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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 turnedhis 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 contrastof 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?”
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“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.”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. Onethousand 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.”
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“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, toBareges; 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.
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“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 inorder 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 liepellmell 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.”
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Mountains then may have another beauty than that of grandeur?"Yes, since they sometimes have a different expression. Look at that little isolated chain, against which theThermessupport 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 Iwill test your reasoning in the gorge of Eaux-Chaudes, and see if it is right.
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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 againto 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.
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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.
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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 areloaded 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.
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The highway makes a turn, and everything changes. The old troop of parched mountains reappears with a threatening air. One of themin the west is crumbling, shattered as if by a cyclopean hammer. It is strewn with squared blocks, dark vertebræ 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.
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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.
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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 birthof 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 spreadingout 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 Olympusesin 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.
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“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, wherecrocodiles 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,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 amonth they will save me four francs; I shall find fairy-land in them, and shall have no further occasion for going to the opera.
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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;it is here that dances take place.
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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, agroup 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 purplecapuletsslowly 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 hisgreat beard with a look of delight. Had he been able, he would have followed the dance.
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“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 wholaughed 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, thetruest, the most harmonious, and hence the most beautiful that can be imagined?”
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, repeatedAve 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 sixteenthcentury. 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.
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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 inplace, 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 soileddouanier’scoat; 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 woollenstuff 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.
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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.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 findthatin 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 onfast: 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 asksyou for a trifle. A tall girl goes by with a fagot on her head; she stops and asks a trifle of you.
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.