THE HIGH VALLEY OF THE AUDE
The Aude, rising close under the crest of the Pyrenees, flows down to
the Mediterranean between Narbonne and Béziers. It is one of the
daintiest mountain streams imaginable as it flows down through the
Gorges de St. Georges and by Axat and Quillan to Carcassonne, and the
following simple lines by Auguste Baluffe describe it well.
"Dans le fond des bleus horizons,
Les villages ont des maisons
Toutes blanches,
Que l'on aperçoit à travers
Les bois, formant des rideaux verts
De leurs branches."
At Carcassonne the Aude joins that natural waterway of the Pyrenees, the
Garonne, through the Canal du Midi. This great Canal-de-Deux-Mers, as it
is often called, connecting with the Garonne at Toulouse, joins the
Mediterranean at the Golfe des Lions, with the Atlantic at the Golfe de
Gascogne, and serves in its course Carcassonne, Narbonne and Béziers.
The Canal du Midi was one of the marvels of its time when built (1668),
though it has since been superseded by many others. It was one of the
first masterpieces of the French engineers, and may have been the
inspiration of De Lesseps in later years.
Boileau in his "Epitre au Roi," said:--
"J'entends déjà frémir les deux mers étonnées
De voir leurs flots unis au pied de Pyrénées."
South of Carcassonne and Limoux, just over "the mountains blue" of which
the old peasant sang, is St. Hilaire, the market town of a canton of
eight hundred inhabitants. It is more than that. It is a mediæval shrine
of the first rank; for it is the site of an abbey founded in the fifth
or sixth century. This abbey was under the direct protection of
Charlemagne in 780, and he bestowed upon it "_lettres de sauvegarde_,"
which all were bound to respect. The monastery was secularized in 1748,
but its thirteenth-century church, half Romanesque and half Gothic, will
ever remain as one of the best preserved relics of its age. For some
inexplicable reason its carved and cut stone is unworn by the ravages of
weather, and is as fresh and sharp in its outlines as if newly cut.
Within is the tomb of St. Hilaire, the first bishop of Carcassonne. The
sculpture of the tomb is of the ninth century, and it is well to know
that the same thing seen in the Musée Cluny at Paris is but a
reproduction. The original still remains here. The fourteenth-century
cloister is a wonderful work of its kind, and this too in a region where
this most artistic work abounds.
One's entrance into Quillan by road is apt to be exciting. The
automobile is no novelty in these days; but to run afoul of a five
kilometre procession of peasant folk with all their traps, coming and
going to a market town keeps one down to a walking pace.
[Illustration: _Château de Puylaurens_]
On the particular occasion when the author and artist passed this way,
all the animals bought and sold that day at the cattle fair of Quillan
seemed to be coming from the town. The little men who had them in tow
were invariably good-natured, but everybody had a hard time in
preventing horses, cows and sheep from bolting and dogs from getting run
over. Finally we arrived; and a more well-appreciated haven we have
never found. The town itself is quaint, picturesque and quite different
from the tiny bourgs of the Pyrenees. It is in fact quite a city in
miniature. Though Quillan is almost a metropolis, everybody goes to
bed by ten o'clock, when the lights of the cafés go out, leaving the
stranger to stroll by the river and watch the moon rise over the Aude
with the ever present curtain of the Pyrenees looming in the distance.
It is all very peaceful and romantic, for which reason it may be
presumed one comes to such a little old-world corner of Europe. And yet
Quillan is a gay, live, little town, though it has not much in the way
of sights to attract one. Still it is a delightful idling-place, and a
good point from which to reach the château of Puylaurens out on the
Perpignan road.
Puylaurens has as eerie a site as any combination of walls and roofs
that one has ever seen. It perches high on a peak overlooking the valley
of the Boulzane; and for seven centuries has looked down on the comings
and goings of legions of men, women and children, and beasts of burden
that bring up supplies to this sky-scraping height. To-day the château
well deserves the name of ruin, but if it were not a ruin, and was
inhabited, as it was centuries ago, no one would be content with any
means of arriving at its porte-cochère but a _funiculaire_ or an express
elevator.
The roads about Quillan present some of the most remarkable and
stiffest grades one will find in the Pyrenees. The automobilist doesn't
fear mountain roads as a usual thing. They are frequently much better
graded than the sudden unexpected inclines with which one meets very
often in a comparatively flat country; nevertheless there is a ten
kilometre hairpin hill to climb out of Quillan on the road to Axat which
will try the hauling powers of any automobile yet put on the road, and
the patience of the most dawdling traveller who lingers by the way. It
is the quick turns, the _lacets_, the "hairpins," that make it difficult
and dangerous, whether one goes up or down; and, when it is stated that
slow-moving oxen, two abreast, and often four to a cart, are met with at
every turn, hauling hundred-foot logs down the mountain, the real danger
may well be conceived.
Axat, the gateway to the Haute-Vallée is a dozen or more kilometres
above Quillan, through the marvellous Gorges de Pierre Lys. This is a
canyon which rivals description. The magnificent roadway which runs
close up under the haunches of the towering rocks beside the river Aude
is a work originally undertaken in the eighteenth century by the Abbé
Felix Arnaud, Curé of St. Martin-Lys, a tiny village which one passes
en route. The Abbé Arnaud who planned to cut this remarkable bit of
roadway through the Gorges du Pierre-Lys, formerly a mere trail along
which only smugglers, brigands and army deserters had hitherto dared
penetrate, and who to-day has the distinction of a statue in the Place
at Quillan, was certainly a good engineer. It is to be presumed he was
as good a churchman.
The Aude flows boldly down between two great beaks of mountains, and
here, over-hanging the torrent, the gentle abbé planned that a great
roadway should be cut, by the frequent aid of tunnels and galleries and
"corniches." And it was cut--as it was planned--in a most masterful
manner. One of the rock-cut tunnels is called the "Trou du Curé," and
above its portal are graven the following lines:--
"Arrête, voyageurs! Le Maître des humains
A fait descendre ici la force et la lumière.
Il a dit au Pasteur: Accomplis mon dessein,
Et le Pasteur des monts a brisé la barrière."
Surely this is a more noble monument to the Abbé Arnaud than that in
marble at Quillan. The actual "Gorge" is not more than fifteen hundred
metres in length, but even this impresses itself more profoundly by
reason of the great height of the rock walls on either side of the
gushing river. At Saint Martin-Lys, midway between Quillan and Axat, is
the church where the Abbé Arnaud served a long and useful life as the
pastor of his mountain flock.
Axat, at the upper end of the Gorge, will become a mountain summer
resort of the very first rank if a boom ever strikes it; but at present
it is simply a delightful little, unspoiled Pyrenean town, where one
eats brook trout and ortolans in the dainty little Hotel Saurel-Labat,
and is lulled to sleep by the purling waters of the Aude directly
beneath his windows. This quiet little town has a population of three
hundred, and is blessed with an electric supply so abundant and so
cheap, apparently, that the good lady who runs the all-satisfying little
hotel does not think it worth while to turn off the lamps even in the
daytime. This is not remarkable when one considers that the electricity
is a home-made product of the power of the swift flowing Aude, which
rushes by Axat's dooryards at five kilometres an hour.
[Illustration: AXAT]
Two kilometres above the town are the Gorges de St. Georges, also with a
superb roadway burrowed out of the rock. Here is the gigantic
_usine-hydro-électrique_ of 6,000 horse-power obtained from a
three-hundred-foot fall of water. That such things could be, here in
this unheard of little corner of the Pyrenees, is far from the minds of
most European travellers who know only the falls of the Rhine at
Schaffhausen. Axat has a ruined château on the height above the town
which is a wonderful ruin although it has no recorded history. To
imagine its romance, however, is not a difficult procedure if you know
the Pyrenees and their history. Its attractions are indeed many; but it
would be a paradise for artists who did not want to go far from their
inn to search their subjects. There are in addition a quaint old
thirteenth-century church, a magnificently arched stone bridge, and
innumerable twisting vaulted passages high aloft near the château.
Away above Axat is the plateau region known as the Capcir, thought to be
the ancient bed of a mountain lake. It is closed on all sides by a great
fringe of mountains, and is comparatively thickly inhabited because of
its particularly good pasture lands; and has the reputation of being the
coldest inhabited region in France, though it may well divide this
honour with the Alpine valleys of the Tarentaise in Savoie. One passes
from the Capcir into the Cerdagne lying to the eastward by the Col de
Casteillon.