BY THE BLUE GAVE DE PAU
The Gave de Pau, a swiftly-flowing stream which comes down from its icy
cradle in the Cirque de Gavarnie and joins with the Adour near Bayonne's
port, winds its way through a gentle, smiling valley filled with
gracious vistas, historic sites and grand mountain backgrounds.
Next to the æsthetic aspects of the Gave de Pau are its washhouses. The
writer in years of French travel does not remember to have seen a stream
possessed of so many.
One sees similar arrangements for washing clothes all over France, but
here they are exceedingly picturesque in their disposition, and the
workers therein are not of the Zola-Amazon type, nor of the withered
beldam class. How much better they wash than others of their fraternity
elsewhere is not to be remarked.
There are municipal washhouses in some of the larger towns of France,
great, ugly, brick, cement and iron structures, but as the actual
washing is done after the same manner as when carried on by the banks of
a rushing river or a purling brook there is not much to be said in their
favour that cannot as well be applied to the washhouses of Pau, Oloron
or Orthez in Navarre, and artist folk will prefer the latter.
Coarraze, twenty kilometres above Pau, on the banks of the Gave, is a
populous centre where the hum of industry, induced by the weavers who
make the _toile du Béarn_, is the prevailing note. _Toile du Béarn_ and
_chapelets_ are the chief output of this little bourg, and many francs
are in circulation here each Saturday night that would probably be
wanting except for these indefatigable workers who had rather bend over
greasy machines at something more than a living wage, than dig a mere
existence out of the ground.
The little bourg is dull and gray in colour, only its surroundings being
brilliant. Its situation is most fortunate. Opposite is a great
tree-covered plateau, a veritable terrace, on which is a modern château
replacing another which has disappeared--"_comme un chevreau en
liberté_," says the native.
[Illustration: _Château de Coarraze_]
It was in this old Château de Coarraze that the youthful Henri IV was
brought up by an aunt, _en paysan_, as the simple life was then
called. Perhaps it was this early training that gave him his later
ruggedness and rude health.
The château has been called royal, and its construction has been
attributed to Henri IV, but this is manifestly not so. Only ruined walls
and ramparts, and the accredited facts of history, remain to-day to
connect Henri IV with the spot.
The château virtually disappeared in a revolutionary fury, and only the
outline of its former walls remains here and there. A more modern
structure, greatly resembling the château at Pau, practically marks the
site of the former establishment endowed with the memory of Henri IV's
boyhood.
Froissart recounts a pleasant history of the Château de Coarraze and its
seigneur. A certain Raymond of Béarn had acquired a considerable
heritage, which was disputed by a Catalan, who demanded a division.
Raymond refused, but the Catalan, to intimidate his adversary,
threatened to have him excommunicated by the Pope. Threats were of no
avail, and Raymond held to his legacy as most heirs do under similar
claims. One night some one knocked loudly at Raymond's door.
"Who is there?" he cried in a trembling voice.
"I am Orthon, and I come on behalf of the Catalan."
After a parley he left, nothing accomplished, but returned night after
night in some strange form of man or beast or wraith or spook or
masquerader and so annoyed Raymond that he was driven into madness, the
Catalan finally coming to his own.
At Nay, Gaston Phoebus is said to have built a sort of modest country
house which in later centuries became known simply as La Maison Carrée.
Perhaps Gaston Phoebus built it, and perhaps he did not, for its
architecture is of a very late Renaissance. At any rate it has a
charming triple-galleried house-front, quite in keeping with the spirit
of mediævalism which one associates with a builder who has "ideas" and
is not afraid of carrying them out, and this was Gaston's reputation.
The house is on record as having one day been occupied by the queen of
Navarre, Jeanne d'Albret.
Just beyond Coarraze is Betharrem whose "Calvary" and church are
celebrated throughout the Midi. From the fifteenth of August to the
eighth of September it is a famous place of pilgrimage for the faithful
of Béarn and Bigorre, a veritable New Jerusalem. Its foundation goes
back to antiquity, but its origin is not unknown, if legend plays any
part in truthful description.
One day, too far back to give a date, a young and pious maiden fell
precipitately into the Gave. She could not swim and was sinking in the
waters, when she called for the protection of the Virgin Mary. At that
moment a tree trunk, leaning out over the river, gave way and fell into
the waters; the maiden was able to grasp it and keep afloat, and within
a short space was drifted ashore. There is nothing very unplausible
about this, nothing at all miraculous; and so it may well be accepted as
a legend based on truth.
A modest chapel was built near at hand, by some pious folk, to
commemorate the event, or perhaps it was built--as has been claimed--by
Gaston IV himself, on his return from the Crusades in the middle of the
twelfth century. The latter supposition holds good from the fact that
the place bears the name of the city by the Jordan.
Montgomery burned the chapel during the religious wars, but again in the
seventeenth century, Hubert Charpentier, _licencié_ of the Sorbonne,
came here and declared that the configuration of the mountain resembled
that where took place the crucifixion, and accordingly erected a Calvary
dedicated to "Our Lady," "in order," as he said, "to revivify the faith
which Calvinism had nearly extinguished."
Saint-Pé-de-Bigorre, lying midway between Pau and Lourdes, is an ideally
situated, typical small town of France. It is not a resort in any sense
of the word, but might well be, for it is as delightful as any Pyrenean
"station" yet "boomed" as a cure for the ills of folk with imaginations.
It is a genuine garden-city. Its houses, strung out along the banks of
the Gave, are wall-surrounded and tree-shaded, nearly every one of them.
But one hotel extends hospitality at Saint Pé to-day, but soon there
will be a dozen, no doubt, and then Saint Pé will be known as a centre
where one may find "_all the attractions of the most celebrated
watering-places_."
To-day Saint Pé depends upon its ravishing site and its historic past
for its reason for being. It derives its name from the old Abbey of
Saint-Pé-de-Générès (Sanctus Petrus de Generoso), founded here in the
eleventh century, by Sanchez-Guillaume, Duc de Gascogne, in
commemoration of a victory. This monastery, with its abbatial church,
was razed during the religious wars by the alien Montgomery who outdid
in these parts even his hitherto unenviable cruelties. The church was
built up anew, from such of its stones as were left, into the present
edifice which serves the parish, but nothing more than the tower and the
apse are of the original structure.
To Lourdes is but a dozen kilometres by road or rail from Saint Pé. In
either case one follows along the banks of the Gave with delightful
vistas of hill and dale at every turn, and always that blue-purple
curtain of mountains for a background.
Lourdes is perhaps the most celebrated, if not the most efficacious,
pilgrim-shrine in all the world. It's a thing to see, if only to remark
the contrasting French types among the pilgrims that one meets
there--the Breton from Pont Aven or Quimperlé, the Norman from the Pays
de Caux, the Parisian, the Alsaçien, the Niçois and the Tourangeau. All
are here, in all stages of health and sickness, vigorous and crippled.
The shrine of "Our Lady of Lourdes" is all things to all men. Lourdes is
a beastly, unclean, and uncomfortable place in which to linger, in spite
of its magnificent situation, and its great and small hotels with all
manner of twentieth-century conveniences.
It's a plague-spot on fair France, looking at it from one point of view;
and a living superstition of Christendom from another. The medical men
of France want to close it up; the churchmen and hotel keepers want to
keep it open. Arguments are puerile, so there the matter stands; and
neither side has gained an appreciable advantage over the other as yet.
Lourdes was one day the capital of the ancient seigneurie,
Lavedan-en-Bigorre, and at that time bore the name of Mirambel, which in
the _patois_ of the region signified beautiful view. Originally it was
but a tiny village seated at the foot of a rock, and crowned by the same
château which exists to-day, and which in its evolution has come down
from a _castellum-romain_, a Carlovingian bastille, a Capetian and
English prison of state, a hospital for the military, a barracks, to
finally being a musée.
Of the château of the feudal epoch nothing remains save two covered
ways, the donjon, a sixteenth-century gate and a drawbridge, this latter
probably restored out of all semblance to its former outlines. One of
these covered ways gave access to the upper stages with so ample a sweep
that it became practically a horse stairway upon which cavaliers and
lords and ladies reined their chargers.
[Illustration: CHÂTEAU DE LOURDES]
The donjon is manifestly a near relation to that of Gaston Phoebus at
Foix, though that prince had no connection with the château.
Transformation has changed all but its outlines, its fosse has become a
mere sub-cellar, and its windows have lost their original proportions.
The Château de Lourdes was undoubtedly a good defence in its day in
spite of its present attenuated appearance. In 1373 it resisted the
troops of Charles V, commanded by the Duc d'Anjou. Under the ancient
French monarchy its career was most momentous, though indeed merely as a
prison of state, or a house of detention for political suspects. Many
were the "_lettres de cachet_" that brought an unwilling prisoner to be
caged here in the shadow of the Pyrenees, as if imbedded in the granite
of the mountains themselves.
The rock which supports the château rises a hundred metres or so above
the Gave. A great square mass--the donjon--forms the principal
attribute, and was formerly the house of the governor. This donjon with
a chapel and a barracks has practically made up the ensemble in later
years.
Here, on one of the counterforts of the Pyrenees, just beyond the grim
old château, and directly before the celebrated Pic du Ger, now
desecrated by a cog-railway, where the seven plains of Lavedan blend
into the first slopes of the mountains, were laid the first stones of
the Basilique de Lourdes in 1857.
Previously the site was nothing more than a moss-grown grotto where
trickled a fountain that, for ages, had been the hope of the incurably
ill, who thought if they bathed and drank and prayed that miracles would
come to them and they would be made whole again.
The fact that the primitive, devout significance of this sentiment has
degenerated into the mere pleasure seeking of a mixed rabble does not
affect in the least the simple faith of other days. The devout and
prayerful still come to bathe and pray, but they are lost in the throng
of indiscriminately "conducted" and "non-conducted" tourists who make of
the shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes a mere guide-book sight to be checked
off the list with others, such as the Bridge of Sighs, the Pyramids of
Gizeh, the Tour Eiffel, or Hampton Court,--places which once seen will
never again be visited.
To-day only the smaller part of the visitors, among even the French
themselves, excepting the truly devout, who are mostly Bretons--will
reply to the question as to whether they believe in Lourdes: "_Oui,
comme un article de foi_."
No further homily shall be made, save to say that the general aspect of
the site is one of the most picturesque and enchanting of any in the
Pyrenees--when one forgets, or eliminates, the signs advertising
proprietary condiments and breakfast foods.
It doesn't matter in the least whether one Frenchman says: "_C'est ma
Foi_;" or another "_C'est un scandale_;" the landscape is gloriously
beautiful. Of the Grotto itself one can only remark that its present-day
garnishings are blatant, garish and offensive. The great, slim basilica
rises on its monticule as was planned. It has been amply endowed and
extravagantly built. Before it is a _perron_, or more properly a
_scala-sancta_, and the whole is so theatrically disposed, with a great
square before it, that one can quite believe it all a stage-setting and
nothing more.
As a place of pilgrimage, Lourdes is perhaps the most popular in all the
world, certainly it comes close after Jerusalem and Rome. Alphonse
XIII, the present ruler of Spain, made his devotions here in August,
1905.
Argelès is practically a resort, and has the disposition of a Normandy
village; that is, its houses are set about with trees and growing
verdure of all sorts. For this reason it is a delightful garden city of
the first rank.
Argelès' chief attraction is its site; there are no monuments worth
mentioning, and these are practically ruins. Argelès is a watering-place
pure and simple, with great hotels and many of them, and prices
accordingly.
Above Argelès the Gave divides, that portion to the left taking the name
of Gave de Cauterets, while that to the right still retains the name of
Gave de Pau.
Cauterets has, in late years, become a great resort, due entirely to its
waters and the attendant attractions which have grouped themselves
around its _établissement_. The beneficial effect of the drinking or
bathing in medicinal waters might be supposed to be somewhat negatived
by bridge and baccarat, poker and "_petits chevaux_" but these
distractions--and some others--seem to be the usual accompaniments of a
French or German spa.
[Illustration: _Cauterets_]
"_C'est le premier jour de septembre que les bains des Pyrénées
commencent à avoir de la vertu._" Thus begins the prologue to
Marguerite de Navarre's "Heptameron." The "season" to-day is not so
late, but the queen of Navarre wrote of her own experiences and times,
and it is to be presumed she wrote truly.
A half a century ago Cauterets was a dirty, shabby village, nearly
unknown, but the exploiter of resorts got hold of it, and with a few
medical endorsements forthwith made it the vogue until now it is as trim
and well-laid-out a little town as one will find.
The town is a gem of daintiness, in strong contrast to the surrounding
melancholy rocks and forests of the mountainside. Peaks, approximating
ten thousand feet in height, rise on all sides, and dominate the more
gentle slopes and valleys, but still the general effect is one of a
savage wildness, with which the little white houses of the town, the
electric lights and the innumerable hotels--a round score of
them--comport little. Certainly the beneficial effects accruing to
semi-invalids here might be supposed to be great--if they would but
leave "the game" alone.
A simple mule path leads to the Col de Riou back of Cauterets, though it
is more frequented by tourists on foot than by beasts of burden.
Here on the Col itself, in plain view of the Pic du Midi and its sister
peaks, the Touring Club has erected one of those admirable guide-book
accessories, a "_table d'orientation_."
On its marbled circumference are traced nearly three hundred
topographical features of the surrounding landscape, and a study of this
well-thought-out affair is most interesting to any traveller with a
thought above a table d'hôte. Throughout the region of the Pyrenees
these circular "_tables d'orientation_," with the marked outlines of all
the surrounding landscape, are to be found on many vantage grounds. The
principal ones are:--
On the Ramparts of the Château de Pau.
The Col d'Aspin.
The Col de Riou.
Platform of the Tour Massey at Tarbes.
Platform de Mouguerre.
Summit of the Pic du Midi.
Summit of the Cabaliros.
Summit of the Canigou.
Over the Col de Riou and down into the Gave de Pau again, and one comes
to Luz. Luz is curiously and delightfully situated in a triangular basin
formed by the water-courses of the Gave de Pau and the Gave de Barèges.
Practically Luz is a _ville ancienne_ and a _ville moderne_, the older
portion being by far the most interesting, though there is no squalor
or unusual picturesqueness. Civic improvements have straightened out
crooked streets and razed tottering house fronts and thus spoiled the
picture of mediævalism such as artists--and most others--love.
A ruined fortress rises on a neighbouring hill-top which gives a note of
feudal times, but the general aspect of Luz, and its neighbouring pretty
suburb of St. Sauveur, each of them possessed of thermal establishments,
are resorts pure and simple, which, indeed, both these places were bound
to become, being on the direct route between Pau and Tarbes and
Gavarnie, and neighbours of Cauterets and Barèges.
Barèges lies just eastward of Luz on a good carriage road. Like
Bagnères-de-Bigorre, it is an oddly named town which depends chiefly
upon the fact that it is a celebrated thermal station for its fame. It
sits thirteen hundred metres above the sea, and while bright and smiling
and gracious in summer, in winter it is as stern-visaged as a harpy, and
about as unrelenting towards one's comfort. Only this last winter the
mountain winds and snows caved in Barèges' Casino and a score of houses,
killing several persons. There is no such a storm-centre in the
Pyrenees. Barèges has got a record no one will envy, though the efficacy
of its waters makes them worthy rivals of those of Bigorre and
Cauterets.
The fame of Barèges' waters goes back to the days of the young Duc du
Maine, who came here with Madame de Maintenon, in 1667, on the orders of
the doctor of the king. In 1760 a military hospital was founded here to
receive the wounded of the Seven Years War.
Barèges is one of the best centres for mountain excursions in the
Pyrenees. The town itself is hideous, but the surroundings are
magnificent.
Above Saint Sauveur, Luz and Cauterets, in the valley of the Gaube,
rises the majestic Vignemale, whose extreme point, the Pic Longue,
reaches a height of three thousand, two hundred and ninety-eight metres,
which is the greatest height of the French Pyrenees. In the year 1808,
on the occasion of the coming of the Queen of Holland, spouse of Louis
Bonaparte, to the Bains de Saint Sauveur, an unknown muse of poesy sang
the praise of this great mountain as follows:--
"Roi des Monts: Despote intraitable.
Toi qui domine dans les airs,
Toi dont le trône inabordable
Appelle et fixe les éclairs!
Fier Vignemale, en vain ta cime
S'entoure d'un affreux abime
De niège et de débris pierreux;
Une nouvelle Bérénice
Ose, à côte du précipice,
Gravir sur ton front sourcilleux!"
Each of the thermal stations in these parts possesses its own special
peak of the Pyrenees. Luchon has the Nethou; Bigorre the Pic du Midi de
Bagnères; Eaux-Bonnes the Balaitous; Eaux-Chaudes the Pic du Midi
d'Ossau; Vernet the Canigou and Saint Sauveur and Cauterets the
Vignemale.
The Vignemale, composed of four peaks, each of them overreaching three
thousand, two hundred metres, encloses a veritable river of ice. Its
profound crevasses and its _Mer de Glace_ remind one of the Alps more
than do the accessories of any other peak of the Pyrenees.
The ascension of the Vignemale, from Cauterets or Luz, is the classic
mountain climb of the Pyrenees. No peak is more easy of access, and none
gives so complete an idea of the ample ranges of the Pyrenees, from east
to west, or north to south.