I.
Cauterets is a town at the bottom of a valley, melancholy enough, paved,
and provided with an octroi. Innkeepers, guides, the whole of a famished
population besieges us; but we have considerable force of mind, and
after a spirited resistance we obtain the right of looking about and
choosing.
Fifty paces further on, we are fastened upon by servants, children,
donkey-hirers and boys, who accidentally stroll about us. They offer us
cards, they praise up to us the site, the cuisine; they accompany us,
cap in hand, to the very edge of the village; at the same time they
elbow away all competitors: “The stranger is mine, I’ll baste you if
{291}you come near him.” Each hotel has its runners on the watch; they
hunt the isard in winter, the traveller in summer.
The town has several springs: that of the King cured Abarca, king of
Aragon; that of Cæsar restored health, as they say, to the great Cæsar.
Faith is needed in history as well as in medicine.
[Illustration: 316]
For example, in the time of Francis I. the Eaux Bonnes cured wounds;
they were called _Eaux d’arqtiebusades _; the soldiers wounded at Pavia
{292}were sent to them. Now they cure diseases of the throat and chest.
A hundred years hence they will perhaps heal something else; with every
century medicine makes an advance.
“Formerly,” said Signarelle, “the liver was at the right and the heart at
the left; we have reformed all that.”
A celebrated physician one day said to his pupils: “Employ this remedy
at once, while it still cures.” Medicines, like hats, have their
fashions.
Yet what can be said against this remedy? The climate is warm, the gorge
sheltered, the air pure, the gayety of the sun is cheering. A change of
habits leads to a change of thoughts; melancholy ideas take flight. The
water is not bad to drink; you have had a beautiful journey; the moral
cures the physical nature; if not, you have had hope for two months--and
what, I beg to know, is a remedy, if not a pretext for hoping? You
take patience and pleasure until either illness or invalid departs, and
everything is for the best in the best of worlds.
II.
Several leagues away, among the precipices, sleeps the lake of Gaube.
The green water, three hundred feet in depth, has the reflexes of an
emerald. {293}
[Illustration: 318]
{294}
{295}The bald heads of the mountains are mirrored in it with a divine
serenity. The slender column of the pines is reflected there as clear as
in the air; in the distance, the woods clothed in bluish mist come down
to bathe their feet in its cold wave, and the huge Vignemale, spotted
with snow, shuts it about with her cliffs. At times a remnant of breeze
comes to ruffle it, and all those grand images undulate; the Greek
Diana, the wild, maiden huntress, would have taken it for a mirror.
[Illustration: 320]
How one sees her come to life again in such sites! Her marbles are
fallen, her festivals have vanished; but in the shivering of the firs,
at the sound of the cracking glaciers, before the steely splendors of
{296}these chaste waters, she reappears like a vision. All the night
long, in the outcries of the wind, the herdsmen could hear the baying
of her hounds and the whistling of her arrows; the untamed chorus of her
nymphs coursed over the precipices; the moon shone upon their shoulders
of silver, and on the point of their lances. In the morning she came
to bathe her arms in the lake; and more than once has she been seen
standing upon a summit, her eyes fixed, her brow severe; her foot trod
the cruel snow, and her virgin breasts gleamed beneath the winter sun.
III.
The Diana of the country is more amiable; it is the lively and gracious
Margaret of Navarre, sister and liberatress of Francis I. She came to
these waters with her court, her poets, her musicians, her savants,
a poet and theologian herself, of infinite curiosity, reading Greek,
learning Hebrew, and taken up with Calvinism. On coming out of the
routine and discipline of the middle ages, disputes about dogma and the
thorns of erudition appeared agreeable, even to ladies; Lady Jane Grey,
Elizabeth took part in these things: it was a fashion, as two centuries
later it was good taste to dispute upon Newton and the existence of God.
The {297}Bishop of Meaux wrote to Margaret: “Madame, if there were at
the end of the world a doctor who, by a single abridged verb, could
teach you as much grammar as it is possible to know, and another as much
rhetoric, and another philosophy, and so on with the seven liberal arts,
each one by an abridged verb, you would fly there as to the fire.” She
did fly there and got overloaded. The heavy philosophic spoil oppressed
her already slender thought. Her pious poems are as infantile as the
odes written by Racine at Port-Royal. What trouble we have had in
getting free from the middle ages! The mind bent, warped and twisted,
had contracted the ways of a choir-boy.
A poet of the country composed in her honor the following pretty song:--
“At the baths of Toulouse
There’s a spring clear and fair,
And three pretty doves
Came to drink and bathe there;
When at last they had bathed
Thus for months barely three,
For the heights of Cauterets
Left they fountain and me.
But why go to Cauterets,
What is there to be seen?
“It is there that we bathe
With the king and the queen.{298}
And the king has a cot
Hung with jasmin in flower;
The dear queen has the same,
But love makes it a bower.”
Is it not graceful and thoroughly southern? Margaret is less poetic,
more French: her verses are not brilliant, but at times are very
touching, by force of real and simple tenderness.
A moderate imagination, a woman’s heart thoroughly devoted, and
inexhaustible in devotion, a good deal of naturalness, clearness, ease,
the art of narration and of smiling, an agreeable but never wicked
malice, is not this enough to make you love Margaret and read here the
Heptameron?{299}
[Illustration: 324]
{300}
IV.
[Illustration: 326]
{301}
She wrote the Heptameron here; it seems that a journey to the waters was
then less safe than now-a-days.
The first day of the month of September, as the baths of the Pyrenees
mountains begin to have virtue, were found at those of Caulderets
several persons, from France and Spain as well as {302}other places;
some to drink the water, others bathe in it, others to take the
mud, which things are so marvellous, that invalids abandoned by the
physicians return from them completely cured. But about the time of
their return, there came on such great rains, that it seemed that God
had forgotten the promise given to Noah never again to destroy the world
by water; for all the cabins and dwellings of the said Caulderets were
so filled with water that it became impossible to live in them.
[Illustration: 327]
“The French lords and ladies, thinking to return to Tarbes as easily
as they had come, found the little brooks so swollen that they could
scarcely ford them. But when they came to pass the Bearnese Gave, which
was not two feet deep when they first saw it, they found it so large and
{303}impetuous, that they made a circuit to look for the bridges, which,
being nothing but wood, were swept away by the vehemence of the water.
[Illustration: 329]
{304}{305}“And some, thinking to break the violence of the course by
assembling several together, were so promptly swept away, that those
who would follow them lost the power and the desire of going after.”
Whereupon they separated, each one seeking a way for himself. “Two poor
ladies, half a league beyond Pierrefitte, found a bear coming down the
mountain, before which they galloped away in such great haste that their
horses fell dead under them at the entrance of their dwelling; two of
their women, who came a long time after, told them that the bear had
killed all their serving men.
“So while they are all at mass, there comes into the church a man
with nothing on but his shirt, fleeing as if some one were chasing and
following him up. It was one of their companions by the name of Guébron,
who recounted to them how, as he was in a hut near Pierrefitte, three
men came while he was in bed; but he, all in his shirt as he was, with
only his sword, wounded one of them so that he remained on the spot,
and, while the other two amused themselves in gathering up their
companion, thought that he could not escape if not by flight, as he was
the least burdened by clothing. {306}
“The abbé of Saint-Savin furnished them with the best horses to be had
in Lavedan, good Bearn cloaks, a quantity of provisions, and pretty
companions to lead them safely in the mountains.”
But it was necessary to busy themselves somewhat, while waiting for
the Gave to go down. In the morning they went to find Mme. Oysille, the
oldest of the ladies; they devoutly listened to the mass with her; after
which “she did not fail to administer the salutary food which she drew
from the reading of the acts of the saints and glorious apostles of
Jesus Christ.” The afternoon was employed in a very different fashion:
they went into a beautiful meadow along the river Gave, where the
foliage of the trees is so dense, “that the sun could neither pierce the
shade nor warm the coolness, and seated themselves upon the green grass,
which is so soft and delicate that they needed neither cushions nor
carpets.” And each in turn related some gallant adventure with details
infinitely artless and singularly precise. There were some relating
to husbands and yet more about monks. The lovely theologian is the
grand-daughter of Boccaccio, and the grand-mother of La Fontaine.
This shocks us, and yet is not shocking. Each age has its degree of
decency, which is prudery for this and blackguardism for another. {307}
[Illustration: 333]
{308}
{309}The Chinese find our trousers and close-fitting coat-sleeves
horribly immodest; I know a lady, an Englishwoman in fact, who allows
only two parts in the body, the foot and the stomach: every other word
is indecent; so that when her little boy has a fall, the governess must
say: “Master Henry has fallen, Madame, on the place where the top of his
feet rejoins the bottom of his stomach.
The habitual ways of the sixteenth century were very different. The
lords lived a little like men of the people; that is why they talked
somewhat like men of the people. Bonnivet and Henri II. amused
themselves in jumping like school-boys, and leaping over ditches
twenty-three feet wide. When Henry VIII. of England had saluted Francis
I. on the field of the cloth of gold, he seized him in his arms and
tried to throw him, out of pure sportiveness; but the king, a good
wrestler, laid him low by a trip. Fancy to-day the Emperor Napoleon at
Tilsitt receiving the Emperor Alexander in this fashion. The ladies
were obliged to be robust and agile as our peasants. To go to an evening
party they had to mount on horseback; Margaret, when in Spain, fearful
of being detained, made in eight days the stages for which a good
horseman would have required fifteen days; one had, too, to guard one’s
self against violence; once she had need of her two fists and all her
nails against Bonnivet. In the midst of such manners, free talk was
only the {310}natural talk; the ladies heard it every day at table, and
adorned with the finest commentaries. Brantôme will describe for you the
cup from which certain lords made them drink, and Cellini will relate
you the conversation that was held with the Duchess of Ferrara. A
milkmaid now-a-days would be ashamed of it. Students among themselves,
even when they are tipsy, will scarce venture what the ladies of honor
of Catherine de Medicis sang at the top of their voice and with all
their heart. Pardon our poor Margaret; relatively she is decent and
delicate, and then consider that two hundred years hence, you also, my
dear sir and madam, you will perhaps appear like very blackguards.
V.
Sometimes here, after a broiling day, the clouds gather, the air is
stifling, one feels fairly ill, and a storm bursts forth. There was such
an one last night. Each moment the heavens opened, cleft by an immense
flash, and the vault of darkness lifted itself entire like a tent. The
dazzling light marked out the limits of the various cultures and the
forms of the trees at the distance of a league. The glaciers flamed with
a bluish glimmer; the jagged peaks suddenly lifted themselves upon the
horizon like an army of spectres. {311}
[Illustration: 337]
{312}
{313}The gorge was illumined in its very depths; its heaped-up blocks,
its trees hooked on to the rocks, its torn ravines, its foaming Gave,
were seen under a livid whiteness, and vanished like the fleeting
visions of an unknown and tortured world.
[Illustration: 339]
Soon the voice of the thunder rolled in the gorges; the clouds that bore
it crept midway along the mountain side, and came into collision among
the rocks; the report burst out like a discharge of artillery. The wind
rose and the rain came on. The inclined plane of the summits opened up
under its squalls; the funeral {314}drapery of the pines clung to the
sides of the mountain. A creeping plain came out from the rocks and
trees. The long streaks of rain thickened the air; under the flashes
you saw the water streaming, flooding the summits, descending the two
slopes, sliding in sheets over the rocks, and from all sides in hurried
waves running to the Gave. In the morning the roads were cut up with
sloughs, the trees hung by their bleeding roots, great patches of earth
had fallen away, and the torrent was a river.
[Illustration: 340]
{315}
[Illustration: 341]