A Shepherd of Bigorre
Following up the valley of the Adour one comes to the Bagnères de Bigorre in a matter of twenty-five kilometres or so. Bagnères de Bigorre is a hodge-podge of a name, but it is the “Bath” of France, as an Englishman of a century ago called it. There are other resorts more popular and fashionable and more wickedly immoral, such as Vichy, Aix les Bains and even Luchon, but still Bigorre remains the first choice. From the times of the Romans, throngs have been coming to this charming little spot of the Pyrenees where the mineral waters bubble up out of the rock, bringing health and strength to those ill in mind and body. Pleasure seekers are here, too, but primarily it is the baths which attract.
There are practically no monuments of bygone days here, but fragmentary relics of one sort or another tell the story of the waters from Roman times to the present with scarcely a break.
Arreau, seven leagues from Bigorre, towards the heart of the Pyrenees, through the Val d’Arreau, certainly one of the most picturesquely unspoiled places in all the Pyrenees, is a relic of mediævalism such as will hardly be found elsewhere in the whole chain of mountains from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean. Its feudal history was fairly important, but its monuments of the period, save its churches and its market house or “Halle,” have practically disappeared. Whatever defences there may have been, have been built into the town’s fine stone houses and bridges, but the Roman tower of St. Exupère, and the primitive church now covered by Notre Dame show its architectural importance in the past.
By reason of being one of the gateways through the Pyrenees into Spain (by the valley of the Arreau and the portes, so called, of Plan and Vielsa) Arreau enjoys a Franco-Espagnol manner of living which is quaint beyond words. It is the nearest thing to Andorra itself to be found on French soil.
Luchon is situated in a nook of the Larboust surrounded with a rural beauty only lent by a river valley and a mountain background. The range to the north is bare and grim, but to the southward is thickly wooded, with little eagles’-nest villages perched here and there on its flanks and peaks, in a manner which leads one to believe that this part of the Pyrenees is as thickly peopled as Switzerland, where peasants fall out of their terrace gardens only to tumble into those of a neighbour living lower down the mountain-side.
The surroundings of Luchon are indeed sublime, from every point of view, and one’s imagination needs no urging to appreciate the sentiment which is supposed to endow a “nature-poet.” Yes, Luchon is beautiful, but it is overrun with fashionables from all over the world, and is as gay as Biarritz or Nice. “La grande vie mondaine” is the key-note of it all, and if one could find out just when was the off-season it would be delightful. Of late it has been crowded throughout the year, though the height of fashion comes in the spring. Outside of its sulphur springs the great world of fashion comes here to dine and wine their friends and play bridge.
Luchon has a history though. As a bathing or a drinking place it was known to the Romans as Onesiorum Thermæ and was mentioned by Strabo as being famous in those days.
There were many pagan altars and temples here erected to the god Ilixion, which by evolution into Luchon came to be the name by which the place has latterly been known.
In 1036, by marriage, Luchon was transferred from the house of Comminges to that of Aragon, but later was returned to the Comtes de Comminges and finally united with France in 1458 under Charles VII, retaining, however, numerous ancient privileges which endured until the end of the seventeenth century.
This was the early history of Luchon. Its later history began when, in 1754, the local waters were specially analyzed and a boom given to a project to make of the place a great spa.
The city itself is the proprietor of all the springs and its administrative sagacity has been such that fifty thousand visitors are attracted here within the year.
THE Gave de Pau, a swiftly-flowing stream which comes down from its icy cradle in the Cirque de Gavarnie and joins with the Adour near Bayonne’s port, winds its way through a gentle, smiling valley filled with gracious vistas, historic sites and grand mountain backgrounds.
Next to the æsthetic aspects of the Gave de Pau are its washhouses. The writer in years of French travel does not remember to have seen a stream possessed of so many.
One sees similar arrangements for washing clothes all over France, but here they are exceedingly picturesque in their disposition, and the workers therein are not of the Zola-Amazon type, nor of the withered beldam class. How much better they wash than others of their fraternity elsewhere is not to be remarked.
There are municipal washhouses in some of the larger towns of France, great, ugly, brick, cement and iron structures, but as the actual washing is done after the same manner as when carried on by the banks of a rushing river or a purling brook there is not much to be said in their favour that cannot as well be applied to the washhouses of Pau, Oloron or Orthez in Navarre, and artist folk will prefer the latter.
Coarraze, twenty kilometres above Pau, on the banks of the Gave, is a populous centre where the hum of industry, induced by the weavers who make the toile du Béarn, is the prevailing note. Toile du Béarn and chapelets are the chief output of this little bourg, and many francs are in circulation here each Saturday night that would probably be wanting except for these indefatigable workers who had rather bend over greasy machines at something more than a living wage, than dig a mere existence out of the ground.
The little bourg is dull and gray in colour, only its surroundings being brilliant. Its situation is most fortunate. Opposite is a great tree-covered plateau, a veritable terrace, on which is a modern château replacing another which has disappeared—“comme un chevreau en liberté,” says the native.
Château de Coarraze
It was in this old Château de Coarraze that the youthful Henri IV was brought up by an aunt, en paysan, as the simple life was then called. Perhaps it was this early training that gave him his later ruggedness and rude health.
The château has been called royal, and its construction has been attributed to Henri IV, but this is manifestly not so. Only ruined walls and ramparts, and the accredited facts of history, remain to-day to connect Henri IV with the spot.
The château virtually disappeared in a revolutionary fury, and only the outline of its former walls remains here and there. A more modern structure, greatly resembling the château at Pau, practically marks the site of the former establishment endowed with the memory of Henri IV’s boyhood.
Froissart recounts a pleasant history of the Château de Coarraze and its seigneur. A certain Raymond of Béarn had acquired a considerable heritage, which was disputed by a Catalan, who demanded a division. Raymond refused, but the Catalan, to intimidate his adversary, threatened to have him excommunicated by the Pope. Threats were of no avail, and Raymond held to his legacy as most heirs do under similar claims. One night some one knocked loudly at Raymond’s door.
“Who is there?” he cried in a trembling voice.
“I am Orthon, and I come on behalf of the Catalan.”
After a parley he left, nothing accomplished, but returned night after night in some strange form of man or beast or wraith or spook or masquerader and so annoyed Raymond that he was driven into madness, the Catalan finally coming to his own.
At Nay, Gaston Phœbus is said to have built a sort of modest country house which in later centuries became known simply as La Maison Carrée. Perhaps Gaston Phœbus built it, and perhaps he did not, for its architecture is of a very late Renaissance. At any rate it has a charming triple-galleried house-front, quite in keeping with the spirit of mediævalism which one associates with a builder who has “ideas” and is not afraid of carrying them out, and this was Gaston’s reputation. The house is on record as having one day been occupied by the queen of Navarre, Jeanne d’Albret.
Just beyond Coarraze is Betharrem whose “Calvary” and church are celebrated throughout the Midi. From the fifteenth of August to the eighth of September it is a famous place of pilgrimage for the faithful of Béarn and Bigorre, a veritable New Jerusalem. Its foundation goes back to antiquity, but its origin is not unknown, if legend plays any part in truthful description.
One day, too far back to give a date, a young and pious maiden fell precipitately into the Gave. She could not swim and was sinking in the waters, when she called for the protection of the Virgin Mary. At that moment a tree trunk, leaning out over the river, gave way and fell into the waters; the maiden was able to grasp it and keep afloat, and within a short space was drifted ashore. There is nothing very unplausible about this, nothing at all miraculous; and so it may well be accepted as a legend based on truth.
A modest chapel was built near at hand, by some pious folk, to commemorate the event, or perhaps it was built—as has been claimed—by Gaston IV himself, on his return from the Crusades in the middle of the twelfth century. The latter supposition holds good from the fact that the place bears the name of the city by the Jordan.
Montgomery burned the chapel during the religious wars, but again in the seventeenth century, Hubert Charpentier, licencié of the Sorbonne, came here and declared that the configuration of the mountain resembled that where took place the crucifixion, and accordingly erected a Calvary dedicated to “Our Lady,” “in order,” as he said, “to revivify the faith which Calvinism had nearly extinguished.”
Saint-Pé-de-Bigorre, lying midway between Pau and Lourdes, is an ideally situated, typical small town of France. It is not a resort in any sense of the word, but might well be, for it is as delightful as any Pyrenean “station” yet “boomed” as a cure for the ills of folk with imaginations.
It is a genuine garden-city. Its houses, strung out along the banks of the Gave, are wall-surrounded and tree-shaded, nearly every one of them. But one hotel extends hospitality at Saint Pé to-day, but soon there will be a dozen, no doubt, and then Saint Pé will be known as a centre where one may find “all the attractions of the most celebrated watering-places.”
To-day Saint Pé depends upon its ravishing site and its historic past for its reason for being. It derives its name from the old Abbey of Saint-Pé-de-Générès (Sanctus Petrus de Generoso), founded here in the eleventh century, by Sanchez-Guillaume, Duc de Gascogne, in commemoration of a victory. This monastery, with its abbatial church, was razed during the religious wars by the alien Montgomery who outdid in these parts even his hitherto unenviable cruelties. The church was built up anew, from such of its stones as were left, into the present edifice which serves the parish, but nothing more than the tower and the apse are of the original structure.
To Lourdes is but a dozen kilometres by road or rail from Saint Pé. In either case one follows along the banks of the Gave with delightful vistas of hill and dale at every turn, and always that blue-purple curtain of mountains for a background.
Lourdes is perhaps the most celebrated, if not the most efficacious, pilgrim-shrine in all the world. It’s a thing to see, if only to remark the contrasting French types among the pilgrims that one meets there—the Breton from Pont Aven or Quimperlé, the Norman from the Pays de Caux, the Parisian, the Alsaçien, the Niçois and the Tourangeau. All are here, in all stages of health and sickness, vigorous and crippled. The shrine of “Our Lady of Lourdes” is all things to all men. Lourdes is a beastly, unclean, and uncomfortable place in which to linger, in spite of its magnificent situation, and its great and small hotels with all manner of twentieth-century conveniences.
It’s a plague-spot on fair France, looking at it from one point of view; and a living superstition of Christendom from another. The medical men of France want to close it up; the churchmen and hotel keepers want to keep it open. Arguments are puerile, so there the matter stands; and neither side has gained an appreciable advantage over the other as yet.
Lourdes was one day the capital of the ancient seigneurie, Lavedan-en-Bigorre, and at that time bore the name of Mirambel, which in the patois of the region signified beautiful view. Originally it was but a tiny village seated at the foot of a rock, and crowned by the same château which exists to-day, and which in its evolution has come down from a castellum-romain, a Carlovingian bastille, a Capetian and English prison of state, a hospital for the military, a barracks, to finally being a musée.
Of the château of the feudal epoch nothing remains save two covered ways, the donjon, a sixteenth-century gate and a drawbridge, this latter probably restored out of all semblance to its former outlines. One of these covered ways gave access to the upper stages with so ample a sweep that it became practically a horse stairway upon which cavaliers and lords and ladies reined their chargers.
The donjon is manifestly a near relation to that of Gaston Phœbus at Foix, though that prince had no connection with the château. Transformation has changed all but its outlines, its fosse has become a mere sub-cellar, and its windows have lost their original proportions.
The Château de Lourdes was undoubtedly a good defence in its day in spite of its present attenuated appearance. In 1373 it resisted the troops of Charles V, commanded by the Duc d’Anjou. Under the ancient French monarchy its career was most momentous, though indeed merely as a prison of state, or a house of detention for political suspects. Many were the “lettres de cachet” that brought an unwilling prisoner to be caged here in the shadow of the Pyrenees, as if imbedded in the granite of the mountains themselves.
The rock which supports the château rises a hundred metres or so above the Gave. A great square mass—the donjon—forms the principal attribute, and was formerly the house of the governor. This donjon with a chapel and a barracks has practically made up the ensemble in later years.
Here, on one of the counterforts of the Pyrenees, just beyond the grim old château, and directly before the celebrated Pic du Ger, now desecrated by a cog-railway, where the seven plains of Lavedan blend into the first slopes of the mountains, were laid the first stones of the Basilique de Lourdes in 1857.
Previously the site was nothing more than a moss-grown grotto where trickled a fountain that, for ages, had been the hope of the incurably ill, who thought if they bathed and drank and prayed that miracles would come to them and they would be made whole again.
The fact that the primitive, devout significance of this sentiment has degenerated into the mere pleasure seeking of a mixed rabble does not affect in the least the simple faith of other days. The devout and prayerful still come to bathe and pray, but they are lost in the throng of indiscriminately “conducted” and “non-conducted” tourists who make of the shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes a mere guide-book sight to be checked off the list with others, such as the Bridge of Sighs, the Pyramids of Gizeh, the Tour Eiffel, or Hampton Court,—places which once seen will never again be visited.
To-day only the smaller part of the visitors, among even the French themselves, excepting the truly devout, who are mostly Bretons—will reply to the question as to whether they believe in Lourdes: “Oui, comme un article de foi.”
No further homily shall be made, save to say that the general aspect of the site is one of the most picturesque and enchanting of any in the Pyrenees—when one forgets, or eliminates, the signs advertising proprietary condiments and breakfast foods.
It doesn’t matter in the least whether one Frenchman says: “C’est ma Foi;” or another “C’est un scandale;” the landscape is gloriously beautiful. Of the Grotto itself one can only remark that its present-day garnishings are blatant, garish and offensive. The great, slim basilica rises on its monticule as was planned. It has been amply endowed and extravagantly built. Before it is a perron, or more properly a scala-sancta, and the whole is so theatrically disposed, with a great square before it, that one can quite believe it all a stage-setting and nothing more.
As a place of pilgrimage, Lourdes is perhaps the most popular in all the world, certainly it comes close after Jerusalem and Rome. Alphonse XIII, the present ruler of Spain, made his devotions here in August, 1905.
Argelès is practically a resort, and has the disposition of a Normandy village; that is, its houses are set about with trees and growing verdure of all sorts. For this reason it is a delightful garden city of the first rank.
Argelès’ chief attraction is its site; there are no monuments worth mentioning, and these are practically ruins. Argelès is a watering-place pure and simple, with great hotels and many of them, and prices accordingly.
Above Argelès the Gave divides, that portion to the left taking the name of Gave de Cauterets, while that to the right still retains the name of Gave de Pau.
Cauterets has, in late years, become a great resort, due entirely to its waters and the attendant attractions which have grouped themselves around its établissement. The beneficial effect of the drinking or bathing in medicinal waters might be supposed to be somewhat negatived by bridge and baccarat, poker and “petits chevaux” but these distractions—and some others—seem to be the usual accompaniments of a French or German spa.
Cauterets
“C’est le premier jour de septembre que les bains des Pyrénées commencent à avoir de la vertu.” Thus begins the prologue to Marguerite de Navarre’s “Heptameron.” The “season” to-day is not so late, but the queen of Navarre wrote of her own experiences and times, and it is to be presumed she wrote truly.
A half a century ago Cauterets was a dirty, shabby village, nearly unknown, but the exploiter of resorts got hold of it, and with a few medical endorsements forthwith made it the vogue until now it is as trim and well-laid-out a little town as one will find.
The town is a gem of daintiness, in strong contrast to the surrounding melancholy rocks and forests of the mountainside. Peaks, approximating ten thousand feet in height, rise on all sides, and dominate the more gentle slopes and valleys, but still the general effect is one of a savage wildness, with which the little white houses of the town, the electric lights and the innumerable hotels—a round score of them—comport little. Certainly the beneficial effects accruing to semi-invalids here might be supposed to be great—if they would but leave “the game” alone.
A simple mule path leads to the Col de Riou back of Cauterets, though it is more frequented by tourists on foot than by beasts of burden.
Here on the Col itself, in plain view of the Pic du Midi and its sister peaks, the Touring Club has erected one of those admirable guide-book accessories, a “table d’orientation.”
On its marbled circumference are traced nearly three hundred topographical features of the surrounding landscape, and a study of this well-thought-out affair is most interesting to any traveller with a thought above a table d’hôte. Throughout the region of the Pyrenees these circular “tables d’orientation,” with the marked outlines of all the surrounding landscape, are to be found on many vantage grounds. The principal ones are:—
On the Ramparts of the Château de Pau.
The Col d’Aspin.
The Col de Riou.
Platform of the Tour Massey at Tarbes.
Platform de Mouguerre.
Summit of the Pic du Midi.
Summit of the Cabaliros.
Summit of the Canigou.
Over the Col de Riou and down into the Gave de Pau again, and one comes to Luz. Luz is curiously and delightfully situated in a triangular basin formed by the water-courses of the Gave de Pau and the Gave de Barèges. Practically Luz is a ville ancienne and a ville moderne, the older portion being by far the most interesting, though there is no squalor or unusual picturesqueness. Civic improvements have straightened out crooked streets and razed tottering house fronts and thus spoiled the picture of mediævalism such as artists—and most others—love.
A ruined fortress rises on a neighbouring hill-top which gives a note of feudal times, but the general aspect of Luz, and its neighbouring pretty suburb of St. Sauveur, each of them possessed of thermal establishments, are resorts pure and simple, which, indeed, both these places were bound to become, being on the direct route between Pau and Tarbes and Gavarnie, and neighbours of Cauterets and Barèges.
Barèges lies just eastward of Luz on a good carriage road. Like Bagnères-de-Bigorre, it is an oddly named town which depends chiefly upon the fact that it is a celebrated thermal station for its fame. It sits thirteen hundred metres above the sea, and while bright and smiling and gracious in summer, in winter it is as stern-visaged as a harpy, and about as unrelenting towards one’s comfort. Only this last winter the mountain winds and snows caved in Barèges’ Casino and a score of houses, killing several persons. There is no such a storm-centre in the Pyrenees. Barèges has got a record no one will envy, though the efficacy of its waters makes them worthy rivals of those of Bigorre and Cauterets.
The fame of Barèges’ waters goes back to the days of the young Duc du Maine, who came here with Madame de Maintenon, in 1667, on the orders of the doctor of the king. In 1760 a military hospital was founded here to receive the wounded of the Seven Years War.
Barèges is one of the best centres for mountain excursions in the Pyrenees. The town itself is hideous, but the surroundings are magnificent.
Above Saint Sauveur, Luz and Cauterets, in the valley of the Gaube, rises the majestic Vignemale, whose extreme point, the Pic Longue, reaches a height of three thousand, two hundred and ninety-eight metres, which is the greatest height of the French Pyrenees. In the year 1808, on the occasion of the coming of the Queen of Holland, spouse of Louis Bonaparte, to the Bains de Saint Sauveur, an unknown muse of poesy sang the praise of this great mountain as follows:—
Each of the thermal stations in these parts possesses its own special peak of the Pyrenees. Luchon has the Nethou; Bigorre the Pic du Midi de Bagnères; Eaux-Bonnes the Balaitous; Eaux-Chaudes the Pic du Midi d’Ossau; Vernet the Canigou and Saint Sauveur and Cauterets the Vignemale.
The Vignemale, composed of four peaks, each of them overreaching three thousand, two hundred metres, encloses a veritable river of ice. Its profound crevasses and its Mer de Glace remind one of the Alps more than do the accessories of any other peak of the Pyrenees.
The ascension of the Vignemale, from Cauterets or Luz, is the classic mountain climb of the Pyrenees. No peak is more easy of access, and none gives so complete an idea of the ample ranges of the Pyrenees, from east to west, or north to south.
OLORON, at the confluence of the Gave d’Ossau and the Gave d’Aspe, has existed since Roman times, when it was known as Iluro, finally changing to Oloro and Olero. It was sacked by the Saracens in 732, and later entirely ruined by the Normans. Centulle, Vicomte de Béarn, reëstablished the city, and for a time made it his residence.
The roads and lanes and paths of the neighbourhood of Oloron offer some of the most charming promenades of the region, but one must go on foot or on donkey-back (the latter at a cost of five francs a day) to discover all their beauties. The highroads of the Pyrenees are a speedy and a short means of communication between two points, but the delicate charm of the region is only discovered by following the by-roads, quite away from the beaten track.
Oloron will some day be an artists’ resort, but it hasn’t been exploited as such yet. It sits delightfully on the banks of the two Gaves, and has all the picturesqueness that old tumble-down Gothic and Renaissance houses and bridges can suggest, the whole surrounded with a verdure and a rocky setting which is “all things to all (painter) men.”
In reality Oloron is a triple city, each quite distinct from one another: Sainte-Marie, the episcopal city, with the cathedral and the bishop’s palace; Sainte-Croix, the old feudal bourg; and the Quartier Neuve, the quarter of the railway station, the warehouses and all the smug commercialism which has spoiled many a fair landscape elsewhere.
The feudal Sainte-Croix has character; the episcopal Sainte-Marie dignity. In Sainte-Croix the houses rise up from the surface of the Gave in the most entrancing, damp picturesqueness imaginable as the waters flow swiftly down towards Orthez. Back from the river, the houses are mounted on tortuous hillsides, with narrow, silent streets, as if they and their inhabitants all lived in the past. On the very crest of the hill is the Église Sainte-Croix, founded in the ninth century by one of the Vicomtes de Béarn, a monument every whit as interesting as the great cathedral lower down.
The diocese of Saint-Marie d’Oloron was the least wealthy of any of mediæval France. Its government allowance was but thirteen thousand francs, and this sum had to be divided with the Bishop of Lescar. On the other hand, the city of Oloron itself was important and wealthy in its own right.
In the Faubourg of Sainte-Croix one remarks as real a mediævalism as exists anywhere in France to-day. Its streets are narrow and silent, and therein are found many examples of domestic habitations dating back to Roman times. These are very rare to-day, even in southern Gaul, where the hand of progress is supposed to be weak. Interspersed with these Romanesque houses are admirable works of the Gothic and Renaissance periods. There is very little that is modern.
Of the old city walls but little evidence remains. A kind of rampart is seen here and there built into other structures, and one, at least, of the watch-towers is left, of the dozen or more that once existed. Sainte-Croix still has, however, an archaic aspect which bids fair not to change within the lives of the present generation.
The chief industries of Oloron are the making of espadrilles, and the weaving of “toile du Béarn,” a species of linen with which housewives all over these parts stock their linen closets once in a lifetime, and which lasts till they die, or perhaps longer, and is handed down to their daughters and granddaughters.
Another echo of Protestantism in Béarn still reverberates at Oloron. A one-time Bishop of Oloron, a protégé of Marguerite de Navarre, became a disciple of Martin Luther. He was named Roussel, and had been a professor of philosophy in the University of Paris. He had travelled in Germany, had met Luther, and had all but accepted his religion, when, returning to Béarn, he came into favour with the learned Marguerite, who nominated him Bishop of Oloron. He hesitated between the two religions, knowing not which to take. Meantime he professed both one and the other; in the morning he was for Rome, and in the evening for Luther; and preaching thus in the churches and temples he became a natural enemy of both parties. One day he was summarily despatched by a blow with a hatchet which one of his parishioners had concealed upon his person as he came to church. For this act the murderer was, in the reign of Henri IV, made Bishop of Oloron in the unworthy Roussel’s place.
Six kilometres from Oloron, at Eysus, a tiny hamlet too small to be noted in most guide books, is an old Château de Plaisance of the Vicomtes de Béarn. Folks had the habit, even in the old days, of living around wherever fancy willed—the same as some of us do to-day. It has some advantages and not many disadvantages.
Back of Oloron, towards the foot-hills of the Pyrenees, is another of those little kingdoms which were scattered all over France, and which only geographers and antiquarians know sufficiently well to be able to place offhand. This is the Barétous, and very curious it is with the survival of its old customs and costumes. Up to Aramits the routes are much frequented, but as one penetrates further into the fastnesses of the mountains, there is an immense sadness that is as entrancing as the most vivid gaiety. Pushing through to the Spanish frontier, fifty kilometres or more beyond Aramits, a whole kaleidoscope of mountain charms unrolls itself at every step.
At the Spanish frontier limit, a quaint and curious ceremony is held on the thirteenth of July in each year by the Baretains and their Spanish neighbours. The Baretains, by an ancient right, pasture their flocks up in the high valleys of the Ronçal, and, to recognize the right of the Ronçalois to keep them out of their pasturage if they so chose, the Baretains pay them homage. The ceremony is carried out before a notary, seven jurats being the representatives of the Baretains, each armed with a pike, as are the representatives of Ronçal. The first lay down their pikes before the latter, and, in a second layer, their points turned towards the Béarnais capital, are placed those of the Ronçalois. Then a shout of acclamation goes up and rends the air: “Patz abantz! Patz abantz! Patz abantz!—Peace for the future!” This is the signal for a general rejoicing, and a merry-making of dancing and eating and drinking, not far different from other fêtes. It is the setting that makes it so remarkable, and the quaint costumes and customs of the men and women of two nations mingling in a common fête.
This Franco-Espagnol ceremony is accomplished with much éclat on a little square of ground set off on the maps of the État Major as “Champ de Foire Français et Espagnol.” Tradition demands that three cows be given or offered to the Spanish by the French for the privilege of pasturage over the border in the Spanish valleys. The cows are loosed on the Champ de Foire, and if they remain for half an hour without crossing the line into France again they belong to the Spanish. If, on the other hand, one or more cross back into France they remain the property of the French.
Formerly three horses were used for this part of the function, but as they were bound to have a white star on the forehead, and as that variety of beast is rare in these parts, a compromise was made to carry out the pact with the cows.
The most historic spot in the Gave d’Aspe is unquestionably Sarrance. Notre Dame de Sarrance is a venerable and supposedly miraculous statue. Numbers of pilgrims have visited the shrine in times past, among them the none too constant Louis XI, who, if he was devoted to Our Lady of Cléry and Notre Dame de Embrun, was ready to bow down before any whom he thought might do him a good turn.
Certainly Sarrance’s most favourite memory is that of the celebrated Marguerite de Navarre. If she did not write, she at least conceived the idea of her “Heptameron” here, if history is to be believed.
The title page of this immortal work reads as follows,
The history of the inception of these tales is often inexactly recounted at this late day, but in the main the facts seem to be as follows:—
In September (1549?), when the queen and her followers were journeying from Cauterets to Tarbes, the waters of the Gave overflowed their banks and destroyed the bridge of Sarrance. The party stopped first at the Abbaye de Saint Savin, and again at the Monastère de Notre Dame de Sarrance. Ten days were necessary to repair the bridge which had been carried away, and time apparently hung heavy on the hands of every one. To break the ennui of their sojourn in the company of these austere monks of Sarrance, the royal party sought what amusements they might.
In the morning all met with the Dame Oysille, the eldest of the company, when they had an hour’s reading of the Scriptures. After this there was a mass; then at ten o’clock they dined; finally each retired to his room—“pour ses affaires particulières,” says the old record—presumably to sleep, though it was early in the day for that. In the afternoon (“depuis midi jusques à quatres heures,” ran the old chronicle) they all assembled in the meadow by the river’s bank beneath the trees, and each, seated at his ease, recounted such salacious satires and tales as would have added to the fame of Boccaccio. This procedure went on until the tellers of tales were interrupted by the coming of the prior who called them to vespers.
These tales or “contes,” or “petites histoires,” or whatever one chooses to call them, free of speech and of incident as was the custom of the time, were afterwards mothered by the queen of Navarre, and given to the world as the product of her fertile mind. Judging from their popularity at that time, and since, the fair lady must have been a wonderful storyteller.
The gentle slopes of a prairie along the banks of the Gave near by is the reputed spot where these tales were told,—a spot “where the sun could not pierce the thick foliage,” certainly romantically and picturesquely endowed. The site is charming, and one can picture the scene all out again for himself if he is possessed of the least bit of imaginative sense.
Still following the valley of the Aspe upward, one comes next to Bedous, really a pretentious little city, but unheard of by conventional travellers. Everything begins to take on a Spanish hue, and the church, dating from 1631, is more Spanish than French in its architecture and all its appointments. All the commercial life of the valley centres here, and a mixed Franco-Espagnol traffic goes on. It is principally the trading of cattle, sheep and wool, with an occasional porker or a donkey sold, or bargained for, on the side. Bedous has been marked out as being the terminus of a railway line yet to be built. Until the times shall be propitious for pushing the railway on into Spain the town will remain simply what it has been for centuries. When that day comes, much of the charm of the region will be gone. The automobile is no such desecrator as the railway, let scoffers say what they will.
In the valley of the Aspe, with snow-capped mountains in full view, there is a surprising softness of climate all through the year. In this valley was the last refuge of Protestantism in the days of the religious wars, and the little village of Bedous still possesses a “temple” and a “pastor.”
Above Bedous, towards the crest of the Pyrenees, is Accous, and as one progresses things become more and more Spanish, until the sign “Posada” is as frequent as “Auberge.”
Accous offers no curiosities to visitors, but it was here that Victor Hugo gave the last glimpses of Jean Valjean when the police were close upon his trail; “at the place called the Grange de Doumec, near the hamlet of Chavilles,” ran the romance.
From this point the valley of the Aspe opens almost perpendicularly into the heart of the rock wall of the Pyrenees; it is a veritable chasm in its upper reaches; and in this rocky defile was once a tiny feudality, absorbed and later wiped into oblivion by the Revolution.
Beyond Sarrance are Urdos and Somport and the fortress of Portalet. The route was known to the ancients as that through which the Saracens came from Spain to over-run southern Gaul. Somport was the Summus Pyreneus of the old-time historians of the Romans.
ORTHEZ is another of those cities of the Pyrenees which does not live up to its possibilities, at least not in a commercial sense. Nevertheless, some of us find it all the more delightful for that. It is a city where the relics of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance are curiously intermingled, and if one within its walls so chose he could imagine himself as living in the past as well as in the present, and this in spite of the fact that the city has been remodelled and restored in certain quarters out of all semblance to its former self.
There is little or nothing remaining of that time which Froissart described with such minuteness when writing of the court at Orthez’ château.
All that remains of this great pile is the Tour de Moncade, but from its grandeur and commanding site one realizes well enough that in its time it was hardly overshadowed by the better preserved edifices at Pau and Foix.
At the northeast of Orthez, on a hill overlooking the city is an ancient, rectangular tower, its sides mellowed by ages, and its crest in ruins.
“Savez-vous ce que sont ces ruines?” you ask of any one, and they will tell you that it is all that remains of the fine chateau of Gaston Phœbus. Fêtes and crimes were curiously intermingled within its walls, for always little rivulets of blood flowed in mediæval times as the accompaniment of the laughter of the feast.
Gaston de Foix, after the burning of his château, came to Orthez in the thirteenth century, and began the citadel of Orthez—the “château-noble” of the chronicles of Froissart. The edifice played an important rôle in the history of Béarn.
At that time Gaston was a vassal of Edward III of England who was then making a Crusade in the East. On his return he found this “château-noble” already built, and his surprise was great, for he knew not what it portended. He concluded that it could only mean the rebellion of his vassal, and he ordered the Seneschal of Gascony to demand the surrender of the property. When this was refused Edward seized it and all the domains of Béarn, and sent Gerard de Laon as envoy to put the new political machinery in running order. The envoy entered Orthez without the least obstacle being put in his way, but in an instant the gates were closed and he was made a prisoner. Irritated by this outrage, Edward, at the head of an imposing army, marched on Orthez. Gaston, seized with fear, lost his head, and made up his mind to surrender before he was attacked. No protestations of future devotion to his overlord would, however, be accepted, and Edward made him prisoner on the spot. To regain his liberty, Gaston promised to turn over the “Fortresse d’Orthez” but, when he was set free, he established himself with a doubled garrison behind his walls and prepared for resistance. Edward pleaded for justice and honourable dealing, and a quarrel, long and animated, followed. The affair took on such proportions that the Pope sent his legate, as an intermediary, to make peace. Gaston would hear of no compromise, and called upon the king of France to take his part. A sort of council was finally arranged, during which Gaston became so exasperated that he threw his glove in the face of the English king. He begged the king’s pardon afterwards, and an agreement was reached whereby everything was left as it had been before the quarrel began.
Many imperishable souvenirs are left of the reign at Orthez of the brilliant Gaston de Foix, when tourneys and fêtes followed in rapid succession. It was Orthez’ most brilliant epoch.
It was here, to the court of Gaston Phœbus, that Messire Jehan Froissart came, in 1388, and stayed three weeks and some of his most brilliant pages relate to this visit. Of his host, the chronicler said: “De toutes choses il est si parfait.”
Gaston Phœbus was so powerful and magnificent a seigneur in his own right, and his castle at Orthez was such a landmark of history that Louis XI—who conceded little enough to others as a usual thing—said to his followers as he was passing through Béarnais territory on a pilgrimage: “Messeigneurs, laissez l’epée de France, nous sortons ici du royaume.”
Gaston Phœbus was the most accomplished seigneur of his time, and he had for his motto “Toquos-y se gaasos”—“Attack who dares.”
One day, in the month of August, 1390, on returning from a bear hunt, greatly fatigued, he was handed a cup from which to drink. He drank from the cup and instantly expired. Was he poisoned? That is what no one knows. It was the custom of the time to make away with one’s enemies thus, and in this connection one recalls that Gaston himself killed his own son because he would not eat at table.
The Pont d’Orthez
Orthez was deserted by the court for Pau, and in time the natural destruction of wind and weather, and the hand of man, stripped the château to what one sees to-day.
The Pont d’Orthez is a far better preserved monument of feudal and warlike times, and it was a real defence to the city, as can be readily understood by all who view it. Its four hardy arches span the Gave as they did in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It was from the summit of one of the sentinel towers of this most remarkable of mediæval bridges that the soldiers of Montgomery obliged the monks to throw themselves into the river below. The “Brothers of the Bridge” were a famous institution in mediæval times, and they should have been better treated than they usually were, but too frequently indeed they were massacred without having either the right or the means to defend themselves.
The history of Montgomery’s connection with Orthez, or more particularly the Pont d’Orthez, reads almost as if it were legend, though indeed it is truth. The story is called by the French historians “La Chronique de la Tour des Caperas.”
Jeanne d’Albret, the mainstay of Protestantism in her day, wished to make Orthez the religious capital, and accordingly she built here a splendid church in which to expound the theories of Calvin and brought “professors” from Scotland and England to preach the new dogma. Orthez became at once the point of attack for those of the opposite faith, and as horrible a massacre as was ever known took place in the streets of Orthez and gave perhaps the first use of the simile that the river flowed as a river of blood. Priests and monks were the special prey of the Protestants, while they themselves were being attacked from without. One by one as they were hunted out from their hiding-places the priests and lay brothers were pushed from the parapet of the bridge into the Gave below. If any gained the banks by swimming they were prodded and stabbed by still other soldiery with lances, and from this great noyade the great Tour des Caperas became known as the Tour des Prêtres.
To-day Montauban and Orthez have relatively the largest Protestant populations of any of the cities of France.
The old Route Royale between Bayonne and the capital of Béarn and Navarre passed through Orthez, and the same narrow streets, irregular, badly paved, and badly kept up, are those which one traverses to-day on entering and leaving the city. One great improvement has been made in the ancient quarter of the town—though of course one does not know what historical souvenirs it may have supplanted—and that is the laying out of a mail or mall, planted on either side with great elms, and running from the banks of the Gave to the fine fifteenth-century—but still Gothic—church, well at the centre of the town.
The “jambons de Bayonne” are mostly cured at Orthez, and it is indeed the leading industry of the city. The porkers of Orthez may not be corn fed, but they are well and cleanly nourished, which is more than can be said of many “domesticated pigs” in New and Old England, which are eaten with a great relish by those who have brought them up.
In the religious wars Orthez played a grand rôle, and in 1814 it was the scene of one of the great struggles of France against alien invasion of her territory. Just north of the city, on the height of a flanking hill, Wellington—at the head of a force very much superior, let no one forget—inflicted a bloody defeat on Maréchal Soult. The Duc de Dalmatie lost, it is recorded, nearly four thousand men, but he wounded or killed six thousand in the same engagement. General Foy here received his fourth wound on the field of battle.
Orthez is one of the really great feudal cities of the south of France. In the ninth century it was known as Orthesium, and belonged to the Vicomtes de Dax, who, only when they were conquered by Gaston III, Prince of Béarn, ceded the city to the crown of Béarn and Navarre.
It was in the château of Orthez that the unfortunate Blanche of Castille, daughter of the king of Aragon, was poisoned by her sister, the wife of Gaston IV, Comte de Foix. This was one of the celebrated crimes of history, though for that matter the builder of the château, the magnificent (sic) Gaston Phœbus, committed one worthy to rank with it when he killed his brother and “propre fils” on the mere suspicion that they might some day be led to take sides against him.
Orthez flourished greatly under its Protestant princes, but it waned and all but dwindled away in the unpeaceful times immediately following upon the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The cessation of the practice of the arts of industry, and very nearly those of commerce, left the city poor and impoverished, and it is only within recent generations that it has arisen again to importance.
The donjon of Moncade is all that remains of the once proud château where Gaston Phœbus held more than one brilliant court on his excursions beyond the limits of his beloved Foix. It dominates the whole region, however, and adds an accentuated note of grimness to the otherwise gay melody of the Gave as it flows down to join the Adour from the high valleys of the Pyrenees.
On the opposite hillside is a memorial in honour of the brave General Foy, which will recall to some the victory of Wellington over Soult, and to others, who have not forgotten their Dumas, the fact that it was General Foy who first gave the elder Dumas his start as writer of romances.
Salies de Béarn is a near neighbour of Orthez, and can be omitted from no Pyrenean itinerary. The bustling little market-town and watering-place combined dates, as to the foundation of its great industry, back to the tenth century, when the Duc de Gascogne gave to the monks of the Monastery of Saint Pé an establishment ready fitted that they might commence the industry of recovering salt from the neighbouring salt springs. All through mediæval times, and down as late as 1840, the industry was carried on under the old concession.
All the distractions of a first-class watering-place may be had here to-day, and the “season” is on from May to September. The city is the birthplace of Colonel Dambourges, who became famous for his defence of Quebec against the English in 1775.
At Salies is still the house which sheltered Jeanne d’Albret when she took the waters here, and not far away is the spot where died Gaston Phœbus, as he was returning from a bear hunt. These two facts taken together make of Salies hallowed historic ground.
At Salies de Béarn one recalls a scrap of literary history that is interesting; Dumas père certainly got inspiration for the names of his three mousquetaire heroes from hereabouts. Not far away is Athos—which he gave to the Comte de la Fère, while Aramits and Artagnan are also near-by. In any historical light further than this they are all unimportant however.
Six kilometres to the northward is the Château de Bellocq, a fine mediæval country house (fourteenth century), though unroofed to-day, the residence of Jeanne d’Albret when she sojourned in the neighbourhood. The walls, flanked with four great round towers, are admirably preserved, and the vaulting and its ribs, two square towers and a great entrance gate show the manner of building of the time with great detail.
Five leagues from Orthez, on a little valley plain, watered by the Gave d’Oloron, is the tiny little city of Navarreux. Its population is scarce above a thousand, but it is the centre of affairs for twenty-five communes, containing perhaps twelve thousand souls. It is a typical, bustling, little Pyrenean metropolis, and the comings and goings on market-day at the little Hôtel de France are as good an illustration of the life and manners of a people of small affairs as one will find in a year of travel.
Henri d’Albret of Navarre picked out the site of the city in the midst of this fertile plain, and planned that it should increase and multiply, if not in population, at least in prosperity, though it was at first a “private enterprise,” like Richelieu’s garden-city in Touraine.
The preëminence of Navarreux was short lived. Henri d’Albret had built it on the squared-off, straight-street, Chicago plan, had surrounded it with walls, and even had a fortress built by Vauban, in the expectation of making it the commercial capital of the Pyrenees, but man proposes, and the lines of communication or trade disposes, and many a thought-to-be-prosperous town has finally dwindled into impotency. There was a good deal in the favour of Navarreux; its situation was central, and it was surrounded by a numerous population, but its dream was over in a couple of hundred years and the same year (1790) saw both its grandeur and its decadence.
To-day it remains still a small town, tied to the end of an omnibus line which runs out from Orthez a dozen or fifteen kilometres away. The fortifications of Vauban are still there and a remarkable old city gate, called the Porte St. Antoine, a veritable gem of feudal architecture. The very dulness and disappointment of the place appeal to one hugely. One might do worse than doze away a little while here after a giddy round at Pau or Biarritz. Navarreux is of the past and lives in the past; it will never advance. As a fortress it has been unclassed, but its walls one day guarded—as a sort of last line of defence—the route from Spain via Ronçevaux and Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port. In those days it certainly occupied a proud position in intent and in reality, as its citadel sat high on a little terrace-plateau, dominated in turn by the red dome of its church still higher up. The effect is still much the same, impotent though the city walls and ramparts have become.