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“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 shewas 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.
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“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 hôtel de Coarraze, and the knight died the following year.”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 thepale sunlight, leave a vague uneasiness in the disordered brain.
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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.
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.
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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 bonbonnière, 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 gentlydown to the river’s brink. We are nearing Saint Pé, 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.
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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.
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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 perpendicularflank 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; thearches 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.
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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 somany 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.
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,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 thebigots.* 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 afflictedwith 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.
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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.
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 avicand the deputies from every four vics assembled at Luz.
The list of the assessments was, from time immemorial, made upon bits of wood calledtotchoux,that is to say, sticks. Each community had itstotchoti,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 deputiesfrom 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,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.
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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, thepeople 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.
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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.
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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.
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 withits 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.
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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; thesound 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?
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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, cameupon 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.”
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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 terraceplanted 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.
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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, andmount 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.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.
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 thereamong 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.
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.
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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.
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 freshnessunder 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.
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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.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.
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Soon the mountains grow bald, the trees disappear; nothing upon the slopes but a poorbrushwood: 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 collecthere, the wind penetrates and the little town is uninhabitable in winter.
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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.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.
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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 ofgayety 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.