519s
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 leagueoff, 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. Allwas 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.
521s
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 tiredwaves 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?
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-upwater 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.
523s
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 thismonstrous 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.
525s
On all hands the heat and thewater 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 Bagnères, a heavy house of stone, which serves as a refuge. The mountains open opposite it their amphitheatre of rock, a hugeand 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.
529s
532s
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 thehuman 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,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.
534s
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 andnurtures 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.
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536s
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.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.
537s
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.
539s
In the streets there 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.
Toulouse appears, all red with bricks, amidst the red dust of evening.
A melancholy city, with narrow and flinty streets. The town hall, calledCapicole, has but one narrow entrance, commonplace halls, a pronounced and elegant façade in the taste of the decorations for public festivals. In order that no one may doubt its antiquity, they have inscribed on it the wordCapitolium.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, Viscountde 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 Adhémar has observed in his chronicle.”
The choir where Adhémar 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, representingSt. Diego and his Monks; you recognize in it the monastic harshness, the master’s sentiment of reality, his originality of expression and earnest vigor. AMartyrdom of St. Andrew,by Caravaggio, black and horrible. Several pictures by the Caracci, Guercino and Guido. ACeremony of the Order of the Holy Ghostin 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.
544s
A charmingMarquise dc Largillerewith a wasp waist in blue velvet, elegant and haughty. AChrist 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, theDeath 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 animalexpression 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 theRomans 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 tosome 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.
547s
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,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.
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.
549s
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.