Chapter V: Various French Scenes (2)

After leaving it and passing out of the two circles of walls, I treated myself, in the most infatuated manner, to another walk round the Cité. It is certainly this general impression that is most striking--the impression from outside, where the whole place detaches itself at once from the landscape. In the warm southern dusk it looked more than ever like a city in a fairy-tale. To make the thing perfect, a white young moon, in its first quarter, came out and hung just over the dark silhouette. It was hard to come away--to incommode one's self for anything so vulgar as a railway train; I would gladly have spent the evening in revolving round the walls of Carcassonne.

BIARRITZ[A]

[Footnote A: From "Castles and Châteaux of Old Navarre." By special arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, L.C. Page & Co. Copyright, 1907.]

BY FRANCIS MILTOUN

If Bayonne is the center of commercial affairs for the Basque country, its citizens must, at any rate, go to Biarritz if they want to live "the elegant and worldly life." The prosperity and luxury of Biarritz are very recent; it goes back only to the Second Empire, when it was but a village of a thousand souls or less, mostly fishermen and women.

The railway and the automobile omnibus make communication with Bayonne to-day easy, but formerly folk came and went on a donkey side-saddled for two, arranged back to back, like the seats of an Irish jaunting-car. If the weight were unequal, a balance was struck by adding cobblestones on one side or the other, the patient donkey not minding in the least.

This astonishing mode of conveyance was known as a "cacolet," and replaced the "voitures" and "fiacres" of other resorts. An occasional example may still be seen, but the "jolies Basquaises" who conducted them have given way to sturdy, barelegged Basque boys--as picturesque, perhaps, but not so entrancing to the view. To voyage "en cacolet" was the necessity of our grandfathers; for us it is an amusement only.

Napoleon III., or rather Eugénie, his spouse, was the faithful godfather of Biarritz as a resort. The Villa Eugénie is no more; it was first transformed into a hotel and later destroyed by fire; but it was the first of a great battery of villas and hotels which has made Biarritz so great that the popularity of Monte Carlo is steadily waning. Biarritz threatens to become even more popular; some sixteen thousand visitors came to Biarritz in 1899, but there were thirty-odd thousand in 1903; while the permanent population has risen from 2,700 in the days of the Second Empire to 12,800 in 1901. The tiny railway from Bayonne to Biarritz transported half a million travelers twenty years ago, and a million and a half, or nearly that number, in 1903; the rest, being millionaires, or gypsies, came in automobiles or caravans. These figures tell eloquently of the prosperity of this "villégiature impériale."

The great beauty of Biarritz is its setting. At Monte Carlo the setting is also beautiful, ravishingly beautiful, but the architecture, the terrace, Monaco's rock, and all the rest combine to make the pleasing "ensemble." At Biarritz the architecture of its Casino and the great hotels is not of an epoch-making beauty, neither are they so delightfully placed. It is the surrounding stage setting that is so lovely. Here the jagged shore line, the blue waves, the ample horizon seaward, are what make it all so charming.

Biarritz as a watering-place has an all-the-year-round clientèle; in summer the Spanish and the French, succeeded in winter by Americans, Germans, and English--with a sprinkling of Russians at all times. Biarritz, like Pau, aside from being a really delightful winter resort, where one may escape the rigors of murky November to March in London, is becoming afflicted with a bad case of "sport fever." There are all kinds of sports, some of them reputable enough in their place, but the comic-opera fox-hunting which takes place at Pau and Biarritz is not one of them....

The picturesque "Plage des Basques" lies to the south of the town, bordered with high cliffs, which in turn are surmounted with terraces of villas. The charm of it all is incomparable. To the northwest stretches the limpid horizon of the Bay of Biscay, and to the south the snowy summits of the Pyrenees, and the adorable bays of Saint-Jean-de-Luz and Fontarabie, while behind, and to the eastward, lies the quaint country of the Basques, and the mountain trails into Spain in all their savage hardiness.

The off-shore translucent waters of the Gulf of Gascony were the "Sinus Aquitanicus" of the ancients. A colossal rampart of rocks and sand dunes stretches all the way from the Gironde to the Bidassoa, without a harbor worthy of the name save at Bayonne and Saint-Jean-de-Luz. Here the Atlantic waves pound, in time of storm, with all the fury with which they break upon the rocky coasts of Brittany further north. Perhaps this would not be so, but for the fact that the Iberian coast to the southward runs almost at right angles with that of Gascony. As it is, while the climate is mild, Biarritz and the other cities on the coasts of the Gulf of Gascony have a fair proportion of what sailors, the world over, call "rough weather."

The waters of the Gascon Gulf are not always angry; most frequently they are calm and blue, vivid with a translucence worthy of those of Capri, and it is this that makes the beach at Biarritz one of the most popular sea-bathing resorts in France to-day. It is a fashionable watering-place, but it is also, perhaps, the most beautifully disposed city to be found in all the round of the European coast line, its slightly curving slope dominated by a background terrace, decorative in itself, but delightfully set off with its fringe of dwelling-houses, hotels, and casinos. Ostend is superbly laid out, but it is dreary; Monte Carlo is beautiful, but it is ultra; while Trouville is constrained and affected. Biarritz has the best features of all these.... Saint-Jean-de-Luz had a population of ten thousand two centuries ago; to-day it has three thousand, and most of these take in boarders, or in one way or another cater to the hordes of visitors who have made it--or would, if they could have supprest its quiet Basque charm of coloring and character--a little Brighton.

Not all is lost, but four hundred houses were razed in the mid-eighteenth century by a tempest, and the stable population began to creep away; only with recent years an influx of strangers has arrived for a week's or a month's stay to take their places--if idling butterflies of fashion or imaginary invalids can really take the place of a hardworking, industrious colony of fishermen, who thought no more of sailing away to the South Antarctic or the banks of Newfoundland in an eighty-ton whaler than they did of seining sardines from a shallop in the Gulf of Gascony at their doors.

DOWN THE SAONE TO LYONS[A]

[Footnote A: From "Pencillings by the Way." Published by Charles Scribner, 1852.]

BY NATHANIEL PARKER WILLIS

The Saone is about the size of the Mohawk, but not half so beautiful; at least for the greater part of its course. Indeed, you can hardly compare American with European rivers, for the charm is of another description, quite. With us it is nature only, here it is almost all art. Our rivers are lovely, because the outline of the shore is graceful, and particularly because the vegetation is luxuriant. The hills are green, the foliage deep and lavish, the rocks grown over with vines or moss, the mountains in the distance covered with pines and other forest-trees; everything is wild, and nothing looks bare or sterile. The rivers of France are crowned on every height with ruins, and in the bosom of every valley lies a cluster of picturesque stone cottages; but the fields are naked, and there are no trees; the mountains are barren and brown, and everything looks as if the dwellings had been deserted by the people, and nature had at the same time gone to decay.

I can conceive nothing more melancholy than the views upon the Saone, seen, as I saw them, tho vegetation is out everywhere, and the banks should be beautiful if ever. As we approached Lyons the river narrowed and grew bolder, and the last ten miles were enchanting. Naturally the shores at this part of the Saone are exceedingly like the highlands of the Hudson above West Point. Abrupt hills rise from the river's edge, and the windings are sharp and constant. But imagine the highlands of the Hudson crowned with antique chateaux, and covered to the very top with terraces and summer-houses and hanging-gardens, gravel-walks and beds of flowers, instead of wild pines and precipices, and you may get a very correct idea of the Saone above Lyons.

You emerge from one of the dark passes of the river by a sudden turn, and there before you lies this large city, built on both banks, at the foot and on the sides of mountains. The bridges are fine, and the broad, crowded quays, all along the edges of the river, have a beautiful effect. There is a great deal of magnificence at Lyons, in the way of quays, promenades, and buildings.... I was glad to escape from the lower streets, and climb up the long staircases to the observatory that overhangs the town. From the base of this elevation the descent of the river is almost a precipice. The houses hang on the side of the steep hill, and their doors enter from the long alleys of stone staircases by which you ascend....

It was holy-week, and the church of Notre Dame de Fourvières, which stands on the summit of the hill, was crowded with people. We went in for a moment, and sat down on a bench to rest. My companion was a Swiss captain of artillery, who was a passenger in the boat, a very splendid fellow, with a mustache that he might have tied behind his ears. He had addrest me at the hotel, and proposed that we should visit the curiosities of the town together. He was a model of a manly figure, athletic, and soldier-like, and standing near him was to get the focus of all the dark eyes in the congregation.

The new square tower stands at the side of the church, and rises to the height of perhaps sixty feet. The view from it is said to be one of the finest in the world. I have seen more extensive ones, but never one that comprehended more beauty and interest. Lyons lies at the foot, with the Saone winding through its bosom in abrupt curves; the Rhone comes down from the north on the other side of the range of mountains, and meeting the Saone in a broad stream below the town, they stretch off to the south, through a diversified landscape; the Alps rise from the east like the edges of a thunder-cloud, and the mountains of Savoy fill up the interval to the Rhone.

All about the foot of the monument lie gardens, of exquisite cultivation; and above and below the city the villas of the rich; giving you altogether as delicious a nucleus for a broad circle of scenery as art and nature could create, and one sufficiently in contrast with the barrenness of the rocky circumference to enhance the charm, and content you with your position. Half way down the hill lies an old monastery, with a lovely garden walled in from the world.

The river was covered with boats, the bells were ringing to church, the glorious old cathedral, so famous for its splendor, stood piled up, with its arches and gray towers, in the square below; the day was soft, sunny, and warm, and existence was a blessing. I leaned over the balustrade, I know not how long, looking down upon the scene about me; and I shall ever remember it as one of those few unalloyed moments, when the press of care was taken off my mind, and the chain of circumstances was strong enough to set aside both the past and the future, and leave me to the quiet enjoyment of the present. I have found such hours "few and far between."

LYONS[A]

[Footnote A: From a letter to his friend West.]

BY THOMAS GRAY

I take this opportunity to tell you that we are at the ancient and celebrated Lugdunum, a city situated upon the confluence of the Rhone and Saône (Arar, I should say) two people, who tho of tempers extremely unlike, think fit to join hands here, and make a little party to travel to the Mediterranean in company; the lady comes gliding along through the fruitful plains of Burgundy.... the gentleman runs all rough and roaring down from the mountains of Switzerland to meet her; and with all her soft airs she likes him never the worse; she goes through the middle of the city in state, and he passes incog, without the walls, but waits for her a little below.

The houses here are so high, and the streets so narrow, as would be sufficient to render Lyons the dismalest place in the world, but the number of people, and the face of commerce diffused about it, are, at least, as sufficient to make it the liveliest: between these two sufficiencies, you will be in doubt what to think of it; so we shall leave the city, and proceed to its environs, which are beautiful beyond expression; it is surrounded with mountains, and those mountains all bedropped and bespeckled with houses, gardens, and plantations of the rich bourgeois, who have from thence a prospect of the city in the vale below on one hand, on the other the rich plains of the Lyonnois, with the rivers winding among them, and the Alps, with the mountains of Dauphiné, to bound the view.

All yesterday morning we were busied in climbing up Mount Fourvière, where the ancient city stood perched at such a height, that nothing but the hopes of gain could certainly ever persuade their neighbors to pay them a visit. Here are the ruins of the emperors' palaces, that resided here, that is to say, Augustus and Severus; they consist in nothing but great masses of old wall, that have only their quality to make them respected. In a vineyard of the Minims are remains of a theater; the Fathers, whom they belong to, hold them in no esteem at all, and would have showed us their sacristy and chapel instead of them. The Ursuline Nuns have in their garden some Roman baths, but we having the misfortune to be men, they did not think proper to admit us.

Hard by are eight arches of a most magnificent aqueduct, said to be erected by Antony, when his legions were quartered here. There are many other parts of it dispersed up and down the country, for it brought the water from a river many leagues off in La Forez. Here are remains too of Agrippa's seven great roads which met at Lyons; in some places they lie twelve feet deep in the ground.

MARSEILLES[A]

[Footnote A: From "Pictures from Italy," written in 1844]

BY CHARLES DICKENS

So we went on, until eleven at night, when we halted at the town of Aix (within two stages of Marseilles) to sleep. The hotel, with all the blinds and shutters closed to keep the light and heat out, was comfortable and airy next morning, and the town was very clean; but so hot, and so intensely light, that when I walked out at noon it was like coming suddenly from the darkened room into crisp blue fire. The air was so very clear, that distant hills and rocky points appeared within an hour's walk; while the town immediately at hand--with a kind of blue wind between me and it--seemed to be white hot, and to be throwing off a fiery air from its surface.

We left this town toward evening, and took the road to Marseilles. A dusty road it was; the houses shut up close; and the vines powdered white. At nearly all the cottage doors, women were peeling and slicing onions into earthen bowls for supper. So they had been doing last night all the way from Avignon. We passed one or two shady dark châteaux, surrounded by trees, and embellished with cool basins of water: which were the more refreshing to behold, from the great scarcity of such residences on the road we had traveled.

As we approached Marseilles, the road began to be covered with holiday people. Outside the public-houses were parties smoking, drinking, playing draughts and cards, and (once) dancing. But dust, dust, dust, everywhere. We went on, through a long, straggling, dirty suburb, thronged with people; having on our left a dreary slope of land, on which the country-houses of the Marseilles merchants, always staring white, are jumbled and heaped without the slightest order; backs, fronts, sides, and gables toward all points of the compass; until, at last, we entered the town.

I was there, twice, or thrice afterward, in fair weather and foul; and I am afraid there is no doubt that it is a dirty and disagreeable place. But the prospect, from the fortified heights, of the beautiful Mediterranean, with, its lovely rocks and islands, is most delightful. These heights are a desirable retreat, for less picturesque reasons--as an escape from a compound of vile smells perpetually arising from a great harbor full of stagnant water, and befouled by the refuse of innumerable ships with all sorts of cargoes, which, in hot weather, is dreadful in the last degree.

There were foreign sailors, of all nations, in the streets; with red shirts, blue shirts, buff shirts, tawny shirts, and shirts of orange color; with red caps, blue caps, green caps, great beards, and no beards; in Turkish turbans, glazed English hats, and Neapolitan headdresses. There were the townspeople sitting in clusters on the pavement, or airing themselves on the tops of their houses, or walking up and down the closest and least airy of boulevards; and there were crowds of fierce-looking people of the lower sort, blocking up the way, constantly.

In the very heart of all this stir and uproar, was the common madhouse; a low, contracted, miserable building, looking straight upon the street, without the smallest screen or courtyard; where chattering madmen and mad-women were peeping out, through rusty bars, at the staring faces below, while the sun, darting fiercely aslant into their little cells, seemed to dry up their brains, and worry them, as if they were baited by a pack of dogs.

We were pretty well accommodated at the Hôtel du Paradis, situated in a narrow street of very high houses, with a hairdresser's shop opposite, exhibiting in one of its windows two full-length waxen ladies, twirling around and around: which so enchanted the hairdresser himself, that he and his family sat in armchairs, and in cool undresses, on the pavement outside, enjoying the gratification of the passers-by, with lazy dignity. The family had retired to rest when we went to bed, at midnight; but the hairdresser (a corpulent man, in drab slippers) was still sitting there, with his legs stretched out before him, and evidently couldn't bear to have the shutters put up.

Next day we went down to the harbor, where the sailors of all nations were discharging and taking in cargoes of all kinds: fruits, wines, oils, silks, stuffs, velvets, and every manner of merchandise. Taking one of a great number of lively little boats with gay-striped awnings, we rowed away, under the sterns of great ships, under tow-ropes and cables, against and among other boats, and very much too near the sides of vessels that were faint with oranges, to the "Marie Antoinette," a handsome steamer bound for Genoa, lying near the mouth of the harbor.

By and by, the carriage, that unwieldy "trifle from the Pantechnicon," on a flat barge, bumping against everything, and giving occasion for a prodigious quantity of oaths and grimaces, came stupidly alongside; and by five o'clock we were steaming out in the open sea. The vessel was beautifully clean; the meals were served under an awning on deck; the night was calm and clear; the quiet beauty of the sea and sky unspeakable.

THE LITTLE REPUBLIC OF ANDORRA[A]

[Footnote A: From "Castles and Châteaux of Old Navarre." By special arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, L.C. Page & Co. Copyright, 1907.]

BY FRANCIS MILTOUN

The little republic of Andorra, hidden away in the fastnesses of the Pyrenees between France and Spain, its allegiance divided between the bishop of Urgel in Spain and the French government, is a relic of medievalism which will probably never fall before the swift advance of twentieth century ideas of progress. At least it will never be overrun by automobiles.

From French or Spanish territory this little unknown land is to be reached by what is called a "wagon-way," but the road is so bad that the sure-footed little donkeys of the Pyrenees are by far the best means of locomotion, unless one would go up on foot, a matter of twenty kilometers or more from Hospitalet in Spanish or Porté in French territory.

The political status of Andorra is most peculiar, but since it has endured without interruption (and this in spite of wars and rumors of wars), for six centuries, it seems to be all that is necessary.

A relic of the Middle Ages, Andorra-Viella, the city, and its six thousand inhabitants live in their lonesome retirement much as they did in feudal times, except for the fact that an occasional newspaper smuggled in from France or Spain gives a new topic of conversation.

This paternal governmental arrangement which cares for the welfare of the people of Andorra, the city and the province, is the outcome of a treaty signed by Pierre d'Urg and Roger-Bernhard, the third Comte de Foix, giving each other reciprocal rights. There's nothing very strange about this; it was common custom in the Middle Ages for lay and ecclesiastical seigneurs to make such compacts, but the marvel is that it has endured so well with governments rising and falling all about, and grafters and pretenders and dictators ruling every bailiwick in which they can get a foot-hold. Feudal government may have had some bad features, but certainly the republics and democracies of to-day, to say nothing of absolute monarchies, have some, too.

The ways of access between France and Andorra are numerous enough; but of the eight only two--and those not all the way--are really practicable for wheeled traffic. The others are mere trails, or mule-paths.

The people of Andorra, as might be inferred, are all ardent Catholics; and for a tiny country like this to have a religious seminary, as that at Urgel, is remarkable of itself.

Public instruction is of late making headway, but half a century ago the shepherd and laboring population--perhaps nine-tenths of the whole--had little learning or indeed need for it. Their manners and customs are simple and severe and little has changed in modern life from that of their great-great-great-grandfathers. Each family has a sort of a chief or official head, and the eldest son always looks for a wife among the families of his own class. Seldom, if ever, does the married son quit the paternal roof, so large households are the rule. In a family where there are only girls, the eldest is the heir, and she may only marry with a cadet of another family by his joining his name with hers. Perhaps it is this that originally set the fashion for hyphenated names.

The Andorrans are generally robust and well built; the maladies of more populous regions are practically unknown among them. This speaks much for the simple life! Costumes and dress are rough and simple and of heavy woolens, clipt from the sheep and woven on the spot. Public officers, the few representatives of officialdom who exist, alone make any pretense at following the fashions. The women occupy a very subordinate position in public affairs. They may not be present at receptions and functions and not even at mass when it is said by the bishop. Crime is infrequent, and simple, light punishments alone are inflicted. Things are not so uncivilized in Andorra as one might think!

In need all men may be called upon to serve as soldiers, and each head of a family must have a rifle and ball at hand at all times. In other words, he must be able to protect himself against marauders. This does away with the necessity of a large standing police force.

Commerce and industry are free of all taxation in Andorra, and customs dues apply on but few articles. For this reason there is not a very heavy tax on a people who are mostly cultivators and graziers. There is little manufacturing industry, as might be supposed, and what is made--save by hand and in single examples--is of the most simple character. "Made in Germany" or "Tabriqué en Belgique" are the marks one sees on most of the common manufactured articles.

The Andorrans are a simple, proud, gullible people, who live to-day in the past, of the past and for the past; "Les vallées et souverainetés de l'Andorre" are to them to-day just what they always were--a little world of their own.

GAVARNIE[A]

[Footnote A: From "A Tour Through the Pyrenees." By special arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, Henry Holt & Co. Copyright, 1873.]

BY HIPPOLYTE ADOLPHE TAINE

From Luz to Gavarnie is eighteen miles.

It is enjoined upon every living creature able to mount a horse, a mule, or any quadruped whatever, to visit Gavarnie; in default of other beasts, he should, putting aside all shame, bestride an ass. Ladies and convalescents are there in sedan-chairs.

Otherwise, think what a figure you will make on your return.

"You come from the Pyrenees; you've seen Gavarnie?"

"No."

What then did you go to the Pyrenees for?

You hang your head, and your friend triumphs, especially if he was bored at Gavarnie.

You undergo a description of Gavarnie after the last edition of the guide-book. Gavarnie is a sublime sight; tourists go sixty miles out of their way to see it; the Duchess d'Angouléme had herself carried to the furthest rocks. Lord Bute, when he saw it for the first time, cried: "If I were now at the extremity of India, and suspected the existence of what I see at this moment, I should immediately leave in order to enjoy and admire it!" You are overwhelmed with quotations and supercilious smiles; you are convinced of laziness, of dulness of mind, and, as certain English travelers say, of unesthetic insensibility.

There are but two resources: to learn a description by heart, or to make the journey. I have made the journey, and am going to give the description.

We leave at six o'clock in the morning, by the road to Scia, in the fog, without seeing at first anything beyond confused forms of trees and rocks. At the end of a quarter of an hour, we hear along the pathway a noise of sharp cries drawing near; it was a funeral procession coming from Scia. Two men bore a small coffin under a white shroud; behind came four herdsmen in long cloaks and brown capuchons, silent, with bent heads; four women followed in black mantles. It was they who uttered those monotonous and piercing lamentations; one knew not if they were wailing or praying. They walked with long steps through the cold mist, without stopping or looking at any one, and were going to bury the poor body in the cemetery at Luz.

At Scia the road passes over a small bridge very high up, which commands another bridge, gray and abandoned. The double tier of arches bends gracefully over the blue torrent; meanwhile a pale light already floats in the diaphanous mist; a golden gauze undulates above the Gave; the aërial veil grows thin and will soon vanish.

Nothing can convey the idea of this light, so youthful, timid, and smiling, which glitters like the bluish wings of a dragon-fly that is pursued and is taken captive in a net of fog.

Beneath, the boiling water is engulfed in a narrow conduit and leaps like a mill-race. The column of foam, thirty feet high, falls with a furious din, and its glaucous waves, heaped together in the deep ravine, dash against each other and are broken upon a line of fallen rocks. Other enormous rocks, débris of the same mountain, hang above the road, their squared heads crowned with brambles for hair; ranged in impregnable line, they seem to watch the torments of the Gave, which their brothers hold beneath themselves crusht and subdued.

We turn a second bridge and enter the plain of Gèdrés, verdant and cultivated, where the hay is in cocks; they are harvesting; our horses walk between two hedges of hazel; we go along by orchards; but the mountain is ever near; the guide shows us a rock three times the height of a man, which, two years ago, rolled down and demolished a house.

We encounter several singular caravans: a band of young priests in black hats, black gloves, black cassocks tucked up, black stockings, very apparent, novices in horsemanship who bound at every step, like the Gave; a big, jolly, round man, in a sedan-chair, his hands crossed over his belly, who looks on us with a paternal air, and reads his newspaper; three ladies of sufficiently ripe age, very slender, very lean, very stiff, who, for dignity's sake, set their beasts on a trot as we draw near them. The cicisbeo is a bony cartilaginous gentleman, fixt perpendicularly on his saddle like a telegraph-pole. We hear a harsh clucking, as of a choked hen, and we recognize the English tongue.

Beyond Gèdres is a wild valley called Chaos, which is well named. After a quarter of an hour's journey there, the trees disappear, then the juniper and the box, and finally the moss. The Gave is no longer seen; all noises are hushed. It is a dead solitude peopled with wrecks. The avalanches of rocks and crusht flint have come down from the summit to the very bottom. The horrid tide, high and a quarter of a league in length, spreads out like waves its myriads of sterile stones, and the inclined sheet seems still to glide toward inundating the gorge. These stones are shattered and pulverized; their living fractures and thin, harsh points wound the eye; they are still bruising and crushing each other. Not a bush, not a spear of grass; the arid grayish train burns beneath a sun of brass; its débris are scorched to a dull hue, as in a furnace.

A hundred paces further on, the aspect of the valley becomes formidable. Troops of mammoths and mastadons in stone lie crouching over the eastern declivity, one above another, and heaped up over the whole slope. These colossal ridges shine with a tawny hue like iron rust; the most enormous of them drink the water of the river at their base. They look as if warming their bronzed skin in the sun, and sleep, turned over, stretched out on their side, resting in all attitudes, and always gigantic and frightful. Their deformed paws are curled up; their bodies half buried in the earth; their monstrous backs rest one upon another. When you enter into the midst of the prodigious band, the horizon disappears, the blocks rise fifty feet into the air; the road winds painfully among the overhanging masses; men and horses seem but dwarfs; these rusted edges mount in stages to the very summit, and the dark hanging army seems ready to fall on the human insects which come to trouble its sleep.

Once upon a time, the mountain, in a paroxysm of fever, shook its summits like a cathedral that is falling in. A few points resisted, and their embattled turrets are drawn out in line on the crest; but their layers are dislocated, their sides creviced, their points jagged. The whole shattered ridge totters. Beneath them the rock fails suddenly in a living and still bleeding wound. The splinters are lower down, strewn over the declivity. The tumbled rocks are sustained one upon another, and man to-day passes in safety amidst the disaster.

But what a day was that of the ruin: It is not very ancient, perhaps of the sixth century, and the year of the terrible earthquake told of by Gregory of Tours. If a man could without perishing have seen the summits split, totter and fall, the two seas of rock come bounding into the gorge, meet one another and grind each other amidst a shower of sparks, he would have looked upon the grandest spectacle ever seen by human eyes.

On the west, a perpendicular mole, crannied like an old ruin, lifts itself straight up toward the sky. A leprosy of yellowish moss has incrusted its pores, and has clothed it all over with a sinister livery. This livid robe upon this parched stone has a splendid effect. Nothing is uglier than the chalky flints that are drawn from the quarry; just dug up, they seem cold and damp in their whitish shroud; they are not used to the sun; they make a contrast with the rest. But the rock that has lived in the air for ten thousand years, where the light has every day laid on and melted its metallic tints, is the friend of the sun, and carries its mantle upon its shoulders; it has no need of a garment of verdure; if it suffers from parasitic vegetations, it sticks them to its sides and imprints them with its colors. The threatening tones with which it clothes itself suits the free sky, the naked landscape, the powerful heat that environs it; it is alive like a plant; only it is of another age, one more severe and stronger than that in which we vegetate.

Gavarnie is a very ordinary village, commanding a view of the amphitheater we are come to see. After you have left it, it is still necessary to go three miles through a melancholy plain, half buried in sand by the winter inundations; the waters of the Gave are muddy and dull; a cold wind whistles from the amphitheater; the glaciers, strewn with mud and stones, are stuck to the declivity like patches of dirty plaster. The mountains are bald and ravined by cascades; black cones of scattered firs climb them like routed soldiers; a meager and wan turf wretchedly clothes their mutilated heads. The horses ford the Gave stumblingly, chilled by the water coming from the snows. In this wasted solitude you meet, all of a sudden, the most smiling parterre. A throng of the lovely iris crowds itself into the bed of a dried torrent; the sun stripes with rays of gold their velvety petals of tender blue; and the eye follows over the whole plain the folds of the rivulet of flowers.

We climb a last eminence, sown with iris and with stones. There is a hut where you breakfast and leave the horses. You arm yourself with a stout stick, and descend upon the glaciers of the amphitheater.

These glaciers are very ugly, very dirty, very uneven, very slippery; at every step you run the risk of falling, and if you fall, it is on sharp stones or into deep holes. They look very much like heaps of old plaster-work, and those who have admired them must have a stock of admiration for sale. The water has pierced them so that you walk upon bridges of snow. These bridges have the appearance of kitchen air-holes; the water is swallowed up in a very low archway, and, when you look closely, you get a distinct sight of a black hole.

After the glaciers we find a sloping esplanade; we climb for ten minutes bruising our feet upon fragments of sharp rock. Since leaving the hut we have not lifted our eyes, in order to restore for ourselves an unbroken sensation. Here at last we look.

A wall of granite crowned with snow hollows itself before us in a gigantic amphitheater. This amphitheater is twelve hundred feet high, nearly three miles in circumference, three tiers of perpendicular walls, and in each tier thousands of steps. The valley ends there; the wall is a single block and impregnable. The other summits might fall, but its massive layers would not be moved. The mind is overwhelmed by the idea of a stability that can not be shaken and an assured eternity. There is the boundary of two countries and two races; this it is that Roland wanted to break, when with a sword-stroke he opened a breach in the summit. But the immense wound disappeared in the immensity of the unconquered wall. Three sheets of snow are spread out over the three tiers of layers.

The sun falls with all its force upon this virginal robe without being able to make it shine. It preserves its dead whiteness. All this grandeur is austere; the air is chilled beneath the noonday rays; great, damp shadows creep along the foot of the walls. It is the everlasting winter and the nakedness of the desert. The sole inhabitants are the cascades assembled to form the Gave. The streamlets of water come by thousands from the highest layer, leap from step to step, cross their stripes of foam, unite and fall by a dozen brooks that slide from the last layer in flaky streaks to lose themselves in the glaciers of the bottom.

The thirteenth cascade on the left is twelve hundred and sixty-six feet high. It falls slowly, like a dropping cloud, or the unfolding of a muslin veil; the air softens its fall; the eye follows complacently the graceful undulation of the beautiful airy veil. It glides the length of the rock, and seems to float rather than to fall. The sun shines, through its plume, with the softest and loveliest splendor. It reaches the bottom like a bouquet of slender waving feathers, and springs backward in a silver dust; the fresh and transparent mist swings about the rock it bathes, and its rebounding train mounts lightly along the courses. No stir in the air; no noise, no living creature in the solitude. You hear only the monotonous murmur of the cascades, resembling the rustle of the leaves that the wind stirs in the forest.

On our return, we seated ourselves at the door of the hut. It is a poor, squat little house, heavily supported upon thick walls; the knotty joists of the ceiling retain their bark. It is indeed necessary that it should be able to stand out alone against the snows of winter. You find everywhere the imprint of the terrible months it has gone through. Two dead fir-trees stand erect at the door. The garden, three feet square, is defended by enormous walls of piled-up slates. The low and black stable leaves neither foot-hold nor entry for the winds. A lean colt was seeking a little grass among the stones. A small bull, with surly air, looked at us out of the sides of his eyes; the animals, the trees and the site, wore a threatening or melancholy aspect. But in the clefts of a rock were growing some admirable buttercups, lustrous and splendid, which looked as if painted by a ray of sunshine.

At the village we met our companions of the journey who had sat down there. The good tourists get fatigued, stop ordinarily at the inn, take a substantial dinner, have a chair brought to the door, and digest while looking at the amphitheater, which from there appears about as high as a house. After this they return, praising the sublime sight, and very glad that they have come to the Pyrenees.