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A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees by Edwin Asa Dix

E >> Edwin Asa Dix >> A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees




Lescar was called the _ville septenaire_; for it had, it is said, seven
churches, seven fountains, seven mills, seven woods, seven vineyards,
seven gates, and seven towers on the ramparts. It is another senile
hamlet now, and imagination must do all the work. Even the cathedral has
been altered, and in its large, rather plain interior are few relics of
its earlier state, few marks to tell of the after-despoiled tombs of
Henri Quatre's ancestry. There is a satisfying legend about this
sanctuary. One of the feudal rulers had a violent hatred for some
neighboring seignior, and finally secured his assassination. His hatred
was thereupon followed by a remorse equally violent,--these men were
violent in good as in bad, which redeems much; and in atonement he
rebuilt magnificently this cathedral, which was even then an old one,
and added to it a monastery as well. And to complete the story of poetic
expiation, the assassin he had employed became a penitent himself; was
later appointed one of the monks by his penitent patron; and ended by
rising to the reverend office of abbot itself.

Southeast from Pau lies our third landmark of the past,--Coarraze. It is
a longer road and a dusty one, but a village will tell off each mile,
the Gave de Pau brings encouraging messages along the way, and the far
Pic du Midi de Bigorre keeps inspiringly in sight. Besides the commoner
trees to be met in this and other directions from Pau, are occasional
orange-trees, Spanish chestnuts, aloes, acacias, and here and there a
magnolia; but this region is north of much tropical verdure, even now in
July, and plain beech and oak play the principal parts. Coarraze can be
reached by rail also, and preferably so when haste is an object, for it
is thirteen miles by the highway, while the train covers the distance
within the half-hour.

This spot too had its castle and its feudal barons, subject to the court
at Orthez. A tower of the castle still remains. It is of Raymond, one of
these barons, that Froissart tells the legend of the familiar spirit.
This obliging bogey was wont to visit his host as he lay asleep, waking
him to tell him what had happened during the day in distant countries.
His mode of rousing his patron was unceremonious, not to say boisterous.
In his first visit, he made a terrific tumult throughout the castle,
pounded the doors and casements, broke the plates in the kitchen,
appalled the sleeping servants, "knocking about everything he met with
in the castle, as if determined to destroy all within it.... On the
following night the noises and rioting were renewed, but much louder
than before; and there were such blows struck against the door and
windows of the chamber of the knight that it seemed they would break
them down."

The baron could no longer desist from leaping out of his bed, and
proceeding to investigate matters; and in the end the bogey and he
became fast friends. In fact, the former "took such an affection to the
Lord de Corasse that he came often to see him in the night-time; and
when he found him sleeping, he pulled his pillow from under his head or
made great noises at the door or windows; so that when the knight was
awakened, he said, 'let me sleep.'

"'I will not,' replied he, 'until I have told thee some news.'

"The knight's lady was so much frightened, the hairs of her head stood
on end and she hid herself under the bed-clothes.

"'Well,' said the knight, 'and what news hast thou brought me?'

"The spirit replied, 'I am come from England, Hungary or some other
place, which I left yesterday, and such and such things have happened.'

"Thus did the Lord de Corasse know by means of this messenger all things
that were passing in the different parts of the world;" and for years
this invisible mediaeval sprite kept his patron comfortably posted on all
current events, in a ghostly adumbration of the modern newspaper press.

But Coarraze and its castle carry us on later than Froissart's days.
Here young Prince Henry ran about in his hardy youth, and romped and
played pranks on his future subjects. Nothing delighted him more in
after life than to come back here and hunt up his old peasant
playfellows, bashful and reluctant, and bewilder and charm them with his
state and his _bonhomie_. Most of the old castle is gone now, destroyed
by a storm and since replaced by a newer structure. The old baron's
spirit-messenger or the "white lady" of the House of Navarre have only
the single tower remaining, for their ghostly visits,--finding change
over all save the far line of the Pyrenees glittering unearthly in the
moonlight.




CHAPTER IX.

THE WARM WATERS AND THE PEAK OF THE SOUTH.

"And we who love this land call it a _paradis terrestre_, because
life is fair in its happy sunshine,--it is beautiful, it is
plentiful, it is at peace."--_The Sun Maid._


It is a nineteenth-century sun that wakes us, after all, each morning,
through the Gassion's broad windows. We can reconjure foregoing eras,
but we do not have to live in them. The hat has outlawed the helmet; the
clear call of the locomotive is unmistakably modern. Throughout Pau, in
its life, its people, its social rubrics; in its streets, shops,
hotels,--the thought is for the present age exclusively. The past is
appraised chiefly at what it can do for the present. Business and
society pursuits are not perceptibly saddened by memories of the
bear-hunt at Rion or the dagger of Ravaillac.

And thus we come into the instant year once more, as we take the
mid-morning train from Pau. We point straight for the mountains. We are
on the way to Eaux Chaudes and Eaux Bonnes, before mentioned as a fourth
excursion from Pau; but we go not as an excursion merely, for they lie
directly in our farther route. These resorts, the repute of whose
springs we hear in advance, are south from Pau about twenty-eight miles;
twenty-five are now covered by the new railway, and the remaining three
are done by the diligence or by breack,--for the latter of which, we
telegraph.

It is a brief journey by the rail. The longer post-road no longer
controls the travel. The train hastens on, by the coteaux, past
maize-fields and meadows, through odds and ends of villages, into
valleys more irregular, and among hills higher and steeper. Of Bielle, a
village where it halts for a moment, there is a well-turned story told
against Henry IV. It is one of the few cases where he was at a loss for
a retort. He admired the four marble columns in the church, and asked
for them; a kingly asking is usually equivalent to a command. But the
inhabitants made reply both dexterous and firm, and it proved
unanswerable. "Our hearts and our possessions are yours," they said; "do
with them as you will. But as to the columns, those belong to God; we
are bound for their custody, and you will have to arrange that with
Him!"

When the train reaches its terminus at Laruns, we are fairly among the
highlands. Rising wedge-shaped beyond the town, dividing all progress,
is a mountain,--not a hill. To the left and right of it pass the roads
we are in turn to follow. On the left, two miles beyond the fork or
three from the railway's end, will be found Eaux Bonnes; on the right,
at the same distance, is its lesser equal, Eaux Chaudes, our first
objective point.

In the distant direction of the former rises the snowy _Pic de Ger,_
nearly nine thousand feet in height and conspicuous from where we stand
at the station platform. Still leftward, east of the hills, is a notch
in the mountains; through it, we are told, pierces the Route
Thermale,--the great carriage-road on to Cauterets and Bigorre, which we
are to take after visiting the Eaux.

Here at the Laruns station, we find our breack awaiting us,--a peer of
the peerless Biarritz equipage. It has been sent down from Eaux Bonnes
to meet us. Trunk and baggage are stowed away, and we are driven up the
straight, sloping road from the station into the village of Laruns
itself, where a stop is to be made for lunch.

The appearances are not prepossessing. Laruns is a small village
centring about a large square. It looks unpromising, and one of its most
unpromising buildings proves to be the "hotel,"--a low, dingy, stone
building set in among its mates. At this the breack draws up. The
splendor of the Gassion seems in the impossible past. The expectant
landlady urges us within; her face beams pleasantly; her appearance
promises at least more than does her environment. One by one and very
doubtfully, we enter a dark, narrow doorway; pass along a dark, harrow
hall, walled and floored with stone; catch a passing vista of a kitchen,
a white-jacketed and white-capped cook, and a vast amount of steam and
crackle and splutter near the stove; and going up the curving stairs are
led into a neat little front dining-room overlooking the square. The
carpet is of unpainted pine; so are the table and chairs; but both are
clean, and this fact cheers. With misgivings we ask for a lunch for
seven; without misgivings it is promptly promised, and the beaming
hostess hurries to the depths below. Whether her quest shall bring us
chill or further cheer, we do not seek to guess.

We canvass the situation and idly look out on the square before us. The
low houses edging it are of stone, faced with a whity-grey, and have a
sleepy, lack-lustre air about them, even under the sun's rays. Women are
grouped around the old marble fountain near the centre,--one drawing
water, several washing and beating white linen. There are barnyard fowls
in plenty, bobbing their preoccupied heads as they search among the
cobbles. In the foreground stands the temporarily dismantled breack,
begirt with awed urchins and venerable Common Councilmen. Behind all
rise the mountains. There is a pleasing effect of unsophisticated
dullness about it all, that seems queerly out of place in a rising
railroad terminus.

But a bright-faced, rosy little girl bustles in presently and proceeds
to set the table. She has an unconscious air of confidence in the doings
of the chef below,--this fact cheers; and the cloth is indubitably
clean,--this also cheers. We take heart. Napkins and plates appear,
white as the cloth; knives, forks, glasses, rapidly follow, seats are
placed, we gather around, and the old lady herself comes triumphantly
in, with a huge, shapely omelet, silky and hot,--and lo, our three
cheers swell into a tiger!

Well,--we shall always recall the zest of that lunch. It was perfection.
The cuisine of the Gassion was more refined but not more whole-souled.
The trout vie with the omelet; the mutton outdoes the trout. Course
after course comes up as by magic from that dark kitchen,--_petits
pois_, a toothsome filet, mushrooms, pickled goose, tartlets, cheese,
fruit,--and each a fresh revelation of a Pyrenean chef's capabilities.
Our doubtings vanish with the dejeuner, and we exchange solemn vows
never hereafter to prejudge a Gascon boniface by his inn.


II.

Our road forth from Laruns brings us soon to the base of the blockading
mountain, the _Gourzy_. There it divides, and taking the right-hand
branch, the breack strikes at once into the narrow ascending valley
which leads southeast to Eaux Chaudes. Below, a fussy torrent splashes
impetuously to meet the incomers. The driver has pointed out to me an
older and now disused wagon-way, short and steep, over the hill at the
right; it is tempting for pedestrianizing, and while the breack is
pulled slowly around its foot by a broad, easy road, I climb by it for
some twenty minutes, gain the crest of the ridge, and passing through a
windy, rock-walled cut, come out on the other curve of the valley. Here
the scene has become wholly mountainous. Grass and box cling to all the
slopes; pines and spruces shoot upward wherever they have won footholds.
They are not great peaks that we see yet, nor anything above the snow
level; but the mountains in view, with their faces of rock, their
massive flanks of green, are imposing notwithstanding. Far below, the
breack has just come in sight, its forward route meeting mine some
distance ahead.

Close at the side of the path stands a tiny roadside oratory. On the
walls of this little shrine, which (or its predecessor) has stood here
for three hundred years, one might formerly read in stilted French the
following astonishing inscription, ignoble witness to human platitude,
as M. Joanne calls it:

"Arrest thee, passer-by! admire a thing thou seest not, and attend
to hear what it is thou shouldst admire: we are but rocks and yet
we speak. Nature gave us being, but it was the Princess Catherine
gave us tongues. What thou now readest we have seen her read; what
she has said we have listened to; her soul we have upborne. Are we
not blessed, passer-by? having no eyes, we yet have seen her! Yet
blessed thou too, in having seen her not; for we rocks were
lifeless and the sight transformed us into life; but as for thee,
traveler, thy transformation would have been into lifeless rock!"

As our routes converge, mine descending, the other rising, the valley
narrows to a gorge. In its depths, a hundred and fifty feet or more
below, the torrent is noisily roaring, and at the other side, half way
up, the carriage-road is built out from the almost perpendicular wall of
the Gourzy. We draw nearer, and at length I cross, high above the
stream, by a rude wooden bridge, and rejoin the main road. The slope I
have quitted steepens now into a precipice, and the two sides of this
ravine move closer and closer together, their bare limestone brows a
thousand, two thousand, feet above the road. I vividly recall the Via
Mala in Switzerland, as I lean over the stone parapet and push down a
heavy stone to crash upon the rocks of the torrent far beneath.

The toiling breack rejoins me, and the road cuts in through the gorge
for some distance farther. Patches of snow are now seen on some of the
summits approaching. Then we round a corner at the left, the valley
opens out, though very slightly, and soon we see ahead the closely set
houses of the Baths of Eaux Chaudes.

* * * * *

We pause before a plain, fatherly hotel, and a motherly landlady appears
at once to welcome us. We are won at once by Madame Baudot. Her
benignant face is a benediction. She leads us in through the low, wide
hallway, past the little windowed office at the end, and turning to the
left into a short corridor brings us out to a set of rooms in the new
extension. As we step out upon the tiny balconies at the windows, we
cannot forbear exclaiming at the charm of their situation. We are
directly above the torrent, which chafes along perhaps fifty feet below,
and the balconies jut out over the water. Beyond it are the cliffs,
rising huge before us, wooded high, but bare and bald near the top; up
and down the valley the eye ranges along their fronts. The rooms, simple
but exactingly clean, are dainty with dimity and netted curtains and
spreads. The whole effect is so home-like and restful, the relief of the
contrast so great from plain and city and the rush of trains, that
involuntarily we sigh for a month to spend at Eaux Chaudes.


III.

We find but two streets, terraced one behind the other; quiet,
heavily-built houses, a small shop or two, another hotel, a little
church, and the bathing establishment. The latter, large and
substantial, overlooks the Gave a few steps up the road. We stroll
inquisitively down through the village, lighten a dull little shop with
a trifling investment, strike out upon the hill above for the reward of
a view, descend to the bed of the torrent, and finally drift together
again into the streetside near the hotel. Most of the houses are
_pensions_ or boarding-places during the summer, and while the spot is
much less fashionable and populous than its neighbor, Eaux Bonnes, it is
instinct with a comforting placidity not easily to be attained in larger
resorts. The waters are said to be specifically good for rheumatism.
Both drinking and bathing are prescribed. In former times the simple
rule was, the more the better; Thor himself could scarcely have
outquaffed the sixteenth-century invalids. One of the early French
historians relates his visit "to the Baths of Beam, seven leagues from
Pau." A young German, he says, "although very sober, drank each day
fifty glasses of sulphur water within the hour." He himself was content
with twenty-five, "rather from pleasure than need;" he experienced
"great relief, with a marvelous appetite, sound sleep, and a feeling of
buoyancy in his whole body."

An experimentally inclined visitor, a few years ago, heard of this
exploit of the "sober young German," and attempted to repeat it. He very
nearly lost his life in consequence.

The sovereigns at Pau were very fond of the Eaux. Marguerite of
Angouleme loved to come to this stern, peaceful valley, and here found
inspiration for her thoughts and her writings. One of her letters tells
us that in these mountains, apart from the careless court, _"elle a
appris a vivre plus de papier que d'aultres choses,"_ Her daughter,
Queen Jeanne, Henry's mother, found her health here when she was young,
having been "meagre and feeble." She often visited them afterward. Her
visits were costly, too; the expenses of the court were considerable,
but she had to bring an armed guard as well; Spain always stood ready to
kidnap the Queen of Navarre if it had opportunity. Such were the times.

Later, for almost a century, these springs became neglected and
forgotten; they were then again brought into notice, and now seem to
have gained a permanent popularity.

As afternoon closes in, we reunite at the hotel, where Madame greets us
graciously. Her visitors will begin to come with the coming week, but we
actually have the house to ourselves. In the tidy parlor blazes a
wood-fire; out of doors, in the dusk, it has grown a trifle chilly.
Attentions are doubled upon us when it is known that we are Americans;
Madame's daughter, who has married the chef and will succeed to the
inheritance, will succeed to the kindly disposition as well, and with a
sunny-faced waiting-woman looks after details of comfort with a personal
interest. Our famous lunch at Laruns was both so ample and so recent
that now we ask only for "tea and toast," and so, while the lamps are
lighted, the trays are brought to us in the parlor, and around the
centre-table and before the fire we nibble _tartines_ in soothed content
and plan to-morrow's excursion.

Later in the evening we pause at the little office in the hall, behind
whose window sits Madame, busy with her knitting yet watchfully
supervising all the details of the household. She chats with us freely,
speaking slowly in her clear, low-toned French,--that southern French
which sounds the vowels and the final _e_ so lingeringly,--telling us of
the village and its surroundings, of the people, of herself; questioning
us about America, (where, she tells us, lives one of her daughters;)
welcoming us evidently with the greater regard as being of the few she
sees from that active, far-off land.


IV.

The low, steady, insistent rumble and rustle of the torrent below our
windows becomes almost ghostly in the stillness of the midnight. It is
coming from the dark and mysterious forests it so well knows, the same
unchanging water-soul it has been in the days of the Pyrenees past. One
almost ascribes to it the power of audibly retelling its past, as it
intones its way onward below us; infusing our dreams with subtle
imaginings of the spirit of dead times, the pathetic forgottenness of
the mountain lives that have been lived within its sound, the
roysterings of the knights who have hunted along its coursing.

For into these forests often rode Gaston Phoebus and his fierce men of
Orthez, in pursuit of a fiercer than they, the now disappearing
Pyrenees bear. At no time was superstition more rife than then; savage
souls were imputed to these savage animals; the spectres of the killed
brutes returned to trouble the dreams of the hunter-knights, as the
growl of their familiar torrent penetrates ours. We seem to hear old
Froissart's voice above the sound, believingly telling a legend of the
hunt:

"'Sir Peter de Bearn has a custom, when asleep in the night-time, to
rise, arm himself, draw his sword, and to begin fighting as if he were
in actual battle. The chamberlains and valets who sleep in his chamber
to watch him, on hearing him rise, go to him and inform him what he is
doing; of all which, he tells them, he is quite ignorant, and that they
lie. Sometimes they leave neither arms nor sword in his chamber, when he
makes such a noise and clatter as if all the devils in hell were there.
They therefore think it best to replace the arms, and sometimes he
forgets them and remains quietly in his bed.'

"'Holy Mary!' said I to the squire, 'how came the knight to have such
fancies, that he cannot sleep quietly in bed but must rise and skirmish
about the house! This is very strange.'

"'By my faith,' answered the squire, 'they have frequently asked him,
but he knows nothing about it. The first time it happened was on a night
following a day when he had hunted a wonderfully large bear in the woods
of Bearn. This bear had killed four of his dogs and wounded many more,
so that the others were afraid of him; upon which Sir Peter drew his
sword of Bordeaux steel and advanced on the bear with great rage on
account of the loss of his dogs; he combated him a long time with much
bodily danger, and with difficulty slew him; when he returned to his
castle of Languedudon in Biscay, and had the bear carried with him.
Every one was astonished at the enormous size of the beast and the
courage of the knight who had attacked and slain him.

"'But when the Countess of Biscay, his wife, saw the bear, she instantly
fainted and was carried to her chamber, where she continued very
disconsolate all that and the following day, and would not say what
ailed her. On the third day she told her husband she should never
recover her health until she had made a pilgrimage to St. James' shrine
at Compostella. "Give me leave therefore to go thither and to carry my
son Peter and my daughter Adrienne with me; I request it of you." Sir
Peter too easily complied; she had packed up all her jewels and plate
unobserved by any one; for she had resolved never to return again.

"'The lady set out on her pilgrimage, and took that opportunity of
visiting her cousins, the King and Queen of Castile, who entertained her
handsomely. She is still with them, and will never return herself nor
send her children. The same night he had hunted and killed the bear,
this custom of walking in his sleep seized him. It is rumored the lady
was afraid of something unfortunate happening, the moment she saw the
bear, and this caused her fainting; for that her father once hunted this
bear, and during the chace a voice cried out, though he saw nobody:
"Thou huntest me, yet I wish thee no ill; but thou shalt die a miserable
death!" The lady remembered this when she saw the bear, as well as that
her father had been beheaded by Don Pedro without any cause; and she
maintains that something unfortunate will happen to her husband, and
that what passes now is nothing to what will come to pass.'"


V.

White clouds scud away before the breeze, as we climb down toward the
torrent again before breakfast and cross a diminutive foot-bridge to a
path on the other side. The sun is at his post. "All Nature smiles,"
here in the mountains as over the plains, and promises lavishly for the
day. The ramble brings a sharpened appetite, and we come back to the
sunny breakfast-room, to find flowers at the plates of mesdames and
mademoiselle, and a family of Pyrenean trout, drawn out within the
half-hour from a trout-well by the stream, in crisp readiness upon the
table.

We have planned for a view to-day of the great Pic du Midi d'Ossau,--the
mountain seen so sharply from Pau. It is not in sight at Eaux Chaudes;
but it is the giant of this section of the range,--a noon-mark for an
entire province. There is no mountain resort without its pet excursions,
and there are three here which take the lead. One is to Goust, another
to the Grotto; but the foremost is to Gabas and the majestic Pic.

Our breack comes pompously to the terrace by the hotel, and the hostess
wishes us _"une belle excursion."_ The road takes us on through the
village, and pushes up into the valley with an ascent which is not steep
but which never relaxes. Around us the scene grows increasingly wild and
everywhere picturesque. We cross at some height the Gave, by the stone
_Pont d'Enfer_,--Bridge of Hell, so named,--and keep along the westerly
bank. On one side the ledges are bare, but the opposite slopes are
greener, densely wooded, and ribboned by occasional cascades. Goats and
cattle graze on the upper stretches of herbage; and the shadows of the
clouds chase each other in great islands over the broad flanks of the
mountain. Often, as the horses pause to rest, panting silently with the
work, we climb down from our perches to walk on against the warm breeze,
or clamber up from the roadway to add a prize to the ladies' mountain
bouquets.

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