BAYONNE: ITS PORT AND ITS WALLS
[Illustration]
The foundation of Bayonne is lost in the obscurity of ages, but it was
the capital of the Basque country.
Three distinct _quartiers_ are formed by the flowing waters of the Nive
and the Adour, communication being by a series of exceedingly
picturesque, if not exactly serviceable, bridges. The bridges of
Bayonne are famous in the eyes of artists, and lovers of damp,
moss-grown and weathered masonry, but an engineer of this age of steel
would consider them inefficient abominations, and not at all suited to a
great port and sous-préfecture such as Bayonne.
One of the finest works of Vauban, the fortress builder, was the
defences of Bayonne. The walls and ramparts were exceedingly efficacious
in times past (though to-day they look flimsy enough), and crowning all,
was a superb fortress at the juncture of the two rivers which come
together here, flowing from the fastnesses of the Pyrenees to the sea.
The Allées Marines at Bayonne, a sort of tree-covered jetty-promenade,
are a unique feature in civic embellishment. The water-gate at Bordeaux
is fine, and so is the Thames Embankment in London, and the Battery in
New York, but those Allées at Bayonne lead them all.
The Adour, coursing its way to the sea down through Bayonne, was fickle
enough one day to leave its bed, and force an outlet three leagues or
more away, threatening disaster to Bayonne's port. The citizens rose in
might and took counsel, and decided that something must be done or they
would die of sheer ennui, if not of poverty. There came to the rescue
one Louis de Foix, the same who had been the architect of Spain's
Escurial, and in 1579 he harnessed the water's flow and returned it to
its ancient bed.
[Illustration: _A Gateway of Bayonne_]
Bayonne glories in the fact that she has never submitted to a foreign
yoke, and when taken from the English, who had usurped it as a
Plantagenet birthright, by Charles VII, in the fifteenth century, the
people of Bayonne recognized that they had come to their own again
through the efforts of their fellow Basques. The city's device "_Nunquam
Polluta_" is distinctly appropriate.
It was to Bayonne that François Premier came to meet his court, after
his days of imprisonment at Madrid, as the hostage of his old enemy
Charles V. He was confined only in the luxuriously appointed palace at
Madrid, but, as he himself said, "the cage was none the less a cage for
being gilded."
Here at Bayonne awaited François' mother, his sister Marguerite, and a
gay court of followers, not forgetting "a brilliant _parterre_ of young
beauties assembled in their train," as Du Bellay puts it.
François' adoration for "brilliant _parterres_" of young ladies was ever
one of his failings, and the master of ceremonies of the temporary
court of Bayonne thought enough of his position to get together an
entrancing bevy, the most beautiful among them all being the famous Anne
de Pisseleu, she who was afterwards to become the Duchesse d'Étampes.
Diane de Poitiers was there too, having come to Bayonne as lady in
waiting to the regent, but it was Anne de Pisseleu who won François'
favour of the moment, and he even allowed her to publicly refer to the
insistent Diane as "an old hag," and declare that she herself was born
on Diane's wedding day. This was after he had put aside Diane.
Vicomte d'Orth was governor of Bayonne on that dread Bartholomew's night
when the tocsin rang out all over the French domain. He wrote to Charles
IX as follows, showing the fidelity and steadfastness of the people of
these parts, when in more frigid climes they lost their heads in an
uncontrollable fury:
"I have communicated the letter of your Majesty to the garrison, and to
the inhabitants of the city; I have found only brave soldiers and good
citizens and not a single murderer."
Bayonne to-day is frankly commercial; its docks and wharves are
possessed of a considerable deep-sea traffic; and one sees
three-masters from the Banks of Newfoundland, and cargo-boats from
Senegal, side by side at its quays. It is, too, the distributing depot
for the whole Basque country, the chief market where the peasant goes to
buy Seth Thomas clocks and Smith and Wesson revolvers, each made in
Belgium most likely; in England and America the cry is "made in
Germany;" in France, it's "made in Belgium."
All of the Basque country, and a part of Béarn, depend on Bayonne for
certain supplies; even Biarritz and Saint-Jean-de-Luz are but its
satellites.
Walckenaer's "Géographie des Gauls" says the evolution of the name
Bayonne was from the Basque Lapurdam, "city of thieves," but nothing
to-day about her warm welcome for strangers justifies this, so it were
best forgot. Bayonne in the old days--and to some extent to-day--spoke
intermittently Gascon, Français, Béarnais and Spanish, and it is this
notable blend of peoples and tongues that makes it so charming.
The _Quartier Landais_ was the mother city of Bayonne, the oldest
portion out of which the other faubourgs grew. Within the old walls, and
in the narrow streets, all is mediæval even now, but in the newer
quarters the straight, rectangular lines of streets and sidewalks are,
as the French call them, _à l'Américaine_.
The Pont Mayou at Bayonne is the liveliest, gayest spot in all the
Basque country. It is the virtual centre of this ancient capital.
Bayonne's cathedral is lovely enough when viewed from afar, particularly
the ensemble of its spires with the roof-tops of the town--a sort of
reminiscence of Nuremberg--and this in spite of the fact that Taine in
his description of it called it ugly.
In the olden times, the city had an important Jewish quarter, whose
inhabitants were an overflow of those expelled from Spain and Portugal.
This little city of the Landes became a miniature Frankfort, and had
three synagogues where the rabbis held services in the Spanish tongue.
The phenomenon has disappeared, by a process of evolution and infusion,
and one no more remarks the Jewish type as at all distinct from the
Basque.
An incident happened at Bayonne fort during the Peninsular War which
seems to have been greatly neglected by historians, though Gleig, the
novelist, in "The Subaltern," makes much of it. The English, believing
that peace had been declared, resented an unprovoked French sortie from
Bayonne's citadel on the tenth of April, 1814. This was the last
British fight on French soil, if fight it was. A number of the guards,
including four officers, died of wounds received at this engagement.
The following anonymous verses tell the story well:
"For England here they fell.
Yon sea-like water guards each hero's grave.
Far Pyrenean heights, mindful, attest
That here our bravest and our best
Their supreme proof of love and loyalty gave,
Dying for England well.
"Among those distant heights,
Had many a day the wrathful cannon roared.
Through black ravine and sunny field of Spain
War's headlong torrent rolled amain.
Irun's defile and Bidassoa's ford
Beheld a hundred fights.
"Last, by this sea-like wave,
Threatening the fort our martial lines were drawn.
Fierce broke upon their watch at midnight hour
The swift sortie, the bullets' shower.
Red carnage ceased with slowly wakening dawn.
France keeps the true and brave."
A kilometre or two outside the walls of Bayonne--the same which defied
the British in 1814--is a guide-post bearing the inscription (the writer
thinks in English) "To the Guards' Cemetery." Down a by-road around a
turning or two, and past a score of vine-clad cottages of Basque
peasants one comes to the spot in question, a little railed-in plot of
hallowed ground. Here are seen the original weather-worn headstones of
nearly a century ago, and a newer series, practically replicas of the
former.
There is also a tablet stating that on this spot stood the "Third Guards
Camp." That is all. It resembles the conventional cemetery not at all,
and may be considered a memorial, nothing more. Certainly there is
nothing pathetic or sad about it, for all is green and bright and
smiling. If one can put themselves in this mood it is certainly a good
one in which to make a pilgrimage to a city of the dead.
There is another warlike reminiscence connected with Bayonne, which is
worth recalling, and that is that Bayonne was the birthplace of the
bayonet, as was Troyes (in France) the birthplace of that species of
weights which is not avoirdupois.
A mid-Victorian writer in England criticized Dickens' story in
_Household Words_, called "Perils of Certain English Prisoners," wherein
the soldiers carried bayonets in their muskets and cartridges in their
haversacks. This particular critic nodded, as they sometimes do.
Cartridges were invented in 1586, and bayonets first made their
appearance at Bayonne in 1641, and the scene of Dickens' tale was laid a
hundred or two years later.
Those who think that York ham, which even the French know as _Jambon
d'Yorck_, is a superlative sort of pig-product, should become acquainted
with the _jambons de Bayonne_, from Basque pigs, cured with the natural
salts of the commune of Salies. There is no room left for comparison
with other hams. Those of Bayonne are the peers of their class, not
forgetting even the sugar-cured variety of the Old Dominion.
There is a considerable chocolate business at Bayonne, too, though not
with the interior, which mostly gets its supplies from Paris, but with
the French colonies, notably with the tiny market of St.
Pierre-et-Miquelon, which, by some business pact or reasoning, is held
to be sacred to the chocolate manufacturers of Bayonne.