned history is only good for learned asses; a thousand dates do
not make a single idea. The celebrated historian of the Swiss, Jean de
Muller, once wanted to rehearse the list of all the Swiss nobility, and
forgot the fifty-first descendant of some undiscoverable viscount; he
became ill with grief and shame; it is as if a general should wish to
know how many buttons each of his soldiers had on his coat.
We have found that these good mountaineers have ever loved gain and
booty. It is so natural to wish to live, and live well too! Above all
is it pleasant to live at the expense of others! Time was when, in
Scotland, every shipwrecked vessel belonged to the coast-side people;
the wrecked ships came to them like herrings in the season, a hereditary
and legitimate harvest; they felt robbed if one of the crew attempted
to keep his coat. It is so here with strangers. The rear-guard of
Charlemagne, under Roland, perished here; the mountaineers rolled down
upon it an avalanche of stone; then they divided the stuffs, the silver,
mules and baggage, and each one betook himself to his den. In the like
manner they treated a second army sent by Louis le Débonnaire. I fancy
they regarded these passages as a blessing from heaven, a special gift
from divine Providence. {206}
[Illustration: 231]
Fine cuirasses, new lances, necklaces, well-lined coats, it was a
perfect magazine of gold, iron, and wool. Very likely the wives ran to
meet them, blessing the good husband who had been the most thoughtful of
the welfare of his little family, and brought back the greatest quantity
of provisions. This artlessness in respect of theft still exists in
Calabria. In Napoleon’s time, a prefect was scolding a well-to-do
peasant wild was behind-hand with his contributions; the peasant
replied, with all the openness of an upright man: “Faith, {207}your
Excellency, it’s not my fault.”
[Illustration: 232]
“For fifteen days now have I taken my carabine every evening, and have
posted myself along the highway to see if no one would pass. Never a man
goes by; but I give you my word I’ll go back there until I have scraped
together the ducats I owe you.”
Add to this custom of thieving an extreme bravery! I believe the country
is the cause of one as well as the other; extreme poverty removes
timidity as well as scruples; they are leeches on the body of others,
but then they are equally prodigal of their own; they can resist as well
as take an advantage; if they willingly take another’s goods, they guard
their own yet more willingly. Liberty has thriven here from the earliest
times, crabbed and savage, home-born and tough like a stem of their own
boxwood. Hear the tone of the primitive charter: {208}“These are the
tribunals of Bearn, in which mention is made of the fact that, in
old times, in Beam they had no lord, and in those days they heard the
praises of a certain knight. They sought him out, and made him their
lord during one year; and after that, he was unwilling to maintain
among them their tribunals and customs. And the court of Bearn then came
together at Pau, and they required of him to maintain among them their
tribunals and customs. And he would not, and thereupon they killed him
in full court.”
In like manner the land of Ossau preserved its privileges, even against
its viscount. Every robber who brought his booty into the valley was
safe there, and might the next day present himself before the viscount
with impunity: it was only when the latter, or his wife in his absence,
came into the valley to dispense justice that he was judged. This
scarcely ever happened, and the land of Ossau was “the retreat of all
the evil livers and marauders” of the country round.
V.
These rude manners, filled with chances and dangers, produced as many
heroes as brigands. First comes the Count Gaston, one of the leaders of
the first crusade; he was, like all the great {209}men of this country,
an enterprising and a ready-minded man, a man of experience and one of
the vanguard. At Jerusalem he went ahead to reconnoitre, and constructed
the machines for the siege; he was held to be one of the wisest in
counsel, and was the first to plant upon the walls the cows of Bearn.
No one struck a heavier blow or calculated more exactly, and no one was
fonder of calculating and striking. On his return, he fought against his
neighbors, twice besieged Saragossa, and once Bayonne, and, along with
king Alphonso, won two great battles against the Moors. Ah, what a time
was that, for minds and muscles framed for adventure! No need then to
seek for war; it was found everywhere, and profit along with it.
[Illustration: 234]
Such a fine career as those cavalcades had among the marvellous cities
of the Asiatic Saracens and of the Spanish Moors! What a quantity of
skulls to cleave, of gold to bring home! It was thus that the overflow
of force and imagination was discharg was no foolish affair of a random
shot or clumsy {210}bullet, in the midst of a well-ordered
manouvre. Then one encountered all the hazards, the unforeseen, of
knight-errantry; the senses were all awake; the arms wrought and
the body was a soldier; Gaston was killed as a private horseman in
ambuscade, with the bishop of Huesca.
That which pleases me in history is the minor circumstances, the details
of character. A mere scrap of a phrase indicates a revolution in the
faculties and passions; great events are contained in it at their ease,
as in their cause. Here in the life of Gaston is one of those words. The
day that Jerusalem was taken, quarter had been granted to a large number
of Mussulmans. “But the next day, the rest, displeased at seeing that
there were any infidels alive, mounted upon the roofs of the temple, and
massacred and mangled all the Saracens, both men and women.” * There was
neither reasoning nor deliberation; at the sight of a Mussulman’s dress,
their blood mounted in wrath to their face, and they sprang forward,
like lions or butchers, struck them down and dismembered them. Lope de
Vega, an antique Christian, a severe Spaniard, renewed this savage and
fanatical sentiment:
* The following fact is from the Siege of Antioch: “Many of
our enemies died, and some of the prisoners were led before
the gate of the city, and there their heads were cut off, in
order to discourage those who remained in the city.”
{211}Garcia Tello. Father, why have you not brought a Moor for me to see
him!
The elder Tello; (showing him the prisoners.) Well, Garcia, those are
Moors.
Garcia. What? Those are Moors? They look like men.
Old Tello. And indeed they are men.
Garcia. They do not deserve to be.
Old Tello. And why?
Garcia. Because they believe neither in God nor in the Virgin Mary; the
sight of them makes my blood boil, Father.
Old Tello. Are you afraid of them?
Garcia. No more than you, Father. (_Going toward the prisoners._) Dogs,
I would tear you in pieces with my hands; you shall know what it is to
be a Christian. (He darts upon them and pursues them.)
Old Tello. Ah, the good little fellow! Gracious Heaven! He is fine as
coral.
Tello. Mendo, see that he does them no harm.
Old Tello. Let him kill one or two; so do they teach a falcon to kill
when he is young.
In fact, they are falcons or vultures. In the song of Roland, when
the doughty knights ask from Turpin the absolution of their sins, the
archbishop for penance recommends them to strike well.
But at the same time they have the mind and the soul of children.
“Deep are the wells, and the valleys dark, the rocks black, the defiles
marvellous.” That is their whole description of the Pyrenees; they feel
and speak _in a lump_. A child, questioned about Paris, which he had
just seen for the first time, {212}replied: “There are a great many
streets, and carriages everywhere, and great houses, and in two squares
two tall columns.” The poet of old times is like the child; he does not
know how to analyze his impressions. Like him, he loves the marvellous,
and takes delight in tales where all the proportions are gigantic.
[Illustration: 237]
In the battle of Roncevaux everything is aggrandized beyond measure. The
worthies kill the entire vanguard of the Saracens, a hundred thousand
men, and, afterward, the army of King Marsile, thirty battalions, each
composed of ten thousand men. Roland winds his horn, and the {213}sound
travels away thirty leagues to Charlemagne, and is echoed by his
sixty thousand hautboys. What visions such words awakened in those
inexperienced brains! Then all at once the bow was unbent; the
wounded Roland calls to mind “men of his lineage, of gentle France, of
Charlemagne his lord who supports him, and cannot help but weep and
sigh for them.” At the conclusion of the carnage with which they filled
Jerusalem, the crusaders, weeping and chanting, went barefoot to the
holy sepulchre. Later, when a number of the barons wanted to leave the
crusade of Constantinople, the others went to meet them, and entreated
them on their knees; then all embraced each other, bursting into sobs.
Robust children: that expresses the whole truth; they killed and howled
as if they were beasts of prey, then when once the fury was calmed, they
were all tears and tenderness, like a child who flings himself upon his
brother’s neck, or who is going to make his first communion.
VI.
I return to my Béarnais; they were the most active and circumspect of
the band. The counts of Bearn fought and treated with all the world;
they hover between the patronage of France, Spain and England, and are
subject to no {214}one; they pass from one to the other and always to
their own advantage, “drawn,” says Matthew Paris, “by pounds sterling,
or crowns, of which they had both great need and great abundance.” They
are always first where fighting is to be done or money to be gained;
they go to be killed in Spain or to demand gold at Poitiers. They are
calculators and adventurers; from imagination and courage lovers of
warfare,--lovers of necessity and reflection.
[Illustration: 239]
And in this manner their Henry won the crown of France, thinking much of
his interests and little of his life, and always poor. After the camp at
La Fère, when he was already recognized as king, he wrote: “I have only
a pretence of a horse on which to fight, and no entire armor that I can
put on; my shirts are in tatters, my pourpoints out at the elbows. My
saucepan is many a time upset, and now these two days I have dined and
supped with {215}one and another, for my purveyors say that they see
no way of furnishing my table any longer, especially since they have
received no money for six months.”
A month later, at Fontaine-Française, he charged an army at the head of
eight hundred cavaliers, and fired off his pistol by way of sport, like
a soldier. But at the same time this father of his people treated the
people in the following manner: “The prisons of Normandy were full of
prisoners for the payment of the duty on salt. They languished there in
such wise that as many as six-score of their corpses were brought forth
at one time. The parliament of Rouen besought His Majesty to have pity
on his people; but the king had been told that a great revenue was
coming from that tax, and said that he was willing that it should be
raised, and seemed that he would wish to turn the rest into mockery.”
[Illustration: 240]
A good fellow, no doubt, but a devil of a good fellow; we French are
fond of such; they are likable, but sometimes deserve hanging. These
had prudence into the bargain, and were made to be officers of fortune.
{216}“Gassion,” says Tallemant des Reaux, “was the fourth of five sons.
When he had finished his studies, he was sent to the war; but otherwise
he was but poorly furnished. For his sole horse his father gave him a
docked pony, that might have been thirty years old; its like was not
in all Bearn, and it was called, as a rarity, _Gassion’s Bob-tail._
Apparently the young man was scarcely better provided with money than
with horses. This pretty courser left him four or five leagues from Pau,
but that did not prevent him from going into Savoy, where he entered the
troops of the duke, for there was then no war in France. But the late
king having broken with this prince, all Frenchmen had orders to quit
his service; this forced our adventurer to return to the service of the
king.
“At the taking of the pass of Suze, he did so well, although only a
simple cavalier, that he was made cornet; but the company in which he
was cornet was broken, and he came to Paris and asked for the mantle of
a musketeer. He was refused on account of his religion. Out of spite,
with several other Frenchmen he went over to Germany, and, although in
his troop there were men of higher position than he, knowing how to talk
in Latin, he was everywhere received for the chief of the band. One
of these made the advances for a company of light-horse that they were
going to {217}raise in France for the king of Sweden; he was lieutenant
of it; his captain was killed, and now he is himself a captain. He soon
made himself known as a man of spirit, so that he obtained from the king
of Sweden the privilege of receiving orders only from His Majesty in
person; this was on condition of marching always at the head of the army
and of filling in a measure the position of forlorn hope. While thus
employed, he received a frightful pistol-shot in the right side, the
wound of which has since opened several times, now to the peril of his
life, and now the opening answering as a crisis in other illnesses.”
[Illustration: 242]
He was a thorough soldier, and above all a lover of valor. A rebel
peasant, at Avranches, fought admirably before a barricade, and killed
the Marquis de Courtaumer, whom he took for Gassion. Gassion had search
made everywhere for this gallant man, in order that he might be pardoned
and to put him in his regiment. The Chancellor Séguier took the affair
like a lawyer; some time after, having seized the peasant, he had
him broken on the wheel. {218}He treated civil affairs just as he
did military ones. He sent word to a merchant in Paris who had become
bankrupt, owing him ten thousand livres, “that it would not be possible
for him to let remain in the world a man who was carrying away his
property.” He was paid.
“He led men into war admirably. I have heard related an action of
his, very bold and at the same time very sensible; before he was
major-general, he asked several noblemen if they wished to join his
party. They went with him. After having gone about the whole morning
without finding anything, he said to them: ‘We are too strong; the
parties all fly before us. Let us leave here our horsemen, and go away
alone.’ The volunteers followed him; they went on until they were near
to Saint-Omer. Just then two squadrons of cavalry suddenly appeared and
cut off their way; for Saint-Omer was behind our people.
“‘Messieurs,’ said he to them, ‘we must pass or die. Put yourselves all
abreast; ride full speed at them and don’t fire. The first squadron will
be afraid, when they see that you mean to fire only into their teeth;
they will rein back and overthrow the others.’” It happened just as he
had said: our noblemen, well mounted, forced the two squadrons and saved
themselves, almost to a man.
“Another, also very daring; which, however, {219}seems to me a little
rash. Having received notice that the Croats were leading away the
horses of the Prince d’Enrichemont, he wanted to charge upon them,
accompanied by only a few of his horsemen, and, as there happened to be
a great ditch between him and the enemy, he swam across it on his horse,
without looking to see if any one followed him, so that he encountered
the enemy alone, killed five of them, put the rest to flight, and
returned with three of our men whom they had taken, and who perhaps
helped him in the struggle. He led back all the horses.”
The quondam light-horseman reappeared beneath the general’s uniform.
Thus he always remained the comrade of his soldiers. When any one had
offended the least of his cavalrymen, he took the man with him and had
satisfaction given in one way or another.
[Illustration: 244]
“La Vieuxville, since superintendent, intrusted to him his eldest son to
learn the trade of war. {220}The young man treated Gassion magnificently
at the army. ‘You are trifling with yourself, Monsieur le Marquis,’ said
he: ‘of what use are all these dainties? ‘S death! we only want good
bread, good wine and good forage.’ He thought of his horse as much as of
himself.”
[Illustration: 245]
He was a poor courtier and troubled himself little about ceremonies.
One day he went to the communion before the prince palatine, and the
following Sunday, having found his place taken, he would never allow
that a nobleman should give it up, and went to seek a place somewhere
else. Nevertheless he was scarcely courtly towards ladies, and on this
point not at all worthy of Henry IV.
“At court, many young ladies who were pleased with him, were wheedling
him, and said: ‘Of a {221}truth, monsieur, you have performed the finest
possible deeds.’--‘That’s a matter of course,’ said he. When one said:
‘I should be glad to have a husband like M. de Gassion.’--‘I don’t doubt
it,’ answered he.
“He said of Mlle, de Ségur, who was old and ugly, ‘I like that young
woman; she looks like a Croat.’
“When Bougis, his _lieutenant de gendarmes_, stayed too long in Paris in
the winter-time, he wrote to him: ‘You are amusing yourself with those
women, and you will die like a dog; here you would find fine chances.
What the devil do you find in the way of pleasure in going to court and
making love! That is pretty business in comparison with the pleasure of
taking a quarter!’”
His brother, Bergerê, seems to have had little taste for this pleasure.
Gassion, then a colonel, on one occasion ordered him to charge at the
head of fifty cavaliers, and declared that if he gave way he would run
him through the body with his sword. An admirable method for forming
men! Bergerê found his account in it, and afterwards went into action
like any other man.
The two adventurers had a thoroughly military ending. Their brother
the president, for economy’s sake, had Bergerê embalmed by a valet de
chambre who mangled him shockingly. As for Gassion, he awaited burial
during three months. {222}“The president, tired of paying for the
funeral hangings, had them returned, and others put up which cost him
ten _sols_ less a day. At last he had a small vault constructed between
two gates in the old cemetery; he had them interred one day when there
was a sermon without any solemnity whatever, and so that no one could
say that he had gone there on their account.” Three out of four heroes
have been similarly buried, like dogs.
The last of the d’Artagnans, those heroic hunters after paying
adventures, was (according to an inscription, said to be false) born at
Pau, rue du Tran, No. 6. A drummer in 1792, he was in 1810 prince royal
of Sweden. He had made his way, and along it he had lost his prejudices.
Like Henry IV., he found that a kingdom was worth quite as much as a
mass; he too made the perilous leap, but in a contrary direction, and
laid aside his religion like an old cassock; a question of old clothes:
a brand-new royal mantle was worth far more.
[Illustration: 247]
{223}{224}
BOOK III. THE VALLEY OF LUZ. {225}
[Illustration: 250]
CHAPTER I. ON THE WAY TO LUZ.
I.
The carriage leaves Eaux-Bonnes at dawn. The sun is scarcely yet risen,
and is still hidden by the mountains. Pale rays begin to color the
mosses on the western declivity. These mosses, bathed in dew, seem as
if awakening under the first caress of the day. Rosy hues, of an
inexpressible softness, rest on the summits, then steal down along the
slopes. One could never have believed that these gaunt old creatures
were capable of an expression so timid and so tender. The light
broadens, heaven expands, the air is filled with joy and life. A bald
peak in the midst of the rest, and darker than they, stands out in an
aureole of flame. All at once, {226}between two serrate points, like a
dazzling arrow, streams the first ray of the sun.
II.
Beyond Pau stretches a smiling country, golden with harvests, amongst
which the Gave winds its blue folds between white and pebbly beaches. On
the right, far away in a veil of luminous mist, the Pyrenees lift their
jagged tops, and the naked points of their black rocks. Their flanks,
furrowed by the torrents of winter, are deeply scored and, as it were,
turned up with an iron rake.
[Illustration: 251]
The picturesque country and the great mountains are seen to disclose
themselves; the fences of the fields are of small rounded stones, in
whose fissures abound waving grasses, pretty heaths, tufts of yellow
sedum, and {227}above all tiny pink geraniums, that shine in the sun
like clusters of rubies. You are quite ready to seek for nymphs; we
come across six in an orchard, not actually dancing, but dirty. They are
eating bread and cheese, squatted on their heels, and stare at us with
half-open mouth.
III.
Coarraze still preserves a tower and gateway, the remains of a castle.
This castle has its legend, which Froissart recounts in a style so
flowing and agreeable, so minute and expressive, that I cannot refrain
from quoting it at length.
The Lord of Coarraze had a dispute with a clerk, and the clerk left him
with threats. About three months after, when the knight least thought
of it, and was sleeping in his bed with his lady, in his castle of
Coarraze, there came invisible messengers, who made such a noise,
knocking about everything they met with in the castle, as if they were
determined to destroy all within it: and they gave such loud raps at
the door of the chamber of the knight, that the lady was exceedingly
frightened. The knight heard it all, but did not say a word, as he would
not have it appear that he was alarmed, for he was a man of sufficient
courage for any adventure. These noises and tumults continued, in
{228}different parts of the castle, for a considerable time, and then
ceased. On the morrow, all the servants of the household assembled, and
went to their lord,’ and said, ‘My lord, did you not hear what we all
heard this night?’ The Lord de Coarraze dissembled, and replied, ‘What
is it you have heard?’
[Illustration: 253]
They then related to him all the noises and rioting they had heard, and
that the plates in the kitchen had been broken. He began to laugh, and
said, ‘It was nothing, that they had dreamed it, or that it had been the
wind.’ ‘In the name of God,’ added the lady, ‘I well heard it.’ {229}
“On the following night the noises and rioting were renewed, but much
louder than before, and there were such blows struck against the door
and windows of the chamber of the knight, that it seemed they would
break them down. The knight could no longer desist from leaping out of
his bed, and calling out, ‘Who is it that at this hour thus knocks at my
chamber door?’ He was instantly answered, ‘It is I.’ ‘And who sends thee
hither?’ asked the knight. ‘The clerk of Catalonia, whom thou hast much
wronged; for thou hast deprived him of the rights of his benefice; I
will, therefore, never leave thee quiet, until thou hast rendered him
a just account, with which he shall be contented.’--‘What art thou
called,’ said the knight, ‘who art so good a messenger?’--‘My name is
Orthon.’--‘Orthon,’ said the knight, ‘serving a clerk will not be of
much advantage to thee; for if thou believest him he will give thee
great trouble: I beg thou wilt therefore leave him and serve me, and I
shall think myself obliged to thee.’ Orthon was ready with his answer,
for he had taken a liking to the knight, and said, ‘Do you wish
it?’--‘Yes,’ replied the knight; ‘but no harm must be done to any one
within these walls.’--‘Oh, no,’ answered Orthon; ‘I have no power to
do ill to any one, only to awaken thee and disturb thy rest, or that of
other persons.’--‘Do what I tell{230} thee,’ added the knight, ‘we shall
well agree, and leave this wicked priest, for he is a worthless fellow,
and serve me.’--‘Well,’ replied Orthon, ‘since thou wilt have it so, I
consent.’
“Orthon took such an affection to the Lord de Coarraze, that he came
often to see him in the night-time, and when he found him sleeping, he
pulled his pillow from under his head, or made great noises at the door
or windows; so that when the knight was awakened, he said, ‘Orthon,
let me sleep.’--‘I will not,’ replied he, ‘until I have told thee some
news.’ The knight’s lady was so much frightened, the hairs of her head
stood on end, and she hid herself under the bed-clothes. ‘Well,’ said
the knight, ‘and what news hast thou brought me?’ Orthon replied, ‘I am
come from England, Hungary, or some other place, which I left yesterday,
and such and such things have happened.’ Thus did the Lord de Coarraze
know by means of Orthon all things that were passing in different parts
of the world; and this connection continued for five years; but he could
not keep it to himself, and discovered it to the Count de Foix, in the
manner I will tell you. The first year, the Lord de Coarraze came to the
Count de Foix, at Orthès, or elsewhere, and told him, ‘My lord, such
an event has happened in England, in Scotland, Germany, or some other
country,’ and the Count {231}de Foix, who found all this intelligence
prove true, marvelled greatly how he could have acquired such early
information, and entreated him so earnestly, that the Lord de Coarraze
told him the means by which he had acquired his intelligence, and the
manner of its communication.
“When the Count de Foix heard this, he was much pleased, and said, ‘Lord
de Coarraze, nourish the love of your intelligencer. I wish I had such
a messenger; he costs you nothing, and you are truly informed of
everything that passes in the world.’--‘My lord,’ replied the knight, ‘I
will do so.’ The Lord de Coarraze was served by Orthon for a long time.
I am ignorant if Orthon had more than one master; but two or three
times every week he visited the knight and told him all the news of the
countries he had frequented, which he wrote immediately to the Count de
Foix, who was much delighted therewith, as there is not a lord in the
world more eager after news from foreign parts than he is. Once, when
the Lord de Coarraze was in conversation on this subject with the Count
de Foix, the Count said, ‘Lord de Coarraze, have you never yet seen your
messenger?’--‘No, by my faith, never, nor have I ever pressed him on
this matter.’--‘I wonder at that,’ replied the count, ‘for had he
been so much attached to me, I should have begged of him to have shown
himself in his {232}own proper form; and I entreat you will do so, that
you may tell how he is made, and what he is like. You have said that he
speaks Gascon as well as you or I do.’--‘By my faith,’ said the Lord de
Coar-raze, ‘he converses just as well and as properly, and, since you
request it, I will do all I can to see him.’ It fell out when the Lord
de Coarraze, as usual, was in bed with his lady (who was now accustomed
to hear Orthon without being frightened), Orthon arrived and shook the
pillow of the knight, who was asleep. On waking, he asked who was there.
Orthon replied, ‘It is I.’--‘And where dost thou come from?’--‘I
come from Prague, in Bohemia.’--‘How far is it hence?’--‘Sixty days’
journey,’ replied Orthon. ‘And hast thou returned thence in so short
a time?’--‘Yes, as may God help me: I travel as fast as the wind, or
faster.’--‘What, hast thou got wings?’--‘Oh, no.’--‘How, then, canst
thou fly so fast?’--‘That is no business of yours.’--‘No!’ said the
knight. ‘I should like exceedingly to see what form thou hast, and how
thou art made.’--‘That does not concern you to know,’ replied Orthon;
‘be satisfied that you hear me, and that I bring you intelligence you
may depend on.’--‘By God,’ said the Lord de Coarraze, ‘I should love
thee better if I had seen thee.’--‘Well,’ replied Orthon, ‘since you
have such a desire, the first thing you shall see {233}tomorrow morning,
in quitting your bed, shall be myself.’--‘I am satisfied,’ said the
knight; ‘you may now depart; I give thee thy liberty for this night.’
“When morning came, the knight arose, but his lady was so much
frightened she pretended to be sick, and said she would not leave her
bed the whole day. The Lord de Coarraze willed it otherwise. ‘Sir,’
said she, ‘if I do get up, I shall see Orthon; and, if it please God, I
would neither see nor meet him.’--‘Well,’ replied the knight,
‘I am determined to see him;’ and leaping out of his bed, he seated
himself on the bedstead, thinking he should see Orthon in his own shape;
but he saw nothing that could induce him to say he had seen him. When
the ensuing night arrived, and the Lord de Coarraze was in bed, Orthon
came and began to talk in his usual manner. ‘Go,’ said the knight; ‘thou
art a liar. Thou oughtest to have shown thyself to me this morning,
and hast not done so.’--‘No!’ replied Orthon; ‘but I have.’--‘I say,
no.’--‘And did you see nothing at all when you leaped out of bed?’ The
Lord de Coarraze was silent, and, having considered awhile, said, ‘Yes;
when sitting on my bedside, and thinking of thee, I saw two straws which
were turning and playing together on the floor.’--‘That was myself,’
replied Orthon, ‘for I had taken that form.’ The Lord de Coarraze said,
‘That will not {234}satisfy me; I beg of thee to assume some other
shape, so that I may see thee and know thee.’ Orthon answered, ‘You
ask so much that you will ruin me and force me away from you, for your
requests are too great.’--‘You shall not quit me,’ said the Lord
de Coarraze; ‘if I had once seen thee, I should not again wish
it.’--‘Well,’ replied Orthon, ‘you shall see me to-morrow, if you
pay attention to the first thing you observe when you leave your
chamber.’--‘I am contented,’ said the knight; ‘now go thy ways, for I
want to sleep.’ Orthon departed.
[Illustration: 259]
“On the morrow, about the hour of eight, the knight had risen and was
dressed; on leaving his apartment, he went to a window which looked
into the court of the castle. Casting his eyes about, the first thing
he observed was an immensely large sow, but she {235}was so poor, she
seemed only skin and bone, with long hanging ears all spotted, and a
sharp-pointed, lean snout. The Lord de Coarraze was disgusted at such a
sight, and, calling to his servants, said, ‘Let the dogs loose quickly,
for I will have that sow killed and devoured.’ The servants hastened to
open the kennel, and to set the hounds on the sow, who uttered a loud
cry and looked up at the Lord de Coarraze, leaning on the balcony of his
window, and was never seen afterwards; for she vanished, and no one ever
knew what became of her.
[Illustration: 260]
“The knight returned quite pensive to his chamber, for he then
recollected what Orthon had told him, and said: ‘I believe I have seen
my messenger Orthon, and repent having set my hounds on him, for perhaps
I may never see him more: he frequently told me, that if I ever angered
him, I should lose him.’ He kept his word; for never did he return
to the hôtel de Coarraze, and the knight died the following year.”
{236}This Orthon, the familiar spirits, queen Mab, are the poor little
popular gods, children of the pool and the oak, engendered by the
melancholy and awe-struck reveries of the spinning maiden and the
peasant. A great state religion then overshadowed all thoughts; doctrine
ready-made was imposed upon them; men could no longer, as in Greece or
Scandinavia, build the great poem which suited their manners and mind.
They received it from above, and repeated the litany with docility, yet
not very well understanding it. Their invention produced only legends of
saints or churchyard superstitions. Since they could not reach God, they
struck out for themselves goblins, hermits, and gnomes, and by these
simple and fantastic figures they expressed their rustic life or their
vague terrors. This Orthon, who storms at the door in the night
and breaks the dishes, is he anything more than the night-mare of a
half-wakened man, anxiously listening to the rustling of the wind that
fumbles at the doors, and the sudden noises of the night magnified by
silence! The child in his bed suffers similar fears when he covers eyes
and ears that he may not see the strange shadow of the wardrobe, or hear
the stifled cries of the thatch on the roof. The two straws that play
convulsively on the floor, twined together like twins, and shine
with mysterious brilliancy in the {237}pale sunlight, leave a vague
uneasiness in the disordered brain.
[Illustration: 262]
In this way is born the race of familiars and fairies, nimble creatures,
swift travellers, as capricious and sudden as a dream, who amuse
themselves maliciously in sticking together the manes of the horses, or
in souring the milk, yet sometimes become tender and domesticated,
attached like the cricket to its hearthstone, and are the penates of the
country and the farm, invisible and powerful as gods, quaint and odd as
children.
[238]
Thus all the legends preserve and set off vanished ways and
sentiments, like to those mineral forces which, deep down in the heart
of the mountains, transform charcoal and stones into marble and the
diamond.
[Illustration: 263]
{239}
[Illustration: 265]
{240}{241}
IV.
We no sooner reach Lestelle, than we are assured on all sides that we
must visit the chapel. We pass between rows of shops full of rosaries,
basins for holy-water, medals, small crucifixes, through a cross-fire
of offers, exhortations and cries. After which we are free to admire
the edifice, a liberty which we are careful not to abuse. On the portal,
indeed, there is a pretty enough virgin in the style of the seventeenth
century, four evangelists in marble, and in the interior several
tolerable pictures; but the blue dome starred with gold looks like
a bonbonnière, the walls are disgraced with engravings from the rue
Saint-Jacques, the altar is loaded with gewgaws. The gilded den is
pretentious and gloomy; for such a beautiful country the good God seems
but ill harbored.
The poor little chapel nestles close to a huge mountain wooded with
crowded green thickets, which stretches out superbly in the light, and
warms its belly in the sun. The highway is abruptly checked, makes a
curve and crosses the Gave. The pretty bridge of a single arch rests its
feet upon the naked rock and trails its ivy drapery in the blue-green
eddies of the stream. We ascend beautiful wooded hills where the cows
are grazing, and whose rounded slopes dip gently {242}down to the
river’s brink. We are nearing Saint Pé, on the confines of Bigorre and
Beam.
Saint-Pe contains a curious Roman church writh sculptured doorway. A
luminous dust was dancing in its warm shadows; the eyes penetrated with
pleasure into the depths of the background; its reliefs seemed to swim
in a living blackness. All at once comes a clatter of cracking whips,
of rolling and grinding wheels, of hoofs that strike fire from the
pavement; then the endless hedge of white walls running away to the
right and the left, flecked with glaring lights; then the sudden opening
of the heavens and the triumph of the sun, whose furnace blazes in the
remotest depths of the air.
V.
[Illustration: 267]
Near Lourdes, the hills became bald and the landscape sad. Lourdes is
only a mass of dull, lead-colored roofs, heaped up below the highway.
{243}
[Illustration: 269]
{244}{245}The two small towers of the fort outline their slender forms
against the sky. A single enormous, blackish rock lifts its back,
corroded by mosses, above the enclosure of a slight wall that winds to
shut it in, and suggests an elephant in a boarded shed. The neighborhood
of the mountains dwarfs all human constructions.
Heavy clouds rose in the sky, and the dull horizon became encased
between two rows of mountains, gaunt, patched with scant brushwood,
cleft in ravines; a pale light fell on the mutilated summits and into
the gray crevices. Bands of beggars, in relays, hooked themselves on
to the carriage with hoarse inarticulate noises, with idiotic air, wry
necks, and deformed bodies; the projecting sinews swelled the wrinkled
skin, and, peeping through the rags and tatters, was seen the flesh, in
color like a burned brick.
We entered the gorge of Pierrefitte. The clouds had spread, and darkened
the whole heaven; the wind swept along in sudden gusts and whipped the
dust into whirlwinds. The carriage rolled on between two immense walls
of dark rocks, slashed and notched as if by the axe of an infuriate
giant; rugged furrows, seamed with yawning gashes, reddish wounds,
torn and crossed by pallid wounds, scar upon scar; the perpendicular
{246}flank still bleeds from multiplied blows. Half-detached, bluish
masses hung in sharp points over our heads; a thousand feet higher up,
layers of blocks leaned forward, overhanging the way. At a prodigious
height, the black, battlemented summits pierced the vapors, while, with
every step forward, it seemed as if the narrow passage were coming to
an end. The darkness was growing, and, under that livid light with
its threatening reflexes, it seemed that those beetling monsters were
shaking and would soon engulf everything. The trees, beaten against the
rock, were bending and twisting. The wind complained with a long-drawn
piercing moan, and beneath its mournful sound, the hoarse rumbling of
the Gave was heard as it dashed madly against the rocks it could not
subdue, and moaned sadly like a stricken soul that rebels against the
torments it is powerless to escape.
The rain came and covered all objects with its blinding veil. An hour
later, the drained clouds were creeping along half way up the height;
the dripping rocks shone through a dark varnish, like blocks of polished
mahogany. Turbid water went boiling down the swollen cascades; the
depths of the gorge were still darkened by the storm; but a tender light
played over the wet summits, like a smile bathed in tears. The gorge
opened up; the {247} arches of the marble bridges sprang lightly
into the limpid air, and, sheeted in light, Luz was seen seated among
sparkling meadows and fields of millet in full bloom.
[Illustration: 272]
{248} {249}
[Illustration: 275]
{250}