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+Project Gutenberg's A Tour Through The Pyrenees, by Hippolyte Adolphe Taine
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: A Tour Through The Pyrenees
+
+Author: Hippolyte Adolphe Taine
+
+Illustrator: Gustave Dore
+
+Translator: J. Safford Fiske
+
+Release Date: December 14, 2013 [EBook #44429]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A TOUR THROUGH THE PYRENEES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+A TOUR THROUGH THE PYRENEES
+
+By Hippolyte Adolphe Taine
+
+
+Translated by J. Safford Fiske
+
+With Illustrations by Gustave Dore
+
+New York Henry Holt And Company 1875
+
+
+[Illustration: 011]
+
+[Illustration: 013]
+
+The Publishers take pleasure in acknowledging their indebtedness to Mr.
+Henry Blackburn for valuable hints in the arrangement of this volume.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+ BOOK I.--THE COAST.
+ PAGE
+ CHAPTER I.--BORDEAUX.--ROY AN...................3
+
+ " II.--LES LANDES.--BAYONNE..............12
+
+ " III.--BIARRITZ.--SAINT-JEAN-DE-LUZ.....35
+
+ BOOK II.--THE VALLEY OF OSSAU.
+
+
+
+
+ CHAPTER I. --DAX.--OR THEZ.....................57
+
+ " II.--PAU.............................85
+
+ " III.--EAUX-BONNES...................117
+
+ " IV.--LANDSCAPES.....................138
+
+ " V.--EA UX-CHAUDES...................169
+
+ " VI.--THE INHABITANTS.................186
+
+ BOOK III.--THE VALLEY OF LUZ.
+
+
+
+
+ CHAPTER I.--ON THE WAY TO LUZ.................225
+
+ " II.--LUZ..............................250
+
+ " III.--SAINT-SAUVEUR.--BAREGES.........266
+
+ " IV.--CAUTERE..........................290
+
+ " V.--SAINT-SATIN.......................315
+
+ " VI.--GAVARNIE.........................326
+
+ " VII.--THE BERGONZ.--THE PIC DU MIDI...352
+
+ " VIII.--PLANTS AND ANIMALS.............367
+
+ BOOK. IV.--BAGNERES AND LUCHON.
+
+
+
+
+ CHAPTER I.--FROM LUZ TO BAGNERES-DE-BIGORRE...389
+
+ " II.--BAGNERES-DE-BIGORRE..............412
+
+ " III.--THE PEOPLE......................420
+
+ " IV--THE ROAD TO BAGNERES-DE-LUCHON....468
+
+ " V--LUCHON.............................485
+
+ " VI.--TOULOUSE.........................509
+
+
+
+
+ LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
+
+ PAGE
+
+ THE PINES.....................................003
+
+ THE RIVER AFTER A STORM.......................005
+
+ THE PINES NEAR ROYAN..........................007
+
+ THE BROAD RIVER...............................009
+
+ BORDEAUX......................................010
+
+ TAIL-PIECE....................................011
+
+ LES LANDES....................................012
+
+ LES LANDES (SECOND VIEW)......................014
+
+ TAIL-PIECE....................................016
+
+ A STREET IN BAYONNE...........................017
+
+ BAYONNE HARBOR................................019
+
+ PE DE PUYANE..................................022
+
+ THE BURNING CASTLE............................025
+
+ HEAD-PIECE....................................035
+
+ THE PIERCED ROCK..............................036
+
+ TAIL-PIECE....................................039
+
+ THE VILLA EUGENIE.............................040
+
+ CLIFFS NEAR SAINT-JEAN-DE-LUZ.................042
+
+ COAST NEAR SAINT-JEAN-DE-LUZ..................045
+
+ TAIL-PIECE....................................046
+
+ LOUIS XIV. AND ANNE OF AUSTRIA................047
+
+ THE POLITENESS OF TO-DAY......................048
+
+ THE POLITENESS OF OTHER DAYS..................049
+
+ "JE VOUS LE RENDS."...........................053
+
+ A SPLENDID CREATION...........................054
+
+ DAX...........................................057
+
+ DAX (SECOND VIEW).............................059
+
+ CASTLE OF ORTHEZ..............................061
+
+ FROISSART.....................................062
+
+ A HOME OF LEGENDS.............................063
+
+ "THAT STOUT CORNIFIC DOCTOR"..................066
+
+ COUNT DE FOIX AT SUPPER.......................068
+
+ THE COUNT DE FOIX'S HOSPITALITY...............071
+
+ A FRENCH "CONDUCTOR"..........................072
+
+ "FOR HEAVEN'S SAKE DO NOT KILL GASTON"........074
+
+ GASTON IN THE TOWER OF ORTHEZ.................076
+
+ COUNT DE FOIX.................................077
+
+ TAILPIECE.....................................078
+
+ CHAPTER-HEADING...............................079
+
+ THE VALLEY OF OSSAU...........................082
+
+ A DESTRUCTION OK SENTIMENT....................084
+
+ AVENUE OF THE CHATEAU AT PAU..................085
+
+ ARMS OF HENRY IV..............................087
+
+ COURT OF THE CHATEAU AT PAU...................088
+
+ PAU...........................................090
+
+ JEANNE D'ALBRET...............................092
+
+ A MORNING'S SPORT.............................094
+
+ IN THE STREETS Of EAUSE.......................097
+
+ SULLY.........................................100
+
+ MARGUERITE OK NAVARRE.........................104
+
+ ENTERTAINING THE LADIES.......................106
+
+ THE PARK AT PAU...............................108
+
+ PROTRACTING A REVERIE.........................109
+
+ PIC DU MIDI OSSAU.............................111
+
+ AN EXHORTATION................................113
+
+ NEAR GAN......................................114
+
+ THE VALLEY OK OSSAU...........................115
+
+ ROAD TO EAUX BONNES...........................116
+
+ THE PROMENADE.................................117
+
+ NEAR EAUX BONNES..............................118
+
+ A RAINY DAY AT EAUX BONNES....................119
+
+ TAKING THE WATERS.............................121
+
+ TAKING THE WATERS (SECOND VIEW)...............122
+
+ "MUSIC HAITI CHARMS"..........................123
+
+ A NATIVE GENIUS...............................125
+
+ DOLCE FAR NIENTE.............................126
+
+ OUR AMATEURS..................................127
+
+ THE BEECHES...................................128
+
+ THE SUMMIT OF THE GER.........................131
+
+ TAIL-PIECE....................................133
+
+ THE ART OK PLEASURE...........................134
+
+ THE "JEU DU CANARD"...........................135
+
+ PLEASURE WITHOUT THE ART......................137
+
+ "A LANDSCAPE".................................138
+
+ EXCELSIOR.....................................139
+
+ THE VALENTIN FALLS AT DISCOO..................140
+
+ CASCADE OF THE VALENTIN.......................142
+
+ PATH TO THE GORGE OF THE SERPENT..............144
+
+ THE GAVE......................................146
+
+ A DISTANT TALE................................148
+
+ SOLITUDE......................................150
+
+ A WATER POWER.................................152
+
+ THE MIGHTY STREAM.............................155
+
+ 'PAPI'........................................157
+
+ A TOO DISTANT LANDSCAPE.......................159
+
+ A VANTAGE-POINT...............................161
+
+ THE PEAKS.....................................163
+
+ ABOVE GABAS...................................166
+
+ "TO HIM WHO, IN LOVE OF NATURE"...............168
+
+ AMONG THE CLOUDS..............................169
+
+ ROUTE TO EAUX CHAUDES.........................170
+
+ ON THE ROAD TO EAUX CHAUDES...................172
+
+ "A WILD AND SUNNY NEST".......................174
+
+ "COLD AND SAD"................................175
+
+ NEAR EAUX CHAUDES.............................177
+
+ "EGYPT BEFORE THE COMING OF WARRIORS".........182
+
+ SOMEBODY'S JOVE...............................185
+
+ THE INHABITANTS...............................186
+
+ FIDDLERS THREE................................187
+
+ "A SORT OF ROUNDELAY".........................189
+
+ "THEY CLUMSILY BENT THE KNEE".................192
+
+ "FIVE OR SIX OLD WOMEN".......................194
+
+ THE PEAK OF THE GER...........................196
+
+ MEETING A LADY................................200
+
+ A STOCK-DEALER................................200
+
+ YOUR OBEDIENT SERVANT.........................201
+
+ DISINTERESTED HOSPITALITY.....................201
+
+ AN AMATEUR SKETCH.............................203
+
+ THE DEATH OF ROLAND...........................206
+
+ "A WELL-TO-DO PEASANT"........................207
+
+ CHIVALRIC WAR.................................209
+
+ SCIENTIFIC WAR................................209
+
+ THE BATTLE OF RONCEVAUX.......................212
+
+ "WHEN FIGHTING IS TO BE DONE".................214
+
+ HENRY OF BEARN................................215
+
+ "AT THE HEAD OF THE ARMY".....................217
+
+ "VERY DARING".................................219
+
+ MLLE. DE SEGUR................................220
+
+ GASSION'S BOB-TAIL............................222
+
+ ON THE WAY TO LUZ.............................225
+
+ A SMILING COUNTRY.............................226
+
+ "WHAT WE ALL HEARD THIS NIGHT".-..............228
+
+ ORTHON'S TRANSFORMATION.......................234
+
+ LETTING THE DOGS LOOSE........................235
+
+ "THE RACE OF FAMILIARS AND FAIRIES"...........237
+
+ A BROODING SUPERSTITION,......................238
+
+ CHAPEL OF LESTELLE............................240
+
+ NEAR LOURDES..................................242
+
+ GORGE OF PIERREFITTE..........................244
+
+ "HEAVY CLOUDS ROSE IN THE SKY"................248
+
+ THE GORGE OPENED UP...........................249
+
+ OLD HOUSE OF THE TEMPLARS AT LUZ..............250
+
+ RUIN OF A CHATEAU NEAR LUZ....................253
+
+ MAX GETS FROM THE DESERT AS MUCH AS HE CAN....257
+
+ THE VALLEY OF LUZ.............................259
+
+ PROGRESS......................................261
+
+ SAINT-PIERRE..................................263
+
+ "THIS HEIGHT IS A DESERT".....................264
+
+ "NO ONE COMES"................................265
+
+ THE MEDIAEVAL TOURISTS........................266
+
+ SAINT-SAUVEUR.................................267
+
+ THE GAVE AT SUNSET............................272
+
+ RUNNING WATERS................................274
+
+ "THE POPLARS RISE ONE ABOVE ANOTHER"..........275
+
+ BAREGES.......................................277
+
+ THE MILITARY HOSPITAL.........................278
+
+ TAIL-PIECE....................................279
+
+ THE MRS.......................................283
+
+ "OUT FROM THE CIVIL WARS".....................287
+
+ "THESE OLD WASTED MOUNTAINS"..................288
+
+ MADAME DE MAINTENON...........................289
+
+ A FEW BLANDISHMENTS...........................290
+
+ THE PATIENTS OF THE OLDEN TIME................291
+
+ THE LAKE OF GAUBE.............................293
+
+ DIANA.........................................295
+
+ NEAR PONT D'ESPAGNE...........................299
+
+ STORM AT CAUTERETS............................302
+
+ VALLEY OF THE GAVE IN A STORM.................304
+
+ NEAR THE LAKE OF GAUISE.......................307
+
+ CAUTERET'S....................................311
+
+ THE FOAMING GAVE..............................313
+
+ HENRY IV AND FRANCIS I........................314
+
+ A FRESHETT IN THE MOUNTAINS..................315
+
+ "A HORRIBLE WORLD"............................316
+
+ ABBEY OF SAINT-SAVIN..........................318
+
+ CASCADE OF CERLSEY, NEAR PONT D'ESPAGNE.......320
+
+ PRAYER........................................325
+
+ ENJOYING HIE SCENERY..........................326
+
+ A MOUNTAIN FUNERAL............................328
+
+ BRIDGE AT SCIA................................330
+
+ VILLAGE OF GEDRES.............................333
+
+ CHAOS.........................................337
+
+ "THE TUMBLED ROCKS"...........................339
+
+ SIECHEUR......................................342
+
+ THE MOUNTAIN SIDE.............................343
+
+ THE FRECHE DE ROLAND..........................344
+
+ THE AMPHITHEATRE NEAR GAVARNIE................346
+
+ "THE THIRTEENTH CASCADE ON THE LEFT"..........347
+
+ THE CASCADE AS SEEN FROM THE INN..............349
+
+ RECIPROCITY...................................351
+
+ THE APPRECIATIVE..............................352
+
+ ASCENT OF THE BERGONZ.........................354
+
+ THE EAGLES....................................355
+
+ MONT PERDU....................................359
+
+ AN EARLY INHABITANT...........................362
+
+ SCENERY DURING AN ASCENT......................365
+
+ "ALLEZ DOUCEMENT; ALLEZ TOUJOURS".............366
+
+ A STIMULATING DREAM...........................367
+
+ THE PINES.....................................369
+
+ A SHOWER IN A FOREST OF BRUSH-FIRS............373
+
+ CONTEMPLATION.................................376
+
+ A POOR DANCER.................................377
+
+ "THE ISARD DWELLS ABOVE THE BEAR".............378
+
+ AN ARGUMENT...................................379
+
+ A HERD OF GOATS...............................381
+
+ "THE HAPPIEST ANIMAL IN CREATION".............383
+
+ DISTINGUISHED NATIVES.........................386
+
+ IN MOUNT CAMPANA..............................389
+
+ DE BENAC IN EGYPT.............................390
+
+ "THEY TRAVERSED A WALL OF CLOUDS".............395
+
+ "MORNING DAWNED"..............................396
+
+ "THE HALL WAS FULL"...........................398
+
+ "STRANGE IMAGES ROSE IN HIS BRAIN"...........400
+
+ BENAC A HERMIT................................403
+
+ BEYOND LOURDES................................404
+
+ CITY OF TORBES................................406
+
+ MEPHISTOPHELES................................411
+
+ BAGNERES DE-BIGORRE...........................412
+
+ ONE OF THE FIRST PATRONS......................419
+
+ SOCIETY.......................................420
+
+ AN OLD CAMPAIGNER.............................422
+
+ A YOUNG CAMPAIGNER............................422
+
+ A MAN OF PEACE................................422
+
+ A MODEL MAN...................................423
+
+ IN DANGER.............................:.......424
+
+ VARIOUS TOURISTS..............................428
+
+ THE LAC D'OO..................................431
+
+ TOURISTS COMME IL FAUT........................434
+
+ FAMILY TOURISTS...............................435
+
+ DINING TOURISTS...............................436
+
+ LEARNED TOURISTS..............................438
+
+ A MAN OF ESPRIT...............................444
+
+ CONNOISSEURS..................................446
+
+ BEETHOVEN.....................................447
+
+ A SERENADER...................................454
+
+ A HISTORIAN...................................456
+
+ A PROFESSIONAL CHARACTER......................458
+
+ THE PLEASURES OF WINTER.......................461
+
+ A DISCUSSION WITHIN BOUNDS....................463
+
+ HEAVEN........................................464
+
+ THE SOURCE OF THINGS..........................466
+
+ GRACE AT MEAT.................................467
+
+ THE REST OF THE WEARY.........................468
+
+ AT THE HOTEL OF THE GREAT SUN.................470
+
+ NEAR LUCHON...................................473
+
+ CHAPELLE AND LACHAUMONT.......................476
+
+ VALLEY OF LUCHON..............................481
+
+ URBS IN REVRE.................................484
+
+ HEAD-PIECE....................................485
+
+ A TALENTED FAMILY.............................487
+
+ LUCHON........................................491
+
+ BAGNERES......................................493
+
+ "ALL WAS IN HARMONY"..........................495
+
+ NEAR CASTEL-VIEIL.............................497
+
+ RUINS OF CASTEL-VIEIL.........................499
+
+ THE MALADETTA.................................503
+
+ "THESE MOUNTAIN SKELETONS"....................505
+
+ "A CLEFT IN THE ETERNAL ROCK".................507
+
+ TAIL-PIECE....................................508
+
+ HEAD-PIECE....................................509
+
+ ST. BERTRAND DE COMINGES......................510
+
+ TOULOUSE......................................512
+
+ SAINT SERININE AT TOULOUSE....................515
+
+ CHURCH OF ST. ETIENNE, TOULOUSE...............519
+
+ THE MUSEUM AT TOULOUSE........................521
+
+ DATUR HORA QUIETI.............................523
+
+
+
+TO MARCELIN.
+
+(EMILE PLANAT.)
+
+This, my dear Marcelin, is a trip to the Pyrenees; I have been there,
+and that is a praiseworthy circumstance; many writers, including some of
+the longest-winded, have described these scenes without leaving home.
+
+And yet I have serious shortcomings to confess, and am deeply humbled
+thereat. I have not been the first to scale any inaccessible mountain;
+I have broken neither leg nor arm; I have not been eaten by the bears;
+I have neither saved any English heiress from being swept away by the
+Gave, nor yet have I married one; I have not been present at a single
+duel; my experiences include no tragic encounter with brigands or
+smugglers. I have walked much, and talked a little, and now I recount
+the pleasures of my eyes and ears. What sort of a man can he be who
+comes home from a long absence bringing all his limbs with him, is not
+the least in the world a hero, and yet does not blush to confess it? In
+this book I have talked as if with thee. There is a Marcelin whom the
+public knows, a shrewd critic, a caustic wit, the lover and delineator
+of every worldly elegance; there is another Marcelin, known to but three
+or four, a learned and thoughtful man. If there are any good ideas in
+this work, half of them belong to him; to him, then, I restore them.
+
+H. TAINE.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK I. THE COAST.
+
+{003}
+
+[Illustration: 027]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I. BORDE A UX.--ROY AN.
+
+I.
+
+The river is so fine, that before going to Bayonne I have come down as
+far as Royan. Ships heavy with white sails ascend slowly on both sides
+of the boat. At each gust of wind they incline like idle birds, lifting
+their long wing and showing their black belly. They run slantwise, then
+come back; one would say that they felt the better for being in this
+great fresh-water harbor; they loiter in it and enjoy its peace after
+leaving the wrath and inclemency of the ocean. The banks, fringed with
+pale verdure, glide right and left, far away to the verge of heaven; the
+river is broad like a sea; at this distance you might think you saw two
+hedges; the trees dimly lift their delicate shapes in a robe of
+bluish gauze; here and there great pines raise their umbrellas on the
+{004}vapory horizon, where all is confused and vanishing; there is an
+inexpressible sweetness in these first hues of the timid day, softened
+still by the fog which exhales from the deep river. As for the river
+itself, its waters stretch out joyous and splendid; the rising sun pours
+upon its breast a long streamlet of gold; the breeze covers it with
+scales; its eddies stretch themselves, and tremble like an awaking
+serpent, and, when the billow heaves them, you seem to see the striped
+flanks, the taw-ney cuirass of a leviathan.
+
+Indeed, at such moments it seems that the water must live and feel; it
+has a strange look, when it comes, transparent and sombre, to stretch
+itself upon a beach of pebbles; it turns about them as if uneasy
+and irritated; it beats them with its wavelets; it covers them, then
+retires, then comes back again with a sort of languid writhing and
+mysterious lovingness; its snaky eddies, its little crests suddenly
+beaten down or broken, its wave, sloping, shining, then all at once
+blackened, resembles the flashes of passion in an impatient mother, who
+hovers incessantly and anxiously about her children, and covers them,
+not knowing what she wants and what fears. Presently a cloud has covered
+the heavens, and the wind has risen. In a moment the river has assumed
+the aspect of a crafty and savage animal. It hollowed itself, and
+{005}showed its livid belly; it came against the keel with convulsive
+starts, hugged it, and dashed against it, as if to try its force; as far
+as one could see, its waves lifted themselves and crowded together, like
+the muscles upon a chest; over the flank of the waves passed flashes
+with sinister smiles; the mast groaned, and the trees bent shivering,
+like a nerveless crowd before the wrath of a fearful beast.
+
+[Illustration: 029]
+
+Then all was hushed; the sun has burst forth, the waves were smoothed,
+you now saw only a laughing expanse; spun out over this polished back a
+thousand greenish tresses sported wantonly; the light rested on it, like
+a diaphanous mantle; it followed the supple movements and the twisting
+of those liquid arms; it folded around {006}them, behind them, its
+radiant, azure robe; it took their caprices and their mobile colors; the
+river meanwhile, slumbrous in its great, peaceful bed, was stretched out
+at the feet of the hills, which looked down upon it, like it immovable
+and eternal.
+
+[Illustration: 031]
+
+II.
+
+The boat is made fast to a boom, under a pile of white houses: it is
+Royan.
+
+Here already are the sea and the dunes; the right of the village is
+buried under a mass of sand; there are crumbling hills, little dreary
+valleys, where you are lost as if in the desert; no sound, no movement,
+no life; scanty, leafless vegetation dots the moving soil, and its
+filaments fall like sickly hairs; small shells, white and empty, cling
+to these in chaplets, and, wherever the foot is set, they crack with a
+sound like a cricket's chirp; this place is the ossuary of some wretched
+maritime tribe. One tree alone can live here, the pine, a wild creature,
+inhabitant of the forests and sterile coasts; there is a whole colony
+of them here; they crowd together fraternally, and cover the sand with
+their brown lamels; the monotonous breeze which sifts through them
+forever awakes their murmur; thus they chant in a plaintive fashion, but
+with a far softer and more harmonious voice {008} {009} than the other
+trees; this voice resembles the grating of the cicadae when in August
+they sing with all their heart among the stalks of the ripened wheat.
+
+[Illustration: 033]
+
+At the left of the village, a footpath winds to the summit of a wasted
+bank, among billows of standing grasses. The river is so broad that the
+other shore is not distinguishable. The sea, its neighbor, imparts
+its refluence; its long undulations come one after another against the
+coast, and pour their little cascades of foam upon the sand; then the
+water retires, running down the slope until it meets a new wave coming
+up which covers it; these billows are never wearied, and their come and
+go remind one of the regular {010}breathing of a slumbering child. For
+night has fallen, the tints of purple grow brown and fade away.
+The river goes to rest in the soft, vague shadow; scarcely, at long
+intervals, a remnant glimmer is reflected from a slanting wave;
+obscurity drowns everything in its vapory dust; the drowsy eye vainly
+searches in this mist some visible point, and distinguishes at last,
+like a dim star, the lighthouse of Cordouan.
+
+III.
+
+[Illustration: 034]
+
+The next evening, a fresh sea-breeze has brought us to Bordeaux. The
+enormous city heaps its monumental houses along the river like bastions;
+the red sky is embattled by their coping. They on one hand, the bridge
+on the other, protect, with a double line, the port where the vessels
+{011}are crowded together like a flock of gulls; those graceful hulls,
+those tapering masts, those sails swollen or floating, weave the
+labyrinth of their movements and forms upon the magnificent purple of
+the sunset. The sun sinks down into the midst of the river and sets it
+all ablaze; the black rigging, the round hulls, stand out against its
+conflagration, and look like jewels of jet set in gold. {012}
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II. LES LANDES.--BA YONNE.
+
+Around Bordeaux are smiling hills, varied horizons, fresh valleys,
+a river peopled by incessant navigation, a succession of cities and
+villages harmoniously planted upon the declivities or in the plains,
+everywhere the richest verdure, the luxury of nature and civilization,
+the earth and man vying with each other to enrich and decorate the
+happiest valley of France. Below Bordeaux a flat soil, marshes, sand; a
+land which goes on growing poorer, villages continually, less frequent,
+ere long the desert. I like the desert as well.
+
+Pine woods pass to the right and to the left, silent and wan.{013}{014}
+
+[Illustration: 038]
+
+{015}Each tree bears on its side the scar of wounds where the woodmen have
+set flowing the resinous blood which chokes it; the powerful liquor
+still ascends into its limbs with the sap, exhales by its slimy shoots
+and by its cleft skin; a sharp aromatic odor fills the air.
+
+Beyond, the monotonous plain of the ferns, bathed in light, stretches
+away as far as the eye can reach. Their green fans expand beneath the
+sun which colors, but does not cause them to fade. Upon the horizon a
+few scattered trees lift their slender columns. You see now and then the
+silhouette of a herdsman on his stilts, inert and standing like a sick
+heron. Wild horses are grazing half hid in the herbage. As the
+train passes, they abruptly lift their great startled eyes and stand
+motionless, uneasy at the noise that has troubled their solitude. Man
+does not fare well here,--he dies or degenerates; but it is the country
+of animals, and especially of plants. They abound in this desert,
+free, certain of living. Our pretty, cutup valleys are but poor things
+alongside of these immense spaces, leagues upon leagues of marshy or
+dry vegetation, a level country, where nature, elsewhere troubled and
+tortured by men, still vegetates as in primeval days with a calm equal
+to its grandeur. The sun needs these savannas in order properly to
+spread out its light; from the rising exhalation, you feel that the
+whole plain is {016} fermenting under its force; and the eyes filled
+by the limitless horizon divine the secret labor by which this ocean of
+rank verdure renews and nourishes itself.
+
+Night without a moon has come on. The peaceful stars shine like points
+of flame; the whole air is filled with a blue and tender light,
+which seems to sleep in the network of vapor wherein it lies. The eye
+penetrates it without apprehending anything. At long intervals, in this
+twilight, a wood confusedly marks its spot, like a rock at the bottom of
+a lake; everywhere around are vague depths, veiled and floating forms,
+indistinct and fantastic creatures melting into each other, fields that
+look like a billowy sea, clumps of trees that you might take for summer
+clouds,--the whole graceful chaos of commingled phantoms, of things of
+the night. The mind floats here as on a fleeting stream, and nothing
+seems to it real, in this dream, but the pools which reflect the stars
+and make on earth a second heaven.
+
+[Illustration: 040]
+
+{017}
+
+Bayonne is a gay city, original and half Spanish. On all sides are men
+in velvet vest and small-clothes; you hear the sharp, sonorous music
+of the tongue spoken beyond the mountains. Squatty arcades border the
+principal streets; there is need of shade under such a sun.
+
+A pretty episcopal palace, in its modern elegance, makes the ugly
+cathedral still uglier. The poor, abortive monument piteously lifts its
+belfry, that for three centuries has remained but a stump. Booths are
+stuck in its hollows, after the manner of warts; here and there they
+have laid on a rude plaster of stone. The old invalid is a sad spectacle
+alongside of the new houses and busy shops which crowd around its grimy
+flanks. {018}I was quite troubled at this decrepitude, and when once
+I had entered, I became still more melancholy. Darkness fell from the
+vault like a winding-sheet; I could make out nothing but o o worm-eaten
+pillars, smoke-darkened pictures, expanses of greenish wall. Two fresh
+toilettes that I met increased the contrast; nothing could shock one
+more in this place than rose-colored ribbons.
+
+I was looking upon the spectre of the middle ages; how opposed to it are
+the security and abundance of modern life! Those sombre vaults, those
+slender columns, those rose windows, blood-dyed, called up dreams and
+emotions which are now impossible for us. You should feel here what men
+felt six hundred years ago, when they swarmed forth from their hovels,
+from their unpaved, six-feet-wide streets, sinks of uncleanness, and
+reeking with fever and leprosy; when their unclad bodies, undermined by
+famine, sent a thin blood to their brutish brains; when wars, atrocious
+laws, and legends of sorcery filled their dreams with vivid and
+melancholy images; when over the bedizened draperies, over the riddles
+of painted glass, the rose windows, like a conflagration or an aureole,
+poured their transfigured rays.
+
+These are the remembrances of fever and ecstasy: to get rid of them I
+have come out to the port; it is a long alley of old trees at the side
+of {019}the Adour. Here all is gay and picturesque. Serious oxen, with
+lowered heads, drag the beams that are being unloaded. Rope-makers, girt
+with a wisp of hemp, walk backward tightening their threads, and twining
+their ever-growing cable. The ships in file are made fast at the quay;
+the slender cordage outlines its labyrinth against the sky, and the
+sailors hang in it hooked on like spiders in their web. Great casks,
+bales, pieces of wood are strewn pell-mell over the flags.
+
+[Illustration: 43]
+
+You are pleased to feel that man is working and prosperous. And here
+nature too is as happy as man. The broad silver river unrolls itself
+under the radiance of the morning. Slender clouds throw out on the azure
+their band of mother-of-pearl. The sky is like an arch of lapis-lazuli.
+Its vault rests on the confines of the flood which advances waveless and
+effortless, under the glitter of its peaceful undulations, between two
+ranges of declivity, {020}away to a hill where pine-woods of a tender
+green slope down to meet it, as graceful as itself. The tide meanwhile
+rises, and the leaves on the oaks begin to shine, and to whisper under
+the feeble wind off the sea.
+
+III.
+
+It rains: the inn is insupportable. It is stifling under the arcades; I
+am bored at the cafe, and am acquainted with nobody. The sole resource
+is to go to the library. That is closed.
+
+Fortunately the librarian takes pity on me, and opens for me. Better
+yet, he brings me all sorts of charters and old books; he is both very
+learned and very amiable, explains everything to me, guides, informs
+and installs me. Here I am then in a corner, alone at a table, with the
+documents of a fine and thoroughly enjoyable history; it is a pastoral
+of the middle ages. I have nothing better to do than to tell it over for
+my own benefit.
+
+Pe de Puyane was a brave man and a skilful sailor, who in his day was
+Mayor of Bayonne and admiral; but he was harsh with his men, like all
+who have managed vessels, and would any day rather fell a man than take
+off his cap. He had long waged war against the seamen of Normandy, and
+on one occasion he hung seventy of them to his yards, cheek {021}by jowl
+with some dogs. He hoisted on his galleys red flags signifying death
+and no quarter, and led to the battle of Ecluse the great Genoese ship
+_Christophle_, and managed his hands so well that no Frenchman escaped;
+for they were all drowned or killed, and the two admirals, Quieret and
+Bahuchet, having surrendered themselves, Bahuchet had a cord tightened
+around his neck, while Quieret had his throat cut. That was good
+management; for the more one kills of his enemies, the less he has of
+them. For this reason, the people of Bayonne, on his return, entertained
+him with such a noise, such a clatter of horns, of cornets, of drums and
+all sorts of instruments, that it would have been impossible on that day
+to hear even the thunder of God.
+
+It happened that the Basques would no longer pay the tax upon cider,
+which was brewed at Bayonne for sale in their country. Pe de Puyane said
+that the merchants of the city should carry them no more, and that, if
+any one carried them any, he should have his hand cut off. Pierre Cambo,
+indeed, a poor man, having carted two hogsheads of it by night, was led
+out upon the market-place, before Notre Dame de Saint-Leon, which was
+then building, and had his hand amputated, and the veins afterwards
+stopped with red-hot irons; after that he was driven in a tumbrel
+throughout the city, {022}which was an excellent example; for the
+smaller folk should always do the bidding of men in high position.
+
+[Illustration: 046]
+
+Afterwards, Pe de Puyane having assembled the hundred peers in the
+town-house, showed them that the Basques being traitors, rebels toward
+the seigniory of Bayonne, should no longer keep the franchises which
+had been granted them; that the seigniory of Bayonne, possessing the
+sovereignty of the sea, might with justice impose a tax in all the
+places to which the sea rose, as if they were in its port, and that
+accordingly the Basques should henceforth {023}pay for passing to
+Villefranche, to the bridge of the Nive, the limit of high tide. All
+cried out that that was but just, and Pe de Puyane declared the toll to
+the Basques; but they all fell to laughing, saying they were not dogs of
+sailors like the mayor's subjects. Then having come in force, they beat
+the bridgemen, and left three of them for dead.
+
+Pe said nothing, for he was no great talker; but he clinched his teeth,
+and looked so terribly around him, that none dared ask him what he would
+do, nor urge him on, nor indeed breathe a word. From the first Saturday
+in April to the middle of August, several men were beaten, as well
+Bayonnais as Basques, but still war was not declared, and, when they
+talked of it to the mayor, he turned his back.
+
+The twenty-fourth day of August, many noblemen among the Basques, and
+several young people, good leapers and dancers, came to the castle of
+Miot for the festival of Saint Bartholomew. They feasted and showed off
+the whole day, and the young people who jumped the pole, with their red
+sashes and white breeches, appeared adroit and handsome. That night came
+a man who talked low to the mayor, and he, who ordinarily wore a grave
+and judicial air, suddenly had eyes as bright as those of a youth who
+sees the coming of his bride. He went down his staircase with four
+bounds, led out a band of old sailors who were come one by one,
+covertly, {024}into the lower hall, and set out by dark night with
+several of the wardens, having closed the gates of the city for fear
+that some traitor, such as there are everywhere, should go before them.
+
+Having arrived at the castle they found the drawbridge down and the
+postern open, so confident and unsuspecting were the Basques, and
+entered, cutlasses drawn and pikes forward, into the great hall. There
+were killed seven young men who had barricaded themselves behind tables,
+and would there make sport with their dirks; but the good halberds, well
+pointed and sharp as they were, soon silenced them. The others, having
+closed the gates from within, thought that they would have power to
+defend themselves or time to flee; but the Bayonne marines, with their
+great axes, hewed down the planks, and split the first brains which
+happened to be near. The mayor, seeing that the Basques were tightly
+girt with their red sashes, went about saying (for he was usually
+facetious on days of battle): "Lard these fine gallants for me; forward
+the spit into their flesh justicoats;" and in fact the spits went
+forward, so that all were perforated and opened, some through and
+through, so that you might have seen daylight through them, and that the
+hall half an hour after was full of pale and red bodies, several bent
+over benches, others in a pile in the corners, some with their noses
+glued to the table like drunkards, {025} so that a Bayonnais, looking
+at them, said: "This is the veal market." Many, pricked from behind, had
+leaped through the windows, and were found next morning, with cleft head
+or broken spine, in the ditches.
+
+[Illustration: 049]
+
+There remained only five men alive, noblemen, two named d'Urtubie,
+two de Saint-Pe, and one, de Lahet, whom the mayor had set aside as
+a precious commodity; then, having sent some one to open the gates of
+Bayonne and command the people to come, he ordered them to set fire to
+the castle. It was a fine sight, for the castle burned from midnight
+until morning; as each turret, wall or floor fell, the people,
+delighted, raised a great shout. {026}There were volleys of sparks in
+the smoke and flames that stopped short, then began again suddenly, as
+at public rejoicings; so that the warden, an honorable advocate, and
+a great literary man, uttered this saying: "Fine festival for Bayonne
+folk; for the Basques great barbecue of hogs."
+
+The castle being burned, the mayor said to the five noblemen that he
+wished to deal with them with all friendliness, and that they should
+themselves be judges, if the tide came as far as the bridge; then he
+had them fastened two by two to the arches until the tide should rise,
+assuring them that they were in a good place for seeing. The people
+were all on the bridge and along the banks, watching the swelling of
+the flood. Little by little it mounted to their breasts, then to their
+necks, and they threw back their heads so as to lift their mouths a
+little higher. The people laughed aloud, calling out to them that the
+time for drinking had come, as with the monks at matins, and that they
+would have enough for the rest of their days. Then the water entered the
+mouth and nose of the three who were lowest; their throats gurgled
+as when bottles are filled, and the people applauded, saying that the
+drunkards swallowed too fast, and were going to strangle themselves out
+of pure greediness. There remained only the two men, {027}d'Urtubie,
+bound to the principal arch, father and son, the son a little lower
+down. When the father saw his child choking, he stretched out his arms
+with such force that a cord broke: but that was all, and the hemp cut
+into his flesh without his being able to get any further. Those above,
+seeing that the youth's eyes were rolling, while the veins on his
+forehead were purple and swollen, and that the water bubbled around him
+with his hiccough, called him baby, and asked why he had sucked so hard,
+and if nurse was not coming soon to put him to bed. At this the father
+cried out like a wolf, spat into the air at them, and called them
+butchers and cowards. That offended them so that they began throwing
+stones at him with such sure aim that his white head was soon reddened
+and his right eye gushed out; it was small loss to him, for shortly
+after, the mounting wave shut up the other. When the water was gone
+down, the mayor commanded that the five bodies, which hung with necks
+twisted and limp, should be left a testimony to the Basques that the
+water of Bayonne did come up to the bridge, and that the toll was justly
+due from them. He then returned home amidst the acclamations of his
+people, who were delighted that they had so good a mayor, a sensible
+man, a great lover of justice, quick in wise enterprises, and who
+rendered to every man his due. {028}.
+
+As he was setting out, he had put sixty men at the entrance of
+the bridge, in the toll-tower, ordering them to look out well for
+themselves, and warning them that the Basques would not be slow in
+seeking to avenge themselves. But they flattered themselves that
+they still had at least one good night, and they busied their throats
+mightily with emptying flagons. Towards the middle of the night, there
+being no moon, came up about two hundred Basques; for they are alert
+as the antelope,* and their runners had awakened that morning more than
+twenty villages in the Soule with the story of fire and drowning. The
+younger men, with several older heads, had set out forthwith by crooked
+circuitous paths, barefoot, that they might make no noise, well armed
+with cutlasses, crampoons and several slender rope-ladders; and, adroit
+as foxes, they had stolen to the base of the tower, to a place on the
+eastern side where it plunges straight down to the bed of the river, a
+real quagmire, so that here there was no guard, and the rolling of the
+water on the pebbles might drown their slight noise, should they make
+any. They fixed their crampoons in the crannies of the stones, and,
+little by little, Jean Amacho, a man from Behobie, a noted hunter
+of{029}mountain beasts, climbed upon the battlements of the first wall,
+then, having steadied a pole against a window of the tower, he entered
+and hooked on two ladders; the others mounted in their turn, until there
+were about fifty of them; and new men were constantly coming, as many as
+the ladders would bear, noiselessly striding over the window-sill.
+
+ * Alertes comme des izards--The isard, or y'sard, is the
+ chamois-antelope of the Pyrenees, often called a chamois.--
+ Translator.
+
+They were in a little, low ante-room, and from thence, in the great hall
+of the first floor, six steps below them, they beheld the Bayonnais, of
+whom there were but three in this place, two asleep, and a third who
+had just waked up and was rubbing his eyes, with his back turned to the
+small door of the ante-room. Jean Amacho gave a sign to the two men who
+had mounted immediately after him, and all jumped together with a single
+leap, and so nicely that, at the same moment, their three knives pierced
+the throats of the Bayonnais, who, bowing their limbs, sank without a
+cry to the ground. The other Basques then came in, and waited at the
+verge of the great balustraded staircase leading into the lower hall
+where were the Bayonnais, some in a heap sleeping near the fireplace,
+others calling out and sharpset at feasting.
+
+One of these feeling that his hair was moist, lifted his head, saw some
+little red streams running from between the joists of the ceiling,
+and began to laugh, saying that the greedy fellows up there could no
+{030}longer hold their cups, and were wasting good wine, which was very
+wrong of them. But finding that this wine was quite warm, he took some
+on his finger, then touched his tongue, and saw, by the insipid taste,
+that it was blood. He proclaimed this aloud, and the Bayonnais starting
+up grasped their pikes and ran for the staircase. Thereupon the Basques
+who had waited, not being sufficiently numerous, wished to recover the
+moment and rushed forth; but the first comers felt the point of the
+pikes, and were lifted, just as bundles of hay are spitted on the forks
+to be thrown into a loft; then the Bayonnais, holding themselves close
+together, and bristling in front with pikes, began to mount.
+
+Just then a valiant Basque, Antoine Chaho, and two others with him,
+dropped down along the wall, lizard fashion, making a cover of dead
+bodies; and gliding between the great legs of the sailors of Bayonne,
+began work with their knives upon their hamstrings; so that the
+Bayonnais, wedged in the stairway, and embarrassed by the men and the
+pikes that were falling crosswise, could neither get on nor wield their
+spits with such nicety. At this moment, Jean Amacho and several young
+Basques, having espied their moment, leaped more than twenty feet clear
+into the middle of the hall, to a place where no halberds were ready,
+and began cutting throats with great promptness, then, thrown upon their
+{031}knees, fell to ripping open bellies; they killed far more than they
+lost, because they had deft hands, while many were well padded with wool
+and wore leather shirts, and besides, the handles to their knives were
+wound with cord and did not slip. Moreover the Basques from above,
+who now numbered more than a hundred, rolled down the staircase like a
+torrent of goats; new ones came up every moment, and in every corner of
+the hall, man to man, they began to run each other through.
+
+There died Jean Amacho in a sad enough fashion, and from no fault of his
+own; for after he had cut the throat of a Bayonnais,--his ordinary mode
+of killing, and, indeed, the best of all,--he held his head too near,
+and the jet from the two great veins of the neck spirted into his face
+like the froth from a jar of perry as it is uncorked, and suddenly shut
+up both his eyes; accordingly he was unable to avoid a Bayonnais who was
+at his left; the fellow planted his dagger in Jean's back, who spit out
+blood, and died a minute after.
+
+But the Bayonnais, who were less numerous and less adroit, could make
+no stand, and at the end of half an hour there remained only a dozen of
+them, driven into a corner near a little cellar where were kept the jugs
+and bottles. In order the sooner to reduce these, the Basques gathered
+together the pikes, and began driving through this heap of men; {032}and
+the Bayonnais, as anybody will on feeling an iron point prick through
+his skin, stepped back and rolled together into the cellar. Just at this
+moment the torches went out, and the Basques, in order not to wound
+each other, dressed the whole armful of pikes, and harpooned at random
+forward into the cellar during more than a quarter of an hour, so as
+to make sure that no Bayonnais remained alive; and thus, when all was
+become tranquil, and the torches were relighted, and they looked in,
+they saw that the cellar resembled a pork-butcher's chopping-block, the
+bodies being cut in twenty places, and separated from their heads, and
+the limbs being confusedly thrown together, till only salt was wanting
+to make a salting-tub of the place.
+
+But the younger of the Basques, although there was nothing more to kill,
+rolled their eyes all around the hall, grinding their teeth like hounds
+after the quarry; they cried aloud continually, trembling in their limbs
+and clenching their fingers after the handles of their daggers; several,
+wounded and whitelipped, no longer felt their wounds or their loss of
+blood, remained crouching beside the man they had last killed, and then
+involuntarily leaped to their feet. One or two laughed with the fixity
+of madmen, and varied this with a hoarse roar; and there was in the room
+such a mist of carnage that any one seeing {033}them reeling or howling
+thus, might have believed them drunk with wine.
+
+At sunrise, when they had loosed the five drowned men from the arches,
+they cast all the Bayonnais upon the current of the stream, and said
+that they might go down thus to their sea, and that this cartful of dead
+flesh was such toll as the Basques would pay. The congealed wounds were
+opened again by the coldness of the water; it was a fine sight: by means
+of the blood that flowed, the river blushed red as a morning sky.
+
+After this the Basques and the men of Bayonne fought several years more,
+man against man, band against band; and many brave men died on both
+sides. At the end, the two parties agreed to submit to the arbitration
+of Bernard Ezi, _Sire d'Albret._ The lord of Albret said that the men
+of Bayonne, since they had made the first attack, were in fault; he
+ordained that in future the Basques should pay no toll, that, on the
+contrary, the city of Bayonne should pay them fifteen hundred new golden
+crowns and should establish ten priestly prebendaryships, which should
+cost four thousand old crowns of the first coinage of France, of good
+gold and loyal weight, for the repose of the souls of the five gentlemen
+drowned without confession, which, perchance, were in purgatory, and
+had need of many masses in order to get out. But the Basques {034}were
+unwilling that Pe de Puyane, the mayor, should be included in this
+peace, either he or his sons, and they reserved the right to pursue
+them until they had taken vengeance on his flesh and his race. The mayor
+retired to Bordeaux, to the house of the Prince of Wales, of whom he
+was a great friend and good servant, and during two o o years did not
+go outside of the city, excepting three or four times, well steeled, and
+attended by men-at-arms. But one day, when he had gone to see a vineyard
+he had bought, he withdrew a little from his troop to lift a great black
+vine-stock which was falling into the ditch; a moment after, his men
+heard a little sharp cry, like that of a thrush caught in a snare; when
+they had run up they saw Pe de Puyane dead, with a knife a fathom long
+which had entered by the armpit where he was unprotected by his cuirass.
+His elder son, Sebastian, who had fled to Toulouse, was killed by
+Augustin de Lahet, nephew of the man who was drowned; the other, Hugues,
+survived and founded a family, since, having gone by sea to England,
+he remained there, and received from King Edward a knight's fief. But
+neither he nor his children ever returned into Gascony; they did wisely,
+for they would have found their grave-diggers there. {035}
+
+[Illustration: 059]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III. BIARRITZ.--SAINT-JEAN-DE-LUZ.
+
+I.
+
+Half a league off, at the turning of a road, may be seen a hill of a
+singular blue: it is the sea. Then you descend, by a winding route, to
+the village.
+
+A melancholy village, with the taint of hotels, white and regular, cafes
+and signs, ranged by stages upon the arid coast; for grass, patches of
+poor starveling turf; for trees, frail tamarisks which cling shivering
+to the earth; for harbor, a beach and two empty creeks. The smaller
+conceals in its sandy recess two barks without masts, without sails, to
+all appearance abandoned.
+
+The waters consume the coast; great pieces of earth and stone, hardened
+by their shock, fifty feet away from the shore, lift their brown and
+yellow spine, worn, raked, gnawed, jagged, scooped out {036}by the wave,
+resembling a troop of stranded whales. The billow barks or bellows in
+their hollow bowels, in their deep yawning jaws; then, after they have
+engulfed it, they vomit it forth in jets and foam against the lofty
+shining waves that forever return to the assault. Shells and polished
+pebbles are incrusted upon their head. Here furzes have rooted their
+patient stems and the confusion of their thorns; this hairy mantle is
+the only one capable of clinging to their flanks, and of standing out
+against the spray of the sea.
+
+[Illustration: 060]
+
+To the left, a train of ploughed and emaciated rocks stretches out in
+a promontory as far as an {037}arcade of hardened beach, which the high
+tides have opened, and whence on three sides the eye looks down upon the
+ocean. Under the whistling north wind it bristles with violet waves; the
+passing clouds marble it with still more sombre spots; as far as the eye
+can reach is a sickly agitation of wan waves, chopping and disjointed,
+a sort of moving skin that trembles, wrenched by an inward fever;
+occasionally a streak of foam crossing them marks a more violent shock.
+Here and there, between the intervals of the clouds, the light cuts out
+a few sea-green fields upon the uniform plain; their tawny lustre,
+their unhealthy color, add to the strangeness and to the limits of the
+horizon. These sinister changing lights, these tin-like reflections upon
+a leaden swell, these white scoriae clinging to the rocks, this slimy
+aspect of the waves suggest a gigantic crucible in which the metal
+bubbles and gleams.
+
+But toward evening the air clears up and the wind falls. The Spanish
+coast is visible, and its chain of mountains softened by distance. The
+long dentation undulates away out of sight, and its misty pyramids at
+the last vanish in the west, between the sky and the ocean. The sea
+smiles in its blue robe, fringed with silver, wrinkled by the last puff
+of the breeze; it trembles still, but with pleasure, and spreads out its
+lustrous, many-hued silk, {038}with voluptuous caprices beneath the sun
+that warms it. Meanwhile a few serene clouds poise above it their down
+of snow; the transparency of the air bathes them in angelic glory, and
+their motionless flight suggests the souls in Dante stayed in ecstasy at
+the entrance of paradise.
+
+It is night; I have come up to a solitary esplanade where is a cross,
+and whence is visible the sea and the coast. The coast, black, sprinkled
+with lights, sinks and rises in indistinct hillocks. The sea mutters and
+rolls with hollow voice. Occasionally, in the midst of this threatening
+breathing comes a hoarse hiccough, as if the slumbering wild beast were
+waking up; you cannot make it out, but from a nameless something that
+is sombre and moving, you divine a monstrous, palpitating back; in its
+presence man is like a child before the lair of a leviathan. Who assures
+us that it will continue to tolerate us to-morrow? On land we feel
+ourselves master; there our hand finds everywhere its traces; it has
+transformed everything and put everything to its service; the soil
+now-a-days is a kitchen-garden, the forests a grove, the rivers
+trenches, Nature is a nurse and a servant. But here still exists
+something ferocious and untamable. The ocean has preserved its liberty
+and its omnipotence; one of its billows would drown our hive; over
+there in America its bed lifts itself; it will {039}crush us without a
+thought; it has done it and will do it again; just now it slumbers, and
+we live clinging to its flank without dreaming that it sometimes wants
+to turn itself about.
+
+[Illustration: 063]
+
+
+II. {040}
+
+There is a light-house to the north of the village, an esplanade of
+beach and prickly plants. Vegetation here is as rough as the ocean.
+
+[Illustration: 064]
+
+Do not look to the left; the pickets of soldiers, the huts of the
+bathers, the ennuyes, the children, the invalids, the drying linen, it
+is all as melancholy as a caserne and a hospital. But at the foot of the
+light-house the beautiful green waves hollow themselves and scale the
+rocks, scattering upon the wind their plume of foam; the billows come
+up to the assault and mount one upon another, as agile and hardy as
+charging horsemen; the caverns rumble; the breeze whispers with a happy
+sound; it enters the breast and expands the muscles; you fill your lungs
+with the invigorating saltness of the sea. {041}Farther on, ascending
+towards the north, are paths creeping along the cliffs. At the bottom of
+the last, solitude opens out; everything human has disappeared; neither
+houses, nor culture, nor verdure. It is here as in the first ages, at a
+time when man had not yet appeared, and when the water, the stone, and
+the sand were the sole inhabitants of the universe. The coast stretches
+into the vapor its long strip of polished sand; the gilded beach
+undulates softly and opens its hollows to the ripples of the sea. Each
+ripple comes up foamy at first, then insensibly smooths itself, leaves
+behind it the flocks of its white fleece, and goes to sleep upon the
+shore it has kissed. Meanwhile another approaches, and beyond that again
+a new one, then a whole troop, striping the bluish water with embroidery
+of silver. They whisper low, and you scarcely hear them under the outcry
+of the distant billows; nowhere is the beach so sweet, so smiling--the
+land softens its embrace the better to receive and caress those darling
+creatures, which are, as it were, the little children of the sea.
+
+III.
+
+It has rained all night; but this morning a brisk wind has dried the
+earth; and I have come along the coast to Saint-Jean-de-Luz. {042}
+
+[Illustration: 066]
+
+Everywhere the wasted cliffs drop perpendicularly down; dreary hillocks,
+crumbling sand; miserable grasses that strike their filaments into the
+moving soil; streamlets that vainly wind and are choked, pushed back
+by the sea; tortured inlets, and naked strands. The ocean tears and
+depopulates its beach. Everything suffers from the neighborhood of the
+old tyrant. As you contemplate here its aspect and its work, the antique
+superstitions seem true. It is a melancholy and hostile god, forever
+thundering, sinister, sudden in caprice, whom nothing appeases, nothing
+subdues, who chafes at being kept back from the land, {043}embraces it
+impatiently, feels it and shakes it, and to-morrow may recapture it
+or break it in pieces. Its violent waves start convulsively and twist
+themselves, clashing like the heads of a great troop of wild horses;
+a sort of grizzling mane streams on the edge of the black horizon; the
+gulls scream; they are seen darting down into the valley that is scooped
+out between two surges, then reappearing; they turn and look strangely
+at you with their pale eyes. One would say that they are delighted with
+this tumult and are awaiting a prey.
+
+A little farther on, a poor hut hides itself in a bay. Three children
+ragged, with naked legs, were playing there in a stream that was
+overflown. A great moth, clogged by the rain, had fallen into a hole.
+They conducted the water to it with their feet, and dabbled in the cold
+mud; the rain fell in showers on the poor creature, which vainly beat
+its wings; they laughed boisterously, stumbling about and holding on to
+each other with their red hands. At that age and amidst such privation
+nothing more was wanting to make them happy.
+
+The road ascends and descends, winding on high hills which denote the
+neighborhood of the Pyrenees. The sea reappears at each turn, and it is
+a singular spectacle, this suddenly lowered horizon, and that greenish
+triangle broadening toward {044}heaven. Two or three villages stretch
+along the route, their houses dropping down the heights like flights of
+stairs. From the white houses the women come out in black gown and veil
+to go to mass. The sombre color announces Spain. The men, in velvet
+vests, crowd to the public house and drink coffee in silence. Poor
+houses, a poor country; under a shed I have seen them cooking, in the
+guise of bread, cakes of maize and barley. This destitution is always
+touching. What is it that a day-laborer has gained by our thirty
+centuries of civilization? Yet he has gained, and when we accuse
+ourselves, it is because we forget history. He no longer has the
+small-pox, or the leprosy; he no longer dies of hunger, as in the
+sixteenth century, under Montluc; he is no longer burned as a witch, as
+happened indeed under Henry IV. here in this very place; he can, if he
+is a soldier, learn to read, become an officer; he has coffee, sugar,
+linen. Our descendants will say that that is but little; our fathers
+would have said that it is a good deal.
+
+St. Jean-de-Luz is a little old city with narrow streets, to-day silent
+and decaying; its mariners once fought the Normans for the king
+of England; thirty or forty ships went out every year for the
+whale-fishery. Now-a-days the harbor is empty; this terrible Biscayan
+sea has thrice broken down its dike. Against this roaring surge, heaped
+up all {045}the way from America, no work of man holds out. The water
+was engulfed in the channel and came like a race-horse high as the
+quays, lashing the bridges, shaking its crests, grooving its wave; then
+it thundered heavily into the basins, sometimes with leaps so abrupt
+that it fell over the parapets like a mill-dam, and flooded the lower
+part of the houses. One poor boat danced in a corner at the end of a
+rope; no seamen, no rigging, no cordage; such is this celebrated harbor.
+They say, however, that half a league away, there are five or six barks
+in a creek.
+
+[Illustration: 069]
+
+From the dike the tumult of the high tide was visible. A massive wall of
+black clouds girt the horizon; the sun blazed through a crevice like a
+fire through the mouth of a furnace, and overflowed {046}upon the billow
+its conflagration of ferruginous flames. The sea leaped like a maniac
+at the entrance of the harbor, smitten by a band of invisible rocks, and
+joined with its white line the two horns of the coast. The waves came
+up fifteen feet high against the beach, then, undermined by the falling
+water, fell head foremost, desperate, with frightful howling; they
+returned however to the assault, and mounted each minute higher, leaving
+on the beach their carpet of snowy foam, and fleeing with the slight
+shivering of a swarm of ants foraging among dry leaves. Finally one of
+them came wetting the feet of the men who were watching from the top of
+the dike. Happily, it was the last; the city is twenty feet below, and
+would be only a mass of ruins if some great tide were urged on by a
+hurricane.
+
+[Illustration: 070]
+
+
+IV. {047}
+
+A noble hotel, with broad halls, and grand antique apartments, displays
+itself at the corner of the first basin facing the sea. Anne of Austria
+lodged there in 1660, at the time of the marriage of Louis XIV.
+
+[Illustration: 071]
+
+Above a chimney is still to be seen the portrait of a princess in the
+garb of a goddess. Were they not goddesses? A tapestried bridge went
+from this house to the little church, sombre and splendid, traversed by
+balconies of black oak, and {048}loaded with glittering reliquaries. The
+married pair passed through it between two hedges of Swiss and bedizened
+guards, the king all embroidered with gold, with a hat ornamented
+with diamonds; the queen in a mantle of violet velvet sprinkled with
+fleur-de-lis, and, underneath, a habit of white brocade studded with
+precious stones, a crown upon her head.
+
+[Illustration: 072]
+
+There was nothing but processions, entries, pomps and parades. Who of us
+now-a-days would wish to be a grand seigneur on condition of performing
+at this rate? The weariness {049}of rank would do away with the
+pleasures of rank; one would lose all patience at being an embroidered
+manikin, always exposed to public view and on exhibition. Then, that was
+the whole of life. When M. de Crequi was going to carry to the infanta
+the presents of the king, "he had sixty persons in livery in his suite,
+with a great number of noblemen and many friends."
+
+[Illustration: 073]
+
+The eyes took delight in this splendor. Pride was more akin to vanity,
+enjoyments were more on the surface. They needed to display their
+power in order to feel it. The courtly life had applied the mind to
+ceremonies. They {050}learned to dance, as now-a-days to reflect; they
+passed whole years at the academy; they studied with extreme seriousness
+and attention the art of bowing, of advancing the foot, of holding
+themselves erect, of playing with the sword, of setting the cane
+properly; the obligation of living in public constrained them to it; it
+was the sign of their rank and education; they proved in this way their
+alliances, their world, their place with the king, their title. Better
+yet, it was the poetry of the time. A fine manner of bowing is a fine
+thing; it recalled a thousand souvenirs of authority and of ease, just
+as in Greece an attitude recalled a thousand souvenirs of war and the
+gymnasium; a slight inclination of the neck, a limb nobly extended, a
+smile complaisant and calm, an ample trailing petticoat with majestic
+folds, filled the soul with lofty and courtly thoughts, and these great
+lords were the first to enjoy the spectacle they afforded. "I went
+to carry my offering," said Mlle. de Montpensier, "and performed my
+_reverences_ as did no one else of the company; I found myself suitable
+enough for ceremonial days; my person held its place there as my name in
+the world." These words explain the infinite attention that was given to
+questions of precedence and to ceremonies; Mademoiselle is inexhaustible
+on this point; she talks like an upholsterer and a chamberlain; she is
+{051}uneasy to know at what precise moment the Spanish grandees take off
+their hats; if the king of Spain will kiss the queen-mother or will only
+embrace her: these important interests trouble her. In fact, at that
+time they were important interests. Rank did not depend, as in a
+democracy, upon proved worth, on acquired glory, on power exercised
+or riches displayed, but upon visible prerogatives transmitted by
+inheritance or granted by the king: so that they fought for a tabouret
+or a mantle, as now-a-days for a place or for a million. Among other
+treacheries they plotted to lodge Mademoiselle's sisters with the queen.
+"The proposition displeased me; they would have eaten with her always,
+which I did not. That roused my pride. I was desperate at that moment."
+The warfare was yet greater when it came to the marriage. "It occurred
+to somebody that it was necessary to carry an offering to the queen, so
+I could not bear her train, and it must be my sisters who would carry it
+with Mme. de Carignan. As soon as there was talk of bearing trains, the
+Duke de Roquelaure had offered to carry mine. They sought for dukes to
+carry those of my sisters, and, as not one was willing to do it, Mme.
+de Saugeon cried aloud that Madame would be in despair at this
+distinction." What happiness to walk first upon the tapestried bridge,
+the train held up by a duke, while, the {052}others go shamefully
+behind, with a train, but without a duke! But suddenly others put in a
+claim. Mme. d'Uzes comes running up in a fright: it is question of an
+atrocious usurpation. "The princess palatine will have a train; will you
+not put a stop to that?" They get together; they go to the king; they
+represent to him the enormity of the deed: the king forbids this new
+train as usurping and criminal, and the princess, who weeps and storms,
+declares that she will not be present at the marriage if they deprive
+her of her appendix. Alas! all human prosperity has its reverses;
+Mademoiselle, so happy in the matter of trains, could not get to kiss
+the queen, and, at this interdict, she remained all day plunged in
+the deepest grief. But, you see, the pursuits of rank had been, from
+infancy, her sole concern; she had wanted to marry all the princes in
+the world, and ever in vain; the person mattered little to her. First
+the cardinal infante, the reverse of an Amadis; at the age of dreams, on
+the threshold of youth, among the vague visions and first enchantments
+of love, she chose this old churl in a ruff to enthrone herself with
+him, in a fine arm-chair, in the government of the Low Countries. Then
+Philip IV. of Spain; the emperor Ferdinand, the arch-duke: negotiating
+with them herself, exposing her envoy to the risk of hanging. Then the
+king of Hungary, the future king of {053}England, Louis XIV., Monsieur,
+the king of Portugal.
+
+[Illustration: 77]
+
+Who could count them? At a pinch, she went to work in advance: the
+princess of Conde being ill, then in the family way, this romantic head
+fancied that the prince was going to become a widower, and wanted to
+retain him for a husband. No one took this hand that she had stretched
+to all Europe. In vain she fired cannon in the Fronde; she remained
+to the end an adventuress, a state puppet, a weathercock, occasionally
+exiled, twenty times a widow, but always before the wedding, carrying
+over the whole of France the weariness and imaginations {054}of her
+involuntary celibacy. At last Lauzun appeared; to marry her, and
+secretly at that, cost him the half of his wealth; the king drew the
+dowry of his bastard from the misalliance of his cousin. It was an
+exemplary household: she scratched him: he beat her.--We laugh at
+these pretensions and bickerings, at these mischances and aristocratic
+quarrels; our turn will come, rest assured of that; our democracy too
+affords matter of laughter: our black coat is, like their embroidered
+coat, laced with the ridiculous; we have envy, melancholy, the want of
+moderation and of politeness, the heroes of George Sand, of Victor Hugo
+and of Balzac. In fact, what does it matter?
+
+"Sifflez-moi librement; je vous le rends, mes freres." So talked
+Voltaire, who gave to all the world at once the charter of equality and
+gayety.
+
+[Illustration: 78]
+
+
+
+
+BOOK II. THE VALLEY OF OSSA
+
+{057}
+
+[Illustration: 81]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I. DAX.--ORTHEZ.
+
+I.
+
+I saw Dax in passing, and I recall only two rows of white walls of
+staring brightness, into which low doorways here and there sank their
+black arches with a strange relief. An old and thoroughly forbidding
+cathedral bristled its bell-turrets and dentations in the midst of the
+pomp of nature and the joyousness of the light, as if the soil, burst
+open, had once put forth out of its lava a heap of crystallized sulphur.
+
+The postilion, a good fellow, takes up a poor woman on the way, and
+sets her beside him on his seat. What gay people! They sing in
+patois,--there, they are singing now. The conductor joins {058}in, then
+one of the people in the imperiale. They laugh with their whole heart;
+their eyes sparkle. How far we are from the north! In all these southern
+folk there is _verve_; occasionally poverty, fatigue, anxiety crush
+it; at the least opening, it Gushes forth like living water in full
+sunlight.
+
+This poor woman amuses me. She is fifty years old, without shoes,
+garments in shreds, and not a sou in her pocket. She talks familiarly
+with a stout, well-dressed gentleman, who is behind her. No humility;
+she believes herself the equal of the whole world. Gayety is like a
+spring rendering the soul elastic; the people bend but rise again. An
+Englishman would be scandalized. Several of them have said to me that
+the French nation have no sentiment of respect. That is why we no longer
+have an aristocracy.
+
+[Illustration: 83]
+
+The chain of the mountains undulates to the left, bluish and like a
+long stratum of clouds. The rich valley resembles a great basin full to
+overflowing of fruit-trees and maize. White clouds hover slowly in the
+depths of heaven, like a flock of tranquil swans. The eye rests on the
+down of their sides, and turns with pleasure upon the roundness of their
+noble forms. They sail in a troop, carried on by the south wind, with an
+even flight, like a family of blissful gods, and from up above they seem
+to look with tenderness upon the beautiful earth which they protect and
+are going to nourish. {059} {060} {061}
+
+
+II.
+
+Orthez, in the fourteenth century, was a capital; of this grandeur there
+remains but the wreck: ruined walls and the high tower of the castle
+hung with ivy. The counts of Foix had there a little state, almost
+independent, proudly planted between the realms of France, England and
+Spain. The people have gained in something, I know; they no longer
+hate their neighbors, and they live at peace; they receive from Paris
+inventions and news; peace, trade and well-being are increased. They
+have, however, lost in something; instead of thirty active thinking
+capitals, there are thirty provincial cities, {062}torpid and docile.
+The women long for a hat, the men go to smoke at a cafe; that is
+their life; they scrape together a few empty old ideas from imbecile
+newspapers. In old times they had thoughts on politics and courts of
+love.
+
+
+III.
+
+[Illustration: 86]
+
+The good Froissart came here in the year 1388, having ridden and chatted
+about arms all along the route with the chevalier Messire Espaing de
+Lyon; he lodged in the inn of the Beautiful Hostess, which was then
+called the hotel of the Moon. The count Gaston Phoebus sent in all haste
+to seek him: "for he was the lord who of all the world the most gladly
+entertained the stranger in order to hear the news." Froissart passed
+twelve weeks in his hotel: "for they made him good cheer and fed well
+his horses, and in all things also ordered well."
+
+Froissart is a child, and sometimes an old child. At that time thought
+was expanding, as in Greece {063}in the time of Herodotus. But, while we
+feel that in Greece it is going on to unfold itself to the very end, we
+discover here that an obstacle checks it: there is a knot in the tree;
+the arrested sap can mount no higher. This knot is scholasticism.
+
+[Illustration: 87]
+
+For, during three centuries already they had written in verse, and for
+two centuries in prose; after this long culture, see what a historian is
+Froissart. One morning he mounts on horseback with several valets,
+under a beautiful sun, and gallops onward; {064}a lord meets him whom
+he accosts: "Sir, what is this castle?" The other tells him about the
+sieges, and what grand sword-thrusts were there exchanged. "Holy Mary,"
+cried Froissart, "but your words please me and do me a deal of good,
+while you tell them off to me! And you shall not lose them, for all
+shall be set in remembrance and chronicled in the history which I am
+pursuing." Then he has explained to himself the kindred of the seigneur,
+his alliances, how his friends and enemies have lived and are dead, and
+the whole skein of the adventures interwoven during two centuries and
+in three countries. "And as soon as I had alighted at the hotels, on the
+road that we were following together, I wrote them down, were it evening
+or morning, for the better memory of them in times to come; for there
+is no such exact retentive as writing." All is found here, the pell-mell
+and the hundred shifts of the conversations, the reflections, the
+little accidents of the journey. An old squire recounts to him mountain
+legends, how Pierre de Beam, having once killed an enormous bear,
+could no longer sleep in peace, but thenceforward he awaked each night,
+"making such a noise and such clatter that it seemed that all the devils
+in hell should have carried away everything and were inside with him."
+Froissart judges that this bear was perhaps a knight turned {065}into
+a beast for some misdeed; cites in support the story of Actaeon, an
+"accomplished and pretty knight who was changed into a stag." Thus goes
+his life and thus his history is composed; it resembles a tapestry
+of the period, brilliant and varied, full of hunting, of tournaments,
+battles and processions. He gives himself and his hearers the pleasure
+of imagining ceremonies and adventures; no other idea, or rather no
+idea. Of criticism, general considerations, reasoning upon man or
+society, counsels or forecast, there is no trace; it is a herald at arms
+who seeks to please curious eyes, the warlike spirit and the empty minds
+of robust knights, great eaters, lovers of thumps and pomps. Is it not
+strange, this barrenness of reason! In Greece, at the end of an hundred
+years, Thucydides, Plato and Xenophon, philosophy and science had
+appeared. By way of climax, read the verses of Froissart, those ballads,
+roundelays and virelays that he recited of evenings to the Count de
+Foix, "who took great solace in hearing them indeed," the old rubbish of
+decadence, worn, affected allegories, the garrulousness of a broken-down
+pedant who amuses himself in composing wearisome turns of address. And
+the rest are all alike. Charles d'Orleans has a sort of faded grace and
+nothing-more, Christine de Pisan but an official solemnity.
+
+Such feeble spirits want the force to give birth to {066}general ideas;
+they are bowed down under the weight of those which have been hooked on
+to them.
+
+[Illustration: 90]
+
+The cause is not far to seek; think of that stout cornific * doctor with
+leaden eyes, a confrere of Froissart, if you like, but how different! He
+holds in his hand his manual of canon-law, Peter the Lombard, a treatise
+on the syllogism. For ten hours a day he disputes in Baralipton on the
+_hicaeity_.
+
+ * Cornificien, a name given by Jean of Sarisberg to those
+ who disfigured dialectics by their extravagant, cornus
+ arguments.--Translator.
+
+As soon as he became hoarse, he dipped {067}his nose again into his
+yellow folio; his syllogisms and quiddities ended by making him stupid;
+he knew nothing about things or dared not consider them; he only wielded
+words, shook formulas together, bruised his own head, lost all common
+sense, and reasoned like a machine for Latin verses.* What a master for
+the sons of noblemen, and for keen poetic minds, and what an education
+was this labyrinth of dry logic and extravagant scholasticism. Tired,
+disgusted, irritated, stupefied, they forgot the ugly dream as soon as
+possible, ran in the open air, and thought only of the chase, of war and
+the ladies; they were not so foolish as to turn their eyes a second time
+towards their crabbed litany; if they did come back to it, that was out
+of vanity; they wanted to set some Latin fable in their songs, or some
+learned abstraction, without comprehending a word of it, donning it for
+fashion's sake, as the ermine of learning. With us of today, general
+ideas spring up in every mind,--living and flourishing ones; among the
+laity of that time their root was cut off, and among the clergy there
+remained of them but a fagot of dead wood. And so mankind was only
+the better fitted for the life of the body and more capable of violent
+passions; with regard to this the style of Froissart, {068}artless as it
+is, deceives us. We think we are listening to the pretty garrulousness
+of a child at play; beneath this prattle we must distinguish the rude
+voice of the combatants, bear-hunters and hunters of men too, and the
+broad, coarse hospitality of feudal manners.
+
+ * See the discourse of Jean Petit on the assassination of
+ the Duke of Orleans.
+
+[Illustration: 92]
+
+At midnight the Count of Foix came to supper in the great hall. "Before
+him went twelve lighted torches, borne by twelve valets: and the same
+twelve torches were held before his table and gave much light unto
+the hall, which was full of knights and squires; and always there were
+plenty of tables laid out for any person who chose to sup." It must have
+been an {069}astonishing sight, to see those furrowed faces and powerful
+frames, with their furred robes and their justicoats streaked under
+the wavering flashes of the torches. One Christmas day, going into his
+gallery, he saw that there was but a small fire, and spoke of it aloud.
+Thereupon a knight, Ernauton d'Espagne, having looked out of the window,
+saw in the court a number of asses with "billets of wood for the use of
+the house. He seized the largest of these asses with his load, threw him
+over his shoulders and carried him up stairs" (there were twenty-four
+steps), "pushing through the crowd of knights and squires who were round
+the chimney, and flung ass and load, with his feet upward, on the dogs
+of the hearth, to the delight of the count, and the astonishment of
+all." Here are the laughter and the amusement of barbaric giants. They
+wanted noise, and songs proportioned to it. Froissart tells of a banquet
+when bishops, counts, abbes, knights, nearly one hundred in number, were
+seated at table. "There were very many minstrels in the hall, as well
+those belonging to the count as to the strangers, who, at their leisure,
+played away their minstrelsy. Those of the duke de Touraine played so
+loud and so well that the count clothed them 'with cloth of gold trimmed
+with ermine.'"
+
+"This count," says Froissart, "reigned prudently; {070}in all things
+he was so perfect that one could not praise him too much. No great
+contemporary prince could compare with him in sense, honor and wisdom."
+In that case the great princes of the day were not worth much. With
+justice and humanity, the good Froissart scarcely troubles himself; he
+finds murder perfectly natural; indeed, it was the custom; they were no
+more astonished at it, than at a snap of the jaws in a wolf. Man then
+resembled a beast of prey, and when a beast of prey has eaten up a
+sheep nobody is scandalized thereby. This excellent Count de Foix was
+an assassin, not once only, but ten times. For example, he coveted the
+castle of Lourdes, and so sent for the captain, Pierre Ernault, who had
+received it in trust for the prince of Wales. Pierre Ernault "became
+very thoughtful and doubtful whether to go or not." At last he went, and
+the count demanded from him the castle of Lourdes. The knight thought
+awhile what answer to make. However, having well considered, he said:
+"My lord, in truth I owe you faith and homage, for I am a poor knight of
+your blood and country; but as for the castle of Lourdes, I will never
+surrender it to you. You have sent for me, and you may therefore do with
+me as you please. I hold the castle of Lourdes from the king of England,
+who has placed me there; and to no other person but {071}to him will
+I ever surrender it." The Count de Foix, on hearing this answer, was
+exceedingly wroth, and said, as he drew his dagger, "Ho, ho, dost thou
+then say so? By this head, thou hast not said it for nothing." And, as
+he uttered these words, he struck him foully with the dagger, so that he
+wounded him severely in five places, and none of the barons or knights
+dared to interfere.
+
+[Illustration: 95]
+
+The knight replied, "Ha, ha, my lord, this is not gentle treatment;
+you sent for me here, and are murdering me." Having received these
+five strokes from the dagger, the count ordered him to be cast into the
+dungeon, which was done; and there he died, for he was ill-cured of his
+wounds. This dominance of sudden passion, this violence {072}of first
+impulse, this flesh and blood emotion, and abrupt appeal to physical
+force, are cropping out continually in the people. At the slightest
+insult their eyes kindle and blows fall like hail.
+
+[Illustration: 096]
+
+As we were leaving Dax, a diligence passed ours, grazing one of the
+horses. The conductor leaped down from his seat, a stake in his
+hand, and was going to fell his _confrer_. Those lords lived and felt
+something like our conductors, and the Count de Foix was such an one.
+
+I beg pardon of the conductors; I wrong them grievously. The count,
+not having the fear of the police before his eyes, came at once not to
+fisticuffs, but to stabs. His son Gaston, while on a visit to the king
+of Navarre, received a black powder which, according to the king, must
+forever reconcile {073}the count and his wife; the youth took the powder
+in a little bag and concealed it in his breast; one day his bastard
+brother, Yvain, saw the bag while playing with him, wanted to have it,
+and afterward denounced him to the count. At this the count "began to
+have suspicions, for he was full of fancies," and remained so until
+dinner-time, very thoughtful, haunted and harassed by sombre imaginings.
+Those stormy brains, filled by warfare and danger with dismal images,
+hastened to tumult and tempest. The youth came, and began to serve the
+dishes, tasting the meats, as was usual when the notion of poison was
+not far from any mind. The count cast his eyes upon him and saw the
+strings of the bag; the sight fired his veins and made his blood boil;
+he seized the youth, undid his pourpoint, cut the strings of the bag,
+and strewed some of the powder over a slice of bread, while the poor
+youth turned pale with fear, and began to tremble exceedingly. Then he
+called one of his dogs to him, and gave it him to eat. "The instant the
+dog had eaten a morsel his eyes rolled round in his head, and he died."
+The count said nothing, but rose suddenly, and seizing his knife, threw
+himself upon his son. But the knights rushed in between them: "For God's
+sake, my lord, do not be too hasty, but make further inquiries before
+you do any ill to your son." {074}
+
+[Illustration: 098]
+
+The count heaped malediction and insult upon the youth, then suddenly
+leaped over the table, knife in hand, and fell upon him like a wild
+beast. But the knights and the squires fell upon their knees before him
+weeping, and saying: "Ah, ah! my lord, for Heaven's sake do not kill
+Gaston; you have no other child." With great difficulty he restrained
+himself, doubtless thinking that it was prudent to see if no one else
+had a part in the matter, and put the youth into the tower at Orthez.
+
+He investigated then, but in a singular fashion, as if he were a
+famished wolf, wedded to a single idea, bruising himself against it
+mechanically and brutally, through murder and outcry, killing blindly
+and without reflecting that his killing is of no use to him. He had many
+of those who served his {075}son arrested, and "put to death not less
+than fifteen after they had suffered the torture; and the reason he gave
+was, that it was impossible but they must have been acquainted with the
+secrets of his son, and they ought to have informed him by saying, 'My
+lord, Gaston wears constantly on his breast a bag of such and such a
+form.' This they did not do and suffered a terrible death for it;
+which was a pity, for there were not in all Gascony such handsome or
+well-appointed squires."
+
+When this search had proved useless he fell back upon his son; he
+sent for the nobles, the prelates and all the principal persons of
+his country, related the affair to them, and told them that it was his
+intention to put the youth to death. But they would not agree to
+this, and said that the country had need of an heir for its better
+preservation and defence; "and would not quit Orthez until the count had
+assured them that Gaston should not be put to death, so great was their
+affection for him." Still the youth remained in the tower of Orthez,
+"where was little light," always lying alone, unwilling to eat, "cursing
+the hour that ever he was born or begotten, that he should come to such
+an end." On the tenth day the jailer saw all the meats that had been
+served in a corner, and went and told it to the count. The count was
+again enraged, like a beast of prey who encounters a {076}remnant of
+resistance after it has once been satiated; "without saying a word," he
+came to the prison, holding by the point a small knife with which he
+was cleaning his nails. Then striking his fist upon his son's throat, he
+pushed him rudely as he said: "Ha, traitor, why dost thou not eat?"
+and went away without saying more. His knife had touched an artery; the
+youth frightened and wan, turned without a word to the other side of the
+bed, shed his blood and died.
+
+[Illustration: 100]
+
+The count was grieved beyond measure when he heard this, for those
+violent natures felt only with excess and by contrasts; he had himself
+shaven and clothed in black. "The body of the youth was borne, with
+tears and lamentations, to the church of the Augustine Friars at Orthez,
+where it was buried."* But such murders left an ill-healed {077}wound
+in the heart; the dull pain remained, and from time to time some dark
+shadow crossed the tumult of the banquets. This is why the count never
+again felt such perfect joy as before.
+
+ * The passages from Froissart are from the version of Thomas
+ Johnes. New York: J. Winchester, New World Press.
+
+[Illustration: 101]
+
+It was a sad time; there is hardly another in which one would have
+lived so unwillingly. Poetry was imbecile, chivalry was falling into
+brigandage, religion suffered degradation, the State, disjointed,
+was crumbling away; the nation, ground down by king, by nobles and by
+Englishmen, struggled for {078}a hundred years in a slough, between the
+dying middle-age and the modern era which was not yet opened. And yet a
+man like Ernauton must have experienced a unique and splendid joy when,
+planted like a Hercules upon his two feet, feeling his shirt of mail
+upon his breast, he pierced through a hedge of pikes, and wielded his
+great sword in the sunlight.
+
+[Illustration: 102]
+
+
+IV {079}
+
+[Illustration: 103]
+
+Nothing can be pleasanter than to journey alone in an unknown country,
+without a definite end, without recent cares; all little thoughts are
+blotted out. Do I know whether this field belongs to Peter or to Paul;
+whether the engineer is at war with the prefect, or if there is any
+dispute over a projected canal or road? I am happy indeed in know-all
+that; happier still in first time, finding fresh {080}sensations, and
+not being troubled by comparisons and souvenirs. I can consider things
+through-general views, no longer regarding the soil as made the most of
+by mankind, can forget the useful, think only of the beautiful, and feel
+the movement of forms and the expression of colors.
+
+The very road seems beautiful to me. What an air of resignation in those
+old elms. They bud and spread forth in branches, from head to foot, they
+have such a desire for life, even under this dust. Then come lustrous
+plane trees, tossing their beautiful and regular leaves. White bindweed,
+blue campanulas, hang at the edge of the ditches. Is it not strange that
+these pretty creatures remain so solitary, that they should be fated to
+die to-morrow, that they should scarcely have looked upon us an instant;
+that their beauty should have flourished only for its two seconds of
+admiration? They too have their world, this people of high grasses
+bending over on themselves; these lizards which wave the thicket of the
+herbs; these gilded wasps that hum in their chalices. This world here is
+well worth ours, and I find them happy in opening thus, then in closing
+their pale eyes to the peaceful whisper of the wind.
+
+The road, as far as the eye can reach, curves and lifts anew its white
+girdle around the hills; this {081}{082}{083}sinuous movement is of
+infinite sweetness; the long riband tightens to their figure their veil
+of fair harvests or their robe of green meadows.
+
+[Illustration: 106]
+
+These slopes and roundnesses are as expressive as human forms; but how
+much more varied, how much stranger and richer in attitudes? Those there
+on the horizon, almost hid behind a troop of others, smile dimly in
+their timidness, under their crown of vapory gauze; they form a round on
+the brink of heaven, a fleeting round that the least disturbance of the
+air would put out of sight, and which yet regards with tenderness the
+fretted creatures lost in its bosom. Others, their neighbors, rudely
+dint the soil with their haunches and their brown slopes; the human
+structure here half peeps forth, then disappears under the mineral
+barbarism; here are the children of another age, ever powerful, severe
+still, unknown and antique races, whose mysterious history the mind
+searches without willing it. Tawny moors filled with herds mount upon
+their flanks to the summits; splendid meadows sparkle upon their back.
+Some among these plunge abruptly away down into depths where they
+disgorge the streams that they accumulate, and where is gathered all
+the heat of the burning vault which shines above under the most generous
+sun. It, meanwhile, embraces and broods over the country; from woods,
+plains, hills, the great soul of {084}vegetation starts forth mounting
+to meet its rays.
+
+Here your neighbor, who is engaged in a warm dispute, pulls your sleeve,
+crying: "The gigot at Orthez doesn't give cramps in the stomach, does
+it, sir?"
+
+You start; then in another moment you turn your nose toward the window.
+But the sensation has disappeared: the mutton of Dax has blotted out
+everything. The meadows are so many kilogrammes of unmown hay, the trees
+are so many feet of timber, and the herds are only walking beefsteaks.
+{085}
+
+[Illustration: 110]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II. PAU.
+
+
+I.
+
+Pau is a pretty city, neat, of gay appearance; but the highway is paved
+with little round stones, the side-walks with small sharp pebbles: so
+the horses walk on the heads of nails and foot-passengers on the points
+of them. From Bordeaux to Toulouse such is the usage, such the pavement.
+At the end of five minutes, your feet tell you in the most intelligible
+manner that you are two hundred leagues away from Paris.
+
+You meet wagons loaded with wood, of rustic {086}simplicity, the
+invention of which goes back to the time of Vercingetorix, but the only
+thing capable of climbing and descending the stony escarpments of the
+mountains. They are composed of the trunk of a tree placed across the
+axles and sustaining two oblique hurdles; they are drawn by two great
+whitish oxen, decked with a piece of hanging cloth, a net of thread upon
+the head and crowned with ferns, all to shield them from the gray flies.
+This suggests food for thought; for the skin of man is far more tender
+than that of the ox, and the gray flies have sworn no peace with our
+kind. Before the oxen ordinarily marches a peasant, of a distrustful and
+cunning air, armed with a long switch, and dressed in white woollen vest
+and brown breeches; behind the wagon comes a little bare-footed boy,
+very wide awake and very ragged, whose old velvet cap falls like the
+head of a wrinkled mushroom, and who stops struck with admiration at the
+magnificent aspect of the diligence.
+
+Those are the true countrymen of Henry IV. As to the pretty ladies in
+gauzy hats, whose swelling and rustling robes graze the horns of the
+motionless oxen as they pass, you must not look at them; they would
+carry your imagination back to the Boulevard de Gand, and you would have
+gone two hundred leagues only to remain in the same place. I am here on
+purpose to visit the sixteenth {087}century; one makes a journey for the
+sake of changing, not place, but ideas. Point out to a Parisian the
+gate by which Henry IV. entered Paris; he will have great difficulty
+in calling up the armor, the halberts and the whole victorious and
+tumultuous procession that l'Etoile describes: it is because he passed
+by there to-day on such and such business, that yesterday he met there
+a friend, while last year he looked upon this gate in the midst of a
+public festival.
+
+[Illustration: 112]
+
+All these thoughts hurry along with the force of habit, repelling and
+stifling the historic spectacle which was going to lift itself into full
+light and unroll itself before the mind. Set down the same man in Pau:
+there he knows neither hotels, nor people, nor shops; his imagination,
+out of its element, may run at random; no known object will trip him up
+and make him fall into the cares of interest, the passion of to-day;
+he enters into the past as a matter of course, and walks there as if at
+home, at his ease. It was eight o'clock in the morning; not a visitor at
+the castle, no one in the courts nor on the terrace; I should not have
+been too much astonished at meeting the Bearnais, "that lusty gallant,
+that very devil," who {088}was sharp enough to get for himself the name
+of "the good king."
+
+His chateau is very irregular; it is only when seen from the valley
+that any grace and harmony can be found in it. Above two rows of pointed
+roofs and old houses, it stands out alone against the sky and gazes
+upon the valley in the distance; two bell-turrets project from the front
+toward the west; the oblong body follows, and two massive brick towers
+close the line with their esplanades and battlements. It is connected
+with the city by a narrow old bridge, by a broad modern one with the
+park, and the foot of its terrace is bathed by a dark but lovely stream.
+Near at hand, this arrangement disappears; a fifth tower upon the north
+side deranges the symmetry.
+
+[Illustration: 113]
+
+The great egg-shaped court is a mosaic of {089}{090}{091}incongruous
+masonry; above the porch, a wall of pebbles from the Gave, and of red
+bricks crossed like a tapestry design; opposite, fixed to the wall, a
+row of medallions in stone; upon the sides, doors of every form and age;
+dormer windows, windows square, pointed, embattled, with stone mullions
+garlanded with elaborate reliefs. This masquerade of styles troubles the
+mind, yet not unpleasantly; it is unpretending and artless; each century
+has built according to its own fancy, without concerning itself about
+its neighbor.
+
+[Illustration: 115]
+
+On the first floor is shown a great tortoise-shell, which was the cradle
+of Henry IV. Carved chests, dressing-tables, tapestries, clocks of
+that day, the bed and arm-chair of Jeanne d'Albret, a complete set of
+furniture in the taste of the Renaissance striking and sombre, painfully
+labored yet magnificent in style, carrying the mind at once back toward
+that age of force and effort, of boldness in invention, of unbridled
+pleasures and terrible toil, of sensuality and of heroism. Jeanne
+d'Albret, mother of Henry IV., crossed France in order that she might,
+according to her promise, be confined in this castle. "A princess," says
+d'Aubigne, "having nothing of the woman about her but the sex, a soul
+entirely given to manly things, a mind mighty in great affairs, a heart
+unconquerable by adversity."{092}
+
+
+II.
+
+She sang an old Bearnese song when she brought him into the world. They
+say that the aged grandfather rubbed the lips of the new-born child with
+a clove of garlic, poured into his mouth a few drops of Jurancon wine,
+and carried him away in his dressing-gown.
+
+[Illustration: 117]
+
+The child was born in the chamber which opens into the tower of Mazeres,
+on the south-west corner. "His grandfather took him away from his
+father and mother, and would have this child brought up at his door,
+reproaching his daughter and his son-in-law with having lost several of
+their children through French luxuries. And, indeed, he brought him up
+in the Bearnese manner, that is, bareheaded and barefoot, often with no
+{093}more nicety than is shown in the bringing up of children among
+the peasantry. This odd resolution was successful, and formed a body
+in which heat and cold, unmeasured toil and all sorts of troubles were
+unable to produce any change, thus apportioning his nourishment to his
+condition, as though God wished at that time to prepare a sure
+remedy and a firm heart of steel against the iron knots of our dire
+calamities."
+
+His mother, a warm and severe Calvinist, when he was fifteen years old,
+led him through the Catholic army to la Rochelle, and gave him to her
+followers as their general. At sixteen years old, at the combat of
+Arnay-le-Duc, he led the first charge of cavalry. What an education and
+what men! Their descendants were just now passing in the streets, going
+to school to compose Latin verses and recite the pastorals of Massillon.
+
+Those old wars are the most poetic in French history; they were made
+for pleasure rather than interest. It was a chase in which adventures,
+dangers, emotions were found, in which men lived in the sunlight, on
+horseback, amidst flashes of fire, and where the body, as well as the
+soul, had its {094}enjoyment and its exercise. Henry carries it on as
+briskly as a dance, with a Gascon's fire and a soldier's ardor, with
+abrupt sallies, and pursuing his point against the enemy as with the
+ladies. This is no spectacle of great masses of well-disciplined men,
+coming heavily into collision and falling by thousands on the field,
+according to the rules of good tactics. The king leaves Pau or Nerac
+with a little troop, picks up the neighboring garrisons on his way,
+scales a fortress, intercepts a body of arquebusiers as they pass,
+extricates himself pistol in hand from the midst of a hostile troop, and
+returns to the feet of Mlle. de Tignonville.
+
+[Illustration: 119]
+
+They arrange their plan from day to day; nothing is done unless
+unexpectedly and by chance. Enterprises are strokes of fortune. Here is
+one which Sully had recounted by his secretary; I like to listen to old
+words among old monuments, and to feel the mutual fitness of objects and
+of style: {095}"The king of Navarre formed the design of seizing on the
+city of Eause, which, by good right, was his, and where he had chance of
+fine fortune; for deeming that the inhabitants, who had not been willing
+to receive a garrison, should have respect for his person, who was their
+lord, he determined to march all day long in order to enter in with few
+people, so as to create no alarm, and, indeed, having taken only fifteen
+or sixteen of you, gentlemen, who placed yourselves nearest to him,
+among whom were you, with simple cuirasses under your hunting tunics,
+two swords and two pistols, he surprised the gate of the city and
+entered in before they of the guard were able to take up arms. But one
+of these gave the alarm to him who was sentinel at the portal, and he
+cut the cord in the slide of the portcullis, so that it fell immediately
+almost on the croup of your horse and that of your cousin, M. de Bethune
+the elder, and hindered the troop which was coming up on the gallop from
+entering, so that the king and you fifteen or sixteen alone remained
+shut up in this city, where all the people, being armed, fell upon you
+in divers troops and at divers times, while the tocsin rang furiously,
+and a cry of '_Arm, arm!' and 'Kill, Kill!_ resounded on all
+sides,--seeing which, the king of Navarre, from the first troop which
+came up, some fifty strong, in part well, in part ill armed, {096}he,
+I say, marching, pistol in hand, straight at them, called out to you:
+'Come now, my friends, my comrades; it is here that you must show
+courage and resolution, for thereon depends our safety; let each one
+then follow me and do as I do, and not fire until the pistol touches.'
+At the same time, hearing three or four cry out: 'Fire at that scarlet
+tunic, at that white plume, for it is the king of Navarre,' he charged
+on them so impetuously that, without firing more than five or six times,
+they took fright and withdrew in several troops. Others in like manner
+came against you three or four times; but as soon as they saw that
+they were broken, they fired a few times and turned away until, having
+rallied nearly two hundred together, they forced you to gain a doorway,
+and two of you went up to give a signal to the rest of the troop
+that the king was there, and that the gate must be burst open, as the
+draw-bridge had not been raised. Whereupon each one began working, and
+then several among that populace who loved the king, and others who
+feared to offend him, began raising a tumult in his favor; finally,
+after a few arquebusades and pistol-shots from both sides, there arose
+such dissension among them, some crying, 'We must yield;' others, 'We
+must defend ourselves;' that the irresolution afforded means and
+time for opening the gates, and for all the troops to present {097}
+{098}themselves, at the head of whom the king placed himself, and saw
+most of the peoples fleeing and the consuls with their chaperons crying:
+'Sire, we are your subjects and your peculiar servants. Alas! allow not
+the sacking of this city, which is yours, on account of the madness of a
+few worthless fellows, who should be driven out. He placed himself, I
+said, at the head to prevent pillage: thus there was committed neither
+violence, nor disorder, nor any other punishment, except that four, who
+had fired at the white plume, were hung, to the joy of all the other
+inhabitants, who thought not that they should be quiet on such ood
+terms."{099}
+
+[Illustration: 122]
+
+At Cahors he burst in the two gates with petard and axe, and fought five
+days and five nights in the city, carrying house after house. Are not
+these chivalric adventures and poetry in action? "So, so, cavaliers,"
+cried the Catholics at Marmande; "a pistol-shot for love of the
+mistress; for your court is too full of lovely ladies to know any lack
+of them." Henry escaped like a true paladin, and lost his victory at
+Contras in order to carry to the beautiful Corisandre the flags that he
+had taken. To act, to dare, to enjoy, to expend force and trouble like
+a prodigal, to be given up to the present sensation, be forever urged
+by passions forever lively, support and {100}search the extremes of all
+contrasts, that was the life of the sixteenth century. Henry at Fontenay
+"worked in the trenches with pick and mattock." On his return there was
+nothing but feasting.
+
+[Illustration: 125]
+
+"We came together," says Marguerite, "to take walks in company, either
+in a lovely garden where are long alleys of cypress and laurel, or in
+the park which I had caused to be made, in alleys three thousand paces
+long, which border the river; and the rest of the day was spent in all
+sorts of suitable pleasures, a ball ordinarily filling the afternoon and
+the evening." The grave Sully "took {101}a mistress like the rest." In
+visiting the restored dining-hall, you repeople it involuntarily
+with the sumptuous costumes described by Brantome: ladies "clad in
+orange-color and gold lace, robes of cloth of silver, of crisped cloth
+of gold, stuffs perfectly stiff with ornaments and embroidery. Queen
+Marguerite in a robe of flesh-colored Spanish velvet, heavily loaded
+with gold lace, so decked out with plumes and precious stones as nothing
+ever was before." I said to M. de Ronsard: "Do you not seem to see this
+beautiful queen, in such guise, appearing as the lovely Aurora, when
+she is going to spring up before the day, with her beautiful pale face,
+bordered with its ruby and carnation color?" At the ball in the evening,
+she loved to dance "the _pavane_ of Spain and the Italian _pazzemano._
+The passages in this were so well danced, the steps so judiciously
+conducted, the rests so beautifully made, that you knew not which most
+to admire, the beautiful manner of dancing, or the majesty of the steps,
+representing now gayety, now a fine and grave disdain."
+
+You may well believe that the good king was not sparing of sport.
+
+"Il fut de ses sujets le vainqueur et le pere"
+
+The maids of honor of Marguerite could bear witness to this; hence
+intrigues, quarrels and {102}conjugal comedies, one of which is very
+prettily and very artlessly told by the queen; Mlle. de Fosseuse was the
+heroine. "The pain seized her one morning, at the break of day, while
+in bed in the chamber of the maids, and she sent for my physician and
+begged him to go and inform the king my husband, which he did. We were
+in bed in the same chamber, but in separate beds, according to our
+custom. When the physician gave him this bit of news, he was in great
+trouble, not knowing what to do, fearful on the one hand lest she should
+be discovered, and on the other lest she should want help, for he loved
+her dearly. He determined, finally, to confess all to me, and to beg me
+go to her assistance, for he knew well that, whatever might have passed,
+he should always find me ready to serve him in anything that could
+please him. He opens my curtain and says to me: 'Dearest, I have
+concealed from you one thing which I must confess to you: I beg you to
+excuse me for it, and not to remember all that I have said to you on
+this subject. But oblige me so much as to get up at once, and go to the
+assistance of Fosseuse, who is very ill; I am sure that you would not
+wish, when you see her in that condition, to resent what is past. You
+know how much I love her; I beg that you will oblige me in this matter.'
+I {103}told him that I honored him too much to be offended with anything
+coming from him. That I would be off and do as if it were my daughter;
+that in the mean time he should go to the chase and take everybody with
+him, so that no talk of it should be heard.
+
+"I had her promptly removed from the chamber of the maids and put into
+a chamber apart, with my physician and women to wait upon her, and gave
+her my best assistance. God willed that it should be only a daughter,
+which moreover was dead. After the delivery, she was carried to the
+chamber of the maids, where, though all possible discretion was used,
+they could not prevent the report from spreading throughout the castle.
+When the king my husband was returned from the chase, he went to see her
+according to his custom; she begged him that I would come to see her, as
+I was accustomed to visit all my maids when they were ill, thinking to
+stop by this means the spread of the report. The king my husband came
+into the chamber and found that I had gone to bed again, for I was tired
+with getting up so early, and with the trouble I had had in rendering
+her assistance. He begged that I would get up and go to see her; I
+told him that I had done so when she had need of my aid, but now she no
+longer had occasion for it; that if I went there, I should reveal rather
+than {104}cloak the truth, and that everybody would point their finger
+at me. He was seriously vexed with me, and this was far from pleasant to
+me, for it seemed that I had not deserved such a recompense for what I
+had done in the morning. She often put him into similar mood toward me."
+
+[Illustration: 129]
+
+Compassionate souls, who admire the complaisance of the queen, do not
+pity her too much: she punished the king, by imitating him, at Usson and
+elsewhere.
+
+And yet Pan was a lesser Geneva. Amidst these violences and this
+voluptuousness, devotion {105}was warm; they went to sermons or to the
+church, with the same air as to the battle-field or the rendezvous. This
+is because religion then was not a virtue, but a passion. In such case,
+the neighboring passions, instead of extinguishing it, only inflame; the
+heart overflows on that side as on the others. When the lazzarone has
+stabbed his enemy, he finds a second pleasure, says Beyle, in prating
+about his anger, alongside a wire grating in a great box of black wood.
+The Hindoo that gets excited and howls at the feast of Juggernaut, to
+the hubbub of fifty thousand tom-toms, the American Methodist who weeps
+and cries aloud his sins in a revival, feels something the same sort
+of pleasure as an Italian enthusiast at the opera. That explains and
+reconciles the zeal and the gallantry of Marguerite.
+
+"They only allowed me," said she, "to have mass said in a little chapel
+not more than three or four paces long, which, narrow as it was, was
+full when there were seven or eight of us there. So when they wanted
+to say mass, they raised the bridge of the castle, for fear that the
+Catholics of the country, who had no exercise of their religion, should
+hear of it; for they had an infinite desire to assist at the holy
+sacrifice, of which they had been deprived for several years. And,
+urged by this sacred desire, the inhabitants of Pau found {106}means, at
+Whitsuntide, before the bridge was raised, to enter the castle, and slip
+into the chapel, where they were not discovered until toward the end
+of mass, when, half opening the door to let in one of my people, some
+Huguenots who were spying round the door perceived them, and went to
+tell it to le Pin, secretary of the king my husband, and he sent there
+some guards of the king my husband, who, dragging them forth and beating
+them in my presence, carried them off to prison, where they remained a
+long time, and paid a heavy fine."
+
+[Illustration: 131]
+
+The little chapel has disappeared, I believe, since the castle and the
+whole country were {107}restored to the Catholic worship. Besides,
+this treatment arose from humanity: Saint-Pont, at Macon, "afforded the
+ladies, as they went out from the banquets that he gave, the pleasure
+of seeing a certain number of prisoners leap off from the bridge." Such
+were these men, extreme in everything, in fanaticism, in pleasure, in
+violence; never did the fountain of desires flow fuller and deeper;
+never did more vigorous passions unfold themselves with more of sap and
+greenness. Walking through these silent halls, disturbed from time
+to time by fair invalids or pale young consumptives who walk there, I
+fancied that enervation of the inner nature came from the enervation of
+the bodies. We spend our time within doors, taken up with discussions,
+reflections and reading; the gentleness of manners removes dangers from
+us, and industrial progress fatigues. They lived in the open air,
+ever following the chase and in war. "Queen Catherine was very fond of
+riding, up to the age of sixty and more, and of making great and active
+journeys, even after she had often fallen, to the great injury of her
+body, for she was several times so far hurt as to break her leg and
+wound her head." The rude exercises hardened their nerves; their warmer
+blood, stirred by incessant peril, urged upon the brain impetuous
+caprices; they made history, while we write it. {108}
+
+
+III.
+
+[Illustration: 133]
+
+The park is a great wood on a hill, embedded among meadows and harvests.
+You walk in long solitary alleys, under colonnades of superb oaks, while
+to the left the lofty stems of the copses mount in close ranks upon the
+back of the hill. The fog was not yet lifted; there was no motion in the
+air; not a corner of blue sky, not a sound in all the country. The song
+of a bird came for an instant from the midst of the ash-trees, then
+sadly ceased. Is that then the sky of the south, and was it necessary to
+come to the happy country of the Bearnais to find such {109}melancholy
+impressions? A little by-way brought us to a bank of the Gave: in a long
+pool of water was growing an army of reeds twice the height of a man;
+their grayish spikes and their trembling leaves bent and whispered under
+the wind; a wild flower near by shed a vanilla perfume. We gazed on the
+broad country, the ranges of rounded hills, the silent plain under the
+dull dome of the sky. Three hundred paces away the Gave rolls between
+marshalled banks, which it has covered with sand; in the midst of the
+waters may be seen the moss-grown piles of a ruined bridge. One is at
+ease here, and yet at the bottom of the heart one feels a vague unrest;
+the soul is softened and loses itself in melancholy and tender revery.
+Suddenly the clock strikes, and one has to go and prepare to take his
+soup between two commercial travellers.
+
+[Illustration: 134]
+
+
+IV. {110}
+
+
+To-day the sun shines. On my way to the _Place Nationale_, I remarked a
+poor, half-ruined church, which had been turned into a coachhouse;
+they have fastened upon it a carrier's sign. The arcades, in small gray
+stones, still round themselves with an elegant boldness; beneath are
+stowed away carts and casks and pieces of wood; here and there workmen
+were handling wheels. A broad ray of light fell upon a pile of straw,
+and made the sombre corners seem yet darker; the pictures that one meets
+with outweigh those one has come to seek.
+
+From the esplanade which is opposite, the whole valley and the mountains
+beyond may be seen; this first sight of a southern sun, as it breaks
+from the rainy mists, is admirable; a sheet of white light stretches
+from one horizon to another without meeting a single cloud. The heart
+expands in this immense space; the very air is festal; the dazzled eyes
+close beneath the brightness which deluges them and which runs over,
+radiated from the burning dome of heaven. The current of the river
+sparkles like a girdle of jewels; the chains of hills, yesterday
+veiled and damp, extend at their own sweet will beneath the warming,
+penetrating rays, and mount range upon range to spread out their
+{111}green robe to the sun. In the distance, the blue Pyrenees look
+like a bank of clouds; the air that bathes them shapes them into aerial
+forms, vapory phantoms, the farthest of which vanish in the canescent
+horizon--dim contours, that might be taken for a fugitive sketch from
+the lightest of pencils.
+
+[Illustration: 136]
+
+In the midst of the serrate chain the peak du _Midi d' Ossau_ lifts its
+abrupt cone; at this distance, forms are softened, colors are blended,
+the Pyrenees are only the graceful bordering of a smiling landscape and
+of the magnificent sky. There is nothing imposing about them nor severe;
+the beauty here is serene, and the pleasure pure. {112}
+
+The statue of Henry IV., with an inscription in Latin and in patois, is
+on the esplanade; the armor is finished so perfectly that it might make
+an armorer jealous. But why does the king wear so sad an air? His neck
+is ill at ease on his shoulders; his features are small and full of
+care; he has lost his gayety, his spirit, his confidence in his fortune,
+his proud bearing. His air is neither that of a great nor a good man,
+nor of a man of intellect; his face is discontented, and one would say
+that he was bored with Pau. I am not sure that he was wrong: and yet the
+city passes for agreeable; the climate is very mild, and invalids who
+fear the cold pass the winter in it. Balls are given in the clubs; the
+English abound, and it is well known that in the matter of cookery, of
+beds and inns, these people are the first reformers in the universe.
+
+They would have done well in reforming the vehicles: the rickety little
+diligences of the country are drawn by gaunt jades which descend the
+hills on a walk, and make stops in the ascent. All encouragements of the
+whip are thrown away on their backs; you could not bear them any grudge
+on that account, so piteous is their appearance, with their ridgy
+backbones, hanging ears, and shrunken bellies. The coachman rises on his
+{113}seat, pulls the reins, waves his arms, bawls and storms, clambers
+down and up again; his is a rude calling, but he has a soul like his
+calling. His passengers are of small consequence to him; he treats them
+as useful packages, a necessary counterpoise over which he has rights.
+At the foot of a mountain, the machine got its wheel into a ditch and
+tilted over; every one leaped out after the manner of Panurge's sheep.
+
+[Illustration: 138]
+
+He went running from one to another to get them back, especially
+exhorting the people from the imperiale, and pointing out to them the
+danger to the vehicle, which was leaning back, and so needed ballast in
+front. They however remained cool, and went on afoot, while he followed
+grumbling and abusing their selfishness. {114}
+
+
+VI.
+
+The harvests, pale in the north, here wave with a reflex of reddish
+gold. A warmer sun makes the vigorous verdure shine more richly; the
+stalks of maize spring from the earth like discharges of rockets, and
+their strong, wrinkled leaves fall over in plumes; such burning rays
+are needed to urge the sap through those gross fibres and gild the massy
+spike.
+
+[Illustration: 139]
+
+Toward Gan, the hills, over which undulates the road, draw nearer
+together, and you travel on through little green valleys, planted with
+ash and alder in clusters, according to the caprices of the slopes, and
+with their feet bathed in living water; a pellucid stream borders the
+road, with waters {115}sombre and hurried under the cover of the trees,
+and then, by fits and starts, brilliant and blue as the sky. Four times
+in the course of a league it encounters a mill, leaps and foams, then
+resumes its course, hurried and stealthy; during two leagues we have its
+company, half hid among the trees that it nourishes, and breathing the
+freshness it exhales. In these gorges, water is the mother of all life
+and the nurse of all beauty.
+
+[Illustration: 140]
+
+At Louvie the valley of Ossau opens up between two mountains covered
+with brushwood, bald in places, spotted with moss and heather from which
+the rocks peep out like bones, while the flanks start forth in grayish
+embossments or bend in dark crevices. The plain of the harvests and
+meadows buries itself in the anfractuosities as if in creeks; its
+contour folds itself about each new mass; it essays to scale the lower
+ridges, and stops, vanquished by the barren rock. We go through three or
+four hamlets whitened by dust, whose roofs shine {116}with a dull color
+like tarnished lead. Then the horizon is shut off; Mount Gourzy, robed
+in forests, bars the route; beyond and above, like a second barrier, the
+peak of the Ger lifts its bald head, silvered with snows. The carriage
+slowly scales an acclivity which winds upon the flank of the mountain;
+at the turn of a rock, in the shelter of a small gorge, may be seen Eaux
+Bonnes.
+
+[Illustration: 141]
+
+{117}
+
+
+[Illustration: 142]
+
+
+CHAPTER III. EA UX BONNES.
+
+
+I.
+
+I thought that here I should find the country; a village like a hundred
+others, with long roofs of thatch or tiles, with crannied walls and
+shaky doors, and in the courts a pell-mell of carts with fagots,
+and tools, and domestic animals, in short, the whole picturesque and
+charming unconstraint of country life. I find a Paris street and the
+promenades of the Bois de Boulogne.
+
+Never was country less countrified: you skirt a row of houses drawn
+up in line, like a row of soldiers when carrying arms, all pierced
+regularly with regular windows, decked with signs and posters, bordered
+by a side-walk, and having the disagreeably decent aspect of _hotels
+garnis._ These uniform buildings, mathematical lines, this disciplined
+and formal architecture make a laughable contrast with the {118}green
+ridges that flank them. It seems grotesque that a little warm water
+should have imported into these mountain hollows civilization and the
+cuisine.
+
+[Illustration: 143]
+
+This singular village tries every year to extend itself, and with great
+difficulty, so straitened and stifled is it in its ravine; they break
+the rock, they open trenches on the declivity, they suspend houses over
+the torrent, they stick others, as it were, to the side of the mountain,
+they pile up their chimneys even to the roots of the beech-trees; thus
+they construct behind the principal street a melancholy lane {119}which
+dips down or raises itself as it can, muddy, steep, half filled with
+temporary stalls and wooden wine-shops, lodging-places of artisans and
+guides; at last it drops down to the Gave, into a nook decked out with
+drying linen, which is washed in the same place with the hogs.
+
+[Illustration: 144]
+
+Of all places in the world, Eaux Bonnes is the most unpleasant on a
+rainy day, and rainy days are frequent there; the clouds are engulfed
+between two walls of the valley of Ossau, and crawl slowly {120}along
+half way up the height; the summits disappear, the floating masses come
+together, accumulate because the gorge has no outlet, and fall in fine
+cold rain. The village becomes a prison; the fog creeps to the earth,
+envelopes the houses, extinguishes the light already obscured by the
+mountain; the English might think themselves in London.
+
+The visitors look through the window-panes at the jumbled forms of
+the trees, the water that drips from the leaves, the mourning of the
+shivering and humid woods; they listen to the gallop of belated riders,
+who return with clinging and pendent skirts, like fine birds with their
+plumage disordered by the rain; they try whist in their despondency;
+some go down to the reading-room and ask for the most blood-stained
+pages of Paul Feval or Frederic Soulie; they can read nothing but the
+gloomiest dramas; they discover leanings towards suicide in themselves,
+and construct the theory of assassination. They look at the clock and
+bethink themselves that the doctor has ordered them to drink three times
+a day; then they button up their overcoats with an air of resignation,
+and climb the long, stiff slope of the streaming road; the lines of
+umbrellas and soaked mantles are a pitiable spectacle; they come,
+splashing through the water, and seat themselves in the drinking-hall.
+Each one takes his syrup-flask from its numbered place on a sort {121}of
+etagere, and the throng of the drinkers form in line about the tap. For
+the rest, patience is soon acquired here; amid such idleness the mind
+goes to sleep, the fog puts an end to ideas, and you follow the crowd
+mechanically; you act only at the instigation of others, and you look at
+objects without receiving from them any reaction.
+
+[Illustration: 146]
+
+After the first glass, you wait an hour before taking another; meanwhile
+you march up and down, elbowed by the dense groups, who drag themselves
+laboriously along between the columns. Not a seat to be had, except two
+wooden benches where the ladies sit, with their feet resting upon the
+damp stones: the economy of the administration supposes that the weather
+is always fine. Wearied and dejected faces pass before the eyes without
+awaking any interest. For the twentieth time you look over {122}the
+marble trinkets, the shop with razors and scissors, a map that hangs on
+the wall. What is there that one is not capable of on a rainy day,
+if obliged to keep moving for an hour between four walls, amidst the
+buzzing of two hundred people? You study the posters, contemplate
+assiduously some figures which pretend to represent the manners of the
+country: these are elegant and rosy shepherds, who lead to the dance
+smiling shepherdesses rosier than themselves. You stretch your neck
+out at the door only to see a gloomy passage where invalids are soaking
+their feet in a trough of warm water, all in a row like school-children
+on cleaning and excursion days. After these distractions you return to
+your lodging, and find yourselves tete-a-tete, in close conversation
+with your chest of drawers and your light-stand.
+
+[Illustration: 147]
+
+{123}
+
+
+II.
+
+People who have any appetite take refuge at the table; they did not
+count upon the musicians. First we saw a blind man come in, a heavy,
+thick-headed Spaniard, then the violinists of the country, then another
+blind man. They play pot-pourris of waltzes, country dances, bits from
+operas, strung one upon another, galloping along, above the note or
+below it, with admirable fearlessness, despoiling every repertory in
+their musical race. The next day we had three Germans, tall as towers,
+stiff as stones, perfectly phlegmatic, playing without a gesture and
+passing the plate without a word; at least they play in time.
+
+[Illustration: 148]
+
+On the third day the musicians of {124}a neighboring village appeared,
+a violin and flageolet; they executed their piece with such energy and
+discord, in tones so piercing, so long-drawn-out and rending, that, by
+universal consent, they were put out doors. They began again under the
+windows.
+
+A good appetite is a consolation for all ills; so much the worse if you
+will, or so much the better for humanity. It is necessary to bear up
+against the tediousness, the rain and the music of Eaux Bonnes. The
+renewed blood then bears gayety to the brain, and the body persuades
+the soul that everything is for the best in the best of worlds. You will
+have pity on those poor musicians as you leave the table; Voltaire
+has proved that an easy digestion induces compassion, and that a good
+stomach gives a good heart. Between forty and fifty years of age, a man
+is handsome when, after dinner, he folds up his napkin and begins his
+indispensable promenade. He walks with legs apart, chest out, resting
+heavily on his stick, his cheeks colored by a slight warmth, humming
+between his teeth some old refrain of his youth; it seems to him that
+the universe is brought nicely together; he smiles and is bland, he is
+the first to reach you his hand. What machines we are! Yet why complain
+of it? My good neighbor would tell you that you have the key of your
+mechanism; {125}turn the spring toward the side of happiness. This may
+be kitchen philosophy,--very well. He who practised it did not trouble
+himself about the name.
+
+[Illustration: 150]
+
+{126}
+
+
+III.
+
+[Illustration: 151]
+
+On sunny days, we live in the open air. A sort of yard, called the
+English garden, stretches between the street and the mountain, carpeted
+with a poor turf, withered and full of holes; the ladies constitute it
+their drawing-room and work there; the dandies, lying on several chairs
+at once, read their journal and proudly smoke their cigar; the little
+girls, in embroidered pantalons, chatter with coquettish gestures and
+graceful little ways; they are trying in advance the parts they will
+play as lovely dolls. But for the red cassocks of the little jumping
+peasants, the aspect is that of the Champs Elysees. You leave this spot
+by beautiful shaded walks which mount in zigzags upon the flanks of the
+two {127}mountains, one above the torrent, the other above the city;
+toward noon, numbers of bathers may be met here lying upon the heather,
+nearly all with a novel in hand.
+
+[Illustration: 152]
+
+These lovers of the country resemble the banker who loved concerts; he
+enjoyed them because then he could calculate his dividends. Pardon these
+hapless creatures; they are punished for knowing how to read and not
+knowing how to look about.
+
+
+IV.
+
+Anomalous beeches sustain the slopes here; no description can give
+an idea of these stunted colossi, eight feet high, and round which
+{128}three men could not reach. Beaten back by the wind that desolates
+the declivity, their sap has been accumulating for centuries in huge,
+stunted, twisted and interlaced branches; all embossed with knots
+misshapen and blackened, they stretch and coil themselves fantastically,
+like limbs swollen by disease and distended by a supreme effort.
+
+[Illustration: 153]
+
+Through the split bark may be seen the vegetable muscles enrolling
+themselves about the trunk, and crushing each other like the limbs of
+wrestlers. These squat torsos, half overthrown, almost horizontal, lean
+toward the plain; but their feet bury themselves among the rocks with
+such ties, that {129}sooner than break that forest of roots, one might
+tear out a side of the mountain. Now and then a trunk, rotted by water,
+breaks open, hideously eventerated; the edges of the wound spread
+farther apart with every year; they wear no longer the shape of trees,
+and yet they live, and cannot be conquered by winter, by their slope,
+nor by time, but boldly put forth into their native air their whitish
+shoots. If, under the shades of evening, you pass by the tortured tops
+and yawning trunks of these old inhabitants of the mountains, when the
+wind is beating the branches, you seem to hear a hollow plaint, extorted
+by a century's toil; these strange forms recall the fantastic creatures
+of the old Scandinavian mythology. You think on the giants imprisoned by
+fate, between walls that contracted day by day, and bent them down and
+lessened them, and then returned them to the light, after a thousand
+years of torture, furious, misshapen and dwarfed.
+
+
+V.
+
+Toward four o'clock the cavalcades return; the small horses of the
+country are gentle, and gallop without too much effort; far away in the
+sunlight gleam the white and luminous veils of the ladies; nothing is
+more graceful than a pretty woman on horseback, when she is neither
+{130}imprisoned in a black riding-habit, nor topped with a chimney-pot
+hat. Nobody here wears this funereal, poverty-stricken English costume;
+in a gay country people assume gay colors; the sun is a oood counsellor.
+It is forbidden to return at a gallop, o which is reason enough why
+everybody should return at that gait. Ah, the great art of imitating the
+coming in of the cattle! They bend in the saddle, the highway resounds,
+the windows quiver, they sweep proudly before the saunterers who stop to
+gaze; it is a triumph; the administration of Eaux Bonnes does not know
+the human heart, especially the heart of woman.
+
+In the evening, everybody meets on a level promenade; it is a flat road
+half a league long, cut in the mountain of Gourzy. The remainder of the
+country is nothing but steeps and precipices; any one who for eight days
+has known the fatigue of climbing bent double, of stumbling down hill,
+of studying the laws of equilibrium while flat on his back, will find it
+agreeable to walk on level ground, and to move his feet freely without
+thinking of his head; it gives a perfectly new sensation of security and
+ease.
+
+[Illustration: 156]
+
+The road winds along a wooded hill-side, furrowed by winter torrents
+into whitish ravines; a few wasted springs slip away under the stones
+in their stream beds, and cover them with climbing plants; you walk
+under the {131}{132}{133}massive beeches, then skirt along an inclined
+plane, peopled with ferns, where feed the tinkling herds; the heat has
+abated, the air is soft, a perfume of healthy and wild verdure reaches
+you on the lightest breeze; fair white-robed promenaders pass by in the
+twilight with ruffles of lace and floating muslins that rise and flutter
+like the wings of a bird. Every day we went to a seat upon a rock at
+the end of this road; from there, through the whole valley of Ossau,
+you follow the torrent grown into a river; the rich valley, a mosaic of
+yellow harvests and green fields, broadly opens out to the confines of
+the landscape, and allows the eye to lose itself in the dim distance of
+Bearn. From each side three mountains strike out their feet towards the
+river, and cause the outline of the plain to rise and fall in waves; the
+furthest slope down like pyramids, and their pale blue declivities stand
+out upon the rosy zone of the dim sky. In the depth of the gorges it
+is already dark; but turn around and you may see the summit of the Ger,
+gleaming with a soft carnation cherishing the last smile of the sun.
+
+[Illustration: 158]
+
+{134}
+
+
+[Illustration: 159]
+
+
+VI.
+
+On Sunday a procession of fine toilets goes up toward the church. This
+church is a round box, of stone and plaster, built for fifty persons but
+made to hold two hundred. Every half-hour the tide of the faithful
+ebbs and flows. Invalid priests abound and say as many masses as may be
+wanted: everything at Eaux Bonnes suffers for want of room; they form in
+line for prayers as for drinking, and are as crowded at the chapel as at
+the tap.
+
+Occasionally a purveyor of public pleasures undertakes the duty of
+enlivening the afternoon; an eloquent poster announces the _jeu du
+canard_. They fasten a perch to a tree, a cord to the perch, and a duck
+to the cord; the most serious-minded people follow the preparation with
+marked interest. I have seen men who yawn at the opera form a ring,
+under a hot sun, for a whole hour in order to witness the decapitation
+of the poor hanging creature. If you are generous-minded and greedy
+{135}of sensations in addition, you give two sous to a small boy; in
+consideration of which he has his eyes bandaged, is made to turn round
+and round, has an old sabre given to him, and is pushed forward, in the
+midst of the laughter and outcry of the spectators.
+
+[Illustration: 160]
+
+"Right! left! halloo! strike! forward!" he knows not which to heed, and
+cuts away into the air. If by rare chance he hits the creature, if by
+rarer chance he strikes the neck, or if, indeed, he takes off the head
+by miracle, he carries off the duck to have it cooked, and eat it. The
+public is not exacting in matter of amusement. If it were announced that
+a mouse was to drown itself in a pool, they would run as if to a fire.
+{136}"Why not?" said my neighbor, an odd, abrupt sort of man: "This is
+a tragedy and a perfectly regular one; see if it has not all the classic
+parts. First, the exposition; the instruments of torture that are
+displayed, the crowd which comes together, the distance that is marked,
+the animal that is fastened up. It is a protasis of the complex order,
+as M. Lysidas used to say. Secondly, the action; every time that a small
+boy starts, you are in suspense, you rise on tip-toe, your heart leaps,
+you are as interested in the pendent animal as in a fellow-creature.
+Do you say that the action is always the same? Simplicity is the
+characteristic of great works, and this one is after the Indian style.
+Thirdly, the catastrophe; if ever it was bloody it is so here. As to the
+passions, they are those demanded by Aristotle, terror and pity. See how
+shiveringly the poor creature lifts its head, when it feels the current
+of air from the sword! With what a lamentable and resigned look it
+awaits the stroke! The chorus of spectators takes part in the action,
+praises or blames, just as in the antique tragedy. In short, the public
+is right in being amused, and pleasure is never wrong."
+
+"You talk like la Harpe; this duck would accept his lot in patience, if
+he could hear you. And the ball, what do you say of that?"
+
+"It is worth as much as the one at the Hotel de {137}France with fine
+people; our dancing is nothing but walking, a pretext for conversation.
+Look how the servants and the guides dance; such cuts and pigeon wings!
+they go into it from pure fun, with all their heart, they feel the
+pleasure of motion, the impulse of their muscles; this is the true dance
+invented by joy and the need of physical activity. These fellows fall to
+and handle each other like timbers. That great girl there is servant at
+my hotel; say, does not that tall figure, that serious air, that proud
+attitude, recall the statues of antiquity? Force and health are always
+the first of beauties. Do you think that the languid graces, the
+conventional smiles of our quadrilles would bring together all this
+crowd? We get further away from Nature with every day; our life is all
+in the brain, and we spend our time in composing and listening to set
+phrases. See how I am uttering them now; to-morrow, I turn over a new
+leaf, buy a stout stick, put on gaiters and tramp over the country. You
+do the same; let each go his own way, and try not to come together."
+
+[Illustration: 162]
+
+{138}
+
+
+[Illustration: 163]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV. LANDSCAPES.
+
+
+I.
+
+I have determined to find some pleasure in my walks; have come out alone
+by the first path that offered itself, and walk straight on as chance
+may lead. Provided you have noted two or three prominent points, you
+are sure of finding the way back. You can now enjoy the unexpected, and
+discover the country. To know where you are going and by what way is
+certain boredom; the imagination deflowers the landscape in advance. It
+works and builds according to its own pleasure; then when you reach
+your goal all must be overturned; that spoils your disposition; the mind
+keeps its bent, and the beauty it has fancied prejudices that which it
+sees; it fails to understand {139}this, because it is already taken up
+with another. I suffered a most grievous disenchantment when I saw the
+sea for the first time: it was a morning in autumn; flecks of purplish
+cloud dappled the sky; a gentle breeze covered the sea with little
+uniform waves. I seemed to see one of those long stretches of beet-root
+that are found in the environs of Paris, intersected by patches of green
+cabbages and bands of russet barley. The distant sails looked like the
+wings of homeward-bound pigeons. The view seemed to me confined; the
+artists, in their pictures, had represented the sea as greater. It was
+three days before I could get back the sensation of immensity.
+
+[Illustration: 164]
+
+{140}
+
+
+II.
+
+The course of the Valentin is nothing but a long fall between multitudes
+of rocks. All along the _promenade Eynard,_ for half a league, you may
+hear it rumbling under your feet.
+
+[Illustration: 165]
+
+At the bridge of Discoo, its standing-ground fails it altogether; it
+falls into an amphitheatre, from shelf to shelf, in jets that cross each
+other and mingle their flakes of foam; then under an arcade of rocks and
+stones, it eddies in deep basins, whose edges it has polished, and
+where the grayish emerald of its waters diffuses a soft and peaceful
+reflection.
+
+[Illustration: 167]
+
+{141}
+
+{142}{143}Suddenly it makes a leap of thirty feet in three dark masses,
+and rolls in silver spray down a funnel of verdure. A fine dew gushes
+over the turf and gives life to it, and its rolling pearls sparkle as
+they glide along the leaves. Our northern fields afford no notion of
+such vividness; this unceasing coolness with this fiery sun is needed in
+order to paint the vegetable robe with such a magnificent hue.
+
+I saw a great, wooded mountain-side stretch sloping away before me; the
+noonday sun beat down upon it; the mass of white rays pierced
+through the vault of the trees; the leaves glowed in splendor, either
+transparent or radiated. Over all this lighted slope no shadow could be
+distinguished; a warm, luminous evaporation covered all, like the
+white veil of a woman. I have often since seen this strange garb of the
+mountains, especially towards evening; the bluish atmosphere enclosed in
+the gorges becomes visible; it grows thick, it imprisons the light and
+makes it palpable. The eye delights in penetrating into the fair network
+of gold that envelopes the ridges, sensitive to the softness and depth
+of it; the salient edges lose their hardness, the harsh contours are
+softened; it is heaven, descending and lending its veil to cover
+the nakedness of the savage daughters of the earth. Pardon me these
+metaphors; I appear, {144}perhaps, to be studying turns of expression,
+and yet I am only recounting my sensations.
+
+From this place a meadow-path leads to the gorge of the Serpent: this
+is a gigantic notch in the perpendicular mountain. The brook that
+runs through it crawls along overborne by heaped-up blocks; its bed is
+nothing but a ruin.
+
+[Illustration: 169]
+
+You ascend along a crumbling pathway, clinging to the stems of box and
+to the edges of rocks; frightened lizards start off like an arrow, and
+cower in the clefts of slaty slabs. A leaden sun inflames the bluish
+rocks; the reflected rays make the air like a furnace. In this parched
+chaos the only life is that of the water, which glides, murmuring,
+beneath the stones. At the bottom of the ravine the mountain abruptly
+lifts its vertical wall to the height of two hundred feet; the water
+drops in long white threads along this polished wall, and turns its
+reddish tint to brown; during the whole fall it does not quit the cliff,
+but clings to it like silvery {145}tresses, or a pendent garland of
+convolvulus. A fine broad basin stays it for an instant at the foot of
+the mountain, and then discharges it in a streamlet into the bog.{146}
+
+[Illustration: 171]
+
+{147}
+
+These mountain streams are unlike those of the plains; nothing sullies
+them; they never have any other bed than sand or naked stone. However
+deep they may be, you may count their blue pebbles; they are transparent
+as the air. Rivers have no other diversity than that of their banks;
+their regular course, their mass always gives the same sensation; the
+Gave, on the other hand, is a forever-changing spectacle; the human face
+has not more marked, more diverse expressions. When the water, green
+and profound, sleeps beneath the rocks, its emerald eyes wear the
+treacherous look of a naiad who would charm the passer-by only to drown
+him; then, wanton that it is, leaps blindly between the rocks, turns
+its bed topsy-turvy, rises aloft in a tempest of foam, dashes itself
+impotently and furiously into spray against the bowlder that has
+vanquished it. Three steps further on, it subsides and goes frisking
+capriciously alongside the bank in changing eddies, braided with bands
+of light and shade, twisting voluptuously like an adder. When the rock
+of its bed is broad and smooth, it spreads out, veined with rose and
+azure, smilingly offering its level glass to the whole {148}mass of the
+sunlight. Over the bending plants, it threads its silent way in lines
+straight and tense as in a bundle of rushes, and with the spring and
+swiftness of a flying trout. When it falls opposite the sun, the hues
+of the rainbow may be seen trembling in its crystal threads, vanishing,
+reappearing, an aerial work, a sylph of light, alongside which a bee's
+wine would seem coarse, and which fairy fingers would in vain strive to
+equal.
+
+[Illustration: 173]
+
+Seen in the distance, the whole Gave is only a storm of silvered falls,
+intersected by splendid blue expanses. Fiery and joyful youth, useless
+and full of poetry; to-morrow that troubled wave will receive the filth
+{149}of cities, and quays of stone will imprison its course by way of
+regulation.
+
+
+III.
+
+At the bottom of an ice-cold gorge rolls the cascade of Larresecq. It
+does not deserve its renown: it is a sort of dilapidated stairway with a
+dirty stream, lost among stones and shifting earth, awkwardly scrambling
+down it; but, in getting there, you pass by a profound steep-edged
+hollow, where the torrent rolls along swallowed up in the caverns it
+has scooped out, obstructed by the trunks of the trees that it uproots.
+Overhead, lordly oaks meet in arcades; the shrubs steep their roots far
+below in the turbulent stream. No sunlight penetrates into this dark
+ravine; the Gave pierces its way through, unseen and icy. At the outlet
+where it streams forth, you hear its hoarse outcry; it is struggling
+among the rocks that choke it: one might fancy-it a bull stricken by the
+pangs of death.
+
+This valley is solitary and out of the world; it is without culture;
+no tourists, not even herdsmen are to be found; three or four cows,
+perhaps, are there, busily cropping the herbage. Other gorges at the
+sides of the road and in the mountain of Gourzy are still wilder. There
+the faint trace of an {150}ancient pathway may with difficulty be made
+out.
+
+[Illustration: 175]
+
+Can anything be sweeter than the certainty of being alone? In any widely
+known spot, you are in constant dread of an incursion of tourists; the
+hallooing of guides, the loud-voiced admiration, the bustle, whether of
+fastening horses, or of unpacking provisions, or of airing opinions, all
+disturb the budding sensation; civilization recovers its hold {151}upon
+you. But here, what security and what silence! nothing that recalls man;
+the landscape is just what it has been these six thousand years: the
+grass grows useless and free as on the first day; no birds among the
+branches; only now and then may be heard the far-off cry of a soaring
+hawk. Here and there the face of a huge, projecting rock patches with a
+dark shade the uniform plane of the trees: it is a virgin wilderness in
+its severe beauty. The soul fancies that it recognizes unknown friends
+of long ago; the forms and colors are in secret harmony with it; when it
+finds these pure, and that it enjoys them unmixed with outside thought,
+it feels that it is entering into its inmost and calmest depth--a
+sensation so simple, after the tumult of our ordinary thoughts, is like
+the gentle murmur of an AEolian harp after the hubbub of a ball.
+
+
+IV.
+
+Going down the Valentin, on the slope of the _Montagne Verte_, I found
+landscapes less austere. You reach the right bank of the Gave d'Ossau.
+A pretty streamlet slips down the mountain, encased between two walls
+of rounded stones all purple with poppies and wild mallows. Its fall has
+been turned to account in driving rows {152}of saws incessantly back and
+forth over blocks of marble. A tall, bare-footed girl, in rags, ladles
+up sand and water for wetting the machine; by the aid of the sand the
+iron blade eats away the block.
+
+[Illustration: 177]
+
+A foot-path follows the river bank, lined with houses, huge oaks and
+fields of Indian corn; on the other side is an arid reach of pebbly
+shore, where children are paddling near some hogs {153}asleep in the
+sand; on the transparent wave, flocks of ducks rock with the undulations
+of the current: it is the country and culture after solitude and the
+desert. The pathway winds through a plantation of osiers and willows;
+the long, waving stalks that love the rivers, the pale pendent foliage,
+are infinitely graceful to eyes accustomed to the intense green of the
+mountains. On the right may be seen the narrow rocky ways that lead to
+the hamlets scattered over the slopes. The houses there lean their backs
+against the mountain, shelved one above another, so as to look down upon
+the valley. At noon the people are all absent. Every door is closed;
+three or four old women, who alone are left in the village, are
+spreading grain upon the level rock which forms the street or esplanade.
+What more singular than this long, natural flag-stone, carpeted with
+gilded heads of grain. The dark and narrow church ordinarily rises from
+a terraced yard, enclosed by a low wall; the bell-tower is white and
+square, with a slated spire. Under the porch may be read a few epitaphs
+carved in the stone; these, for the most part, are the names of invalids
+who have died at Eaux Bonnes; I remarked those of two brothers. To
+die so far from home and alone! It is touching to read these words of
+sympathy graven upon a tomb; this sunlight is so sweet! the {154}valley
+so beautiful! you seem to breathe health in the air; you want to live;
+one wishes, as the old poet says, "Se rejouir longtemps de sa force et
+de sa jeunesse." The love of life is imparted with the love of light.
+How often, beneath the gloomy northern sky, do we form a similar desire?
+
+At the turn of the mountain is the entrance into an oak wood that rises
+on one of the declivities. These lofty, roomy forests give to the south
+shade without coolness. High up, among the trunks, shines a patch of
+blue sky; light and shade dapple the gray moss like a silken design upon
+a velvet ground. A heavy, warm air, loaded with vegetable emanations,
+rises to the face; it fills the chest and affects the head like wine.
+The monotonous sound of the cricket and the grasshopper comes from
+wheat-land and meadow, from mountain and from plain; you feel that
+living myriads are at work among the heather and under the thatch; and
+in the veins, where ferments the blood, courses a vague sensation of
+comfort, the uncertain state between sleeping and dreaming, which steeps
+the soul in animal life and stifles thought under the dull impressions
+of the senses. You stretch yourself out, and are content with merely
+living; you feel not the passage of the hours, but are happy in the
+present moment, without a thought for past or future; you gaze upon
+{155}the slender sprigs of moss, the grayish spikes of the grasses, the
+long ribands of the shining herbs; you follow the course of an insect
+striving to get over a thicket of turf, and clambering up and down in
+the labyrinth of its stalks. Why not confess that you have become a
+child again and are amused with the least of sights? What is the country
+but a means of returning to our earliest youth, of finding again that
+faculty of happiness, that state of deep attention, that indifference to
+everything but pleasure and the present sensation, that facile joy which
+is a brimming spring ready to overflow at the least impulse? I passed an
+hour beside a squadron of ants who were dragging the body of a big fly
+across a stone. They were bent upon the dismemberment of the vanquished;
+at each leg a little workwoman, in a black bodice, pulled and worked
+with all her might; the rest held the body in place. I never saw efforts
+more fearful; at times their prey rolled off the stone; then they had
+to begin over again. At last, fatigued by the toils of war, and wanting
+power to cut up and carry off the prey, they resigned themselves to
+eating it on the spot. {156}
+
+
+V.
+
+The view from Mount Gourzy is much admired; the traveller is informed
+that he will see the whole plain of Beam as far as Pau. I am obliged to
+take the word of the guide-book for it; I found clouds at the summit and
+saw nothing but the fog. At the end of the forest that covers the first
+slope lay some enormous trees, half rotten, and already whitened with
+moss. Some mummies of pine trees were left standing; but their pyramids
+of branches showed a shattered side. Old oaks split open as high up as
+a man's head, crowned their wound with mushrooms and red strawberries.
+From the manner in which the ground is strewn it might be called a
+battle-field laid waste by bullets; it is the herdsmen who, for mere
+amusement, set fire to the trees.
+
+My neighbor, the tourist, told me next day that I had not lost much,
+and gave me a dissertation against the views from mountain-tops. He is
+a resolute traveller, a great lover of painting, very odd, however,
+and accustomed to believing nothing but himself, enthusiastic reasoner,
+violent in his opinions and fruitful in paradox. He is a singular man;
+at fifty, he is as active as if he were but twenty. He is dry, nervous,
+always well and alert, his legs {157}forever in motion, his head
+fermenting with some idea which has just sprung up in his brain and
+which during two days will appear to him the finest in the world. He is
+always under way and a hundred paces ahead of others, seeking truth with
+rash boldness, even to loving danger, finding pleasure in contradicting
+and being contradicted, and now and then deceived by his militant
+and adventurous spirit. He has nothing to hamper him; neither wife,
+children, place nor ambition. I like him, notwithstanding his want of
+moderation, because he is sincere; bit by bit he has told me his life,
+and I have found out his tastes; his name is Paul, and he was left, at
+the age of twenty, without parents and with an income of twelve thousand
+francs.
+
+[Illustration: 182]
+
+From experience of himself and of the world, he judged that an
+occupation, an office or a household would weary him, and he has
+remained free. He found that amusements failed to amuse, and he gave up
+pleasures; he says that suppers give him the headache, that play makes
+him nervous, that a respectable mistress ties a man down, and a hired
+mistress disgusts him. So he has turned {158}his attention to travelling
+and reading. "It is only water, if you will," said he, "but that is
+better than your doctored wine: at least, it is better for my stomach."
+Besides, he finds himself comfortable under his system, and maintains
+that tastes such as his grow with age, that, in short, the most sensible
+of senses, the most capable of new and various pleasures is the brain.
+He confesses that he is dainty in respect of ideas, slightly selfish,
+and that he looks upon the world merely as a spectator, as if it were a
+theatre of marionettes. I grant that he is a thoroughly good fellow at
+heart, usually good-humored, careful not to step on the toes of others,
+at times calculated to cheer them up, and that, at least, he has
+the habit of remaining modestly and quietly in his corner. We have
+philosophized beyond measure between ourselves, or rather against
+one another; you may skip the following pages if you are not fond of
+dissertations.
+
+He could not bear to have people go up a mountain in order to look down
+on the plain.
+
+"They don't know what they are doing," said he. "It is an absurdity of
+perspective. It is destroying a landscape for the better enjoyment of
+it. At such a distance there are neither forms nor colors. The heights
+are mere molehills, the villages are spots, the rivers are lines drawn
+by a pen. The objects are all lost in one grayish tint; the contrast
+{159}of lights and shades is blotted out; everything is diminished; you
+make out a multitude of imperceptible objects,--a mere Liliputian world.
+And thereupon you cry out at the magnificence! Does a painter ever take
+it into his head to scale a height in order to copy the score of leagues
+of ground that may be seen from thence?"
+
+[Illustration: 184]
+
+"That is good only for a land-surveyor. The basins, highways, tillage,
+are all seen as in an atlas. Do you go then in search of a map? A
+landscape is a picture; you should put yourself at the point of sight.
+But no; the beauty is all ciphered mathematically; it is calculated
+that an elevation of a thousand feet makes it a thousand times more
+beautiful. The operation is admirable, and its only fault is that it
+is absurd, and that it leads through a great deal of fatigue to
+immeasurable boredom." {160}But the tourists, when once at the summit,
+are carried away with enthusiasm.
+
+"Pure cowardice--they are afraid of being accused of dryness, and of
+being thought prosy; everybody now-a-days has a sublime soul, and
+a sublime soul is condemned to notes of admiration. There are still
+sheep-like minds, who take their admirations on trust and get excited
+out of mere imitation. My neighbor says that this is fine, the
+book thinks so too; I have paid to come up, I ought to be charmed;
+accordingly I am. I was one day on a mountain with a family to whom the
+guide pointed out an indistinct bluish line, saying, 'There is
+Toulouse!' The father, with sparkling eyes, repeated to the son, 'There
+is Toulouse!' And he, at sight of so much joy, cried with transport,
+'There is Toulouse!' They learned to feel the beautiful, as any one
+learns to bow, through family tradition. It is so that artists are
+formed, and that the great aspects of Nature imprint forever upon the
+soul solemn emotions."
+
+Then an ascent is an error of taste?
+
+"Not at all; if the plain is ugly, seen from above, the mountains
+themselves are beautiful; and indeed they are beautiful only from above.
+When you are in the valley they overwhelm you; you cannot take them in,
+you see only one side of them, you cannot appreciate their height nor
+their size. One {161}thousand feet and ten thousand are all the same
+to you; the spectator is like an ant in a well; at one moment distance
+blots out the beauty; the next, it is proximity does away with the
+grandeur."
+
+[Illustration: 186]
+
+"From the top of a peak, on the other hand, the mountains proportion
+themselves to our organs, the eye wanders over the ridges and takes in
+their whole; our mind comprehends them, because our body dominates them.
+Go to Saint-Sauveur, to {162}Bareges; you will see that those monstrous
+masses have as expressive a physiognomy, and represent as well-defined
+an idea as a tree or an animal. Here you have found nothing but pretty
+details; the ensemble is tiresome."
+
+You talk of this country as a sick man of his doctor. What have you to
+say then against these mountains?
+
+"That they have no marked character; they have neither the austerity of
+bald peaks nor the lovely roundings of wooded hills. These fragments
+of grayish verdure, this poor mantle of stunted box pierced by the
+projecting bones of the rock, those scattered patches of yellowish moss,
+resemble rags; I like to have a person either naked or clothed, and do
+not like your tatterdemalion. The very forms are wanting in grandeur,
+the valleys are neither abrupt nor smiling. I do not find the
+perpendicular walls, the broad glaciers, the heaps of bald and jagged
+summits which are seen further on. The country does not amount to much
+either as plain or mountain; it should either be put forward or held
+back."
+
+You give advice to Nature.
+
+[Illustration: 188]
+
+"Why not? She has her uncertainties and incongruities like any one else.
+She is not a god, but an artist whose genius inspires him to-day and
+to-morrow lets him down again. A landscape in {163}{164}{165}order to
+be beautiful must have all its parts stamped with the common idea and
+contributing to produce a single sensation. If it gives the lie here
+to what it says yonder, it destroys itself, and the spectator is in the
+presence of nothing but a mass of senseless objects. What though these
+objects be coarse, dirty, vulgar? provided they make up a whole by their
+harmony, and that they agree in giving us a single impression, we are
+pleased."
+
+So that a court-yard, a worm-eaten hut, a parched and melancholy plain,
+may be as beautiful as the sublimest mountain.
+
+"Certainly. You know the fields of the Flemish painters, how flat they
+are; you are never tired of looking at them. Take something that
+is still more trivial, an interior of Van Ostade; an old peasant is
+sharpening a chopping-knife in the corner, the mother is swaddling her
+nursling, three or four brats are rolling about among the tools, the
+kettles and benches; a row of hams is ranged in the chimney, and the
+great old bed is displayed in the background under its red curtains.
+What could be more common! But all these good people have an air of
+peaceful contentment; the babies are warm and easy in the over-wide
+breeches, glossy antiques transmitted from generation to generation.
+There must have been habits of security and abundance, for a scattered
+household to lie {166}pellmell on the ground in this fashion; this
+comfort must have lasted from father to son, for the furniture to have
+assumed that sombre color and all the hues to harmonize. There is not an
+object here that does not point to the unconstraint of an easygoing life
+and uniform good-nature. If this mutual fitness of the parts is the mark
+of fine painting, why not of fine nature? Real or fancied, the object
+is the same; I praise or I blame one with as good right as the other,
+because the practice or the violation of the same rules produces in me
+the same enjoyment or the same displeasure."
+
+[Illustration: 191]
+
+ABOVE GABAS.
+
+Mountains then may have another beauty than that of grandeur? {167}"Yes,
+since they sometimes have a different expression. Look at that little
+isolated chain, against which the _Thermes_ support themselves: nobody
+climbs it; it possesses neither great trees, nor naked rocks, nor points
+of view. And yet I experienced a genuine pleasure there yesterday; you
+follow the sharp backbone of the mountain that protrudes its vertebrae
+through its meagre coating of earth; the poor but thickset turf,
+sunburnt and beaten by the wind, forms a carpet firmly sewn with
+tenacious threads; the half-dried mosses, the knotty heaths strike their
+stubborn roots down between the clefts of the rock; the stunted
+firs creep along, twisting their horizontal trunks. An aromatic and
+penetrating odor, concentrated and drawn forth by the heat, comes from
+all these mountain plants. You feel that they are engaged in an eternal
+struggle against a barren soil, a dry wind, and a shower of fiery
+rays, driven back upon themselves, hardened to all inclemencies, and
+determined to live. This expression is the soul of the landscape; now,
+given so many varied expressions, you have so many different beauties,
+so many chords of passion are stirred. The pleasure consists in seeing
+this soul. If you cannot distinguish it, or if it be wanting, a mountain
+will make upon you precisely the effect of a heap of pebbles."
+
+That is an attack on the tourists; to-morrow I {168}will test your
+reasoning in the gorge of Eaux-Chaudes, and see if it is right. {169}
+
+[Illustration: 194]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V. EAUX-CHAUDE S.
+
+
+I.
+
+On the north of the valley of Ossau is a cleft; it is the way to
+Eaux-Chaudes. An entire skirt of the mountain was torn out in order to
+open it; the wind eddies through the hollows of this chilly pass; the
+precipitous cut, of a dark iron-color, lifts its formidable mass as
+if to overwhelm the passerby; upon the rocky wall opposite are perched
+twisted trees in rows, and their thin, feathery tops wave strangely
+among the reddish projections. The highway overhangs the Gave which
+eddies five hundred feet below. It is the stream which has hollowed out
+this prodigious groove, coming back again and again {170}to the attack,
+and for whole centuries together; two rows of huge rounded niches mark
+the lowering of its bed, and the ages of its toil; the day seems to grow
+dark as you enter; it is only a strip of sky that can be seen above the
+head.
+
+[Illustration: 195]
+
+On the right, a range of giant cones rises into relief against the
+intense azure; their bellies crowd one upon another and protrude in
+rounded masses; but their lofty peaks swing upward with a dash, with
+a gigantic sort of flight, towards the sublime dome whence
+streams the day. {171}
+
+[Illustration: 197]
+
+{172}{173}The light of August falls on the stony escarpments,
+upon the broken walls, where the rock, damasked and engraven, gleams
+like an oriental cuirass. Leprous spots of moss are there incrusted;
+stems of dried box dangle wretchedly in the crannies; but they are
+lost sight of in such heroic nakedness: the ruddy or blackened colossi
+display themselves in triumph in the splendor of the heavens.
+
+Between two channelled granite towers stretches the little village of
+Eaux-Chaudes. But who, here, pays any attention to the village? All
+thought is taken up by the mountains. The eastern chain, abruptly cut
+off, drops perpendicularly like the wall of a citadel; at the summit, a
+thousand feet above the highway, are esplanades expanding in forests
+and meadows, a crown green and moist, whence cascades ooze forth by the
+hundred. They wind broken and flaky along the breast of the mountain,
+like necklaces of pearls told off between the fingers, bathing the feet
+of the lustrous oaks, deluging the bowlders with their tempest, then at
+last spreading themselves out in long beds where the level rock lures
+them to sleep.
+
+The wall of granite falls away; at the east, an amphitheatre of forests
+suddenly opens up. On all sides, as far as the eye can reach, the
+mountains are {174}loaded with wood to the very top; several of them
+rise, in all their blackness, into the heart of the light, and their
+fringe of trees bristles against the pale sky. The charming cup of
+verdure rounds its gilded margin, then drops into hollows, overflowing
+with birch and oak, with tender, changeable hues that lend additional
+sweetness to the mists of morning. Not a hamlet is to be seen, no smoke,
+no culture; it is a wild and sunny nest, no doubt like to the valley
+that, on the finest day of the happiest springtide of the universe,
+received the first man.
+
+[Illustration: 199]
+
+The highway makes a turn, and everything changes. The old troop of
+parched mountains reappears with a threatening air. One of them {175}in
+the west is crumbling, shattered as if by a cyclopean hammer. It is
+strewn with squared blocks, dark vertebrae snatched from its spine;
+the head is wanting, and the monstrous bones, crushed and in disorder,
+scattered to the brink of the Gave, announce some ancient defeat.
+Another lying opposite, with a dreary air, extends its bald back a
+league away; in vain you go on or change your view: it is always there,
+always huge and melancholy. Its naked granite suffers neither tree nor
+spot of verdure; a few patches of snow alone whiten the hollows in its
+sides, and its monotonous ridge shifts sadly its lines, blotting out
+half the sky with its bastions.
+
+Gabas is a hamlet in a barren plain. The torrent here rumbles underneath
+glaciers and among shattered tree-trunks; it descends, lost at
+the bottom of the declivity, between colonnades of pines, the mute
+inhabitants of the gorge. The silence and constraint contrast with the
+desperate leaps of the snowy water. It is cold here, and everything is
+sad; only, on the horizon may be seen the Pic du Midi in its splendor,
+lifting its two jagged piles of tawny gray into the serene light.
+
+[Illustration: 200]
+
+
+{176}II.
+
+In spite of myself I have been dreaming here of the antique gods, sons
+of Greece, and made in the likeness of their country. They were born in
+a similar country, and they spring to life again here in ourselves, with
+the sentiments which gave birth to them.
+
+I imagine idle and curious herdsmen, of fresh and infantile souls, not
+yet possessed by the authority of a neighboring civilization and
+an established dogma, but active, hardy, and poets by nature. They
+dream--and of what, if not of the huge beings that all day long besiege
+their eyes? How fantastical are those jagged heads, those bruised and
+heaped-up bodies, those twisted shoulders! What unknown monsters, what
+melancholy, misshapen race, alien to humanity! By what-dread travail has
+the earth brought them forth from her womb, and what contests have
+their blasted heads sustained amidst clouds and thunderbolts! They still
+threaten to-day; the eagles and the vultures are alone welcome to sound
+their depths. They love not man; their bowlders lie in wait to roll upon
+him, so soon as he shall violate their solitudes. With a shiver they
+hurl upon his harvests a tide of rocks; they have but to gather up a
+storm in order to drown him like an ant. {177}
+
+[Illustration: 202]
+
+{178}
+
+{179}How changeable is their face, but always to be dreaded! What
+lightnings their summits hurl among the creeping fogs! That flash causes
+fear like the eye of some tyrant god, seen for a moment, then hid again.
+There are mountains that weep, amidst their gloomy bogs, and their tears
+trickle down their aged cheeks with a hollow sob, betwixt pines that
+rustle and whisper sorrowfully, as if pitying that eternal mourning.
+Others, seated in a ring, bathe their feet in lakes the color of steel,
+and which no wind ever ruffles; they are happy in such calm, and gaze
+into the virgin wave at their silver helmet. How mysterious are they at
+night, and what evil thoughts do they turn over in winter, when wrapped
+in their shroud of snow! But in the broad day and in summer, with what
+buoyancy and how glorified rises their forehead to the sublimest heights
+of air, into pure and radiant realms, into light, to their own native
+country. All scarred and monstrous though they be, they are still the
+gods of the earth, and they have aspired to be gods of heaven.
+
+But lo, where comes a second race, lovely and almost human, the choir
+of the nymphs, fleeting and melting creatures who are daughters of those
+misshapen colossuses. How comes it that they have begotten them? No one
+knows; the birth {180}of the gods, full of mystery, eludes mortal eye.
+Some say that their first pearl has been seen to ooze from an herb, or
+from a cranny beneath the glaciers, in the uplands. But they have dwelt
+long in the paternal bowels; some, burning ones, keep the memory of that
+inner furnace whose bubbling they have looked upon, and which, from
+time to time, still makes the ground to tremble; others, icy cold, have
+crossed the eternal winter that whitens the summits. At the outset,
+all retain the fire of their race; dishevelled, screaming, raving, they
+bruise themselves against the rocks, they cleave the valleys, sweep away
+trees, struggle and are sullied. What transport is here--maidenly and
+bacchanal! But, once they have reached the smooth beds which the rounded
+rock spreads out for them, they smile, they hush themselves in sleep, or
+they sport. Their deep eyes of liquid emerald have their flashes. Their
+bodies bow and rise again; in the vapors of morning, in sudden falls,
+their water swells, soft and satiny as a woman's breast. With what
+tenderness, what delicately wild quiverings they caress the bended
+flowers, the shoots of fragrant thyme that thrive between two rocky
+edges on the bank! Then with sudden caprice they plunge deep down in
+a cavern, and scream and writhe as mad and wayward as any child. What
+happiness in spreading {181}out thus to the sun! What strange gayety,
+or what divine tranquillity, in that transparent wave as it laughs or
+eddies! Neither the eye nor the diamond has that changeful clearness,
+those burning and glaucous reflections, those inward tremblings
+of pleasure or of anxiety; women though they are, they are indeed
+goddesses. Without more than human might, would they have availed,
+with their soft wave, to wear these hard cliffs, to bore through these
+impregnable barriers? And by what secret virtue do they know, they, so
+innocent of aspect, how at one time to torture and slay him who drinks,
+and, again, to heal the infirm and the invalid? They hate the one and
+love the other, and, like their fathers, they bestow life and death at
+their pleasure.
+
+Such is the poetry of the pagan world, of the childhood of mankind; thus
+each one framed it for himself, in the dawn of things, at the awaking of
+imagination and conscience, long before the age when reflection set up
+defined worship and studied dogmas. Among the dreams that blossomed in
+the morning of the world, I love only those of Ionia.
+
+Hereupon Paul became vexed, and called me a classicist: "You are all
+like that! You take one step forward into an idea, and then stop short
+like cowards. Come now; there are a hundred Olympuses {182}in Egypt, in
+Iceland, in India. Each one of those landscapes is an aspect of Nature;
+each of those Gods is one of the forms in which man has expressed his
+idea of Nature. Admire the god by the same standard as the landscape;
+the onion of Egypt is worth as much as Olympian Jove." That is too
+strong, yet I take you at your word; you shall stand by your assertion,
+and extract a god from your onion.
+
+[Illustration: 207]
+
+"This very instant; but first transport yourself to Egypt, before the
+coming of warriors and priests, upon the river-ooze, among savages half
+naked in the mire, half drowned in water, half burned by the sun. What
+a sight is that of this great black shore steaming under the heat, where
+{183}crocodiles and writhing fish lash the waters of the pools! Myriads
+of mosquitoes buzz in the air; large-leaved plants lift their tangled
+mass; the earth ferments and teems with life; the brain grows giddy with
+the heavy exhalations, and man, made restless, shudders as he feels in
+the air and coursing through his limbs the generative virtue by whose
+means everything multiplies and grows green. A year ago nothing grew on
+this ooze: what a change! There springs from it a tall, straight reed,
+with shining thongs, the stem, swollen with juices, striking deep into
+the slime; with every day it expands and changes: green at the outset,
+it reddens like the sun behind the mists. Unceasingly does this child of
+the ooze suck therefrom juices and force; the earth broods over it and
+commits to it its every virtue. See it now, how, of its own accord,
+it lifts itself half-way, and at last wholly, and warms in the sun
+its scaly belly filled with an acrid blood; blood that boils, and so
+exuberant that it bursts the triple skin and oozes through the wound!
+What a strange life! and by what miracle is it that the point of the
+summit becomes a plume and a parasol? Those who first gathered it wept,
+as though some poison had burned their eyes; but in the winter-time,
+when fish fails, it rejoices him who meets it. Those enormous heaped-up
+globes, are they not the hundred breasts of the great nurse, {184}mother
+Earth? New ones reappear as often as the waters retire; there is some
+divine force hidden beneath those scales. May it never fail to return!
+The crocodile is god, because it devours us; the ichneumon is god,
+because it saves us; the onion is god, because it nourishes us."
+
+The onion is god, and Paul is its prophet; you shall have some this
+evening, with white sauce. But, my dear friend, you frighten me; you
+blot out with one stroke three thousand years of history. You put on
+one level races of artists and races of visionaries, savage tribes
+and civilized nations. I like the crocodile and the onion, but I
+like Jupiter and Diana better. The Greeks have invented the arts and
+sciences; the Egyptians have only left some heaps of ashlar-work. A
+block of granite is not as good as either Aristotle or Homer. They
+are everywhere the first who, through clear reasoning, have reached a
+conception of justice and have made science. Then, however evil our
+time may be, it surpasses many another. Your grotesque and oriental
+hallucinations are beautiful, at a distance however; I am willing to
+contemplate them, but not to submit to them. Now-a-days we have no
+poetry, be it so; but we appreciate the poetry of others. If our museum
+is poor, we have the museums of all ages and all nations. Do you know
+what I get from your theories? Three times a {185}month they will save
+me four francs; I shall find fairy-land in them, and shall have no
+further occasion for going to the opera.
+
+[Illustration: 210]
+
+
+[Illustration: 211]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI. THE INHABITANTS.
+
+I.
+
+{186}On the eighth of August, at nine o'clock in the morning, the
+piercing note of a flageolet was to be heard at half a league's distance
+from Eaux-Bonnes, and the bathers set out for Aas. The way there is by
+a narrow road cut in the Montagne Verte, and overhung with lavender and
+bunches of wild flowers. We entered upon a street six feet in width:
+it is the main street. Scarlet-capped children, wondering at their own
+magnificence, stood bolt upright in the doorways and looked on us in
+silent admiration. The public square, at the side of the lavatory, is as
+large as a small room; {187}it is here that dances take place.
+
+[Illustration: 212]
+
+Two hogsheads had been set up, two planks upon the hogsheads, two chairs
+upon the planks, and on the chairs two musicians, the whole surmounted
+by two splendid blue umbrellas which did service as parasols; for the
+sky was brazen, and there was not a tree on the square.
+
+The whole formed an exceedingly pretty and original picture. Under
+the roof of the lavatory, a {188}group of old women leaned against the
+pillars in talk; a crystal stream gushed forth and ran down the
+slated gutter; three small children stood motionless, with wide-open,
+questioning eyes. The young men were at exercise in the pathway, playing
+at base. Above the esplanade, on points of rock forming shelves, the
+women looked down on the dance, in holiday costume; a great scarlet
+hood, a body embroidered in silver, or in silk with violet flowers; a
+yellow, long-fringed shawl; a black petticoat hanging in folds, close to
+the figure, and white woollen gaiters. These strong colors, the lavished
+red, the reflexes of the silk under a dazzling light, were delightful.
+About the two hogsheads was wheeling, with a supple, measured movement,
+a sort of roundelay, to an odd and monotonous air terminated by a shrill
+false note of startling effect. A youth in woollen vest and breeches led
+the band; the young girls moved gravely, without talking or laughing;
+their little sisters at the end of the file took great pains in
+practising the step, and the line of purple _capulets_ slowly waved like
+a crown of peonies. Occasionally the leader of the dance gave a sudden
+bound with a savage cry, and recalled to our mind that we were in the
+land of bears, in the very heart of the mountains.
+
+Paul was there under his umbrella, wagging his {189}great beard with a
+look of delight. Had he been able, he would have followed the dance.
+
+[Illustration: 214]
+
+"Was I right? Is there a single things here out of harmony with the
+rest, and which the sun, the climate, the soil, do not make suitable?
+These people are poets. They must have been in love with the light to
+have invented these splendid costumes. Never would a northern sun have
+inspired this feast of color; their costume harmonizes with their
+sky. In Flanders, they would look like mountebanks; here they are as
+beautiful as their country. You no longer notice the ugly features, the
+sunburnt faces, the thick, knotty hands that yesterday offended you; the
+sun enlivens the brilliancy of the dresses, and in that golden splendor
+all ugliness disappears. I have seen people who {190}laughed at the
+music; 'the air is monotonous,' they say, 'contrary to all rule, it has
+no ending; those notes are false.' At Paris, that may be; but here, no.
+Have you remarked that wild and original expression? How it suits
+the landscape! That air could have sprung up nowhere but among the
+mountains. The frou-frou of the tambourine is as the languid voice
+of the wind when it coasts the narrow valleys; the shrill tone of the
+flageolet is the whistling of the breeze when it is heard on the naked
+summits; that final note is the cry of a hawk in the depths of the air;
+the mountain sounds too are recognizable, hardly transformed by the
+rhythm of the song. And then the dance is as primitive, as natural, as
+suitable to the country as the music: they go wheeling about hand in
+hand. What could be more simple! It is thus that the children do at
+their play. The step is supple and slow; that is as the mountaineer
+walks; you know by experience that you must not be in too much haste if
+you would climb, and that here the stiff strides of a town-bred man will
+bring him to the ground. That leap, that seems to you so strange, is
+one of their habits, hence one of their pleasures. To make up a festival
+they have chosen what they found agreeable among the things to which
+their eyes, ears, and legs were habituated. Is not this festival then
+the most national, the {191}truest, the most harmonious, and hence the
+most beautiful that can be imagined?"
+
+
+II.
+
+Laruns is a market-town. Instead of a hogshead there were four times two
+hogsheads and as many musicians, all playing together, and each one
+a different portion of the same air. This clatter excepted and a few
+magnificent pairs of velvet breeches, the festival was the same as that
+at Aas. What we go there to see is the procession.
+
+At first everybody attends vespers; the women in the sombre nave of the
+church, the men in a gallery, the small boys in a second gallery higher
+up, under the eye of a frowning schoolmaster. The young girls, kneeling
+close to the gratings of the choir, repeated _Ave Marias_, to which the
+deep voice of the congregation responded; their clear, metallic voices
+formed a pretty contrast to the hollow buzzing of the resounding
+responses. Some wolfish-looking old mountaineers, from thirty miles
+away, made the blackened wood of the balustrade creak as they clumsily
+bent the knee. A twilight fell on the dense crowd, and made yet darker
+the expression of those energetic countenances. One might have fancied
+himself in the sixteenth {192}century. Meanwhile the little bells
+chattered joyously with their shrill voices, and made all possible
+noise, like a roost full of fowls at the top of the white tower.
+
+[Illustration: 217]
+
+At the end of an hour, the procession arranged itself very artistically
+and went forth. The first part of the cortege was amusing: two rows of
+little scapegraces in red vests, their hands clasped over their bellies,
+in order to keep their book in {193}place, tried to give themselves an
+air of compunction, and looked at each other out of the corners of their
+eyes in a manner truly comical. This band of masquerading monkeys was
+led by a jolly stout priest, whose folded bands, cuffs, and hanging
+laces fluttered and waved like wings. Then a sorry beadle, in a soiled
+_douanier's_ coat; then a fine maire in uniform, with his sword at his
+side; then two long seminarians, two plump little priests, a banner
+of the Virgin, finally all the douaniers and all the gendarmes of the
+country; in short, all the grandeurs, all the splendors, all the actors
+of civilization.
+
+The Barbarians however were more beautiful: it was the procession of men
+and women who, taper in hand, filed by during three-quarters of an
+hour. I saw in it true Henry IV. faces, with the severe and intelligent
+expression, the proud and serious bearing, the large features of his
+contemporaries. Especially there were some old herdsmen in russet
+great-coats of hairy felt, their brows not wrinkled but farrowed,
+bronzed and burned by the sun, their glances savage as those of a wild
+beast, worthy of having lived in the time of Charlemagne. Surely those
+who defied Roland were not more savage in physiognomy. Finally appeared
+five or six old women, the like of whom I could never have imagined:
+a hooded cloak of white woollen {194}stuff enfolded them like a
+bed-blanket; only the swarthy countenance was visible, their eyes deep
+and fierce like the she-wolf's, their mumbling lips, that seemed to
+be muttering spells. They called to mind involuntarily the witches in
+Macbeth; the mind was transported a hundred leagues away from cities,
+into barren gorges, beneath lone glaciers where the herdsmen pass whole
+months amidst the snows of winter, near to the growling bears, without
+hearing one human word, with no other companions than the gaunt peaks
+and the dreary fir-trees. They have borrowed from solitude something of
+its aspect.
+
+[Illustration: 219]
+
+{195}
+
+[Illustration: 221]
+
+{196}
+
+
+III.
+
+{197}The Ossalais, however, have ordinarily a gentle, intelligent,
+and somewhat sad physiognomy. The soil is too poor to impart to their
+countenance that expression of impatient vivacity and lively spirit
+that the wine of the south and the easy life give to their neighbors of
+Languedoc. Three-score leagues in a carriage prove that the soil
+moulds the type. A little farther up, in the Cantal, a country of
+chest-nut-trees, where the people fill themselves with a hearty
+nourishment, you will see countenances red with sluggish blood and set
+with a thick beard, fleshy, heavy-limbed bodies, massive machines for
+labor. Here the men are thin and pale; their bones project, and their
+large features are weatherbeaten like those of their mountains. An
+endless struggle against the soil has stunted the women as well as the
+plants; it has left in their eyes a vague expression of melancholy and
+reflection. Thus the incessant impressions of body and soul in the long
+run modify body and soul; the race moulds the individual, the country
+moulds the race. A degree of heat in the air and of inclination in the
+ground is the first cause of our faculties and of our passions.
+
+Disinterestedness is not a mountain virtue. In a poor country, the first
+want is want of money. {198}The dispute is to know whether they shall
+consider strangers as a prey or a harvest; both opinions are true:
+we are a prey which every year yields a harvest. Here is an incident,
+trifling, but capable of showing the dexterity and the ardor with which
+they will skin a flint.
+
+One day Paul told his servant to sew another button upon his trousers.
+An hour after she brings in the trousers, and, with an undecided,
+anxious air, as if fearing the effect of her demand: "It is a sou," said
+she. I will explain later how great a sum the sou is in this place.
+
+Paul draws out a sou in silence and gives it to her. Jeannette retires
+on tip-toe as far as the door, thinks better of it, returns, takes
+up the trousers and shows the button: "Ah! that is a fine button! (A
+pause.) I did not find _that_ in my box. (Another and a longer pause.)
+I bought that at the grocer's; it costs a sou!" She draws herself up
+anxiously; the proprietor of the trousers, still without speaking, gives
+a second sou.
+
+It is clear that she has struck upon a mine of sous. Jeannette goes out,
+and a moment after reopens the door. She has resolved on her course,
+and in a shrill, piercing voice, with admirable volubility: "I had no
+thread; I had to buy some thread; I used a good deal of thread; good
+thread, too. The button won't come off. I sewed it on {199}fast: it cost
+a sou." Paul pushes across the table the third sou.
+
+Two hours later, Jeannette, who has been pondering on the matter,
+reappears. She prepares breakfast with the greatest possible care; she
+takes pains to wipe the least spot, she lowers her voice, she walks
+noiselessly, she is charming in her little attentions; then she says,
+putting forth all sorts of obsequious graces: "I ought not to lose
+anything, you would not want me to lose anything; the cloth was harsh, I
+broke the point of my needle; I did not know it a while ago, I have just
+noticed it; it cost a sou."
+
+Paul drew out the fourth sou, saying with his serious air: "Cheer up,
+Jeannette; you will keep a good house, my child; happy the husband who
+shall lead you, pure and blushing, beneath the roof of his ancestors;
+you may go and brush the trousers."
+
+Beggars swarm. I have never met a child between the ages of four and
+fifteen years who did not ask alms of me; all the inhabitants follow
+this trade. No one is ashamed of it. You look at any one of the little
+girls, scarcely able to walk, seated at their threshold busy in eating
+an apple: they come stumbling along with their hands stretched out
+towards you. You find in a valley a young herdsman with his cows; he
+comes up and asks {200}you for a trifle. A tall girl goes by with a
+fagot on her head; she stops and asks a trifle of you.
+
+[Illustration: 225]
+
+A peasant is at work on the road. "I am making a good road for you,"
+says he; "give me just a trifle." A band of scapegraces are playing at
+the end of a promenade; as soon as they see you, they take each other
+by the hand, begin the dance of the country, and end by collecting the
+usual trifle. And so it is throughout the Pyrenees. {201}
+
+[Illustration: 225]
+
+And they are merchants as well as beggars. You rarely pass along the
+street without being accosted by a guide who offers you his services and
+begs you to give him the preference. If you are seated on the hillside,
+three or four children come dropping out of the sky, bringing you
+butterflies, stones, curious plants, bouquets of flowers.
+
+If you go near a dairy, the proprietor comes out with a porringer of
+milk, and will sell it to you in spite of yourself. One day as I was
+looking at a young bull, the drover proposed to me to buy it.
+
+This greediness is not offensive. I once went up the brook of la Soude,
+behind Eaux-Bonnes: it is a sort of tumbledown staircase which for three
+leagues winds among the box in a parched ravine. You have to clamber
+over pointed rocks, jump from point to point, balance yourself along
+narrow ledges, climb zigzag up the scarped slopes covered with rolling
+stones. The foot-path is enough to frighten the goats. You bruise your
+feet on it, and at every step {202}run the risk of getting a sprain. I
+met there some young women and girls of twenty, all barefooted, carrying
+to the village, one a block of marble in her basket, another three sacks
+of charcoal fastened together, another five or six heavy planks; the
+way is nine miles long, under a mid-day sun; and nine miles for the home
+journey: for this they are paid ten sous.
+
+Like the beggars and the merchants, they are very crafty and very
+polite. Poverty forces men to calculate and to please; they take off
+their cap as soon as you speak to them and smile complaisantly; their
+manners are never brutal or artless. The proverb says very truly: "False
+and courteous Bearnais." You recall to mind the caressing manners and
+the perfect skill of their Henry IV.; he knew how to play on everybody
+and offend nobody. In this respect, as in many others, he was a
+true Bearnais. With the aid of necessity, I have seen them trump up
+geological disquisitions. In the middle of July there was a sort of
+earthquake; a report was spread that an old wall had fallen down;
+in truth the windows had shaken as if a great wagon were passing by.
+Immediately half of the bathers quitted their lodgings: a hundred and
+fifty persons fled from Cauterets in two days; travellers in their
+night-shirts ran to the stable to fasten on their carriages, and to
+light themselves carried away the {203}hotel lantern. The peasants shook
+their heads compassionately and said to me: "You see, sir, they are
+going from the frying-pan into the fire; if there is an earthquake, the
+plain will open, and they will fall into the crevices, whereas here the
+mountain is solid, and would keep them safe as a house."
+
+That same Jeannette who already holds so honorable place in my history,
+shall furnish an example of the polite caution and the over-scrupulous
+reserve in which they wrap themselves when they are afraid that they
+shall be compromised. The master had drawn the neighboring church, and
+wanted to judge of his work after the manner of Moliere.
+
+"Do you recognize that, Jeanette."
+
+"Ah! monsieur, did you do that?"
+
+"What have I copied here?"
+
+"Ah! monsieur, it is very beautiful."
+
+[Illustration: 228]
+
+{204}"But still, tell me what it is there."
+
+She takes the paper, turns it over and over again, looks at the artist
+with a dazed air and says nothing.
+
+"Is it a mill or a church?"
+
+"Yes, indeed."
+
+"Is it the church of Laruns?"
+
+"Ah! it's very beautiful."
+
+You could never get her beyond that.
+
+
+IV.
+
+We had a wish to know if the fathers were equal to the sons; and we have
+found the history of Bearn in a fine red folio, composed in the year
+1640, by Master Pierre de Marca, a Bearnais, counsellor of the king
+in his state and privy councils, and president in his court of the
+parliament of Navarre; the whole ornamented with a magnificent engraving
+representing the conquest of the Golden Fleece. Pierre de Marca makes
+several important discoveries in his book, among others, that of two
+kings of Navarre, personages of the ninth century, until then unknown:
+Semeno Enneconis, and En-neco Semenonis.
+
+Although filled with respect for Semeno Enneconis and Enneco Semenonis,
+we are desperately wearied with the recital of the suits, the robberies
+{205}and the genealogies of all the illustrious unknown. Paul maintains
+that learned history is only good for learned asses; a thousand dates do
+not make a single idea. The celebrated historian of the Swiss, Jean de
+Muller, once wanted to rehearse the list of all the Swiss nobility, and
+forgot the fifty-first descendant of some undiscoverable viscount; he
+became ill with grief and shame; it is as if a general should wish to
+know how many buttons each of his soldiers had on his coat.
+
+We have found that these good mountaineers have ever loved gain and
+booty. It is so natural to wish to live, and live well too! Above all
+is it pleasant to live at the expense of others! Time was when, in
+Scotland, every shipwrecked vessel belonged to the coast-side people;
+the wrecked ships came to them like herrings in the season, a hereditary
+and legitimate harvest; they felt robbed if one of the crew attempted
+to keep his coat. It is so here with strangers. The rear-guard of
+Charlemagne, under Roland, perished here; the mountaineers rolled down
+upon it an avalanche of stone; then they divided the stuffs, the silver,
+mules and baggage, and each one betook himself to his den. In the like
+manner they treated a second army sent by Louis le Debonnaire. I fancy
+they regarded these passages as a blessing from heaven, a special gift
+from divine Providence. {206}
+
+[Illustration: 231]
+
+Fine cuirasses, new lances, necklaces, well-lined coats, it was a
+perfect magazine of gold, iron, and wool. Very likely the wives ran to
+meet them, blessing the good husband who had been the most thoughtful of
+the welfare of his little family, and brought back the greatest quantity
+of provisions. This artlessness in respect of theft still exists in
+Calabria. In Napoleon's time, a prefect was scolding a well-to-do
+peasant wild was behind-hand with his contributions; the peasant
+replied, with all the openness of an upright man: "Faith, {207}your
+Excellency, it's not my fault."
+
+[Illustration: 232]
+
+"For fifteen days now have I taken my carabine every evening, and have
+posted myself along the highway to see if no one would pass. Never a man
+goes by; but I give you my word I'll go back there until I have scraped
+together the ducats I owe you."
+
+Add to this custom of thieving an extreme bravery! I believe the country
+is the cause of one as well as the other; extreme poverty removes
+timidity as well as scruples; they are leeches on the body of others,
+but then they are equally prodigal of their own; they can resist as well
+as take an advantage; if they willingly take another's goods, they guard
+their own yet more willingly. Liberty has thriven here from the earliest
+times, crabbed and savage, home-born and tough like a stem of their own
+boxwood. Hear the tone of the primitive charter: {208}"These are the
+tribunals of Bearn, in which mention is made of the fact that, in
+old times, in Beam they had no lord, and in those days they heard the
+praises of a certain knight. They sought him out, and made him their
+lord during one year; and after that, he was unwilling to maintain
+among them their tribunals and customs. And the court of Bearn then came
+together at Pau, and they required of him to maintain among them their
+tribunals and customs. And he would not, and thereupon they killed him
+in full court."
+
+In like manner the land of Ossau preserved its privileges, even against
+its viscount. Every robber who brought his booty into the valley was
+safe there, and might the next day present himself before the viscount
+with impunity: it was only when the latter, or his wife in his absence,
+came into the valley to dispense justice that he was judged. This
+scarcely ever happened, and the land of Ossau was "the retreat of all
+the evil livers and marauders" of the country round.
+
+
+V.
+
+These rude manners, filled with chances and dangers, produced as many
+heroes as brigands. First comes the Count Gaston, one of the leaders of
+the first crusade; he was, like all the great {209}men of this country,
+an enterprising and a ready-minded man, a man of experience and one of
+the vanguard. At Jerusalem he went ahead to reconnoitre, and constructed
+the machines for the siege; he was held to be one of the wisest in
+counsel, and was the first to plant upon the walls the cows of Bearn.
+No one struck a heavier blow or calculated more exactly, and no one was
+fonder of calculating and striking. On his return, he fought against his
+neighbors, twice besieged Saragossa, and once Bayonne, and, along with
+king Alphonso, won two great battles against the Moors. Ah, what a time
+was that, for minds and muscles framed for adventure! No need then to
+seek for war; it was found everywhere, and profit along with it.
+
+[Illustration: 234]
+
+Such a fine career as those cavalcades had among the marvellous cities
+of the Asiatic Saracens and of the Spanish Moors! What a quantity of
+skulls to cleave, of gold to bring home! It was thus that the overflow
+of force and imagination was discharg was no foolish affair of a random
+shot or clumsy {210}bullet, in the midst of a well-ordered
+manouvre. Then one encountered all the hazards, the unforeseen, of
+knight-errantry; the senses were all awake; the arms wrought and
+the body was a soldier; Gaston was killed as a private horseman in
+ambuscade, with the bishop of Huesca.
+
+That which pleases me in history is the minor circumstances, the details
+of character. A mere scrap of a phrase indicates a revolution in the
+faculties and passions; great events are contained in it at their ease,
+as in their cause. Here in the life of Gaston is one of those words. The
+day that Jerusalem was taken, quarter had been granted to a large number
+of Mussulmans. "But the next day, the rest, displeased at seeing that
+there were any infidels alive, mounted upon the roofs of the temple, and
+massacred and mangled all the Saracens, both men and women." * There was
+neither reasoning nor deliberation; at the sight of a Mussulman's dress,
+their blood mounted in wrath to their face, and they sprang forward,
+like lions or butchers, struck them down and dismembered them. Lope de
+Vega, an antique Christian, a severe Spaniard, renewed this savage and
+fanatical sentiment:
+
+ * The following fact is from the Siege of Antioch: "Many of
+ our enemies died, and some of the prisoners were led before
+ the gate of the city, and there their heads were cut off, in
+ order to discourage those who remained in the city."
+
+{211}Garcia Tello. Father, why have you not brought a Moor for me to see
+him!
+
+The elder Tello; (showing him the prisoners.) Well, Garcia, those are
+Moors.
+
+Garcia. What? Those are Moors? They look like men.
+
+Old Tello. And indeed they are men.
+
+Garcia. They do not deserve to be.
+
+Old Tello. And why?
+
+Garcia. Because they believe neither in God nor in the Virgin Mary; the
+sight of them makes my blood boil, Father.
+
+Old Tello. Are you afraid of them?
+
+Garcia. No more than you, Father. (_Going toward the prisoners._) Dogs,
+I would tear you in pieces with my hands; you shall know what it is to
+be a Christian. (He darts upon them and pursues them.)
+
+Old Tello. Ah, the good little fellow! Gracious Heaven! He is fine as
+coral.
+
+Tello. Mendo, see that he does them no harm.
+
+Old Tello. Let him kill one or two; so do they teach a falcon to kill
+when he is young.
+
+In fact, they are falcons or vultures. In the song of Roland, when
+the doughty knights ask from Turpin the absolution of their sins, the
+archbishop for penance recommends them to strike well.
+
+But at the same time they have the mind and the soul of children.
+"Deep are the wells, and the valleys dark, the rocks black, the defiles
+marvellous." That is their whole description of the Pyrenees; they feel
+and speak _in a lump_. A child, questioned about Paris, which he had
+just seen for the first time, {212}replied: "There are a great many
+streets, and carriages everywhere, and great houses, and in two squares
+two tall columns." The poet of old times is like the child; he does not
+know how to analyze his impressions. Like him, he loves the marvellous,
+and takes delight in tales where all the proportions are gigantic.
+
+[Illustration: 237]
+
+In the battle of Roncevaux everything is aggrandized beyond measure. The
+worthies kill the entire vanguard of the Saracens, a hundred thousand
+men, and, afterward, the army of King Marsile, thirty battalions, each
+composed of ten thousand men. Roland winds his horn, and the {213}sound
+travels away thirty leagues to Charlemagne, and is echoed by his
+sixty thousand hautboys. What visions such words awakened in those
+inexperienced brains! Then all at once the bow was unbent; the
+wounded Roland calls to mind "men of his lineage, of gentle France, of
+Charlemagne his lord who supports him, and cannot help but weep and
+sigh for them." At the conclusion of the carnage with which they filled
+Jerusalem, the crusaders, weeping and chanting, went barefoot to the
+holy sepulchre. Later, when a number of the barons wanted to leave the
+crusade of Constantinople, the others went to meet them, and entreated
+them on their knees; then all embraced each other, bursting into sobs.
+Robust children: that expresses the whole truth; they killed and howled
+as if they were beasts of prey, then when once the fury was calmed, they
+were all tears and tenderness, like a child who flings himself upon his
+brother's neck, or who is going to make his first communion.
+
+
+VI.
+
+I return to my Bearnais; they were the most active and circumspect of
+the band. The counts of Bearn fought and treated with all the world;
+they hover between the patronage of France, Spain and England, and are
+subject to no {214}one; they pass from one to the other and always to
+their own advantage, "drawn," says Matthew Paris, "by pounds sterling,
+or crowns, of which they had both great need and great abundance." They
+are always first where fighting is to be done or money to be gained;
+they go to be killed in Spain or to demand gold at Poitiers. They are
+calculators and adventurers; from imagination and courage lovers of
+warfare,--lovers of necessity and reflection.
+
+[Illustration: 239]
+
+And in this manner their Henry won the crown of France, thinking much of
+his interests and little of his life, and always poor. After the camp at
+La Fere, when he was already recognized as king, he wrote: "I have only
+a pretence of a horse on which to fight, and no entire armor that I can
+put on; my shirts are in tatters, my pourpoints out at the elbows. My
+saucepan is many a time upset, and now these two days I have dined and
+supped with {215}one and another, for my purveyors say that they see
+no way of furnishing my table any longer, especially since they have
+received no money for six months."
+
+A month later, at Fontaine-Francaise, he charged an army at the head of
+eight hundred cavaliers, and fired off his pistol by way of sport, like
+a soldier. But at the same time this father of his people treated the
+people in the following manner: "The prisons of Normandy were full of
+prisoners for the payment of the duty on salt. They languished there in
+such wise that as many as six-score of their corpses were brought forth
+at one time. The parliament of Rouen besought His Majesty to have pity
+on his people; but the king had been told that a great revenue was
+coming from that tax, and said that he was willing that it should be
+raised, and seemed that he would wish to turn the rest into mockery."
+
+[Illustration: 240]
+
+A good fellow, no doubt, but a devil of a good fellow; we French are
+fond of such; they are likable, but sometimes deserve hanging. These
+had prudence into the bargain, and were made to be officers of fortune.
+{216}"Gassion," says Tallemant des Reaux, "was the fourth of five sons.
+When he had finished his studies, he was sent to the war; but otherwise
+he was but poorly furnished. For his sole horse his father gave him a
+docked pony, that might have been thirty years old; its like was not
+in all Bearn, and it was called, as a rarity, _Gassion's Bob-tail._
+Apparently the young man was scarcely better provided with money than
+with horses. This pretty courser left him four or five leagues from Pau,
+but that did not prevent him from going into Savoy, where he entered the
+troops of the duke, for there was then no war in France. But the late
+king having broken with this prince, all Frenchmen had orders to quit
+his service; this forced our adventurer to return to the service of the
+king.
+
+"At the taking of the pass of Suze, he did so well, although only a
+simple cavalier, that he was made cornet; but the company in which he
+was cornet was broken, and he came to Paris and asked for the mantle of
+a musketeer. He was refused on account of his religion. Out of spite,
+with several other Frenchmen he went over to Germany, and, although in
+his troop there were men of higher position than he, knowing how to talk
+in Latin, he was everywhere received for the chief of the band. One
+of these made the advances for a company of light-horse that they were
+going to {217}raise in France for the king of Sweden; he was lieutenant
+of it; his captain was killed, and now he is himself a captain. He soon
+made himself known as a man of spirit, so that he obtained from the king
+of Sweden the privilege of receiving orders only from His Majesty in
+person; this was on condition of marching always at the head of the army
+and of filling in a measure the position of forlorn hope. While thus
+employed, he received a frightful pistol-shot in the right side, the
+wound of which has since opened several times, now to the peril of his
+life, and now the opening answering as a crisis in other illnesses."
+
+[Illustration: 242]
+
+He was a thorough soldier, and above all a lover of valor. A rebel
+peasant, at Avranches, fought admirably before a barricade, and killed
+the Marquis de Courtaumer, whom he took for Gassion. Gassion had search
+made everywhere for this gallant man, in order that he might be pardoned
+and to put him in his regiment. The Chancellor Seguier took the affair
+like a lawyer; some time after, having seized the peasant, he had
+him broken on the wheel. {218}He treated civil affairs just as he
+did military ones. He sent word to a merchant in Paris who had become
+bankrupt, owing him ten thousand livres, "that it would not be possible
+for him to let remain in the world a man who was carrying away his
+property." He was paid.
+
+"He led men into war admirably. I have heard related an action of
+his, very bold and at the same time very sensible; before he was
+major-general, he asked several noblemen if they wished to join his
+party. They went with him. After having gone about the whole morning
+without finding anything, he said to them: 'We are too strong; the
+parties all fly before us. Let us leave here our horsemen, and go away
+alone.' The volunteers followed him; they went on until they were near
+to Saint-Omer. Just then two squadrons of cavalry suddenly appeared and
+cut off their way; for Saint-Omer was behind our people.
+
+"'Messieurs,' said he to them, 'we must pass or die. Put yourselves all
+abreast; ride full speed at them and don't fire. The first squadron will
+be afraid, when they see that you mean to fire only into their teeth;
+they will rein back and overthrow the others.'" It happened just as he
+had said: our noblemen, well mounted, forced the two squadrons and saved
+themselves, almost to a man.
+
+"Another, also very daring; which, however, {219}seems to me a little
+rash. Having received notice that the Croats were leading away the
+horses of the Prince d'Enrichemont, he wanted to charge upon them,
+accompanied by only a few of his horsemen, and, as there happened to be
+a great ditch between him and the enemy, he swam across it on his horse,
+without looking to see if any one followed him, so that he encountered
+the enemy alone, killed five of them, put the rest to flight, and
+returned with three of our men whom they had taken, and who perhaps
+helped him in the struggle. He led back all the horses."
+
+The quondam light-horseman reappeared beneath the general's uniform.
+Thus he always remained the comrade of his soldiers. When any one had
+offended the least of his cavalrymen, he took the man with him and had
+satisfaction given in one way or another.
+
+[Illustration: 244]
+
+"La Vieuxville, since superintendent, intrusted to him his eldest son to
+learn the trade of war. {220}The young man treated Gassion magnificently
+at the army. 'You are trifling with yourself, Monsieur le Marquis,' said
+he: 'of what use are all these dainties? 'S death! we only want good
+bread, good wine and good forage.' He thought of his horse as much as of
+himself."
+
+[Illustration: 245]
+
+He was a poor courtier and troubled himself little about ceremonies.
+One day he went to the communion before the prince palatine, and the
+following Sunday, having found his place taken, he would never allow
+that a nobleman should give it up, and went to seek a place somewhere
+else. Nevertheless he was scarcely courtly towards ladies, and on this
+point not at all worthy of Henry IV.
+
+"At court, many young ladies who were pleased with him, were wheedling
+him, and said: 'Of a {221}truth, monsieur, you have performed the finest
+possible deeds.'--'That's a matter of course,' said he. When one said:
+'I should be glad to have a husband like M. de Gassion.'--'I don't doubt
+it,' answered he.
+
+"He said of Mlle, de Segur, who was old and ugly, 'I like that young
+woman; she looks like a Croat.'
+
+"When Bougis, his _lieutenant de gendarmes_, stayed too long in Paris in
+the winter-time, he wrote to him: 'You are amusing yourself with those
+women, and you will die like a dog; here you would find fine chances.
+What the devil do you find in the way of pleasure in going to court and
+making love! That is pretty business in comparison with the pleasure of
+taking a quarter!'"
+
+His brother, Bergere, seems to have had little taste for this pleasure.
+Gassion, then a colonel, on one occasion ordered him to charge at the
+head of fifty cavaliers, and declared that if he gave way he would run
+him through the body with his sword. An admirable method for forming
+men! Bergere found his account in it, and afterwards went into action
+like any other man.
+
+The two adventurers had a thoroughly military ending. Their brother
+the president, for economy's sake, had Bergere embalmed by a valet de
+chambre who mangled him shockingly. As for Gassion, he awaited burial
+during three months. {222}"The president, tired of paying for the
+funeral hangings, had them returned, and others put up which cost him
+ten _sols_ less a day. At last he had a small vault constructed between
+two gates in the old cemetery; he had them interred one day when there
+was a sermon without any solemnity whatever, and so that no one could
+say that he had gone there on their account." Three out of four heroes
+have been similarly buried, like dogs.
+
+The last of the d'Artagnans, those heroic hunters after paying
+adventures, was (according to an inscription, said to be false) born at
+Pau, rue du Tran, No. 6. A drummer in 1792, he was in 1810 prince royal
+of Sweden. He had made his way, and along it he had lost his prejudices.
+Like Henry IV., he found that a kingdom was worth quite as much as a
+mass; he too made the perilous leap, but in a contrary direction, and
+laid aside his religion like an old cassock; a question of old clothes:
+a brand-new royal mantle was worth far more.
+
+[Illustration: 247]
+
+{223}{224}
+
+
+
+
+BOOK III. THE VALLEY OF LUZ. {225}
+
+[Illustration: 250]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I. ON THE WAY TO LUZ.
+
+
+I.
+
+The carriage leaves Eaux-Bonnes at dawn. The sun is scarcely yet risen,
+and is still hidden by the mountains. Pale rays begin to color the
+mosses on the western declivity. These mosses, bathed in dew, seem as
+if awakening under the first caress of the day. Rosy hues, of an
+inexpressible softness, rest on the summits, then steal down along the
+slopes. One could never have believed that these gaunt old creatures
+were capable of an expression so timid and so tender. The light
+broadens, heaven expands, the air is filled with joy and life. A bald
+peak in the midst of the rest, and darker than they, stands out in an
+aureole of flame. All at once, {226}between two serrate points, like a
+dazzling arrow, streams the first ray of the sun.
+
+
+II.
+
+Beyond Pau stretches a smiling country, golden with harvests, amongst
+which the Gave winds its blue folds between white and pebbly beaches. On
+the right, far away in a veil of luminous mist, the Pyrenees lift their
+jagged tops, and the naked points of their black rocks. Their flanks,
+furrowed by the torrents of winter, are deeply scored and, as it were,
+turned up with an iron rake.
+
+[Illustration: 251]
+
+The picturesque country and the great mountains are seen to disclose
+themselves; the fences of the fields are of small rounded stones, in
+whose fissures abound waving grasses, pretty heaths, tufts of yellow
+sedum, and {227}above all tiny pink geraniums, that shine in the sun
+like clusters of rubies. You are quite ready to seek for nymphs; we
+come across six in an orchard, not actually dancing, but dirty. They are
+eating bread and cheese, squatted on their heels, and stare at us with
+half-open mouth.
+
+
+III.
+
+Coarraze still preserves a tower and gateway, the remains of a castle.
+This castle has its legend, which Froissart recounts in a style so
+flowing and agreeable, so minute and expressive, that I cannot refrain
+from quoting it at length.
+
+The Lord of Coarraze had a dispute with a clerk, and the clerk left him
+with threats. About three months after, when the knight least thought
+of it, and was sleeping in his bed with his lady, in his castle of
+Coarraze, there came invisible messengers, who made such a noise,
+knocking about everything they met with in the castle, as if they were
+determined to destroy all within it: and they gave such loud raps at
+the door of the chamber of the knight, that the lady was exceedingly
+frightened. The knight heard it all, but did not say a word, as he would
+not have it appear that he was alarmed, for he was a man of sufficient
+courage for any adventure. These noises and tumults continued, in
+{228}different parts of the castle, for a considerable time, and then
+ceased. On the morrow, all the servants of the household assembled, and
+went to their lord,' and said, 'My lord, did you not hear what we all
+heard this night?' The Lord de Coarraze dissembled, and replied, 'What
+is it you have heard?'
+
+[Illustration: 253]
+
+They then related to him all the noises and rioting they had heard, and
+that the plates in the kitchen had been broken. He began to laugh, and
+said, 'It was nothing, that they had dreamed it, or that it had been the
+wind.' 'In the name of God,' added the lady, 'I well heard it.' {229}
+
+"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 knight could no longer desist from leaping out of
+his bed, and calling out, 'Who is it that at this hour thus knocks at my
+chamber door?' He was instantly answered, 'It is I.' 'And who sends thee
+hither?' asked the knight. 'The clerk of Catalonia, whom thou hast much
+wronged; for thou hast deprived him of the rights of his benefice; I
+will, therefore, never leave thee quiet, until thou hast rendered him
+a just account, with which he shall be contented.'--'What art thou
+called,' said the knight, 'who art so good a messenger?'--'My name is
+Orthon.'--'Orthon,' said the knight, 'serving a clerk will not be of
+much advantage to thee; for if thou believest him he will give thee
+great trouble: I beg thou wilt therefore leave him and serve me, and I
+shall think myself obliged to thee.' Orthon was ready with his answer,
+for he had taken a liking to the knight, and said, 'Do you wish
+it?'--'Yes,' replied the knight; 'but no harm must be done to any one
+within these walls.'--'Oh, no,' answered Orthon; 'I have no power to
+do ill to any one, only to awaken thee and disturb thy rest, or that of
+other persons.'--'Do what I tell{230} thee,' added the knight, 'we shall
+well agree, and leave this wicked priest, for he is a worthless fellow,
+and serve me.'--'Well,' replied Orthon, 'since thou wilt have it so, I
+consent.'
+
+"Orthon took such an affection to the Lord de Coarraze, 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, 'Orthon,
+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?' Orthon 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 Coarraze
+know by means of Orthon all things that were passing in different parts
+of the world; and this connection continued for five years; but he could
+not keep it to himself, and discovered it to the Count de Foix, in the
+manner I will tell you. The first year, the Lord de Coarraze came to the
+Count de Foix, at Orthes, or elsewhere, and told him, 'My lord, such
+an event has happened in England, in Scotland, Germany, or some other
+country,' and the Count {231}de Foix, who found all this intelligence
+prove true, marvelled greatly how he could have acquired such early
+information, and entreated him so earnestly, that the Lord de Coarraze
+told him the means by which he had acquired his intelligence, and the
+manner of its communication.
+
+"When the Count de Foix heard this, he was much pleased, and said, 'Lord
+de Coarraze, nourish the love of your intelligencer. I wish I had such
+a messenger; he costs you nothing, and you are truly informed of
+everything that passes in the world.'--'My lord,' replied the knight, 'I
+will do so.' The Lord de Coarraze was served by Orthon for a long time.
+I am ignorant if Orthon had more than one master; but two or three
+times every week he visited the knight and told him all the news of the
+countries he had frequented, which he wrote immediately to the Count de
+Foix, who was much delighted therewith, as there is not a lord in the
+world more eager after news from foreign parts than he is. Once, when
+the Lord de Coarraze was in conversation on this subject with the Count
+de Foix, the Count said, 'Lord de Coarraze, have you never yet seen your
+messenger?'--'No, by my faith, never, nor have I ever pressed him on
+this matter.'--'I wonder at that,' replied the count, 'for had he
+been so much attached to me, I should have begged of him to have shown
+himself in his {232}own proper form; and I entreat you will do so, that
+you may tell how he is made, and what he is like. You have said that he
+speaks Gascon as well as you or I do.'--'By my faith,' said the Lord de
+Coar-raze, 'he converses just as well and as properly, and, since you
+request it, I will do all I can to see him.' It fell out when the Lord
+de Coarraze, as usual, was in bed with his lady (who was now accustomed
+to hear Orthon without being frightened), Orthon arrived and shook the
+pillow of the knight, who was asleep. On waking, he asked who was there.
+Orthon replied, 'It is I.'--'And where dost thou come from?'--'I
+come from Prague, in Bohemia.'--'How far is it hence?'--'Sixty days'
+journey,' replied Orthon. 'And hast thou returned thence in so short
+a time?'--'Yes, as may God help me: I travel as fast as the wind, or
+faster.'--'What, hast thou got wings?'--'Oh, no.'--'How, then, canst
+thou fly so fast?'--'That is no business of yours.'--'No!' said the
+knight. 'I should like exceedingly to see what form thou hast, and how
+thou art made.'--'That does not concern you to know,' replied Orthon;
+'be satisfied that you hear me, and that I bring you intelligence you
+may depend on.'--'By God,' said the Lord de Coarraze, 'I should love
+thee better if I had seen thee.'--'Well,' replied Orthon, 'since you
+have such a desire, the first thing you shall see {233}tomorrow morning,
+in quitting your bed, shall be myself.'--'I am satisfied,' said the
+knight; 'you may now depart; I give thee thy liberty for this night.'
+
+"When morning came, the knight arose, but his lady was so much
+frightened she pretended to be sick, and said she would not leave her
+bed the whole day. The Lord de Coarraze willed it otherwise. 'Sir,'
+said she, 'if I do get up, I shall see Orthon; and, if it please God, I
+would neither see nor meet him.'--'Well,' replied the knight,
+'I am determined to see him;' and leaping out of his bed, he seated
+himself on the bedstead, thinking he should see Orthon in his own shape;
+but he saw nothing that could induce him to say he had seen him. When
+the ensuing night arrived, and the Lord de Coarraze was in bed, Orthon
+came and began to talk in his usual manner. 'Go,' said the knight; 'thou
+art a liar. Thou oughtest to have shown thyself to me this morning,
+and hast not done so.'--'No!' replied Orthon; 'but I have.'--'I say,
+no.'--'And did you see nothing at all when you leaped out of bed?' The
+Lord de Coarraze was silent, and, having considered awhile, said, 'Yes;
+when sitting on my bedside, and thinking of thee, I saw two straws which
+were turning and playing together on the floor.'--'That was myself,'
+replied Orthon, 'for I had taken that form.' The Lord de Coarraze said,
+'That will not {234}satisfy me; I beg of thee to assume some other
+shape, so that I may see thee and know thee.' Orthon answered, 'You
+ask so much that you will ruin me and force me away from you, for your
+requests are too great.'--'You shall not quit me,' said the Lord
+de Coarraze; 'if I had once seen thee, I should not again wish
+it.'--'Well,' replied Orthon, 'you shall see me to-morrow, if you
+pay attention to the first thing you observe when you leave your
+chamber.'--'I am contented,' said the knight; 'now go thy ways, for I
+want to sleep.' Orthon departed.
+
+[Illustration: 259]
+
+"On the morrow, about the hour of eight, the knight had risen and was
+dressed; on leaving his apartment, he went to a window which looked
+into the court of the castle. Casting his eyes about, the first thing
+he observed was an immensely large sow, but she {235}was so poor, she
+seemed only skin and bone, with long hanging ears all spotted, and a
+sharp-pointed, lean snout. The Lord de Coarraze was disgusted at such a
+sight, and, calling to his servants, said, 'Let the dogs loose quickly,
+for I will have that sow killed and devoured.' The servants hastened to
+open the kennel, and to set the hounds on the sow, who uttered a loud
+cry and looked up at the Lord de Coarraze, leaning on the balcony of his
+window, and was never seen afterwards; for she vanished, and no one ever
+knew what became of her.
+
+[Illustration: 260]
+
+"The knight returned quite pensive to his chamber, for he then
+recollected what Orthon had told him, and said: 'I believe I have seen
+my messenger Orthon, and repent having set my hounds on him, for perhaps
+I may never see him more: he frequently told me, that if I ever angered
+him, I should lose him.' He kept his word; for never did he return
+to the hotel de Coarraze, and the knight died the following year."
+{236}This Orthon, the familiar spirits, queen Mab, are the poor little
+popular gods, children of the pool and the oak, engendered by the
+melancholy and awe-struck reveries of the spinning maiden and the
+peasant. A great state religion then overshadowed all thoughts; doctrine
+ready-made was imposed upon them; men could no longer, as in Greece or
+Scandinavia, build the great poem which suited their manners and mind.
+They received it from above, and repeated the litany with docility, yet
+not very well understanding it. Their invention produced only legends of
+saints or churchyard superstitions. Since they could not reach God, they
+struck out for themselves goblins, hermits, and gnomes, and by these
+simple and fantastic figures they expressed their rustic life or their
+vague terrors. This Orthon, who storms at the door in the night
+and breaks the dishes, is he anything more than the night-mare of a
+half-wakened man, anxiously listening to the rustling of the wind that
+fumbles at the doors, and the sudden noises of the night magnified by
+silence! The child in his bed suffers similar fears when he covers eyes
+and ears that he may not see the strange shadow of the wardrobe, or hear
+the stifled cries of the thatch on the roof. The two straws that play
+convulsively on the floor, twined together like twins, and shine
+with mysterious brilliancy in the {237}pale sunlight, leave a vague
+uneasiness in the disordered brain.
+
+[Illustration: 262]
+
+In this way is born the race of familiars and fairies, nimble creatures,
+swift travellers, as capricious and sudden as a dream, who amuse
+themselves maliciously in sticking together the manes of the horses, or
+in souring the milk, yet sometimes become tender and domesticated,
+attached like the cricket to its hearthstone, and are the penates of the
+country and the farm, invisible and powerful as gods, quaint and odd as
+children.
+
+[238]
+
+Thus all the legends preserve and set off vanished ways and
+sentiments, like to those mineral forces which, deep down in the heart
+of the mountains, transform charcoal and stones into marble and the
+diamond.
+
+[Illustration: 263]
+
+{239}
+
+
+[Illustration: 265]
+
+{240}{241}
+
+
+IV.
+
+We no sooner reach Lestelle, than we are assured on all sides that we
+must visit the chapel. We pass between rows of shops full of rosaries,
+basins for holy-water, medals, small crucifixes, through a cross-fire
+of offers, exhortations and cries. After which we are free to admire
+the edifice, a liberty which we are careful not to abuse. On the portal,
+indeed, there is a pretty enough virgin in the style of the seventeenth
+century, four evangelists in marble, and in the interior several
+tolerable pictures; but the blue dome starred with gold looks like
+a bonbonniere, the walls are disgraced with engravings from the rue
+Saint-Jacques, the altar is loaded with gewgaws. The gilded den is
+pretentious and gloomy; for such a beautiful country the good God seems
+but ill harbored.
+
+The poor little chapel nestles close to a huge mountain wooded with
+crowded green thickets, which stretches out superbly in the light, and
+warms its belly in the sun. The highway is abruptly checked, makes a
+curve and crosses the Gave. The pretty bridge of a single arch rests its
+feet upon the naked rock and trails its ivy drapery in the blue-green
+eddies of the stream. We ascend beautiful wooded hills where the cows
+are grazing, and whose rounded slopes dip gently {242}down to the
+river's brink. We are nearing Saint Pe, on the confines of Bigorre and
+Beam.
+
+Saint-Pe contains a curious Roman church writh sculptured doorway. A
+luminous dust was dancing in its warm shadows; the eyes penetrated with
+pleasure into the depths of the background; its reliefs seemed to swim
+in a living blackness. All at once comes a clatter of cracking whips,
+of rolling and grinding wheels, of hoofs that strike fire from the
+pavement; then the endless hedge of white walls running away to the
+right and the left, flecked with glaring lights; then the sudden opening
+of the heavens and the triumph of the sun, whose furnace blazes in the
+remotest depths of the air.
+
+
+V.
+
+[Illustration: 267]
+
+Near Lourdes, the hills became bald and the landscape sad. Lourdes is
+only a mass of dull, lead-colored roofs, heaped up below the highway.
+{243}
+
+[Illustration: 269]
+
+{244}{245}The two small towers of the fort outline their slender forms
+against the sky. A single enormous, blackish rock lifts its back,
+corroded by mosses, above the enclosure of a slight wall that winds to
+shut it in, and suggests an elephant in a boarded shed. The neighborhood
+of the mountains dwarfs all human constructions.
+
+Heavy clouds rose in the sky, and the dull horizon became encased
+between two rows of mountains, gaunt, patched with scant brushwood,
+cleft in ravines; a pale light fell on the mutilated summits and into
+the gray crevices. Bands of beggars, in relays, hooked themselves on
+to the carriage with hoarse inarticulate noises, with idiotic air, wry
+necks, and deformed bodies; the projecting sinews swelled the wrinkled
+skin, and, peeping through the rags and tatters, was seen the flesh, in
+color like a burned brick.
+
+We entered the gorge of Pierrefitte. The clouds had spread, and darkened
+the whole heaven; the wind swept along in sudden gusts and whipped the
+dust into whirlwinds. The carriage rolled on between two immense walls
+of dark rocks, slashed and notched as if by the axe of an infuriate
+giant; rugged furrows, seamed with yawning gashes, reddish wounds,
+torn and crossed by pallid wounds, scar upon scar; the perpendicular
+{246}flank still bleeds from multiplied blows. Half-detached, bluish
+masses hung in sharp points over our heads; a thousand feet higher up,
+layers of blocks leaned forward, overhanging the way. At a prodigious
+height, the black, battlemented summits pierced the vapors, while, with
+every step forward, it seemed as if the narrow passage were coming to
+an end. The darkness was growing, and, under that livid light with
+its threatening reflexes, it seemed that those beetling monsters were
+shaking and would soon engulf everything. The trees, beaten against the
+rock, were bending and twisting. The wind complained with a long-drawn
+piercing moan, and beneath its mournful sound, the hoarse rumbling of
+the Gave was heard as it dashed madly against the rocks it could not
+subdue, and moaned sadly like a stricken soul that rebels against the
+torments it is powerless to escape.
+
+The rain came and covered all objects with its blinding veil. An hour
+later, the drained clouds were creeping along half way up the height;
+the dripping rocks shone through a dark varnish, like blocks of polished
+mahogany. Turbid water went boiling down the swollen cascades; the
+depths of the gorge were still darkened by the storm; but a tender light
+played over the wet summits, like a smile bathed in tears. The gorge
+opened up; the {247} arches of the marble bridges sprang lightly
+into the limpid air, and, sheeted in light, Luz was seen seated among
+sparkling meadows and fields of millet in full bloom.
+
+[Illustration: 272]
+
+{248} {249}
+
+[Illustration: 275]
+
+{250}
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II. LUZ.
+
+
+I.
+
+Luz is a little city, thoroughly rustic and agreeable. Streams of water
+run down the narrow, flinty streets; the gray houses press together
+for the sake of gaining a little shade. The morning sees the arrival of
+flocks of sheep, of asses laden with wood, of grunting and undisciplined
+hogs, and bare-footed peasant girls, knitting as they walk alongside of
+their carts. Luz is in a spot where four valleys come together. Men and
+beasts disappear on the market-place; red umbrellas are fixed in the
+ground. The women seat themselves alongside their wares; around them
+their red-cheeked brats are nibbling their bread, and frisking like
+so {251}many mice; provisions are sold, stuffs are bought. At noon the
+streets are deserted; here and there in the shadow of a doorway may be
+discerned the figure of an old woman sitting, but no sound is heard save
+the gentle murmur of the streams along their stony bed.
+
+The faces here are pretty: the children are a pleasure to look upon,
+before toil and the sun have spoiled their features. They amble merrily
+through the dust, and turn toward the passer their bright round faces,
+their speaking eyes, with slight and abrupt movements. When the girls,
+with their red petticoats tucked up, and in capulets of thick red stuff,
+approach to ask alms of you, you see under the crude color the pure
+oval of a clear-cut, proud countenance, a soft, almost pale hue, and the
+sweet look of two great tranquil eyes.
+
+
+II.
+
+The church is cool and solitary; it once belonged to the Templars. These
+monk-soldiers obtained a foothold in the most out-of-the-way corners
+of Europe. The tower is square as a fortress; the enclosing wall has
+battlements like a fortified city. The dark old door-way would be easily
+defended. Upon its arch, which is very low, may be distinguished a
+half-obliterated Christ, and two fantastic, {252}rudely colored birds.
+As you enter, a small uncovered tomb serves as font, and you are shown
+a low door through which passed the accursed race of the _bigots._ * Its
+first aspect is singular, but has nothing unpleasant about it. A
+good woman in a red capulet, knitting in hand, was praying near a
+confessional of badly planed boards, under an old brown gallery of
+turned wood. Poverty and antiquity are never ugly, and this expression
+of religious care seemed to suit well with the ruins and souvenirs of
+the middle ages scattered about us.
+
+ * Name applied among the Pyrenees to a people afflicted
+ with Cretinism.--Translator.
+
+But deeply rooted in the people is a certain indefinable love of the
+ridiculous and absurd which succeeds in spoiling everything; in this
+poor church, tracery, from which the gilding is worn away, crosses a
+vault of scoured azure with tarnished stars, flames, roses and little
+cherubs with wings for cravats. A brownish pink angel, suspended by one
+foot, flies forward, bearing in its hand a golden crown. In the opposite
+aisle may be seen the face of the sun, with puffy cheeks, semicircular
+eyebrows, and looking as sapient as in an almanac. The altar is loaded
+with a profusion of tarnished gilding, sallow angels, with simple and
+piteous faces like those of children who have eaten too much dinner. All
+this shows that their huts are very dreary, naked and dull.{253}
+
+[Illustration: 278]
+
+{254}
+
+{255}A people that has just emerged from the dirt is apt to love
+gilding. The most insipid sweetmeat is delicious to one who has long
+eaten nothing but roots and dry bread.
+
+
+III.
+
+Luz was formerly the capital of these valleys, which formed together
+a sort of republic; each commune deliberated upon its own private
+interests; four or five villages formed a _vic_ and the deputies from
+every four vics assembled at Luz.
+
+The list of the assessments was, from time immemorial, made upon bits of
+wood called _totchoux,_ that is to say, sticks. Each community had its
+_totchoti,_ upon which the secretary cut with his knife Roman ciphers,
+the value of which was known only to himself. In 1784 the intendant
+of Auch, who knew nothing of this custom, ordered of the government
+officials to bring to him the ancient registers; the official came,
+followed by two cartloads of totchoux.
+
+Poor country, free country. The estates of Bigorre were composed of
+three chambers which deliberated separately; that of the clergy, that
+of the nobility, and the third estate, made up of consuls or principal
+officers of the communes, and deputies {256}from the valleys. In these
+assemblies the taxes were apportioned, and all important matters were
+discussed. A valley is a natural fortified city, defended against the
+outside world and stimulating association. The enemy could be arrested
+on his way, and crushed beneath the rocks; in winter, the torrents and
+the snow shut him off from all entrance. Could knights in armor pursue
+the herdsman into his bogs? What could they have taken as prisoners,
+except a few half-starved goats? The daring climbers, hunters of the
+bear and wolf, would willingly have played at this game, sure of winning
+at it warm clothes, arms and horses. It is thus that independence has
+lasted in Switzerland.
+
+Free country, poor country. I have already remarked that in the valley
+of Ossau. The plains are mere defiles between the feet of two chains.
+Cultivation climbs the slope, wherever it is not too steep. If a morsel
+of earth exists between two rocks, it is put to seed. Man gets from
+the desert as much as he can wrest from it: so terraces of fields and
+harvests mottle the declivity with green strips and yellow squares.
+Barns and stables sprinkle it with white patches; it is streaked by a
+long grayish footpath. But this robe, torn by jutting rocks as it is,
+stops short half-way up, and the summit is clothed only with barren
+moss.
+
+The harvest is gathered in July, without horses, {257}of course, or
+carts. On these slopes, man alone can perform the service of a horse:
+the sheaves are enclosed in great pieces of cloth and fastened with
+cords; the reaper takes the enormous bundle upon his head, and ascends
+with naked feet among the sharp-pointed stalks and stones, without ever
+making a false step.
+
+[Illustration: 282]
+
+You find here ordinances reducing by half the number of men-at-arms
+required of the country, founded upon the proportion of harvests
+destroyed each year by hail and frost. Several times, during the
+religious wars, the country became a desert. In 1575, Montluc declares
+"that it is now so poor that the dwellers hereabouts are forced to quit
+their houses and take to begging." In 1592, the {258}people of Comminge
+having devastated the country, "the peasants of Bigorre abandoned the
+culture of the land for want of cattle, and the greater part of them
+took the road into Spain." It is not a hundred years since that, in all
+the country, there, were known to exist but three hats and two pairs of
+shoes. To this very day, the mountaineers are forced to renew with every
+year their sloping fields, wasted by the rains of winter. "They burn,
+for light, bits of resinous pine, and scarcely ever taste meat."
+
+What misery is contained in those few words! Yet how deep must be the
+wretchedness that can break the tie that binds man to his native soil!
+A threadbare text from history, a phrase of passionless statistics,
+contain within their limits years of suffering, myriads of deaths,
+flight, separations, degradation. Of a truth, there is too much ill in
+the world. With every century, man removes a bramble and a stone
+that had helped to obstruct the way over which he advances; but what
+signifies a bramble or a stone? There remain, and always will remain,
+more than enough to lacerate and kill him. Besides, new flints are
+falling into the way, new thorns are springing up. Prosperity increases
+his sensibility: an equal pain is inflicted by a less evil; the body may
+be better shielded, but the soul is more disordered. {259}
+
+[Illustration: 284]
+
+{260}
+
+{261}The benefits of the Revolution, the progress of industry, the
+discoveries of science, have given us equality, the comforts of life,
+liberty of thought, but at the same time a malevolent envy, the rage for
+success, impatience of the present, necessity of luxury, instability of
+government, and all the sufferings of doubt and over-refinement.
+
+[Illustration: 286]
+
+Is a citizen of the year 1872 any happier than one of the year
+
+1672? Less oppressed, better informed; furnished with more comforts,
+all that is certain; but I do not know if he is more cheerful. One thing
+alone increases--experience, and with it science, industry, power. In
+all else, we lose as much as we gain, and the surest progress lies in
+resignation. {262}
+
+
+IV.
+
+This valley is everywhere refreshed and made, fertile by running water.
+On the road to Pierrefitte two swift streams prattle under the shade of
+the flowering hedges: no travelling companion could be gayer. On
+both sides, from every meadow, flow streamlets that cross each other,
+separate, come together, and finally together spring into the Gave. In
+this way the peasants water all their crops; a field has five or six
+lines of streams which run hemmed in by beds of slate. The bounding
+troop tosses itself in the sunlight, like a madcap band of boys just
+let loose from school. The turf that they nourish is of an incomparable
+freshness and vigor; the herbage grows thick along the brink, bathes its
+feet in the water, or lies under the rush of the little waves, and its
+ribbons tremble in a pearly reflection under the ripples of silver. You
+cannot walk ten steps without stumbling upon a waterfall; swollen and
+boiling cascades pour down upon great blocks of stone; transparent
+sheets stretch themselves over the rocky shelves; threadlike streaks of
+foam wind from the verge to the very valley; springs ooze out alongside
+the hanging grasses and fall drop by drop; on the right rolls the Gave,
+and drowns all these murmurs with {263}its great monotonous voice. The
+beautiful blue iris thrives along the marshy slopes; woods and Crops
+climb very high among the rocks. The valley smiles, encircled with
+verdure; but on the horizon the embattled peaks, the serrate crests
+and black escarpments of the notched mountains rise into the blue sky,
+beneath their mantle of snow.
+
+[Illustration: 288]
+
+Back of Luz is a bare, rounded eminence, called Saint-Pierre, crowned by
+a fragment of gray ruin, and commanding a view of the whole valley.
+When the sky has been overcast, I have spent here entire hours without
+a moment of weariness: beneath its cloudy Curtain the air is moderately
+warm. Sudden patches of sunlight stripe the Gave, or illumine the
+harvests hung midway on the mountain slope. The swallows, with shrill
+cries, wheel high in the creeping vapors; the {264}sound of the Gave
+comes up, softened by distance into a harmony that is almost aerial. The
+wind breathes, and dies away; a troop of little flowers flutters at the
+passage of its wing; the buttercups are drawn up in line; frail little
+pinks bury in the herbage their rosy-purple stars; slender-stemmed
+grasses nod over the broad slaty patches; the air is filled with the
+fragrance of thyme. Are they not happy, these solitary plants, watered
+by the dew, fanned by the breezes?
+
+[Illustration: 289]
+
+This height is a desert; no one comes to tread them down; they grow
+after their own sweet will, in clefts of the rock, by families, useless
+and free, flooded by the loveliest sunlight. And man, the slave
+of necessity, begs and calculates under penalty of his life! Three
+children, all in rags, came {265}upon the scene: "What are you looking
+for here?"
+
+"Butterflies."
+
+"What for?"
+
+"To sell."
+
+The youngest had a sort of tumor on his forehead. "Please, sir, a sou
+for the little one who is ill."
+
+[Illustration: 290]
+
+{266}
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III. SAUVT-SAUVEUR.--BAREGES.
+
+
+I.
+
+Saint-Sauveur is a sloping street, both pretty and regular, bearing
+no trace of the extemporized hotel or of the scenery of an opera,
+and without either the rustic roughness of a village or the tarnished
+elegance of a city. The houses extend without monotony, their lines of
+windows encased in rough-hewn marble: on the right, they are set back
+to back against pointed rocks, from which water oozes; on the left they
+overhang the Gave, which eddies at the bottom of the precipice.
+
+The bath-house is a square portico with a double row of columns, in
+style at once noble and simple; the blue-gray of the marble, neither
+dull nor glaring, is pleasing to the eye. A terrace {267}planted with
+lindens projects over the Gave, and receives the cool breezes that rise
+from the torrent toward the heights; these lindens fill the air with a
+delicate and agreeable perfume. At the foot of the breast-high wall, the
+water of the spring shoots forth in a white jet and falls between the
+tree-tops into a depth unfathomable by the eye.
+
+[Illustration: 292]
+
+At the end of the village, the winding paths of an English garden
+descend to the Gave; you cross its dull blue waters on a frail wooden
+bridge, and {268}mount again, skirting a field of millet as far as
+the road to Scia. The side of this road plunges down six hundred feet,
+streaked with ravines; at the bottom of the abyss, the Gave writhes in a
+rocky corridor that the noon-day sun scarce penetrates; the slope is so
+rapid that, in several places, the stream is invisible; the precipice is
+so deep that the roar reaches the ear like a murmur. The torrent is lost
+to sight under the cornices and boils in the caverns; at every step it
+whitens with foam the smooth stone. Its restless ways, its mad leaps,
+its dark and livid reflexes, suggest a serpent wounded and covered with
+foam. But the strangest spectacle of all is that of the wall of rocks
+opposite: the mountain has been cleft perpendicularly as if by an
+immense sword, and one would say that the first gash had been further
+mutilated by hands, weaker, yet still infuriate. From the summit down to
+the Gave, the rock is of the color of dead wood, stripped of the bark;
+the prodigious tree-trunk, slit and jagged, seems mouldering away there
+through the centuries; water oozes in the blackened rents as in those
+of a worm-eaten block; it is yellowed by mosses such as vegetate in the
+rottenness of humid oaks. Its wounds have the brown and veined hues that
+one sees in the old scars of trees. It is in truth a petrified beam, a
+relic of Babel. {269}The geologists are a fortunate race; they express
+all this, and many things besides, when they say that the rock is
+schistose.
+
+After going a league we found a bit of meadow, two or three cottages
+situated upon the gentle slope. The contrast is refreshing. And yet the
+pasturage is meagre, studded with barren rocks, surrounded with fallen
+debris; if it were not for a rivulet of ice-cold water, the sun would
+scorch the herbage. Two children were sleeping under a walnut tree;
+a goat that had climbed upon a rock was bleating plaintively and
+tremblingly; three or four hens, with curious and uneasy air, were
+scratching on the brink of a trench; a woman was drawing water from the
+spring with a wooden porringer: such is the entire wealth of these poor
+households. Sometimes they have, four or five hundred feet higher up, a
+field of barley, so steep that the reaper must be fastened by a rope in
+order to harvest it.
+
+
+II.
+
+The Gave is strewn with small islands, which may be reached by jumping
+from one stone to another. These islands are beds of bluish rock spotted
+with pebbles of a staring white; they are submerged in winter, and
+now there are trunks stripped of their bark still lying here and there
+{270}among the bowlders. In some hollows are remains of ooze; from these
+spring clusters of elms like a discharge of fireworks, and tufts of
+grass wave over the arid pebbles; around the hushed water grows warm in
+the caverns. Meanwhile on two sides the mountain lifts its reddish wall,
+streaked with foam by the streamlets that wind down over the surface.
+Over all the flanks of the island the cascades rumble like thunder;
+twenty ravines, one above another, engulf them in their chasms, and
+their roar comes from all sides like the din of a battle. A mist flashes
+back and floats above all this storm: it hangs among the trees and
+opposes' its fine cool gauze to the burning of the sun.
+
+
+III.
+
+In clear weather I have often climbed the mountain before sunrise.
+During the night, the mist of the Gave, accumulated in the gorges, has
+filled them to overflowing; under foot there is a sea of clouds, and
+overhead a dome of tender blue radiant with morning splendor; everything
+else has disappeared; nothing is to be seen but the luminous azure of
+heaven and the dazzling satin of the clouds; nature wears her vesture
+of purity. The eye glides with pleasure over the softly rounded forms of
+the aerial mass. {271}
+
+[Illustration: 297]
+
+{272}{273}In its bosom the crests stand forth like promontories; the
+mountain tops that it bathes rise like an archipelago of rocks; it
+buries itself in the jagged gulfs, and waves slowly around the peaks
+that it gains. The harshness of the bald crests heightens the grace
+of its ravishing whiteness. But it evaporates as it rises; already the
+landscapes of the depths appear under a transparent twilight; the middle
+of the valley discovers itself. There remains of the floating sea only
+a white girdle, which trails along the declivities; it becomes torn, and
+the shreds hang for a moment to the tops of the trees; the last tufts
+take flight, and the Gave, struck by the sun glitters around the
+mountain like a necklace of diamonds.
+
+
+IV.
+
+Paul and I have gone to Bareges; the road is a continual ascent for two
+leagues.
+
+An alley of trees stretches between a brook and the Gave. The water
+leaps from every height; here and there a crowd of little mills is
+perched over the cascades; the declivities are sprinkled with them.
+It is amusing to see the little things nestled in the hollows of the
+colossal slopes. And yet their slated roofs smile and gleam among the
+foliage. There is nothing here that is not gracious and lovely; the
+banks of the Gave preserve their freshness {274}under the burning sun;
+the small streams scarcely leave between themselves and it a narrow band
+of green; one is surrounded by running waters; the shadow of the ashes
+and alders trembles in the fine grass; the trees shoot up with a superb
+toss, in smooth columns, and only spread forth in branches at a height
+of forty feet. The dark water in the trench of slate grazes the green
+stems in its course; it runs so swiftly that it seems to shiver.
+
+[Illustration: 299]
+
+On the opposite side of the torrent, the poplars rise one above another
+on the verdant hill; their palish leaves stand out against the pure blue
+of the sky; they quiver and shine at the slightest wind. {275}Flowering
+brambles descend the length of the rock and reach the tips of the waves.
+Further off, the back of the mountain, loaded with brushwood, stretches
+out in a warm tint of dark blue. The distant woods sleep in this
+envelope of living moisture, and the earth impregnated by it seems to
+inhale with it force and pleasure.
+
+[Illustration: 300]
+
+
+V.
+
+Soon the mountains grow bald, the trees disappear; nothing upon the
+slopes but a poor {276}brushwood: Bareges is seen. The landscape is
+hideous. The flank of the mountain is creviced with whitish slides; the
+narrow and wasted plain disappears beneath the coarse sand; the poor
+herbage, dry and weighed down, fails at every step; the earth is as if
+ripped open, and the slough, through its yawning wound, exposes the very
+entrails; the beds of yellowish limestone are laid bare; one walks on
+sands and trains of rounded pebbles; the Gave itself half disappears
+under heaps of grayish stones, and with difficulty gets out of the
+desert it has made. This broken-up soil is as ugly as it is melancholy;
+the debris are dirty and mean; they date from yesterday; you feel that
+the devastation begins anew with every year. Ruins, in order to be
+beautiful, must be either grand or blackened by time; here, the stones
+have just been unearthed, they are still soaking in the mud; two miry
+streamlets creep through the gullies: the place reminds one of an
+abandoned quarry.
+
+The town of Bareges is as ugly as its avenue; melancholy houses, ill
+patched up; at some distance apart are long rows of booths and wooden
+huts, where handkerchiefs and poor ironmongery are sold. It is because
+the avalanche accumulates every winter in a mountain crevice on the
+left, and as it slides down carries off a side of the street; these
+booths are a scar. The cold mists collect {277}here, the wind penetrates
+and the little town is uninhabitable in winter.
+
+[Illustration: 302]
+
+The around is enshrouded un der fifteen feet of snow; all the
+inhabitants emigrate; seven or eight mountaineers are left here with
+provisions, to watch over the houses and the furniture. It often happens
+that these poor people cannot get as far as Luz, and remain imprisoned
+during several weeks.
+
+The bathing establishment is miserable, the compartments are cellars
+without air or light; there are only sixteen cabinets, all dilapidated.
+Invalids are often obliged to bathe at night. The three pools are fed
+by water which has just served for the bathing-tubs; that for the poor
+receives the water discharged from the other two. {278}These pools,
+_piscines,_ are low and dark, a sort of stifling, under-ground prison.
+One must have pretty good health in order to be cured in them.
+
+[Illustration: 303]
+
+The military hospital, banished to the north of the little town, is a
+melancholy plastered building, whose windows are ranged in rows with
+military regularity. The invalids, wrapped in a gray cloak too large for
+them, climb one by one the naked slope, and seat themselves among the
+stones; they bask whole hours in the sun, and look straight before them
+with a resigned air. An invalid's days are so long! These wasted faces
+resume an air of {279}gayety when a comrade passes; they exchange
+a jest: even in a hospital, at Bareges even, a Frenchman remains a
+Frenchman.
+
+You meet poor old men on crutches, invalids, climbing the steep street.
+Those visages reddened by the inclement air, those pitiful bent or
+twisted limbs, the swollen or enfeebled flesh, the dull eyes, already
+dead, are painful to behold. At their age, habituated to misery,
+they ought to feel only the suffering of the moment, not to trouble
+themselves about the past, and no longer to care for the future. You
+need to think that their torpid soul lives on like a machine. They are
+the ruins of man alongside those of the soil.
+
+The aspect of the west is still more sombre. An enormous mass of
+blackish and snowy peaks girdles the horizon. They are hung over the
+valley like an eternal threat. Those spines so rugged, so manifold, so
+angular, give to the eye the sensation of an invincible hardness. There
+comes from them a cold wind, that drives heavy clouds towards Bareges;
+nothing is gay but the two jewelled streamlets which border the street
+and prattle noisily over the blue pebbles.
+
+[Illustration: 304]
+
+{280}
+
+
+VI.
+
+In order to console ourselves here, we have read some charming letters;
+here is one of them from the little Duc du Maine, seven years old, whom
+Mme. de Maintenon had brought here to be cured. He wrote to his mother
+Mme. de Montespan, and the letter must certainly pass under the king's
+eyes. What a school of style was that court!
+
+"I am going off to write all the news of the house for thy diversion, my
+dear little heart, and I shall write far better when I shall think
+that it is for you, madame. Mme. de Maintenon spends all her time in
+spinning, and, if they would let her, she would also give up her nights
+to it, or to writing. She toils daily for my mind; she has good hope of
+making something of it, and the darling too, who will do all he can to
+have some brains, for he is dying with the desire of pleasing the king
+and you. On the way here I read the history of Caesar, am at present
+reading that of Alexander, and shall soon commence that of Pompey. La
+Couture does not like to lend me Mme. de Maintenon's petticoats, when I
+want to disguise myself as a girl. I have received the letter you write
+to the dear little darling; I was delighted with it; I will do what you
+bid me, if only to please you, for I love {281}you superlatively. I
+was, and am still, charmed with the little nod that the king gave me on
+leaving, but was very ill pleased that thou didst not seem to me sorry:
+thou wast beautiful as an angel."
+
+Could any one be more gracious, more flattering, insinuating or
+precocious? To please was a necessity at that time, to please people of
+the world, quick-witted people. Never were men more agreeable; because
+there was never greater need of being agreeable. This youth, brought
+up among petticoats, took on from the beginning a woman's vivacity, her
+coquetry and smiles. You see that he gets upon their knees, receives
+and gives embraces, and is amusing; there is no prettier trinket in the
+_salon._
+
+Mme. de Maintenon, devout, circumspect and politic, also writes, but
+with the clearness and brevity of a worldly abbess or a president in
+petticoats. "You see that I take courage in a place more frightful than
+I can tell you; to crown the misery, we are freezing here. The company
+is poor; they respect and bore us. All the women are ill continually;
+they are loungers who have found the world really great as soon as ever
+they have been at Etampes."
+
+We have amused ourselves with this raillery, dry, disdainful, clear-cut
+and somewhat too short, and I have maintained to Paul that Mme. de
+{282}Maintenon resembles the yews at Versailles, brushy extinguishers
+that are too closely clipped. Whereupon I spoke very ill of the
+landscapes of the seventeenth century, of Le Notre, Poussin and
+his architectural nature, Leclerc, Perelle, and of their abstract,
+conventional trees, whose majestically rounded foliage agrees with that
+of no known species. He lectured me severely, according to his custom,
+and called me narrow-minded; he maintains that all is beautiful; that
+all that is necessary is to put yourself at the right point of view. His
+reasoning was nearly as follows:
+
+He claims that things please us by contrast, and that beautiful things
+are different for different souls. "One day," said he, "I was travelling
+with some English people in Champagne, on a cloudy day in September.
+They found the plains horrible, and I admirable. The dull fields
+stretched out like a sea to the very verge of the horizon, without
+encountering a hill. The stalks of the close-reaped wheat dyed the earth
+with a wan yellow; the plain seemed covered with an old wet mantle.
+Here were lines of deformed elms; here and there a meagre square of
+fir-trees; further off a cottage of chalk with its white pool: from
+furrow to furrow the sun trailed its sickly light, and the earth,
+emptied of its fruits, was like a woman dead in child-bed whose infant
+they have taken away. {283}
+
+[Illustration: 308]
+
+{284}
+
+{285}"My companions were utterly bored, and called down curses on France.
+Their minds, strained by the rude passions of politics, by the national
+arrogance, and the stiffness of scriptural morality, needed repose.
+They wanted a smiling and flowery country, meadows soft and still,
+fine shadows, largely and harmoniously grouped on the slopes of the
+hills..The sunburnt peasants, dull of countenance, sitting near a pool
+of mud, were disagreeable to them. For repose, they dreamed of pretty
+cottages set in fresh turf, fringed with rosy honeysuckle. Nothing could
+be more reasonable. A man obliged to hold himself upright and unbending
+finds a sitting posture the most beautiful..
+
+"You go to Versailles, and you cry out against the taste of the
+seventeenth century. Those formal and monumental waters, the firs turned
+in the lathe, the rectangular staircases heaped one above another, the
+trees drawn up like grenadiers on parade, recall to you the geometry
+class and the platoon school. Nothing can be better. But cease for an
+instant to judge according to your habits and wants of the day. You
+live alone, or at home, on a third floor in Paris, and spend four hours
+weekly in the saloons of some thirty different people. Louis XIV. lived
+eight hours a day, every day the whole year long, in public, and this
+public included all the lords of France. He held his {286}drawing-room
+in the open air; the drawing-room is the park at Versailles. Why ask
+of it the charms of a valley? These squared hedges of hornbeam are
+necessary that the embroidered coats may not be caught. This levelled
+and shaven turf is necessary that high-heeled shoes may not be wetted.
+The duchesses will form a circle about these circular sheets of
+water. Nothing can be better chosen than these immense and symmetrical
+staircases for showing off the gold and silver laced robes of three
+hundred ladies. These large alleys, which seem empty to you, were
+majestic when fifty lords in brocade and lace displayed here their
+_cordons bleus_ and their graceful bows. No garden is better
+constructed for showing one's self in grand costume and in great
+company, for making a bow, for chatting and concocting intrigues of
+gallantry and business. You wish perhaps to rest, to be alone, to dream;
+you must go elsewhere; you have come to the wrong gate: but it would
+be the height of absurdity to blame a drawing-room for being a
+drawing-room.
+
+"You understand then that our modern taste will be as transitory as
+the ancient; that is to say, that it is precisely as reasonable and as
+foolish. We have the right to admire wild, uncultivated spots, as
+once men had the right of getting tired in them. Nothing uglier to the
+seventeenth century {287}than a true mountain. It recalled a thousand
+ideas of misfortune.
+
+[Illustration: 312]
+
+"The men who had come out from the civil wars and semi-barbarism thought
+of famines, of long journeys on horseback through rain and snow, of
+the wretched black bread mingled with straw, of the foul hostelries,
+infested with vermin. They were tired of barbarism as we of
+civilization. To-day the streets are so clean, the police so abundant,
+the houses drawn out in such regular lines, manners are so peaceful,
+events so small and so clearly foreseen, that we love grandeur and the
+unforeseen. The landscape changes as literature does: then literature
+furnished long {288}sugary romances and elegant dissertations;
+now-a-days it offers spasmodic poetry and a physiological drama.
+Landscape is an unwritten literature; the former like the latter is a
+sort of flattery addressed to our passions, or a nourishment proffered
+to our needs.
+
+[Illustration: 313]
+
+"These old wasted mountains, these lacerating points, bristling by
+myriads, these formidable fissures whose perpendicular wall plunges
+with a spring down into invisible depths; this chaos of monstrous ridges
+heaped together, and crushing {289}each other like an affrighted herd of
+leviathans; this universal and implacable domination of the naked rock,
+the enemy of all life, refreshes us after our pavements, our offices and
+our shops. You only love them from this cause, and this cause removed,
+they would be as unpleasant to you as to Madame de Maintenon."
+
+[Illustration: 314]
+
+So that there are fifty sorts of beauty,--one for every age.
+
+"Certainly."
+
+Then there is no such thing as beauty.
+
+"That is as if you were to say that a woman is nude because she has
+fifty dresses." {290}
+
+[Illustration: 315]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV. CAUTERETS.
+
+
+I.
+
+Cauterets is a town at the bottom of a valley, melancholy enough, paved,
+and provided with an octroi. Innkeepers, guides, the whole of a famished
+population besieges us; but we have considerable force of mind, and
+after a spirited resistance we obtain the right of looking about and
+choosing.
+
+Fifty paces further on, we are fastened upon by servants, children,
+donkey-hirers and boys, who accidentally stroll about us. They offer us
+cards, they praise up to us the site, the cuisine; they accompany us,
+cap in hand, to the very edge of the village; at the same time they
+elbow away all competitors: "The stranger is mine, I'll baste you if
+{291}you come near him." Each hotel has its runners on the watch; they
+hunt the isard in winter, the traveller in summer.
+
+The town has several springs: that of the King cured Abarca, king of
+Aragon; that of Caesar restored health, as they say, to the great Caesar.
+Faith is needed in history as well as in medicine.
+
+[Illustration: 316]
+
+For example, in the time of Francis I. the Eaux Bonnes cured wounds;
+they were called _Eaux d'arqtiebusades _; the soldiers wounded at Pavia
+{292}were sent to them. Now they cure diseases of the throat and chest.
+A hundred years hence they will perhaps heal something else; with every
+century medicine makes an advance.
+
+"Formerly," said Signarelle, "the liver was at the right and the heart at
+the left; we have reformed all that."
+
+A celebrated physician one day said to his pupils: "Employ this remedy
+at once, while it still cures." Medicines, like hats, have their
+fashions.
+
+Yet what can be said against this remedy? The climate is warm, the gorge
+sheltered, the air pure, the gayety of the sun is cheering. A change of
+habits leads to a change of thoughts; melancholy ideas take flight. The
+water is not bad to drink; you have had a beautiful journey; the moral
+cures the physical nature; if not, you have had hope for two months--and
+what, I beg to know, is a remedy, if not a pretext for hoping? You
+take patience and pleasure until either illness or invalid departs, and
+everything is for the best in the best of worlds.
+
+
+II.
+
+Several leagues away, among the precipices, sleeps the lake of Gaube.
+The green water, three hundred feet in depth, has the reflexes of an
+emerald. {293}
+
+[Illustration: 318]
+
+{294}
+
+{295}The bald heads of the mountains are mirrored in it with a divine
+serenity. The slender column of the pines is reflected there as clear as
+in the air; in the distance, the woods clothed in bluish mist come down
+to bathe their feet in its cold wave, and the huge Vignemale, spotted
+with snow, shuts it about with her cliffs. At times a remnant of breeze
+comes to ruffle it, and all those grand images undulate; the Greek
+Diana, the wild, maiden huntress, would have taken it for a mirror.
+
+[Illustration: 320]
+
+How one sees her come to life again in such sites! Her marbles are
+fallen, her festivals have vanished; but in the shivering of the firs,
+at the sound of the cracking glaciers, before the steely splendors of
+{296}these chaste waters, she reappears like a vision. All the night
+long, in the outcries of the wind, the herdsmen could hear the baying
+of her hounds and the whistling of her arrows; the untamed chorus of her
+nymphs coursed over the precipices; the moon shone upon their shoulders
+of silver, and on the point of their lances. In the morning she came
+to bathe her arms in the lake; and more than once has she been seen
+standing upon a summit, her eyes fixed, her brow severe; her foot trod
+the cruel snow, and her virgin breasts gleamed beneath the winter sun.
+
+
+III.
+
+The Diana of the country is more amiable; it is the lively and gracious
+Margaret of Navarre, sister and liberatress of Francis I. She came to
+these waters with her court, her poets, her musicians, her savants,
+a poet and theologian herself, of infinite curiosity, reading Greek,
+learning Hebrew, and taken up with Calvinism. On coming out of the
+routine and discipline of the middle ages, disputes about dogma and the
+thorns of erudition appeared agreeable, even to ladies; Lady Jane Grey,
+Elizabeth took part in these things: it was a fashion, as two centuries
+later it was good taste to dispute upon Newton and the existence of God.
+The {297}Bishop of Meaux wrote to Margaret: "Madame, if there were at
+the end of the world a doctor who, by a single abridged verb, could
+teach you as much grammar as it is possible to know, and another as much
+rhetoric, and another philosophy, and so on with the seven liberal arts,
+each one by an abridged verb, you would fly there as to the fire." She
+did fly there and got overloaded. The heavy philosophic spoil oppressed
+her already slender thought. Her pious poems are as infantile as the
+odes written by Racine at Port-Royal. What trouble we have had in
+getting free from the middle ages! The mind bent, warped and twisted,
+had contracted the ways of a choir-boy.
+
+A poet of the country composed in her honor the following pretty song:--
+
+ "At the baths of Toulouse
+ There's a spring clear and fair,
+ And three pretty doves
+ Came to drink and bathe there;
+ When at last they had bathed
+ Thus for months barely three,
+ For the heights of Cauterets
+ Left they fountain and me.
+ But why go to Cauterets,
+ What is there to be seen?
+
+ "It is there that we bathe
+ With the king and the queen.{298}
+ And the king has a cot
+ Hung with jasmin in flower;
+ The dear queen has the same,
+ But love makes it a bower."
+
+Is it not graceful and thoroughly southern? Margaret is less poetic,
+more French: her verses are not brilliant, but at times are very
+touching, by force of real and simple tenderness.
+
+A moderate imagination, a woman's heart thoroughly devoted, and
+inexhaustible in devotion, a good deal of naturalness, clearness, ease,
+the art of narration and of smiling, an agreeable but never wicked
+malice, is not this enough to make you love Margaret and read here the
+Heptameron?{299}
+
+[Illustration: 324]
+
+{300}
+
+
+IV.
+
+[Illustration: 326]
+
+{301}
+
+She wrote the Heptameron here; it seems that a journey to the waters was
+then less safe than now-a-days.
+
+The first day of the month of September, as the baths of the Pyrenees
+mountains begin to have virtue, were found at those of Caulderets
+several persons, from France and Spain as well as {302}other places;
+some to drink the water, others bathe in it, others to take the
+mud, which things are so marvellous, that invalids abandoned by the
+physicians return from them completely cured. But about the time of
+their return, there came on such great rains, that it seemed that God
+had forgotten the promise given to Noah never again to destroy the world
+by water; for all the cabins and dwellings of the said Caulderets were
+so filled with water that it became impossible to live in them.
+
+[Illustration: 327]
+
+"The French lords and ladies, thinking to return to Tarbes as easily
+as they had come, found the little brooks so swollen that they could
+scarcely ford them. But when they came to pass the Bearnese Gave, which
+was not two feet deep when they first saw it, they found it so large and
+{303}impetuous, that they made a circuit to look for the bridges, which,
+being nothing but wood, were swept away by the vehemence of the water.
+
+[Illustration: 329]
+
+{304}{305}"And some, thinking to break the violence of the course by
+assembling several together, were so promptly swept away, that those
+who would follow them lost the power and the desire of going after."
+Whereupon they separated, each one seeking a way for himself. "Two poor
+ladies, half a league beyond Pierrefitte, found a bear coming down the
+mountain, before which they galloped away in such great haste that their
+horses fell dead under them at the entrance of their dwelling; two of
+their women, who came a long time after, told them that the bear had
+killed all their serving men.
+
+"So while they are all at mass, there comes into the church a man
+with nothing on but his shirt, fleeing as if some one were chasing and
+following him up. It was one of their companions by the name of Guebron,
+who recounted to them how, as he was in a hut near Pierrefitte, three
+men came while he was in bed; but he, all in his shirt as he was, with
+only his sword, wounded one of them so that he remained on the spot,
+and, while the other two amused themselves in gathering up their
+companion, thought that he could not escape if not by flight, as he was
+the least burdened by clothing. {306}
+
+"The abbe of Saint-Savin furnished them with the best horses to be had
+in Lavedan, good Bearn cloaks, a quantity of provisions, and pretty
+companions to lead them safely in the mountains."
+
+But it was necessary to busy themselves somewhat, while waiting for
+the Gave to go down. In the morning they went to find Mme. Oysille, the
+oldest of the ladies; they devoutly listened to the mass with her; after
+which "she did not fail to administer the salutary food which she drew
+from the reading of the acts of the saints and glorious apostles of
+Jesus Christ." The afternoon was employed in a very different fashion:
+they went into a beautiful meadow along the river Gave, where the
+foliage of the trees is so dense, "that the sun could neither pierce the
+shade nor warm the coolness, and seated themselves upon the green grass,
+which is so soft and delicate that they needed neither cushions nor
+carpets." And each in turn related some gallant adventure with details
+infinitely artless and singularly precise. There were some relating
+to husbands and yet more about monks. The lovely theologian is the
+grand-daughter of Boccaccio, and the grand-mother of La Fontaine.
+
+This shocks us, and yet is not shocking. Each age has its degree of
+decency, which is prudery for this and blackguardism for another. {307}
+
+[Illustration: 333]
+
+{308}
+
+{309}The Chinese find our trousers and close-fitting coat-sleeves
+horribly immodest; I know a lady, an Englishwoman in fact, who allows
+only two parts in the body, the foot and the stomach: every other word
+is indecent; so that when her little boy has a fall, the governess must
+say: "Master Henry has fallen, Madame, on the place where the top of his
+feet rejoins the bottom of his stomach.
+
+The habitual ways of the sixteenth century were very different. The
+lords lived a little like men of the people; that is why they talked
+somewhat like men of the people. Bonnivet and Henri II. amused
+themselves in jumping like school-boys, and leaping over ditches
+twenty-three feet wide. When Henry VIII. of England had saluted Francis
+I. on the field of the cloth of gold, he seized him in his arms and
+tried to throw him, out of pure sportiveness; but the king, a good
+wrestler, laid him low by a trip. Fancy to-day the Emperor Napoleon at
+Tilsitt receiving the Emperor Alexander in this fashion. The ladies
+were obliged to be robust and agile as our peasants. To go to an evening
+party they had to mount on horseback; Margaret, when in Spain, fearful
+of being detained, made in eight days the stages for which a good
+horseman would have required fifteen days; one had, too, to guard one's
+self against violence; once she had need of her two fists and all her
+nails against Bonnivet. In the midst of such manners, free talk was
+only the {310}natural talk; the ladies heard it every day at table, and
+adorned with the finest commentaries. Brantome will describe for you the
+cup from which certain lords made them drink, and Cellini will relate
+you the conversation that was held with the Duchess of Ferrara. A
+milkmaid now-a-days would be ashamed of it. Students among themselves,
+even when they are tipsy, will scarce venture what the ladies of honor
+of Catherine de Medicis sang at the top of their voice and with all
+their heart. Pardon our poor Margaret; relatively she is decent and
+delicate, and then consider that two hundred years hence, you also, my
+dear sir and madam, you will perhaps appear like very blackguards.
+
+
+V.
+
+Sometimes here, after a broiling day, the clouds gather, the air is
+stifling, one feels fairly ill, and a storm bursts forth. There was such
+an one last night. Each moment the heavens opened, cleft by an immense
+flash, and the vault of darkness lifted itself entire like a tent. The
+dazzling light marked out the limits of the various cultures and the
+forms of the trees at the distance of a league. The glaciers flamed with
+a bluish glimmer; the jagged peaks suddenly lifted themselves upon the
+horizon like an army of spectres. {311}
+
+[Illustration: 337]
+
+{312}
+
+{313}The gorge was illumined in its very depths; its heaped-up blocks,
+its trees hooked on to the rocks, its torn ravines, its foaming Gave,
+were seen under a livid whiteness, and vanished like the fleeting
+visions of an unknown and tortured world.
+
+[Illustration: 339]
+
+Soon the voice of the thunder rolled in the gorges; the clouds that bore
+it crept midway along the mountain side, and came into collision among
+the rocks; the report burst out like a discharge of artillery. The wind
+rose and the rain came on. The inclined plane of the summits opened up
+under its squalls; the funeral {314}drapery of the pines clung to the
+sides of the mountain. A creeping plain came out from the rocks and
+trees. The long streaks of rain thickened the air; under the flashes
+you saw the water streaming, flooding the summits, descending the two
+slopes, sliding in sheets over the rocks, and from all sides in hurried
+waves running to the Gave. In the morning the roads were cut up with
+sloughs, the trees hung by their bleeding roots, great patches of earth
+had fallen away, and the torrent was a river.
+
+[Illustration: 340]
+
+{315}
+
+[Illustration: 341]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V. SAINT-SAVIN.
+
+
+I.
+
+Upon a hill, at the end of a road, are the remains of the abbey of
+Saint-Savin. The old church was, they say, built by Charlemagne; the
+stones, eaten and burned, are crumbling, the disjointed flags are
+incrusted with moss; from the garden the eye takes in the valley, brown
+in the evening light; the winding Gave already lifts into the air its
+trail of pale smoke.
+
+It was sweet here to be a monk; it is in such places that the
+_Imitation_ should be read; in such places was it written. For a
+sensitive and noble nature, a convent was then the sole refuge; all
+around wounded and repelled it.
+
+Around what a horrible world! Brigand lords who plunder travellers and
+butcher each other; artisans and soldiers who stuff themselves with meat
+{316}and yoke themselves together like brutes; peasants whose huts they
+burn, whose wives they violate, who out of despair and hunger slip away
+to tumult.
+
+[Illustration: 342]
+
+No remembrance of good, nor hope of better. How sweet it is to renounce
+action, company, speech, to hide one's self, forget outside things, and
+to listen, in security and solitude, to the divine voices that, like
+collected springs, murmur peacefully in the depths of the heart!
+
+How easy is it here to forget the world! Neither books, nor news, nor
+science; no one travels and no one thinks. This valley is the whole
+universe; from time to time a peasant passes, or a man-at-arms. A moment
+more and he is gone; the mind has retained no more trace of him than
+the empty road. Every morning the eyes find again the great woods asleep
+upon {317}the mountain's brow, and the layers of clouds stretched out
+on the edge of the sky. The rocks light up, the summit of the forests
+trembles beneath the rising breeze, the shadow changes at the foot of
+the oaks, and the mind takes on the calm and the monotony of these slow
+sights by which it is nourished. Meanwhile the responses of the monks
+drone confusedly in the chapel; then their measured tread resounds
+in the high corridors. Each day the same hours bring back the same
+impressions and the same images. The soul empties itself of worldly
+ideas, and the heavenly dream, which begins to flow within, little by
+little heaps up the silent wave that is going to fill it.
+
+Far from it are science and treatises on doctrine. They drain the stream
+instead of swelling it. Will so many words augment peace and inward
+tenderness? "The kingdom of God consisteth not in word, but in power."
+The heart must be moved, tears must flow, the arms must open toward an
+unseen place, and the sudden trouble will not be the work of the lips,
+but the touch of the hand divine. This hand it is which doth "lift up
+the humble mind;" this it is which teaches "without noise of words,
+without confusion of opinions, without ambition of honor, without the
+scuffling of arguments." A light penetrates, and all at once the eyes
+see as it were a new heaven and a new earth. {318}
+
+[Illustration: 344]
+
+The men of the age perceive in its events only the events themselves;
+the solitary discovers behind the veil of things created the presence
+and the will of God. He it is who by the sun warms the earth, and by the
+rain refreshes it. He it is who sustains the mountains and envelops
+them at the setting of the sun in the repose of night. The heart feels
+everywhere, around and inside of things, an immense goodness, like a
+vague ocean of light which penetrates and animates the world; to this
+goodness it intrusts and abandons itself, like a child that drops asleep
+at evening on its mother's knees. A hundred times a day divine things
+become palpable to it. The light streams through the morning mist,
+chaste as the brow of the virgin; the {319} stars shine like celestial
+eyes, and yonder when the sun goes down the clouds kneel at the brink of
+heaven, like a blazing choir of seraphim.
+
+[Illustration: 346]
+
+{320}
+
+{321}The heathen were indeed blind in their thoughts upon the grandeur
+of nature. What is our earth, but a narrow pass between two eternal
+worlds! Down there, beneath our feet, are the damned and their pains;
+they howl in their caverns and the earth trembles; without the sign of
+God, these walls would to-morrow be swallowed up in their abyss; they
+often come out thence by the bare precipices; the passers-by hear
+their shouts of laughter in the cascades; behind those gnarled beeches,
+glimpses have been caught of their grimacing countenances, their eyes
+of flame, and more than one herdsman, wandering at night towards their
+haunt, has been found in the morning with hair on end and twisted neck.
+But up there, in the azure, above the crystal, are the angels; many a
+time has the vault opened, and, in a long trail of light, the saints
+have appeared more radiant than molten silver, suddenly visible, then
+all at once vanished. A monk saw them; the last abbot was informed by
+them, in a vision, of the spring which healed his diseases. Another,
+long time ago, hunting wild beasts one day, saw a great stag stop before
+him with eyes filled with tears; when he had looked, he saw upon its
+antlers the cross of Jesus Christ, fell on his knees, and, on his
+{322}return to the convent, lived for thirty years doing penance in his
+cell, without any desire to leave it. Another, a very young man, who
+had gone into a forest of pines, heard far off a nightingale which sang
+marvellously; he drew near in astonishment, and it seemed to him that
+everything was transfigured; the brooks flowed as it were a long stream
+of tears, and again seemed full of pearls; the violet fringes of the
+firs shone magnificently, like a stole, upon their funereal trunks.
+The rays ran along the leaves, empurpled and azured as if by cathedral
+windows; flowers of gold and velvet opened their bleeding hearts in the
+midst of the rocks. He approached the bird, which he could not see
+among the branches, but which sang like the finest organ, with notes so
+piercing and so tender, that his heart was at once torn and melted. He
+saw nothing more of what was about him, and it seemed to him that his
+soul detached itself from his breast, and went away to the bird, and
+mingled itself with the voice which rose ever vibrating more and more
+in a song of ecstasy and anguish, as if it had been the inner voice of
+Christ to his Father when he was dying on the cross. When he returned
+towards the convent, he was astonished to find that the walls, which
+were quite new, had become brown as through age, that the little lindens
+in the garden were now great trees, that no face among the {323}monks
+was familiar to him, and that no one remembered to have seen him.
+Finally an infirm old monk called to mind that in former times they had
+talked to him of a novice who had gone, a hundred years before, into the
+pine forest, but who had not come back, so that no one had ever known
+what had happened to him. Thus transported and forgotten will those live
+who shall hear the inner voices. God envelops us, and we have only to
+abandon ourselves to him in order to feel him.
+
+For he does not hold communion through outside things only; he is within
+us, and our thoughts are his words. He who retires within himself, who
+listens no more to the news of this world, who effaces from his mind
+its reasonings and imaginations, and who holds himself in expectancy, in
+silence and solitude, sees little by little a thought rise in him which
+is not his own, which comes and goes without his will, and, whatever he
+may will, which fills and enchants him, like those words, heard in a
+dream, which make tranquil the soul with their mysterious song. The soul
+listens and no longer perceives the flight of the hours; all its powers
+are arrested, and its movements are nothing but the impressions which
+come to it from above. Christ speaks, it answers; it asks, and he
+teaches; it is afflicted, and he consoles. "My son, now will I teach
+thee the way of peace and true liberty. {324}O Lord, I beseech thee, do
+as thou sayest, for this is delightful for me to hear. _Be desirous, my
+son, to do the will of another rather than thine own, choose always to
+have less rather than more. Seek always the lowest place, and to be
+inferior to every one. Wish always, and pray, that the will of God
+may be wholly fulfilled in thee. Behold such a man entereth within
+the borders of peace and rest._ O Lord, this short discourse of thine
+containeth within itself much perfection. It is little to be spoken,
+but full of meaning, and abundant in fruit." How languid is everything
+alongside of this divine company! How all which departs from it is
+unsightly! "When Jesus is present, all is well, and nothing seems
+difficult: but when Jesus is absent everything is hard. When Jesus
+speaks not inwardly to us, all other comfort is nothing worth; but if
+Jesus speak but one word, we feel great consolation. How dry and hard
+art thou without Jesus! How foolish and vain, if thou desire anything
+out of Jesus! Is not this a greater loss than if thou shouldest lose the
+whole world? He that findeth Jesus, findeth a good treasure, yea, a Good
+above all good. And he that loseth Jesus, loseth much indeed, yea, more
+than the whole world! Most poor is he who liveth without Jesus; and he
+most rich who is well with Jesus. It is matter of great skill to know
+how to hold converse with Jesus; and to know how to keep Jesus, a
+{325}point of great wisdom. Be thou humble and peaceable, and Jesus will
+be with thee. Be devout and quiet, and Jesus will stay with thee..Thou
+mayest soon drive away Jesus and lose his favor if thou wilt turn aside
+to outward things. And if thou shouldest drive him from thee, and lose
+him, unto whom wilt thou flee, and whom wilt thou seek for thy friend?
+Without a friend thou canst not well live; and if Jesus be not above all
+a friend to thee, thou shalt be sad and desolate."--"Behold! My God,
+and all things." What can I wish more, and what happier thing can I
+long for? "My God, and all things." To him that understandeth, enough is
+said; and to repeat it often is delightful to him that loveth.
+
+Some died of this love, lost in ecstasies or drowned in a divine
+languor. These are the great poets of the middle ages.
+
+[Illustration: 351]
+
+{326}
+
+
+[Illustration: 352]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI. GAVARNIE.
+
+
+I.
+
+From Luz to Gavarnie is eighteen miles. It is enjoined upon every living
+creature able to mount a horse, a mule, or any quadruped whatever, to
+visit Gavarnie; in default of other beasts, he should, putting aside
+all shame, bestride an ass. Ladies and convalescents are taken there in
+sedan-chairs.
+
+Otherwise, think what a figure you will make on your return.
+
+"You come from the Pyrenees; you've seen Gavarnie?"
+
+"No."
+
+What then did you go to the Pyrenees for?
+
+You hang your head, and your friend triumphs, especially if he was
+bored at Gavarnie. You undergo a description of Gavarnie after the last
+edition of the guide-book. Gavarnie is a sublime {327}sight; tourists
+go sixty miles out of their way to see it; the Duchess d'Angouleme had
+herself carried to the furthest rocks; Lord Bute, when he saw it for
+the first time, cried: "If I were now at the extremity of India,
+and suspected the existence of what I see at this moment, I should
+immediately leave in order to enjoy and admire it!" You are overwhelmed
+with quotations and supercilious smiles; you are convicted of laziness,
+of dulness of mind, and, as certain English travellers say, of
+_unaesthetic insensibility._
+
+There are but two resources: to learn a description by heart, or to
+make the journey. I have made the journey, and am going to give the
+description.
+
+
+II.
+
+We leave at six o'clock in the morning, by the road to Scia, in the fog,
+without seeing at first anything beyond great confused forms of trees
+and rocks. At the end of a quarter of an hour, we hear along the pathway
+a noise of sharp cries drawing near: it was a funeral procession coming
+from Scia. Two men bore a small coffin under a white shroud; behind
+came four herdsmen in long cloaks and brown capuchons, silent, with
+bent heads; four women followed in black mantles. It was they {328}who
+uttered those monotonous and piercing lamentations; one knew not if they
+were wailing or praying. They walked with long steps through the cold
+mist, without stopping or looking at any one, and were going to bury the
+poor body in the cemetery at Luz.
+
+[Illustration: 354]
+
+At Scia the road passes over a small bridge very high up, which commands
+another bridge, gray and abandoned. The double tier of arches bends
+gracefully over the blue torrent; meanwhile a pale light already floats
+in the diaphanous mist; a golden gauze undulates above the {329}Gave;
+the aerial veil grows thin and will soon vanish.
+
+[Illustration: 356]
+
+{330}
+
+{331}Nothing can convey the idea of this light, so youthful, timid and
+smiling, which glitters like the bluish wings of a dragon-fly that is
+pursued and is taken captive in a net of fog. Beneath, the boiling water
+is engulfed in a narrow conduit and leaps like a mill-race. The column
+of foam, thirty feet high, falls with a furious din, and its glaucous
+waves, heaped together in the deep ravine, dash against each other and
+are broken upon a line of fallen rocks. Other enormous rocks, debris of
+the same mountain, hang above the road, their squared heads crowned with
+brambles for hair; ranged in impregnable line, they seem to watch the
+torments of the Gave, which their brothers hold beneath themselves
+crushed and subdued.
+
+
+III.
+
+We turn a second bridge and enter the plain of Gedres, verdant and
+cultivated, where the hay is in cocks; they are harvesting; our horses
+walk between two hedges of hazel; we go along by orchards; but the
+mountain is ever near; the guide shows us a rock three times the height
+of a man, which, two years ago, rolled down and demolished a house.
+{332}We encounter several singular caravans: a band of young priests
+in black hats, black gloves, black cassocks tucked up, black stockings,
+very apparent, novices in horsemanship who bound at every step, like the
+Gave; a big, jolly round man, in a sedan-chair, his hands crossed over
+his belly, who looks on us with a paternal air, and reads his newspaper;
+three ladies of sufficiently ripe age, very slender, very lean, very
+stiff, who, for dignity's sake, set their beasts on a trot as we
+draw near them. The cicisbeo is a bony cartilaginous gentleman, fixed
+perpendicularly on his saddle like a telegraph-pole. We hear a harsh
+clucking, as of a choked hen, and we recognize the English tongue.
+
+As for the French nation, it is but poorly represented at Gedres. First
+appears a long, mouldy custom-house officer, who indorses the permission
+to pass of the horses; with his once green coat the poor man had the
+air of having sojourned a week in the river. No sooner has he let us go,
+than a blackguard band, boys and girls, pounces upon us; some stretch
+out their hands, others wish to sell stones to us; they motion to the
+guide to stop; they claim the travellers; two or three hold the bridle
+of each horse, and all cry in chorus: "The grotto! the grotto!" There is
+nothing for it but to resign ourselves and see the grotto.{333}
+
+
+
+[Illustration: 359]
+
+{334}
+
+{335}A servant opens a door, makes us descend two staircases, throws
+a lump of earth in passing into a lagune, to awaken the sleeping
+fish, takes half-a-dozen steps over a couple of planks. "Well, the
+grotto?"--"Behold it, Monsieur." We see a streamlet of water between two
+rocks overhung with ash-trees. "Is that all?" She does not understand,
+opens her eyes wide and goes away. We ascend again and read this
+inscription: _The charge for seeing the grotto is ten cents._ The
+matter is all explained. The peasants of the Pyrenees are not wanting in
+brains.
+
+
+IV.
+
+Beyond Gedres is a wild valley called Chaos, which is well named.
+After quarter of an hour's journey there, the trees disappear, then the
+juniper and the box, and finally the moss; the Gave is no longer seen;
+all noises are hushed. It is a dead solitude peopled with wrecks. Three
+avalanches of rocks and crushed flint have come down from the summit
+to the very bottom. The horrid tide, high and a quarter of a league in
+length, spreads out like waves its myriads of sterile stones, and the
+inclined sheet seems still to glide towards inundating the gorge. These
+stones are shattered and pulverized; their living fractures and thin
+harsh points wound the eye; they are still bruising and crushing
+{336}each other. Not a bush, not a spear of grass; the arid grayish
+train burns beneath a sun of brass; its debris are scorched to a dull
+hue, as in a furnace. A ruined mountain is more desolate than any human
+ruin.
+
+A hundred paces further on, the aspect of the valley becomes formidable.
+Troops of mammoths and mastodons in stone lie crouching over the eastern
+declivity, one above another, and heaped up over the whole slope. These
+colossal ridges shine with a tawny hue like iron rust; the most enormous
+of them drink the water of the river at their base. They look as if
+warming their bronzed skin in the sun, and sleep, turned over, stretched
+out on their side, resting in all attitudes, and always gigantic and
+frightful. Their deformed paws are curled up; their bodies half buried
+in the earth; their monstrous backs rest one upon another. When you
+enter into the midst of the prodigious band, the horizon disappears, the
+blocks rise fifty feet into the air; the road winds painfully among the
+overhanging masses; men and horses seem but dwarfs; these rusted edges
+mount in stages to the very summit, and the dark hanging army seems
+ready to fall on the human insects which come to trouble its sleep.
+
+Once upon a time, the mountain, in a paroxysm of fever, shook its
+summits like a cathedral that is falling in.{337}
+
+[Illustration: 363]
+
+{338}
+
+{339}A few points resisted, and their embattled turrets are drawn out
+in line on the crest; but their layers are dislocated, their sides
+creviced, their points jagged.
+
+[Illustration: 365]
+
+The whole shattered ridge totters. Beneath them the rock fails suddenly
+in a living and still bleeding wound. The splinters are lower down,
+strewn over the declivity. The tumbled rocks are sustained one upon
+another, and man today passes in safety amidst the disaster. But what a
+day was that of the ruin! It is not very ancient, perhaps of the sixth
+century, and the year of the terrible earthquake told of by Gregory
+of Tours. If a man could without perishing have seen the {340}summits
+split, totter and fall, the two seas of rock come bounding into the
+gorge, meet one another and grind each other amidst a shower of sparks,
+he would have looked upon the grandest spectacle ever seen by human
+eyes.
+
+On the west, a perpendicular mole, crannied like an old ruin, lifts
+itself straight up towards the sky. A leprosy of yellowish moss has
+incrusted its pores, and has clothed it all over with a sinister livery.
+This livid robe upon this parched stone has a splendid effect. Nothing
+is uglier than the chalky flints that are drawn from the quarry; just
+dug up, they seem cold and damp in their whitish shroud; they are not
+used to the sun; they make a contrast with the rest. But the rock that
+has lived in the air for ten thousand years, where the light has every
+day laid on and melted its metallic tints, is the friend of the sun, and
+carries its mantle upon its shoulders; it has no need of a garment of
+verdure; if it suffers from parasitic vegetations, it sticks them to
+its sides and imprints them with its colors. The threatening tones with
+which it clothes itself suits the free sky, the naked landscape, the
+powerful heat that environs it; it is alive like a plant; only it is
+of another age, one more severe and stronger than that in which we
+vegetate. {341}
+
+
+V.
+
+Gavarnie is a very ordinary village, commanding a view of the
+amphitheatre we are come to see. After you have left it, it is still
+necessary to go three miles through a melancholy plain, half buried in
+sand by the winter inundations; the waters of the Gave are muddy and
+dull; a cold wind whistles from the amphitheatre; the glaciers, strewn
+with mud and stones, are stuck to the declivity like patches of dirty
+plaster. The mountains are bald and ravined by cascades; black cones of
+scattered firs climb them like routed soldiers; a meagre and wan turf
+wretchedly clothes their mutilated heads. The horses ford the Gave
+stumblingly, chilled by the water coming from the snows. In this wasted
+solitude you meet, all of a sudden, the most smiling parterre. A throng
+of the lovely iris crowds itself into the bed of a dried torrent: the
+sun stripes with rays of gold their velvety petals of tender blue; the
+harvest of plumes winds with the sinuosities of the bank, and the eye
+follows over the whole plain the folds of the rivulet of flowers.
+
+We climb a last eminence, sown with iris and with stones. There is a hut
+where you breakfast and leave the horses. You arm yourself with a stout
+stick, and descend upon the glaciers of the amphitheatre. {342}
+
+[Illustration: 368]
+
+These glaciers are very ugly, very dirty, very uneven, very slippery; at
+every step you run the risk of falling, and if you fall it is on sharp
+stones or into deep holes. They look like heaps of old plaster-work, and
+those who have admired them have a stock of admiration for sale.
+
+The water has pierced them so that you walk upon bridges of snow. These
+bridges have the appearance of kitchen air-holes; the water is swallowed
+up in a very low archway, and, when you look closely, you get a distinct
+sight of a black hole. An Englishman who wished to enjoy the view,
+allowed himself to fall, and came out half dead, "with the rapidity of a
+trout." We left such experiments to the trout and the English. {343}
+
+
+VI.
+
+[Illustration: 369]
+
+After the glaciers we find a sloping esplanade; we climb for ten minutes
+bruising our feet upon fragments of sharp rock. Since leaving the hut we
+have not lifted our eyes, in order to reserve for ourselves an unbroken
+sensation. Here at last we look. {344}A wall of granite crowned
+with snow hollows itself before us in a gigantic amphitheatre. This
+amphitheatre is twelve hundred feet high, nearly three miles in
+circumference, three tiers of perpendicular walls, and in each tier
+thousands of steps.
+
+[Illustration: 370]
+
+The valley ends there; the wall is a single block, and impregnable. The
+other summits might fall, but its massive layers would not be moved. The
+mind is overwhelmed by the idea of a stability that cannot be shaken
+and an assured eternity. There is the boundary of two countries and two
+races; this it is that Roland wanted to break, when with a sword-stroke
+he opened a breach in the summit. But the immense wound disappeared in
+the immensity of the conquered wall.{345}
+
+[Illustration: 372]
+
+{346}
+
+{347} Three sheets of snow are spread out over the three tiers of
+layers. The sun falls with all its force upon; this virginal robe
+without being able to make it shine. It will preserve its dead
+whiteness. All this grandeur is austere; the air is chilled beneath the
+noonday rays; great, damp shadows creep along the foot of the walls.
+It is the everlasting winter and the nakedness of the desert. The sole
+inhabitants are the cascades assembled to form the Gave.
+
+[Illustration: 373]
+
+The streamlets of water come by thousands from the highest layer, leap
+from step to step, cross their stripes of foam, wind, unite and fall by
+a dozen brooks that slide from the last layer in flaky streaks to lose
+themselves in the glaciers of the bottom. The thirteenth cascade on the
+left is twelve hundred and sixty-six feet {348}high. It falls slowly,
+like a dropping cloud, or the unfolding of a muslin veil; the air
+softens its fall; the eye follows complacently the graceful undulation
+of the beautiful airy veil. It glides the length of the rock, and seems
+to float rather than to fall. The sun shines, through its plume, with
+the softest and loveliest splendor. It reaches the bottom like a bouquet
+of slender waving feathers, and springs backward in a silver dust; the
+fresh and transparent mist swings about the rock it bathes, and its
+rebounding train mounts lightly along the courses. No stir in the
+air; no noise, no living creature in this solitude. You hear only the
+monotonous murmur of the cascades, resembling the rustle of the leaves
+that the wind stirs in the forest.
+
+On our return, we seated ourselves at the door of the hut. It is a
+poor, squat little house, heavily supported upon thick walls; the knotty
+joists of the ceiling retain their bark. It is indeed necessary that it
+should be able to stand out alone against the snows of winter. You find
+everywhere the imprint of the terrible months it has gone through. Two
+dead fir-trees stand erect at the door. The garden, three feet square,
+is defended by enormous walls of piled-up slates. The low and black
+stable leaves neither foot-hold nor entry for the winds. A lean colt was
+seeking a little grass among the stones. {349}
+
+[Illustration: 375]
+
+{350}
+
+{351}A small bull, with surly air, looked at us out of the sides of
+his eyes; the animals, the trees and the site, wore a threatening
+or melancholy aspect. But in the clefts of a rock were growing some
+admirable buttercups, lustrous and splendid, which looked as if painted
+by a ray of sunshine.
+
+At the village we met our companions of the journey who had sat down
+there.. The good tourists get fatigued, stop ordinarily at the inn, take
+a substantial dinner, have a chair brought to the door, and digest while
+looking at the amphitheatre, which from there appears about as high as a
+house. After this they return, praising the sublime sight, and very glad
+that they have come to the Pyrenees.
+
+[Illustration: 377]
+
+{352}
+
+
+[Illustration: 378]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII. THE BER GONZ.--THE PIC DU MIDI.
+
+
+I.
+
+We ought to be useful to our fellow-mortals; I have climbed the Bergonz
+in order to have at least one ascent to tell about.
+
+A stony, zigzag pathway excoriates the green mountain with its whitish
+track. The view changes with every turn. Above and below us are meadows
+with girls making hay, and little houses stuck to the declivity like
+swallows' nests. Lower down, an immense pit of black rock, to which from
+all sides hasten streams of silver. The higher up we are, the more the
+valleys are contracted and fade from sight; the more the gray mountains
+{353}enlarge and spread themselves in all their hugeness. Suddenly,
+beneath the burning sun, the perspective becomes confused; we feel the
+cold and damp touch of some unknown and invisible being. A moment after,
+the air clears up, and we perceive behind us the white, rounded back
+of a beautiful cloud fleeing into the distance, and whose shadow glides
+lightly over the slope. The useful herbage soon disappears; scorched
+mosses, thousands of rhododendrons clothe the barren escarpments; the
+road is damaged by the force of the hidden springs; it is encumbered
+with rolling stones. It turns with every ten paces, in order to conquer
+the steepness of the slopes. You reach at last a naked ridge, where you
+dismount from your horse; here begins the top of the mountain. You walk
+for ten minutes over a carpet of serried heather, and you are upon the
+highest summit.
+
+What a view! Everything human disappears; villages, enclosures,
+cultivations, all seem like the work of ants. I have two valleys under
+my eyes, which seem two little bands of earth lost in a blue funnel.
+Nothing exists here but the mountains. Our roads and our works have
+scratched upon them an imperceptible point; we are mites, who lodge,
+between two awakings, under one of the hairs of an elephant. Our
+civilization is a pretty, miniature toy, with which nature amuses
+herself for {354}a moment, and which presently she will break.
+
+[Illustration: 380]
+
+You see nothing but a throng of mountains seated under the burning
+dome of heaven. They are ranged in an amphitheatre, like a council of
+immovable and eternal being's. All considerations are overpowered by the
+sensation of immensity: monstrous ridges which stretch themselves out,
+gigantic, bony spines, ploughed flanks that drop down precipitously into
+indistinguishable depths.{355}
+
+[Illustration: 381]
+
+{356}
+
+{357}It is as though you were in a bark in the middle of the sea. The
+mountain-chains clash like billows. The tops are sharp and jagged like
+the crests of uplifted waves; they come from all sides, athwart each
+other, piled one above another, bristling, innumerable, and the flood of
+granite mounts high into the sky at the four corners of the horizon.
+On the north, the valleys of Luz and Argeles open up in the plain by
+a bluish vista, shining with a dead splendor resembling two ewers of
+burnished pewter. On the west the chain of Bareges stretches like a saw
+as far as the Pic du Midi, a huge, ragged-edged axe, marked with patches
+of snow; on the east, lines of leaning fir-trees mount to the assault of
+the summits. In the south an army of embattled peaks, of ridges cut
+to the quick, squared towers, spires, perpendicular escarpments, lifts
+itself beneath a mantle of snow; the glaciers glitter between the dark
+rocks; the black ledges stand out with an extraordinary relief against
+the deep blue. These rude forms pain the eye; you are oppressively alive
+to the rigidness of the masses of granite which have burst through the
+crust of our planet, and the invincible ruggedness of the rock that is
+lifted above the clouds. This chaos of violently broken lines tells of
+the effort of forces of which we have no longer any idea. {358}Since
+then Nature has grown mild; she rounds and softens the forms she moulds;
+she embroiders in the valleys her leafy robe, and, as an industrious
+artist, she shapes the delicate foliage of her plants. Here, in her
+primitive barbarism, she only knew how to cleave the blocks and heap
+up the rough masses of her Cyclopean constructions. But her monument is
+sublime, worthy of the heaven it has for a vault and the sun which is
+its torch.
+
+
+II.
+
+Geology is a noble science. Upon this summit theories grow lively; the
+arguments of the books breathe new life into the story of the mountains,
+and the past appears grander than the present. This country was in
+the beginning a solitary and boiling sea, then slowly cooled, finally
+peopled by living creatures and built up by their debris. Thus were
+formed the ancient limestones, the slates of transition and several of
+the secondary rocks. What myriads of ages are accumulated in a single
+phrase! Time is a solitude in which we set up here and there our
+boundaries; they reveal its immensity, but do not measure it.
+
+This crust cleaves, and a long wave of molten granite heaves itself up,
+forming the lofty chain of {359}the Gave, of the Nestes, the Garonne,
+the Mala-detta, Neouvielle.
+
+[Illustration: 385]
+
+{360}
+
+{361}From here you see Neouvielle in the north-east. How this wall of
+fire worked in lifting itself amidst this upturned sea, the imagination
+of man will never conceive. The liquid mass of granite formed a paste
+among the rocks; the lower layers were changed into slate beneath
+the fiery blast; the level grounds rose up, and were overturned. The
+subterranean stream rose with an effort so abrupt, that they were stuck
+to its flanks in layers almost perpendicular. "It was congealed in
+torment, and its agitation is still painted in its petrified waves."
+
+How much time rolled away between this revolution and the next?
+Monuments are wanting; the centuries have left no traces. There is
+a page torn out in the history of the earth. Our ignorance like our
+knowledge overwhelms us. We see one infinity, and from it we divine
+another which we do not see.
+
+At last the ocean changed its bed, perhaps from the uplifting of
+America; from the south-west came a sea to burst upon the chain.
+The shock fell upon the dark embattled barrier that you see towards
+Gavarnie. There was a frightful destruction of marine animals: Their
+corpses have formed the shelly banks that you cross in mounting to la
+Breche; several layers of la Breche, of the {362}Taillon and of Mont
+Perdu, are fields still fetid with death. The rolling sea, tearing up
+its bed, drifted it against the wall of rocks, piled it against the
+sides, heaped it upon the summits, set mountain upon mountain, covered
+the immense rock, and oscillated in furious currents in its ravaged
+basin.
+
+[Illustration: 388]
+
+I seemed to see on the horizon the oozy surface coming higher than the
+summits, lifting its waves against the sky, eddying in the valleys, and
+howling above the drowned mountains like a tempest.
+
+That sea was bringing half of the Pyrenees; its raging waters overlaid
+the primitive declivity with calcareous strata, tilted and torn;
+upon these the quieted waters deposited the high horizontal layers.
+{363}Yonder, in the south-west, the Vignemale is covered with them. In
+order to raise up the summits, generations of marine creatures were born
+and died silent and inert populations which swarmed in the warm ooze,
+and watched through their green waves the rays of the blue-tinged sun.
+They have perished along with their sepulchre; the storms have torn open
+the banks where they had buried themselves, and these shreds of their
+wreck scarce tell how many myriads of centuries this shrouded world has
+seen pass away.
+
+One day at last, the great mountains which form the horizon on the south
+were seen to grow, Troumousse, the Vignemale, Mont Perdu, and all the
+summits that surround Gedres. The soil had burst open a second time. A
+wave of new granite arose, laden with the ancient granite, and with the
+prodigious mass of the limestones; the alluvia rose to more than ten
+thousand feet; the ancient summits of pure granite were surpassed; the
+beds of shells were lifted into the clouds, and the upheaved tops found
+themselves forever above the seas.
+
+Two seas have dwelt upon these summits; two streams of burning rock have
+erected these chains. What will be the next revolution? How long time
+will man yet last? A contraction of the crust which bears him will cause
+a wave of lava to gush forth or will displace the level of the seas. We
+live {364}between two accidents of the soil; our history occupies, with
+room to spare, a line in the history of the earth; our life depends upon
+a variation in the heat; our duration is for a moment, and our force a
+nothing. We resemble the little blue forget-me-nots which you pluck
+as you go down the slope; their form is delicate, their structure
+admirable; nature lavishes them and crushes them; she uses all her
+industry in shaping them, and all her carelessness in destroying them.
+There is more art in them than in the whole mountain. Have they any
+ground for pretending that the mountain was made for them?
+
+
+III.
+
+Paul has climbed the Pic du Midi of Bigorre: here is his journal of the
+trip:--
+
+"Set out in the mist at four o'clock in the morning. The pastures of
+Tau through the mist; the mist is distinctly visible. The lake of Oncet
+through the mist; same view.
+
+"Howker of the Five Bears. Several whitish or grayish spots on a whitish
+or grayish ground. To form an idea of it, look at five or six wafers, of
+a dirty white, stuck behind a leaf of blotting-paper.
+
+"Beginning of the steep rise; ascent at a footpace, head of one to tail
+of another; this recalls to {365}me Leblanc's riding-school, and the
+fifty horses advancing gracefully in the saw-dust, each one with his
+nose against the tail of the one before him, and his tail against the
+nose of his follower, as it used to be on Thursdays, the school-day for
+going out and for the riding lesson. I cradle myself voluptuously in the
+poetical remembrance.
+
+[Illustration: 391]
+
+"First hour: view of the back of my guide and the hind-quarters of
+his horse. The guide has a vest of bottle-green velvet, darned in two
+places, on the right and on the left; the horse is a dirty brown and
+bears the marks of the whip. Several big pebbles in the pathway. Fog. I
+meditate on German philosophy. {366}"Second hour: the view enlarges; I
+perceive the left eye of the guide's horse. That eye is blind; it loses
+nothing.
+
+"Third hour: the view broadens more. View of the hind-quarters of two
+horses and two tourists' vests fifteen feet above us. Gray vests, red
+girdles, berets. They swear and I swear; that consoles us a little. .
+
+"Fourth hour: joy and transports; the guide promises me for the summit
+the view of a sea of clouds.
+
+"Arrival: view of the sea of clouds. Unhappily we are in one of the
+clouds. Appearance that of a vapor bath when one is in the bath.
+
+"Benefits: cold in the head, rheumatism in the feet, lumbago, freezing,
+such happiness as a man might feel who had danced attendance for eight
+hours in an ante-chamber without fire.
+
+"And this happens often?
+
+"Twice out of three times. The guides swear it does not."
+
+[Illustration: 392]
+
+{367}
+
+[Illustration: 393]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII. PLANTS AND ANIMALS.
+
+
+I.
+
+The beeches push high upon the declivities, even beyond three thousand
+feet. Their huge pillars strike down into the hollows where earth is
+gathered. Their roots enter into the clefts of the rock, lift it, and
+come creeping to the surface like a family of snakes. Their skin, white
+and tender in the plains, is changed into a grayish and solid bark;
+their tenacious leaves shine with a vigorous green, beneath the sun
+which cannot penetrate them. They live isolated, because they need
+space, and range themselves at intervals one above another like lines of
+towers. From afar, between the dull heather, their mound rises splendid
+with light, and sounds with its hundred thousand leaves as with so many
+little bells of horn. {368}
+
+
+II.
+
+But the real inhabitants of the mountains are the pines, geometrical
+trees, akin to the ferruginous blocks hewn by the primitive eruptions.
+The vegetation of the plains unfolds itself in undulating forms with
+all the graceful caprices of liberty and wealth. The pines, on the other
+hand, seem scarcely alive; their shaft rises in a perpendicular line
+along the rocks; their horizontal branches part from the trunk at right
+angles, equal as the radii of a circle, and the entire tree is a cone
+terminated by a naked spike. The dull little blades that answer for
+leaves have a melancholy hue, without transparency or lustre; they seem
+hostile to the light; they neither reflect it, nor allow it to pass,
+they extinguish it; hardly does the noonday sun fringe them with a
+bluish reflection. Ten paces away, beneath such an aureole, the black
+pyramid cuts the horizon like an opaque mass. They crowd together
+in files under their funereal mantles. Their forests are silent as
+solitudes; the whistle of the wind makes there no noise; it glides over
+the stiff beard of the leaves without stirring or rubbing them together.
+One hears no sound save the whispering of the tops and the shrivelling
+of the little yellowish lamels which fall in showers as soon as you
+touch a branch. {369}
+
+[Illustration: 395]
+
+{370}
+
+{371}The turf is dead, the soil naked; you walk in the shade beneath an
+inanimate verdure, among pale shafts which rise like tapers. A strong
+odor fills the air, resembling the perfume of aromatics. The impression
+is that made by a deserted cathedral, while, after a ceremony, the smell
+of incense still floats under the arches, and the declining day outlines
+far away in the obscurity the forest of pillars.
+
+They live in families and expel the other trees from their domain.
+Often, in a wasted gorge, they may be seen like a mourning drapery
+descending among the white glaciers. They love the cold, and in winter
+remain clothed in snow. Spring does not renew them; you see only a few
+green lines run through the foliage; they soon grow dark like the rest.
+But when the tree springs from a spot of deep earth, and rises to a
+height of a hundred feet, smooth and straight as the mast of a ship,
+the mind with buoyancy follows to the very summit the flight of its
+inflexible form, and the vegetable column seems as grand as the mountain
+which nurtures it.
+
+
+III.
+
+Higher up, on the barren steeps, the yellowish box twists its knotty
+feet beneath the stones. It is a melancholy and tenacious creature,
+stunted {372}and thrust back upon itself; overborne amidst the rocks,
+it dares not shoot upward nor spread. Its small thick leaves follow each
+other in monotonous rows, clumsily oval and of a formal regularity. Its
+stem, short and grayish, is rough to the touch; the round fruit encloses
+black capsules, hard as ebony, that must be broken open for the seed.
+Everything in the plant is calculated with a view to utility: it thinks
+only of lasting and resisting; it has neither ornaments, elegance, nor
+richness; it expends its sap only in solid tissues, in dull colors, in
+durable fibres. It is an economical and active housewife, the only thing
+capable of vegetating in the quagmires that it fills.
+
+If you continue to ascend, the trees begin to fail. The brush-fir creeps
+in a carpet of turf. The rhododendrons grow in tufts and crown the
+mountain with rosy clusters. The heather crowds its white bunches,
+small, open, vase-shaped flowers, from which springs a crown of garnet
+stamens. In the sheltered hollows, the blue campanulas swing their
+pretty bells; the least wind lays them low; they live for all that, and
+smile, trembling and graceful.
+
+But, among all these flowers nourished with light and pure air, the
+most precious is the thornless rose. Never did petals form a frailer and
+lovelier corolla; never did a vermilion so vivid color a more delicate
+tissue. {373}
+
+[Illustration: 399]
+
+{374}
+
+
+IV.
+
+{375}At the summit grow the mosses. Battered by the wind, dried by
+the sun, they lose the fresh green tint they wear in the valleys and on
+the brink of the springs. They are reddened with tawny hues, and their
+smooth filaments have the reflexes of a wolf's fur. Others, yellowed and
+pale, cover with their sickly colors the bleeding crevices. Then there
+are gray ones, almost white, which grow like remnants of hair upon the
+bald rocks. Far away, upon the back of the mountain, all these tints are
+mingled, and the shaded fur emits a wild gleam.
+
+The last growths are reddish crusts, stuck to the walls of rock, seeming
+to form part of the stone, and which you might take, not for a
+plant, but for a scurf. Cold, dryness, and the height have by degrees
+transformed or killed vegetation.
+
+
+V.
+
+The climate shapes and produces animals as well as plants.
+
+The bear is a serious beast, a thorough mountaineer, curious to behold
+in his great-coat of felted hair, yellowish or grayish in color. It
+seems formed {376}for its domicile and its domicile for it. Its heavy
+fur is an excellent mantle against the snow. The mountaineers think
+it so good, that they borrow it from him as often as they can, and he
+thinks it so good that he defends it against them to the best of his
+ability. He likes to live alone, and the gorges of the heights are as
+solitary as he wishes.
+
+[Illustration: 402]
+
+The hollow trees afford him a ready-made house; as these are for the
+most part beeches and oaks, he finds in them at once food and shelter.
+For the rest, brave, prudent, and robust, he is an estimable animal; his
+only faults are that he eats his little ones, when he runs across them,
+and that he is a poor dancer. {377}
+
+[Illustration: 403]
+
+In hunting him, they go into ambush and fire on him as he passes.
+Lately, in a battue, a superb female was tracked. When the foremost
+hunters, who were novices, saw the glitter of the little fierce eyes,
+and perceived the black mass descending with great strides, beating the
+underbrush, they forgot all of a sudden that they had guns, and kept
+whist behind their oak. A hundred paces further on, a brave fellow
+fired. The bear, which was not hit, came up on a gallop. The man,
+dropping his gun, slipped into a pit. Reaching the bottom, he felt of
+his limbs, and by some miracle found himself whole, when he saw the
+animal hesitating above {378}his head, busy in examining the slope, and
+pressing her foot upon the stones to see if they were firm. She sniffed
+here and there, and looked at the man with the evident intention of
+paying him a visit. The pit was a well; if she reached the bottom, he
+must resign himself to a tete-a-tete. While the man reflected on this,
+and thought of the animal's teeth, the bear began to descend with
+infinite precaution and address, managing her precious person with
+great care, hanging on to the roots, slowly, but without ever stumbling.
+She was drawing near, when the hunters came up and shot her dead.
+
+[Illustration: 404]
+
+The isard dwells above the bear, upon the naked tops, in the region
+of the glaciers. He needs space for his leaps and gambols. He is
+too lively and gay to shut himself, like the heavy misanthrope, in the
+gorges and forests. No animal is more agile; he leaps from rock to rock,
+clears precipices, and keeps {379}his place upon points where there is
+just room for his four feet You sometimes hear a hollow bleating on the
+heights: it is a band of isards cropping the herbage amidst the snow;
+their tawny dress and their little horns stand out in the blue of the
+heavens; one of them gives the alarm and all disappear in a moment.
+
+
+VI.
+
+[Illustration: 405]
+
+You often hear for a half-hour a tinkling of bells behind the mountain;
+these are the herds of goats changing their pasture. Sometimes there are
+more than a thousand of them. You find yourself stopped in crossing the
+bridges until the whole caravan has filed over. They have long hanging
+hairs which form their coat; with their black mantle and great beard,
+you would say that they were {380}dressed for a masquerade. Their yellow
+eyes stare vaguely, with an expression of curiosity and gentleness. They
+seem to wonder at their walking in such orderly fashion on level ground.
+Only to look at that dry leg and horny foot, you feel that they are
+framed to wander at random and leap about on the rocks. From time to
+time the less disciplined ones stop, set their fore feet against the
+mountain, and crop a bramble or a blossom of lavender. The others come
+and push them on; they start off again with a mouthful of herbage, and
+eat as they walk. All their physiognomies are intelligent, resigned and
+melancholy, with flashes of caprice and originality. You see the forest
+of horns waving above the black mass, and their smooth hair shining
+in the sun. Enormous dogs, with woolly coat, spotted with white, walk
+gravely along the sides, growling when you draw near. The herdsman
+comes behind in his brown cloak, with an eye fixed, glittering, void of
+thought, like that of the animals; and the whole band disappears in a
+cloud of dust, out of which comes a sound of shrill bleating.
+
+
+VII.
+
+Why should not I speak of the happiest animal in creation? A great
+painter, Karel du Jardin, has taken a liking for it: he has drawn it
+in all its attitudes, and has shown all its pleasures and all its
+tastes.{381}
+
+[Illustration: 407]
+
+{382}
+
+{383} The rights of prose are indeed equal to those of painting, and
+I promise that travellers will take pleasure in considering the hogs.
+There, the word is out. Now mind that in the Pyrenees they are not
+covered with tainting filth, as on our farms; they are rosy or black,
+well washed, and live upon the dry gravel, alongside the running waters.
+
+[Illustration: 409]
+
+They make holes in the heated sand, and sleep there in groups of five
+or six, close set in lines, in admirable order. When any one draws
+near, the whole mass moves; the corkscrew tails frisk fantastically;
+two crafty, philosophic eyes open beneath the pendent ears; the mocking
+noses stretch forth and snuff; they all grunt in concert; after which,
+becoming accustomed to the intrusion, they are quieted, they lie down
+again, the eyes close {384}in sanctimonious fashion, the tails retire
+into place, and the blessed rogues return to their digestion and
+enjoyment of the sun. All these expressive snouts seem to cry shame
+upon prejudices, and invoke enjoyment; there is something reckless
+and derisive about them; the whole countenance is directed towards the
+snout, and the end of the entire head is in the mouth. Their lengthened
+nose seems to sniff and take in from the air all agreeable sensations.
+They spread themselves so complacently on the ground, they wag their
+ears with such voluptuous little movements, they utter such penetrating
+ejaculations of pleasure, that you get out of patience with them. Oh
+genuine epicureans, if sometimes in your sleep you deign to reflect, you
+ought to think, like the goose of Montaigne, that the world was made for
+you, that man is your servant, and that you are the privileged creatures
+of nature. There is but one moment of trouble in their whole life, that
+is when they are killed. Still they pass quickly away and do not foresee
+this moment.
+
+
+VIII.
+
+Myriads of lizards nestle in the chinks of slate and in the walls of
+rounded pebbles. On the approach of a passer-by, they run like a streak
+across {385}the road. If you stand quiet for a moment, you see their
+little restless, sly heads peep out between two stones; the rest of the
+body shows itself, the tail wriggles, and, with an abrupt movement, they
+climb zigzag upon the gravelly ledges. There they have as much sun as
+they please, sun to roast alive in; at noon, the rock burns the hand.
+This powerful sun heats their cold blood, and gives spring and action
+to their limbs. They are capricious, passionate, violent, and fight like
+men. Sometimes you may see two of them rolling the whole length of a
+rock, one over the other, in the dust, get up again dimmed and dirty,
+and run briskly away, like cowardly and insubordinate schoolboys taken
+in a misdeed. Some of them lose their tails in these adventures, so that
+they look as if they wore a coat that is too short for them; they hide,
+ashamed of being so ill dressed. Others in their gray justi-coats have
+slight, graceful motions, an air at once so coquettish and timid that
+it takes away all desire to harm them. When they are asleep on a slab
+of stone, you can see their whitish throat and their small, intelligent
+mouth; but they scarcely, ever sleep, they are always on the lookout;
+they scamper off at the least sound, and, when nothing troubles them,
+they trot, frolic, climb up and down, make a hundred turns for pleasure.
+They love company, and live near or with one another. No animal is
+{386}prettier or has more innocent ways; with the charming white and
+yellow sedum, it enlivens the long walls of stone, and both live on
+dryness, as other things on moisture.
+
+The sun, the light, the vegetation, animals, man, are so many books
+wherein Nature has, in different characters, written the same thought.
+If the hogs have a clean and rosy skin, it is because the boiling
+granite and the sea swarming with fish have during millions of years
+accumulated and uplifted ten thousand feet of rock.
+
+[Illustration: 412]
+
+
+
+
+BOOK IV. BAGNE RES AND LUCHON.
+
+
+[Illustration: 415]
+
+{389}
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I. FROM LUZ TO BAGNERES-DE-BIGORRE.
+
+
+I.
+
+Here one must submit to long, stifling ascents; the horses trudge on
+at a foot-pace or pant; the travellers sleep or sweat; the conductor
+grumbles or drinks; the dust whirls, and, if you go out, your throat is
+parched or your eyes smart. There is only one way of passing the evil
+hour: it is to tell over some old story of the country, as, for example,
+the following:--
+
+Bos de Benac was a good knight, a great friend of the king Saint Louis;
+he went on a crusade into the land of Egypt, and killed many Saracens
+for {390}the salvation of his soul. But finally the French were beaten
+in a great battle, and Bos de Benac left for dead. He was taken away
+prisoner along the river, towards the south, into a country where the
+skin of the men was quite burned by the heat, and there he remained
+ten years. They made him herdsman of their flocks, and often beat him
+because he was a Frank and a Christian.
+
+[Illustration: 416]
+
+One day when he was afflicted and lamenting his lot in a solitary place,
+he saw appear before him a little black man, who had two horns to his
+forehead, a goat's foot, and a more wicked air than {391}the most wicked
+of Saracens. Bos was so used to seeing black men, that he did not make
+the sign of the cross. It was the devil, who said, sneering, to him:
+"Bos, what good has it done thee to fight for thy God? He leaves thee
+the servant of my servants of Nubia; the dogs of thy castle are better
+treated than thou. Thou art thought dead and tomorrow thy wife will be
+married. Go then to milk thy flock, thou good knight."
+
+Bos uttered a loud cry and wept, for he loved his wife; the devil
+pretended to have pity on him, and said to him: "I am not so bad as thy
+priests tell. Thou hast fought well; I like brave men; I will do for
+thee more than thy friend, the crucified one. This night shalt thou be
+in thy beautiful land of Bigorre. Give me in exchange a plate of nuts
+from thy table: what, there thou art embarrassed as a theologian! Dost
+thou think that nuts have souls? Come, decide."
+
+Bos forgot that it is a mortal sin to give anything to the devil, and
+stretched out to him his hand. Immediately he was borne away as in a
+whirlwind; he saw beneath him a great yellow river, the Nile, which
+stretched out, like a snake, between two bands of sand; a moment
+afterward, a city spread on the strand like a cuirass; then innumerable
+waves ranged from one end of the horizon to the other, and on them black
+vessels {392}like unto swallows; further on, a triple-coasted island,
+with a hollow mountain full of fire and a plume of tawny smoke; then
+again the sea. Night fell, when a range of mountains lifted itself into
+the red bands of the sunset. Bos recognized the serrate tops of the
+Pyrenees and was filled with joy.
+
+The devil said to him: "Bos, come first to my servants of the mountain.
+In all conscience, since you return to the country, you owe them a
+visit. They are more beautiful than thy angels, and will love thee,
+since thou art my friend."
+
+The good knight was horrified to think that he was the friend of the
+devil, and followed him reluctantly. The hand of the devil was as a
+vice; he went swifter than the wind. Bos traversed at a bound the valley
+of Pierrefitte and found himself at the foot of the Bergonz, before a
+door of stone which he had never seen. The door opened of itself with a
+sound softer than a bird's song, and they entered a hall a thousand
+feet high, all of crystal, flaming as if the sun were inside it. Bos saw
+three little women as large as one's hand, on seats of agate; they
+had eyes clear as the green waters of the Gave; their cheeks had the
+vermilion of the thornless rose; their snowy robe was as light as the
+airy mist of the cascades; their scarf was of the hues of the rainbow.
+Bos believed he had seen it formerly floating on the brink of the
+{393}precipices, when the morning fog evaporated with the sun's first
+rays. They were spinning, and their wheels turned so fast that they were
+invisible. They rose all together, and sang with their little silvery
+voices: "Bos is returned; Bos is the friend of our master; Bos, we will
+spin thee a cloak of silk in exchange for thy crusader's mantle."
+
+A moment later he was before another mountain, which he recognized
+by the light of the stars. It was that of Campana, which rings when
+misfortune comes upon the country. Bos found himself inside without
+knowing how it happened, and saw that it was hollow to the very summit.
+An enormous bell of burnished silver descended from the uppermost vault;
+a troop of black goats was attached to the clapper. Bos perceived that
+these goats were devils; their short tails wriggled convulsively; their
+eyes were like burning coals; their hair trembled and shrivelled like
+green branches on live coals; their horns were pointed and crooked like
+Syrian swords. When they saw Bos and the demon they came leaping around
+them with such abrupt bounds and such strange eyes that the good knight
+felt his heart fail within him. Those eyes formed cabalistic figures,
+and danced after the manner of the will-o'-the-wisp in the grave-yard;
+then they ranged themselves in single file and ran forward; the steel
+clapper flew against the sounding {394}wall, an immense voice came
+rolling forth from the vibrant silver. Bos seemed to hear it in the
+depths of his brain; the palpitations of the sound ran through his whole
+body; he shuddered with anguish like a man in delirium, and distinctly
+heard the bell chanting: "Bos has returned; Bos is the friend of our
+master; Bos, it is not the bell of the church, it is I who ring thy
+return."
+
+He felt himself once more lifted into the air; the trees rooted in the
+rock bent before his companion and himself as beneath a storm; the bears
+howled mournfully; troops of wolves fled shivering over the snow. Great
+reddish clouds flew across the sky, jagged and quivering like the wings
+of bats. The evil spirits of the valley rose up and eddied through the
+night. The heads of the rocks seemed alive; the army of the mountains
+appeared to shake themselves and follow him. They traversed a wall of
+clouds and stopped upon the peak of Anie. At that very moment, a flash
+cleft the vapory mass. Bos saw a phantom tall as a huge pine, the face
+burning like a furnace, enveloped in red clouds. Violet aureoles flamed
+upon his head; the lightning crept at his feet in dazzling trains;
+his whole body shone with white flashes. The thunder burst forth, the
+neighboring summit fell, the upturned rocks smoked, and Bos heard
+a mighty voice saying: "Bos has returned; Bos is the friend of our
+{395}master; Bos, I illumine the valley for thy return better than the
+tapers of thy church."
+
+[Illustration: 421]
+
+The poor Bos, bathed in a cold sweat, was suddenly borne to the foot of
+the chateau of Benac, and the devil said to him: "Good knight, go now,
+find again thy wife!" Then he began to laugh with a noise like the
+cracking of a tree, and disappeared, leaving behind a smell of sulphur.
+{396}
+
+[Illustration: 422]
+
+Morning dawned, the air was cold, the earth damp, and Bos shivered under
+his tatters, when he saw a superb cavalcade draw near. Ladies in robes
+of brocade seamed with silver and pearls; lords in armor of polished
+steel, with chains of gold; noble palfreys beneath scarlet housings,
+conducted by pages in doublets of black velvet; then an escort of
+men-at-arms, whose cuirasses glittered {397}in the sun. It was the Sire
+d'Angles coming to marry the lady of Benac. They filed slowly along the
+ascent and were buried beneath the darkness of the porch.
+
+Bos ran to the gate; but they repelled him, saying: "Come back at noon,
+my good man, thou shalt have alms like the rest."
+
+Bos sat down upon a rock, tormented with grief and rage. Inside the
+castle he heard the flourish of trumpets and the sounds of rejoicing.
+Another was going to take his wife and his goods; he clenched his fists
+and revolved thoughts of murder; but he had no weapons; he determined to
+be patient, as he had so often been among the Saracens, and waited.
+
+All the poor of the neighborhood were gathered together, and Bos placed
+himself among them. He was not humble as the good king Saint Louis, who
+washed the feet of the beggars; he was heartily ashamed of walking among
+these pouch-bearers, these maimed and halt, with crooked legs and
+bent backs, ill clad in poor, torn and patched cloaks, and in rags and
+tatters; but he was still more ashamed when, in passing over the moat
+filled with clear water, he saw his burnt face, his locks bristling like
+the hair of a wild beast, his haggard eyes, his whole body wasted
+and bruised; then he remembered that his only garment was a torn sack
+{398}and the skin of a great goat, and that he was more hideous than the
+most hideous beggar. These cried aloud the praises of the wedded ones,
+while Bos ground his teeth with rage.
+
+[Illustration: 424]
+
+They followed the lofty corridor, and Bos saw through the door the old
+banqueting hall. His arms still hung there; he recognized the antlers
+of stags that he had shot with his bow, the heads of bears that he had
+slain with his bear-spear. The hall was full; the joy of the banquet
+rose high beneath the vault; the wine of Languedoc flowed generously in
+the cups, the guests were drinking the health of the betrothed. The lord
+of Angles was talking very low to the beautiful lady, who smiled and
+turned towards him her gentle eyes. {399}
+
+[Illustration: 426]
+
+{400}
+
+{401}When Bos saw those rosy lips smiling and the black eyes beaming
+beneath the scarlet capulet, he felt his heart gnawed with jealousy,
+bounded into the hall and cried out with a terrible voice: "Out of this,
+ye traitors! I am master here, Bos de Benac."
+
+"Beggar and liar!" said the lord of Angles. "We saw Bos fall dead on the
+banks of the Egyptian stream, Who art thou, old leper? Thy face is black
+like those of the damned Saracens. You are all in league with the devil;
+it is the evil spirit who has led thee hither. Drive him out, and loose
+the dogs upon him."
+
+But the tender-hearted lady begged them to have mercy on the unhappy
+madman. Bos, pricked by his conscience, believing that everybody knew
+his sin, fled with his face in his hands, in horror of himself, and
+stayed not until he had reached a solitary bog. Night came, and the bell
+of Mount Campana began to toll. He heard the wheels of the faeries of
+the Bergonz humming. The giant clad in fire appeared on the peak of
+Anie. Strange images, like the dreams of a sick man, rose in his brain.
+The breath of the demon was on him. A legion of fantastic visages
+galloped through his head to the rustle of infernal wings, and the
+ravishing smile of the lovely lady pricked him to the heart like the
+point of a poniard. The little {402}black man appeared near him, and
+said to him: "How, Bos, art thou not invited to the wedding of thy wife?
+The lord of Angles espouses her at this very hour. Friend Bos, he is not
+courteous!"
+
+"Accursed of God, what art thou here to do?"
+
+"Thou art scarcely grateful; I have led thee out of Egypt, as Moses did
+his loafing Israelites, and I have transported thee, not in forty years
+but in a day, into the promised land. Poor fool, whose amusement is
+tears! Dost thou wish thy wife? Give me thy faith, nothing more. Indeed,
+thou art right; to-morrow, if thou art not frozen, and if thou pleadest
+humbly with the lord of Angles, he will make thee keeper of his kennels;
+it is a fine situation. To-night, sleep on the snow, good knight.
+Yonder, where the lights are, the lord of Angles embraces thy wife."
+
+Bos was stifling, and thought he was going to die. "Oh Lord my God,"
+said he, falling on his knees, "deliver me from the tempter!" And he
+burst into tears.
+
+The devil fled, driven by this ardent prayer; the hands of Bos clasped
+over his breast touched his marriage ring which he carried in his
+scapulary. He trembled with joy! "Thanks, O Lord, and bring me there in
+time."
+
+He ran as if he had wings, crossed the threshold at a bound, and hid
+himself behind a pillar {403}of the gallery. The procession advanced
+with torches. When the lady was near him, Bos rose, took her hand and
+showed her the ring. She recognized it and threw herself into his arms.
+He turned towards those who were present and said: "I have suffered
+like our Saviour, and like Him been denied. Men of Bigorre, who have
+maltreated and denied me, I pray that you will be my friends as of old."
+
+On the morrow Bos went to pour a dish of nuts into a black gulf, where
+often was heard the voice of the devil; after that he left to confess
+himself to the pope. On his return he became a hermit in a cavern of the
+mountain, and his wife a nun in a convent at Tarbes. Both piously did
+penance, and were worthy after their death to behold God.
+
+[Illustration: 429]
+
+{404}
+
+
+II.
+
+[Illustration: 430]
+
+A little beyond Lourdes begins the plain, and the sky opens out over
+an immense space: the azure dome grows pale toward the edges, and its
+tender blue, graded down by insensible shades, loses itself on the
+horizon in an exquisite whiteness. {405}These colors, so pure, so rich,
+so sweetly blended, are like a great concert where one finds himself
+enveloped in harmony; the light comes from all sides; the air is
+penetrated with it, the blue vault sparkles from the dome to the very
+horizon. Other objects are forgotten; you are absorbed in a single
+sensation; you cannot help enjoying this unchangeable serenity, this
+profusion of brightness, this overflowing of golden, gushing light
+playing in limitless space. This sky of the south corresponds to but one
+state of the soul, joy; it has but one thought, one beauty, but it gives
+rise to the conception of full and durable happiness; it sets in the
+heart a spring of gayety ever ready to flow; man in this country ought
+to wear life lightly. Our northern skies have a deeper and more varied
+expression; the metallic reflections of their changing clouds accord
+with the troubled souls; their broken light and strange shadings express
+the sad joy of melancholy passions they touch the heart more deeply and
+with a keener stroke. But blue and white are such lovely hues! From here
+the north seems an exile; you would never have thought that two colors
+could give so much pleasure. They vanish into each other, like pleasant
+sounds that grow into harmony and are blended together. The distant
+white softens the garish light and imprisons it in a haze of thickened
+{406}air. The azure of the dome deadens the rays under its dark tint,
+reflects them, breaks them, and seems strewn with spangles of gold.
+This glitter in the sky, these horizons drowned in a misty zone, this
+transparence of the infinite air, this depth of a heaven without clouds,
+is worth as much as the sight of the mountains.
+
+
+III.
+
+[Illustration: 432]
+
+Tarbes is a good-sized city that looks like a market town, paved with
+small stones, mediocre in appearance. You alight in a place where great
+dusty elms make a shade. At noon the streets are empty; it is evident
+that you are near the sun of {407}Spain. A few women merely, with red
+foulards on the head, were selling peaches at the corners. A little
+further on some cavalry soldiers stretched their great awkward legs
+in the narrow shadow of their wall. You run across a square of four
+buildings, in the midst of which rises a bell-tower flaring at the base.
+It is the church; it has but a single aisle, very high, very broad,
+very cool, painted in dark colors, which contrast with the stifling heat
+outside and the glare of the white walls; above the altar, six columns
+of mottled marble, surmounted with a baldachin, make a pretty effect.
+The pictures are like those everywhere else: A Christ, mingled fresh
+butter and pale rose in hue, a passion in colored engravings at six sous
+each. A few, hung very high in dark corners, seem better because you
+can make nothing out of them. A little further on they have just built
+a court-house, clean and new as a judge's robe; the ashler work is well
+dressed, and the walls perfectly scraped. The front is adorned with two
+statues: Justice, who looks like a fool, and Force, who looks like a
+girl. Force has on low boots and the skin of an animal. Instead of fine
+statues we have ugly riddles. Since they had a fancy for symbols, could
+they not have dressed Force as a policeman? To compensate ourselves for
+the statues, we went to visit the horses. In this place, the homely city
+becomes an elegant city. {408}The buildings of the stud are simple
+and in good taste. Turf, rosebushes, stairways filled with flowers, a
+beautiful meadow of high grass; in the distance are poplars ranged as
+a screen to the limpid horizon. The habitation of the horses is a
+pleasure-house. There are fifty beasts in a long stable that might serve
+at need for a ball-room; they are superb creatures with shining coats,
+firm croup, gentle eye, calm front: they feed peaceably in their stalls,
+having a double mat under their litter; everything is brushed, wiped,
+rubbed. Grooms in red vests come and go incessantly to clean them and
+see that nothing is wanting. Man in the earthly paradise was less happy.
+
+
+IV.
+
+Poor mankind has no city which is not full of lamentable memories. The
+Protestants took this one in 1570 and butchered all the inhabitants. One
+of them had taken refuge in a tower whose only ascent was by a narrow
+staircase; they sent one of his friends, who called to him under pretext
+of a parley; no sooner had he put his head at the window than he was
+killed by an arquebusade. The peasants who came to give burial to
+the dead interred two thousand of them in the {409}ditches. Five years
+after, the country was almost a desert.
+
+Patience! the Catholics were no gentler than the Protestants; witness
+that siege of Rabastens, twelve miles distant from Tarbes.
+
+"Suddenly," says Montluc, "I saw that others besides our foot soldiers
+should have a hand here, and said to the nobility: 'Gentlemen, my
+friends, follow boldly, and give, and be not wonder-struck; for we could
+not choose a more honorable death.' And so we all marched with as good a
+will as ever I saw in my life to the assault, and I twice looked back;
+I saw that all were closed up so as to touch one another. I had caused
+three or four ladders to be carried to the brink of the moat, and as
+I turned backward to order them to bring up two ladders, a volley was
+given me in the face from the corner of a barricade which adjoined the
+tower. I was suddenly covered with blood, for I bled from the mouth,
+nose and eyes. Then almost all the soldiers, and nearly all the nobles
+too, began to be affrighted and would retreat. But I cried out to them,
+although I could scarcely speak for the quantity of blood which gushed
+from my mouth and nose: 'Where will you go? Will you be frightened on
+my account? Do not stir, and do not abandon the fight.' And said to the
+nobles, 'I am going to get my wounds dressed: let no one follow {410}me,
+and avenge me as you love me.' I took a nobleman by the hand, and so
+was led to my lodging, where I found a surgeon of M. de Goas' regiment,
+named Maitre Simon, who dressed my wound and pulled out the bones from
+both cheeks with his two fingers, so large were the holes, and cut off
+much flesh from my face, which was covered with wounds.
+
+"Here now is M. de Madaillan, my lieutenant, who was at my side when I
+went to the charge, and M. de Goas on the other, who was come to see if
+I were dead, and said to me: 'Rejoice, monsieur, take courage, we
+are inside. There are the soldiers with hands that kill everybody; be
+assured then that we will avenge your wound.' Then I said to him: 'I
+praise God, because I see that victory is ours before I die. At present
+I feel no concern at dying. I beg you will go back, and show me all
+the affection you have borne me, _and take care that no one escapes
+unkilled._
+
+"And immediately he went away, and even my servants all went; so that
+there remained along with me only two pages, and the advocate de Las
+and the surgeon. They wanted to save the minister and the captain of the
+garrison, named Ladous, so as to have them hung before my quarters. But
+the soldiers had nearly killed them themselves, and took them away
+from those who held them and tore {411}them into a thousand pieces. The
+soldiers made fifty or sixty who had withdrawn into the great tower,
+leap from the top into the moat, and these were drowned. It turns out
+that two who had hidden themselves were saved. There was a certain
+prisoner who wanted to give four thousand crowns. But never a man would
+hear of any ransom, and most of the women were killed."
+
+With such fits of madness how has the human race managed to endure? "In
+vain you drain it," says Mephistopheles, "the fresh spring of living
+blood forever reappears."
+
+[Illustration: 437]
+
+{412}
+
+
+[Illustration: 438]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+BAGNERES-DE-BIGORRE.
+
+
+I.
+
+You set out for Bagneres at five o'clock in the afternoon, in the dust
+and amidst a train of _coucous_ laden with people. The road is blocked,
+like the roads in the suburbs of Paris on a Saturday evening. The
+diligence, in passing, takes up as many peasants as it meets; they are
+put in heaps under the tilt, among the trunks, alongside the dogs; they
+seem proud and pleased with their lofty place. Legs, arms and heads,
+dispose themselves as best they can; they sing, and the coach appears
+like a music-box. It is in this triumphal equipage that you reach
+Bagneres, after sunset. You dine in haste, are taken to the _Promenade
+des Coustous_, and find, to your utter surprise, the Boulevard de Gand
+among the Pyrenees. {413}Four rows of dusty trees; regular benches at
+equal intervals; on both sides, hotels of modern aspect, one of which
+is occupied by M. de Rothschild; rows of illuminated shops, of cafes
+chantants surrounded by crowds; terraces filled with seated spectators;
+upon the roadway, a black throng streaming under the lights. Such is the
+spectacle beneath your eyes. The groups form, dissolve, close up; you
+follow the crowd; you learn again the art of getting on without stepping
+on the feet of those you meet, of grazing everybody without elbowing
+anybody; of not getting crushed and of not crushing others; in short,
+all the talents taught by civilization and the asphaltum. You meet again
+with the rustle of dresses, the confused hum of conversations and steps,
+the offensive splendor of artificial lights, the obsequious and
+wearied faces of traffic, the skilful display of the shops, and all the
+sensations you wanted to leave behind. Bagneres-de-Bigorre and Luchon
+are in the Pyrenees the capitals of polite life, the meeting place of
+the pleasures of the world and of fashion--Paris, six hundred miles away
+from Paris.
+
+The next morning, in the sunlight, the aspect of the city is charming.
+Great alleys of old trees cross it in every direction. Little gardens
+bloom upon the terraces. The Adour rolls along by the houses. Two
+streets are islands connected with {414}the highway by bridges laden
+with oleanders, and their green windows are mirrored in the clear wave.
+Streamlets of limpid water run from all the open places and all the
+streets; they cross, dive under ground, reappear, and the city is filled
+with their murmurs, their coolness, and their gayety. A little girl,
+seated upon a slab of slate, bathes her feet in the current; the cold
+water reddens them, and the poor little thing tucks up her worn gown
+with great care, for fear of wetting it. A woman on her knees is
+washing linen at her door; another bends over and draws water for her
+saucepan. The two black and shining trenches hedge in the white road,
+like two bands of jet. In the inner court or in the vestibule of
+each house the assembled women sew and spin, some on the steps of the
+stairway, others at the feet of a ville; they are in the shade, but on
+the crest of the wall the beautiful green leaves are traversed by a ray
+of sunlight.
+
+In the neighboring place, some men ranged in two lines were threshing
+wheat with long poles and heaping up masses of golden grain. Under its
+borrowed luxury the city preserves some rustic customs; but the rich
+light blends the contrasts, and the threshing of the wheat has the
+splendor of a ball. Further on are some buildings where the stream works
+the marbles. Slabs, blocks, piles of chips, shapeless material, fill
+the court for a length {415}of three hundred paces, among clusters of
+rosebushes, flowery borders, statues, and kiosks. In the workshops,
+heavy gearings, troughs of muddy water, rusty saws, huge wheels--these
+are the workmen. In the storerooms, columns, capitals of an admirable
+polish, white chimney-pieces bordered with leaves in relief, carved
+vases, sculptured basins, trinkets of agate--that is the work. The
+quarries of the Pyrenees have, all of them, given a specimen to panel
+the walls; it is a library of marbles. There are white ones like
+alabaster, rosy like living flesh, brown speckled like a guinea fowl's
+breast--the Griotte is of a blood-red. The black Baudean, veined with
+white threads, emits a greenish reflection. The Ronce de Bise furrows
+its fawn-colored dress with dark bands. The grayish Sarrancolin has
+a peculiar glitter, is marked all over with scales, striped with pale
+tints, and stained with a broad blood-red spot. Nature is the greatest
+of painters; her infiltrations and subterranean fires could alone have
+invented this profusion of shades and patterns: it needed the audacious
+originality of chance and the slow toil of the mineral forces, to turn
+lines so capricious and assort tints so complex.
+
+A stream of swift water rolls beneath the workshops; another glides in
+front of the house, in a lovely meadow, under a screen of poplars. In
+the {416}pale distance you see the mountains. It is a fortunate spot
+considering that it is a sawer of stone.
+
+
+II.
+
+The bathing-house is a beautiful white building, vast and regular;
+the long front, quite unornamented, is of a very simple form. This
+architecture, akin to the antique, is more beautiful in the south than
+in the north; like the sky, it leaves in the mind an impression of
+serenity and grandeur.
+
+A half of the river washes the facade, and precipitates under the
+entrance bridge its black sheet bristling with sparkling waves. You
+enter into a great vestibule, follow a huge staircase with double
+balustrade, then corridors ending in noble porticos and commanding the
+terraces. Bathing rooms panelled with marble, a verdant garden, fine
+points of view everywhere, high vaults, coolness, simple forms, soft
+hues that rest the eye and contrast with the crude, dazzling light,
+that out of doors falls on the dusty place and the white houses; all
+attracts, and it is a pleasure to be ill here.
+
+The Romans, a people as civilized and as bored as we, did as we do,
+and came to Bagneres. The inhabitants of the country, good courtiers,
+constructed, on the public place, a temple in honor of Augustus. The
+temple became a church that was {417}dedicated to St. Martin, but
+retained the pagan inscription. In 1641, they removed the inscription to
+above the fountain of the southern entrance, where it still is.
+
+In 1823, they discovered on the site of the bathhouse, columns,
+capitals, four piscinae cased with marbles and adorned with mouldings,
+and a large number of medals with effigies of the first Roman emperors.
+These remains, found after a lapse of eighteen centuries, leave a deep
+impression, like that one experiences in measuring the great limestone
+beds, antediluvian sepulchres of buried races. Our cities are founded
+upon the ruins of extinct civilizations, and our fields on the remains
+of subverted creations.
+
+Rome has left its trace everywhere at Bagneres. The most agreeable of
+these souvenirs of antiquity are the monuments which those who had been
+healed erected in honor of the Nymphs, and whose inscriptions still
+remain. Lying in the _baignoires_ of marble, they felt the virtue of
+the beneficent goddess penetrating their limbs; with eyes half-closed,
+dozing in the soft embrace of the tepid water, they heard the mysterious
+spring dripping, dripping with a song, from the recesses of the rock,
+its mother; the outpoured sheet shone about them with dim, greenish
+reflexes, and before them passed like a vision the strange eye and magic
+voice of the {418}unknown divinity, who came to the light in order to
+bring health to hapless mortals.
+
+Behind the bath-house is a high hill, covered with admirable trees,
+where wind sequestered walks. Thence you see under your feet the city,
+whose slated roofs reflect the powerful light of the burning sky and
+stand out in the limpid air with a tawny and leaden hue. A line of
+poplars marks on the great green plain the course of the river; towards
+Tarbes it strikes endlessly into the vaporous distance, amidst tender
+hues. Opposite, wooded and cultivated hills rise, round-topped, to
+the very horizon. On the right, the mountains, like so many pyramids,
+descend in long regular quoins. These hills and mountains cut out
+a sinuous line on the radiant border of the sky. From the white and
+smiling horizon, the eye mounts by insensible shades to the deep
+burning blue of the dome. This whiteness imparts a tender and delicious
+sensation, mingling of revery and pleasure; it touches, troubles and
+delights, like the song of Cherubino in Mozart. A fresh wind comes from
+the valley; the body is as comfortable as the mind; one finds in his
+nature a harmony hitherto unknown; he no longer bears the weight of
+his thought or of his mechanism; he does nothing but feel; he becomes
+thoroughly animal, that is to say, perfectly happy.
+
+In the evening we walk in the plain. There are {419}in the fields of
+maize retired paths where one is alone. The tops, seven feet high, form,
+as it were, a copse of trees. The great sheaf of green leaves ends in
+slender little columns of rosy grains, and the slanting sun slips its
+arrows of gold among the stalks. You find meadows cut by streams which
+the peasants dam up, and which, for several hours, overflow to refresh
+the fields. The day declines, the huge shadow of the mountains darkens
+the verdure; clouds of insects hum in the heavy air. The whisper of an
+expiring breeze makes the leaves to shiver for a moment. Meanwhile the
+carriages and the cavalcades return on all the roads, and the courts are
+illuminated for the evening promenade.
+
+[Illustration: 445]
+
+{420}
+
+
+[Illustration: 446]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III. THE PEOPLE.
+
+
+I.
+
+Everybody agrees that life at watering-places is very poetic, abounding
+in adventures of every sort, especially adventures of the heart. Read
+the novels _L'Anneau d'Argent_ of Charles de Bernard, George Sand's
+_Lavinia_, etc.
+
+If watering-place life is a romance, it is in the books that it is so.
+To see great men in these places, you must carry them bound in calf in
+your trunk.
+
+It is equally agreed that conversation at watering-places is extremely
+brilliant, that you meet only artists, superior men, people of the great
+world; that ideas, grace and elegance are lavished there, and that the
+flower of all pleasures and all thought there comes into bloom. {421}The
+truth is that you use up a great many hats, eat a great many peaches,
+say a great many words, and, in the matter of men and of ideas, you find
+very much what you find elsewhere.
+
+Here is the catalogue of a _salon_ better made up than many another:
+
+An old nobleman, somewhat resembling Balzac's M. de Mortsauf, an officer
+previous to 1830, very brave, and capable of reasoning exactly, when he
+was hard pushed. He had a great long cartilaginous neck, that turned all
+together and with difficulty, like a rusty machine; his feet shook about
+in his square-toed shoes; the skirts of his frock-coat hung like
+flags about his legs. His body and his clothes were stiff, awkward,
+old-fashioned and scant, like his opinions; a dotard, moreover,
+fastidious, peevish, busy all day long in sifting over nothings and
+complaining about trifles; he pestered his servant a whole hour about a
+grain of dust overlooked on the skirt of his coat, explaining the method
+of removing dust, the danger of leaving dust, the defects of a negligent
+spirit, the merits of a diligent spirit, with so much monotony and
+tenacity and so slowly, that at last one stopped up one's ears or
+went to sleep. He took snuff, rested his chin on his cane, and looked
+straight ahead with the torpid, dull expression of a mummy. Rustic life,
+the want of conversation and action, the fixedness {422}of mechanical
+habits, had extinguished him.
+
+[Illustration: 448]
+
+Beside him sat an English girl and her mother. The young woman had
+not succeeded in extinguishing herself, she was frozen at her birth;
+however, she was motionless as he. She carried a jeweller's shop on her
+arms, bracelets, chains, of every form and all metals, which hung and
+jingled like little bells. The mother was one of those hooked stalks of
+asparagus, knobby, stuck into a swelling gown, such as can flourish
+and come to seed only amidst the fogs of London. They took tea and only
+talked with each other.
+
+In the third place one remarked a very noble young man, dressed to
+perfection, curled every day, with soft hands, forever washed, brushed,
+adorned and beautified, and handsome as a doll. His was a formal and
+serious self-conceit. His least actions were of an admirable correctness
+and {423}gravity. He weighed every word when he asked for soup. He put
+on his gloves with the air of a Roman emperor. He never laughed; in his
+calm gestures you recognized a man penetrated with self-respect, who
+raises conventionalities into principles. His complexion, his hands,
+his beard, and his mind, had been so scoured, rubbed, and perfumed by
+etiquette, that they seemed artificial.
+
+[Illustration: 449]
+
+Ordinarily he gave the cues to a Moldavian lady, who kept the
+conversation alive. This lady had travelled all over Europe, and related
+her travels in such a piercing and metallic voice, that you wondered if
+she had not a clarion somewhere in her body. She held forth unassisted,
+sometimes for a quarter of an hour together, principally about rice
+and the degree of civilization among the Turks, on the barbarism of the
+Russian generals, and on the baths of Constantinople. Her well-filled
+memory only overflowed in tirades: it was almost as amusing as a
+gazetteer.
+
+Near her was a pale, slender, meagre Spaniard, with a face like a
+knife-blade. We knew, by some {424}words he let fall, that he was rich
+and a republican. He spent his life with a newspaper in his hand,--he
+read twelve or fifteen of them in a day, with little dry, jerking
+movements, and nervous contractions that passed over his face like
+a shiver. He sat habitually in a corner, and you saw gleaming in his
+countenance feeble desires of proclamations and professions of faith.
+In the very same moment his glance died away like a too sudden fire that
+blazes up and falls again. He only spoke in monosyllables, and to ask
+for tea. His wife knew no French, and sat all the evening motionless in
+her arm-chair.
+
+[Illustration: 450]
+
+Must we speak of an old lady from Saumur, a frequenter of the baths,
+watchful of the heat, the cold, the currents of air, the seasoning,
+determined not to enrich her heirs any sooner than it was necessary,
+who trotted about all day, and played with her dog in the evening? Of an
+abbe and his pupil, who dined apart, to escape the contagion of worldly
+conversation? etc. The truth is that there is nothing to paint, and that
+in the next restaurant you will see the same people.
+
+Now, in good faith, what can be the conversation in such a society? As
+the answer is important, I {425}beg the reader to run over the subjoined
+classification of interesting conversations; he will judge for himself
+as to the likelihood of meeting at a watering-place with anything
+similar.
+
+First sort: Circumlocutions, oratorical argumentation, exordiums full of
+insinuation, smiles and bows, which may be translated by the following
+phrase: "Monsieur, help me to make a thousand francs." Second sort:
+Periphrases, metaphysical disquisitions, the voice of the soul, gestures
+and genuflexions, ending in this phrase: "Madame, allow me to be your
+very humble servant."
+
+Third sort: Two persons who have need of each other are together;
+abstract of their conversation: "You are a great man."
+
+"And so are you." Fourth sort: You are seated at the fireside with an
+old friend; you stir up the embers and talk of--no matter what, for
+instance: "Would you like some tea? My cigar is out." Or, what is
+better, you say nothing at all, and listen to the singing of the
+tea-kettle; all actions, which mean: "You are a good fellow, and would
+do me a service in case of need."
+
+Fifth sort: New general ideas and freely expressed; sort lost sight
+of these hundred years. It was known in the salons of the eighteenth
+century; genus to-day fossil.
+
+Sixth, and last sort: Discharges of wit, fireworks {426}of brilliant
+speeches, images struck out, colors displayed, profusion of animation,
+originality and gayety. A sort infinitely rare and diminished every
+day, by the fear of compromising one's self, by the important air, by
+the affectation of morality.
+
+These six sorts wanting--and they are evidently wanting--what remains?
+Conversation such as Henri Monnier paints, and M. Prudhomme makes. Only
+the manners here are better; for instance, we know that we ought to help
+ourselves last to soup, and first to salad; we are provided with certain
+proper phrases which we exchange for other proper phrases; we answer to
+an anticipated motion by an anticipated motion, after the fashion of the
+Chinese; we come to yawn inwardly and smile outwardly, in company and in
+state. This comedy of affectations and the commerce of _ennui_ form the
+conversation at the springs and elsewhere.
+
+Accordingly many people go to take the air in the streets.
+
+
+II.
+
+The street is full of downcast faces; lawyers, bankers, people tired
+with office work, or bored with having too much fortune and too little
+trouble. In the evening, they go to Frascati or watch the loungers who
+elbow each other among the shops {427}on the course. During the day
+they drink and bathe a little, ride and smoke a good deal. The bloated
+patients, stretched on arm-chairs, digest their food; the lean study the
+newspapers; the young men talk with the ladies about the weather; the
+ladies are busy in rounding their petticoats aright: the old, who are
+critics and philosophers, take snuff, or look at the mountains with
+glasses, to ascertain if the engravings are exact. It is not worth the
+trouble of having so much money, merely to have so little pleasure.
+
+This _ennui_ proves that life resembles the opera; to be happy there,
+you must have money for your ticket, but, also, the sentiment of music.
+If the money is wanting, you remain outside in the rain among the
+boot-blacks; if you have no taste for music, you sleep sullenly in your
+superb box. I conclude that we must try to earn the four francs for the
+parterre, but above all to make ourselves acquainted with music.
+
+The promenades are too neat and recall the Bois de Boulogne; here and
+there a tired broom leans against a tree its slanting silhouette. From
+the depths of a thicket the _sergents de ville_ cast on you their eagle
+glance, and the dung decorates the alleys with its poetic heaps.
+
+An invalid always brings with him one or more {428}companions. Where is
+the being so disinherited by heaven as not to have a relation or friend
+who is bored? And where is the friend or relation so thankless as to
+refuse a service which is a pleasure party? The invalid drinks and
+bathes; the friend wears gaiters or rides, hence the species of
+tourists.
+
+[Illustration: 454]
+
+This species comprises several varieties, which are distinguished by the
+song, the plumage, and the gait. These are the principal:
+
+FIRST.
+
+The first has long legs, lean body, head bent {429}forward, large and
+powerful feet, vigorous hands, excellent at grasping and holding on. It
+is provided with canes, ferruled sticks, umbrellas, cloaks, india-rubber
+top-coats. It despises dress, shows itself but little in society, knows
+thoroughly guides and hotels. It strides over the ground in an admirable
+manner, rides with saddle, without saddle, in every way and all possible
+beasts. It walks for the sake of walking, and to have the right of
+repeating several fine, ready-made phrases.
+
+I found, and picked up, at Eaux-Chaudes, the journal of one of these
+walking tourists. It is entitled: _My Impressions_.
+
+"15th July.--Ascent of Vignemale. Set out at midnight, came back at ten
+o'clock in the evening. Appetite on the summit; excellent dinner, pate,
+fowls, trout, claret, kirsch. My horse stumbled eleven times. Feet
+galled. Rondo, good guide. Total: sixty-seven francs.
+
+"20th July.--Ascent of the Pic du Midi de Bigorre. Fifteen hours. Sanio,
+fair guide; knows neither songs nor stories. Good sleep for an hour
+at the top. Two bottles broken, which rather spoiled the provisions.
+Thirty-eight francs.
+
+"21st July.--Excursion to the Valley of Heas. Too many stones in the
+road. Twenty-one miles. Must exercise every day. To-morrow will
+walk twenty-four. {430}"24th July.--Excursion to the Valley of Aspe.
+Twenty-seven miles.
+
+"1st August.--Lake of Oo. Good water, very cold; the bottles were well
+cooled.
+
+"2d August.--Valley of the Arboust. Met three caravans; two of donkeys,
+one of horses. Thirty miles. Throat raw. Corns on the feet.
+
+"3d August.--Ascent of the Maladetta. Three days. Sleep at the Rencluse
+de la Maladetta. My large double cloak with the fur collar keeps me
+from being frozen. In the morning I make the omelette myself. Punch with
+snow. Second night in the Vale of Malibierne. Passage of the Glacier. My
+right shoe gets torn. Arrival at the summit. View of three bottles
+left by the preceding tourists. For amusement, I read a number of the
+_Journal des Chasseurs_. On my return, I am entertained by the guides.
+Bagpipes in the evening at my door; great bouquet with a ribbon. Total:
+one hundred and sixty-eight francs.
+
+"15th August.--Leave the Pyrenees. Three hundred and ninety-one leagues
+in a month, on foot as well as on horse and in carriage. Eleven ascents,
+eighteen excursions. I have used up two ferruled sticks, a top-coat,
+three pairs of trousers, five pairs of shoes. Good year.
+
+"P.S.--Sublime country. My spirit bows beneath these great emotions."
+{431}
+
+[Illustration: 457]
+
+{432}
+
+{433}SECOND.
+
+The second variety comprises thoughtful methodical people, generally
+wearing spectacles, endowed with a passionate confidence in the printed
+letter. You know them by the guide-book, which they always carry in
+their hand. This book is to them the law and the prophets. They eat
+trout at the place named in the book, make all the stops advised by the
+book, dispute with the innkeeper when he asks more than is marked in the
+book. You see them at the remarkable points with their eyes fixed on the
+book, filling themselves with the description, and informing themselves
+exactly of the sort of emotion which it is proper to feel. On the eve
+of an excursion, they study the book and learn in advance the order and
+connection of the sensations they ought to experience: first, surprise;
+a little further on a tender impression; three miles beyond, chilled
+with horror; finally a calm sensibility. They do and feel nothing but
+with documents in hand and on good authority. On reaching a hotel, their
+first care is to ask their neighbor at the table if there is any place
+of reunion; at what hour people meet there; how the different hours of
+the day are filled up; what walk is taken in the afternoon; what other
+in the evening. The next {434}day they follow all these directions
+conscientiously. They are clad in watering-place fashion; they change
+their dress as many times as the custom of the places deems proper; they
+make all the excursions they ought to make at the necessary hour, in the
+proper equipage. Have they any taste? It is impossible to say; the book
+and public opinion have thought and decided for them. They have the
+consolation of thinking that they have walked in the broad road and are
+imitators of the human kind. These are the _docile tourists._
+
+THIRD.
+
+[Illustration: 460]
+
+The third variety walks in troops and makes its excursions by families.
+You see from afar a great {435}peaceable cavalcade; father, mother, two
+daughters, two tall cousins, one or two friends and sometimes donkeys
+for the little boys.
+
+[Illustration: 461]
+
+They beat the donkeys, which are restive; they advise the fiery youths
+to be prudent; a glance retains the young ladies about the green veil of
+the mother. The distinctive traits of this variety are the green veil,
+the bourgeois spirit, the love of siestas and meals on the grass; an
+unfailing sign is the taste for little social games. This variety is
+rare at Eaux-Bonnes, more common at Bagneres de Bigorre and at Bagneres
+de Luchon. It is remarkable for its prudence, its culinary instincts,
+its economical habits. The individuals making the excursion stop at a
+spot selected the day before; they unload pates and bottles.
+
+If they have brought nothing, they go and knock at the nearest hut for
+milk; they are astonished at having to pay three sous a glass for it:
+they find that it strongly resembles goat's milk, and they say to
+each other, after they have drunken, that the wooden spoon was
+not over-clean. They {436}look curiously at the dark stable, half
+underground, where the cows ruminate on beds of heather; after which,
+the great fat men seat themselves or lie down. The artist of the family
+draws out his album and copies a bridge, a mill, and other album views.
+The young girls run and laugh, and let themselves drop out of breath
+upon the grass; the young men run after them. This variety, indigenous
+in the great cities, in Paris above all, wishes to revive among the
+Pyrenees the pleasure parties of Meudon or Montmorency.
+
+FOURTH.
+
+[Illustration: 462]
+
+Fourth kind: dining tourists. At Louvie, a family from Carcassonne,
+father, mother, son, daughter and servant, alighted from the interior.
+For the first time in their life they were undertaking a {437}pleasure
+trip. The father was one of those florid bourgeois, pot-bellied,
+important, dogmatic, well-clad in fine cloth, carefully preserved, who
+educate their cooks, arrange their house _en bonbonniere_, and establish
+themselves in their comfort, like an oyster in its shell. They entered
+stupefied into a dark dining-room, where the half-empty bottles strayed
+among the cooling dishes. The cloth was soiled, the napkins of a
+doubtful white. The father, indignant, asked for a cup of tea, and began
+walking up and down with a tragic air. The rest looked at each other
+mournfully and sat down. The dishes came helter-skelter, all of them
+failures. Our Carcassonne friends helped themselves, turned the meat
+over on their plates, looked at it, and did not eat. They ordered tea a
+second time; the tea did not appear; the travellers were called for the
+coach, and the landlord demanded twelve francs. Without saying a word,
+with a gesture of concentrated horror, the head of the family paid.
+Then, approaching his wife, he said to her: "It was your wish, madam!" A
+quarter of an hour later the storm burst forth: he poured his complaint
+into the bosom of the conductor. He declared that the company would fail
+if it changed horses at such a poisoner's; he trusted that disease would
+soon carry off such dirty people. They told him that everybody in the
+country was so, and that they lived {438}happily for eighty years.
+He raised his eyes to heaven, repressed his grief, and directed his
+thoughts toward Carcassonne.
+
+FIFTH.
+
+Fifth variety; rare: learned tourists.
+
+[Illustration: 464]
+
+One day, at the foot of a damp rock, I saw a little lean man coming
+toward me, with a nose like an eagle's beak; a hatchet face, green eyes,
+grizzling locks, nervous, jerky movements, and something quaint and
+earnest in his countenance. He had on huge gaiters, an old black,
+rain-beaten cap, trousers spattered to the knee with mud, a botanical
+case full of dents on his back, and in his {439}hand a small spade.
+Unfortunately I was looking at a plant with long, straight, green stalk,
+and white, delicate corolla, which grew near some hidden springs. He
+took me for a raw fellow-botanist. "Ah, here you are, gathering plants!
+What, by the stalk, clumsy? What will it do in your herbarium without
+roots? Where is your case? your weeder?"
+
+"But, sir--"
+
+"Common plant, frequent in the environs of Paris, _Parnassia palustris_:
+stem simple, erect, a foot in height, glabrous, radical leaves petiolate
+(sheathing caulis, sessile), cordiform, entirely glabrous; simple
+flower, white, terminal, the calix with lanceolate leaves, petals
+rounded, marked with hollow lines, nectaries ciliate and furnished
+with yellow globules at the extremity of the cilia resembling pistils;
+helleboraceous. Those nectaries are curious; good study, plant well
+chosen. Courage! you'll get on."
+
+"But I am no botanist!"
+
+"Very good, you are modest. However, since you are in the Pyrenees,
+you must study the flora of the country; you will not find another such
+opportunity. There are rare-plants here which you should absolutely
+carry away. I gathered near Oleth, the Menziesra Daboeci, an inestimable
+godsend. I will show you at the house the _Ramondia_ {440}_Pyrenaica,_
+solanaceous with the aspect of the primrose. I scaled Mont Perdu to find
+the _Ranunculus parnassifolius_ mentioned by Ramond, and which grows at
+a height of 2,700 metres. Hah! what is that! the _Aquilcgia Pyrenaica!_"
+
+And my little man started off like an isard, clambered up a slope,
+carefully dug the soil about the flower, took it up, without cutting
+a single root, and returned with sparkling eyes, triumphant air, and
+holding it aloft like a banner.
+
+"Plant peculiar to the Pyrenees. I have long wanted it; the specimen is
+excellent. Come, my young friend, a slight examination: you don't know
+the species, but you recognize the family?"
+
+"Alas! I don't know a word of botany."
+
+He looked at me stupefied. "And why do you gather plants?"
+
+"To see them, because they are pretty."
+
+He put his flower into his case, adjusted his cap, and went off without
+adding another word.
+
+SIXTH.
+
+Sixth variety; very numerous: _sedentary tourists._ They gaze on the
+mountains from their windows; their excursions consist in going from
+their room to the English garden, from the English garden to the
+promenade. They take a siesta upon the heath, {441}and read the journal
+stretched on a chair; after which they have seen the Pyrenees.
+
+SEVENTH.
+
+There was a grand ball yesterday. Paul presented there a young creole
+from Venezuela in America; the young man has as yet seen nothing; he has
+just left ship at Bordeaux, whence he comes here; a very fine fellow,
+however, of a fine, olive complexion; great hunter, and better fitted
+for frequenting mountains than drawing-rooms. He comes to France to form
+himself, as they say; Paul pretends that it is to be deformed.
+
+We have taken our place in a corner; and the young man has asked Paul to
+define to him a ball.
+
+"A great funereal and penitential ceremony."
+
+"Pshaw!"
+
+"No doubt of it, and the custom goes back a long way."
+
+"Indeed?"
+
+"Back to Henry III. who instituted assemblies of flagellants. The men of
+the court bared their backs, and met together to lash one another over
+the shoulders. Nowadays there is no longer any whipping, but the sadness
+is the same. All the men who are here come to expiate great sins or
+have just lost their relations." {442}"That is the reason why they are
+dressed in black."
+
+"Precisely."
+
+"But the ladies are in magnificent dresses."
+
+"They mortify themselves only the better for that. Each one has hung
+around the loins a sort of haircloth, that horrible load of petticoats
+which hurts them and finally makes them ill. This is after the example
+of the saints, the better to work out salvation."
+
+"But all the men are smiling."
+
+"That is the finest thing about it; cramped as they are, shut up in
+their winding-sheet of black cloth. They impose restraint on themselves,
+and give proof of virtue. Go forward six steps, you will see."
+
+The young man advanced; not yet used to the movements of a drawing-room,
+he stepped on the feet of a dancer and smashed the hat of a melancholy
+gentleman. He returned, covered with confusion, to hide himself beside
+us.
+
+"What did your two poor devils say to you?"
+
+"I don't at all understand. The first, after an involuntary wry face,
+looked at me amiably. The other put his hat under his other arm and
+bowed."
+
+"Humility, resignation, a wish to suffer in order to enhance their
+merits. Under Henry III. they thanked him who had strapped them the
+best. I {443}will make a musician talk; listen. Monsieur Steuben, what
+quadrille are you playing there?"
+
+"_L'Enfer_, a fantastic quadrille. It is the legend of a young girl
+carried off alive in the clutches of the devil."
+
+"It is, indeed?"
+
+"Very expressive. The finale expresses her cries of grief and the
+howling of the demons. The young girl makes the air, the demons the
+bass.
+
+"And you play after that?"
+
+"Some contra-dances on _di tanti palpiti._"
+
+"Won't you please give me the idea of that air."
+
+"It is at the return of Tancred. The point is to paint the most touching
+sadness."
+
+"Excellent choice. And no mazurkas, no waltzes?"
+
+"Presently; here is a great book of Chopin, he is our favorite. What a
+master! What fever! what cries, sorrowful, uncertain, broken! All these
+mazurkas make one want to weep.
+
+"That is why they are danced; you see, my dear child, only afflicted
+people could select such music. By the way, how do they dance in your
+country?"
+
+"With us? we jump and stir about, we laugh out, shout, perhaps."
+
+"What comical folks! and why?"
+
+"Because they are happy and want to stir their limbs."{444}
+
+"Here, four steps forward, as many back, a turn cramped by the conflict
+of neighboring dresses, two or three geometric inclinations. The
+cotton-spinners in the prison at Poissy make precisely the same
+motions."
+
+"But these people talk."
+
+"Go forward and listen; there is nothing inconsiderate about it, I
+assure you."
+
+He returns after a minute.
+
+"What did the man say?"
+
+"The gentleman came up briskly, smiled delicately, and, with a gesture
+as of a happy discoverer, he remarked that it was warm."
+
+[Illustration: 472]
+
+"And the lady?"
+
+"The lady's eyes flashed. With an enchanting smile of approval, she
+answered that it was indeed."
+
+"Judge what constraint they must have imposed on themselves. The
+gentleman is thirty years old; for twelve years he has known his phrase;
+the lady is twenty-two, she has known hers for seven years. Each has
+made and heard the question and answer three or four thousand times, and
+yet they appear to be interested, surprised. What empire over self! What
+force {445}of nature! You see clearly that these French who are called
+light are stoics on occasion."
+
+"My eyes smart, my feet are swollen, I have been swallowing dust; it
+is one o'clock in the morning, the air smells bad, I should like to go.
+Will they remain much longer?"
+
+"Until five o'clock in the morning."
+
+EIGHTH.
+
+Two days after there was a concert. The creole said in coming out that
+he was very tired, and had understood nothing of all that buzzing, and
+begged Paul to explain to him what pleasure people found in such noise.
+
+"For," said he, "they have enjoyed it, since they paid six francs for
+admission, and applauded vehemently."
+
+"Music awakes all sorts of agreeable reveries."
+
+"Let us see."
+
+"Such an air suggests scenes of love; such another makes you imagine
+great landscapes, tragic events."
+
+"And if you don't have these reveries, the music bores you?"
+
+"Certainly; unless you are professor of harmony." {446}"But the audience
+were not professors of harmony?"
+
+"No indeed."
+
+"So that they have all had all those reveries you talk about, otherwise
+they would be bored; and, if they were bored, they would neither have
+paid nor applauded."
+
+[Illustration: 472]
+
+"Well argued."
+
+"Explain then to me the reveries they have had; for example, that
+serenade mentioned in the programme, the serenade from Don Pasquale."
+
+"It paints a happy love, full of pleasure and unconcern. You see a
+handsome youth with laughing eyes and blooming cheek, in a garden in
+Italy; under a tranquil moon, by the whispering of the breeze, he
+awaits his mistress, thinks of her smile, {447}and little by little, in
+measured notes, joy and tenderness spring harmoniously from his heart."
+
+"What, they imagined all that! What happy country-folk are your people!
+What fulness of emotion and thought! What discreet countenances! I
+should never have suspected, to see them, that they were having so sweet
+a dream."
+
+"The second piece was an andante of Beethoven."
+
+"What about Beethoven?"
+
+[Illustration: 473]
+
+"A poor, great man, deaf, loving, misunderstood, and a philosopher,
+whose music is full of gigantic or sorrowful dreams."
+
+"What dreams?"
+
+"'Eternity is a great eyry, whence all the centuries, like young
+eaglets, have flown in turn to cross {448}the heavens and disappear.
+Ours is in its turn come to the brink of the nest; but they have clipped
+its wings, and it awaits death while gazing upon space, into which it
+cannot take flight.'"
+
+"What is that you are reciting to me?"
+
+"A sentence of de Musset, which translates your andante."
+
+"What! In three minutes they passed from the first idea to this. What
+men! What flexibility of spirit! I should never have believed in such
+readiness. Without tripping, as a matter of course, they entered this
+reverie on leaving a serenade? What hearts! What artists! You make me
+thoroughly ashamed of myself: I shall never again dare to say a word to
+them."
+
+"The third piece, a duo of Mozart's, expresses quite German sentiments,
+an artless candor, melancholy, contemplative tenderness, the
+half-defined smile, the timidity of love."
+
+"So that their imagination, which was still in a perfect state
+of distraction, is in a moment so transformed as to represent the
+confidence, the innocence, the touching agitation of a young girl?"
+
+"Certainly."
+
+"And there are seven or eight pieces in a concert?"
+
+"At least. Moreover, these pieces being taken from three or four
+countries and two or three {449}centuries, the audience must suddenly
+assume the sentiments, opposite as they are and varied, of all these
+centuries and of all these countries."
+
+"And they were crowded on benches, under a glaring light."
+
+"And in the pauses, the men talked railroads, the ladies dresses."
+
+"I am getting confused. I, when I dream, want to be alone, at my ease,
+or at most with a friend. If music touches me, it is in a little dark
+room, when some one plays airs of one sort, that suit my state of
+mind. It is not necessary that any one should talk to me about positive
+things. Dreams do not come to me at will; they fly away in spite of me.
+I see clearly that I am on another continent, with an entirely different
+race. One learns in travelling."
+
+A suspicion seized him: "Perhaps they had come there for penance? When
+they came out, I saw them yawning, and dejected in countenance."
+
+"Don't believe anything of it. It is because they restrain themselves.
+Otherwise, they would burst into tears and throw themselves on your
+neck."
+
+NINTH.
+
+In the evening our creole, who had been thinking, said to Paul:
+
+{450}"Since you are such musicians in France, your well-educated girls
+must all learn music?"
+
+"Three hours of scales every day, for thirteen years, from seven to
+twenty; total, fourteen thousand hours."
+
+"They profit by it?"
+
+"One out of eight; of the other seven, three become good hand-organs,
+four poor hand-or-gans."
+
+"I suppose for a compensation they are made to read?"
+
+"Le Ragois, La Harpe, and other dictionaries, all sorts of little
+treatises of florid piety."
+
+"What then is your education?"
+
+"A pretty case embalmed with incense, perfumed, securely padlocked,
+where the mind sleeps while the finders turn a bird-organ."
+
+"Well, that is encouraging for the husband. And what does _he_ do?"
+
+"He receives the key of the case, opens it; a little devil in a white
+dress jumps at his nose, eager to dance and get out."
+
+"Very well, the husband serves as guide. Has he other cares?"
+
+"Perhaps so."
+
+"For instance?"
+
+"An apartment, third floor, costs two thousand francs, the dress of the
+wife fifteen hundred, the {451}education of a child, a thousand; the
+husband earns six thousand."
+
+"I understand; while dancing, they think of all sorts of melancholy
+things."
+
+"Of economizing, keeping up appearances, flattering, calculating."
+
+"What then is marriage with you?"
+
+"An act of society between a minister of foreign relations and a
+minister of the interior."
+
+"And for preparation they have learned--"
+
+"To roll off scales, to shine in trills, to shift their wrists.
+Prestidigitation instructs in housekeeping."
+
+"Decidedly, you Europeans have a fine logic. And the eighth girl, the
+one who does not become a hand-organ?"
+
+"The piano forms her too. It answers for everything, everywhere.
+Beneficent machine!"
+
+"How is that?"
+
+"It exalts and refines. Mendelssohn surrounds them with ardent,
+delicate, morbid imaginings. Rossini fills their nerves with an
+expansive and voluptuous joy. The sharp, tormented desires, the broken,
+rebel cries of modern passions, rise from every strain of Meyerbeer.
+Mozart awakens in them a swarm of affections and dim longings. They live
+in a cloud of emotions and sensations."
+
+"The other arts would do as much."
+
+"Not a bit of it. Literature is a living psychology, {452}painting a
+living physiology. Music alone invents all, copies nothing, is a pure
+dream, gives free rein to dreams."
+
+"And probably they strike out into it."
+
+"With all the ardor of their ignorance, their sex, imagination,
+idleness, and their twenty years."
+
+"Well, of evenings they have the poetry of the family and the world for
+pasture."
+
+"In the evening, a night-capped gentleman, their husband, talks to
+them of his reports and his practice. The children in their cradle are
+spoiled or grumble. The cook brings her account. They bow to fifteen
+men in their _salon_, and compliment fifteen ladies on their dresses. In
+addition, once in awhile, the penitential and funereal ceremony you saw
+three days ago."
+
+"But then the piano seems chosen expressly."
+
+"To resign them at the outset to the meanness of a commonplace
+condition, the nothingness of the feminine condition, the wretchedness
+of the human condition. It is plain that all will be content, that none
+will become languishing or sharp. Dear and beneficent instrument! Salute
+it with respect, when you enter a room. It is the source of domestic
+concord, of feminine patience and conjugal bliss."
+
+"Saint Jacques, I swear that my wife shall not know music!"{453}
+
+"You are making bachelor's vows, my dear friend. Nowadays every girl who
+wears gloves has made her fingers run over that machine; otherwise she
+would think herself no better than a washerwoman."
+
+"I will marry my washerwoman."
+
+"The day after your wedding she will have a piano brought in."
+
+*****
+
+Paul has sprained his foot and spent two days in his room, occupied
+in watching a poultry yard. He improved the occasion by writing the
+following little treatise for the use of the young creole, a sort
+of viaticum, with which he will nourish himself for the better
+understanding of the world. I thought the treatise melancholy and
+skeptical. Paul replies, that one should be so at first, in order not to
+be afterward, and that it is well to be a little skeptical if you wish
+not to be too skeptical. {454}
+
+[Illustration: 480]
+
+
+LIFE AND PHILOSOPHICAL OPINIONS OF A CAT.
+
+
+I.
+
+I was born in a cask, at the back of a hay-loft: the light fell on
+my closed eyelids, so that the first eight days, everything appeared
+rose-colored to me.
+
+The eighth, it was still better; I looked, and saw a great fall of light
+upon the dark shade; the dust and insects danced in it. The hay was
+warm and fragrant; the spiders hung in sleep from the tiles; the gnats
+hummed; everything seemed happy; that emboldened me; I wanted to go
+and touch the white patch where those little diamonds were whirling and
+which rejoined the roof by a column of gold. I rolled over like a ball;
+my eyes were burned, my sides bruised; I was choking, and I coughed till
+nightfall. {455}
+
+
+II.
+
+When my paws had become firm, I went out and soon made friends with
+a goose, an estimable creature, for she had a warm belly; I cowered
+underneath, and during this time her philosophic conversation was
+forming me. She used to say that the poultry yard was a republic of
+allies; that the most industrious, man, had been chosen for chief, and
+that the dogs, although turbulent, were our guardians. I shed tears of
+emotion under my kind friend's belly.
+
+One morning the cook appeared looking as if butter would not melt in her
+mouth, and showing a handful of barley. The goose stretched forth her
+neck, which the cook grasped, drawing a big knife. My uncle, an active
+philosopher, ran up and began to exhort the goose, which was uttering
+indecorous cries: "Dear sister," said he, "the farmer, when he shall
+have eaten your flesh, will have a clearer intelligence, and will watch
+better over your welfare; and the dogs, nourished with your bones,
+will be the more capable of defending you." Thereupon the goose became
+silent, for her head was cut off, and a sort of red pipe stuck out
+beyond the bleeding neck. My uncle ran for the head and carried it
+nimbly away; as for me, a little frightened, I {456}drew near to the
+pool of blood, and, without thinking, I dipped my tongue into it; the
+blood was very good, and I went to the kitchen to see if I could not
+have some more of it.
+
+III.
+
+My uncle, a very old and experienced animal, taught me universal
+history.
+
+[Illustration: 482]
+
+At the beginning of things, when he was born, the master being dead,
+the children at the funeral and the servants at a dance, all the animals
+found themselves free. It was a frightful hubbub; a turkey, whose
+feathers were too fine, was stripped by his comrades. In the evening, a
+ferret, which had slipped in, sucked the jugular vein of three-quarters
+{457}of the combatants, who, naturally, made no further outcry. The
+spectacle in the farmyard was fine; here and there was a dog swallowing
+a duck; the horses in pure sportiveness were breaking the backs of the
+dogs; my uncle himself crunched a half-dozen little chickens. That was
+the golden age, said he.
+
+In the evening, when the people came home, the whipping began. Uncle
+received a lash which took off a strip of his fur. The dogs, well
+flogged and tied up, howled with repentance and licked the hands of
+their new master. The horses resumed their burden with administrative
+zeal. The fowls, protected, clucked their benedictions; only, six months
+after, when the dealer passed, they killed fifty at once. The geese,
+among whose number was my late kind friend, flapped their wings, saying
+that everything was in good order, and praising the farmer, the public
+benefactor.
+
+
+IV.
+
+My uncle, although surly, acknowledges that things are better than they
+used to be. He says that at first our race was savage, and that there
+are still in the woods cats who are like our first ancestors, which, at
+long intervals, catch a mole or dormouse, but oftener the contents of a
+shot-gun. {458}Others, lean, short-haired, run over the roofs and think
+that mice are very rare. As for us, brought up on the summit of earthly
+felicity, we whisk a flattering tail in the kitchen, we utter tender
+little mewings, we lick the empty plates, and at the utmost we put up
+with a dozen cuffs in the course of the day.
+
+
+V.
+
+[Illustration: 484]
+
+{459} Music is a heavenly art, and it is certain that our race has the
+privilege of it; it springs from the depths of our entrails; men know
+this so well that they borrow them from us when they want to imitate us
+with their violins.
+
+Two things inspire in us these heavenly songs: the view of the stars
+and love. Men, clumsy copyists, cram themselves ridiculously into a low
+hall, and skip about thinking to equal us. It is on the summit of the
+roofs, in the splendor of the night, when all the skin shivers, that
+the divine melody can find vent. Out of jealousy they curse us and fling
+stones at us. Let them burst with rage. Never will their expressionless
+voice attain to those serious rumblings, those piercing notes, mad
+arabesques, inspired and unexpected fancies, which soften the soul of
+the most stubborn she, and give her over to us, all trembling, while up
+above the voluptuous stars twinkle and the moon grows pale with love.
+
+How happy is youth, and how hard it is to lose its holy illusions! And
+I too, I have loved and have haunted the roofs, modulating the while the
+roll of my bass. One of my cousins was touched thereby, and two months
+after brought into the world six pink and white kittens. I ran to them
+and wanted to eat them; I certainly had a right, since I was their
+father. Who would believe it! My cousin, my spouse, to whom I was
+willing to give her share {460}of the banquet, flew at my eyes. This
+brutality roused my indignation, and I strangled her on the spot; after
+which I swallowed the entire litter.
+
+But the hapless little rogues were good for nothing, not even to nourish
+their father: their flabby flesh weighed on my stomach for three days.
+Disgusted with the strong passions, I gave up music, and returned to the
+kitchen.
+
+
+VI.
+
+I have thought much on the ideal happiness, and I think I have made
+thereupon some notable discoveries.
+
+It evidently consists, in warm weather, in sleeping near the barnyard
+pool. A delicious odor arises from the fermenting dung; lustrous straws
+shine in the sunlight. The turkeys ogle lovingly, and let their crest of
+red flesh fall on their beak. The fowls scratch up the straw, and
+bury their broad bellies to take in the rising heat. The pool gleams,
+swarming with moving insects which make the bubbles rise to its surface.
+The harsh whiteness of the walls renders yet deeper the bluish recesses
+where the gnats hum. With eyes half closed you dream; and, as you have
+almost ceased to think, you no longer wish for anything. {461}In winter,
+happiness is in sitting at the fireside in the kitchen. The little
+tongues of flame lick the log and shoot amidst the sparks; the twigs
+snap and writhe, while the twisted smoke rises in the dark chimney to
+the very sky. Meanwhile the spit turns with a harmonious and pleasing
+ticktack. The fowl that is impaled reddens, turns brown, becomes
+splendid; the fat which moistens it softens its hues; a delightful odor
+irritates the olfactories; your tongue involuntarily caresses your lips;
+you take in the divine emanations of the fat; with eyes lifted to heaven
+in a serious transport, you wait till the cook takes off the creature
+and offers you the part that belongs to you.
+
+[Illustration: 487]
+
+He who eats is happy, he who digests is happier, he who sleeps while
+digesting is happier still. All the rest is only vanity and vexation of
+spirit. The {462}fortunate mortal is he who, warmly rolled into a ball
+with his belly full, feels his stomach in operation and his skin expand.
+A delightful tickling penetrates and softly stirs the fibres. The outer
+and the inner creature enjoy with their every nerve. Surely if the
+universe is a great and blessed God, as our sages say, the earth must be
+an immense belly busy through all eternity digesting the creatures, and
+warming its round skin in the sun.
+
+
+VII.
+
+My mind has been greatly enlarged by reflection. By a sure method,
+sound conjectures and sustained attention, I have penetrated some of the
+secrets of nature.
+
+The dog is an animal so deformed, of such an unruly character, that
+from the earliest times it has been considered to be a monster, born and
+moulded in despite of all laws. Indeed, when rest is the natural state,
+how explain an animal that is forever in motion and busy, and that
+without aim nor need, even when he is gorged and not afraid? When beauty
+universally consists in suppleness, grace and prudence, how allow
+an animal to be forever brutal, howling, mad, jumping at the nose of
+people, running after kicks and rebuffs? When the favorite {463}and
+masterpiece of creation is the cat, how understand an animal that hates
+it, runs at it, without having received a single scratch from it, and
+breaks its ribs without any desire to eat its flesh?
+
+These contradictions prove that dogs are condemned beings; without a
+doubt the souls of the guilty and punished pass into their bodies. They
+suffer there; that is why they worry one another, and fret unceasingly.
+They have lost their reason, so they spoil everything, incite to battle,
+and are chained three-quarters of the day. They hate the beautiful and
+the good, consequently they try to throttle us.
+
+[Illustration: 489]
+
+
+VIII.
+
+Little by little the mind frees itself from the {464}prejudices in which
+it was reared; light dawns; it thinks for itself; thus it is that I have
+attained to the true explanation of things.
+
+Our first ancestors (and the gutter cats have retained this belief) said
+that heaven is a very lofty granary, well covered, where the sun never
+hurts the eyes.
+
+[Illustration: 490]
+
+In this granary, my great-aunt used to say, there are troops of rats
+so fat that they can {465}hardly walk, and the more we eat of them, the
+more there are to eat.
+
+But it is evident that this is the opinion of poor devils, who, since
+they have never eaten anything but rat, cannot imagine a better diet.
+Besides, granaries are wood-color or gray, and the sky is blue, which
+finishes their confusion.
+
+In truth, they rest their opinion upon a sufficiently shrewd remark: "It
+is evident," they say, "that the sky is a granary of straw or flour,
+for there come out of it very often clouds light, as when the wheat is
+winnowed, or white, as when bread is sprinkled in the kneading-trough."
+
+But I reply to them that the clouds are not formed by the chaff of grain
+or the dust of flour; for when they fall, it is water that we receive.
+
+Others, more refined, have maintained that the Dutch oven was God,
+saying that it is the fount of every blessing, turns unceasingly, goes
+to the fire without being burned, and that the sight of it is enough to
+throw one into ecstasy.
+
+In my opinion they have erred here only because they saw it through
+the window, from a distance, in a poetic, colored, sparkling smoke,
+beautiful as the sun at evening. But I, who have sat near it during
+whole hours, I know that it has to be sponged, mended, wiped; and in
+acquiring knowledge, I have lost the innocent illusions of heart and
+stomach. {466}The mind must be opened to conceptions more vast, and
+reason by more certain methods. Nature is everywhere uniform with
+herself, and in small things offers the image of the great.
+
+[Illustration: 492]
+
+From what do all animals spring? from an egg; the earth then is a very
+great egg; I even add that it is a broken egg.
+
+You will convince yourself of this if you examine the form and the
+limits of this valley, which is the visible world. It is concave like
+an egg, and the sharp edges by which it rejoins the sky are jagged, are
+keen-edged and white like those of a broken shell.
+
+The white and the yolk, pressed into lumps, have {467}formed these
+blocks of stone, these houses and the whole solid earth. Some parts have
+remained soft and form the surface that men plough; the rest runs in
+water and makes the pools, the rivers; each spring-time there runs a
+little that is new.
+
+As to the sun, nobody can doubt its use; it is a great red firebrand
+that is moved back and forth above the egg to cook it gently; the
+egg has been broken on purpose, in order that it may be the better
+impregnated with the heat; the cook always does so. The world is a great
+beaten egg.
+
+Now that I have reached this stage of wisdom, I have nothing more to
+ask of nature, nor of men, nor of any one; except, perhaps, some little
+tidbits from the roaster. In future I have only to cradle myself to
+rest in my wisdom; for my perfection is sublime, and no thinking cat has
+penetrated into the secret of the world so far as I.
+
+[Illustration: 493]
+
+{468}
+
+
+[Illustration: 494]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV. THE ROAD TO BA GNERES-DE-LUCHON.
+
+
+I.
+
+Every man who has the use of his eyes and ears ought, in travelling, to
+climb up to the imperial. The highest places are the most beautiful;
+ask those who occupy them. You break your neck if you fall from them;
+consult the same people about this. But you enjoy yourself while you are
+there.
+
+In the first place, you see the landscape, which produces descriptions
+that you offer to the public. In the coupe, your only spectacle is the
+harness of the horses; in the interior, you see through a tiny window
+the trees trooping by like soldiers carrying arms; in the rotunda, you
+are in a cloud {469}of dust that dims the landscape and strangles the
+traveller.
+
+In the second place, at the top you will have comedy. In the lower
+places, the people preserve decorum and are silent. The peasants here
+perched aloft, who are your companions, the postilion and the conductor,
+make open-hearted confidences: they talk of their wives, their children,
+their property, trade, neighbors, and above all of themselves; so that
+at the end of an hour you imagine their housekeeping and their life as
+clearly as if you were at home with them. It is a novel of manners that
+you skim through on the road. Not one of them gives ideas so vivid and
+so truthful. You get to know the people only by living with them, and
+the people from three-quarters of the nation. These bits of conversation
+teach you the number of their ideas and the hue of their passions; now,
+on these ideas and passions depend all the great events. Besides their
+rude manners, their loud bursts of laughter, their frank respect for
+bodily strength, their acknowledged inclination for the pleasure of
+eating and drinking, offer a contrast to the humbug of our politeness
+and our affectation of refinement. The conductor told the postilion how
+the evening before they had eaten the half of a sheep among three of
+them. It was good, fat mutton; they served up no better at the Hotel of
+the Great Sun: {470}there were sirloins, cutlets, a neat leg of mutton.
+They had emptied six bottles. The other made him tell it over, and
+seemed to eat in imagination, by the reaction, by recoil, as it were.
+
+[Illustration: 496]
+
+After the banquet, he had made the horses gallop; he had passed by
+Ribettes. Ribettes had swallowed dust for a whole hour; Ribettes wanted
+to get ahead again, but wasn't able. Ribettes grew very angry. They
+had dared Ribettes. The story of Ribettes and the mutton was told eight
+times in an hour, and seemed the last time as delightful and as new as
+the first. They laughed like the blest.
+
+In the third place, that is the only spot where you can breathe. The
+other divisions are sweating-rooms whose partitions and black cushions
+hold and concentrate the heat. Now, there is no man, no matter how he
+may love colors and lines, who can enjoy a landscape shut up in a
+box without air. When the creature is cramped, the soul is cramped.
+{471}Admiration presupposes comfort, and when you are broiled by the sun
+you curse the sun.
+
+
+II.
+
+The coach starts very early in the morning and climbs a long ascent
+under the gray brightness of the dawn. The peasants come in troops; the
+women have five or six bottles of milk on the head, in a basket. Oxen,
+with lowered brows, drag carts as primitive and Gallic as at-Pau. The
+children, in brown _berets_, run in the dust, alongside their mothers.
+The village is coming to nourish the city.
+
+Escaladieu shows at the wayside the remains of an ancient abbey. The
+chapel is still standing and preserves fragments of gothic sculpture.
+A bridge is at the side, shaded by tall trees. The pretty river Arros
+runs, with _moire_ reflexes and guipures of silver, over a bed of dark
+pebbles. No one could choose a situation better than the monks: they
+were the artists of the time.
+
+Mauvoisin, an ancient stronghold of robber-knights, lifts its ruined
+tower above the valley. Froissart relates how they besieged these honest
+folk; of a truth, in those times, they were as good as their neighbors,
+and the Duke of Anjou, their enemy, had done more harm than they.
+{472}"A Gascon squire, an able man-at-arms, named Raymonet de l'Epee,
+was at that time Governor of Malvoisin. There were daily skirmishes at
+the barriers, where many gallant feats were done by those who wished to
+advance themselves....
+
+"The castle of Malvoisin held out about six weeks, there were daily
+skirmishes between the two armies at the barriers, and the place would
+have made a longer resistance, for the castle was so strong it could
+have held a long siege; but the well that supplied the castle with water
+being without the walls, they cut off the communication: the weather was
+very hot, and the cisterns within quite dry, for it had not rained one
+drop for six weeks, and the besiegers were at their ease, on the banks
+of this clear and fine river, which they made use of for themselves and
+horses.
+
+"The garrison of Malvoisin were alarmed at their situation, for they
+could not hold out longer. They had a sufficiency of wine, but not one
+drop of sweet water. They determined to open a treaty; and Raymonet de
+l'Epee requested a passport to wait on the duke, which, having easily
+obtained, he said: 'My lord, if you will act courteously to me and my
+companions, I will surrender the castle of Malvoisin.' 'What courtesy is
+it you ask?' replied the Duke of Anjou:{473}
+
+[Illustration: 499]
+
+{474}
+
+{475}"'Get about your business each of you to his own country, without
+entering any fort that holds out against us; for if you do so, and I
+get hold of you, I will deliver you up to Jocelin, who will shave you
+without a razor.' 'My lord,' answered Raymonet, 'if we thus depart we
+must carry away what belongs to us, and what we have gained by arms and
+with great risk.' The duke paused awhile, and then said, 'I consent that
+you take with you whatever you can carry before you in trunks and on
+sumpter horses, but not otherwise; and if you have any prisoners, they
+must be given up to us.' 'I agree,' said Raymonet. Such was the treaty,
+as you hear me relate it; and all who were in the castle departed, after
+surrendering it to the Duke of Anjou, and carrying all they could with
+them. They returned to their own country, or elsewhere, in search of
+adventures."
+
+These good folk who wished to keep the fruits of their labor, had spent
+their time "in fleecing the merchants" of Catalonia, as well as
+of France, "and in making war on and harrying them of Bagneres and
+Bigorre." Bagneres was then "a good, big, closed city." People fortified
+everywhere, because there was fighting everywhere. They went out
+only with a safe-conduct and an escort: instead of gendarmes they met
+plunderers; instead of umbrellas they carried off lances. A secure
+{476}house was a fine house; when a man had immured himself in a thick
+tower built like a well, he breathed freely, he felt at his ease. Those
+were the good old times, as every one knows.
+
+
+III.
+
+Encausse is very near here, at the turn of the road. Chapelle and
+Bachaumont came there to restore their stomachs, which needed and
+deserved it well, for they used them more than some do. They wrote their
+travels, and their style flows as easily as their life.
+
+[Illustration: 502]
+
+They go by short stages, drink, chat, feast among the friends they
+have everywhere, court the ladies, make game very pleasantly of the
+provincial folk. They drink the health of the {477}absent, enjoy the
+muscatel as much as possible, and trifle in prose and verse. They are
+the epicureans of their time, easy poets who are troubled about nothing,
+not even about glory; graze all that they touch, and write only for
+their own amusement.
+
+"Encausse," say they, "is far from all commerce, and a man can have no
+other diversion in it than that of watching the return of his health. A
+small stream that, a score of paces away from the village, winds among
+willows and the greenest fields imaginable, was our only consolation.
+We used to go every morning to take our water in this pretty spot, and
+after dinner to walk there. One day when we were on the brink, seated
+on the grass, there came suddenly from the midst of the reeds that were
+nearest a man who had apparently been listening to us; it was an old
+man, all white, pale and lean, whose beard and locks hung below his
+girdle, such (an one) as Melchisedec is painted; or rather the figure
+is that of a certain old Greek bishop, who, with many a salaam, tells
+everybody's fortune; for he wore a top-piece like a cauldron-lid, but of
+exceeding size, which answered him for a hat. And this hat, whose broad
+brim went drooping upon his shoulders, was made of branches of willow,
+and covered nearly all his body. His coat of greenish hue was woven of
+rushes, the whole {478}covered with great bits of a thick and bluish
+crystal.
+
+"At sight of this apparition, fear caused us to make the sign of the
+cross twice over, and go three paces backward. But curiosity prevailed
+over fear, and we resolved, although with some little palpitation of
+heart, to await the extraordinary old man, whose approach was thoroughly
+courteous, and who spoke to us very civilly as follows:
+
+"Gentlemen, I am not surprised that with my unexpected appearance you
+should be a little startled in mind, but when you shall have learned in
+what rank the fates have set my birth to you unknown, and the motive of
+my coming, you will calm your minds.
+
+{479}"I am the god of this stream, who, with an ever inexhaustible urn,
+tilted at the foot of that hill, take the task in this meadow of pouring
+unceasingly the water, which makes it so green and flowery. For eight
+days now, morning and evening, you come regularly to see me without
+thinking to pay me a visit. It is not that I do not deserve that you
+should pay me this respect; for, in short, I have this advantage, that a
+channel so pure and clear is the place of my appanage. In Gascony such a
+portion is very neat for a cadet."
+
+{480}The two travellers were talking of the tides of the Garonne, and of
+the reasons for them given by Gassendi and Descartes. This very obliging
+god relates to them how Neptune thereby punishes an ancient rebellion
+of the rivers. "Then the honest river-god takes himself off, and when he
+has gone a score of paces the good soul is melted entirely into water."
+
+Nowadays this mythology seems unmeaning, and the thought flat. Look at
+the environs, the surroundings save it. Carelessness, intoxication,
+are on one side. It is born between two glasses of good wine thoroughly
+relished, in the midst of an unpremeditated letter. Are people so very
+nice at table? It is a refrain they are humming; flat or not, is of no
+consequence. The main thing is good humor and the inclination to laugh.
+I picture to myself the honest fellows, well-dressed, portly, their eyes
+still shining from the long dinner of yesterday, with rubies on their
+cheeks, perfectly ready to sit down to dine at the first inn and to
+bedevil the maid. La Fontaine did so, especially when he travelled. They
+made stops, forgot themselves, the broad jokes flew.{481}
+
+[Illustration: 508]
+
+{482}
+
+{483} They didn't cross France as nowadays, after the fashion of
+a cannon-ball or an attorney; they allowed five days for going to
+Poitiers, and in the evening, on going to bed, they fed the body. It was
+the last age of the good corporeal life, that heavy _bourgoisie_
+which had its flower and its portrait in Flemish art. It was already
+disappearing; aristocratic propriety and lordly salutes were taking
+possession of literature; Boileau gave us serious verse, thoroughly
+useful and solid, like pairs of tongs. Nowadays when the middle-class
+man is a philosopher, ambitious, a man of business, it is far worse. Let
+us not speak ill of those who are happy; happiness is a sort of poetry;
+it is in vain that we boast ourselves, that poetry we have not.
+
+
+IV.
+
+The road is bordered with vines, each of which carries up its tree, elm
+or ash, the crown of a fresh verdure, and lets its leaves and tendrils
+fall again in plumes. The valley is a garden long and narrow, between
+two chains of mountains. On the lower slopes are beautiful meadows where
+the living waters run in orderly fashion in trenches, nimble, prattling
+irrigators; the villages are seated {484}alone the little river;
+vine-stocks climb alone the dusty wall. The mallows, straight as tapers,
+lift above the hedges their round flowers, brilliant as roses of rubies.
+Orchards of apples pass continually on both sides of the coach; cascades
+fall in every hollow of the chain, surrounded with houses that seek a
+shelter. The heat and the dust are so terrible that they are obliged
+every time we pass a spring to sponge the nostrils of the horses. But
+at the end of the valley a mass of dark, rugged mountains lifts itself,
+with tops that are white with snow, feeding the river and closing the
+horizon. Finally, we pass beneath an alley of fine plane-trees, between
+two rows of villas, gardens, hotels, and shops. It is Luchon, a little
+city as Parisian as Bigorre. {485}
+
+[Illustration: 511]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V. LUCHON.
+
+
+I.
+
+The street is a broad alley, planted with large trees, and lined with
+rather handsome hotels. It was opened by the intendant d'Etigny, who,
+for this misdeed, was near being stoned. It was necessary to call in a
+company of dragoons to force the Luchonnais to endure the prosperity of
+their country.
+
+At the end of the alley a pretty chalet, like those in the Jardin
+des Plantes, shelters the _du Pr'e_ spring. Its walls are a fantastic
+trellis of gnarled branches, adorned with their bark; its roof is
+thatched; its ceiling is a tapestry of moss. A {486}young girl sitting
+at the taps distributes to the bathers glasses of sulphurous water.
+The elegant toilettes come about four o'clock. Meanwhile you sit in the
+shade on benches of woven wood, and watch the children playing on the
+turf, the rows of trees descending toward the river, and the broad green
+plain, sprinkled with villages.
+
+Below the spring are the bathing-houses, nearly finished, and which will
+be the finest in the Pyrenees. At present the neighboring field is still
+strewn with materials; the lime smokes all day, and makes the air to
+flame and quiver.
+
+The court of the baths contains a large votive altar, bearing on one of
+its faces an amphora and this inscription:
+
+ Nymph is.
+
+ Aug.
+
+ Sacrum.
+
+They have preserved in two:
+
+ Nymphis T. Claudius Rufus
+
+ V. S. L. M.
+
+This god Lixo, they say, was in the time of the Celts the tutelary deity
+of the country. Hence the addition these other name of Luchon.
+
+ Lixoni Deo Fabia Festa
+
+ V. S. L. M.
+
+{487}He is maimed and not destroyed. The gods are tenacious of life.
+
+[Illustration: 513]
+
+There are several balls, and orchestras in certain cafes. These
+orchestras are strolling families, hired at so much a week, to make the
+house uninhabitable. One of these, composed of a flute, male, and
+four violins, female, used fearlessly to play the same overture every
+evening. The privileged beings {488}who had paid were in the hall among
+the music stands. A throng of peasants always crowded at the door, with
+open mouths; they formed in a circle and mounted on the benches to see.
+
+The tradespeople of every sort turn their shops into a lottery: lottery
+of plate, of books, of little objects of ornament, etc. The tradesman
+and his wife distribute cards, price one sou, to the servant-maids,
+soldiers, and children, who compose the crowd. Somebody draws; the
+gallery and those interested stretch their necks eagerly forward.
+The man reads the number; a cry is heard, the unguarded sign of an
+overflowing joy. "It's I that have won, I, monsieur the merchant." And
+you see a little serving-maid, blushing all over, lift herself on
+tiptoe and stretch out her hands. The merchant dexterously seizes a pot,
+parades it above his head, and makes everybody about remark it. "A fine
+mustard-pot; a mustard-pot worth three francs, threaded with gold. Who
+wants numbers?" The assembly lasts four hours. It begins anew every day;
+the customers are not wanting for a single moment.
+
+These people have a genius for display. One day we heard the roll of
+drums, followed by four men marching solemnly, swathed in shawls and
+pieces of cloth. The children and the dogs follow the procession with
+hubbub; it is the opening of a {489}new shop. The next day I copied the
+following handbill printed on yellow paper:
+
+"Orpheonic festival in the grotto of Gargas.
+
+"The Orpheonic Society from the city of Montrejean will execute
+
+"The polka;
+
+"Several military marches;
+
+"Several waltzes;
+
+"Divers other pieces from the works of the great masters.
+
+"Among other amateurs who will allow themselves to be heard, one will
+sing some stanzas on eternity.
+
+"Finally, an exquisite voice, which wishes to remain anonymous in order
+to avoid those deserved praises that people are fond of lavishing on its
+sex, will sing also a number of pieces analogous to the circumstances.
+
+"It will be delicious and even seraphic to lend an ear to the echo of
+the sonorous concretions of the stalactites, which will unite with the
+vibrating echo of the vault to repeat the harmonious notes; and when the
+divine voice shall be heard, the intoxicating charm of the spell will
+surpass every impression which can have been left in the soul by the
+most delightful of musical reunions.
+
+"Price of admission: 1 franc."
+
+These people are descendants of Clemence {490}Isaure. Their
+advertisements are odes. By way of compensation many odes are
+advertisements.
+
+In fact, you are here not far from Toulouse; like the character, the
+type is new. The young girls have fine, regular, clear-cut faces, of a
+lively and gay expression. They are small, with a light step, brilliant
+eyes, the nimbleness of a bird. In the evening, about a lottery-shop,
+these pretty faces stand out animated and full of passion beneath the
+flickering light, fringed with a black shadow. The eyes sparkle, the red
+lips tremble, the neck tosses with the little abrupt movements of the
+swallow; no picture can be more full of life.
+
+If you leave the lighted and tumultuous alley, at the distance of an
+hundred paces, you find silence, solitude and obscurity. At night, the
+valley is of great beauty; it is framed and drawn out between two chains
+of parallel mountains, huge pillars which stretch in two files and
+support the dark vault of heaven.
+
+Their arches mark it out like a cathedral ceiling, and the immense nave
+vanishes several leagues away, radiant with stars; these stars fling out
+flames. At this moment, they are the only living things; the valley is
+black, the air motionless; you can only distinguish the tapering tops
+of the poplars, erect in the tranquil night, wrapt in their mantle of
+leaves. The topmost branches stir, and {491}their rustle is like the
+murmur of a prayer echoed by the distant hum of the torrent.
+
+
+III.
+
+[Illustration: 517]
+
+The valley is not a gorge, but a beautiful level meadow marked with trees
+and fields of maize, among which the river runs, but does not leap.
+Luchon is surrounded with alleys of plane-trees, poplars and lindens.
+You leave these alleys for a pathway which follows the waves of the
+Pique and winds amidst the high grass. The ashes and oaks form a screen
+along the two banks; big brooks come from the mountains; you cross them
+on trunks laid bridge-wise or on broad slabs of slate. All these waters
+{492}flow in the shade, between knotted roots which they bathe, and
+which form trellises on both sides. The bank is covered with hanging
+herbage; you see nothing but the fresh verdure and the dark waters. It
+is here that at noon the pedestrians take refuge; along the sides of
+the valley wind dusty roads where stream the carriages and the horsemen.
+Higher up, the mountains, gray or browned with moss, display their soft
+lines and noble forms as far as the eye can reach. They are not wild
+as at Saint Sauveur, nor bare as at Eaux-Bonnes; each of these chains
+advances nobly toward the city and behind it leaves its vast ridge to
+undulate to the very verge of the horizon.
+
+
+IV.
+
+Above Luchon is a mountain called Super-Bagneres. At the outset I run
+across the Fountain of Love; it is a hut of planks where beer is sold.
+
+A winding staircase, crossed by springs, then steep pathways in a black
+forest of firs lead you in two hours to the pastures on the summit.
+The mountain is about five thousand feet high. These pastures are great
+undulating hills, ranged in rows, carpeted with short turf and thickset,
+fragrant thyme; here and there in crowds are broad tufts {493}of a sort
+of wild iris, the flower of which fades in the month of August.
+
+[Illustration: 519]
+
+You reach there fatigued, and on the grass of the highest point you may
+sleep in the sunlight with the utmost pleasure in life. Clouds of
+winded ants eddied in the warm rays. In a hollow beneath us we heard the
+bleating of sheep and of goats. A quarter of a league {494}off, on the
+back of the mountain, a pool of water was glittering like burnished
+steel. Here, as on Mount Bergonz and the Pic du Midi, you look on an
+amphitheatre of mountains. These have not the heroic severity of the
+primal granite, black rocks clothed with luminous air and white snow.
+On one side alone, toward the Crabioules mountains, the naked and jagged
+rocks were silvered with a girdle of glaciers. Everywhere else, the
+slopes were without escarpment, the forms softened, the angles dulled
+and rounded. But, although less wild, the amphitheatre of the mountains
+was imposing. The idea of the simple and imperishable entered with an
+entire dominion into the subdued mind. Peaceful sensations cradled the
+soul in their mighty undulations. It harmonized itself with these huge
+and immovable creatures. It was like a concert of three or four notes
+indefinitely prolonged and sung by deep voices.
+
+The day was declining, clouds dimmed the chilled sky. The woods, the
+fields, the mossy moors, the rocks of the slopes, took various hues in
+the waning light. But this opposition of hues, obliterated by distance
+and the greatness of the masses, melted into a green and grayish shade,
+of a melancholy and tender effect, like that of a vast wilderness
+half stocked with verdure. The shadows of the clouds travelled slowly,
+darkening the tawny summits. All {495}was in harmony, the monotonous
+sound of the wind, the calm march of the clouds, the waning of the day,
+the tempered colors, the softened lines.
+
+[Illustration: 521]
+
+Here it is the second age of nature. The earth conceals the rocks, the
+mosses clothe the earth, the rounded undulations of the upheaved soil
+resemble the tired {496}waves an hour after the tempest. Luchon is
+not far from the plains; its mountains are the last billows of the
+subterranean storm which lifted the Pyrenees; distance has diminished
+their violence, tempered their grandeur, and softened their steeps.
+
+Toward evening we descended into the hollow where the goats were
+passing. A spring was running there, caught in the hollowed trunks
+of trees which answered for watering-troughs to the herds. It is a
+delicious pleasure after a day's tramp to bathe hands and lips in the
+cold fountain. Its sound on this solitary plateau was charming. The
+water trickled through the wood, among the stones, and everywhere that
+it glided over the blackened earth the sun covered it with splendor.
+Lines of reeds marked its track to the brink of the pool. Herdsman and
+animals had gone down; it was the sole inhabitant of this abandoned
+field. Was it not singular to meet with a marsh at the height of five
+thousand feet?
+
+
+V.
+
+Toward the south the river becomes a torrent. Half a league from Luchon
+it is swallowed up in a deep defile of red rocks, many of which have
+fallen; the bed is choked with blocks; the two walls of rock close
+together in the north, and the dammed-up {497}water roars to get out of
+its prison; but the trees grow in the crevices, and along the wall the
+white flowers of the bramble hang in locks.
+
+[Illustration: 523]
+
+Very near here, on a round eminence of bare rock, rises the ruin of
+a Moorish tower, named Cas-tel-Vieil. Its side is bordered with a
+frightful mountain, black and brown, perfectly bald and resembling
+a decayed amphitheatre; the layers hang one over another, notched,
+dislocated, bleeding; the sharp edges and fractures are yellowed with
+wretched moss, vegetable ulcers that defile with their leprous patches
+the nudity of the stone. The pieces of this {498}monstrous skeleton
+hold together only by their mass; it is crannied with deep fissures,
+bristling with falling blocks, broken to the very base; it is nothing
+but a ruin dreary and colossal, sitting at the entrance of a valley,
+like a battered giant.
+
+There was an old beggar-woman there, with naked feet and arms, who was
+worthy of the mountain. For a dress she had a bundle of rags of every
+color sewn together, and remained the whole day long crouched in the
+dust. One might have counted the muscles and tendons of her limbs; the
+sun had dried her flesh and burned her skin; she resembled the rock
+against which she was sitting; she was tall, with large, regular
+features, a brow seamed with wrinkles like the bark of an oak, beneath
+her grizzled lids a savage black eye, a mat of white hair hanging in the
+dust. If a sculptor had wished to make a statue of Dryness, the model
+was there.
+
+The valley narrows and ascends; the Gave rolls between two slopes of
+great forests, and falls in a constant succession of cascades. The eyes
+are satiated with freshness and verdure; the trees mount to the very
+sky, thickset, splendid; the magnificent light falls like a rain on the
+immense slope; the myriads of plants suck it in, and the mighty sap that
+gorges them overflows in luxury and vigor. On all hands the heat and the
+water {499}
+
+[Illustration: 525]
+
+{500}
+
+{501}invigorate and propagate them; they accumulate; enormous beeches
+hang above the torrent; ferns people the brink; moss hangs in green
+garlands on the arcades of roots; wild flowers grow by families in the
+crevices of the beeches; the long branches go with a leap to the further
+brink; the water glides, boils, leaps from one bank to the other with a
+tireless violence, and pierces its way by a succession of tempests.
+
+Further on some noble beeches climb the slope, forming an inclined plane
+of foliage. The sun gives lustre to their rustling tops. The cool shadow
+spreads its dampness between their columns, over the ribbons of sparse
+grass, and on strawberries red as coral. From time to time the light
+falls through an opening, and gushes in cataracts over their flanks
+which it illuminates; isles of brightness then cleave the dim depths;
+the topmost leaves move softly their diaphanous shade; the shadow almost
+disappears, so strong and universal is the splendor. Meanwhile a small
+hidden spring beads its necklace of crystal among the roots, and great
+velvet butterflies wheel in the air in broken starts, like falling
+chestnut-leaves.
+
+At the bottom of a hollow filled with plants, appears the hospice
+of Bagneres, a heavy house of stone, which serves as a refuge. The
+mountains open opposite it their amphitheatre of rock, a huge {502}and
+blasted pit; to crown the whole the clouds have gathered, and dull the
+rent enclosure which fences off the horizon--enclosure that winds with
+dreary air, perfectly barren, with the grinning army of its pinnacles,
+its raw cuts, its murderous steeps; beneath the dome of clouds, wheels a
+band of screaming crows. This well seems their eyry; wings are needed
+to escape the hostility of all those bristling points, and of so many
+yawning gulfs which draw on the passer in order to dash him to atoms.
+
+Soon the road seems brought to an end; wall after wall, the serried
+rocks obstruct every outlet; still you advance, zigzag, among rounded
+blocks, along a falling stairway; the wind sweeps down these, howling.
+No sign of life, no herbage; everywhere the horrible nakedness and the
+chill of winter. Squat rocks lean beetling over the precipice; others
+project their heads to meet one another; between them the eye plunges
+into dark gulfs whose bottom it cannot reach. The violent juttings of
+all parts advance and rise, piercing the air; down there, at the bottom,
+they spring forward in lines, climbing over one another, in heaps,
+bristling against the sky their hedge of pikes. Suddenly in this
+terrible battalion a cleft is opened; the Maladetta springs up like a
+great spectre; forests of shivered pines wind about its foot; a girdle
+of black rocks embosses its arid breast, and the glaciers make it a
+crown.{503}
+
+[Illustration: 529]
+
+{504}
+
+{505}
+
+[Illustration: 532]
+
+Nothing is dead, and in respect to this our feeble organs deceive us;
+those mountain skeletons seem to us inert because our eyes are used to
+the mobile vegetation of the plains; but nature is eternally alive, and
+its forces struggle together in these sepulchres of granite and snow,
+as well as in the {506}human hives or the most flourishing forests.
+Each particle of rock presses or supports its neighbors; their apparent
+immobility is an equilibrium of forces; everything works and struggles;
+nothing is calm and nothing uniform. Those blocks that the eye takes
+to be massive are networks of atoms infinitely removed from each other,
+drawn by innumerable and contrary attractions, invisible labyrinths
+where unceasing transformations are wrought out, where ferments the
+mineral life, as active as other lives, but grander. And ours, what is
+it, confined within the experience of a few years and the memory of a
+few centuries? What are we, but a transitory excrescence, formed of a
+little thickened air, grown by chance in a cleft of the eternal rock?
+What is our thought, so high in dignity, so little in power? The mineral
+substance and its forces are the real possessors and the only masters
+of the world. Pierce below this crust which sustains us as far as that
+crucible of lava which tolerates us. Here strive and are developed the
+great forces, the heat and the affinities which have formed the soil,
+have composed the rocks which support our life, have furnished
+its cradle for it, and are preparing its tomb. Everything here is
+transformed and stirs as in the heart of a tree; and our race, nested
+on a point of the bark, perceives not that silent vegetation which
+has lifted the trunk, spread the branches, {507}and whose invincible
+progress brings in turns flowers, fruits and death. Meanwhile a vaster
+movement bears the planet with its companions around the sun, borne
+itself toward an unknown goal, in the infinite space wherein eddies
+the infinite people of the worlds. Who will say that they are not there
+merely to decorate and fill it? These great rolling masses are the first
+thought and the broader development of nature; they live by the same
+right with ourselves, they are sons of the same mother, and we recognize
+in them our kin and elders.
+
+[Illustration: 534]
+
+But in this family there are ranks. I know I am but an atom; to
+annihilate me, the least of these stones would suffice; a bone half as
+thick as my thumb is the wretched cuirass that defends my thought
+from delirium and death; my entire action and that of all the machines
+invented within sixty centuries would not avail to scrape one of the
+leaves of the mineral crust that supports and {508}nurtures me. And yet
+in this all-powerful nature I count for something. If among her works
+I am the most fragile, I am also the last; if she confines me within a
+corner of her expanse, it is in me that she ends. It is in me that she
+attains the indivisible point where she is concentred and perfected; and
+this mind through which she knows herself opens to her a new career
+in reproducing her works, imitating her order, penetrating her work,
+feeling its magnificence and eternity. In it is opened a second world
+reflecting the other, reflecting itself also, and, beyond itself
+and that other, grasping the eternal law which engenders them both.
+To-morrow I shall die, and I am not capable of displacing any portion of
+this rock. But during one moment I have thought, and within the limits
+of that thought nature and the universe were comprehended.
+
+[Illustration: 535]
+
+{509}
+
+
+[Illustration: 536]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI. TOULOUSE.
+
+
+I.
+
+When, after a two months' sojourn in the Pyrenees, you leave Luchon, and
+see the flat country near Martres, you are delighted and breathe freely:
+you were tired, without knowing it, of those eternal barriers that shut
+in the horizon; you needed space. You felt that the air and light were
+usurped by those monstrous protuberances, and that you were not in a
+land of men, but in a land of mountains. Unknown to yourself you longed
+for a real champaign, free and broad. That of Martres is as level as
+a sheet of water, populous, fertile, stocked with good plants, well
+cultivated, convenient for life, a realm of abundance and security.
+{510}There is no doubt that a field of brown earth, broadly ploughed
+with deep furrows, is a noble sight, and that the labor and happiness of
+civilized man are as pleasant to behold as the ruggedness of the untamed
+rocks.
+
+[Illustration: 537]
+
+A highway white and flat led in a straight line to the very horizon, and
+ended in a cluster of red houses; the peaked belfry lifted its needle
+into the sky; but for the sun, it would pass for a Flemish landscape. In
+the streets there {511}
+
+[Illustration: 539]
+
+{512}
+
+{513}were Van Ostade's interiors. Old houses, roofs of uneven thatch,
+leaning one upon another, machines for hemp displayed in the doorways,
+little courtyards filled with tubs, wheelbarrows, straw, children,
+animals--a gay and well-to-do air; above all the great illuminator of
+the country, the universal decorator, the everlasting giver of joy, the
+sun poured in profusion its beautiful warm light over the walls of ruddy
+brick, and patched with strong shadows the white roughcast.
+
+
+II.
+
+Toulouse appears, all red with bricks, amidst the red dust of evening.
+
+A melancholy city, with narrow and flinty streets. The town hall, called
+_Capicole_, has but one narrow entrance, commonplace halls, a pronounced
+and elegant facade in the taste of the decorations for public festivals.
+In order that no one may doubt its antiquity, they have inscribed on
+it the word _Capitolium._ The cathedral, dedicated to St. Stephen, is
+remarkable only for one pleasant memory:
+
+"Towards the year 1027," says Pierre de Marca,
+
+"It was the custom at Toulouse to box a Jew's ears in public on Easter
+day, in the Church of St. Stephen. Hugues, chaplain to Aimery, Viscount
+{514}de Rochechouart, being at Toulouse in his master's suite, dealt the
+Jew a blow with such force that it crushed his head and made his brains
+and eyes to fall out, as Adhemar has observed in his chronicle."
+
+The choir where Adhemar made this observation is wanting in neither
+beauty nor grandeur; but what strikes you most on leaving the mountains,
+is the museum. You find anew thought, passion, genius, art, all the most
+beautiful flowers of human civilization.
+
+It is a broad, well-lighted hall, flanked by two small galleries of
+greater height, which form a semicircle, and filled with pictures of all
+the schools, some of which are excellent. A Murillo, representing _St.
+Diego and his Monks_; you recognize in it the monastic harshness, the
+master's sentiment of reality, his originality of expression and earnest
+vigor. A _Martyrdom of St. Andrew,_ by Caravaggio, black and horrible.
+Several pictures by the Caracci, Guercino and Guido. A _Ceremony of the
+Order of the Holy Ghost_ in 1635, by Philip de Champagne. These most
+real, delicate and noble faces are portraits of the time; you see the
+contemporaries of Louis XIII. in life. Here are the correct drawing,
+temperate color, conscientious but not literal exactness of a Fleming
+become a Frenchman. {515}
+
+[Illustration: 544]
+
+{516}
+
+{517}A charming _Marquise dc Largillere_ with a wasp waist in blue
+velvet, elegant and haughty. A _Christ Crucified,_ by Rubens, the eyes
+glassy, flesh livid--a powerful sketch, wherein the cold whiteness of
+the faded tints exhales the frightful poetry of death.
+
+I name only the most striking; but the liveliest sensation comes from
+the modern pictures. They transport the mind all at once to Paris, into
+the midst of our discussions, into the inventive and troubled world
+of the modern arts, the immense laboratory where so many fruitful and
+opposing forces weave the work of a renewing century: A celebrated
+picture by Glaize, the _Death of St. John the Baptist_; the half-naked
+butcher who holds the head is a superb brute, a careless instrument
+of death which has just done its work well. An elegant and affected
+painting by Schoppin, _Jacob before Laban and his two Daughters_.
+The daughters of Laban are pretty drawing-room misses who have just
+disguised themselves as Arabs. _Muley Abd-el-Rhaman,_ by Eugene
+Delacroix. He is motionless on a bluish and melancholy horse. Files of
+soldiers are presenting arms, packed in masses in a stifling atmosphere;
+dull heads, stupid and real, hooded with the white bournous; ruined
+towers are piled behind them under a leaden sun. The crude colors,
+the heavy garments, bronzed limbs, massive parasols, that lifeless and
+animal{518} expression are the revelation of a land where thought
+sleeps overwhelmed and buried under the weight of barbarism, of the
+religion and the climate. In a corner of the small gallery is the first
+brilliant stroke of Couture, _The Thirst of Gold._ All misery and every
+temptation come to solicit the miser: a mother and her starving child,
+an artist reduced to beggary, two half-nude courtesans. He gazes at them
+with sorrowful ardor, but the hooked fingers cannot let go the gold. His
+lips shrivel, his cheeks glow, his burning eyes are fastened to their
+wanton bosoms. It is the torture of the heart torn by the rebellion of
+the senses, the concentrated despair of repressed desire, the bitter
+tyranny of the ruling passion. Never did face better express the soul.
+The drawing is bold, the color superb, more daring than in the _Romans
+of the Decadence_, so lively that you forget to notice a few crude
+tones, hazarded in the transport of composition.
+
+It is perhaps too much praise. All these moderns are poets who have
+determined to be painters. One has sought out dramas in history, another
+scenes of manners; one translates religions, another a philosophy. Such
+an one imitates Raphael, such another the early Italian masters; the
+landscapist employs trees and clouds to compose odes or elegies. No one
+is simply a painter; they are all archaeologists, psychologists, giving
+setting to {519}some memory or theory. They please our learning, our
+philosophy. Like ourselves, they are full and overflowing with general
+ideas, Parisians uneasy and curious. They live too much by the brain,
+and too little by the senses; they have too much wit and too little
+artlessness. They do not love a form for its own sake, but for what it
+expresses; and if they chance to love it, it is voluntarily, with an
+acquired taste, from an antiquary's superstition.
+
+[Illustration: 547]
+
+They are children of a wise generation, harassed and thoughtful, in
+which men who have won equality and the freedom of thought, and of
+shaping each for himself his religion, rank, {520}and fortune, wish to
+find in art the expression of their anxieties and meditations. They are
+a thousand leagues away from the first masters, workmen or cavaliers,
+who lived out-of-doors, scarcely read at all, and thought only of giving
+a feast for their eyes. It is for that that I love them; I feel like
+them because I am of their century. Sympathy is the best source of
+admiration and pleasure.
+
+
+III.
+
+Below the museum is a square tower enclosed by a gallery of slender
+columns, which towards the top bend and are cut into trefoils, forming
+a border of arcades. They have gathered under this gallery all the
+antiquities of the country: fragments of Roman statues, severe busts of
+emperors, ascetic virgins of the middle ages, bas-reliefs from churches
+and temples, knights of stone lying all armed upon their tombs. The
+court was deserted and silent; tall slender trees, tufted shrubbery,
+were bright with the loveliest green. A dazzling sunlight fell on the
+red tiles of the gallery; an old fountain, loaded with little columns
+and heads of animals, murmured near to a bench of rose-veined marble. A
+statue of a young man was seen amidst the branches; stems of green hops
+climbed up around broken columns.{521}
+
+[Illustration: 549]
+
+{522}
+
+{523}This mixture of rustic objects and objects of art, these wrecks of
+two dead civilizations and the youth of flowery plants, the joyous rays
+on the old tiles, united in their contrasts all that I had seen for two
+months.
+
+
+THE END.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of A Tour Through The Pyrenees, by
+Hippolyte Adolphe Taine
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