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LIFE AND PHILOSOPHICAL OPINIONS OF A CAT.
I.
I was born in a cask, at the back of a hay-loft: the light fell on my closed eyelids, so that the first eight days, everything appeared rose-colored to me.
The eighth, it was still better; I looked, and saw a great fall of light upon the dark shade; the dust and insects danced in it. The hay was warm and fragrant; the spiders hung in sleep from the tiles; the gnats hummed; everything seemed happy; that emboldened me; I wanted to go and touch the white patch where those little diamonds were whirling and which rejoined the roof by a column of gold. I rolled over like a ball; my eyes were burned, my sides bruised; I was choking, and I coughed till nightfall.
II.
When my paws had become firm, I went out and soon made friends with a goose, an estimable creature, for she had a warm belly; I cowered underneath, and during this time her philosophic conversation was forming me. She used to say that the poultry yard was a republic of allies; that the most industrious, man, had been chosen for chief, and that the dogs, although turbulent, were our guardians. I shed tears of emotion under my kind friend’s belly.
One morning the cook appeared looking as if butter would not melt in her mouth, and showing a handful of barley. The goose stretched forth her neck, which the cook grasped, drawing a big knife. My uncle, an active philosopher, ran up and began to exhort the goose, which was uttering indecorous cries: “Dear sister,” said he, “the farmer, when he shall have eaten your flesh, will have a clearer intelligence, and will watch better over your welfare; and the dogs, nourished with your bones, will be the more capable of defending you.” Thereupon the goose became silent, for her head was cut off, and a sort of red pipe stuck out beyond the bleeding neck. My uncle ran for the head and carried it nimbly away; as for me, a little frightened, I drew near to the pool of blood, and, without thinking, I dipped my tongue into it; the blood was very good, and I went to the kitchen to see if I could not have some more of it.
III.
My uncle, a very old and experienced animal, taught me universal history.
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At the beginning of things, when he was born, the master being dead, the children at the funeral and the servants at a dance, all the animals found themselves free. It was a frightful hubbub; a turkey, whose feathers were too fine, was stripped by his comrades. In the evening, a ferret, which had slipped in, sucked the jugular vein of three-quarters of the combatants, who, naturally, made no further outcry. The spectacle in the farmyard was fine; here and there was a dog swallowing a duck; the horses in pure sportiveness were breaking the backs of the dogs; my uncle himself crunched a half-dozen little chickens. That was the golden age, said he.
In the evening, when the people came home, the whipping began. Uncle received a lash which took off a strip of his fur. The dogs, well flogged and tied up, howled with repentance and licked the hands of their new master. The horses resumed their burden with administrative zeal. The fowls, protected, clucked their benedictions; only, six months after, when the dealer passed, they killed fifty at once. The geese, among whose number was my late kind friend, flapped their wings, saying that everything was in good order, and praising the farmer, the public benefactor.
IV.
My uncle, although surly, acknowledges that things are better than they used to be. He says that at first our race was savage, and that there are still in the woods cats who are like our first ancestors, which, at long intervals, catch a mole or dormouse, but oftener the contents of a shot-gun. Others, lean, short-haired, run over the roofs and think that mice are very rare. As for us, brought up on the summit of earthly felicity, we whisk a flattering tail in the kitchen, we utter tender little mewings, we lick the empty plates, and at the utmost we put up with a dozen cuffs in the course of the day.
V.
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Music is a heavenly art, and it is certain that our race has the privilege of it; it springs from the depths of our entrails; men know this so well that they borrow them from us when they want to imitate us with their violins.
Two things inspire in us these heavenly songs: the view of the stars and love. Men, clumsy copyists, cram themselves ridiculously into a low hall, and skip about thinking to equal us. It is on the summit of the roofs, in the splendor of the night, when all the skin shivers, that the divine melody can find vent. Out of jealousy they curse us and fling stones at us. Let them burst with rage. Never will their expressionless voice attain to those serious rumblings, those piercing notes, mad arabesques, inspired and unexpected fancies, which soften the soul of the most stubborn she, and give her over to us, all trembling, while up above the voluptuous stars twinkle and the moon grows pale with love.
How happy is youth, and how hard it is to lose its holy illusions! And I too, I have loved and have haunted the roofs, modulating the while the roll of my bass. One of my cousins was touched thereby, and two months after brought into the world six pink and white kittens. I ran to them and wanted to eat them; I certainly had a right, since I was their father. Who would believe it! My cousin, my spouse, to whom I was willing to give her share of the banquet, flew at my eyes. This brutality roused my indignation, and I strangled her on the spot; after which I swallowed the entire litter.
But the hapless little rogues were good for nothing, not even to nourish their father: their flabby flesh weighed on my stomach for three days. Disgusted with the strong passions, I gave up music, and returned to the kitchen.
VI.
I have thought much on the ideal happiness, and I think I have made thereupon some notable discoveries.
It evidently consists, in warm weather, in sleeping near the barnyard pool. A delicious odor arises from the fermenting dung; lustrous straws shine in the sunlight. The turkeys ogle lovingly, and let their crest of red flesh fall on their beak. The fowls scratch up the straw, and bury their broad bellies to take in the rising heat. The pool gleams, swarming with moving insects which make the bubbles rise to its surface. The harsh whiteness of the walls renders yet deeper the bluish recesses where the gnats hum. With eyes half closed you dream; and, as you have almost ceased to think, you no longer wish for anything. In winter, happiness is in sitting at the fireside in the kitchen. The little tongues of flame lick the log and shoot amidst the sparks; the twigs snap and writhe, while the twisted smoke rises in the dark chimney to the very sky. Meanwhile the spit turns with a harmonious and pleasing ticktack. The fowl that is impaled reddens, turns brown, becomes splendid; the fat which moistens it softens its hues; a delightful odor irritates the olfactories; your tongue involuntarily caresses your lips; you take in the divine emanations of the fat; with eyes lifted to heaven in a serious transport, you wait till the cook takes off the creature and offers you the part that belongs to you.
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He who eats is happy, he who digests is happier, he who sleeps while digesting is happier still. All the rest is only vanity and vexation of spirit. The fortunate mortal is he who, warmly rolled into a ball with his belly full, feels his stomach in operation and his skin expand. A delightful tickling penetrates and softly stirs the fibres. The outer and the inner creature enjoy with their every nerve. Surely if the universe is a great and blessed God, as our sages say, the earth must be an immense belly busy through all eternity digesting the creatures, and warming its round skin in the sun.
VII.
My mind has been greatly enlarged by reflection. By a sure method, sound conjectures and sustained attention, I have penetrated some of the secrets of nature.
The dog is an animal so deformed, of such an unruly character, that from the earliest times it has been considered to be a monster, born and moulded in despite of all laws. Indeed, when rest is the natural state, how explain an animal that is forever in motion and busy, and that without aim nor need, even when he is gorged and not afraid? When beauty universally consists in suppleness, grace and prudence, how allow an animal to be forever brutal, howling, mad, jumping at the nose of people, running after kicks and rebuffs? When the favorite and masterpiece of creation is the cat, how understand an animal that hates it, runs at it, without having received a single scratch from it, and breaks its ribs without any desire to eat its flesh?
These contradictions prove that dogs are condemned beings; without a doubt the souls of the guilty and punished pass into their bodies. They suffer there; that is why they worry one another, and fret unceasingly. They have lost their reason, so they spoil everything, incite to battle, and are chained three-quarters of the day. They hate the beautiful and the good, consequently they try to throttle us.
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VIII.
Little by little the mind frees itself from the prejudices in which it was reared; light dawns; it thinks for itself; thus it is that I have attained to the true explanation of things.
Our first ancestors (and the gutter cats have retained this belief) said that heaven is a very lofty granary, well covered, where the sun never hurts the eyes.
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In this granary, my great-aunt used to say, there are troops of rats so fat that they can hardly walk, and the more we eat of them, the more there are to eat.
But it is evident that this is the opinion of poor devils, who, since they have never eaten anything but rat, cannot imagine a better diet. Besides, granaries are wood-color or gray, and the sky is blue, which finishes their confusion.
In truth, they rest their opinion upon a sufficiently shrewd remark: “It is evident,” they say, “that the sky is a granary of straw or flour, for there come out of it very often clouds light, as when the wheat is winnowed, or white, as when bread is sprinkled in the kneading-trough.”
But I reply to them that the clouds are not formed by the chaff of grain or the dust of flour; for when they fall, it is water that we receive.
Others, more refined, have maintained that the Dutch oven was God, saying that it is the fount of every blessing, turns unceasingly, goes to the fire without being burned, and that the sight of it is enough to throw one into ecstasy.
In my opinion they have erred here only because they saw it through the window, from a distance, in a poetic, colored, sparkling smoke, beautiful as the sun at evening. But I, who have sat near it during whole hours, I know that it has to be sponged, mended, wiped; and in acquiring knowledge, I have lost the innocent illusions of heart and stomach. The mind must be opened to conceptions more vast, and reason by more certain methods. Nature is everywhere uniform with herself, and in small things offers the image of the great.
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From what do all animals spring? from an egg; the earth then is a very great egg; I even add that it is a broken egg.
You will convince yourself of this if you examine the form and the limits of this valley, which is the visible world. It is concave like an egg, and the sharp edges by which it rejoins the sky are jagged, are keen-edged and white like those of a broken shell.
The white and the yolk, pressed into lumps, have formed these blocks of stone, these houses and the whole solid earth. Some parts have remained soft and form the surface that men plough; the rest runs in water and makes the pools, the rivers; each spring-time there runs a little that is new.
As to the sun, nobody can doubt its use; it is a great red firebrand that is moved back and forth above the egg to cook it gently; the egg has been broken on purpose, in order that it may be the better impregnated with the heat; the cook always does so. The world is a great beaten egg.
Now that I have reached this stage of wisdom, I have nothing more to ask of nature, nor of men, nor of any one; except, perhaps, some little tidbits from the roaster. In future I have only to cradle myself to rest in my wisdom; for my perfection is sublime, and no thinking cat has penetrated into the secret of the world so far as I.
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CHAPTER IV. THE ROAD TO BA GNÈRES-DE-LUCHON.
I.
Every man who has the use of his eyes and ears ought, in travelling, to climb up to the imperial. The highest places are the most beautiful; ask those who occupy them. You break your neck if you fall from them; consult the same people about this. But you enjoy yourself while you are there.
In the first place, you see the landscape, which produces descriptions that you offer to the public. In the coupé, your only spectacle is the harness of the horses; in the interior, you see through a tiny window the trees trooping by like soldiers carrying arms; in the rotunda, you are in a cloud of dust that dims the landscape and strangles the traveller.
In the second place, at the top you will have comedy. In the lower places, the people preserve decorum and are silent. The peasants here perched aloft, who are your companions, the postilion and the conductor, make open-hearted confidences: they talk of their wives, their children, their property, trade, neighbors, and above all of themselves; so that at the end of an hour you imagine their housekeeping and their life as clearly as if you were at home with them. It is a novel of manners that you skim through on the road. Not one of them gives ideas so vivid and so truthful. You get to know the people only by living with them, and the people from three-quarters of the nation. These bits of conversation teach you the number of their ideas and the hue of their passions; now, on these ideas and passions depend all the great events. Besides their rude manners, their loud bursts of laughter, their frank respect for bodily strength, their acknowledged inclination for the pleasure of eating and drinking, offer a contrast to the humbug of our politeness and our affectation of refinement. The conductor told the postilion how the evening before they had eaten the half of a sheep among three of them. It was good, fat mutton; they served up no better at the Hotel of the Great Sun: there were sirloins, cutlets, a neat leg of mutton. They had emptied six bottles. The other made him tell it over, and seemed to eat in imagination, by the reaction, by recoil, as it were.
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After the banquet, he had made the horses gallop; he had passed by Ribettes. Ribettes had swallowed dust for a whole hour; Ribettes wanted to get ahead again, but wasn’t able. Ribettes grew very angry. They had dared Ribettes. The story of Ribettes and the mutton was told eight times in an hour, and seemed the last time as delightful and as new as the first. They laughed like the blest.
In the third place, that is the only spot where you can breathe. The other divisions are sweating-rooms whose partitions and black cushions hold and concentrate the heat. Now, there is no man, no matter how he may love colors and lines, who can enjoy a landscape shut up in a box without air. When the creature is cramped, the soul is cramped. Admiration presupposes comfort, and when you are broiled by the sun you curse the sun.
II.
The coach starts very early in the morning and climbs a long ascent under the gray brightness of the dawn. The peasants come in troops; the women have five or six bottles of milk on the head, in a basket. Oxen, with lowered brows, drag carts as primitive and Gallic as at-Pau. The children, in brown berets, run in the dust, alongside their mothers. The village is coming to nourish the city.
Escaladieu shows at the wayside the remains of an ancient abbey. The chapel is still standing and preserves fragments of gothic sculpture. A bridge is at the side, shaded by tall trees. The pretty river Arros runs, with moiré reflexes and guipures of silver, over a bed of dark pebbles. No one could choose a situation better than the monks: they were the artists of the time.
Mauvoisin, an ancient stronghold of robber-knights, lifts its ruined tower above the valley. Froissart relates how they besieged these honest folk; of a truth, in those times, they were as good as their neighbors, and the Duke of Anjou, their enemy, had done more harm than they. "A Gascon squire, an able man-at-arms, named Raymonet de l’Epèe, was at that time Governor of Malvoisin. There were daily skirmishes at the barriers, where many gallant feats were done by those who wished to advance themselves....
“The castle of Malvoisin held out about six weeks, there were daily skirmishes between the two armies at the barriers, and the place would have made a longer resistance, for the castle was so strong it could have held a long siege; but the well that supplied the castle with water being without the walls, they cut off the communication: the weather was very hot, and the cisterns within quite dry, for it had not rained one drop for six weeks, and the besiegers were at their ease, on the banks of this clear and fine river, which they made use of for themselves and horses.
“The garrison of Malvoisin were alarmed at their situation, for they could not hold out longer. They had a sufficiency of wine, but not one drop of sweet water. They determined to open a treaty; and Raymonet de l’Epêe requested a passport to wait on the duke, which, having easily obtained, he said: ‘My lord, if you will act courteously to me and my companions, I will surrender the castle of Malvoisin.’ ‘What courtesy is it you ask?’ replied the Duke of Anjou:
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“‘Get about your business each of you to his own country, without entering any fort that holds out against us; for if you do so, and I get hold of you, I will deliver you up to Jocelin, who will shave you without a razor.’ ‘My lord,’ answered Raymonet, ‘if we thus depart we must carry away what belongs to us, and what we have gained by arms and with great risk.’ The duke paused awhile, and then said, ‘I consent that you take with you whatever you can carry before you in trunks and on sumpter horses, but not otherwise; and if you have any prisoners, they must be given up to us.’ ‘I agree,’ said Raymonet. Such was the treaty, as you hear me relate it; and all who were in the castle departed, after surrendering it to the Duke of Anjou, and carrying all they could with them. They returned to their own country, or elsewhere, in search of adventures.”
These good folk who wished to keep the fruits of their labor, had spent their time “in fleecing the merchants” of Catalonia, as well as of France, “and in making war on and harrying them of Bagnères and Bigorre.” Bagnères was then “a good, big, closed city.” People fortified everywhere, because there was fighting everywhere. They went out only with a safe-conduct and an escort: instead of gendarmes they met plunderers; instead of umbrellas they carried off lances. A secure house was a fine house; when a man had immured himself in a thick tower built like a well, he breathed freely, he felt at his ease. Those were the good old times, as every one knows.
III.
Encausse is very near here, at the turn of the road. Chapelle and Bachaumont came there to restore their stomachs, which needed and deserved it well, for they used them more than some do. They wrote their travels, and their style flows as easily as their life.
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They go by short stages, drink, chat, feast among the friends they have everywhere, court the ladies, make game very pleasantly of the provincial folk. They drink the health of the absent, enjoy the muscatel as much as possible, and trifle in prose and verse. They are the epicureans of their time, easy poets who are troubled about nothing, not even about glory; graze all that they touch, and write only for their own amusement.
“Encausse,” say they, “is far from all commerce, and a man can have no other diversion in it than that of watching the return of his health. A small stream that, a score of paces away from the village, winds among willows and the greenest fields imaginable, was our only consolation. We used to go every morning to take our water in this pretty spot, and after dinner to walk there. One day when we were on the brink, seated on the grass, there came suddenly from the midst of the reeds that were nearest a man who had apparently been listening to us; it was an old man, all white, pale and lean, whose beard and locks hung below his girdle, such (an one) as Melchisedec is painted; or rather the figure is that of a certain old Greek bishop, who, with many a salaam, tells everybody’s fortune; for he wore a top-piece like a cauldron-lid, but of exceeding size, which answered him for a hat. And this hat, whose broad brim went drooping upon his shoulders, was made of branches of willow, and covered nearly all his body. His coat of greenish hue was woven of rushes, the whole covered with great bits of a thick and bluish crystal.
“At sight of this apparition, fear caused us to make the sign of the cross twice over, and go three paces backward. But curiosity prevailed over fear, and we resolved, although with some little palpitation of heart, to await the extraordinary old man, whose approach was thoroughly courteous, and who spoke to us very civilly as follows:
“Gentlemen, I am not surprised that with my unexpected appearance you should be a little startled in mind, but when you shall have learned in what rank the fates have set my birth to you unknown, and the motive of my coming, you will calm your minds.
"I am the god of this stream, who, with an ever inexhaustible urn, tilted at the foot of that hill, take the task in this meadow of pouring unceasingly the water, which makes it so green and flowery. For eight days now, morning and evening, you come regularly to see me without thinking to pay me a visit. It is not that I do not deserve that you should pay me this respect; for, in short, I have this advantage, that a channel so pure and clear is the place of my appanage. In Gascony such a portion is very neat for a cadet.”
The two travellers were talking of the tides of the Garonne, and of the reasons for them given by Gassendi and Descartes. This very obliging god relates to them how Neptune thereby punishes an ancient rebellion of the rivers. “Then the honest river-god takes himself off, and when he has gone a score of paces the good soul is melted entirely into water.”
Nowadays this mythology seems unmeaning, and the thought flat. Look at the environs, the surroundings save it. Carelessness, intoxication, are on one side. It is born between two glasses of good wine thoroughly relished, in the midst of an unpremeditated letter. Are people so very nice at table? It is a refrain they are humming; flat or not, is of no consequence. The main thing is good humor and the inclination to laugh. I picture to myself the honest fellows, well-dressed, portly, their eyes still shining from the long dinner of yesterday, with rubies on their cheeks, perfectly ready to sit down to dine at the first inn and to bedevil the maid. La Fontaine did so, especially when he travelled. They made stops, forgot themselves, the broad jokes flew.
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They didn’t cross France as nowadays, after the fashion of a cannon-ball or an attorney; they allowed five days for going to Poitiers, and in the evening, on going to bed, they fed the body. It was the last age of the good corporeal life, that heavy bourgoisie which had its flower and its portrait in Flemish art. It was already disappearing; aristocratic propriety and lordly salutes were taking possession of literature; Boileau gave us serious verse, thoroughly useful and solid, like pairs of tongs. Nowadays when the middle-class man is a philosopher, ambitious, a man of business, it is far worse. Let us not speak ill of those who are happy; happiness is a sort of poetry; it is in vain that we boast ourselves, that poetry we have not.
IV.
The road is bordered with vines, each of which carries up its tree, elm or ash, the crown of a fresh verdure, and lets its leaves and tendrils fall again in plumes. The valley is a garden long and narrow, between two chains of mountains. On the lower slopes are beautiful meadows where the living waters run in orderly fashion in trenches, nimble, prattling irrigators; the villages are seated alone the little river; vine-stocks climb alone the dusty wall. The mallows, straight as tapers, lift above the hedges their round flowers, brilliant as roses of rubies. Orchards of apples pass continually on both sides of the coach; cascades fall in every hollow of the chain, surrounded with houses that seek a shelter. The heat and the dust are so terrible that they are obliged every time we pass a spring to sponge the nostrils of the horses. But at the end of the valley a mass of dark, rugged mountains lifts itself, with tops that are white with snow, feeding the river and closing the horizon. Finally, we pass beneath an alley of fine plane-trees, between two rows of villas, gardens, hotels, and shops. It is Luchon, a little city as Parisian as Bigorre.
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CHAPTER V. LUCHON.
I.
The street is a broad alley, planted with large trees, and lined with rather handsome hotels. It was opened by the intendant d’Ètigny, who, for this misdeed, was near being stoned. It was necessary to call in a company of dragoons to force the Luchonnais to endure the prosperity of their country.
At the end of the alley a pretty chalet, like those in the Jardin des Plantes, shelters the du Pr’e spring. Its walls are a fantastic trellis of gnarled branches, adorned with their bark; its roof is thatched; its ceiling is a tapestry of moss. A young girl sitting at the taps distributes to the bathers glasses of sulphurous water. The elegant toilettes come about four o’clock. Meanwhile you sit in the shade on benches of woven wood, and watch the children playing on the turf, the rows of trees descending toward the river, and the broad green plain, sprinkled with villages.
Below the spring are the bathing-houses, nearly finished, and which will be the finest in the Pyrenees. At present the neighboring field is still strewn with materials; the lime smokes all day, and makes the air to flame and quiver.
The court of the baths contains a large votive altar, bearing on one of its faces an amphora and this inscription:
Aug.
Sacrum.
They have preserved in two:
V. S. L. M.
This god Lixo, they say, was in the time of the Celts the tutelary deity of the country. Hence the addition these other name of Luchon.
V. S. L. M.
He is maimed and not destroyed. The gods are tenacious of life.
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There are several balls, and orchestras in certain cafés. These orchestras are strolling families, hired at so much a week, to make the house uninhabitable. One of these, composed of a flute, male, and four violins, female, used fearlessly to play the same overture every evening. The privileged beings who had paid were in the hall among the music stands. A throng of peasants always crowded at the door, with open mouths; they formed in a circle and mounted on the benches to see.
The tradespeople of every sort turn their shops into a lottery: lottery of plate, of books, of little objects of ornament, etc. The tradesman and his wife distribute cards, price one sou, to the servant-maids, soldiers, and children, who compose the crowd. Somebody draws; the gallery and those interested stretch their necks eagerly forward. The man reads the number; a cry is heard, the unguarded sign of an overflowing joy. “It’s I that have won, I, monsieur the merchant.” And you see a little serving-maid, blushing all over, lift herself on tiptoe and stretch out her hands. The merchant dexterously seizes a pot, parades it above his head, and makes everybody about remark it. “A fine mustard-pot; a mustard-pot worth three francs, threaded with gold. Who wants numbers?” The assembly lasts four hours. It begins anew every day; the customers are not wanting for a single moment.
These people have a genius for display. One day we heard the roll of drums, followed by four men marching solemnly, swathed in shawls and pieces of cloth. The children and the dogs follow the procession with hubbub; it is the opening of a new shop. The next day I copied the following handbill printed on yellow paper:
“Orpheonic festival in the grotto of Gargas.
“The Orpheonic Society from the city of Montrejean will execute
“The polka;
“Several military marches;
“Several waltzes;
“Divers other pieces from the works of the great masters.
“Among other amateurs who will allow themselves to be heard, one will sing some stanzas on eternity.
“Finally, an exquisite voice, which wishes to remain anonymous in order to avoid those deserved praises that people are fond of lavishing on its sex, will sing also a number of pieces analogous to the circumstances.
“It will be delicious and even seraphic to lend an ear to the echo of the sonorous concretions of the stalactites, which will unite with the vibrating echo of the vault to repeat the harmonious notes; and when the divine voice shall be heard, the intoxicating charm of the spell will surpass every impression which can have been left in the soul by the most delightful of musical reunions.
“Price of admission: 1 franc.”
These people are descendants of Clemence Isaure. Their advertisements are odes. By way of compensation many odes are advertisements.
In fact, you are here not far from Toulouse; like the character, the type is new. The young girls have fine, regular, clear-cut faces, of a lively and gay expression. They are small, with a light step, brilliant eyes, the nimbleness of a bird. In the evening, about a lottery-shop, these pretty faces stand out animated and full of passion beneath the flickering light, fringed with a black shadow. The eyes sparkle, the red lips tremble, the neck tosses with the little abrupt movements of the swallow; no picture can be more full of life.
If you leave the lighted and tumultuous alley, at the distance of an hundred paces, you find silence, solitude and obscurity. At night, the valley is of great beauty; it is framed and drawn out between two chains of parallel mountains, huge pillars which stretch in two files and support the dark vault of heaven.
Their arches mark it out like a cathedral ceiling, and the immense nave vanishes several leagues away, radiant with stars; these stars fling out flames. At this moment, they are the only living things; the valley is black, the air motionless; you can only distinguish the tapering tops of the poplars, erect in the tranquil night, wrapt in their mantle of leaves. The topmost branches stir, and their rustle is like the murmur of a prayer echoed by the distant hum of the torrent.
III.
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The valley is not a gorge, but a beautiful level meadow marked with trees and fields of maize, among which the river runs, but does not leap. Luchon is surrounded with alleys of plane-trees, poplars and lindens. You leave these alleys for a pathway which follows the waves of the Pique and winds amidst the high grass. The ashes and oaks form a screen along the two banks; big brooks come from the mountains; you cross them on trunks laid bridge-wise or on broad slabs of slate. All these waters flow in the shade, between knotted roots which they bathe, and which form trellises on both sides. The bank is covered with hanging herbage; you see nothing but the fresh verdure and the dark waters. It is here that at noon the pedestrians take refuge; along the sides of the valley wind dusty roads where stream the carriages and the horsemen. Higher up, the mountains, gray or browned with moss, display their soft lines and noble forms as far as the eye can reach. They are not wild as at Saint Sauveur, nor bare as at Eaux-Bonnes; each of these chains advances nobly toward the city and behind it leaves its vast ridge to undulate to the very verge of the horizon.
IV.
Above Luchon is a mountain called Super-Bagnères. At the outset I run across the Fountain of Love; it is a hut of planks where beer is sold.
A winding staircase, crossed by springs, then steep pathways in a black forest of firs lead you in two hours to the pastures on the summit. The mountain is about five thousand feet high. These pastures are great undulating hills, ranged in rows, carpeted with short turf and thickset, fragrant thyme; here and there in crowds are broad tufts of a sort of wild iris, the flower of which fades in the month of August.