TARBES, BIGORRE AND LUCHON
There is a clean-cut, commercial-looking air to Tarbes, little in
keeping with what one imagines the capital of the Hautes-Pyrénées to be.
Local colour has mostly succumbed to twentieth-century innovations in
the train of great hotels, tourists and clubs. In spite of this, the
surrounding panorama is superb; the setting of Tarbes is delightful; and
at times--but not for long at a time--it is really a charming town of
the Midi. Tarbes possessed a château of rank long years ago; not of so
high a rank as that of Pau, for that was royal, but still a grand and
dignified château, worthy of the seigneurs who inhabited it. Raymond I
fortified the place in the tenth century, and all through the following
five hundred years life here was carried on with a certain courtly
splendour. To-day the château, or what is left of it, serves as a
prison.
The unlovely cathedral at Tarbes was once a citadel, or at least served
as such. It must have been more successful as a warlike accessory than
as a religious shrine, for it is about the most ungracious, unchurchly
thing to be seen in the entire round of the Pyrenees.
The chief architectural curiosity of Tarbes is the Lycée, on whose
portal (dated 1669) one reads: "May this building endure until the ant
has drunk the waters of the ocean, and the tortoise made the tour of the
globe." It seems a good enough dedication for any building.
The ever useful Froissart furnishes a reference to Tarbes and its inns
which is most apropos. Travellers even in those days, unless they were
noble courtiers, repaired to an inn as now.
The Messire Espaing de Lyon, and the Maître Jehan Froissart made many
journeys together. It was here under the shelter of the Pyrenees that
the maître said to his companion:
"Et nous vînmes à Tarbes, et nous fûmes tout aises à l'hostel de
l'Etoile.... C'est une ville trop bien aisée pour séjourner chevaux: de
bons foins, de bons avoines et de belles rivières."
Tarbes is something of an approach to this, but not altogether. The
missing link is the Hostel de l'Étoile, and apparently nothing exists
which takes the place of it. From the fourteenth century to the
twentieth century is a long time to wait for hotel improvements,
particularly if they have not yet arrived.
The great Marché de Tarbes is, and has been for ages, one of its chief
sights, indeed it is the rather commonplace modern city's principal
picturesque accessory, if one excepts its grandly scenic background.
Every fifteen days throughout the year the market draws throngs of
buyers and sellers from the whole region of the western Pyrenees.
In the very midst of the most populous and wealthy valleys and plains of
the Pyrenees, one sees here the complete gamut of picturesque peoples
and costumes in which the country abounds. Here are the Béarnais, agile
and gay, and possessed of the very spirit associated with Henri IV. They
seat themselves among their wares, composed of woollen stuffs and
threads, pickled meats, truffles, potatoes, cheeses of all sorts,
agricultural implements--mostly primitive, but with here and there a
gaudy South Bend or Milwaukee plough--porcelain, coppers, cattle, goats,
sheep and donkeys, and a greater variety of things than one's
imagination can suggest. It is almost the liveliest and most populous
market to be seen in France to-day. The gaudy umbrellas and tents cover
the square like great mushrooms. There are much picturesqueness and
colour, and lively comings and goings too. This is ever a contradiction
to the reproach of laziness usually applied to the care-free folk of the
Midi.
In olden times the market of Tarbes was the resort of many Spanish
merchants, and they still may be distinguished as donkey-dealers and
mule traders, but the chief occupants of the stalls and little squares
of ground are the dwellers of the countryside, who think nothing of
coming in and out a matter of four or five leagues to trade a side of
bacon--which they call simply _salé_--for a sheep or a goat, or a sheep
or a goat for a nickel clock, made in Connecticut. It's as hard for the
peasant to draw the line between necessities and superfluities as it is
for the rest of us, and he is often apt to put caprice before need.
Neighbouring close upon Tarbes is the ancient feudal bourg of Ossun,
which most of the fox-hunters of Pau, or the pilgrims of Lourdes, know
not even by name. It's only the traveller by road--the omnipresent
automobilist of to-day--who really stands a chance of "discovering"
anything. The art of travel degenerated sadly with the advent of the
railway and the "personally conducted pilgrimage," but the automobile
is bringing it all back again. The bicycle stood a chance of
participating in the same honour at one time, but folk weren't really
willing to take the trouble of becoming a vagabond on wheels.
Ossun was the site of a Roman camp before it became a feudal stronghold,
and with the coming of the château and its seigneurs, in the fifteenth
century, it came to a prominence and distinction which made of it nearly
a metropolis. To-day it is a dull little town of less than two thousand
souls, but with a most excellent hotel, the Galbar, which is far and
away better (to some of us) than the popular hotels of Pau, Tarbes or
Luchon.
The château of Ossun, or so much of it as remains, was practically a
fortress. What it lacks in luxury it makes up for in its intimation of
strength and power, and from this it is not difficult to estimate its
feudal importance.
The Roman camp, whose outlines are readily defined, was built, so
history tells, by one Crassus, a lieutenant of Cæsar. It was an
extensive and magnificent work, a long, sunken, oblong pit with four
entrances passing through the sloping dirt walls. Four or five thousand
men, practically a Roman legion, could be quartered within.
It was from the Château d'Odos, near Tarbes, in the month of December,
1549, that the Queen of Navarre observed the comet which was said to
have made its appearance because of the death of Pope Paul III. Says
Brantome: "She jumped from her bed in fright at observing this celestial
phenomenon, and presumably lingered too long in the chill night, for she
caught a congestion which brought about her death eight days later, 21st
December, 1549, in the fifty-eighth year of her age." According to
Hilarion de Coste her remains were transported to Pau, and interred in
the "_principal église_," but others, to the contrary, say that she was
buried in the great burial vault at Lescar. This is more likely, for an
authentic document in the Bibliothèque Nationale describes minutely the
details of the ceremony of burial "_dans l'antique cathédrale de
Lescar_."
On the Landes des Maures, near by, was celebrated a bloody battle in the
eighth century between the Saracens and the inhabitants of the country.
Gruesome finds of "skulls of extraordinary thickness" have frequently
been made on this battlefield. Just what this description seems to augur
the writer does not know; perhaps some ethnologist who reads these
lines will. At any rate the combatants must have died _hard_.
[Illustration: _A Shepherd of Bigorre_]
Following up the valley of the Adour one comes to the Bagnères de
Bigorre in a matter of twenty-five kilometres or so. Bagnères de Bigorre
is a hodge-podge of a name, but it is the "Bath" of France, as an
Englishman of a century ago called it. There are other resorts more
popular and fashionable and more wickedly immoral, such as Vichy, Aix
les Bains and even Luchon, but still Bigorre remains the first choice.
From the times of the Romans, throngs have been coming to this charming
little spot of the Pyrenees where the mineral waters bubble up out of
the rock, bringing health and strength to those ill in mind and body.
Pleasure seekers are here, too, but primarily it is the baths which
attract.
There are practically no monuments of bygone days here, but fragmentary
relics of one sort or another tell the story of the waters from Roman
times to the present with scarcely a break.
Arreau, seven leagues from Bigorre, towards the heart of the Pyrenees,
through the Val d'Arreau, certainly one of the most picturesquely
unspoiled places in all the Pyrenees, is a relic of mediævalism such as
will hardly be found elsewhere in the whole chain of mountains from the
Atlantic to the Mediterranean. Its feudal history was fairly important,
but its monuments of the period, save its churches and its market house
or "Halle," have practically disappeared. Whatever defences there may
have been, have been built into the town's fine stone houses and
bridges, but the Roman tower of St. Exupère, and the primitive church
now covered by Notre Dame show its architectural importance in the past.
By reason of being one of the gateways through the Pyrenees into Spain
(by the valley of the Arreau and the _portes_, so called, of Plan and
Vielsa) Arreau enjoys a Franco-Espagnol manner of living which is quaint
beyond words. It is the nearest thing to Andorra itself to be found on
French soil.
Luchon is situated in a nook of the Larboust surrounded with a rural
beauty only lent by a river valley and a mountain background. The range
to the north is bare and grim, but to the southward is thickly wooded,
with little eagles'-nest villages perched here and there on its flanks
and peaks, in a manner which leads one to believe that this part of the
Pyrenees is as thickly peopled as Switzerland, where peasants fall out
of their terrace gardens only to tumble into those of a neighbour
living lower down the mountain-side.
The surroundings of Luchon are indeed sublime, from every point of view,
and one's imagination needs no urging to appreciate the sentiment which
is supposed to endow a "nature-poet." Yes, Luchon is beautiful, but it
is overrun with fashionables from all over the world, and is as gay as
Biarritz or Nice. "_La grande vie mondaine_" is the key-note of it all,
and if one could find out just when was the off-season it would be
delightful. Of late it has been crowded throughout the year, though the
height of fashion comes in the spring. Outside of its sulphur springs
the great world of fashion comes here to dine and wine their friends and
play bridge.
Luchon has a history though. As a bathing or a drinking place it was
known to the Romans as _Onesiorum Thermæ_ and was mentioned by Strabo as
being famous in those days.
There were many pagan altars and temples here erected to the god
Ilixion, which by evolution into Luchon came to be the name by which the
place has latterly been known.
In 1036, by marriage, Luchon was transferred from the house of Comminges
to that of Aragon, but later was returned to the Comtes de Comminges
and finally united with France in 1458 under Charles VII, retaining,
however, numerous ancient privileges which endured until the end of the
seventeenth century.
This was the early history of Luchon. Its later history began when, in
1754, the local waters were specially analyzed and a boom given to a
project to make of the place a great spa.
The city itself is the proprietor of all the springs and its
administrative sagacity has been such that fifty thousand visitors are
attracted here within the year.