THE VALLEY OF THE NIVE
There is no more gracious little river valley in all France than that of
the Nive, as it flows from fabled Ronçevaux by Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port,
Bidarray and Cambo, to the Gulf of Gascony, down through the fertile
Pyrenean slopes. Ronsard sang of the Loir at Vendome and his rhymes have
become classic; but much of the phrasing might apply here. All about is
a profound verdure, a majesty, and a magnificence of colour which will
ravish the heart of an artist, be he realist or impressionist. From the
very first, the Nive flows between banks wide and sinuous, and in its
lower reaches, between Cambo and the sea, takes on an amplitude that
many longer and more pretentious streams lack utterly. By a rock-cut
way, the Nive passes from French Navarre into the Pays de Labourd, an
ancient fief of feudal times, between Cambo and the Pas de Roland.
The legend which has perpetuated the death of Roland and so many of the
rear-guard of Charlemagne's army gives an extraordinary interest to this
otherwise striking region. Here the Nive narrows its banks and tumbles
itself about in a veritable fury of foam, and whether the sword stroke
of the Paladin Roland made the passage possible, as it did in the famous
"Brèche," or not has little to do with one of the strikingly sentimental
episodes of legendary history. If it took place anywhere likely enough
it happened here also.
Between the Pas de Roland and Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port one passes
Bidarray and a curious donkey-back bridge, and the famous Bassin de
Bidarray, famous only because it is a cavern underground, for it does
not differ greatly in appearance from others of its family. Above
Bidarray is the superb cone of Mondarrain, crowned with the ruins of a
feudal castle.
The following legend of a dragon who once lived in a cavern on the banks
of the Nive is worthy of preserving in print; at any rate it sounds
plausible, as told the writer by an old dealer in _bérets_ and _sabots_.
He had an eye for the picturesque, though, and if his facts are correct
he would make a very good historian.
A young Bayonnais went out one day to attack this fabled monster whom no
one yet had been able to kill. By name he was Gaston Armaud de Belzunc,
and his father was governor of Bayonne in 1372.
After a day and a half of journeying, the young Tartarin of other days
came upon his quarry. The beast, furious, jumped upon the cavalier and
threw him to the ground, but his lance pierced the scaly neck and so
weakened the monster that man and beast grappled together. The two died,
and Gaston's companions, who had ungallantly fled precipitately at the
first encounter, found them later laced in each other's embrace.
To perpetuate the memory of this act of bravery, the king of Navarre
granted the family De Belzunc the privilege of adding a dragon to its
arms. Up to the Revolution there existed a fund in behalf of the clergy
of a Bayonne church to pray for the repose of the soul of this gallant
young knight of the Middle Ages.
High above the banks of the upper reaches of the Nive are the grim ruins
of the Château de Laustan. Practically it was, in its palmy days, a
fortress-château. It was built by the Seigneur de Laustan, who possessed
great privileges in the neighbourhood, to turn the tide of aggression of
his jealous neighbours, and of the Spaniards. It was constructed of a
sort of red sandstone, with walls of great thickness, as evidences show
to-day, and must have been a very successful feudal habitation of its
class. The family De Laustan was one of the most celebrated in
Basse-Navarre. It gave three archbishops to Spain, and its archives are
now kept in the royal library at Madrid.
Cambo, in the mid-valley of the Nive, is as delightful a spot of its
class as is marked on any map, far more so than many pretentious resorts
where bridge, baccarat and the bumptious pretence of its habitués are
the chief characteristics.
Cambo is simple, but pleasant, and besides its quiet, peaceful delights
it has two historical institutions which are as un-French as they are
really and truly Basque. First: its remarkable church, with its golden
_rétable_ and its galleries surrounding the nave, is something
distinctively local, as is also its churchyard. The other feature is the
court or _fronton_ where is played the _jeu de paume_, or, to give it
its Basque nomenclature, _pelota_. Here meet from time to time, all
through the year, the most famous players of the French Basque country
and of Guipuzcoa, the chief Spanish centre, across the border.
This game of _pelota_ is the passion of the Basques, but as the habitant
says, "the game plays out the player, and in four or five years his
suppleness disappears, his muscles become hardened, and he is
superannuated."
Still one cannot get away from the fact that Cambo's present-day vogue
is wholly due to the coming of Edmond Rostand. It was famous before,
among a select few, but the craze is on, and the land-boomer and the
resort-exploiter have already marked its acres for their own.
Rostand's country home "Arnaga" is something like a palace of an Arabian
Nights tale. The walls of the apartments, whose windows look out over
the crests of the Pyrenees, are covered with paintings by some of the
most celebrated French artists. One room has a decorated frieze taken
from the ever-delightful tales immortalized by Andersen and the Grimm
brothers, and the gem of this poet's dwelling is Madame Rostand's
boudoir. Familiar stories of "Cinderella" and the "Beauty and the Beast"
are told again, with a wealth of colour and fantasy, by that whimsical
artist Jean Weber.
This artistic retreat is a happy combination of Byzantine palace and
Basque chalet. Here Rostand lives part of the year, with his wife and
son, in a retirement only broken to receive a friend, who is supposed
never to speak of the strenuous life. To escape from the continual
excitement of city life and the feverish fashionable resorts, and also
to be able to devote himself entirely to work, the creator of "Cyrano"
fled to this spot eight years ago. Arnaga is not constructed along the
conventional lines of the French château, but looks rather like a
Moorish palace as it stands on a high hill, surrounded by parks and
terraces, and the wonderful Basque landscape. On one side the castle or
palace, or château, or whatever you choose to call it, overlooks a
verdant plain sprinkled with semi-tropical blossoms and watered by the
winding stream of the Nive. On the other rise the majestic Pyrenees,
which, in the glory of the southern sunset, flush to a deep crimson and
then pale to a sombre purple.
Surely it is an ideal spot and will be till the madding crowd comes and
sets this ideal litterateurs' and artists' retreat in an uproar, as it
did Étretat and St. Raphael in the days of Alphonse Karr.
Rostand's earnings as a dramatist might not suffice to keep up such a
pretentious establishment, but since he is married to the daughter of a
Paris banker the thing seems simpler.
"The fame of Cambo is only just coming to be widespread. This is due to
the fact that the great poet and playwright whose fame rests upon
having invented a _papier-maché_ nose for his chief creation has made it
so." This was the rather unkindly criticism of a brother professional (a
French playwright) jealous, presumably, of Rostand's fame, and must not
be taken seriously.
Rostand's house is one of the sights of Cambo, but as a Frenchman wrote:
"_M. Rostand n'est pas toujours à sa fenêtre_." Still the house is there
and those who would worship at the shrine from without may do so.
To get in and out of Cambo one passes over a tiny bridge, so narrow that
one conveyance must wait while another crosses. As the same observant
Frenchman said: "No wonder M. Rostand does not quit Cambo if he has to
cross a bridge like this!" Automobiles especially have an annoying time
of it, and the new "automobile _corne quadruple_" as it whistles out the
famous air: "_Je suis le pâtre des montagnes_," will not turn a Basque
peasant and his donkey aside once the latter has set his forefoot on the
curious old bridge.
At Cambo the bathing establishment is in a half-hidden, tree-grown
corner on the banks of the transparent Nive.
Cambo, in spite of having "arrived" to a position of affluence and
popularity, is but a commune of the canton of Espelette, whose
market-town itself has but a population of fifteen hundred souls, though
it draws half as many again to its bosom each bi-weekly market day,
mostly Basques from Spain. Espelette is full of curious old Basque
houses, and its manners and customs are quaint and queer; in short it is
most interesting, though if you stop for lunch at any one of its four or
five little inns you will most likely want to get back to Cambo by
diligence for the night. Espelette's chief industry is tanning leather
and making those curious Basque shoes called _espadrilles_.
Above Cambo, a dozen kilometres, are the Châteaux Teillery and Itxassou.
Itxassou possesses a richly endowed church, with an entire silver-gilt
altar, the gift of a "Basque-Americain" of the eighteenth century, Pedro
d'Echegaray.