THE WARM WATERS AND THE PEAK OF THE SOUTH.
“And we who love
this land call it a paradis terrestre, because
life is fair in its
happy sunshine, it is beautiful, it is
plentiful, it is at peace. The Sun Maid.
It is a nineteenth-century sun that
wakes us, after all, each morning, through the Gassion’s
broad windows. We can reconjure foregoing eras,
but we do not have to live in them. The hat has
outlawed the helmet; the clear call of the locomotive
is unmistakably modern. Throughout Pau, in its
life, its people, its social rubrics; in its streets,
shops, hotels, the thought is for the present
age exclusively. The past is appraised chiefly
at what it can do for the present. Business and
society pursuits are not perceptibly saddened by memories
of the bear-hunt at Rion or the dagger of Ravaillac.
And thus we come into the instant
year once more, as we take the mid-morning train from
Pau. We point straight for the mountains.
We are on the way to Eaux Chaudes and Eaux Bonnes,
before mentioned as a fourth excursion from Pau; but
we go not as an excursion merely, for they lie directly
in our farther route. These resorts, the repute
of whose springs we hear in advance, are south from
Pau about twenty-eight miles; twenty-five are now
covered by the new railway, and the remaining three
are done by the diligence or by breack, for
the latter of which, we telegraph.
It is a brief journey by the rail.
The longer post-road no longer controls the travel.
The train hastens on, by the coteaux, past maize-fields
and meadows, through odds and ends of villages, into
valleys more irregular, and among hills higher and
steeper. Of Bielle, a village where it halts
for a moment, there is a well-turned story told against
Henry IV. It is one of the few cases where he
was at a loss for a retort. He admired the four
marble columns in the church, and asked for them;
a kingly asking is usually equivalent to a command.
But the inhabitants made reply both dexterous and
firm, and it proved unanswerable. “Our
hearts and our possessions are yours,” they said;
“do with them as you will. But as to the
columns, those belong to God; we are bound for their
custody, and you will have to arrange that with Him!”
When the train reaches its terminus
at Laruns, we are fairly among the highlands.
Rising wedge-shaped beyond the town, dividing all progress,
is a mountain, not a hill. To the left
and right of it pass the roads we are in turn to follow.
On the left, two miles beyond the fork or three from
the railway’s end, will be found Eaux Bonnes;
on the right, at the same distance, is its lesser
equal, Eaux Chaudes, our first objective point.
In the distant direction of the former
rises the snowy Pic de Ger, nearly nine thousand
feet in height and conspicuous from where we stand
at the station platform. Still leftward, east
of the hills, is a notch in the mountains; through
it, we are told, pierces the Route Thermale, the
great carriage-road on to Cauterets and Bigorre, which
we are to take after visiting the Eaux.
Here at the Laruns station, we find
our breack awaiting us, a peer of the peerless
Biarritz equipage. It has been sent down from
Eaux Bonnes to meet us. Trunk and baggage are
stowed away, and we are driven up the straight, sloping
road from the station into the village of Laruns itself,
where a stop is to be made for lunch.
The appearances are not prepossessing.
Laruns is a small village centring about a large square.
It looks unpromising, and one of its most unpromising
buildings proves to be the “hotel,” a
low, dingy, stone building set in among its mates.
At this the breack draws up. The splendor of
the Gassion seems in the impossible past.
The expectant landlady urges us within; her face beams
pleasantly; her appearance promises at least more
than does her environment. One by one and very
doubtfully, we enter a dark, narrow doorway; pass along
a dark, harrow hall, walled and floored with stone;
catch a passing vista of a kitchen, a white-jacketed
and white-capped cook, and a vast amount of steam and
crackle and splutter near the stove; and going up the
curving stairs are led into a neat little front dining-room
overlooking the square. The carpet is of unpainted
pine; so are the table and chairs; but both are clean,
and this fact cheers. With misgivings we ask for
a lunch for seven; without misgivings it is promptly
promised, and the beaming hostess hurries to the depths
below. Whether her quest shall bring us chill
or further cheer, we do not seek to guess.
We canvass the situation and idly
look out on the square before us. The low houses
edging it are of stone, faced with a whity-grey, and
have a sleepy, lack-lustre air about them, even under
the sun’s rays. Women are grouped around
the old marble fountain near the centre, one
drawing water, several washing and beating white linen.
There are barnyard fowls in plenty, bobbing their
preoccupied heads as they search among the cobbles.
In the foreground stands the temporarily dismantled
breack, begirt with awed urchins and venerable Common
Councilmen. Behind all rise the mountains.
There is a pleasing effect of unsophisticated dullness
about it all, that seems queerly out of place in a
rising railroad terminus.
But a bright-faced, rosy little girl
bustles in presently and proceeds to set the table.
She has an unconscious air of confidence in the doings
of the chef below, this fact cheers; and
the cloth is indubitably clean, this also
cheers. We take heart. Napkins and plates
appear, white as the cloth; knives, forks, glasses,
rapidly follow, seats are placed, we gather around,
and the old lady herself comes triumphantly in, with
a huge, shapely omelet, silky and hot, and
lo, our three cheers swell into a tiger!
Well, we shall always recall
the zest of that lunch. It was perfection.
The cuisine of the Gassion was more refined but not more whole-souled.
The trout vie with the omelet; the mutton outdoes the trout. Course after
course comes up as by magic from that dark kitchen, petits
pois, a toothsome filet, mushrooms, pickled goose,
tartlets, cheese, fruit, and each a fresh
revelation of a Pyrenean chef’s capabilities.
Our doubtings vanish with the dejeuner, and we exchange
solemn vows never hereafter to prejudge a Gascon boniface
by his inn.
II.
Our road forth from Laruns brings
us soon to the base of the blockading mountain, the
Gourzy. There it divides, and taking the
right-hand branch, the breack strikes at once into
the narrow ascending valley which leads southeast
to Eaux Chaudes. Below, a fussy torrent splashes
impetuously to meet the incomers. The driver has
pointed out to me an older and now disused wagon-way,
short and steep, over the hill at the right; it is
tempting for pedestrianizing, and while the breack
is pulled slowly around its foot by a broad, easy
road, I climb by it for some twenty minutes, gain
the crest of the ridge, and passing through a windy,
rock-walled cut, come out on the other curve of the
valley. Here the scene has become wholly mountainous.
Grass and box cling to all the slopes; pines and spruces
shoot upward wherever they have won footholds.
They are not great peaks that we see yet, nor anything
above the snow level; but the mountains in view, with
their faces of rock, their massive flanks of green,
are imposing notwithstanding. Far below, the
breack has just come in sight, its forward route meeting
mine some distance ahead.
Close at the side of the path stands
a tiny roadside oratory. On the walls of this
little shrine, which (or its predecessor) has stood
here for three hundred years, one might formerly read
in stilted French the following astonishing inscription,
ignoble witness to human platitude, as M. Joanne calls
it:
“Arrest thee, passer-by! admire
a thing thou seest not, and attend to hear what
it is thou shouldst admire: we are but rocks and
yet we speak. Nature gave us being, but
it was the Princess Catherine gave us tongues.
What thou now readest we have seen her read; what
she has said we have listened to; her soul we
have upborne. Are we not blessed, passer-by?
having no eyes, we yet have seen her! Yet blessed
thou too, in having seen her not; for we rocks were
lifeless and the sight transformed us into life;
but as for thee, traveler, thy transformation
would have been into lifeless rock!”
As our routes converge, mine descending,
the other rising, the valley narrows to a gorge.
In its depths, a hundred and fifty feet or more below,
the torrent is noisily roaring, and at the other side,
half way up, the carriage-road is built out from the
almost perpendicular wall of the Gourzy. We draw
nearer, and at length I cross, high above the stream,
by a rude wooden bridge, and rejoin the main road.
The slope I have quitted steepens now into a precipice,
and the two sides of this ravine move closer and closer
together, their bare limestone brows a thousand, two
thousand, feet above the road. I vividly recall
the Via Mala in Switzerland, as I lean over the stone
parapet and push down a heavy stone to crash upon
the rocks of the torrent far beneath.
The toiling breack rejoins me, and
the road cuts in through the gorge for some distance
farther. Patches of snow are now seen on some
of the summits approaching. Then we round a corner
at the left, the valley opens out, though very slightly,
and soon we see ahead the closely set houses of the
Baths of Eaux Chaudes.
We pause before a plain, fatherly
hotel, and a motherly landlady appears at once to
welcome us. We are won at once by Madame Baudot.
Her benignant face is a benediction. She leads
us in through the low, wide hallway, past the little
windowed office at the end, and turning to the left
into a short corridor brings us out to a set of rooms
in the new extension. As we step out upon the
tiny balconies at the windows, we cannot forbear exclaiming
at the charm of their situation. We are directly
above the torrent, which chafes along perhaps fifty
feet below, and the balconies jut out over the water.
Beyond it are the cliffs, rising huge before us, wooded
high, but bare and bald near the top; up and down
the valley the eye ranges along their fronts.
The rooms, simple but exactingly clean, are dainty
with dimity and netted curtains and spreads.
The whole effect is so home-like and restful, the relief
of the contrast so great from plain and city and the
rush of trains, that involuntarily we sigh for a month
to spend at Eaux Chaudes.
III.
We find but two streets, terraced
one behind the other; quiet, heavily-built houses,
a small shop or two, another hotel, a little church,
and the bathing establishment. The latter, large
and substantial, overlooks the Gave a few steps up
the road. We stroll inquisitively down through
the village, lighten a dull little shop with a trifling
investment, strike out upon the hill above for the
reward of a view, descend to the bed of the torrent,
and finally drift together again into the streetside
near the hotel. Most of the houses are pensions
or boarding-places during the summer, and while the
spot is much less fashionable and populous than its
neighbor, Eaux Bonnes, it is instinct with a comforting
placidity not easily to be attained in larger resorts.
The waters are said to be specifically good for rheumatism.
Both drinking and bathing are prescribed. In former
times the simple rule was, the more the better; Thor
himself could scarcely have outquaffed the sixteenth-century
invalids. One of the early French historians
relates his visit “to the Baths of Beam, seven
leagues from Pau.” A young German, he says,
“although very sober, drank each day fifty glasses
of sulphur water within the hour.” He himself
was content with twenty-five, “rather from pleasure
than need;” he experienced “great relief,
with a marvelous appetite, sound sleep, and a feeling
of buoyancy in his whole body.”
An experimentally inclined visitor,
a few years ago, heard of this exploit of the “sober
young German,” and attempted to repeat it.
He very nearly lost his life in consequence.
The sovereigns at Pau were very fond
of the Eaux. Marguerite of Angoulême loved to
come to this stern, peaceful valley, and here found
inspiration for her thoughts and her writings.
One of her letters tells us that in these mountains,
apart from the careless court, "elle a appris a
vivre plus de papier que d’aultres choses,"
Her daughter, Queen Jeanne, Henry’s mother,
found her health here when she was young, having been
“meagre and feeble.” She often visited
them afterward. Her visits were costly, too;
the expenses of the court were considerable, but she
had to bring an armed guard as well; Spain always stood
ready to kidnap the Queen of Navarre if it had opportunity.
Such were the times.
Later, for almost a century, these
springs became neglected and forgotten; they were
then again brought into notice, and now seem to have
gained a permanent popularity.
As afternoon closes in, we reunite
at the hotel, where Madame greets us graciously.
Her visitors will begin to come with the coming week,
but we actually have the house to ourselves.
In the tidy parlor blazes a wood-fire; out of doors,
in the dusk, it has grown a trifle chilly. Attentions
are doubled upon us when it is known that we are Americans;
Madame’s daughter, who has married the chef and
will succeed to the inheritance, will succeed to the
kindly disposition as well, and with a sunny-faced
waiting-woman looks after details of comfort with a
personal interest. Our famous lunch at Laruns
was both so ample and so recent that now we ask only
for “tea and toast,” and so, while the
lamps are lighted, the trays are brought to us in
the parlor, and around the centre-table and before
the fire we nibble tartines in soothed content
and plan to-morrow’s excursion.
Later in the evening we pause at the
little office in the hall, behind whose window sits
Madame, busy with her knitting yet watchfully supervising
all the details of the household. She chats with
us freely, speaking slowly in her clear, low-toned
French, that southern French which sounds
the vowels and the final e so lingeringly, telling
us of the village and its surroundings, of the people,
of herself; questioning us about America, (where,
she tells us, lives one of her daughters;) welcoming
us evidently with the greater regard as being of the
few she sees from that active, far-off land.
IV.
The low, steady, insistent rumble
and rustle of the torrent below our windows becomes
almost ghostly in the stillness of the midnight.
It is coming from the dark and mysterious forests
it so well knows, the same unchanging water-soul it
has been in the days of the Pyrénées past. One
almost ascribes to it the power of audibly retelling
its past, as it intones its way onward below us; infusing
our dreams with subtle imaginings of the spirit of
dead times, the pathetic forgottenness of the mountain
lives that have been lived within its sound, the roysterings
of the knights who have hunted along its coursing.
For into these forests often rode
Gaston Phoebus and his fierce men of Orthez, in pursuit
of a fiercer than they, the now disappearing Pyrénées
bear. At no time was superstition more rife than
then; savage souls were imputed to these savage animals;
the spectres of the killed brutes returned to trouble
the dreams of the hunter-knights, as the growl of
their familiar torrent penetrates ours. We seem
to hear old Froissart’s voice above the sound,
believingly telling a legend of the hunt:
“’Sir Peter de Bearn has
a custom, when asleep in the night-time, to rise,
arm himself, draw his sword, and to begin fighting
as if he were in actual battle. The chamberlains
and valets who sleep in his chamber to watch him,
on hearing him rise, go to him and inform him what
he is doing; of all which, he tells them, he is quite
ignorant, and that they lie. Sometimes they leave
neither arms nor sword in his chamber, when he makes
such a noise and clatter as if all the devils in hell
were there. They therefore think it best to replace
the arms, and sometimes he forgets them and remains
quietly in his bed.’
“‘Holy Mary!’ said
I to the squire, ’how came the knight to have
such fancies, that he cannot sleep quietly in bed
but must rise and skirmish about the house! This
is very strange.’
“‘By my faith,’
answered the squire, ’they have frequently asked
him, but he knows nothing about it. The first
time it happened was on a night following a day when
he had hunted a wonderfully large bear in the woods
of Bearn. This bear had killed four of his dogs
and wounded many more, so that the others were afraid
of him; upon which Sir Peter drew his sword of Bordeaux
steel and advanced on the bear with great rage on
account of the loss of his dogs; he combated him a
long time with much bodily danger, and with difficulty
slew him; when he returned to his castle of Languedudon
in Biscay, and had the bear carried with him.
Every one was astonished at the enormous size of the
beast and the courage of the knight who had attacked
and slain him.
“’But when the Countess
of Biscay, his wife, saw the bear, she instantly fainted
and was carried to her chamber, where she continued
very disconsolate all that and the following day,
and would not say what ailed her. On the third
day she told her husband she should never recover
her health until she had made a pilgrimage to St. James’
shrine at Compostella. “Give me leave therefore
to go thither and to carry my son Peter and my daughter
Adrienne with me; I request it of you.”
Sir Peter too easily complied; she had packed up all
her jewels and plate unobserved by any one; for she
had resolved never to return again.
“’The lady set out on
her pilgrimage, and took that opportunity of visiting
her cousins, the King and Queen of Castile, who entertained
her handsomely. She is still with them, and will
never return herself nor send her children. The
same night he had hunted and killed the bear, this
custom of walking in his sleep seized him. It
is rumored the lady was afraid of something unfortunate
happening, the moment she saw the bear, and this caused
her fainting; for that her father once hunted this
bear, and during the chace a voice cried out, though
he saw nobody: “Thou huntest me, yet I
wish thee no ill; but thou shalt die a miserable death!”
The lady remembered this when she saw the bear, as
well as that her father had been beheaded by Don Pedro
without any cause; and she maintains that something
unfortunate will happen to her husband, and that what
passes now is nothing to what will come to pass.’”
V.
White clouds scud away before the
breeze, as we climb down toward the torrent again
before breakfast and cross a diminutive foot-bridge
to a path on the other side. The sun is at his
post. “All Nature smiles,” here in
the mountains as over the plains, and promises lavishly
for the day. The ramble brings a sharpened appetite,
and we come back to the sunny breakfast-room, to find
flowers at the plates of mesdames and mademoiselle,
and a family of Pyrenean trout, drawn out within the
half-hour from a trout-well by the stream, in crisp
readiness upon the table.
We have planned for a view to-day
of the great Pic du Midi d’Ossau, the
mountain seen so sharply from Pau. It is not in
sight at Eaux Chaudes; but it is the giant of this
section of the range, a noon-mark for an
entire province. There is no mountain resort without
its pet excursions, and there are three here which
take the lead. One is to Goust, another to the
Grotto; but the foremost is to Gabas and the majestic
Pic.
Our breack comes pompously to the
terrace by the hotel, and the hostess wishes us "une
belle excursion." The road takes us on through
the village, and pushes up into the valley with an
ascent which is not steep but which never relaxes.
Around us the scene grows increasingly wild and everywhere
picturesque. We cross at some height the Gave,
by the stone Pont d’Enfer, Bridge
of Hell, so named, and keep along the westerly
bank. On one side the ledges are bare, but the
opposite slopes are greener, densely wooded, and ribboned
by occasional cascades. Goats and cattle graze
on the upper stretches of herbage; and the shadows
of the clouds chase each other in great islands over
the broad flanks of the mountain. Often, as the
horses pause to rest, panting silently with the work,
we climb down from our perches to walk on against the
warm breeze, or clamber up from the roadway to add
a prize to the ladies’ mountain bouquets.
At a noted angle in the trend of the
valley, the forked white cone of the great Pic comes
suddenly into sight. The vision lasts but a minute.
A cloud sweeps down upon it, and when it lifts again
we have passed the point of view.
We anathematize the intruder openly;
this is incautious, for our anathemas provoke reprisals.
Other clouds rally around their offended sister in
support, as we push slowly onward, and some of the
nearer mountains are soon enveloped also. The
blue sky is forced back, cut off in all directions;
even the pusillanimous sun retires from the conflict;
the heavens have darkened ominously.
In an hour and a half from Eaux Chaudes,
we have come to Gabas, 3600 feet above the sea.
The place consists of two or three houses, and a dull
little inn by a patch of wooded park. It does
not attract overmuch, but to go farther at present
is manifestly unwise. Nature’s smile has
become a pout, and that is fast developing into a crying-spell.
The guide and ponies sent on from Madame Baudot’s
must wait. The breack is tarpaulined and left
to the pines in the park, the horses are led off into
the stable, and we disconsolately enter the hotel,
to chill the coming hour with spiritless lemonade
and a period of waiting.
I believe it will always rain on you
at Gabas. The few persons we had hitherto met
who had been to Eaux Chaudes enthusiastically praised
this trip toward the Pic du Midi, “but
we could not complete it, ourselves.” they invariably
added, “because it came on to shower when we
reached Gabas.” We had smiled commiseratingly,
confident of being better favored. Now we find
that the clouds, jealous body-guard of this regal
summit, which is “first a trap and then an abiding-place
for every vagrant vapor,” can deny him alike
to the just and the unjust, that they trouble
little to make distinctions, even where nationality
is involved.
It is a dull hour. Within, we
are in a murky, musty reception-room, and find no
consolation save in ourselves, last week’s Pau
newspapers, and a decrepit French guide-book which
tells tantalizingly of the magnificent trip on toward
the peak. Without, the rain falls softly and maliciously,
slackening at times in order to taunt us with glimpses
of fugitive blue overhead. We wait and conjecture;
plans and anecdotes and a good fire help wonderfully
to hurry the time. The landlord offers but dubious
prophecies; and the window-panes prophesy as dubiously,
as we peer out into the grey mist and the dripping,
shivering park. Nature’s resentments are
strong, and when she gives battle she fights to a
finish.
At last, in full caucus assembled,
we vote the war a failure and elect for a retreat.
VI.
The climb we were to take is to a
plateau called Bious-Artigues. It is about three
miles beyond Gabas by bridle-path, and its ascent needs
an hour and a half. Here the full face of the
Pic du Midi d’Ossau is squarely commanded.
The view is said to challenge that of the Matterhorn
from the Riffel. The plateau itself is nearly
five thousand feet above the sea, and across the ravine
before it, this isolated granite obelisk, with its
mitre of snow, lifts itself upward more than five thousand
feet higher, a precipitous cone, “notched
like a pair of gaping jaws, eager to grasp the heavens.”
This formidable pyramid was first
ascended in 1552, and afterward by Palma Cayet in
1591. It has often been climbed since, and affords
a view over a veritable wilderness of peaks.
From Bious-Artigues, without making the ascent but
simply following the sides of the surrounding basin,
one can go on to a second and even a third plateau,
adding to the outlook each time, and may finally work
his way entirely around the Pic and return to Gabas
by another direction. At Gabas too one is but
seven miles from the Spanish frontier, and there is
a foot-pass that scales the high barrier between the
countries and leads down to the Spanish baths of Panticosa.
A great international highway over this pass has been
in contemplation, the carriage-road to be
continued on from Gabas, upward over the crest of
the range, and so descending to Panticosa and the
plains of Aragon. It is a singular fact that at
present, from the Bay of Biscay to the Mediterranean,
there is not one such highway over any portion of
the chain, but solely around the two extremities.
The only midway access from country to country, (except
a poor cart-road from Pau to Jaca,) is by mule-paths,
or oftener difficult trails and passes known chiefly
to the blithe contrabandista.
Mournfully, yet with philosophy, we
muse on these withholden glories, as we drive rapidly
homeward. Umbrellas shut off the scenery where
the mists do not, and we are forced to introspection.
We resort for comfort to praising each other for bearing
the disappointment so well. We laud each other’s
cheerfulness under affliction. After all,
“Into each life some rain must fall,
Some days must be dark and dreary.”
We solace ourselves with the most
fulsome mutual adulation, uncriticised by the stolid
coachman; and as we roll down the long descent back
to Eaux Chaudes, our disappointment wears gradually
away; at Hell Bridge, we have become quite angelic;
and we respond to Madame Baudot’s condoling
welcome almost with hilarity.
VII.
The last wrinkles of regret are smoothed
away by a sumptuous luncheon. It competes even
with that at Laruns, which we have set up as henceforth
the standard, the model, the criterion, the ultimate
ideal, of all luncheons. Of a truth, this chef
is proving himself a worthy son-in-law.
It has set in for a rainy afternoon,
and this comforts us surprisingly. If it had
cleared after all, on our return here to Eaux Chaudes,
and the blue had opened into bloom overhead, I do
not know what would have been said of the climate,
but we should have held very strong opinions concerning
it. As it is, we can lay the fault on Fate, not
on any misplanning. This is an inestimable relief.
We did our part. We went more than half
way. The blame was Fate’s, not ours.
Fate is the one, therefore, that merits the abuse.
It is a solace to put the blame squarely where it
belongs, and a greater solace still to abuse the absent.
But need we spend the rest of the
day at Eaux Chaudes? The hotel is cosy and seems
almost a home, but the wet little street has nothing
to invite us. We are not going to Gabas again.
On that point we are resolved. The Pic du Midi
has forfeited all claims. Goust we can return
to visit. We call another caucus, and
in an hour, warm farewells have been spoken to Madame,
and we are atop of our breack, on the watery way to
Eaux Bonnes.