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A Midsummer Drive Through the Pyrenees

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Title: A Midsummer Drive Through the Pyrenees

Author: Edwin Asa Dix


        
Release date: January 26, 2005 [eBook #14812]
                Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

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A MIDSUMMER DRIVE THROUGH THE PYRENEES

by

EDWIN ASA DIX, M.A.

Ex-Fellow in History of the College of New Jersey at Princeton

Illustrated

New York & London
G.P. Putnam's Sons
The Knickerbocker Press

1890







[Illustration: A DIFFICULT BIT ON THE ROUTE THERMALE.]




"How comes it to pass," wondered a traveler, over twenty years ago,
"that, when the American people think it worth while to pay a visit to
Europe almost exclusively to see Switzerland and Italy; when in 1860
twenty-one thousand Americans visited Rome and only seven thousand
English; so few should think it worth while to visit the Pyrenees? It is
certainly the only civilized country we have visited without finding
Americans there before us. Is it accident or caprice, or part of a
system of leaving it to the last,--which 'last' never comes? The feast
is provided,--where are the guests? The French Pyrenees form one of the
loveliest gardens in Europe and a perfect place for a summer holiday.
'La beauté ici est sereine et le plaisir est pur.'"

The query is still unanswered to-day. The stream of summer journeyings
to Europe has swollen to a river; it has overflowed to the Arctic Ocean,
to the Baltic, to the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. The Pyrenees--a
garden not only, but a land of sterner scenery as well,--almost alone
remain by our nation of travelers unvisited and unknown.




CONTENTS.


CHAPTER I.

IN PERSPECTIVE


CHAPTER II.

A BISCAYAN BEACH


CHAPTER III.

BAYONNE, THE INVINCIBLE


CHAPTER IV.

SAINT JOHN OF LIGHT


CHAPTER V.

THE CITY OF THE ARROW-PIERCED SAINT


CHAPTER VI.

AN OLD SPANISH MINIATURE


CHAPTER VII.

AN ERA IN TWILIGHT


CHAPTER VIII.

"THE LITTLE PARIS OF THE SOUTH,"


CHAPTER IX.

THE WARM WATERS AND THE PEAK OF THE SOUTH


CHAPTER X.

THE GOOD WATERS OF THE ARQUEBUSADE


CHAPTER XI.

OVER THE HIGHWAY OF THE HOT SPRINGS


CHAPTER XII.

MIRRORS AND MOUNTAINS


CHAPTER XIII.

A COLOSSEUM OF THE GODS


CHAPTER XIV.

THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW


CHAPTER XV.

THE VALLEY OF THE SUN


CHAPTER XVI.

THE INTERLAKEN OF THE PYRENEES


CHAPTER XVII.

OUT TOWARD THE PLAIN



ILLUSTRATIONS.

A DIFFICULT BIT ON THE ROUTE THERMALE, FRONTISPIECE

BEACH AND VILLA EUGÉNIE AT BIARRITZ

"HERE TOO ARE THE FISHERMEN'S CABINS,"

EN CACOLET

A BAYONNE ARCADE

A CONSPICUOUS ENTRY INTO ST. JEAN DE LUZ

THE CAMERA AT THE CUSTOM-HOUSE

A DISILLUSIONIZING LEGEND

THE LEGEND AS REFRAIN

A BÉARNAIS MARKET-WOMAN

A SYMBOL OF VENGEANCE

DULL PROSPECTS AT GABAS

CAILLOU IN COSTUME

THE BELLES AND DAMES OF GOUST

ROAD-MENDERS ON THE PASS

"ACCOUTRED AS SHE IS, SHE PLUNGES IN,"

"THE TOWN IS WAITING FOR THE DILIGENCE,"

A CAFÉ CONJURING-SCENE

LAC DE GAUBE AND VIGNEMALE

ONE CORNER OF THE OMNIBUS

THE CIRQUE OF GAVARNIE FROM THE CHAOS

THE INN-YARD AT GRIP

"THERE IS NAUGHT OF THE PRETENTIOUS ABOUT THE HOTEL D'ANGLETERRE,"

PIC DE LA PIQUE, AND PATH TO THE PORT DE VÉNASQUE

THE EVENING FÊTE AT BIGORRE


MAP.

RELIEF-MAP OF THE CENTRAL PYRENEES.






CHAPTER I.

IN PERSPECTIVE.

  "In fortune's empire blindly thus we go;
    We wander after pathless destiny,
  Whose dark resorts since prudence cannot know,
    In vain it would provide for what shall be."


A trip to the Pyrenees is not in the Grand Tour. It is not even in any
southerly extension of the Grand Tour. A proposition to exploit them
meets a dubious reception. Pictures arise of desolate gorges; of lonely
roads and dangerous trails; of dismal roadside inns, where, when you
halt for the night, a "repulsive-looking landlord receives the unhappy
man, exchanges a look of ferocious intelligence with the driver,"--and
the usual melodramatic midnight carnage probably ensues. The Pyrenees
seem to echo the motto of their old counts, "_Touches-y, si tu l'oses_!"
the name seems to stand vaguely for untested discomforts, for clouds and
chasms, and Spanish banditti in blood-red _capas_; to be, in a word, a
symbol of an undiscovered country which would but doubtfully reward a
resolve to discover.

Yet there is a fascination in the project, as we discuss a summer tour.
There, we know, are mountains whose sides are nearly Alpine, whose
shoulders are of snow and glacier, whose heads rise to ten and eleven
thousand feet above the sea. There, we know, must be savage
scenery,--ravines, cliffs, ice-rivers, as in the Alps; valleys and
streams and fair pastures as well, and a richer southern sunlight over
the uplands; besides a people less warped by tourists, intensely
tenacious of the past, and still tingling with their old local love of
country,--a people with whom, "to be a Béarnais is greater than to be a
Frenchman."

To visit the Pyrenees, too, will be almost to live again in the Middle
Ages. The Roman, the Moor, the Paladin, Froissart, Henry of Navarre,
have marked the region both in romance and in soberer fact. Its valleys
have individual histories; its aged towns and castles, stirring
biographies. The provinces on its northern flanks, once a centre, a
nucleus, of old French chivalry, are saturated with mediæval adventure.
One visits the Alps to be in the tide of travel, to find health in the
air, to feel the religion of noble mountains. In the Pyrenees is all
this, and more,--the present and the past as well. As we call down the
shades of old chroniclers from the dust of upper library tiers, we grow
more and more in desire of a closer acquaintance. Cæsar, Charlemagne,
Roland, the Black Prince, Gaston Phoebus, Montgomery and knightly King
Henry stand in ghostly armor and beckon us on.


II.

Facts of detail prove farther to seek. We inquire almost in vain for
travelers' notes on the Pyrenees. Those who had written on Spanish
travel spoke of the range admiringly. But these authors, we find,
invariably, only passed by the eastern extremity, or the western, of the
great mountain wall; the mountains themselves they did not visit. Search
in the large libraries brings out a few scant volumes of Pyrenean
travel, but all, with two or three exceptions, bear date within the
first three-fifths of the century. It is with books, often, as with the
_Furançon_, the wine of the Pyrenees, and with certain other vintages:
age improves them only up to a certain limit; when put away longer than
a generation, they lose value.

Taine's glowing _Tour_,[1] itself made nearly thirty years ago, is a
delight, almost a marvel; the style, the torrent of simile, the vivid
thought, rank it as a classic. But M. Taine's is less a book of travel
than a work of art; in the iridescence of the descriptions, you lose the
reflection of the things described. Even hand-books, the way-clearing
lictors of travel, prove, as to the Pyrenees region, first scarce and
then scanty. The few we unearth in the stores are armed only with the
usual perfunctory fasces of facts,--cording information into stiff,
labeled bunches, marshaling details into cramped and characterless
order, scrutinizing the ground with a microscope, never surveying it in
bird's-eye view. Two recent novels we eagerly buy, hearing that their
scenes are laid in that vicinity; but each merely speaks, in easy
omniscience, of the "distant chain of blue mountains," or of the
"far-off snow-peaks outlined against the horizon," and the fiction
proves hardly worth sifting for so little fact. Plainly the Pyrenees
lack the voluminous literature of the Alps. Plainly we shall have, in
part, to grope our way. The grooves of Anglo-Saxon travel are many and
deep, lined increasingly with English speech and customs; but they have
not yet been cut into these Spanish mountains.

[1] _Voyage aux Pyrénées_.


The search enlarges the horizon, however. The lonely roads we learn to
qualify in thought with occasional branches of railway; the dangerous
trails, with certain cultivated highways; the dismal road-side inns,
with spasmodic hotels, some even named confidently as "palatial." We
read of spas and springs and French society, more than of chasms and
banditti. We realize in surprise that over all the past of these
mountains flows now in bracing contrast the easy, laughing tide of
modern French fashion,--life so different in detail, so like in kind, to
the day of trapping and tourney.

It is enough:

  "Now are we fix'd, and now we will depart,
  Never to come again till what we seek
  Be found."


III.

Difficulties always lessen after a decision. I casually question a
doughty Colonel, who has been an indefatigable traveler; he has twice
girdled the earth, and has many times cross-hatched Spain; he has not
been to the Pyrenees, but heartily urges the trip. He assures me that
the banditti there have become, he believes, comparatively few; that
they now rarely slit their captives' ears, and that present quotations
for ransoms, so he hears, are ruling very low, much lower than at any
previous epoch. Thus comforted, we interview other traveled friends; but
our goal is to all an unvisited district. We find no kindly Old
Travelers returned from Pyrenees soil, to counsel us, advise us, and
inflict well-meant and inordinate itineraries upon us. At least, then,
we are not alone in our ignorance; it is evident that our knowledge of
the region is not blamably less than that of others, and that the
Pyrenees are in literal fact a land untrodden by Americans.

Questions of accessibility now arise. It seems a far cry from Paris to
the doors of Spain. The Pyrenees are not on the way to Italy, as are the
Alps. They are not on the way around the world, as are the Mountains of
Lebanon and the Sierras. They are not strictly on the way even to Spain.
But we consider. Our country men are streaming to Europe, quick-eyed for
unhackneyed routes, throwing over the continent new and endless
net-works of silver trails. They travel three full days to reach the
Norway fjords, and five in addition to see the high noon of midnight.
They journey a day and night to Berlin, and forty-two hours
consecutively after, without wayside interest, to visit the City of the
Great Czar; if they persevere toward the Kremlin, and around by
"Warsaw's waste of ruin," they will have counted a week in a railway
compartment. Constantinople and Athens lie two thousand miles away,
Naples and Granada nearly as far; all sought, even in summer, though
quivering in the tropics' livid heat. We came round to our Pyrenees: it
needs from Paris but nine hours to Bordeaux, with coigns of vantage
between; in four hours from Bordeaux, you are by the waters of the Bay
of Biscay, or in six, in the centre of the Pyrenees chain.


IV.

And so _La Champagne_ leaves its long wake across the Atlantic, and we
journey down from Paris to the little city of the Maid of Orleans;
wander to Tours, the approximate scene of the great Saracenic defeat;
drive along the quays of Bordeaux, and visit its vineyards and finally
come on, in the luxurious cars of the _Midi_ line, to the shores of
Cantabria and the popular watering-place of Biarritz.




CHAPTER II.

A BISCAYAN BEACH.


Clearly we are in advance of the summer season at Biarritz. It is the
latter part of June. The air is soft and warm, the billows lap the shore
enticingly. But fashion has not yet transferred its court; the van of
the column only has arrived. A few adventurous bathers test the cool
surf; the table-d'hôte is slimly attended; the liverymen confidentially
assure us, as an inducement for drives, that their prices are now
crouching low, for a prodigious leap to follow.

But everything has a pleasing air of anticipation. Since we are to be
out of the season at all, we are glad we are in advance of it. This is
the youth of the summer, not its old age. People are looking forward;
events are approaching, instead of receding; the coming months seem big
with indefinite promise of benefit and pleasure.

We quickly become imbued with the general hopefulness of the place.
Every one has the look of one making ready. You hear, all day long, when
far enough from the waves, a vague, joyous hum of bustle pervading the
town. The enterprising click of hammer or trowel falls constantly on the
ear. The masons are at work upon the new villas, and our hotel is
completing a fine addition for a café; the stores along the busy little
main street are being put in order, the windows alluringly stocked, and
bright awnings unrolled above them, fenders from the summer's heat. The
hotels are fairly awake. Everything is rejoicing that the
semi-hibernation is over.

[Illustration: RELIEF MAP OF THE CENTRAL PYRENEES]

Biarritz, the town, is as delightful, if not as picturesque, as we had
hoped. Perhaps it is too modern to be picturesque. In this part of the
world at least, one rather requires the picturesque to be allied with
the old. The nucleus of Biarritz is old, but that is out of sight in the
modern overgrowth; Biarritz, as it is, is of this half century.

This is not, on the whole, to be regretted. Biarritz has no history, no
past of associations, no landmarks to be guarded. Vandalism in the form
of the modern rebuilder can here work more good than harm. Save for its
location at the edge of the wild Basque country, and what it has seen,
itself sheltered by obscurity, of the forays of that restless people,
the place has little to tell. It is a watering-place, pure and simple,
buoyed entirely by the prospering ebb and flow of modern fashion. Let us
take it as of to-day, not of yesterday, content to seek its charms under
that aspect alone, enjoying it for itself, not for its pedigree.

Biarritz is a prerogative instance of the magnetism of royalty,--of the
social power of the court as an institution. It was a watering-place, in
a small way, before Eugénie's advent; but there was not a tithe of its
present size and popularity. In 1840, it numbered in all not more than
fifty houses, a few of them lodgings or humble cafés, but the greater
part staid little whitewashed summer-dwellings with green verandas and
occasional roof-balconies; set down irregularly, without street or
system, along the sunny slopes of the bluff. Murray's _Handbook_ for
1848 gives it passing notice, and disrespectfully styles it the dullest
place upon earth for one having no resources of friends upon the spot.
But in the modern edition of forty years later, the same manual has come
to describe the place in a very different strain; assigns it a
population of nearly 6,000; details, with respect, its fashionable rank,
its villas and increasing hotels, its graded streets and driveways; and
among other things adds the simple remark that "about twenty-one
thousand strangers now visit Biarritz every year." Evidently there has
been some advance within the span.

It was the Empress of the French who distilled the life-elixir for the
quiet little resort. As a maiden, she had spent long summers by its
shore, and when she was become the first lady in the land, she turned
still to Biarritz, and the midsummer tide of fashion followed after her.
Across the downs, on the bluff, stands the _Villa Eugénie_, the handsel
of Biarritz's prosperity; and here about us is the town that grew up to
make her court.

Fair France lost as well as gained when the burning walls of the
Tuileries crashed in. In these days of the plain French Republic,--of
its sober, unornamental, business government,--the contrast is vivid
with the glitter and "go" of Louis Napoleon's régime. And the nation
feels it, and involuntarily grieves over it. The twenty years have far
from sufficed to smother that certain inborn Gallic joy in
monarchy,--autocratic rule, a brilliant court, leadership in fashion,
and all the pomp and pageantry which the French love so well.

Little more than a century ago, stable governments seemed at last to be
ruling the world; civilization had come to believe itself finally at
peace; war, it was complacently said, had finished its work; the coming
cycles would prove so far tamed as to have outgrown fightings and
revolutions. Cultured modern history, like Nature, would refuse to
proceed _per saltum_. Yet the hundred years since gone by have brought
wars as fierce, "leaps" of government as tremendous, as any century in
the past. It is this same fair France that has contributed more than her
share of them, and the Fall of the Second Empire was one of the most
dramatic. The world is not, after all, so securely merged from the
darkness of the Dark Ages. Within that short century, in Paris itself,
the very capital of cultured Europe, there has twice uprisen a human
savagery immeasurably exceeding all the tales we are to tell of the
fierce past of the Pyrenees.

It needs an effort to-day to picture the social power of France and
Eugénie twenty years ago. The mantle has not fallen to England and
Alexandra. Only a people like the French can endue fashion with
absolutism.

So it was, that when the Empress came to Biarritz, "all the world" came
also. From the building of her villa dates the true origin of Biarritz.
From that time its growth was progressive and sound. When the empire
finally fell, this creature of its making had already passed the
danger-point, and so stood unshaken; Biarritz had become too popular,
its clientèle too devoted, to part company. Even in the winter it has
its increasing colony; in summer its vogue is beyond caprice. The
sparkle of the royal occupation has gone, and the royal villa is
tenantless; but the place no longer needs a helping hand, for it is
abundantly able to walk alone.

[Illustration: BEACH AND VILLA EUGÉNIE AT BIARRITZ.]


II.

In the afternoon we wander down to the sands. The tide is low. The long
billows of the Bay of Biscay roll smugly in, hypocritical and placid,
with nothing to betray the unenviable reputation they sustain _in mediis
aquis_. The broad, smooth beach is not notably different in kind from
other beaches; but we instantly see the peculiar charm of its location.
The shore sweeps off in a long, lazy crescent, rounding up, a mile or
two to the northward, with the light-house near Bayonne. Southward we
cannot follow it from where we stand, for the near irregularities of
cliff cut it off from sight. Back from the beach rises the bluff,
curving northward with the crescent; at our left it comes boldly down
toward the water, partitioning the beach and breaking up at the edge
into strange, gaunt capes and peninsulas. Black masses of rock, large
and small, are crouching out among the waves, tortured by storms into
misshapen forms and anguished attitudes, patted and petted into
fantastic humps and contortions. The strata dip at an angle of about
twenty-five degrees, and the stone is friable and defenceless.
Soothingly now the water is running over and around these rocks, or
whitens their outlines with foam; granting their piteous torsos, in
merciful caprice, a day's brief respite from the agony of its
scourgings.

The afternoon sun shines brightly against the bathing pavilion,
irradiating its red and yellow brick. Along the narrow; sheltered
platform at its front, sit matronly French dowagers, holding their
daughters, as it were, in leash, and talking of women and things, and
affairs of state. Though early in the season, the beach is well
sprinkled with people. A few attempt the bathing again, but the rest
saunter here and there or enjoy beach-chairs at a stipulated rental. The
elderly French gentleman, a dapper and interesting, specimen rarely
paralleled at home, strolls about contentedly on the asphalt promenade
back from the beach, smoking a cigar and fingering a light bamboo.
Younger men, also well-dressed, pass in couples, or walk with a mother
and daughter,--never with the daughter alone. Boatmen and candy-peddlers
ramble in and out, a Basque fisherman or two linger about the scene, and
dogs, a pony and a captive monkey, add an element of animal life.

Despite its sunny holiday temperament, Biarritz was one of certain
Biscayan villages once denounced as "given up to the worship of the
devil,"--thus denounced by Henry IV's bloodthirsty inquisitor, Pierre de
Lancre, a veritable French Jeffreys, and the same who in 1609 put to
death no less than eight hundred persons on the ground of sorcery. "He
tells us that the devils and malignant spirits banished from Japan and
the Indies took refuge here in the mountains of Labourd. Above all, he
asserts that the young girls of Biarritz, always celebrated for their
beauty, 'have in their left eye a mark impressed by the devil.'"

Happily we have no devil in this nineteenth century, and in the clear
glance of these Biarritz peasants loitering on the sands, we find that
his brand-marks have disappeared with him.

A few of the faces we meet are English; many are Spanish, and show that
Biarritz draws its worshipers from the South as from the North. Indeed,
a large proportion of its summer society wears the mantilla and wields
the fan. Other marks, too, of Spanish dress are here, as where little
girls in many-hued outfit romp along the sands, dragooned by dark-faced
nurses in true Iberian costume. Three or four brilliant red parasols add
amazingly to the general effect of the scene.

We repair to the stone parapet before the pavilion, and gravely paying
our dues for chairs, sit and watch the picture. There is no charge for
sitting on the beach, but this is severely frowned upon at Biarritz. The
dues are two sous per chair, and, with true Continental thrift, they are
always rigorously collected. Whether one wanders into the open square of
the Palais Royal at Paris, or listens to the music in the Place de
Tourny at Bordeaux, or watches the waves at Biarritz, the old woman with
her little black bag at once appears upon the scene. Some Frenchless
friends in Paris, on one occasion, guilelessly seated in the gardens of
the Palais Royal, took the collector simply for a pertinacious
beggar-woman, and waved her airily off. She returned to the charge, of
course, in indignant French, and grew angrier every moment as she found
herself still loftily ignored. A warm fracas was in prospect, when a
passing American fortunately cleared up the complication; the woman
would have called in a gendarme unhesitatingly, to enforce her
diminutive claim.

On the bluff, beyond the pavilion, Eugénie's villa, a square, rich
building of English brick, surveys the scene its existence has brought
about. Around us, on the beach, the nurses sit in the shade of the rocks
and discourse on the respective failings of their charges. Children dig
in the sand with pail and shovel, with the same zest as at home.
Child-nature changes little with locality. So recently from the great
unknown, it is not yet seamed and crusted by environment. I suppose that
children fairly represent the prehistoric man. Impulse, appetite,
passion,--all the gusts of the moment sway them. We quell our emotions
so uniformly, as we grow on, that we finally hardly feel their
struggles. The children have richer life than we, in some respects:

  "Faith and wonder and the primal earth
  Are born into the world with every child."

I make no doubt that Nimrod, or Achilles and Ajax, great children that
they were, as ready to cry as to feast, to laugh as to fight, hunting
mightily, sulking in the tent, or defying the lightning,--intense,
sudden, human all through,--drank down their strong, muddy potion of
existence with a smack far heartier than the reflective sips of life
which civilization has now taught us to take. Childhood is wide and free
and abounding and near to nature, and we can take thoughts from it, and
ponder, perhaps dubiously, on the distance we since have traveled.

The children dig in the sand, and throw it over the nurses, just as they
are doing at Old Orchard and Old Point. Here, with a maid, is a pair of
children who freely show one attribute of childhood not so pleasing as
others,--cruelty. They have a little monkey, fastened by collar and
chain, and it is pitiful and yet ludicrous to see the close watch the
animal keeps on his captors' movements. He has found a slack chain his
best policy, and adapts his every motion anxiously and solicitously to
the leaps of the boy. But the utmost vigilance avails him little. When
the child is weary with running and sudden turns, which have called for
marvelous dexterity of accommodation on the part of the monkey, the
chain is hauled up, with the animal clinging worriedly to it, and he is
flung far out into the fringe of waves, to pick his shivering way up
again and again from the water. These children have a white rat, also,
which they chase over the sand, and souse into puddles, and otherwise
maltreat. It is useless to interfere parentally, and we hardly see our
way to buying either rat or monkey, even to ensure them a peaceable old
age. One wonders why children have this queer taint of cruelty.
Unconscious cruelty it may be, but it seems none the less out of place
in their fresh, unused nature. We outgrow some rude vices as well as
rude virtues, in becoming older, and there is comfort in that.


III.

The bluff, coming out to the sea, cuts off, close at hand, the curve of
the shore toward the south, and we climb by a sloping path. From the
top, we look down upon, the beach we have left; back upon the downs
cluster the numberless private villas which form a feature of Biarritz;
to the left, over the near roofs and hotels of the town, we can see the
first far-off pickets of the Pyrenees; while immediately in front now
appear below us three or four rocky bays and coves, broken by the lines
of the cliff and partly sheltered by the rocks out at sea. "Many of
these rocks," writes an old-time visitor,[2] in the pleasantly aging
English of 1840, "are perforated with holes, so that, with a high sea
and an incoming tide, and always, indeed, in some degree, when the tide
flows, the water pours through these hollows and rents, presenting the
singular appearance of many cascades. Some of the rocks lying close to
the shore, and many of those which form the cliff, are worn into vast
caverns. In these the waves make ceaseless music,--a hollow, dismal
sound, like distant thunder,--and when a broad, swelling wave bounds
into these caverns and breaks in some distant chamber, the shock, to
one standing on the beach, is like a slight earthquake. But when a storm
rises in the Bay of Biscay, and a northwest wind sweeps across the
Atlantic, the scene is grand beyond the power of description. The whole
space covered with rocks, which are scattered over the coast, is an
expanse of foam, boiling whirlpools and cataracts, and the noise of the
tremendous waves, rushing into these vast caverns and lashing their
inner walls, is grander a thousand times than the most terrific
thunder-storm that ever burst from the sky."

[2] INGLIS: Switzerland and the South of France.


In these little coves now float idle pleasure-boats, bright with paint
and listless awnings, and ready to be manned by their stout Basque
rowers. Here, too, are the fishermen's cabins, snugly built in against
the rocks, and garnished with baskets and poles, and with men repairing
their nets. The irregular curves of the bluff, broken here into abrupt
and dislocated masses, lend themselves readily to winding paths, and we
ramble on, curving upward and downward, over short bridges and through
little tunnels under the rocks, each turn giving a new view of the bay
or the town.

Finally we round another promontory, cross a last bridge to a large
rock-islet standing out from the mainland, and lo! the crescent of the
coast is completed, and far to the south we see a low mountain ending
the curve; it is Spain.


IV.

In the dreamy summer stillness, we sit with, content, looking at those
distant hills, listening to the lapping of the waves, watching the sun
sink lower toward the sea. The afternoon sunlight makes a glade across
the waters,--seeming to one from a western sea-board like some
strange disarrangement in the day.

[Illustration: "HERE TOO ARE THE FISHERMEN'S CABINS."]

The rounded mountains before us are indeed in Spain, a communicative
fisherman tells us. At the foot of the outermost, eighteen miles away,
is hidden the old Spanish town of Fuenterrabia. On its other side, in a
hollow of the coast, lies San Sebastian. Nearer us, though well down
along the sweep of the grey clay bluffs, is St. Jean de Luz, which, with
the others, lies on our intended way.

We seem to see, conforming to the crescent of that foreign coast, the
menacing crescent of the Armada, parting from Spanish shores, just three
hundred years ago to a month, to crush Anglo-Saxon civilization. There
before us lies the land of intolerance and bigotry which gave it being,
the land of Philip the Second and his Inquisition. But for Drake and
Howard and England's "wooden walls," events would have moved differently
during the last three centuries,--in our country as in theirs.


V.

The last spark of the sun has disappeared in the water. We turn into the
town in the fading light, passing another large bathing pavilion in a
sheltered cove, and saunter homeward through an undulating street, the
aorta of Biarritz. It is not a wide street, but it is busy and brisk,
and it has a refurbished look like newly scoured metal. Neat
dwelling-houses, guarded behind stone walls and well-kept hedges,
display frequent signs of furnished apartments to let Small and large
shops alternate sociably in the line; there is the _épicerie_ or
grocery-store, with raisins and olives and Albert biscuits in the
window; next is a lace and worsted shop, where black Spanish nettings
vie with gay crotchet-work,--

  "By Heaven, it is a splendid sight to see
  Their rival scarfs of mix'd embroidery,"

all made by hand, and bewilderingly low-priced. Now we come to a
mirrored café, the Frenchman's hearth-side; it compels a détour into the
middle of the street, since the sidewalk is quite preempted by its
chairs and tiny tables. Here is another Spanish store, conspicuous for
its painted tambourines with pendent webs of red and yellow worsted, and
for its spreading fans, color-dashed with exciting pictures of
bull-fights and spangled matadors. A hotel appears next, across the way,
standing back from the street, with: a small, triangular park between;
and then comes a pretentious bric-à-brac bazaar, and another café, and a
confectioner's, and a tobacco-store,--each presided over by a buxom
French matron, affable and vigilant, and clearly the animating spirit of
the establishment.


Tiny carriages of a peculiar species, with donkeys and boy drivers, line
the streets. The carriage holds one,--say an infirm dowager seeking the
afternoon breeze,--and if the driver's attendance is desired, he is able
to run beside it for miles. It is light and noiseless, comfortably
cushioned, always within call, and governed by a beneficently trifling
tariff. These _vinaigrettes_, as they are called, would be appreciated
at home, if habit took kindly to novelties. How greatly they might
simplify problems of calling and shopping! Our conveyances are all
cumbrous. We must have the huge barouche, the coach, the close-shut
coupé. Even the phaeton yields to the high T-cart. But convention is
autocratic, and would frown on these vinaigrettes as it frowns on many
useful ideas. Another unfortunate victim of its taboo is the
sedan-chair, which would be lustily stared at to-day, yet the utility of
which might be made positively inestimable. One who reads of the Chinese
palanquins, or sees the carrying-chairs of Switzerland, convenient and
always in demand, or who watches these agile little vinaigrettes darting
along the ways, wonders that similar devices do not force their way, if
need be, into universal favor.

Another mode of conveyance, once peculiarly popular with Biarritz, might
be more difficult of exportation. This was the _promenade en cacolet_.
The town of Bayonne is but five miles distant, by a delightful road, and
formerly, particularly before the railroad came in, to ridicule old
ways, every one went to Bayonne _en cacolet_. It is no longer so, and
the world has lost a unique custom. The contrivance was very simple: the
motive power was a donkey or a horse, and the conveyance consisted of a
wooden frame or yoke fitting across the animal's back, with a seat
projecting from each side. One seat was for the driver, usually a lively
Basque peasant-woman; the other was for the passenger. There was a small
arm-piece, at the outside of each seat, and generally there was a
cushion. This was once a favorite means of travel between Bayonne and
Biarritz. It was expeditious, enlivening,--and highly insecure; that was
one of its charms. Throughout the ride there was a ludicrous titillation
of insecurity; but it was greatest at the start and at the finish. For,
the seats being evenly balanced, to mount was in itself high art. Driver
and passenger needed to spring at precisely the same instant, or the
result was dust and ashes. Trial after trial was needed by the neophyte;
he must be, as an eye-witness[3] of long ago aptly describes it, "as
watchful of the mutual signal as a file of soldiers who wait the command
'make ready,--present,--fire!' A second's delay,--a second's
precipitation,--proves fatal; the seat is attained, and at the same
moment up goes the opposite empty seat, and down goes the equestrian
between the horse's feet.... In descending, it is still worse; because
there is more hurry, more impatience, on arriving at the end of a
journey; and an injudicious descent does not visit its effects upon one
but upon both travelers; for unless the person who descends be extremely
quick in his motions, his seat flies up before he has quite left it, and
oversets him, and the opposite weight, of course, goes plump to the
ground,--with as fatal effects as cutting the hammock-strings of a
middy's berth."

[3] INGLIS.


[Illustration]

Perilous balancing feats and a high degree of skill were evidently
demanded of him who would journey _en cacolet_. Requiring thus a special
training, so to speak, as well as a nice equivalence in weight between
passenger and driver difficult to always realize, its use is not likely
to supersede that of wheeled vehicles. To take a ride _en cacolet_, one
might have a long hunt before finding a driver who should be his proper
counterpoise; and it would be often inconvenient, not to say
impracticable, thus to have to order one's driver according to measure.

It is the evening dining-hour as we find ourselves at last in the open
court-yard of our hotel and seek the welcoming light of its _salle_. The
hotels of Biarritz are handsome, even to elegance,--elegance which seems
wasted on the few people now in them. But numbers do not seem to affect
the anxious concern of Continental hotel-keepers. The same elaborate and
formal table-d'hôte is served for our small company and a few others, as
will, later on, be prepared for a houseful of guests. The waiters don
the same ducal costume and with it the same grave decorum; and our
attendant Ganymede, bending respectfully to present his laden salver,
watches my selection of a portion of the pullet with as anxious
solicitude as could be shown by the mother hen herself. The solemnity of
a table-d'hôte, and the silencing effect it has on the most talkative,
is invariable, as it is inexplicable, and accents sharply the contrast
with the breezy clatter of the American summer hotel dining-hall. This
is not to say that either is, in all ways, to be preferred. Each in its
own setting. There is a comforting stir and whir about the great, bare,
sociable dining-hall at Crawford's or at the Grand Union, which causes a
European table-d'hôte utterly to pale and dwindle. And there is a
satisfying quiet, a self-respecting, ritualistic calm, in the frescoed
salle-a-manger of the Schweizerhof, or of the Grand Hotel at Biarritz,
which makes its American rival seem impetuous and unrestful, and even a
trifle garish. 'Tis hard to choose. Man and mood both vary. There is no
parallel. The two modes of dining are as wide apart as the countries
and their characteristics, and each is, in the best sense, distinctly
typical.


VI

There is music during the evening in the little park we passed, and the
best of Biarritz assembles to enjoy the programme. We charter chairs
with the rest. Tables go with the chairs without extra charge, waiters
follow up the tables, and soon all the world is sipping its coffee or
cordials, and listening to Zampa. Outside, around the fence enclosing
the little park, revolves an endless procession of the poorer
people,--thrifty folk who are here as earners, not spenders, and would
not dream of melting their two sous into a chair. Round the small
enclosure they go, by couples or threes, like asteroids round the sun,
staring with interest at the more aristocratic assemblage within,--just
as the family circle stares at the boxes. And the music sings on
pleasantly for all, this mild summer evening in Biarritz.




CHAPTER III.

BAYONNE, THE INVINCIBLE.

     "I am here on purpose to visit the sixteenth century; one makes a
     journey for the sake of changing not place but ideas."


In the morning, a dashing equipage rolls up to the doorway of the Grand
Hotel. A "breack" is its Gallicized English name. It has four white
horses, with bells on the harness, and the driver is richly bedight in a
scarlet-faced coat, blazing with buttons and silver lace; a black glazed
hat, and very white duck trousers. We ascend, the ladder is removed, the
porter bows, his thanks, the whip signals, and we roll out of the
court-yard for a six-mile drive northward to Bayonne.

We take the sea-road in going, following the bluff as it trends
northward, and having dazzling views of blue sky and blue water. There
is a fresh, sweet, morning breeze, which exhilarates. Truly here is the
joy of travel! Kilometre-stones pass, one after another, to the rear.
Still the road presses on, winding over the downs, or between long rows
of pines and poplars standing even and equidistant for mile after mile.
The light-house at the end of the crescent beach comes nearer. Few teams
are met, and fewer travelers; for the main highway to Bayonne, which
lies inland and by which we are to return, is shorter than this, and
draws to itself the most of the traffic.

At length, the light-house is neared, and to the right Bayonne is seen,
not far off. The breack turns to the right along the river Adour, which
here runs to the sea, and, skirting the long stone jetties, we roll
toward town by the _Allées Marines_, a wide promenade along the river,
cross the bridge, rattle through the streets, and draw up before the
hotel in the open square with a jingle and whip-cracking and general
hullaballoo which fills the street urchins with awe and gives unmixed
joy to our jolly driver.


II.

Bayonne has been a centre.

A few cities are suns, the rest planets. This, with regard to their
importance, not their size.

If Bordeaux is the sun of southwestern French commerce, Bayonne has at
least been the most important planet, with the towns and villages of a
wide district for its satellites.

Here we catch the first breath of the bracing mediæval air we shall
breathe in the Pyrenees. Bayonne has still a trace of the free,
out-of-door spirit of its lawless prime. Miniature epics, more than one,
have clustered around it. The rallying-cry, "Men of Bayonne!" has always
appealed to the intensest local pride to be found perhaps in France, and
the boast of the city still is that it has never been conquered. Looking
back to the sharp times when every near warfare centred about
Bayonne,--when feudal enmities were constantly outcropping on quick
pretexts,--when the issue always gathered itself into hand-to-hand
encounter, and was determined by personal prowess,--the boast is not
meaningless.

The Basques, who are close neighbors to Bayonne, make the same boast.
As Basques and Bayonnais were always fighting, their respective boasts
seem to be continuing the conflict. But these old feuds, desperately
bitter, were after all local and guerilla-like, and the advantages
ephemeral. At few times did either people clash arms with the other in a
general war. Thus neither conquered the other, and in peace their boasts
joined hands against all comers.


III.

Bestriding both the river Nive and the swift Adour, Bayonne seems a
healthy and healthful city, viewed in this June sunshine. But there is
little of the new about it. The horses are taken from the breack, we
leave at the hotel a requisition for lunch, and move forth for a survey.
The chief streets are wide and airy, but a turn places one instantly in
an older France. We ramble with curiosity in and out among the streets
and shops, finding no one preeminent attraction, but an infinite number
of minor ones which maintain the equation. In fact there is little for
the guide-book sight-seer in Bayonne. The cathedral leaves only a dim
impression of being in no wise remarkable. The citadel affords, it is
said, a wide-ranging view, but we prefer the arcades and the people to
the heat of the climb. The shops along the square are small but
characteristic; they are evidently for the Bayonnais themselves rather
than for strangers; this gives them their only charm for strangers. But
taken in its entirety and not in single effects, the town is wholly
pleasing. These dark, ancient arcades, its old houses, its rough-cobbled
pavements, its general appearance of fustiness, give it a charmingly
individual air.

They contrast it, however, completely with Biarritz. Bayonne is a staid
and serious city, Biarritz a youthful-hearted resort. Bayonne is
reminiscent of the past; Biarritz is alive with its present. The genie
of modern improvement has not yet come, to rebuild Bayonne. Neither
fashion nor commerce has sufficiently rubbed the lamp. It holds
unlessened its long-time population of about thirty thousand souls; it
still drives its comfortable, trade as the second port of southwestern
France; it is known as enjoying a mild commercial specialty or two, as
in the line of textiles, particularly wools and woolen fabrics; and it
displays an artless pride in its reputation for excellent chocolate. It
even pets, a little suburb of winter visitors, and it has caught some
quickening rays from the summer prosperity of its neighbor. But it will
never feel the bounding impulse of rejuvenescence that has come to
Biarritz. Bayonne has no potentialities. It will continue in its
afternoon of peace, of easy, quiet thrift, contentedly aside from the
main current of events, recounting its traditions, prodigiously and
harmlessly proud of its local prestige; like a tribal chieftain of the
homage of his clan.

[Illustration]

Basques abound in the streets, and the varied costumes to be seen show
the influence of that strange race. There are Spaniards here, too, and
Jews in plenty, mingling with the native French element. The men wear
the _berret_, a wool cap, like that of the Scotch lowlander, but
smaller. It is of dark blue or brown, and in universal use from Bordeaux
southward. When capping the Basque, particularly, with his rusty velvet
sack, crimson sash, dark knee-breeches and stockings, and the sandals or
wooden sabots worn on the feet, its effect is vividly picturesque. The
poorer women, as elsewhere on the Continent, become hard-featured and
muscular with age; saving a few beggars, they all seem to be
busy,--carrying burdens, washing linen, watching their huckster-stalls
or the dark little shops under the arcades. Here, however, the men
themselves are not idle. One seldomer sees in southern France a sight
frequent in Italy and many other parts of Europe,--that of a woman
toilsomely dragging a hand-cart or shouldering a burden while her spouse
walks idly by and smokes a thankful pipe.

Diminutive donkeys, hardy and hoarse, are in great use, and we hear in
the streets their plaintive and sonorous denunciations of men and
manners. The donkey here seems to take the place of the dog, which in
Holland and Scandinavia is taught the ways of constant and praiseworthy
usefulness. There, with a voluble old woman for yoke-fellow, he draws
the small market-carts about the streets and grows lusty-limbed in the
service. Here, the donkey does duty for both, dog and old woman, and
must develop both muscle and tongue to offset their respective
specialties.


IV.

An afternoon of peace, such towns as Bayonne have earned and gained.
This one has added few notable pages to universal history, but its own
personal biography would be an exciting one. It is worn with adventure,
and old before its time. The quarrelings of its hot youth, the tension
of strife and insecurity, the life of alarms it has lived, have aged it.
They have aged many another city of Europe, and endeared the blessing of
repose.

They were different days, those of the past of Bayonne. These streets
are narrow, the houses stoutly walled, because they were built for siege
as well as shelter. The doorways are low-browed, the stone-lined rooms
little lighter than caves, because every man's hand might rise against
his neighbor, and every man's hovel become his castle. Humanity was a
hopeless discord; individual security lay only in individual strength.
It is hard to conceive clearly the fierce life of the Darker Ages. The
rough jostling, the discomfort and pitilessness, the utter animality of
it all,--it is hard to conceive it even inadequately. The curtest
historical sweep from then to now, shows how far the world has come. The
savage unrest of slum and faubourg to-day shows too how far the world
has yet to go. Not till civilization becomes more than a veneer, will it
lose its liability to crack.

The picture is not wholly dark. There were many of the humanities. There
was culture and thought and refinement, much of it of a high type. Light
and shade,--both were strongly limned. But in the mass, it was
barbarism. For the lower classes, occupation, brawling; mental
thermometer at zero; cruelty and greed the ethical code. "You should
feel here," declares Taine,[4] "what men felt six hundred years ago,
when they swarmed forth from their hovels, from their unpaved,
six-feet-wide streets, sinks of uncleanness, and reeking with fever and
leprosy; when their unclad bodies, undermined by famine, sent a thin
blood to their brutish brains; when wars, atrocious laws, and legends of
sorcery filled their dreams with vivid and melancholy images." Hear him
tell over one of the trenchant tales from the annals of Bayonne:

[4] _Tour Through the Pyrenees_; translated by J. SAFFORD FISKE, New
York: Henry Holt & Co.


V.

"Pé de Puyane was a brave man and a skillful sailor, who, in his day,
was Mayor of Bayonne and admiral; but he was harsh with his men, like
all who have managed vessels, and would any day rather fell a man than
take off his cap. He had long waged war against the seamen of Normandy,
and on one occasion he hung seventy of them to his yards, cheek by jowl
with some dogs. He hoisted on his galleys red flags, signifying death
and no quarter, and led to the battle of Écluse the great Genoese ship
Christophle, and managed his hands so well that no Frenchman escaped;
for they were all drowned or killed, and the two admirals, Quieret and
Bahuchet, having surrendered themselves, Bahuchet had a cord tightened
around his neck, while Quieret had his throat cut. That was good
management; for the more one kills of his enemies, the less he has of
them. For this reason, the people of Bayonne, on his return, entertained
him with such a noise, such a clatter of horns, of cornets, of drums and
all sorts of instruments, that it would have been impossible on that day
to hear even the thunder of God.

"It happened that the Basques would no longer pay the tax upon cider,
which was brewed at Bayonne for sale in their country, Pé de Puyane
said that the merchants, of the city should carry them no more, and that
if any one carried them any, he should have his hand cut off. Pierre
Cambo, indeed, a poor man, having carted two hogsheads of it by night,
was led out upon the market-place, before Notre Dame de Saint-Léon,
which was then building, and had his hand amputated, and the veins
afterwards stopped with red-hot irons; after that, he was driven in a
tumbrel throughout the city, which was an excellent example; for the
smaller folk should-always do: the bidding of men in high position.

"Afterwards, Pé de Puyane having assembled the hundred peers in the
town-house, showed them that the Basques, being traitors, rebels toward
the seigniory of Bayonne, should no longer keep the franchises which had
been granted them; that the seigniory of Bayonne, possessing the
sovereignty of the sea, might with justice impose a tax in all the
places to which the sea rose, as if they were in its port, and that
accordingly the Basques should henceforth pay for passing to
Villefranche, to the bridge of the Nive, the limit of high tide. All
cried out that that was but just, and Pé de Puyane declared the toll to
the Basques; but they all fell to laughing, saying they were not dogs of
sailors like the mayor's subjects. Then having come in force, they beat
the bridgemen, and left three of them for dead.

"Pé said nothing, for he was no great talker; but he clinched his teeth,
and looked so terribly around him that none dared ask him what he would
do nor urge him on nor indeed breathe a word. From the first Saturday in
April to the middle of August, several men were beaten, as well
Bayonnais as Basques, but still war was not declared, and when they
talked of it to the mayor, he turned his back.

"The twenty-fourth day of August, many noble men among the Basques, and
several young people, good leapers and dancers, came to the castle of
Miot for the festival of Saint Bartholomew. They feasted and showed off,
the whole day, and the young people who jumped the pole, with their red
sashes and white breeches, appeared adroit and handsome. That night came
a man who talked low to the mayor, and he, who ordinarily wore a grave
and judicial air, suddenly had eyes as bright as those of a youth who
sees the coming of his bride. He went down his staircase with four
bounds, led out a band of old sailors who were come one by one,
covertly, into the lower hall, and set out by dark night with several of
the wardens, having closed the gates of the city for fear that some
traitor, such as there are everywhere, should go before them.

"Having arrived at the castle, they found the draw-bridge down and the
postern open, so confident and unsuspecting were the Basques, and
entered, cutlasses drawn and pikes forward, into the great hall. There
were killed seven young men, who had barricaded themselves behind tables
and would there make sport with their dirks, but the good halberds, well
pointed and sharp as they were, soon silenced them. The others, having
closed the gates, from within, thought that they would have power to
defend themselves or time to flee; but the Bayonne marines, with their
great axes, hewed down the planks, and split the first brains which
happened to be near. The mayor, seeing that the Basques were tightly
girt with their red sashes, went about saying, (for he was unusually
facetious on days of battle,) 'Lard these fine gallants for me! Forward
the spit into their flesh justicoats!' And, in fact, the spits went
forward so that all were perforated and opened, some through and
through, so that you might have seen daylight through them, and that the
hall, half an hour after, was full of pale and red bodies, several bent
over benches, others in a pile in the corners, some with their noses
glued to the table like drunkards, so that a Bayonnais, looking at them,
said, 'This is the veal market!' Many, pricked from behind, had leaped
through the windows, and were found next morning, with cleft head or
broken spine, in the ditches.

"There remained only five men alive, noblemen, two named D'Urtubie, two
De Saint-Pé, and one De Lahet, whom the mayor had set aside as a
precious commodity. Then, having sent some one to open the gates of
Bayonne and command the people to come, he ordered them to set fire to
the castle. It was a fine sight, for the castle burned from midnight
until morning. As each turret, wall or floor fell, the people,
delighted, raised a great shout. There were volleys of sparks in the
smoke and flames, that stopped short, then began again suddenly, as at
public rejoicings, so that the warden, an honorable advocate and a great
literary man, uttered this saying: 'Fine festival for Bayonne folk; for
the Basques, great barbecue of hogs!'

"The castle being burned, the mayor said to the five noblemen that he
wished to deal with them with all friendliness, and that they should
themselves be judges if the tide came as far as the bridge. Then he had
them fastened two by two to the arches, until the tide should rise,
assuring them that they were in a good place for seeing. The people were
all on the bridge and along the banks, watching the swelling of the
flood. Little by little it mounted to their breasts, then to their
necks, and they threw back their heads so as to lift their mouths a
little higher. The people laughed aloud, calling out to them that the
time for drinking had come, as with the monks at matins, and that they
would have enough for the rest of their days. Then the water entered the
mouth and nose of the three who were lowest; their throats gurgled as
when bottles are filled, and the people applauded, saying that the
drunkards swallowed too fast and were going to strangle themselves out
of pure greediness.

"There remained only the two men D'Urtubie, bound to the principal arch,
father and son, the son a little lower down. When the father saw his
child choking, he stretched out his arms with such force that a cord
broke; but that was all, and the hemp cut into his flesh without his
being able to get any further. Those above, seeing that the youth's eyes
were rolling, while the veins on his forehead were purple and swollen,
and that the water bubbled around him with his hiccough, called him
baby, and asked why he had sucked so hard, and if nurse was not coming
soon to put him to bed. At this, the father cried out like a wolf, spat
into the air at them, and called them butchers and cowards. That
offended them so, that they began throwing stones at him, with such sure
aim that his white head was soon reddened and his right eye gushed out;
it was small loss to him, for shortly after the mounting wave shut up
the other.

"When the water was gone down, the mayor commanded that the five bodies,
which hung with necks twisted and limp, should be left a testimony to
the Basques that the water of Bayonne did come up to the bridge and that
the toll was justly due from them. He then returned home amidst the
acclamations of his people, who were delighted that they had so good a
mayor, a sensible man, a great lover of justice, quick in wise
enterprises, and who rendered to every man his due."


VI.

One asks where were the preceding ages of civilization. Where was the
influence of Babylonia and Egypt, of Athens and of Rome? Here in
mid-Europe, nearly two thousand years after Socrates, and in the second
millenary of the white light of Christianity, men were like wolves, nay
worse, rending their prey or each other not under the lashing of hunger
but from very ferocity.

By way of contrast, take a fête given in Bayonne in happier years. An
account of it, garnered from old records, I translate from the French of
Lagrèze.[5] Elizabeth, sister of Charles IX and wife of Philip of Spain,
was returning from the Baths of Cauterets and passing through the city;
the fête was in her honor. Charles was there, the King of France, with
the queen-mother, Catherine de Medici; Marguerite of Valois, and her
future husband, the young Henry of Navarre.

[5] LAGRÈZE: _La Société et les Moeurs en Béarn._


"The place for the fête had been well chosen: it was an isle of the
Adour. In the centre, a border of ancient oaks encircling a grassy glade
framed it round into a kind of arboreal parlor. Under the shade of these
great trees, in the multitude of their leafy nooks, were disposed the
tables. That of royalty rose in the midst, elevated above all the rest;
it was reached by four grassy steps.

"Decorated barges transported the guests to the enchanted isle; at their
approach, in honor of the arrival, strains of soft music fell upon the
ear. The musicians represented Neptune, Arion, six tritons, three
sirens, and numberless minor marine deities; the sirens chanted sweet
songs of romance and chivalry, seeking to approve the fabled charm of
siren voices.

"Rivulets of water, skillfully led in along tiny grooves, serpentined
among the parterres, half hidden in rare and brilliant flowers. Dainty
shepherdesses in waiting line stretched hand in hand to the water's
edge, and formed a species of avenue leading to the table of honor.

"In advance of the retinue went Orpheus and Linus, accompanied by three
nymphs, reciting verses to their Majesties,--who had, however, at this
moment, more eyes than ears, and could not cease admiring the bevy of
shepherdesses in their picturesque costumes, brightly colored and so
varied. These shepherdesses, forming afterward into separate groups,
each group the graceful rival of the next, wore the costumes of the
different provinces and danced to music the respective dances there in
usage: those of Poitiers to the music of the bagpipe, those of Provence
to the kettle-drums, the Champenoises to the small hautboys, the violins
and the tambourines, and so for the rest.

"The aged trees which covered with shade the banqueting tables formed a
vast octagonal hall, in the centre of which rose in all its majesty a
gigantic oak-tree. At its base vaulted the jet of a fountain, the limpid
waters springing from a basin of glittering shells.

"The table of honor was taken by the king; his mother, Catherine de
Medici; the Duke of Anjou, who was afterward to become Henry III; the
Queen of Spain; Henry of Navarre, (afterward Henry IV,) and Margot, his
future wife.

"The repast was served with promptness. Six proficient bagpipe-players
went before five shepherds and ten shepherdesses, who advanced three by
three, each bearing a salver. Six stewards guided them by crooks
ornamented by flowers. Following this, eight shepherds and sixteen
shepherdesses made the service at the other tables; one and two advanced
at a time, depositing their salvers and retiring to make way for others.

"At the latter part of the repast, appeared six violin-players,
resplendent in tinseled garb; also nine nymphs of a marvelous beauty; a
swarm of musicians accompanied them, disguised as satyrs.

"Toward nightfall, to the astonishment of all, suddenly shone out a
luminous rock lit up with fantastic glow; out of which came forth as by
magic countless naiads, their soft robes glistening with jewels; they
dart out upon the sward and join in a fair and lissome dance."

But one thing was wanting to crown this princely picnic,--a storm. It
came. Says the queen Margot, who was pleased to relate herself the
details of this fête: "Envious Fortune, unable to suffer the glory of
this fair dance, hurled upon us a strange rain and tempest; and the
confusion of the sudden evening retreat by boat across the river brought
out next day as many mirthful anecdotes as the lavish festival itself
had brought gratifications."

Such was a _fête champêtre_ in the sixteenth century,--filled in with
all the luxuriant pomp and splendor which the French love so dearly.

Yet, only seven years after this scene of flowers and song, France was
in blood, and the age had darkened once more; the evil-minded De
Medicis, queen-mother and king, had given the signal for the Massacre of
St. Bartholomew.


VII.

It was Bayonne, too, whose governor, when ordered in advance by the king
to arrange for massacring the Huguenots in his city on that epoch-making
night, dared to send back a prompt and spirited refusal. "Your Majesty,"
he reported, "I have examined those under my command touching your
mandate; all are good citizens and brave soldiers, but I am unable to
find for you among them a single executioner!"

The Queen of Spain, widow of Charles II, resided here from 1706 until
1738. Many stories are told of her good-heartedness and her lavish
fondness for display. The Bayonnais were children still, and loved her
for it. She, too, gave a festival and banquet,--in honor of some Spanish
successes; "it lasted even till the next day among the people, and on
board the vessels in the river; and the windows of every house were
illuminated.... After the repast was finished," adds the grave record,
"much to the satisfaction of all, a _panperruque_ was danced through the
town. M. de Gibaudière led the dance, holding the hand of the Mayor of
Bayonne; the Marquis de Poyanne bringing up the rear; so that this dance
rejoiced all the people, who on their side gave many demonstrations of
joy."

The world has grown stiffer since, and Mayors and Marquises are no
longer wont to caper about the streets of great cities in the sportive
_abandon_ of a festival dance; in those days it seems not to have abated
a jot of their serious dignity.

Bayonne is the key to all roads south and east. It has a superb citadel.
It has been a valuable military position, has withstood seventeen sieges
in its day, and is still an important strategic point. Here were
exciting times during the Peninsular war, when Wellington on his
northward march from Spain found Bayonne in his way and undertook to
capture it. More a fancy than a fact, however, is probably the tradition
that the bayonet was invented in this locality and took its name from
the city. The story of the Basque regiment running short of ammunition
and being prompted by the exigency to insert their long-handled knives
into the musket-muzzles, has since had grave doubts cast upon its
veraciousness. This is most unfortunate, for it was a story which
travelers delighted to honor.


VIII.

It is mid-afternoon as our breack clatters out again over the paved
roadway of the bridge and we turn westward along the river for the
return to Biarritz. A few vessels stand idly moored to the quays. The
_Allées Marines_ are quiet and still; later they will be thronged. They
are the favorite promenade of Bayonne, which thus holds here a species
of daily "town-meeting" as the dusk comes on. At present we see merely a
few old women bearing panniers toward the city, and rope-makers at work
upon great streamers of hemp which stretch from tree to tree. Soon we
turn off to the southward, and are on the main highway to Biarritz.

This highway sees a considerable traffic. Bayonne furnishes carts,
Biarritz carriages. Omnibuses ply to and fro; market-barrows are drawn
frequently past; burden-bearers and peasants are met or overtaken
trudging contentedly on. The latter cheat both the omnibus and
themselves, for the fare is but a trifle, and the road hot and sandy. It
is abundantly shaded by trees, but we agree that it is far better
enjoyed _en breach_ than on foot.

This is the road once famous for the _cacolet_. It must have been a
pleasing and peculiar sight, in the years ago, to see the jolly Duchess
of Berri and her fashionable companions sociably hobnobbing with their
peasant drivers _en cacolet_ in the pleasant summer afternoons.




CHAPTER IV.

SAINT JOHN OF LIGHT.

  "_Guibelerat so'guin eta
  Hasperrenak ardura?_"

  "As we pursue our mountain track,
  Shall we not sigh as we look back?"

--Basque Song.


The days pass happily by, at Biarritz. One quickly feels the charm of
the place; it has its own delightfulness, apart from the season and its
amusements. In the season, however, the amusements are not once allowed
to flag. By half-past ten, fashion is astir and gathers toward the beach
for the bathing hour; then parts to walk and drive, and afterward to
lunch. It takes its siesta as does the nation its neighbor; meets once
more for the afternoon hour on the sands, and at six drifts to the
Casino, where children are soon dancing, little glasses clinking, and
mild gambling games in full swing. The thought of dinner deepens with
the dusk, but in the evening the tide sets again to the Casino, and a
concert or a ball rounds up the day.

The scope of diversions is much the same as on the opposite edge of the
Atlantic,--with due allowance for national types; but here there is
perhaps more color to the scene. European watering-places are naturally
cosmopolitan. Here at Biarritz, English society mingles with the
French, and both are strongly reinforced from Spain. Only thirteen hours
from Paris, or twenty-two, actual travel, from London, it is but one
from the Spanish frontier and eighteen from Madrid. Memories of Orleans,
Pavia and the Armada are canceled in the common pursuit of pleasure.

  "Three hosts combine to offer sacrifice;
  Three tongues prefer strange orisons on high;
  Three gaudy standards flout the pale blue skies;
  The shouts are, France, Spain, Albion, Victory!"

There is besides a goodly sprinkling from other countries. A Russian
nobleman and his family are to arrive at our hotel to-morrow. The spot
is not difficult of access for Italians. The Austrians have long
appreciated it. And do we not constitute at least a small contingent
from across the ocean?

Not only visitors make up the parti-colored effect. There are all grades
in Biarritz,--visitors and home-stayers, rich and poor,--

  "From point and saucy ermine, down
  To the plain coif and rustic gown."

The natives have their peculiar air and customs, and the Basques are
always picturesque. Spanish guitar-players vie with Neapolitan harpists,
and both with the waves and the hum of talk. The lottery spirit shoots
up here from its hot-bed in Spain. Small boys wander about the beach
with long, cylindrical tin boxes painted a bright red and carried by a
strap from the shoulder. The rim of the lid is marked off into numbered
compartments, and in its centre is an upright teetotum with a bone
projection; while the cylinder itself is filled with cones of crisp,
flaky sweet-wafers, stacked one into another like cornucopias. The
charge is one sou for a spin, and the figure opposite which the
projecting bone-piece stops indicates the number of cones due the
spinner. The figures vary from 2 to 30, and there are no blanks. Every
one appears to patronize the contrivance, and you constantly hear the
click of the teetotum along the beach. Though there are but two 30's in
the circumference, each who spins fondly hopes to gain one, and thus the
same spirit which supports Monte Carlo in splendor gives these boys a
thriving trade.


II.

We spend an idle morning on the projecting point of bluff overlooking
the coves and the fishermen's cabins. This promontory uplifts a
signal-station, the _Atalaye_. Down at the left and rear, cutting
inland, is the _Port Vieux_, where the second bathing pavilion stands;
and, sending up their cries and shoutings to the heights, we

      "see the children sport along the shore,
  And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore."

The day is breezy and not too warm. We feel few ambitions. Has the
dreamy spirit of the South come upon us so soon?

It will be a perfect spot for a picnic lunch.

We will imitate the _fête champêtre_ of Charles and Catherine held on
the isle of the Adour. The ladies give their sanction, and three of us
are promptly appointed commissaries. We take the path down to the
street, and find a promising little grocery-store. The madame bows a
welcome.

"Can one obtain here of the bread?" we ask.

"Ah, no," deprecatingly, "that is only with the baker."

"A little of cheese, then? and some Albert biscuits? And a bottle or two
of lemonade, and one of light wine?"

"But yes, without doubt; monsieur shall have these instantly;" and a
bright-faced little girl proceeds to collect the supplies.

"Might one carry away the bottles, and afterward return them?" we
venture.

Here the madame begins to appear suspicious. It is evidently an
irregular purchase at best, and this request seems to make her a trifle
frosty.

"A deposit should perhaps be necessary," we suggest; "how much is
desired?"

Madame gives the subject a moment's thought. "Monsieur would have to
leave at least four sous on each bottle," she finally declares.

"And could madame also lend us some small drinking-glasses, it may be,
and a little corkscrew?"

The old lady is visibly hardening. She is clearly averse to mysteries.
We may be contrabandists, or political exiles, or any variety of refugee
foreigners. She hesitates about the drinking-glasses; is not sure she
_has_ a corkscrew. But another deposit is soothingly arranged for and
paid, and the articles are found.

"And now could we ask to borrow a basket?--also on deposit."

But here the madame's obligingness quite deserts her. The refusal is
flat. She has no basket which can possibly be spared.

It is, we see, plainly time that we should explain our mysterious
selections. Confidingly we entrust her with the secret, and lay bare
our unconventional plan. At the first she listens unmoved, but the idea
of "pique-nique" is soon borne in upon her, and lets in a ray of light.
The frost thaws a trifle. "We are with friends," we say; "they are on
the bluffs; they have desired to make a luncheon for once without the
fork,--to eat their little breads in the open air, upon the rocks." Our
listener nods, half doubtfully. Then we play our highest trump: "We are
but on a visit to Biarritz; we have come from far away; we are
Americans."

Instantly the barriers are down; madame is our firmest ally. "Run,
Élise, seek the large pannier for our friends! Is it that you are of the
fair America?--_la belle Amérique._ Ah, but monsieur, why have you not
said thus before? You should most charmingly have been supplied; are
they not indeed always the friends of our country,--the Americans! You
shall bring here the breads you buy at the bakery; we will add knives
and plates and some fruit, and Élise shall herself carry for you the
full basket to the place of the pique-nique."

Verily the Stars and Stripes are words to conjure with! The picnic is a
complete success. The De Medici fête is more than surpassed; even an
attendant nymph, in the person of the rustic Élise, is not wanting; the
historical parallel is perfect.

In fact, the parallel finally carries itself too far. So small an affair
even as this, it appears, cannot escape the hostility of "envious
Fortune,"--the same who untimely cut off its lamented rival. A large,
black cloud, coming up over us like a vengeful harpy, forebodes the
invariable downpour, and grimly compels us to shorten the feast.

On Sunday, we attend the English service; Britain is sufficiently well
represented at Biarritz to support one during both summer and winter.
The day is restful and calm, and we stroll out afterward along the beach
and over to the deserted villa of the Empress, returning by the path on
the bluff. The sound of trowels and hammers is in part stilled about the
town, and the afternoon takes on a comfortingly peaceful tone in
consequence. The English-speaking contingent keeps the day as quietly as
may be; the Continental majority of course does not. In a few weeks,
posters will adorn the Saturday bulletins, announcing the next day's
bull-fight in San Sebastian, over the border; and if Sunday is quiet at
Biarritz in the season, it is simply because all the world spends the
day at San Sebastian.


III.

But Spain and the Pyrenees lie before us, and we cannot tarry longer at
Biarritz. We shall long feel the warm life of the fresh June days by the
sea. The breack rolls again into the court-yard; we pay our devoirs to
mine host and our dues to his minions, and once more we start, this time
toward the south.

We are to dip into Spain for a day, and have chosen to go by road as far
on the way toward the frontier as St. Jean de Luz, before taking the
train. St. Jean lies on the crescent of the shore only eight miles away,
and the road, like the sea-road to Bayonne, follows the curve of the
higher land, and shows beach and hill and sea in turn as it trends over
the downs. It is another clear, taintless morning. The sun is already
high; but, though having the sky wholly to himself, he is forbearing in
his power. Palisades of poplars lend us their shadows; clumps of
protecting firs stand aside for the road, each with a great gash down
its side and a cup fastened below to catch the bleeding pitch. Now we
are facing the Pyrenees; a little to the left they rise before us, still
miles away. These are not the high Pyrenees; the monarchs stand in the
centre of their realm, and are hardly to be seen, even distantly, until
we shall in a day or two turn inland and approach them. The mountain
wall is broken and lower near the sea, both east and west; yet even here
it rises commandingly, filling the horizon with its hazy hills.

The road is the counterpart of that to Bayonne. We fly smoothly on,
above its hard, thin crackle of sand. We meet peasants afoot, and
burdened horses, on their morning way to Biarritz or Bayonne. The men
ornament their loose, blue linen frocks and brown trousers with the
bright scarlet sash so popular in this region. Heavy oxen draw their
creaking loads toward the same centres,--their bowed heads yoked by the
horns, which are cushioned with a woolly sheepskin mat and tasseled with
red netting. They pull strongly, for the loads are not light, and the
clumsy wheels are disks of solid wood. Little donkeys trot amiably by,
with huge double panniers that recall the _cacolet_. A file of marching
soldiers is overtaken; small villages are passed, each one agog with the
stir of our transit; while now and then we meet a dog-cart and cob or a
stylish span, antennae of the coming season of fashion.

To the right is the accurate level of the sea-horizon; about us are the
heath and furze and the sand-dunes; and far along to the south we can
trace the arc of the beach, until it ends in the projecting hills of
Spain.

       *       *       *       *       *

St. Jean is reached almost too soon, for the drive has been
exhilarating. We enter by a long, narrow street, which is found to be
alive with people. A small procession is in motion, enlivened by a band.
Every one seems in holiday dress. Our driver has before shown his easy
conviction that streets were intended first for breacks, secondly for
citizens; and now he urges his horses down this narrow way without a
pause in their gallop. The whip signals, the bells on the harness jingle
furiously, the wheels clatter along the cobbles; and, almost before we
have time to order a slackening, procession and by-standers, like a
flock of sheep, go in disorder to the wall, and our breack sweeps by
into the central square.

[Illustration]

It is the festival, we find, of the village's patron saint, St. John the
Baptist. The twenty-fifth of June renews his yearly compact of
protection. In the afternoon, there will be the full procession, led by
the priests, and with a canopied effigy of the saint or of the Virgin
borne in solemnity behind them. Services in the cathedral will follow,
and probably an evening of illumination. We enter the cathedral. Its
floor has been newly strewn with sweet hay, and near the altar, is the
sacred image itself, adorned for the procession, dressed in linen and
velvet and gilt lace, and with a chaplet of beads in its wooden hand.
The canopy-frame, ready prepared, is close by, with its projecting
handle-bars, its four upright poles and its roof of white satin
embroidered with gold.

The cathedral itself is somewhat more interesting than we expected to
see; it is a Basque rather than a French church, has a very high chancel
and altar and no transepts, and the altar is marked by a striking
profusion of color and of gilding, which does not degenerate into the
tawdry and which lights up vividly under the entering noon light. The
chapels at the sides are similarly decorated. Dark oaken balconies,
elaborately carved, run in three tiers along the upper part of the nave.
The seats in these are reserved for the men, the women being relegated
to small black cushions placed on the chairless floor.

St. Jean's one great event was the marriage of Louis XIV with the
Infanta of Spain, which took place in this same church. "A raised
platform extended from the residence of Anne of Austria to the entrance
of the church, which was richly carpeted. The young queen was robed in a
royal mantle of violet-colored velvet, powdered with _fleurs-de-lis_,
over a white dress, and wore a crown upon her head. Her train was
carried by Mesdemoiselles d'Alençon and de Valois and the Princess of
Carignan. After the ceremony, the queen complained of fatigue, and
retired for a few hours to her chamber where she dined alone. In the
evening, she received the court, dressed in the French style; and gold
and silver tokens commemorative of the royal marriage were profusely
showered from the windows of her apartment."[6]

[6] MISS PARDOE: _Louis XIV_.

       *       *       *       *       *

Without, as we turn for an idle stroll, we find a fair-sized town, with
provincial streets like much of Bayonne. Often the stories of the
houses jut out, one over the other. These projections give a relish of
local color to the crooking ways, intensified by the round-tiled roofs
and by occasional red or blood-colored beams and doorposts. Although we
are still on the French side of the frontier, Spanish influence is
already marked, while that of the Basques predominates over both. St.
Jean is also a summer resort, in a modest way, chiefly for quiet Spanish
families; and from the heavy stone sea-wall built along the beach we see
many of their villas. In days before the railroad went beyond, the port
exchanged regular and almost daily steamers with San Sebastian and
Santander, thus connecting with the Spanish rail, and giving a rather
important traffic advantage. It fostered, besides, extensive cod-fishing
and even whaling enterprises. Its harbor has suffered since; the rails
too have gone through to Spain, and St. Jean is left mildly and
interestingly mournful, in its lessened power, its decayed gentility.


IV.

In St. Jean de Luz, we are fairly in the country of the Basques. One
sees so many of that singular people in the streets, and along the
Biscayan shore generally, that inquiries about them are almost forced
upon the attention. The Basques are still the curiously ill-explained
race they have always been; the learned still disagree over their
origin, and the world at large scarcely knows of them more than the
name. They are scattered all through this lower sea-corner of France,
shading off near Bayonne; and are in yet greater numbers in the
adjoining upper edges of Spain. It seems strange that the beginnings of
this isolated race should to-day be almost no better settled than in the
time of Humboldt or Ramond. Yet they contrive still to embroil the
philologists and historians. Here the race has lived, certainly since
the days of the Romans, probably since long before, out of kin with all
the world, and the world's periods have passed on and left them. No one
knows their birth-mark; they have forgotten it themselves. Of theories,
numberless and hopelessly in discord, each still offers its weighty
arguments, and each destroys the certainty of any.

This appears incredible. What mystery is insoluble in the sharp light of
modern research? Yet until the defenders of the view that the Basques
came from Atlantis can make truce with the advocates of their Phoenician
origin,--until the well-attested theory of their affinity with certain
South American races can overthrow the better-attested theory that they
are the remains of the ancient Iberians,--until Moor and Finn,[7] Tartar
and Coptic, can amicably blend their claims to relationship, the Basques
must remain as they are,--foundlings; or rather, a race whose length of
pedigree has swallowed up its beginnings.

[7] It is said that the Basque nomenclature of domestic animals is
almost entirely Finnish.


It is these unattached sea and mountain races who are always hardest to
conquer. Hence the boast of the Basques. Even the Romans, though they
could defeat, could not subdue them. The strong Roman fortress of
Lapurdum (now Bayonne) did not succeed in even terrifying them, though
they were worsted several times by its legions. Down through all the
early part of the long Christian era, the forefathers of these
frank-faced fishers and mountaineers we see here in the streets of St.
Jean kept their hills stubbornly to themselves. Later, as much perhaps
from policy as necessity, the race came gradually to fall in with the
general governments crystallizing about them. The Spanish Basques came
first into the traces, though not until the thirteenth century; they
were then finally incorporated into the Castilian monarchy. But they
claimed and held marked rights in compensation. While special
privileges--_fueros_--were accorded to certain other provinces as well
as to them, theirs were the widest and endured the longest. They had
five special exemptions: they were not subject to military conscription;
nor to certain imposts and taxes, (paying a gross composition in their
place;) nor in general to trial outside their province; nor to the
quartering of troops; nor to any regulations of their internal affairs
beyond that of the _corregidor_, a representative magistrate appointed
by the king. These _fueros_ lasted in substance even up to 1876, when
Alfonso's government finally repealed them. While thus the Spanish
Basques have, even under allegiance, held stoutly to the right of
virtual self-government, their brethren north of the Pyrenees long
preserved a still fuller autonomy, only coming into the national fold of
France under the impetus of the Revolution.

Thus the Basques have a stiff record of independence; it keeps them in
no little esteem, both with themselves and with their neighbors. Trains,
travel, traffic, eat into their solidarity, and may in time disintegrate
it; but a Basque has not yet lost a particle of his pride of clan; it is
inborn and ineradicable; he would be no other than he is; "_je ne suis
pas un homme_" he boasts, "_je suis un Basque_." You note instinctively
his straighter bearing among the neighboring French peasantry; you can
often single out a Basque by his air. This hardens into a peculiar
result: since they are all of the same high lineage, all are
aristocrats; every Basque is _ex officio_ a nobleman; this is seriously
meant and seriously believed. There are no degrees of caste, the highest
is the only; the entire race is blood-proud, ancestor-proud. A Basque
family might not improbably have been the originators of that celebrated
family tree which remarked, in a marginal note only midway back, that
"about this time the Creation took place."

They are not stilted in their pride, however; your true Basque cares
much for his descent and little for its dignities. "Where the McGregor
sits," he would affirm, "there is the head of the table," and so he
cares nothing about the nominal headship. He lives a free, busy life in
the hill-country or near the sea, stalwart, swarthy, a lover of the open
air, apt at work and sufficiently enterprising, self-respecting, "proud
as Lucifer and combustible as his matches," in no case pinchingly poor,
but rarely rich, and never in awe of his own coat-of-arms.

Writers uniformly take a wicked pleasure in maligning the Basque
language. Its spelling and syntax, its words and sentences, its methods
of construction, are openly derided. Unusual word-forms and distended
proper names are singled out and held up to jeers and contumely. A
Spanish proverb asserts that as to pronunciation the Basques write
"Solomon" and pronounce it "Nebuchadnezzar." The devil, it is alleged,
studied for seven years to learn the Basque tongue; at the end of that
time he had mastered only three words and abandoned the task in disgust.
"And the result is," adds a vivacious writer, "that he is unable to
tempt a Basque, because he cannot speak to him, and that consequently
every Basque goes straight to heaven. Unfortunately, now that the
population is beginning to talk French, (which the devil knows terribly
well,) this privilege is disappearing."

Overhearing disjointed Basque phrases on the Biarritz beach or here in
the streets and cafés of St. Jean, one will not blame the devil's
discouragement. There is scarcely one familiar Aryan syllable. For
centuries their speech was not even a written one; there is said to be
no book in Basque older than two hundred years. But, its strangeness and
isolation once allowed for, there is in reality much to defend in the
Basque language. As spoken, it is far from being harsh, and falls
pleasantly, often softly, on the ear; the sounds are clear, the
articulations rarely, hurried as with the French. The words, other than
a few proper names, do not exceed a sober and reasonable length, and as
to spelling, every letter has its assigned use and duty; there are no
phonetic drones. The original root-forms are short and always
recognizable; the full words grow from these by an orderly if intricate
system of inflections and the forming of derivatives.

The inflections are, it must be admitted, intricate. Each noun boasts
two separate forms, and each of its declension-cases keeps a group of
sub-cases within reach for special emergencies. There are only two
regularly ordained verbs,--"to be" and "to have"; but they don different
canonicals for each different ceremony, and their varying garbs seem
fairly without limit. In the Grammaire Basque of M. Gèze, published in
Bayonne, I count no less than one hundred and eight pages of
closely-set tables needed to paint the opalescent hues of these
multiform auxiliaries,--and this only in one dialect, out of six in all.
M. Chaho, an essayist of weight and himself a Basque, informs us
artlessly and seriously that one counts a thousand and forty-five forms
for their combined present indicatives, and a trifle over ten thousand
forms for the two fully expanded verbs; and yet the language, he hastens
to add, is so magically simple that even a Basque child never makes an
error!

As to its appearance in print, the reader may judge for himself, for
here is one of their favorite love-songs. These light songs abound, many
being surprisingly delicate and dainty.

  BASQUE SONG

  "_Chorittoua, nourat houa,
    Bi hegalez airian?
  Espanalat jouaiteco,
    Elhurra duc bortean.
  Algarreki jouanen guiuc
    Elhurra hourtzen denian._

  "_San Josefen ermita
    Desertion gora da.
  Espanalat jouaiteco,
    Han da goure pausada.
  Guibelerat so'guin eta
    Hasperrenak ardura?_

  "_Hasperrena, habiloua
    Maitiaren borthala.
  Bihotzian sar hakio
    Houra eni beçala;
  Eta guero erran izoc
    Nic igorten haidala._"

A graceful English version of the above is in existence, and will fitly
complement its original:

  "Borne on thy wings amidst the air,
    Sweet bird, where wilt thou go?
  For if thou wouldst to Spain repair,
    The ports are filled with snow.
  Wait, and we will fly together,
  When the Spring brings sunny weather.

  "St. Joseph's hermitage is lone,
    Amidst the desert bare,
  And when we on our way are gone,
    Awhile we'll rest us there;
  As we pursue our mountain track,
  Shall we not sigh as we look back?

  "Go to my love, O gentle sigh,
  And near her chamber hover nigh;
  Glide to her heart, make that thy shrine,
  As she is fondly kept in mine.
  Then thou mayst tell her it is I
  Who sent thee to her, gentle sigh!"

--COSTELLO.

In regard to length of words, there exist undoubtedly some surprising
examples, but they are merely compound expressions and quite in analogy
with those of better known and less abused tongues. The German, for one,
indulges in such with notorious yet unrebuked frequency. One is
naturally startled at encountering in Basque such imbrications as
_Izarysaroyarenlarrearenbarena_, or _Ardanzesaroyareniturricoburua_,
which are actual names of places in Spanish Basque-land; but they are
mercifully rare, and when analyzed prove to be rational and even poetic
formations, laden with a full equivalent of import,--the first of the
above two signifying "the centre of the field of the mountain of the
star," and the second, "the summit of the fountain of the mountain of
the vine."

These be scarcely fair samples, however. Commoner words and some of
their more musical phrases are instanced in the following, taken in the
dialect of this region of St. Jean:

    _Haran_,                Valley.
    _Etchelde_,             Farm.
    _Ogi_,                  Bread.
    _Egur_,                 Wood.
    _Maraza_,               Hatchet.
    _Nekarsale_,            Workman.
    _Aita_,                 My father.
    _Lo_,                   Sleep.
    _Etche_,                House.
    _Etchetar_,             Household.
    _Nerhaba_,              Child.
    _Nescatcha_,            Maiden.
    _Zorioneko_,            Happy.
    _Ama_,                  My mother.
    _Neure maiteak_,        My loved ones.

Home words, such as these latter, give a glimpse of this people's home
life. For they are devoted to their household as to their tribe, and
uniformly show a certain homely honesty and simplicity underneath all
their free ways. Love of smuggling does not impugn this honesty,--in
their own view, at all events; for the Basque, man and woman, is a born
smuggler, and believing it right is not ashamed. Indeed, they make
common cause of it; for years, if a revenue officer detected and shot a
Basque in the act, he had to fly the land at once, for the entire
neighborhood united in seeking hot and deadly vengeance.

The race is notably fond of dancing and drama, and the villages hold
frequent open-air theatricals, generally upon religious themes, which
they always handle with great seriousness. They have at intervals unique
contests in improvisation, rivaling Wolfram and Tannhaüser, or the
Meistersingers, in this special talent. They are fruitful, too, in
proverb lore, as would be expected in an old race. Their wise saws are
sharp, often rasping:

     "Hard bread makes sharp teeth." (_Ogi gogorrari haguin sorroza_.)

     "One eye suffices the seller; the buyer has need of a hundred."

     "Marriage-day is the next day after happiness."

     "Avarice, having killed a man, took refuge in the Church; it has
     never gone out since."

Husbandmen, herdsmen, fishermen,--such are the majority. The farms are
small, averaging four or five acres, and descend by primogeniture; flax,
hemp, corn, are their staples. Basques were the first whalers, so it is
declared, and St. Jean used to be a noted port for their vessels; the
whales have since sought more northern banks, and St. Jean is reduced to
the humbler quest of sardines and anchovies. There are iron-mines and
marble-quarries, besides, to engage many; hunting and logging are
favored pursuits; Basque sailors are to be found in all waters, while
great numbers of the younger men are now yearly emigrating to the South
American coasts, to make a better living,--and to avoid conscription.

Those of the race we see in our transit impress one, on the whole,
favorably. The men have, in the main, the lithe, firm port attributed to
them, though there are Basque "trash," as there are Georgia "crackers,"
and average-lesseners everywhere. The women are often noticeably
attractive; the younger ones have a ruddy face and full, clear eye, but
the skin shrivels and wears with middle age, as does that of their
French peasant sisters. The Basques about Biarritz and St. Jean appear
to associate with the French element in entire amity; the race strives
still to keep distinct, but habits and idioms and manners imperceptibly
mingle; they speak French or patois quite as much as their own tongue,
and in divers ways hint at the working of amalgamation and assimilation.

Mention of this bizarre tribe is perhaps not untimely; the leveling
process progresses fast, over Basque-land as in all the world; steam and
lightning are the genii of the age, but they destroy while they build.
As a significant straw, the French government enforces here, in the
public schools, the teaching and speaking of French to supersede the
Basque. Similarly, Spanish is required in the schools over the border.
In some of these, a child detected in a lapse into Basque must wear a
certain ring, which he is allowed to pass on to the first companion he
catches likewise tripping. The latter may pass it on in turn. At the end
of the week comes the reckoning-day, and the unhappy individual then
found with the ring is, punished for the collective sinners of the week.
Few more ingenious, even if demoralizing, expedients could be devised to
put the native tongue and sentiments under ban.

"It has been truthfully observed," says one,[8] "that, in ancient times,
the Basques kept themselves outside of the Roman world; in the middle
age they remained outside of feudal society; while to-day they would
fain keep out of the modern world. The spectacle of this little
confederacy, steadily maintaining its isolation for so many centuries,
is most interesting, and, in some aspects, affecting; but the very
stubbornness and the prolonged success of its resistance to all attempts
to draw it into the current of modern life and thought only enhances the
significance of its ultimate failure, and furnishes an expressive
commentary upon the futility of a people's most determined efforts to
hold itself aloof from the brotherhood of nations. Contact is God's
manifest decree. The five Basques at Bayonne bridge, helpless against
the incoming tide, present a truthful prophecy of the destiny of the
whole race before the advancing and mounting wave of modern
civilization."

[8] VINCENT: _In the Shadow of the Pyrenees_. New York: Charles
Scribner's Sons.


V.

In this region, too, lies the famous pass of Ibañeta or Roncesvalles. It
may be readily visited in a two days' excursion from St. Jean or from
Biarritz. There is a carriage-road to Valcarlos, a small village on the
way; beyond, a mule-path winds on up through the pass and down to the
convent on the other side.

This convent was founded to commemorate the one greatest tradition of
the pass,--the destruction of Charlemagne's rear-guard by the Basques in
ambush and the death of the hero Roland.

  "Oh for a blast of that dread horn
  On Fontarabian echoes borne
    That to King Charles did come;
  When Rowland brave and Olivier
  And every paladin and peer
    On Roncesvalles died!"

Of the few writers who have visited this region, all make airy mention
of the battle of Roncesvalles; scarcely one, however, condescends to
details. Yet it gave rise to a great epic poem,--the greatest epic of
France, the delight of all her ancient minstrels. One often hears named
the _Song of Roland_; one seldom hears more than the name. By many the
charm of its story is all unknown.

"In truth and fact," observes a recent anonymous writer, "the chain can
claim one single real legend. That one, however, is so great, so grand,
so dominating,--it is so immense, so universal, so world-wide,--that it
suffices all alone; it creates a doctrine by itself, it needs no aid, no
support, no companions,--it is the mighty tale of Roland. The mountain
is full of Roland. His hands, his feet, his horse, his sword, his voice,
have left their puissant mark on almost every crest, in almost every
glen. Above Gavarnie, amidst the eternal snow, gapes the slashed fissure
hewn by Durandal, his sword; ten miles off in a gorge you see the
indents of the hoofs of Bayard on a rock which served as his half-way
touching-point when he sprang in two flying bounds from the Breach to
the Peak of the Chevalier near St. Sauveur. At the Pass of Roland, above
Cambo, the rock remains split open where the hero stamped and claimed a
passage. The ponds of Vivier Lion, near Lourdes, were dug by the
pressure of his foot and knee when Vaillantif, a charger which carried
him in his last fight, but who was then unbroken, had the audacity to
throw him. At St. Savin, where the monks had lodged him, he paid his
bill by slaying the irreverent giants, Passamont and Alabaster, whose
neighborhood, was unpleasant to the convent. And so on, all about. His
tremendous figure is everywhere, all full of the superbest violence and
of the most wondrous acrobatry. But it is at Roncesvalles that his great
name is greatest. There, where he died, his memory lives in an unfading
halo. In Spain, beneath the Peak of Altabiscar amongst the beech groves,
on the 15th of August, 778, perished the astounding paladin. The _Song
of Roland_ tells how he fell, not quite exactly but very amazingly; the
story is so intensely interesting that the reader is carried away by it
and finds himself for a moment almost able to believe it. It does not
matter that the defeat is attributed to the Saracens, not one of whom
was present, (the whole thing having been got up and carried out by the
Basques alone;) that error was indispensable to the tale, and gives it
much of its strange charm."

There is an excellent reason why the poem might fail in sharp historical
accuracy; it was not formally composed until between three and four
hundred years after the battle. The event itself happened in 778; the
first known MS. was made, by a scribe, about 1150. All during the long
interval, ballad-singers and minstrels had been extolling France and
Roland; the love of the heroic was as strong as before Homer; the hero's
name had grown: with his fame into titanic proportions; the actual
author, (conjectured to have been one Turoldus or Theurolde, a monk,)
had but to take the poetic material ready at his hand and fashion it
into the epic. Time had dimmed and enlarged the details; the _Song of
Roland_ deals in mass and massive heroes; in this it is like a book from
the Iliad.

It is not a long poem; there are only about 3,500 lines in all, but the
Old French in which it is written makes it difficult reading, at least
to one not a Frenchman. The briefest citation will show this:

      "Carles li Reis, nostre Emperere magnes,
  Sela anz tuz pleins ad estet en Espaigne;
  Tresqu'en la mer, cunquist la tere altaigne.
  N'i ad castel ki devant lui remagnet."

      ("Charles le Roi, notre grand Empereur,
  Sept ans entiers est resté en Espagne;
  Jusqu' à la mer, il a conquis la haute terre.
  Pas de château qui tienne devant lui."

                                   --GAUTIER.)



However, it has been transmuted into modern French, and latterly twice
translated into English verse; and the English translations appear to
have preserved remarkably both the power and sweetness of the original.

The poem centres almost wholly upon this deadly battle in the
Pyrenees,--the last battle of Roland its hero. Charlemagne and the
Franks had invaded Spain, and spent seven years warring with the Moors
and conquering their cities. On their return, as the poem narrates it,
the Moors, instigated by a traitor in Charlemagne's army, plotted an
ambush in this pass of Roncesvalles. The army began its march. The main
body defiled through in safety, and turned westward to await the
rear-guard nearer the coast. But when that division, the flower of the
Frankish forces,--commanded by Roland, his bosom friend Oliver, the
warrior-archbishop Turpin, and the others of the twelve great
paladins,--reached the pass, hostiles began to appear,--in front, above,
behind. More and more they thickened around it,--fierce Basques or
swarthy Moslems, "a hundred thousand heathen men;" and the three leaders
soon realized their betrayal. Oliver exclaimed:

  "'Ganelon[9] wrought this perfidy!
  It was he who doomed us to hold the rear.'
  'Hush,' said Roland, 'O Olivier,
  No word be said of my step-sire here,'"

--a touch of magnanimity strange for that brutal age, yet only one of
many in the poem. Roland rather exulted than shrank at the prospect of a
battle, by whatever means brought about. Oliver was the cooler of the
two, and he promptly urged Roland to sound his great horn, which might
be heard for thirty leagues, and so summon Charlemagne to the rescue. He
saw that the danger was real, for the odds were overwhelmingly against
them. But Roland impetuously refused. Thrice, though not in cowardice,
Oliver pleaded with him:

  "'Roland, Roland, yet wind one blast!
  Karl will hear ere the gorge be past,
  And the Franks return on their path full fast.'
    'I will not sound on mine ivory horn!
  It shall never be spoken of me in scorn
  That for heathen felons one blast I blew.
  I may not dishonor my lineage true.

         *       *       *       *       *

  "'Death were better than fame laid low.
  Our Emperor loveth a downright blow!'"

[9] Ganelon was the traitor and Roland's own step-father. The lines
quoted are from the late version by JOHN O'HAGAN, outlined in an article
in the _Edinburgh Review_ to whose appreciative commentary much
indebtedness is acknowledged.


The Moors at last swarmed to the attack. They were no cravens, the
Moors; the fight grew rapidly desperate. The Franks performed wonders;
they tingled with the Archbishop's glorious assoilment:

  "In God's high name the host he blest,
  And for penance he gave them--to smite their best!"

The twelve paladins slew twelve renowned Paynims; the mailed phalanx
hewed its way into the infidels, laying them low by thousands. But
thousands more were behind,--the reserve was inexhaustible; the "hundred
thousand" were cut to pieces, when the Moorish king, hastily summoned,
came up with a fresh army of myriads more. It was too much; little by
little the Franks were beaten down, not back, and melted unyielding
away. The peers fell one by one, upon heaps of the Moslem dead; the day
wore on; of the twenty thousand Frankish warriors, but sixty men at
length remained. Too late Roland would wind his horn; it was Oliver's
turn to disdain the now useless expedient. Roland sounded nevertheless:

  "The mountain peaks soared high around;
  Thirty leagues was borne the sound.
  Karl hath heard it and all his band;
  'Our men have battle,' he said, 'on hand!'
    Ganelon rose in front and cried;
  'If another spake, I would say he lied!'"

Again the desperate sound was faintly heard:

  "'It is Roland's horn,' said the Emperor,
  'And save in battle he had not blown!'
  'Battle,' said Ganelon, 'is there none.
  Old you have grown,--all white and hoar!

         *       *       *       *       *

  "'He would sound all day for a single hare.'"

The third time, Roland blew; his nostrils and mouth are filled with
blood, his temples crack with the stress:

  "Said Karl: 'That horn is full of breath!'
  Said Naimes: ''Tis Roland who travaileth,'"

--and the Emperor instantly gave the command to turn and rush to the
rescue.

But the battle had gone too far. Again and again the little band of
Franks clove its way into the enemy; the latter wavered, retreated, fell
by hundreds, and came back in thousands. Roland's tears fell fast over
his dead companions:

  "'Land of France, thou art soothly fair!
  To-day thou liest bereaved and bare.
  It was all for me your lives ye gave,
  And I was helpless to shield or save.'"

The last Frankish man-at-arms at length fell; only the three foremost
paladins remained of all the host. But the Saracens dared no longer to
approach them; they hurled their lances from afar. Spent and faint and
bleeding, the three still stood out, but the death-wound of Oliver
finally came; his vision swam, he swayed blindly on his horse. There is
no more touching and beautiful incident in the whole range of song than
this of his death:

  "His eyes from bleeding are dimmed and dark,
  Nor mortal near or far can mark;
  And when his comrade beside him pressed,
  Fiercely he smote on his golden crest;
  Down to the nasal the helm he shred,--
  But passed no further nor pierced his head.
  Roland marveled at such a blow,
  And thus bespake him, soft and low:
    'Hast thou done it, my comrade, wittingly?
  Roland, who loves thee so dear, am I;
  Thou hast no quarrel with me to seek?'
  Oliver answered: 'I hear thee speak,
  But I see thee not. God seeth thee.
  Have I struck thee, brother? Forgive it me.'
    'I am not hurt, O Olivier,
  And in sight of God I forgive thee here.'
  Then each to each his head hath laid,
  And in love like this was their parting made."

And now but Roland and the Archbishop were left,--the former on foot,
his charger dead. Wounded and gasping, they rushed forward upon the
enemy; the sword-arm of the Moorish king was cut from his side, his son
fell dead before him. The Moors quailed; their lances fell in storms
upon the heroes. Suddenly a long, far sound was heard; it was of the
trumpets of Charlemagne's returning army rushing to the rescue but still
miles and hours away. The Saracens turned at the very sound; a final
lance-shower, and they fled; the two held the pass of Roncesvalles,
unconquered,--but dying.

For it was too late.

The Archbishop had sunk to the ground, gasping,--lifeless. Roland,
stricken himself, placed his companion gently on the grass:

  "He took the fair white hands outspread,
  Crossed and clasped them upon his breast."

Then with his remaining strength, he sought one by one for the corpses
of the other ten paladins; one by one he brought them to the feet of the
dead prelate and laid them before the august body,--Oliver's corpse last
and dearest of all. There he might leave them, the solemn assembly of
the peers. It was his last task. His wound too was mortal; his time had
come to join them.

"In vigor and pathos," justly observes the review before mentioned,
"this poem rises to the end. There are few things in poetry more simply
grand than the death of Roland. He moves feebly back to the adjoining
limit-line of Spain,--the land which his well-loved master has
conquered,--and a bow-shot beyond it, and then drops to the ground:"

  "That death was on him he knew full well;
  Down from his head to his heart it fell.
  On the grass beneath a pine tree's shade,
  With face to earth, his form he laid;
  Beneath him placed he his horn and sword,
  And turned his face to the heathen horde
  Thus hath he done the sooth to show
  That Karl and his warriors all may know
  That the gentle Count a conqueror died.
    '_Mea culpa_,' full oft he cried,
  And for all his sins, unto God above
  In sign of penance he raised his glove.

         *       *       *       *       *

  "He did his right-hand glove uplift;
  Saint Gabriel took from his hand the gift.
  --Then drooped his head upon his breast,
  And with clasped hands he went to rest."

There is indeed little in epic poetry to surpass the high simplicity of
this loving portrayal of a hero's death.

It is the climax of the poem. The Emperor's army burst upon the scene,
frantic with anxiety; but no eye was open to give them greeting. Roland
was dead with his slaughtered rear-guard, and lying with his face to the
foe. For three days the sun stayed its motion, at Charlemagne's frenzied
petition, and the Moors were chased and cut to pieces, Saragossa
taken,--a full and furious vengeance exacted. The whole army mourned for
their companions; holy rites attended their stately burial; Ganelon was
tried, condemned, torn to pieces by wild horses. But the joy of the
Franks, their hero, their idol, was gone forever from them; retribution,
even the bitterest, could count for little against the passing of that
peerless spirit.

A pathetic meeting was afterward the old Emperor's with Alva, the
affianced of Roland:

  "'Where is my Roland, sire,' she cried,
  'Who vowed to take me for his bride?'"

Brokenly at length he told her of the news. A moment she gazed at him
unseeing:

  "'God and his angels forbid, that I
  Should live on earth if Roland die!'
  Pale grew her cheek,--she sank amain
  Down at the feet of Charlemagne."

So let us leave this tender poem, tender unwontedly among its times; an
epic which sincerely merits a vogue more near to its value.




CHAPTER V.

THE CITY OF THE ARROW-PIERCED SAINT;


We glide smoothly away from St. Jean de Luz and its legends, by the
unlegendary railroad. The track curves southward, with frequent views of
the coast, and it will be but a few minutes before we shall be in Spain.
We instinctively feel for the reassuring rustle of our passports, duly
_viséd_ at Bordeaux. The low mountain that overhangs Fuenterrabia, one
of the nearest Spanish towns, comes closer, and soon the train whistles
shrilly into the long station at Hendaye, the last French village, in
great repute for its delicious cordial. It is on the edge of the
Bidassoa, a placid, shallow river which here lazily acts as the
international boundary. Irun, the first town of the peninsula, is across
the bridge, and after a short delay the train crosses,--and we instantly
feel a hundred miles nearer to the Escorial, a hundred years nearer to
Philip and the _auto-da-fé_.

The change of nationality at these frontier towns is always distinct and
surprising, and more so than elsewhere here in Irun. Within three
minutes we have in every sense passed from France into Spain. Language
not only, but the type of face and dress, have altered in a flash. We
are not conscious, however, of any increased governmental surveillance;
passports are not asked for at all, and the customs-official gives but a
light inspection to trunk and satchels.

But he is in considerable perplexity over the camera. This he is
scrutinizing very suspiciously. We assume that a true Greek compound
should pass current everywhere, if given a proper local termination, and
so confidently hazard, "_photo-grafia_."

[Illustration]

I still believe that the word was skilfully and philologically evolved,
but it seems to fail of its effect. We repeat it, with appropriate
gestures; the official looks puzzled but not enlightened. He inspects
the lens, the bellows, the slides. We fear for the negatives and the
unexposed plates. Prompt action is needed, for already his hand is
approaching them; and boldly withdrawing the closed plate-holders from
the camera we defiantly pocket them before his eyes.

A short, clicking sound caused by the act of withdrawal gives the
inspector an idea. He looks up hopefully.

"_Telegrafo_?" he asks.

We nod with vigor and even more hopefully, and are inspired to add:

"_Si, señor, telegrafo! Americano; caramba!_"

This has the desired effect. The mystery is explained. The government's
hand is stayed, its doubt vanishes; the precious scroll of chalk is
made, and the plates are saved to darkness and to good works.

It is necessary to change cars at Irun. Trains cannot possibly go
through, owing to a difference in gauge,--a difference purposely devised
by moody Spain, in order to impede hostile invasion. There is also a
wait of an hour. The Spaniard does not assent to the equation between
time and money. The lunch at the buffet in the station is ceremonious
and calm; the successive courses are gravely served at its naperied
tables with the same deliberation, the same care and attention to
detail, as at a hotel. It is but a short journey to San Sebastian, and
in half an hour after leaving Irun we are at our destination.


II.

San Sebastian is both a city unto itself, and a summer resort unto
others. As to the latter, it is among the most popular watering-places
in Spain, and is styled "the Brighton of Madrid." As to the former, it
is a home for twenty thousand human beings of its own; it earns a
sufficing competence, chiefly in exchanges with its surrounding
province; and it has a monopoly of centralization over a wide region,
for no other important Spanish city lies nearer than Pampeluna or
Burgos. Burgos is not actually so very remote,--only a short hundred and
fifty miles beyond; and we had spoken of a visit to its renowned
cathedral. But we had not reckoned with Spanish railway speed; it was
found that the time required solely to go and come would be nearly
fifteen hours! Unvisited, we saw, must remain the cathedral within which
the hot-headed Protestant missionary blew out the sacred light that had
burned for three hundred years. Owing to the Hispanian misconception of
horological values, Burgos is practically, if not actually, exceedingly
remote from San Sebastian.

The latter, however, is so fortunately close to the edge of France that
those who come as near as Biarritz or Pau should assuredly make this
brief dip over the border.

San Sebastian is strictly new; its predecessors have been burned five
times, one upon the other, the last being brought to ashes by the
soldiers of Wellington; and it is liable to be burned again whenever
France and Spain begin to fight again across it. It is an excellent
model for that worthy fowl, the phoenix, for it has risen with
undismayed cheerfulness from each holocaust. The present representative
is in three segments. The city itself is composed of two, and the
citadel makes a fairly important third. From a military point of view,
the citadel was once counted first, and the city itself made an
unimportant third,--with no second. But modern gunnery has changed that
estimate.

Of the two parts of the city proper, one is national, the other
international; they do not unite, but adjoin, welded by a central
promenade, the _Alameda_. Each is distinct, and has little to do with
the life of the other. The native population centres wholly in the west
half; we drift first over to this, in our afternoon walk, and scan its
appearance and people with inquisitive though decorous interest. This
section, comprising much of what was the old town, has evidently aimed
to reproduce it; it has been rebuilt with persistent regard to the
former municipal type, and shows to-day a curious combination of bright,
new and well constructed tenements, built on a dark, old and ill
instructed plan. The streets are left narrow,--very narrow. The black
doorways and halls, as we peer in, in passing, are cramped and
forbidding; the projecting balconies approach each other overhead, and
the oblong yellow buildings themselves rise to overshadowing height.
Like soldiers on dress parade they stand, relentlessly regular and
uniform, block after block, and their walled lanes, straight and similar
and uncharacteristic, cross and weave themselves into a stiff,
right-angled check, exasperating and profitless, unrelieved by a hint at
variation of outline, by a picturesque eave or gable, or a single
artistic "bit;"

The cathedral does indeed possess some interest, particularly its carved
front of light-colored stone; and here and there about it are a few old
houses, unsutteed relicts, that have not bowed to the new régime. The
shops in this part of the town are less individual than one would
expect, though we find them not devoid of a certain variety. The
specialty of the place is the enameling of gold and silver upon iron.
Jewelry and small articles are made of this ware in elaborate designs
and with great daintiness and skill. Outside of this, San Sebastian does
not seem to have invented any new wants for humanity, and its shops do
not seek to supply any but the old.

The other half of the town I have called international. This is the
section of the hotels, of wide streets and flagged walks, of massy
squares of business buildings, of villas and a park and the bathing
circle. The sea swings around the projecting cape of the citadel into a
deeply notched bay, small and still, and on its edge which meets the
town you find pavilions and beach-chairs and their usual accompaniment
of idling humanity. The Casino stands boldly up, a little to the right,
and in front of it, on the Alameda, the band will play in the coming
summer evenings for all the élite of Madrid.

The fine Hôtel de Londres is large and well kept, and, like all Spanish
hotels, charges on the good American plan of so much per day. One
gratefully appreciates this, after juggling every few days with
disheartening lists of accumulated coffees and eggs and dinners and
rooms and mineral waters and service and _bougies_, and the others. The
infinitude of microscopic book-keeping made necessary by the Continental
system is a thought to shudder at. For the rest, the hotel is only
unsatisfying because it seems in nowise distinctively Spanish. We almost
wish we had chosen a certain other hostelry equally well spoken of,
which, instead of Hotel, had alluringly styled itself a _Fonda_.
Probably we might have found as little there as here that was pure
Castilian. Save in language and location, San Sebastian is not of Spain,
Spanish. And as with Biarritz, it is not to be sought for its
reminiscences of old age. It is trim and "kempt" and modern, and lives
strictly in the present. We soon come to realize this, cease longing for
the unattainable, and enjoy the place for what it is. Perhaps we shall
recoup the vanished _patina_ to-morrow, when we visit an older and far
different town,--Fuenterrabia.


III.

The Sebastian season is coëxtensive with the summer season at Biarritz;
perhaps rather tardier in its beginnings. Consequently we are still
somewhat in advance of the tide. This is distinctly a disadvantage, as
it was in part at Biarritz. There are places whose very reason for
existence is society. Only in this costume are they rightly themselves;
only in full dress, so to say, should they be called upon. In a true
"sentimental journey," art and nature and history should take but equal
turn with the life of the present. The ideal traveler courts solitude in
a ruin and society in a resort. The spirit of each is differently
divined.

And San Sebastian out of season is a casket without its
jewels,--modern-made casket at that, costly but uncharacteristic, and
with nothing of an heirloom's charm; a casket neither encased in time's
antique leather nor encrusted with true Spanish enamel.

However, we are not wholly out of the season. We are in the van of it,
but day breaks before the sun rises. San Sebastian is partially awake
already and rubbing its eyes. The season's contingent is arriving in
daily portions. The Queen Regent is coming soon, to spend the summer;
this draws an additional number in advance, thus influenced to summer
here themselves. The beach is already mildly popular, and the cabmen
mildly independent. We drive out from the town around the bend of the
little bay, and see opening villas and other marks of awakening life.
But we sigh for music on the quiet plaza; hope in vain for a concert or
ball in the Casino; and, above all, mourn and refuse to be comforted,
for there is no bull-fight. After Wellington, whose way to Waterloo left
here its fiery track, we exclaim: "O for August or Madrid!" In Madrid,
they are holding bull-fights even now in June; in August, they will be
holding them here.


IV.

As to the citadel, sight-seers are not solicitously catered to by the
authorities. I stroll up there in the afternoon. The citadel hill is
known as the Monte Orgullo. The spirals of the road lead out to and
around the edge of the promontory to its ocean side, and curve steadily
upward during a rise of four hundred feet. There are pleasant views of
the sea,--the Spanish main in literal fact,--and of the hills across the
little notch of water that turns in at the left toward the town. I near
the summit, pass under an untended gateway, work upward still by a
narrow lane shut in with high stone walls, and finally reach the foot of
a long flight of stone steps and see the citadel looming above. It is
Spain, and my passport is at the hotel. They are said to be very
suspicious in Spain; to act first and investigate afterward. My whole
vocabulary has already been employed at the custom-house, and consists
of "_Americano_," "_caramba_," and "_Si, Señor_." It won the day at
Irun. Will it win the day here?

Boldly I begin ascending the steps. They are many and wide, confined by
the same high walls, and commanded from above by the battlements of the
fort. There is commotion on the parapet at the unmuffled sound of the
foreigner's foot-fall, and armed figures at once appear at the edge.

I pause half-way, and look expectantly upward.

"_Caramba_?" I inquire.

A soldier shakes, his head.

"_Americano_," I insinuate, sweetly.

Another shake, more decided.

I grieve for a somewhat fuller technical familiarity with the Spanish
military idiom. Undismayed, however, I resort to the sign language, and
make gestures to signify that I want to ascend.

Either the proposal is rejected or it is not comprehended, and I act it
out again, with a cajoling "_Si, Señor_." Then, to make the idea
clearer, I move on up the steps.

But now there is a vigorous negative. More armed figures, appear at the
parapet, and, while I pause again, one of them explains his position in
a few well-chosen and emphatic phrases, and illustrates his views by a
pointed gesture toward his gun. The illustration at least is definite
and unmistakable.

International complications are never to be recklessly brought on. But
shall the assailing traveler quail before a gesture? My store of Spanish
passwords is exhausted, but there is one solvent yet remaining,--the
universal countersign. With undiminished cheerfulness, I select from my
pocket a stamped silver disk of well-known design, hold it significantly
a moment in full view, and then confidently proceed up the staircase.

The armed figures vanish from view. There is a foreboding silence as I
near the heavy entrance-way at the top. But before I can pound for
admittance, the great door swings deferentially open, a guard within
salutes still more deferentially, I advance, friend, and proffer the
countersign,--and the Monte Orgullo is won!

The view from this hill of Mars well merits the climb and any attendant
risk to the home State Department. The air is warm and still. In front,
the sea stretches to the horizon, smooth as the fair Glimmerglass loved
by Deerslayer. To the right flows a clear, quiet river, the Urumea, to
meet it,--a river on whose nearer bank below us lies buried many a brave
English soldier, their graves marked by white headstones; and from the
farther shore of which once flew leaden rain and iron hail from
conquering English guns. Behind us lies the city, asleep in the warm
afternoon haze, and in the distance are the forms of purplish Pyrenees
hills; while farther around opens the bright little bay,--the _Concha_
or Shell, happily so called,--with villas fringing it's curve, and an
islet-pearl in its centre. A wistful touch of peace and sunshine is over
all the scene, as one views it, in the irony of fact, from this
storm-centre of war.

There are barracks within the walls, and monster guns and other usual
martial furnishings, and the fortifications themselves have, to some
extent, been put in touch with modern requirements. The garrison's life
is not hard, and they live contentedly through drill and evolution,
ration and routine, and stroll down to the Alameda and Casino in hours
of leave. But theirs is a post of honor and danger, nevertheless. San
Sebastian lies foremost in the route of possible invasion. It could not
be ignored nor left untaken. And the very isolation of this fortress,
once its strength, is now its weakness. It might serve to delay an
onrushing army for a saving moment,--a dog thrown out to check the
wolves. It could accomplish little more against the terrific artillery
of to-day; and,--as with the dog,--the interval would prove a period of
marked unrest to the fated garrison.

However, war is now at last, if never hitherto, extinct for all time, so
trusts the world at peace. And barrack-life is dreamy and easy, and the
stroll down to the Alameda very pleasant, these fair days of summer.

But the white headstones on the river slope come out into view again,
for a time, as I wander back down the spiral road toward the town and
think on these things; a cloud drifts across the sun and dims their
brightness; then the light pours down as before.


V.

Wellington fought his way over this region in 1813, and took San
Sebastian,--took it by storm and thunder-storm,--took it in fire and
hail, at fearful cost, and over the dead bodies of a quarter of his
stormers. The place blocked his northward way to meet the Man of
Destiny. Destiny decreed its fall. For seven weeks, the siege,
octopus-like, wound its long tentacles about its victim, sucking away
the life. On the last day of summer, the assault was let loose. The
attack seemed irresistible; the defence impregnable. All that furious
morning, column after column of British troops swarmed up the river
bank, pressed on into the breaches, or hurled themselves to the top of
the walls. Column after column melted back, under the torrent of fire
from the parapet and from the batteries in the citadel. "In vain," says
Napier,[10] "the following multitude covered the ascent, seeking an
entrance at every part; to advance was impossible, and the mass of
assailants, slowly sinking downwards, remained stubborn and immovable on
the lower part of the breach ...

[10] _Peninsular War_.


"The volunteers, who had been with difficulty restrained in the
trenches, 'calling out to know why they had been brought there if they
were not to lead the assault,' being now let loose, went like a
whirlwind to the breaches, and again the crowded masses swarmed up the
face of the ruins, but reaching the crest line they came down like a
falling wall; crowd after crowd were seen to mount, to totter and to
sink, the deadly French fire was unabated, the smoke floated away, and
the crest of the breach bore no living man."

The British artillery, from a near elevation, now reinforced the attack
with a raking fire, and new regiments plunged across the stream and
rushed to join the attack. "The fighting now became fierce and obstinate
again at all the breaches, but the French musketry still rolled with
deadly effect, the heaps of slain increased, and once more the great
mass of stormers sank to the foot of the ruins, unable to win; the
living sheltered themselves as they could, but the dead and wounded lay
so thickly that hardly could it be judged whether the hurt or unhurt
were most numerous.

"It was now evident that the assault must fail unless some accident
intervened, for the tide was rising, the reserves all engaged, and no
greater effort could be expected from men whose courage had been already
pushed to the verge of madness. In this crisis, fortune interfered. A
number of powder-barrels, live shells, and combustible materials which
the French had accumulated behind the traverses for their defence,
caught fire, a bright, consuming flame wrapped the whole of the high
curtain, a succession of loud explosions was heard, hundreds of the
French grenadiers were destroyed, the rest were thrown into confusion,
and while the ramparts were still involved with suffocating eddies of
smoke, the British soldiers broke in at the first traverse. The
defenders, bewildered by this terrible disaster, yielded for a moment,
yet soon rallied, and a close, desperate struggle took place along the
summit of the high curtain; but the fury of the stormers, whose numbers
increased every moment, could not be stemmed. The French colors on the
cavalier were torn away, by Lieutenant Gethin of the eleventh regiment.
The hornwork and the land front below the curtain, and the loopholed
wall behind the great breach, were all abandoned; the light-division
soldiers, who had already established themselves in the ruins on the
French left, immediately penetrated to the streets; and at the same
moment the Portuguese at the small breach, mixed with the British who
had wandered to that point seeking for an entrance, burst in on their
side.

"Five hours the dreadful battle had lasted at the walls, and now the
storm of war went pouring into the town. The undaunted governor still
disputed the victory for a short time with the aid of his barricades,
but several hundreds of his men being cut off and taken in the hornwork,
his garrison was so reduced that even to effect a retreat behind the
line of defences which separated the town from the Monte Orgullo was
difficult; the commanders of battalions were embarrassed for want of
orders, and a thunder-storm, which came down from the mountains with
unbounded fury immediately after the place was carried, added to the
confusion of the fight.

"Many officers exerted themselves to preserve order, many men were well
conducted; but the rapine and violence commenced by villains soon
spread, the camp-followers crowded into the place, and the disorder
continued until the flames, following the steps of the plunderer, put an
end to his ferocity by destroying the whole town."

       *       *       *       *       *

It is beyond imagination, this sunny June afternoon, that the shining
city about us has gasped in smoke and ruins, has been pierced with
arrows unto death as was its patron saint of old; that this contentful
droning of the shore and the street deepened once to the roar of war and
rose to the shriek of suffering.




CHAPTER VI.

AN OLD SPANISH MINIATURE.

  "When Charlemain with all his peerage fell,
  By Fontarabia."

  --MILTON.


The next day an indolent morning train draws us back to the frontier.
The landscape is rather shadeless; "a Spaniard hates a tree." It should
be but a twenty-minute ride, and so, it being short at the longest, we
do not have time to grudge the additional twenty consumed in
"indolencing." The time-table allowed for that, and so prepared us. It
is when larger times are involved,--when a four-hour ride is inflated to
eight, and an eight-hour trip to fifteen, as in going to Burgos,--that
the corporate deliberateness of the Spanish railways ceases to be a
curiosity, and becomes a crime.

We are soon in Irun once more, and after change of cars, cross to
Hendaye, and baggage is inspected for France. The train goes on its way
north, but we stay in Hendaye, to lunch, and to make our projected
excursion to Fuenterrabia.

In terms of logic, San Sebastian the modern has in Fuenterrabia the
ancient its full "contradictory." The one, the resort, is affirmative
and universal; the other, the old, strange town, is negative and
individual. The one has told us little of old Spain; we turn hopefully
to the other.

Fuenterrabia lies near the mouth of the Bidassoa, on the Spanish side of
the stream, below Irun. It is but two miles, from Irun, and readily
reached from that place by carriage; from Hendaye, on the French side,
one reaches it by row-boat in about the same time, with the additional
zest and boast of recrossing the river and of entering and leaving Spain
once more.


II.

Luncheon past, we walk up the long, easy incline that leads from Hendaye
station into its town; and with a turn to the left find our way through
its streets down again to the river bank. Here are boats and boatmen,
and we have to run the customary gauntlet of competition, as vociferous
at Hendaye as at Killarney or the Crossmon. We elect two of the
competitors as allies, and the rest become our sworn enemies forthwith.

The tide is low, the water still and shallow; and we are sculled
smoothly out into the stream, restful in the soft sunshine, the full
blue of the afternoon sky. The voices of our hundred enemies recede; the
sounds from the town yield to the dripping oars; soon the stream
stretches its silent width about us. Close-grouped on the opposite shore
we see the dark walls of Fuenterrabia, domineered by the castle. The
railway whistle begins to seem a memory of another existence, the bustle
of travel a thing remote. The quiet of the river, unlike Lethe, turns us
to the past, and clouds the present in a dreamy haze.

"In that sunny corner where the waves of the Bay of Biscay wash over a
sandy barrier and mingle with the waters of the Bidassoa stream,"--thus
runs the legend so charmingly recounted in _The Sun-Maid_,--"they tell
the ancient story that a favored mortal won from the gods permission to
ask three blessings for Spain.

"He asked that her daughters might be beautiful, that her sons might be
brave, and that her government might be good.

"The first two requests were granted,--the beauty of a Spanish woman is
of world-wide renown; and if the men are rash, passionate, and
revengeful, at least they are brave; but the last request was refused.

"'Impossible!' was the answer; 'impossible! Already she is an earthly
paradise, and were this last blessing hers, the very gods themselves
would desert Elysium and come down to dwell in Spain.'"

Of this we think, winding among the shallows, as the Spanish bank comes
nearer, and the boat at last grounds lightly on its soil. Before us is
the old town we are seeking,--a type perhaps of the nation itself, in
its courtly unthrift, its proud misgovernance.


III.

There is a little custom-house on the bank, but our _impedimenta_ are
safe in Hendaye. I think our passports are there as-well, so bold does
one grow upon familiarity.

We have scarcely traversed a hundred yards before we come upon the
middle centuries. There will be no caviling at the satisfying antiquity
of Fuenterrabia. We have passed in between the lichened walls which
still guard the city, and a few steps bring us into the town and to the
foot of the main street. We pause to look, and the sight is certainly
striking. Beyond a doubt Fuenterrabia is old. It has a true Spanish
tint, and one dyed in the wool; one might probably travel far in Spain
before meeting a truer. This street seems utterly unmodified by modern
formulæ. Wavering and narrow and sombre, it stretches upward on a
gradual incline until it meets the cathedral stepping out from the line
of the old houses and closing the vista. Even in the short perspective,
the huge, blackened eaves of the opposite roofs seem almost to meet.
Balconies, associated with moonlight and mandolins, serenades and
señoritas, jut out from every window; dark bosses of escutcheons mark
the fronts; and below, along the edging of sidewalk, are the dim little
shops, curtained by yellow canvas, intensely and delightfully local, and
wholly unknowing of outside demand or competition. One of these places
does indeed cater to visitors with a humble supply of photographs and of
clicking sets of varnished wooden castanets paired by colored worsteds;
but the others of the store-keepers and the inhabitants in the streets
are clearly unhardened to foreigners, and regard us solely with a deep
and artless curiosity,--tempered, I hope, by admiration. As the town has
been, so it is. It is an epitome of Spain and her past.


IV.

At the head of the street we enter the cool cathedral, and find, as
always, wealth created by poverty. In places such as these one realizes
the hold of the Romish system on mediæval Europe. One realizes its power
also. No matter what the size of a town, it boasts its costly church;
oftener, as here, its cathedral. Villages, houses, people, may be poor,
their church stands rich; they may be unlearned in art and in culture,
their church stands a model of both. There was their shrine, their
finality,--in religion not merely, but in art and wisdom and authority.


At least, the Catholic system held its followers firmly in leash.
Condemn its errors and excesses, yet, these apart, it was marvelously
adapted to its mission. As an engine of unification it was almost
omnipotent. Through the ups and downs of restless migrations and
invasions,--of feudalisms and governments and the soberer commercial
spirit,--it has kept its hold unbroken upon the mass of European
humanity. Its priests and popes might sink out of respect; the Church
did not sink. In the fiercest civil feuds, its abbeys were held
inviolate. To the most brutal, the Church had an odor of sanctity. Its
threats terrified; its mandates were obeyed; it was the one persistent,
binding principle; it held men in check from a relapse into tribalism.

And its hold is firm to-day. Go into a Romish church, you shall find
worshipers at every hour. Worn housewives, seamed and aged market-women,
a chance workingman, an awed and tiptoeing child,--they are there in
their silence. They kneel, they pray, their eyes are fixed on the altar.
Formalism or not, a sincerity underlies it,--a belief and obedience
absorbed from centuries of environment; implicit and unquestioning, and
making for good.


V.

Beyond the cathedral is the broad square or plaza, and the half-alive
streets wandering from this are even more Fuenterrabian than the one
just past, for they are less well-to-do. The poorer houses may reveal
the traits and traditions of a town far more faithfully than the richer.
The latter can draw their models from a wider field. The former copy
only the local and long-followed pattern.

Here at our right stands the castle. It is stern in its decrepitude; its
very aspect is historic. It was built by a king of Navarre, Sancho
Abarca, known as the Strong, so long ago as the tenth century; the
façade facing the square is somewhat later, and the other façade was
rebuilt by Charles V. We pass through the entrance-way and across a
murky, earthen-floored atrium, and stand in silence in the roofless
central hall.

It is at this point that our nascent impressions are brusquely shocked.
Fuenterrabia is not all steeped in dreams of the past. It has waked for
once into the business present as well. Its proud reserve has been
broken. There is a rift in the lute. Here by the mossy courtyard,
enclosed by historic walls and the spirit of an unworldly past, we are
met by a sign-board, with the following English inscription:

[Illustration: For Sale]

FOR SALE!
THIS ROYAL PALACE
AND CASTLE OF THE EMPEROR CHARLES V.
appli for informations
to
PRIMO FERNANDEZ, FUENTERRABIA.

A preceding traveler saw this sign when here, and quotes it in part in a
recent book.[11] It still hangs, as we see it now, two years after his
visit, still pathetically but vainly invoking the spirit of a worldly
present.

[11] FIELD: _Old Spain and New Spain._


For the lover of day dreams, given to designing his _châteaux en
Espagne_, I seriously recommend this purchase in Fuenterrabia. The
castillo is a real one and the most accessible in Spain, and all its
surroundings are gratefully in harmony. It is presumably a bargain, and
one might either hold it for a rise, or turn grandee and live in it.



Within the court, the daylight comes in over the dismantled walls. The
ivy green climbs along the grey stones. We trace the old hearth and the
outline of the stone staircase scarred upon the wall. We conjure up the
rest of the structure, but the Northern Wizard is not with us here, as
at Kenilworth, to repeople it with life and merrymaking, and it strains
the imagination to depart far from the dull, dead present of
Fuenterrabia. Perchance of old there came hither knights and ladies,
pricking o'er the plaine, perchance here was dancing and wassail. We
close our eyes and would fain image the scene. We banish the ruined
walls, the sunlight creeping among the ivy. We see the sheen of cloth of
gold and the gleam of greaves and breastplates. We catch the tale of
battle, the passing of the loving-cup, the stately treading of slow
Spanish measures. We hear,--we hear,--what is it that we hear?--the
melodious sound of woman's soft voice, gently whispering: "Five sous
each for the party, monsieur."

And as we awake and pay and depart, we turn and see again the
disillusionizing legend:

[Illustration: For Sale]




CHAPTER VII.

AN ERA IN TWILIGHT.

     "_Pour faire comprendre le caractère d'un peuple, je conterais
     trente anecdotes et je supprimerais toutes les théories
     philosophiques sur le sujet_,"

     --STENDHAL.


Returning to Hendaye, a train takes us again to Bayonne, connecting
there for Orthez and Pau. The ride to Bayonne needs an hour or less, and
from thence to Orthez calls for two. It is not many decades since much
of this journey had to be made by the diligence. Railways and highways
have pushed rapidly toward the Pyrenees. When in the approaching
fortnight we shall come to traverse the Route Thermale, the great
carriage-way along the chain, we shall see modern road-making in its
perfection; and the rail will keep anxious watch, over the road, running
parallel along the distant plain and reaching helpful arms up the
valleys to uphold it.

Toward Pau especially, the railroads converge. That city, a social
capital for centuries, is a social capital still, and its winter influx
of invalids and pleasure-seekers stimulates every facility of approach.
Then, too, it lies on the way crossing southern France from the Bidassoa
to the Rhone, and no line linking these rivers could omit from its chain
the Gave[12] de Pau.

[12] _Gave_ is the generic name among the Pyrenees for a mountain stream
or torrent.



From Bayonne, the train at first traverses an edge of a singular region.
It is a part of the _Landes_. This great savanna, which flattens the
entire space from Bordeaux to Bayonne, was crossed in coming southward
from Bordeaux, and now as we strike eastward and inland we but briefly
skirt its southerly portion. A sandy, marshy waste, infertile,
unhealthful and poor, it lies in utter contrast with the fields and
slopes of neighboring provinces. It is anomalous, incongruous,--

                  "A bare strand
  Of hillocks heaped with ever-shifting sand,
  Matted with thistles and amphibious weeds,
  Such as from earth's embrace the salt ooze breeds."

Its inhabitants are meagre and stunted; it scants them both in food and
drink. Its miserliness is deep-set: artesian wells sunk a thousand feet
through its dull grey sands bring up only a brackish yellow water; a
precarious rye and barley grow grudgingly.

The low stretches of furze and heath and fern are fringed only by
mournful horizons of pines or broken by long files of gashed and wounded
firs. This extensive tree-growth, however, which is comparatively
recent, has at least lessened one terror of the Landes: sand-storms and
snow-storms, which once swept across the wastes, have been shorn of
their strength. Honor for this is due almost alone to one man, a M.
Brémontier. Before his time, forest-making had here been deemed
impossible; pine seeds planted in the lax hold of these sands had
hitherto been unable even to take root, against the unbroken sweep of
the winds. M. Brémontier, after many experiments, conceived the idea of
planting with the pine seeds the seeds of the common broom, whose hardy
tuft should protect the tiny sapling until it could stand by itself.
The result surpassed hope; pine forests, protecting in their turn, have
sprung up and endured throughout the Landes; they have broken forever
the power of the wind-storms; and their pitch and timber are even a
source of some riches to the Department.

Still it remains a region unsmiling and melancholy. A monochrome of
sand, darkened everywhere by long blotches of sickly undergrowth or the
dull reach of the pines; here and there are cork-trees and alders. The
sheen of some slow lagoon is caught in the distance. There is a charm in
the very charmlessness of the scene, as in some sombre-toned etching.

One striking specialty this district has, however; and from the train
windows we watch closely for a specimen. This is the shepherd on stilts,
the _Xicanque_, immortalized by Rosa Bonheur and mentioned by many
travelers. He is peculiar to this region; perched on these wooden
supports, at a perilous height above the ground, he stalks gravely over
the landscape, enabled to behold a horizon of triple range and to
outstride the fleetest of his vagrant flock. When so inclined, he is
quite able, it is said, to skillfully execute a _pas seul_ or even a
jig,--with every appropriate flourish of his timber limbs and with
surprising grace and _abandon_. His stilts are strapped to the thigh,
not the knee, for greater freedom, and he mounts from his cabin-roof in
the early morning and lives in the air throughout the day. A third stilt
forms a seat, and makes of his silhouette a ludicrous and majestic
tripod. This genius's chief amusement is startlingly domestic: it is
knitting stockings; and engaged in this peaceful art he sits with
dignity and whiles away the hours. How he manoeuvres when he
accidentally drops a needle, I have not been able to learn.

A dignitary of Bordeaux arranged a fête and procession in these Landes
on one occasion; triumphal arches were erected, hung with flowers and
garlands; and the feature of the parade was a sedate platoon of these
heron-like shepherds engaged for the occasion, dressed in skins, decked
with white hoods and mantles, preceded by a band of music, and stalking
by fours imposingly down the line of march.


II.

We are nearing the Pyrenees now, and entering the ancient and famous
province of Béarn, once a noted centre of mediæval chivalry. Beam did
not become part of France until almost modern times.[13] For seven
hundred years preceding, its successive rulers held their brilliant
court unfettered and unpledged. "Ours," declared its barons and prelates
in assembly, "is a free country, which owes neither homage nor servitude
to any one." The life of the province was its own, separated entirely
from that of the kingdom. It had its own succession, its own wars and
feuds, its own love of country. It has a national history in miniature.
"If I have excused myself from bearing arms upon either side," said one
of its rulers, replying to the royal remonstrances, "I have, as I think,
good reasons for it: the wars between England and France no way concern
me, for I hold my country of Béarn from God, my sword and by
inheritance. I have not therefore any cause to enter into the service or
incur the hatred of either of these kings."

[13] In 1620.


There is a pleasant old legend which touches the true note of Béarn.
Toward the year 1200, three of its rulers, in turn misgoverning, were in
turn deposed by the barons. The heirs next in line were the infant
twins of one William de Moncade. "It was agreed," as Miss Costello
relates it; "that one of these should fill the vacant seat of
sovereignty of Béarn, and two of the _prudhommes_ were deputed to visit
their father with the proposition. On their arrival at his castle, the
sages found the children asleep, and observed with attention their
infant demeanor. Both were beautiful, strong and healthy; and it was a
difficult matter to make an election between two such attractive and
innocent creatures. They were extremely alike, and neither could be
pronounced superior to the other; the _prudhommes_ were strangely
puzzled, for they had been so often deceived that they felt it to be
most important that they should not err this time. As they hung in
admiration over the sleeping babes, one of them remarked a circumstance
that at once decided their preference and put an end to their
vacillation: one of the little heroes held his hand tightly closed; the
tiny, mottled palm of the other was wide open as it lay upon his snowy
breast. 'He will be a liberal and bold knight,' said one of the
Béarnais, 'and will best suit us as a head.' This infant was accordingly
chosen, given up by his parents to the wise men, and carried off in
triumph to be educated among his future subjects. The event proved their
sagacity, and the object of their choice lived to give them good laws
and prosperity."


III.

The past of Béarn, like an ellipse, curves around two foci. One is the
town of Orthez,[14] the other, the later city of Pau. The hero, the
central figure, of one is Gaston Phoebus, Count of Foix; that of the
other, Henry of Navarre.

[14] Anciently written Ortayse, afterward Orthès.


These are the two great names of Béarn. Each lights up a distinctive
epoch,--Gaston, the fourteenth century, Henry, the sixteenth.

       *       *       *       *       *

In two hours after leaving Bayonne, the train has come to Orthez. There
is little splendor in the old town as one views it to-day; yet in
Gaston's time it was the capital of Béarn, successor of the yet older
Morlaäs, and a centre for knights and squires and men-at-arms, a magnet
for pilgrims and noble visitors from other countries, attracted by its
fame. There were jousts, tourneys, hunts, banquets. The now broken walls
of the old Castle of Moncade on the hill have sheltered more glittering
merrymakings than those of Kenilworth or Fuenterrabia. But decay never
surrenders an advantage once gained; the castle is dying now; dull
modern commonplace has enfolded the once bright town below; and this
Orthez is to-day at best but a lounging-place for the pessimist. We
shall love better Pau, its rival and successor, still buoyant and
prospering, rising not falling. "Good men study and wise men describe,"
avers Ruskin, in a more than half-truth, "only the growth and standing
of things,--not their decay. Dissolution and putrescence are alike
common and unclean ... in State or organism."

For all that, Orthez and its traditions are too significant to hasten
by. Nowhere is the picture of mediæval life more strongly illuminated;
in no spot shall we more fitly pause to summon back the inner past of
the Pyrenees we are approaching. But we would linger over it only as it
was in its best days, and leave to others the drearier story of its
decadence.

It is Froissart, the old historian and traveler, genial, story-loving
Sir John, who tells us most about Orthez and Gaston. Orthez, as the
capital of Béarn, was in his time, at its meridian, (it was afterward
supplanted by Pau,) and Gaston Phoebus, known as the Count de Foix, was
lord both of Beam and of the neighboring county of Foix. It was
precisely five hundred years ago, come next St. Catherine's Day, that
the old chronicler alighted from his horse here in Orthez. He was come
on a visit to the count, well introduced, and seeking further material
for his easy-going history of the times; knowing that foreign knights
assembled in Orthez from all countries, and that there were few spots
more alive to the sound of the world's doings or better informed in the
varying gossip of wars and court-craft.

Froissart liked to write, "and it was very tiresome," he remarks, "to me
to be idle, for I well know that when the time shall come when I shall
be dead and rotten, this grand and noble history will be in much fashion
and all noble and valiant persons will take pleasure in it and gain from
it augmentation of profit." So, seeking fresh chapters, he had come to
Orthez, where he was at once handsomely received by Count Gaston at this
Castle of Moncade. Here he remained through the winter, affable and
inquiring and observant, adding many pages to his history,--which, his
host assured him, would in times to come be more sought after than any
other; "'because,' added he, 'my fair sir, more gallant deeds of arms
have been performed within these last fifty years, and more wonderful
things have happened, than for three hundred years before. '"

"The style of Froissart," says Taine, who has so marvelously divined the
inner spirit of those times, "artless as it is, deceives us. We think
we are listening to the pretty garrulousness of a child at play; beneath
this prattle we must distinguish the rude voice of the combatants,
bear-hunters and hunters of men too, and the broad, coarse hospitality
of feudal manners. At midnight the Count of Foix came to supper in the
great hall. 'Before him went twelve lighted torches, borne by twelve
valets; and the same twelve torches were held before his table and gave
much light unto the hall, which was full of knights and squires; and
always there were plenty of tables laid out for any person who chose to
sup.' It must have been an astonishing sight to see those furrowed faces
and powerful frames, with their furred robes and their justicoats
streaked under the wavering flashes of the torches." And one of
Froissart's characteristic anecdotes is cited, which merits giving even
more in full: "On Christmas Day, when the Count de Foix was celebrating
the feast with numbers of knights and squires, as is customary, the
weather was piercing cold, and the count had dined, with many lords, in
the hall. After dinner he rose and went into a gallery, which has a
large staircase of twenty-four steps: in this gallery is a chimney where
there is a fire kept when the count inhabits it, otherwise not; and the
fire is never great, for he does not like it: it is not for want of
blocks of wood, for Béarn is covered with wood in plenty to warm him if
he had chosen it, but he has accustomed himself to a small fire. When in
the gallery, he thought the fire too small, for it was freezing and the
weather very sharp, and said to the knights around him: 'Here is but a
small fire for this weather.' The Bourg d'Espaign instantly ran down
stairs; for from the windows of the gallery, which looked into the
court, he had seen a number of asses laden with billets of wood for the
use of the house; and seizing the largest of these asses with his load,
threw him over his shoulders and carried him up stairs, pushing through
the crowd of knights and squires who were around the chimney, and flung
ass and load with his feet upward on the dogs of the hearth, to the
delight of the count and the astonishment of all."


IV.

Gaston himself was a type of the time. He had its virtues and its vices,
both magnified. Hence, hearing an eye-witness draw his character for us
is to gain a direct if but partial insight into the character of his
era. Froissart's moral perspective is often curiously blurred, and in
the light of many of his anecdotes about the count his eulogium perhaps
needs qualification: "Count Gaston Phoebus de Foix, of whom I am now
speaking, was at that time fifty-nine years old; and I must say that
although I have seen very many knights, kings, princes and others, I
have never seen any so handsome, either in the form of his limbs and
shape, or in countenance, which was fair and ruddy, with grey and
amorous eyes that gave delight whenever he chose to express affection.
He was so perfectly formed, one could not praise him too much. He loved
earnestly the things he ought to love, and hated those which it was
becoming him so to hate. He was a prudent knight, full of enterprise and
wisdom. He had never any men of abandoned character with him, reigned
prudently, and was constant in his devotions. There were regular
nocturnals from the Psalter, prayers, from the rituals to the Virgin, to
the Holy Ghost, and from the burial service. He had every day
distributed as alms at his gate five florins in small coin to all
comers. He was liberal and courteous in his gifts; and well knew how to
take when it was proper and to give back where he had confidence."

There is an obverse to the medallion. "The Count de Foix was very cruel
to any person who incurred his indignation, never sparing them, however
high their rank, but ordering them to be thrown over the walls, or
confined on bread and water during his pleasure; and such as ventured to
speak for their deliverance ran risks of similar treatment. It is a
well-known fact that he confined in a deep dungeon his cousin-german,
the Viscount de Châteaubon, during eight days; and he would not give him
his liberty until he had paid down forty thousand francs."

And then in the very chapter with his eulogy, Sir John goes on to relate
the count's brutal killing of his own son in a fit of rage and
suspicion, and torturing fifteen retainers as possible accomplices of
the innocent lad; and elsewhere tells of his stabbing his half-brother
and letting him die in a dungeon of the tower, for refusing the
surrender of a fortress. This was the other side of Gaston's character,
and a side quite as representative. It was all in line with the time.
His reign was turbulent, magnificent, cruel, devout,--everything by
extremes. The man is characteristic of the mode, and Orthez in this
summarizes much of the life of the France of the Middle Ages.


V.

These old annalists scarcely pause to censure this spirit of crime, this
hideous quickness to black deeds. They view it as a regrettable failing,
perhaps, and glowingly point to the doer's lavish religiousness in
return. Absolution covers a multitude of sins. To a generous son of the
Church much might be forgiven. "Among the solemnities which the Count de
Foix observes on high festivals," records his visitor, "he most
magnificently keeps the feast of St. Nicholas, as I learnt from a squire
of his household the third day after my arrival at Orthès. He holds this
feast more splendidly than that of Easter, and has a most magnificent
court, as I myself noticed, being present on that day. The whole clergy
of the town of Orthès, with all its inhabitants, walk in procession to
seek the count at the castle, who on foot returns with them to the
church of St. Nicholas, where is sung the psalm _Benedictus Dominus,
Deus meus, qui docet manus meas ad proelium et digitos meos ad bellum_,
from the Psalter of David, which, when finished, recommences, as is done
in the chapels of the pope or king of France on Christmas or Easter
Days; for there were plenty of choristers. The Bishop of Pamiers sang
the mass for the day; and I there heard organs play as melodiously as I
have ever heard in any place. To speak briefly and truly, the Count de
Foix was perfect in person and in mind; and no contemporary prince could
be compared with him for sense, honor or liberality."


VI.

As to liberality, these robber barons were able to afford it. Mention is
incidentally made in conversation of Count Gaston's store of florins in
his Castle of Moncade at Orthez. Froissart instantly pricks up his ears:

"'Sir,' said I to the knight, 'has he a great quantity of them?'

"'By my faith,' replied he, 'the Count de Foix has at this moment a
hundred thousand, thirty times told; and there is not a year but he
gives away sixty thousand; for a more liberal lord in making presents
does not exist.'"

We can see the good Sir John's eyes glistening:

"'Ha, ha, holy Mary!' cried I, 'to what purpose does he keep so large a
sum? Where does it come from? Are his revenues so great to supply him
with it? To whom does he make these gifts? I should like to know this if
you please.'

"He answered: 'To strangers, to knights and squires who travel through
his country, to heralds, minstrels, to all who converse with him; none
leave him without a present, for he would be angered should any one
refuse it.'"

With such sums at disposal, Gaston might well indulge his passion for
the chase and keep sixteen hundred hounds. His hospitality too was
unbounded. When the Duke of Bourbon made a three-days' visit to Orthez,
he was "magnificently entertained with dinners and suppers. The Count de
Foix showed him good part of his state, which would recommend him to
such a person as the Duke of Bourbon. On the fourth day, he took his
leave and departed. The count made many presents to the knights and
squires attached to the duke, and to such an extent that I was told this
visit of the Duke of Bourbon cost him ten thousand francs.... Such
knights and squires as returned through Foix and waited on the count
were well received by him and received magnificent presents. I was told
that this expedition, including the going to Castile and return, cost
the Count de Foix, by his liberalities, upwards of forty thousand
francs."

The King of France was entertained by Gaston at a dazzling banquet where
no less than two hundred and fifty dishes covered the tables. But a
succeeding Gaston outdid this in a lavish dinner, likewise to visiting
royalty, of which a faithful record has come down to us from old
documents. There were twelve wide tables, each seven yards long. At the
first, the count presiding, were seated the king and queen and the
princes of the blood, at the others foreign knights and lords according
to their rank and dignity. There were served seven elaborate courses,
each course requiring one hundred and forty plates of silver. There were
seven sorts of soup, then patties of capon, and the ham of the wild
boar; then partridge, pheasant, peacock, bittern, heron, bustard,
gosling, woodcock and swan. This was the third course, concluding with
antelope and wild horse. An _entremet_ or spectacle followed, and then a
course of small birds and game, this served on gold instead of silver.
Next appeared tarts and cakes and intricate pastries, and later, after
another spectacle, comfits and great moulds of conserves in fanciful and
curious forms,--the whole liberally helped down with varied wines, and
joyously protracted with music, dancing and tableaux.


VII.

Gaston Phoebus died suddenly as he had lived violently. He was hunting
near Orthez, three years after Froissart's visit, and to ward evening
stopped at a country inn at Rion to sup. Within, the room was "strewed
with rushes and green leaves; the walls were hung with boughs newly cut
for perfume and coolness, as the weather was marvelously hot even for
the month of August. He had no sooner entered this room than he said:
'These greens are very agreeable to me, for the day has been desperately
hot.' When seated, he conversed with Sir Espaign du Lyon on the dogs
that had best hunted; during which conversation his son Sir Evan and
Sir Peter Cabestan entered the apartment, as the table had been there
spread." He called for water to wash, and two squires advanced; a
knight, the Bourg d'Espaign, (the hero of the Christmas Day exploit,)
took the silver basin and another knight the napkin. "The count rose
from his seat and stretched out his hands to wash; but no sooner had his
fingers, which were handsome and long, touched the cold water, than he
changed color, from an oppression at his heart, and his legs failing
him, fell back on his seat, exclaiming, 'I am a dead man: Lord God, have
mercy on me!'"

It is a significant comment on the period, that amid the commotion at
the inn the first thought was of foul play. "The two squires who had
brought water to wash in the basin said, to free themselves from any
charge of having poisoned him: 'Here is the water; we have already drank
of it, and will now again in your presence,' which they did, to the
satisfaction of all. They put into his mouth bread and water and spices,
with other comforting things, but to no purpose, for in less than half
an hour he was dead, having surrendered his soul very quietly. God, out
of his grace, was merciful to him."

He was entombed before the altar in the little church at Orthez, with
imposing obsequies. No epitaph remains, but this of a preceding Gaston,
buried in the same church, deserves note for its curious, jingling Latin
rhyme:

  "Continet hæc fossa Gastonis principis ossa,
  Nobilis ac humilis aliis, pulvis sibi vilis,
  Subjectis parcens, hastes pro viribus arcens.
  Da veniam, Christe, flos militiæ fuit isle,
  Et virtute precum, confer sibi gaudia tecum,
  Gastonis nomen gratum fert auribus omen,
  Mulcet prolatum, dulcescis sæpe relatum,"

Two hundred years afterward, in the tumult of Protestant iconoclasm,
Gaston Phoebus's tomb was broken open, its débris sold, piece by piece,
and Montgomery's Huguenots derisively kicked the august skull about the
streets of Orthez and used it for a bowling-ball:

  "They hopped among the weeds and stones,
  And played at skittles with his bones."


VIII.

There are a few gleams of humor among these grim recounts. It was always
tinged with the sardonic. Pitard, moralist and pedant, staying at the
Béarnais court, fell into a dispute with a poet, Théophile:

"''T is a pity,' sneered Pitard, finally, 'that, having so much spirit,
you know so little!'

"''T is a pity,' retorted Théophile, 'that, knowing so much, you have so
little spirit!'"

Often the jests take a religious turn. The chaplain of one of the counts
of Orthez, defending his own unpriestly fondness for hunting, asserted
that the ten horns of the stag (_cerf_) stood for the Decalogue; and
that the stag was to be as ardently followed as the sovereign pontiff,
the latter being himself _le cerf des cerfs,--servus servorum_.

If a husband were seriously rasped by his wife, or their tempers could
not agree, he was wont to retire her to a convent. "He did not send her
to the devil," remarks a sly annalist, "but he gave her to the Lord."

And read this whimsical epitaph on an organist of the cathedral at
Lescar, a bishopric near Orthez. He died in the fifteenth century:

     "As you pass, pray God for his soul, that having assisted in the
     music of this world, he may be received forever among the blessed
     to assist in the celestial music. Amen."

Orthez is known to our century as the scene of a spiteful battle
between Wellington and Soult, engaging eighty thousand men, and ending
in the victory of the former and the rout of the French. But the town is
so deeply sunk in the past that its kinship with modern events seems
almost cause for resentment; and we will leave it as it is, with its
older glories and memories thickly crusted upon it.




CHAPTER VIII.

"THE LITTLE PARIS OF THE SOUTH."


When the Count of Foix made a hunting trip to his _château mignon_ on
the present site of Pau, he found it a goodly journey. There were
quagmires and waste land to pass, and the visit and return were not to
be made in a sun's shining. More greatly than avenging spirits from his
dungeons the spirit of steam would affright him to-day, as it goes
roaring over the levels in a hundred minutes to the same destination.

From Orthez, it is less than two hours by rail, and we are at last in
Pau. The _Midi_ line is accurately on time. These French railroads are
operated by the State; they are not afflicted with parallel lines and
bitter competition; they have no occasion, as our roads have, to
advertise a faster schedule than can possibly be carried out.
Consequently their time-tables aim to state the exact truth, and the
roads can and do live up to it.

It is late in the evening when we arrive, and we seek no impressions. A
comfortable omnibus winds us up an infinity of turns, through an
apparent infinity of streets, and we are at the Hotel Gassion.

It is impossible to be entirely impressionless, even for travelers at
ten at night. It is the hotel itself which makes the dent. Our vague
misgivings as to the "dismal roadside inns" awaiting our tour have
already been arrested at Biarritz and San Sebastian. They are sent into
exile from Pau. The Hotel Gassion, whose name honors a stout old
Béarnais warrior, is fitly a palace. It cost four hundred thousand
dollars. A cushioned elevator lifts us smoothly upward to our rooms,
which prove high-ceiled and unusually large and have dressing-rooms
attached. The dark walls accord with a deep mossy carpet. The
furnishings are massive in mahogany, polished and carved: a wardrobe,
dressing-cases, a writing-desk; a sofa-couch, made inaccessible, as
everywhere in Europe, by the barrier of a huge round table; padded
arm-chairs, upholstered in silk damask; and, acme of prevision, a
praying-chair. The beds seem beds of state, covered and canopied with
some satiny material; and both silk and lace curtains part before the
windows, showing separate balconies in the night outside. The
dining-hall and the parlors, which we do not seek until the morning,
prove to be on an equally expensive scale; paintings of the Pyrenees
hang in the wide halls; and there is a conservatory and winter-garden
opening on the terrace. The building is of grey stone, with corner
towers and turrets and an imposing elevation, and has less the look of a
hotel than of a royal _Residenz_.

Our estimates of the standards of comfort in the Pyrenees are
perceptibly heightened by the evening's impressions alone, as we discuss
our surroundings and the Apollinaris. With Pau thus rivaling Lucerne, we
grow more confident for Eaux-Bonnes and Cauterets, Luchon and Bigorre.
And as, from the balcony, we look in vain across the murky night to see
the snow-peaks which we know are facing us, we agree that here at the
good Hotel Gassion we could luxuriously outstay the lengthiest storm to
view them.


II.

We are glad when daylight comes, as boys are on Christmas morning. The
present we are eager for is the sight of the Pyrenees snow-peaks. The
sun is shining, the sky clear. Even coffee and rolls seem time-wasters,
and we hasten out to the terrace.

Yes, the Pyrenees are before us. There stretches the range, its relief
walling the southern horizon from west to the farthest east, the line of
snow-tusks sharp and white in the sunshine. They are distant yet, but
they stand as giants, parting two kingdoms. Austere and still, they face
us, as they have faced this spot since that stormy Eocene morning when
they sprang like the dragon's white teeth from the earth.

The view is a far-reaching one. The eye sweeps the broadside of the
entire west-central chain,--a full seventy miles from right to left. The
view might recall, as the greater recalls the less, the winter summits
of the Adirondacks, seen from the St. Regis mountain. It has been more
equally paired with the line of the distant Alps seen from the platform
at Berne. I may parallel it, too, again in Switzerland, with the view of
the Valais peaks which bursts on one when, winding upward past the
Daubensee and its desolation, he comes out suddenly upon the brink of
the great wall of the Gemmi. But here there is a warmth in the view
beyond that of Switzerland. Some one has said that "snow is regarded as
the type of purity not because it is cold but because it is spotless."
This distant snow-line is spotless, but to the eye at least it is not
cold.

Here as there, the separate peaks have their separate personality. It is
not a blur of nameless tips. Two especially arrest attention, south and
southeast, for they rise head and shoulders above their neighbors. Each
bears the name of the _Pic du Midi_. That opposite us, dominating the
valley of Ossau, is the _Pic du Midi d'Ossau_. It is ice-capped and
jagged,--

        "A rocky pyramid,
  Shooting abruptly from the dell
  Its thunder-splintered pinnacle,"--

the Matterhorn of the Pyrenees. That on the left is the noted _Pic du
Midi de Bigorre_, famed for the view from its top. Other prominent peaks
are also pointed out. _Mont Perdu_ and the _Vignemale_, two of the
princes of the chain, are partly hidden by other summits, and are too
distant to rule as they ought. The monarch _Maladetta_, the highest
summit of the Pyrenees, is farther eastward still and cannot be seen
from Pau.

It is a repaying prospect; a majestic salutation, preceding the nearer
acquaintance to come. One thing we know instantly. There will be no lack
of noble scenery in these mountains. We shall find wild views among
their rocks and ice,--views, it must be, which shall dispute with many
in the Alps.

This prospect from the terrace at Pau is a celebrated one. Icy peaks are
not all that is seen. In front of them the ranges rise, still high from
the plain, but smoothed and softened with the green of pines and turf.
Between these and the Pau valley spread hidden leagues of rolling
plains, swelling as they approach us into minor ravelins of foothills
known as the _coteaux_; and little poplar-edged streams, "creaming over
the shallows," winding their way toward the valley just below us, are
coming from the long slopes to join the hurrying Gave de Pau. Houses and
hamlets are here and there, and the even streak of the railway; and
over toward the coteaux we see the village of Jurançon, famed for its
wines.

The terrace falls sheer away, a fifty-foot wall from where we stand, and
at its base, as we lean over the parapet, we see houses and alleys and
just beneath us a school-yard of shouting, frolicking children. We
brighten their play with a few friendly sous, as one enlivens the
Bernese bear-pit with carrots.

Behind us, the Hotel Gassion rises to cut off the streets beyond it; to
the right, along the terrace a few hundred yards, stands a stout old
building, square and firm, which we know at once for the castle of Henry
of Navarre.


III.

"In most points of view," as Johnson observes, in his _Sketches in the
South of France_, "we look down the valley and see on either side its
mountain walls; or we are placed upon culminating points overtopping all
the rest of the prospect; but here the view is across the depression and
against the vast panorama, which opposes the eye at all quarters, and
comprehends within it the whole of the picture. High up in the snow the
very pebbles seem to lie so distinctly that, but for the space between,
a boy might pick them up; lower down, from among the brown heather thin
blue streaks stream aloft from some cottage chimney, winding along the
brae-side till melted into air. We half expect to see some human figure
traverse those white fields and mark the footprints he leaves behind,
some shepherd with his dog crossing from valley to valley. Alas! it is
twenty miles away, the pebbles are huge masses of projecting rock,
precipices on which the snow cannot rest; yonder smoke is from the
charcoal-burner's fire, which would take in a cottage for a mouthful of
fuel, and a dozen men piled on each other's shoulders might at this
moment be swallowed up in these snow-beds and we never the wiser.

"With the warm sunlight upon it, and the pure, clear blue above, into
which these great shapes are wedged like a divine mosaic, the scene
looks so spotless and holy in its union with the heavens that one might
fancy it a link between this earthliness and the purity above, 'the
heaven-kissing hill' on which angels' feet alight. The great vision of
marvelous John Bunyan seemed there realized, and we had found the
Immanuel's Land and these were the Delectable Mountains. 'For,' said he,
'when the morning was up they bid him look South; so he did, and behold,
at a great distance he saw a most pleasant mountainous country
beautified with woods, vineyards, fruits of all sorts, flowers also;
with springs and fountains very delectable to behold.... It was common,
too, for all the pilgrims, and from thence they might see the gates of
the Celestial City.'"


IV.

At the other side of the hotel we are in Pau. There is not very much
that is impressive in its general appearance. We go by a patch of park
and through a mediocre street, and find ourselves in the public
square,--the Carfax of the city. From this run east and south its two
chief streets. All of the buildings are low and most of them dingy. We
expected newer, higher, more Parisian effects. At the right of the
square is the long, flat market-building, vocal, in and out, this early
morning, with bustling hucksters superintending their stalls. The
square itself is bright with the colors of overflowing flowers and
fabrics and other idols of the market-place. Neat little heaps of fruit,
apexed into "ball-piled pyramids," are guarded by characterful old
women, alert and intent, whose heads, coifed with striped kerchiefs, nod
a reward to the purchaser with a hearty "_Merci, monsieur_!"

[Illustration]

Few of the streets in the town are well paved, and few of the villas
seen in driving in the suburbs aid to raise the architectural average.
Except for its palace-hotels, Pau seems to show little of artistic
building enterprise.

This city, so popular with the English, is rarely spoken of in America.
There, in fact, it is singularly little known. This is no truer of Pau
than of the Pyrenees themselves; but even to Englishmen who may know as
little as we of the latter, the former is familiar ground. Four thousand
Britons winter here annually, besides French and other visitors, and Pau
runs well in the hibernal race, even against Mentone and Nice. Its
hotels alone would evidence this. Up to these, there are all grades of
good accommodation,--the _pensions_, of good or better class; furnished
apartments, or a flat to be rented by the season; whole villas to be
leased or purchased, as the intending comer may prefer.

One can leave Paris or Marseilles by the evening express and be in Pau
the next afternoon,--about the same length of time as required to reach
St. Augustine from New York. This is certainly far from a formidable
journey, and it is matter for surprise that the adventurous American
does not oftener take it.

The favor of the spot, it owes to its climate. Something there is,--some
meteorological idiosyncrasy in its location,--which guards its still,
mild air, the winter through. Storms rage impotently down from the
mountains or across the Landes; they cannot pass the charmed barrier of
the coteaux. Winds are rare in Pau. Rain is not rare; but the
atmosphere, even when damp, is not chilling, and the lines of rain fall
soft and never aslant. There is a tradition of an old sea-captain who
once made a brief stay here and who, as he took his daily walks, was
noticed as constantly and restlessly whistling. He finally left in
disgust, with the remark that there was not a capful of wind to be had
in the place.

The winter colony takes full possession of the town. It passes thirty
thousand inhabitants under the yoke, as Rome passed their forefathers
the Aquitani. Pau in the season is a British oligarchy. Society fairly
spins. There are titles, and there is money; there are drives, calls,
card-parties; dances and dinners; clubs,--with front windows; theatres,
a Casino, English schools, churches; tennis, polo, cricket; racing,
coaching,--and, _Anglicissime_, a tri-weekly fox-hunt! For some years,
too, the position of master of the hounds, a post of much social
distinction in Pau, was held by a well-known American, so we are
told,--a fact certainly hitherto unheralded to many of his countrymen.

Socially, there is a wide range of entertainment at Pau. What Johnson
wrote of it thirty years ago is not materially inapplicable to-day: "One
set, whom you may call the banqueteers, give solemn, stately dinners
immediately before going to bed; another perform a hybrid entertainment,
between the English tea-party, and the Continental soirée, where you may
enjoy your Bohea and Souchong, play long small whist, and occasionally
listen to ponderous harmonies solemnly performed. A third are the
formal rout-givers, the white-kid-and-slipper, orchestra-and-programme,
dance-and-sit-down-to-supper folks; so like home that it only requires
Gunter's men to fancy oneself in Baker Street of olden times. Another is
the delightful soirée _pur sang_, where everybody comes as a matter of
course, and where everybody who does not sing, dances or plays, or is a
phenomenon in charades, or writes charming impromptus, or talks like the
last book, or can play at any known game from loto to chess, or knows
all the gossip of the last six hours; and where everybody chats and
laughs, and sends everybody else comfortably home in the best of humors
just about the time that the great people are expecting the _coiffeur_
to arrive."

Thus there is a stir in the Pyrenees the year around. In the winter, at
Pau; in summer, at the twenty cures and centres among the mountains. The
proprietor of a winter hotel here will own also his summer hostelry at
Bigorre or Cauterets. In the summer, it is the French and Spanish to
whom he caters, for they have so far been the ones most appreciative
both of the springs and the scenery of these mountains. And so, with the
rise and dip of the seasons, the European element waxes as the English
wanes, in a kind of solstitial see-saw. And the smiling landlord stands
upon the pivot.

       *       *       *       *       *

The clouds are closing in, after granting us that glittering panorama,
and the morning grows dull and dark. We explore the book-stores, and
finally find the old Library in the upper story of the market-building.
Here two of us at least pass a long and contentful forenoon.


V.

In fierce Count Gaston's time, Béarn centred in Orthez, and Pau was but
his hunting-box. Two hundred years later, Pau had become the focus, and
Béarn and Foix not only, but French Navarre as well, were its united
kingdom. Gaston's Castle of Moncade had aged into history,--

        "Outworn, far and strange,
  A transitory shame of long ago,"

and the hunting-box had grown in its turn to castle's stature.

The world had brightened during the two centuries. Constantinople had
fallen and the Renaissance came. Luther had posted his theses on the
Wittemberg church door and the Reformation took root. Men were older
than when Froissart lived and wrote. And this active province of Béarn
kept pace; it opened quickly to the new influences, was alive to the
changing _zeitgeist_. There remained the chivalric still,--and a trace
of the barbaric,--as with the outer world; in short, in its faults and
fervor's, in its codes and standards, the sixteenth century is aptly
summed up in Béarn-Navarre,--and Navarre in its famous Henry.


VI.

And so, on the following morning, we pass into the courtyard of his
castle here at Pau with the feeling that in some sense we are evoking
the shade of the era, not of the man. The feeling dies hard; but the
robustious, business-like guide that herds us together with other
comers, and shepherds us all briskly through the official round, goes
very far toward killing it. There is little that one needs to remember
of the successive rooms and halls; it is a confusion of polished floors,
and vases, and tapestry, and porphyry tables, and the rest,--adorned and
illumined by a voluble Gallic description. Later French kings have
restored the old building, and stocked it with Paris furniture, and made
it modern and comfortable. One is always divided in spirit over these
restorations. The castle needed help painfully; it had been badly used
by the Revolution; and it had been debased to a barrack by Napoleon's
troops, who "stabled their steeds in the courts and made their drunken
revelry resound in the chambers of Marguerite of Angoulême." Dismantled,
half-roofless, its great halls, unsheltered and unsheltering, it was
wasting fast under the elements into picturesque but irreparable ruin.
And I suppose the pleasure of kings and the peace of utilitarians ought
fairly to outweigh the disappointments of the touring impression-seeker.

In one apartment, however, we make a stand. The herd and its shepherd
can pass along. This, he has told us, is the birthplace of Henry IV. The
floor is polished like the rest, and the furniture has been in part
renewed, but the room is the same which that alert baby first laughed
upon. In the corner at the right is an antique bed of carved walnut,
with four posts and a rich canopy. Around its side are cut in the wood
an elaborate series of medallions, each a foot square, representing the
heads of the kings of France. Across the apartment swings still a great
tortoise-shell, which served the royal infant for a cradle,--saved
afterward from the furies of the Revolution by the substitution of a
false shell in its place.[15]

[15] The genuineness of the present shell has frequently been
questioned; but the testimony of LAGRÈZE has now fairly established the
story of its preservation.


In this room, Jeanne d'Albret sang a Béarnais song as the hero of Ivry
was born, and so won the wager with her martial old father, the King of
Navarre; and the boy came into the world smiling and unafraid. And
writers tell us how delighted the old king was, and how he took the
infant into his arms, and rubbed its lips with a garlic clove, and
tilted into its little mouth from a golden goblet some drops of the
manly wine of Jurançon. When Queen Jeanne herself was born in this very
castle, twenty-five years before, the Spaniards had sneered: "A miracle!
the cow (of the arms of Béarn) has given birth to a ewe!" "My ewe,"
exclaimed the happy old father now, "has brought forth a lion! _Tu seras
un vray Béarnais!_"


VII.

Henry's life was as martial and as merry as his grandfather sought to
form it. He grew up on the coteaux in a hardy, fresh-air life, and at
nineteen became King of Navarre,--the title including Béarn and Foix.
Into this old room in the castle where we stand throng reminders of his
career, its beginnings so closely twined with Pau. Independent still as
under Gaston, the sovereigns of the stout little kingdom had lived
friends but no subjects of the King of France; and the Court at Pau,
always proud and autonomous as the Court at Paris, had become defiantly
Protestant besides. And now if ever it had a sovereign after its own
heart. Henry was kingly, but a king of the people. He had their spirit.
His long, keen, grizzled face was alight with ready comradeship. "I want
my poorest subject," he said, "to have a fowl for his pot on Sundays."
He was a Béarnais from sole to crown,--in bravery and craft, tact and
recklessness, in virtues, and--which pleased them as much--in vices. "He
was plain of speech, rough in manner,--with a quaint jest alike for
friend or foe; his hand upon his sword, his foot in the stirrup, his gun
slung across his shoulder, the first in assault, the last in retreat.
Irregular in his habits, eating at no stated times, but when hungry
voraciously devouring everything that pleased him, especially fruit and
oysters; negligent, not to say dirty, in his person, and smelling strong
of garlic. A man who called a spade a spade, swore like a trooper, and
hated the parade of courts; was constant in friendship, promised
anything freely, a boon companion, a storyteller, cynical in his
careless epicureanism, and so profound a believer in the 'way of fate,'
that reckless of the morrow he extracted all things from the passing
hour."[16]

[16] ELLIOTT: _Old Court Life in France_.


Time had not jogged on so far, in journeying from Orthez to Pau, as to
forget all his mediæval ways,--his promptings to strife and feuds, his
liking for adventures. Henry had abundance of them, in his running fire
against his neighbor-enemies, in his hot Protestant struggles against
the Medicis, in his hotter fight for the throne of France. There are
both meats and sweetmeats in his career,--strong deeds and knightly
diversions. "These old wars are the most poetic in French history; they
were made for pleasure rather than interest. It was a chase in which
adventures, dangers, emotions were found, in which men lived in the
sunlight, on horseback, amidst flashes of fire, and where the body as
well as the soul had its enjoyment and its exercise. Henry carries it on
as briskly as a dance, with a Gascon's fire and a soldier's ardor....
This is no spectacle of great masses of well-disciplined men coming
heavily into collision and falling by thousands on the field, according
to the rules of good tactics. The king leaves Pau or Nérac with a little
troop, picks up the neighboring garrisons on his way, scales a fortress,
intercepts a body of arquebusiers as they pass, extricates himself
pistol in hand from the midst of a hostile troop, and returns.... They
arrange their plan from day to day; nothing is done unless unexpectedly
and by chance. Enterprises are strokes of fortune.... To act, to dare,
to enjoy, to expend force and trouble like a prodigal, to be given up to
the present sensation, be forever urged by passions forever lively,
support and search the extremes of all contrasts, that was the life of
the sixteenth century."[17]

[17] _Tour Through the Pyrenees_.


Exciting incidents abound among Henry's dashing forays. He exposed
himself to every risk he asked of his men, deaf even to their own
entreaties that he should take more care of his life. More than once it
was his personal leadership alone that carried the day. For example,
there was a hostile city on the river Lot. Henry coveted it. Its
garrison was strong; its governor scoffed: "a fig for the Huguenots!"
Henry would brave defeat sooner than brook defiance. He marched to the
town at once. "It was in the month of June," as Sully relates it in his
_Memoirs,_ "the weather extremely hot, with violent thunder but no rain.
He ordered us to halt in a plantation of walnut trees, where a fountain
of running water afforded us some refreshment;" and after a brief rest,
he disposed his little army, and planned his attack:

"We had three gates to force; these we made haste to throw down with the
petard, after which we made use of hatchets. The breaches were so low
that the first who entered were obliged to creep through on their hands
and feet. At the noise of the petard, forty men armed and about two
hundred arquebusiers ran almost naked to dispute our entry; meantime the
bells rung the alarm, to warn everybody to stand to their defence. In a
moment, the houses were covered with soldiers, who threw large pieces of
wood, tiles and stones upon us, with repeated cries of 'Charge, kill
them!' We soon found that they were resolved to receive us boldly; it
was necessary therefore at first to sustain an encounter, which lasted
above a quarter of an hour and was very terrible. I was cast to the
ground by a large stone that was cast out of a window; but by the
assistance of the Sieur de la Bertichère and La Trape, my valet de
chambre, I recovered, and resumed my post. All this time we advanced
very little, for fresh platoons immediately succeeded those that fled
before us; so that before we gained the great square, we had endured
more than twelve battles. My cuisses being loosened, I was wounded in
the left thigh. At last we got to the square, which we found barricaded,
and with infinite labor we demolished those works, being all the time
exposed to the continual discharge of the artillery, which the enemy had
formed into a battery.

"The King of Navarre continued at the head of his troops during all
these attacks; he had two pikes broke, and his armor was battered in
several places by the fire and blows of the enemy. We had already
performed enough to have gained a great victory; but so much remained
to do that the battle seemed only to be just begun; the city being of
large extent and filled with so great a number of soldiers that we in
comparison of them were but a handful. At every cross-way we had a new
combat to sustain, and every stone house we were obliged to storm; each
inch of ground so well defended that the King of Navarre had occasion
for all his men, and we had not a moment's leisure to take breath.

"It is hardly credible that we could endure this violent exercise for
five whole days and nights, during which time not one of us durst quit
his post for a single moment, take any nourishment but with his arms in
his hand, or sleep except for a few moments leaning against the shops.
Fatigue, faintness, the weight of our arms, and the excessive heat,
joined to the pain of our wounds, deprived us of the little remainder of
our strength; our feet, scorched with heat and bleeding in many places,
gave us agonies impossible to be expressed.

"The citizens, who suffered none of these inconveniences and who became
every minute more sensible of the smallness of our numbers, far from
surrendering, thought of nothing but protracting the fight till the
arrival of some succors, which they said were very near; they sent forth
great cries, and animated each other by our obstinacy. Though their
defence was weak, yet they did enough to oblige us to keep upon our
guard, which completed our misfortunes. In this extremity the principal
officers went to the king, and advised him to assemble as many men as he
could about his person and open himself a retreat. They redoubled their
instances at the report which was spread and which they found to be
true, that the succors expected by the enemy were arrived at the bar
and would be so soon in the city that he would have but just time to
force the wall and secure himself a passage. But this brave prince,
whose courage nothing was ever able to suppress, turning toward them
with a smiling countenance and air so intrepid as might have inspired
courage into the most pusillanimous heart: ''Tis heaven,' said he,
'which dictates what I ought to do upon this occasion; remember then
that my retreat out of this city, without having secured one also to my
party, shall be the retreat of my soul from my body. My honor requires
this of me; speak therefore to me of nothing but fighting, conquest or
death.'"

There could be but one issue to such words. Henry fought till
reinforcements came to him, and the town fell.

       *       *       *       *       *

Anecdotes of Henry are in a very real sense anecdotes of Béarn. The one
following, lines out two of the king's best qualities. He was besieging
a strong city in Poitou. "We applied ourselves without ceasing to the
trenches and undermining. The King of Navarre took inconceivable pains
in this siege; he conducted the miners himself, after he had taken all
the necessary precautions to hinder supplies from entering without; the
bridges, avenues and all the roads that lead to the city were strictly
guarded, as likewise great part of the country.... The mining was so far
advanced that we could hear the voices of the soldiers who guarded the
parapets, within the lodgment of the miners. The King of Navarre was the
first who perceived this; he spoke and made himself known to the
besieged; who were so astonished at hearing him name himself from the
bottom of these subterraneous places that they demanded leave to
capitulate. The proposals were all made by this uncommon way; the
articles were drawn up or rather dictated by the King of Navarre, whose
word was known by the besieged to be so inviolable that they did not
require a writing. They had no cause to repent of this confidence; the
King of Navarre, charmed with a proceeding so noble, granted the
garrison military honors and preserved the city from pillage."


VIII.

The great satisfaction in contemplating the career of Henry is in the
fact that it succeeded. His ambitions, maturing in purpose, ended in
result. The King of Navarre found himself at last the King of France.

The path had not been of roses. He had captured two hundred towns and
fought in sixty battles on his way. He himself had strewed thorns for
others as well. His wars spread suffering throughout France. His
skirmishings, petty but many, add up to an appalling total of harm.
Henry as a model of renounced ambition is a failure. Read what his
Catholic enemies in Béarn said of him, in an address and appeal to the
Catholics of France; as now first translated out of its Old French, it
has an oddly Jeffersonian ring:

"Knowing long since, to our cost, the nature of the wolf who seeks to
deceive and then devour you, we have deemed it duty to warn you of the
character of the beast, (_le naturel de la beste,_) so that by our
putting you on your guard he shall not have means to endamage you.
Within twenty years he has summoned a round million of foreign
mercenaries to pillage and rend your kingdom. He has sacked and
demolished two thousand monasteries and twenty thousand (_sic!_)
churches; he has wrecked no less than nine hundred hospitals; he has
caused the death, by war and divers punishments, of nearly one million,
six hundred thousand men. In the face of his assurances to the nobility
in 1580 and of his reiterated protestations, he has put up our very
priests at auction and sold them off to the highest bidder, in order
that his Huguenots might have on whom to wreak at leisure their diabolic
hatred. He thinks himself King of France; it is a malady common to the
crack-brained to fancy themselves kings of the first realm they spy and
to fashion them seigniories in the air. Beware trusting your fowls to
this fox!"

Evidently the Béarnais hero had made some tolerably strong enemies in
pursuing his ambitions. No less truly his ambitions had made some
tolerably wide gaps in his ethics.

But the world pardons much to success. And this man had a certain
high-mindedness in him which compels admiration. When the battle of Ivry
was commencing, "he remembered," relates Perefix, an old historian,
"that the evening before the battle he had used some harsh expressions
to Colonel Theodoric Schomberg, who had asked him for money, and told
him in a passion that it was not acting like a man of honor to demand
money when he came to take orders for fighting. He afterward went to
him, when he was ranging his troops in order, and said: 'Colonel, we are
now upon the point; perhaps I shall never go from this place; it is not
just that I should deprive a brave gentleman as you are of your honor; I
come therefore to declare that I know you to be an honest man and
incapable of committing a base action.' Saying this, he embraced him
with great affection."[18]

[18] "The colonel," continues Perefix, "sensibly moved with this
behavior, replied with tears in his eyes: 'Ah, Sire! in restoring to me
my honor you take away my life; for after this I should be unworthy of
your favor if I did not sacrifice it to-day for your service. If I had a
thousand lives I would lay them all at your feet.' In fact he was killed
upon this occasion."


He besieged Paris, but would not storm it. "I am like the true mother
in the judgment of Solomon," was his famous declaration; "I would rather
not have Paris at all than see it torn to pieces." "The Duke of Nemours
sent all useless mouths out of Paris; the king's council opposed his
granting them passage; but the king, being informed of the dreadful
scarcity to which these miserable wretches were reduced, ordered that
they should be allowed to pass. 'I am not surprised,' said he, 'that the
Spaniards and the chiefs of the League have no compassion upon these
poor people; they are only tyrants; as for me, I am their father and
their king, and cannot hear the recital of their calamities without
being pierced to my inmost soul and ardently desiring to bring them
relief.'"

Take it good and bad, lion of ewe, the character of Jeanne's high son is
crystallized in one saying of his: "I would give a whole finger to have
a battle,--and two to have a general peace."

       *       *       *       *       *

With delight Pau watched her merry monarch; backed his final claim to
the throne of St. Louis, made on the death of the last of the Medici
kings and traced back through nine generations; followed tensely his
long contest for that high prize, his rivalry with the League and with
Philip of Spain, his victories at Arques and Ivry, his coronation, and
his wise reign as Henry the Fourth of France. His fame was hers. The
hour he died,--stabbed while in his state-carriage at Paris by the
dagger of a fanatic,--"a tempest broke over the place of his birth, and
lightning shivered to pieces the royal arms suspended over the gateway
o

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