A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees by Edwin Asa Dix

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A MIDSUMMER DRIVE THROUGH THE PYRENEES

by

EDWIN ASA DIX, M.A.

Ex-Fellow in History of the College of New Jersey at Princeton

Illustrated

New York & London
G.P. Putnam's Sons
The Knickerbocker Press

1890

[Illustration: A DIFFICULT BIT ON THE ROUTE THERMALE.]

"How comes it to pass," wondered a traveler, over twenty years ago,
"that, when the American people think it worth while to pay a visit to
Europe almost exclusively to see Switzerland and Italy; when in 1860
twenty-one thousand Americans visited Rome and only seven thousand
English; so few should think it worth while to visit the Pyrenees? It is
certainly the only civilized country we have visited without finding
Americans there before us. Is it accident or caprice, or part of a
system of leaving it to the last,--which 'last' never comes? The feast
is provided,--where are the guests? The French Pyrenees form one of the
loveliest gardens in Europe and a perfect place for a summer holiday.
'La beaute ici est sereine et le plaisir est pur.'"

The query is still unanswered to-day. The stream of summer journeyings
to Europe has swollen to a river; it has overflowed to the Arctic Ocean,
to the Baltic, to the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. The Pyrenees--a
garden not only, but a land of sterner scenery as well,--almost alone
remain by our nation of travelers unvisited and unknown.

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I.

IN PERSPECTIVE

CHAPTER II.

A BISCAYAN BEACH

CHAPTER III.

BAYONNE, THE INVINCIBLE

CHAPTER IV.

SAINT JOHN OF LIGHT

CHAPTER V.

THE CITY OF THE ARROW-PIERCED SAINT

CHAPTER VI.

AN OLD SPANISH MINIATURE

CHAPTER VII.

AN ERA IN TWILIGHT

CHAPTER VIII.

"THE LITTLE PARIS OF THE SOUTH,"

CHAPTER IX.

THE WARM WATERS AND THE PEAK OF THE SOUTH

CHAPTER X.

THE GOOD WATERS OF THE ARQUEBUSADE

CHAPTER XI.

OVER THE HIGHWAY OF THE HOT SPRINGS

CHAPTER XII.

MIRRORS AND MOUNTAINS

CHAPTER XIII.

A COLOSSEUM OF THE GODS

CHAPTER XIV.

THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW

CHAPTER XV.

THE VALLEY OF THE SUN

CHAPTER XVI.

THE INTERLAKEN OF THE PYRENEES

CHAPTER XVII.

OUT TOWARD THE PLAIN

ILLUSTRATIONS.

A DIFFICULT BIT ON THE ROUTE THERMALE, FRONTISPIECE

BEACH AND VILLA EUGENIE AT BIARRITZ

"HERE TOO ARE THE FISHERMEN'S CABINS,"

EN CACOLET

A BAYONNE ARCADE

A CONSPICUOUS ENTRY INTO ST. JEAN DE LUZ

THE CAMERA AT THE CUSTOM-HOUSE

A DISILLUSIONIZING LEGEND

THE LEGEND AS REFRAIN

A BEARNAIS MARKET-WOMAN

A SYMBOL OF VENGEANCE

DULL PROSPECTS AT GABAS

CAILLOU IN COSTUME

THE BELLES AND DAMES OF GOUST

ROAD-MENDERS ON THE PASS

"ACCOUTRED AS SHE IS, SHE PLUNGES IN,"

"THE TOWN IS WAITING FOR THE DILIGENCE,"

A CAFE CONJURING-SCENE

LAC DE GAUBE AND VIGNEMALE

ONE CORNER OF THE OMNIBUS

THE CIRQUE OF GAVARNIE FROM THE CHAOS

THE INN-YARD AT GRIP

"THERE IS NAUGHT OF THE PRETENTIOUS ABOUT THE HOTEL D'ANGLETERRE,"

PIC DE LA PIQUE, AND PATH TO THE PORT DE VENASQUE

THE EVENING FETE AT BIGORRE

MAP.

RELIEF-MAP OF THE CENTRAL PYRENEES.

CHAPTER I.

IN PERSPECTIVE.

"In fortune's empire blindly thus we go;
We wander after pathless destiny,
Whose dark resorts since prudence cannot know,
In vain it would provide for what shall be."

A trip to the Pyrenees is not in the Grand Tour. It is not even in any
southerly extension of the Grand Tour. A proposition to exploit them
meets a dubious reception. Pictures arise of desolate gorges; of lonely
roads and dangerous trails; of dismal roadside inns, where, when you
halt for the night, a "repulsive-looking landlord receives the unhappy
man, exchanges a look of ferocious intelligence with the driver,"--and
the usual melodramatic midnight carnage probably ensues. The Pyrenees
seem to echo the motto of their old counts, "_Touches-y, si tu l'oses_!"
the name seems to stand vaguely for untested discomforts, for clouds and
chasms, and Spanish banditti in blood-red _capas_; to be, in a word, a
symbol of an undiscovered country which would but doubtfully reward a
resolve to discover.

Yet there is a fascination in the project, as we discuss a summer tour.
There, we know, are mountains whose sides are nearly Alpine, whose
shoulders are of snow and glacier, whose heads rise to ten and eleven
thousand feet above the sea. There, we know, must be savage
scenery,--ravines, cliffs, ice-rivers, as in the Alps; valleys and
streams and fair pastures as well, and a richer southern sunlight over
the uplands; besides a people less warped by tourists, intensely
tenacious of the past, and still tingling with their old local love of
country,--a people with whom, "to be a Bearnais is greater than to be a
Frenchman."

To visit the Pyrenees, too, will be almost to live again in the Middle
Ages. The Roman, the Moor, the Paladin, Froissart, Henry of Navarre,
have marked the region both in romance and in soberer fact. Its valleys
have individual histories; its aged towns and castles, stirring
biographies. The provinces on its northern flanks, once a centre, a
nucleus, of old French chivalry, are saturated with mediaeval adventure.
One visits the Alps to be in the tide of travel, to find health in the
air, to feel the religion of noble mountains. In the Pyrenees is all
this, and more,--the present and the past as well. As we call down the
shades of old chroniclers from the dust of upper library tiers, we grow
more and more in desire of a closer acquaintance. Caesar, Charlemagne,
Roland, the Black Prince, Gaston Phoebus, Montgomery and knightly King
Henry stand in ghostly armor and beckon us on.

II.

Facts of detail prove farther to seek. We inquire almost in vain for
travelers' notes on the Pyrenees. Those who had written on Spanish
travel spoke of the range admiringly. But these authors, we find,
invariably, only passed by the eastern extremity, or the western, of the
great mountain wall; the mountains themselves they did not visit. Search
in the large libraries brings out a few scant volumes of Pyrenean
travel, but all, with two or three exceptions, bear date within the
first three-fifths of the century. It is with books, often, as with the
_Furancon_, the wine of the Pyrenees, and with certain other vintages:
age improves them only up to a certain limit; when put away longer than
a generation, they lose value.

Taine's glowing _Tour_,[1] itself made nearly thirty years ago, is a
delight, almost a marvel; the style, the torrent of simile, the vivid
thought, rank it as a classic. But M. Taine's is less a book of travel
than a work of art; in the iridescence of the descriptions, you lose the
reflection of the things described. Even hand-books, the way-clearing
lictors of travel, prove, as to the Pyrenees region, first scarce and
then scanty. The few we unearth in the stores are armed only with the
usual perfunctory fasces of facts,--cording information into stiff,
labeled bunches, marshaling details into cramped and characterless
order, scrutinizing the ground with a microscope, never surveying it in
bird's-eye view. Two recent novels we eagerly buy, hearing that their
scenes are laid in that vicinity; but each merely speaks, in easy
omniscience, of the "distant chain of blue mountains," or of the
"far-off snow-peaks outlined against the horizon," and the fiction
proves hardly worth sifting for so little fact. Plainly the Pyrenees
lack the voluminous literature of the Alps. Plainly we shall have, in
part, to grope our way. The grooves of Anglo-Saxon travel are many and
deep, lined increasingly with English speech and customs; but they have
not yet been cut into these Spanish mountains.

[1] _Voyage aux Pyrenees_.

The search enlarges the horizon, however. The lonely roads we learn to
qualify in thought with occasional branches of railway; the dangerous
trails, with certain cultivated highways; the dismal road-side inns,
with spasmodic hotels, some even named confidently as "palatial." We
read of spas and springs and French society, more than of chasms and
banditti. We realize in surprise that over all the past of these
mountains flows now in bracing contrast the easy, laughing tide of
modern French fashion,--life so different in detail, so like in kind, to
the day of trapping and tourney.

It is enough:

"Now are we fix'd, and now we will depart,
Never to come again till what we seek
Be found."

III.

Difficulties always lessen after a decision. I casually question a
doughty Colonel, who has been an indefatigable traveler; he has twice
girdled the earth, and has many times cross-hatched Spain; he has not
been to the Pyrenees, but heartily urges the trip. He assures me that
the banditti there have become, he believes, comparatively few; that
they now rarely slit their captives' ears, and that present quotations
for ransoms, so he hears, are ruling very low, much lower than at any
previous epoch. Thus comforted, we interview other traveled friends; but
our goal is to all an unvisited district. We find no kindly Old
Travelers returned from Pyrenees soil, to counsel us, advise us, and
inflict well-meant and inordinate itineraries upon us. At least, then,
we are not alone in our ignorance; it is evident that our knowledge of
the region is not blamably less than that of others, and that the
Pyrenees are in literal fact a land untrodden by Americans.

Questions of accessibility now arise. It seems a far cry from Paris to
the doors of Spain. The Pyrenees are not on the way to Italy, as are the
Alps. They are not on the way around the world, as are the Mountains of
Lebanon and the Sierras. They are not strictly on the way even to Spain.
But we consider. Our country men are streaming to Europe, quick-eyed for
unhackneyed routes, throwing over the continent new and endless
net-works of silver trails. They travel three full days to reach the
Norway fjords, and five in addition to see the high noon of midnight.
They journey a day and night to Berlin, and forty-two hours
consecutively after, without wayside interest, to visit the City of the
Great Czar; if they persevere toward the Kremlin, and around by
"Warsaw's waste of ruin," they will have counted a week in a railway
compartment. Constantinople and Athens lie two thousand miles away,
Naples and Granada nearly as far; all sought, even in summer, though
quivering in the tropics' livid heat. We came round to our Pyrenees: it
needs from Paris but nine hours to Bordeaux, with coigns of vantage
between; in four hours from Bordeaux, you are by the waters of the Bay
of Biscay, or in six, in the centre of the Pyrenees chain.

IV.

And so _La Champagne_ leaves its long wake across the Atlantic, and we
journey down from Paris to the little city of the Maid of Orleans;
wander to Tours, the approximate scene of the great Saracenic defeat;
drive along the quays of Bordeaux, and visit its vineyards and finally
come on, in the luxurious cars of the _Midi_ line, to the shores of
Cantabria and the popular watering-place of Biarritz.

CHAPTER II.

A BISCAYAN BEACH.

Clearly we are in advance of the summer season at Biarritz. It is the
latter part of June. The air is soft and warm, the billows lap the shore
enticingly. But fashion has not yet transferred its court; the van of
the column only has arrived. A few adventurous bathers test the cool
surf; the table-d'hote is slimly attended; the liverymen confidentially
assure us, as an inducement for drives, that their prices are now
crouching low, for a prodigious leap to follow.

But everything has a pleasing air of anticipation. Since we are to be
out of the season at all, we are glad we are in advance of it. This is
the youth of the summer, not its old age. People are looking forward;
events are approaching, instead of receding; the coming months seem big
with indefinite promise of benefit and pleasure.

We quickly become imbued with the general hopefulness of the place.
Every one has the look of one making ready. You hear, all day long, when
far enough from the waves, a vague, joyous hum of bustle pervading the
town. The enterprising click of hammer or trowel falls constantly on the
ear. The masons are at work upon the new villas, and our hotel is
completing a fine addition for a cafe; the stores along the busy little
main street are being put in order, the windows alluringly stocked, and
bright awnings unrolled above them, fenders from the summer's heat. The
hotels are fairly awake. Everything is rejoicing that the
semi-hibernation is over.

[Illustration: RELIEF MAP OF THE CENTRAL PYRENEES]

Biarritz, the town, is as delightful, if not as picturesque, as we had
hoped. Perhaps it is too modern to be picturesque. In this part of the
world at least, one rather requires the picturesque to be allied with
the old. The nucleus of Biarritz is old, but that is out of sight in the
modern overgrowth; Biarritz, as it is, is of this half century.

This is not, on the whole, to be regretted. Biarritz has no history, no
past of associations, no landmarks to be guarded. Vandalism in the form
of the modern rebuilder can here work more good than harm. Save for its
location at the edge of the wild Basque country, and what it has seen,
itself sheltered by obscurity, of the forays of that restless people,
the place has little to tell. It is a watering-place, pure and simple,
buoyed entirely by the prospering ebb and flow of modern fashion. Let us
take it as of to-day, not of yesterday, content to seek its charms under
that aspect alone, enjoying it for itself, not for its pedigree.

Biarritz is a prerogative instance of the magnetism of royalty,--of the
social power of the court as an institution. It was a watering-place, in
a small way, before Eugenie's advent; but there was not a tithe of its
present size and popularity. In 1840, it numbered in all not more than
fifty houses, a few of them lodgings or humble cafes, but the greater
part staid little whitewashed summer-dwellings with green verandas and
occasional roof-balconies; set down irregularly, without street or
system, along the sunny slopes of the bluff. Murray's _Handbook_ for
1848 gives it passing notice, and disrespectfully styles it the dullest
place upon earth for one having no resources of friends upon the spot.
But in the modern edition of forty years later, the same manual has come
to describe the place in a very different strain; assigns it a
population of nearly 6,000; details, with respect, its fashionable rank,
its villas and increasing hotels, its graded streets and driveways; and
among other things adds the simple remark that "about twenty-one
thousand strangers now visit Biarritz every year." Evidently there has
been some advance within the span.

It was the Empress of the French who distilled the life-elixir for the
quiet little resort. As a maiden, she had spent long summers by its
shore, and when she was become the first lady in the land, she turned
still to Biarritz, and the midsummer tide of fashion followed after her.
Across the downs, on the bluff, stands the _Villa Eugenie_, the handsel
of Biarritz's prosperity; and here about us is the town that grew up to
make her court.

Fair France lost as well as gained when the burning walls of the
Tuileries crashed in. In these days of the plain French Republic,--of
its sober, unornamental, business government,--the contrast is vivid
with the glitter and "go" of Louis Napoleon's regime. And the nation
feels it, and involuntarily grieves over it. The twenty years have far
from sufficed to smother that certain inborn Gallic joy in
monarchy,--autocratic rule, a brilliant court, leadership in fashion,
and all the pomp and pageantry which the French love so well.

Little more than a century ago, stable governments seemed at last to be
ruling the world; civilization had come to believe itself finally at
peace; war, it was complacently said, had finished its work; the coming
cycles would prove so far tamed as to have outgrown fightings and
revolutions. Cultured modern history, like Nature, would refuse to
proceed _per saltum_. Yet the hundred years since gone by have brought
wars as fierce, "leaps" of government as tremendous, as any century in
the past. It is this same fair France that has contributed more than her
share of them, and the Fall of the Second Empire was one of the most
dramatic. The world is not, after all, so securely merged from the
darkness of the Dark Ages. Within that short century, in Paris itself,
the very capital of cultured Europe, there has twice uprisen a human
savagery immeasurably exceeding all the tales we are to tell of the
fierce past of the Pyrenees.

It needs an effort to-day to picture the social power of France and
Eugenie twenty years ago. The mantle has not fallen to England and
Alexandra. Only a people like the French can endue fashion with
absolutism.

So it was, that when the Empress came to Biarritz, "all the world" came
also. From the building of her villa dates the true origin of Biarritz.
From that time its growth was progressive and sound. When the empire
finally fell, this creature of its making had already passed the
danger-point, and so stood unshaken; Biarritz had become too popular,
its clientele too devoted, to part company. Even in the winter it has
its increasing colony; in summer its vogue is beyond caprice. The
sparkle of the royal occupation has gone, and the royal villa is
tenantless; but the place no longer needs a helping hand, for it is
abundantly able to walk alone.

[Illustration: BEACH AND VILLA EUGENIE AT BIARRITZ.]

II.

In the afternoon we wander down to the sands. The tide is low. The long
billows of the Bay of Biscay roll smugly in, hypocritical and placid,
with nothing to betray the unenviable reputation they sustain _in mediis
aquis_. The broad, smooth beach is not notably different in kind from
other beaches; but we instantly see the peculiar charm of its location.
The shore sweeps off in a long, lazy crescent, rounding up, a mile or
two to the northward, with the light-house near Bayonne. Southward we
cannot follow it from where we stand, for the near irregularities of
cliff cut it off from sight. Back from the beach rises the bluff,
curving northward with the crescent; at our left it comes boldly down
toward the water, partitioning the beach and breaking up at the edge
into strange, gaunt capes and peninsulas. Black masses of rock, large
and small, are crouching out among the waves, tortured by storms into
misshapen forms and anguished attitudes, patted and petted into
fantastic humps and contortions. The strata dip at an angle of about
twenty-five degrees, and the stone is friable and defenceless.
Soothingly now the water is running over and around these rocks, or
whitens their outlines with foam; granting their piteous torsos, in
merciful caprice, a day's brief respite from the agony of its
scourgings.

The afternoon sun shines brightly against the bathing pavilion,
irradiating its red and yellow brick. Along the narrow; sheltered
platform at its front, sit matronly French dowagers, holding their
daughters, as it were, in leash, and talking of women and things, and
affairs of state. Though early in the season, the beach is well
sprinkled with people. A few attempt the bathing again, but the rest
saunter here and there or enjoy beach-chairs at a stipulated rental. The
elderly French gentleman, a dapper and interesting, specimen rarely
paralleled at home, strolls about contentedly on the asphalt promenade
back from the beach, smoking a cigar and fingering a light bamboo.
Younger men, also well-dressed, pass in couples, or walk with a mother
and daughter,--never with the daughter alone. Boatmen and candy-peddlers
ramble in and out, a Basque fisherman or two linger about the scene, and
dogs, a pony and a captive monkey, add an element of animal life.

Despite its sunny holiday temperament, Biarritz was one of certain
Biscayan villages once denounced as "given up to the worship of the
devil,"--thus denounced by Henry IV's bloodthirsty inquisitor, Pierre de
Lancre, a veritable French Jeffreys, and the same who in 1609 put to
death no less than eight hundred persons on the ground of sorcery. "He
tells us that the devils and malignant spirits banished from Japan and
the Indies took refuge here in the mountains of Labourd. Above all, he
asserts that the young girls of Biarritz, always celebrated for their
beauty, 'have in their left eye a mark impressed by the devil.'"

Happily we have no devil in this nineteenth century, and in the clear
glance of these Biarritz peasants loitering on the sands, we find that
his brand-marks have disappeared with him.

A few of the faces we meet are English; many are Spanish, and show that
Biarritz draws its worshipers from the South as from the North. Indeed,
a large proportion of its summer society wears the mantilla and wields
the fan. Other marks, too, of Spanish dress are here, as where little
girls in many-hued outfit romp along the sands, dragooned by dark-faced
nurses in true Iberian costume. Three or four brilliant red parasols add
amazingly to the general effect of the scene.

We repair to the stone parapet before the pavilion, and gravely paying
our dues for chairs, sit and watch the picture. There is no charge for
sitting on the beach, but this is severely frowned upon at Biarritz. The
dues are two sous per chair, and, with true Continental thrift, they are
always rigorously collected. Whether one wanders into the open square of
the Palais Royal at Paris, or listens to the music in the Place de
Tourny at Bordeaux, or watches the waves at Biarritz, the old woman with
her little black bag at once appears upon the scene. Some Frenchless
friends in Paris, on one occasion, guilelessly seated in the gardens of
the Palais Royal, took the collector simply for a pertinacious
beggar-woman, and waved her airily off. She returned to the charge, of
course, in indignant French, and grew angrier every moment as she found
herself still loftily ignored. A warm fracas was in prospect, when a
passing American fortunately cleared up the complication; the woman
would have called in a gendarme unhesitatingly, to enforce her
diminutive claim.

On the bluff, beyond the pavilion, Eugenie's villa, a square, rich
building of English brick, surveys the scene its existence has brought
about. Around us, on the beach, the nurses sit in the shade of the rocks
and discourse on the respective failings of their charges. Children dig
in the sand with pail and shovel, with the same zest as at home.
Child-nature changes little with locality. So recently from the great
unknown, it is not yet seamed and crusted by environment. I suppose that
children fairly represent the prehistoric man. Impulse, appetite,
passion,--all the gusts of the moment sway them. We quell our emotions
so uniformly, as we grow on, that we finally hardly feel their
struggles. The children have richer life than we, in some respects:

"Faith and wonder and the primal earth
Are born into the world with every child."

I make no doubt that Nimrod, or Achilles and Ajax, great children that
they were, as ready to cry as to feast, to laugh as to fight, hunting
mightily, sulking in the tent, or defying the lightning,--intense,
sudden, human all through,--drank down their strong, muddy potion of
existence with a smack far heartier than the reflective sips of life
which civilization has now taught us to take. Childhood is wide and free
and abounding and near to nature, and we can take thoughts from it, and
ponder, perhaps dubiously, on the distance we since have traveled.

The children dig in the sand, and throw it over the nurses, just as they
are doing at Old Orchard and Old Point. Here, with a maid, is a pair of
children who freely show one attribute of childhood not so pleasing as
others,--cruelty. They have a little monkey, fastened by collar and
chain, and it is pitiful and yet ludicrous to see the close watch the
animal keeps on his captors' movements. He has found a slack chain his
best policy, and adapts his every motion anxiously and solicitously to
the leaps of the boy. But the utmost vigilance avails him little. When
the child is weary with running and sudden turns, which have called for
marvelous dexterity of accommodation on the part of the monkey, the
chain is hauled up, with the animal clinging worriedly to it, and he is
flung far out into the fringe of waves, to pick his shivering way up
again and again from the water. These children have a white rat, also,
which they chase over the sand, and souse into puddles, and otherwise
maltreat. It is useless to interfere parentally, and we hardly see our
way to buying either rat or monkey, even to ensure them a peaceable old
age. One wonders why children have this queer taint of cruelty.
Unconscious cruelty it may be, but it seems none the less out of place
in their fresh, unused nature. We outgrow some rude vices as well as
rude virtues, in becoming older, and there is comfort in that.

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