A Book of the Pyrenees

CHAPTER XVI

COUSERANS

Cobweb of lines – The Viscounty – S. Lizier – S. Girons – S. Lizier a double town – Two cathedrals – Bishop Bernard – His palace – S. Marie de la Sède – The other cathedral – Bridge and inscription – Ramparts – The training of dancing bears – Bear hunting – Mendicity – Improvidence – Factory of La Moulasse – Job cigarette papers – Vic – Sully tree – Oust – The Nine Springs – Aulus – The Planturel.

The railway lines in the central portion of the Pyrenees converge on Toulouse, and to get across country from west to east is no easy matter. In the Eastern Pyrenees they form a cobweb amidst which the traveller gets entangled and spends a day unprofitably in endeavours to extricate himself, for French railway directors ingeniously contrive to make through travelling by branch lines most difficult, or at least most tedious. To reach S. Girons it is necessary to run northwards from S. Gaudens to Boussens, then change trains and turn the face due south, following up the Salat, past the salt springs of Salies.

We now enter the old viscounty of Couserans, of which the civil capital was Massat, and the ecclesiastical was S. Lizier. It pertained for awhile to the counts of Carcassonne; Roger II gave both the district and the bishopric to his younger son, Bernard, with the title of viscount, in or about 990. But in 1257 Esquivat, Count of Bigorre, inherited the land from Roger, Count of Pallier, and thus the Couserans passed into the possession of the house of Foix-Béarn, and so to the kings of Navarre.

The capital of the whole country in early days was Lugdunum Consoranorum, now S. Lizier, and one of the nine cities of Novempopulania. The Couserans, situated between the basins of the Ariège and the Garonne, has much the shape of a vine-leaf, having the valleys of the Arac, Garbet, Salat, and Lez converging at S. Girons into the one broad stream of the Salat, as the stalk of the leaf. If S. Bertrand de Cominges has fallen from its high estate to be a miserable village, it is not alone in its fall, in that S. Lizier has shared the same fate. But Lugdunum Convenarum went out in one tragic drama of blood and flame. Lugdunum Consoranorum is dying of slow decline, its life-blood sucked out of it by the parasitic growth of S. Girons. Indeed, so low is it fallen that the railway does not afford it a station, only a halte. Once the fifth in order of size and splendour of the cities of Novempopulania, it now shelters within its walls not more than five hundred inhabitants. This was a double town: one portion was the city, the other the ville; and what is more, it possessed two cathedrals – one in the city, Notre Dame; the other, S. Lizier, in the town. As just before death a patient often brightens up, puts on an appearance of renewed life, and enjoys buoyant hopes, only to sink in relapse to death, so was it with this Lyons of the Couserans.

Bishop Bernard de Marmiesse (1653–80), not content with the medieval residence of the prelates, erected an enormous and splendid palace, commanding the whole town with its long façade flanked by semicircular towers, embracing the cathedral of S. Marie de la Sède within its walls. Where the bishops ruled and feasted in purple and fine linen lunatics are now installed. Lazarus has crept into the shell of Dives. The bishopric was suppressed at the Revolution and never restored. There had been on the cathedral staff twelve canons and twenty-four prebendaries, having under them a swarm of sacristans, curés to relieve them of burdensome duties, and workmen.

Ste. Marie de la Sède is a Renaissance church, but built when the spirit of Gothic architecture had not gone out of the land; but the portal is Romanesque. The interior woodwork is of the eighteenth century, and is fine for its period. To the north is the chapter-house, of the twelfth century. The materials of which cathedral and palace were built proceeded from the ruins of the Gallo-Roman city.

The other cathedral is more interesting. It consists of a nave without aisles, and an apse constructed out of fragments of Roman buildings, and over a Roman gateway. The central tower is of the fourteenth century: octagonal, lighted by windows with triangular heads, and the whole crowned by a crenellated platform. It affects the Toulouse style, and is of brick. The magnificent cloister of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries has thirty-two round-headed arches resting on alternate single and double pillars with quaintly-carved and varied capitals. Above it is an open walk or cloister, with the pantiled roof supported on beams, dating from the fifteenth century. Probably the town would expire altogether were it not kept alive by the lunatics installed in the episcopal palace, which is lighted by electricity, and such light as is not wanted in the asylum is distributed over the town.

Like S. Bertrand, this Lyons changed its name and assumes that of one of the bishops, a native of Lerida, who is said to have saved the city from destruction by the Visigoths by his intercession. The town is built on the slopes of a hill above the Salat. It communicates with the halte by means of a steep-pitched bridge of the twelfth or thirteenth century, consisting of three unequal arches. Into one of the piers is built a votive inscription to the goddess Belisama, who was identified by the Romans with Minerva. Another inscription to this goddess has been found at Vaison. A tower formerly stood in the midst of the bridge. Above, on the right bank of the Salat, is a square tower that defended a fortified mill. This mill has been reconstructed. The old city is enclosed in the Roman ramparts forming an ellipse, flanked by a dozen towers, of which six on the north side are square, and the rest on the south are semicircular. Against the rampart within is the episcopal keep of the twelfth century, rectangular, and only to be entered by a wooden bridge that led to the first story from the palace. The lower rests on Roman foundations.

The valleys of the Couserans do not attract many visitors; they have not the boldness of those farther west. The Pic de Crabère reaches to 7200 feet, that of Mauberme to 8650, that of Roujos to 8340. There is a little lake, the Lac d’Arrainge, out of which flows the Isar, but it is insignificant; others are above Aulus. The principal business of the people in the upper valleys was the training of dancing bears, and sometimes when a father married his daughter he would hand over to his son-in-law as the dot a well-trained Bruin. But the taste for seeing these beasts led about and made to stand on their hind legs and plead for coppers has died out. There is no further demand for bears, and the industry is expiring, if not dead. Perhaps the last was seen by M. Ardouin-Dumazet: —

“No sooner had we entered the hamlet of Sérac, with its steep and muddy streets, than I asked after these strange educators. Alas! it was a lost tradition. In all the commune of Uston there was but a single little bear in training. Happily he inhabited Sérac, so I could see him.

“A little girl conducted me to the grange in which the small animal was shut up. It was still a baby, but its mark of slavery was upon it, the ring through its nostrils, by means of which the tamer can control it. The little bear, sitting up on its hind paws, waddled and hopped incessantly, as if afflicted with S. Vitus’s dance. Our visit seemed to please it; it invited caresses, and rolled about at our feet. The people said that it would be easy to tame the poor little bruin.”

Bears are no longer hunted on the French side of the Pyrenees, and those who seek for them must cross over the Spanish frontier, where a good many are still to be found in the forests. But, as already said, the demand for them has ceased, not only to be led about, but to show in barber’s yards as evidence that genuine bears’ grease is sold on the premises.

This industry having failed, the peasants have had to fall back on cattle-rearing, and dairy-farming. But this hardly suffices for their necessities, and many of the men turn into hawkers, and almost all migrate at the time of the vintage to the Bordelais and to Languedoc. Whether it be the bear association, or the migratory habits of the fathers of the household, has given a rudeness and lack of self-respect to the children cannot be said, but nowhere in the Pyrenees does mendicity prevail with such persistency and effrontery as in the valleys of the Couserans. The legend prevails in the plain that when Christ was walking over the earth with S. Peter He found these valleys unpopulated; so He took clay and moulded it into a man, and set the figure on its feet before Him, and breathed into it the breath of life; whereupon instantly the New Adam held out its hands and cried, “Un p’tit sou, siou plaît, m’ssius!” Begging has ever since been the predominant and all-prevailing instinct of the upper region of the Couserans.

The population here as elsewhere in the mountains is dwindling owing to emigration, mainly to South America, especially to the Argentine Republic. This is largely due to the peasant seeing the comfort and comparative wealth of his brother peasant in the plain, the proprietor of vineyard and olive-yard, and of mulberry trees that feed silkworms. He returns to his Alpine pastures sulky and dissatisfied with his condition. He is unwilling to change his native, deeply-rooted customs of farming, that are unscientific and wasteful, incapable maybe of realizing that he might do better if he adopted newer methods.

“Nevertheless,” says M. Ardouin-Dumazet, “he might lead a better existence if he could be brought to limit the quantity of his cattle to that number which he could rear suitably; if he would consent to make a practical use of the milk of his flocks. But everywhere in Ariège one finds every little property support three times as many beasts as the soil can well sustain; the result is lean cattle, giving poor meat and milk, giving consequently but an insufficient return of revenue.

“However, nowhere has the problem of the renovation of the pastures and the animals that overrun it been more studied and theoretically resolved. The Board of Forestry has shown by example how that the extent of meadowland and the quality of the grass might be largely extended. But everywhere it encounters invincible routine.

“Every hamlet, every farm has its stables, in which during the winter the beasts are crowded in conditions of hygiene absolutely deplorable. Air, light, litter are wanting; the fodder is measured out sparingly. If the winter be long there is dearth, for the number of beasts is out of all proportion to the resources of the forage.

“So soon as the weather becomes mild, at once the animals are despatched to the pastures or the waste lands; too numerous for the space, they ruin the turf and trample up the soil. The high pastures are squandered, and, above all, are not kept up. Juniper and rhododendrons invade them without the mountaineers concerning themselves about it. The agents of the Forestry have shown them how to get rid of these shrubs by eradication and burning, and how to make the ashes fertilize the meadows; they have shown them how by irrigation to enhance the quantity and quality of the herbage. This has been seen, understood, but not followed. Channels for irrigation have been made by the foresters and abandoned. The watering places for the cattle are choked. The paths rendering access to the mountain pastures are not kept up. The carelessness of the herdsmen surpasses all that could be imagined. It makes one despair.”

And the only remedy for their poverty that they can conceive is to turn their children out into the roads to beg for sous.

A watering-place at Aulus is coming into fashion. It is reached from S. Girons by a good road, and is distant from it thirty-three kilometres; Aulus lies high up in the valley of the Garbet.

On leaving S. Girons – about which I say nothing, as concerning it nothing can be said – the factory of La Moulasse is passed, where cigarette papers are manufactured in large quantities. The man who started making them was named Jean Bardon, and he put his initials on the little books of cigarette papers, with a lozenge between, thus J.◊.B. This was read as Job, and such papers acquired the name and became famous as Job’s cigarette papers. The name has been accepted on the spot, and the sources of the Moulasse that feeds the factory are now called “les sources de Job.”

Vic, now a little village of 150 inhabitants, was once a Roman station, and remained of sufficient consequence in the Middle Ages to give to S. Girons the name of Bourg-sous-Vic. It has a little church with three Romanesque apses, and a ceiling of the sixteenth century with paintings in squares. Beside the church is a Sully elm. Such elms were planted throughout the country as token of rejoicing in 1593, when Henry IV abjured Calvinism and joined the Catholic Church.

Oust also speaks of the Roman occupation; the name is derived from Augusta. At Oust the road leaves the valley of the Salat to ascend its tributary vale of the Garbet; to the south snowy crests appear and the cascade of Arse comes in view. The Nine Springs is passed, supposed to have an underground course from the marshy lake of Lhers, at a distance of four miles. Usually it gives but little water; but after a storm the source bursts forth suddenly with violence and pours down in cascade over the rocks.

Aulus lies in an extremely agreeable situation, surrounded by well-wooded mountains, above which soar snowy peaks. The place was well known to the Romans, who worked there the mines of silver-lead. As a watering-place it is furnished with a casino, a park, and theatre in which every evening during the season comedies and farces are performed; and in the park a band plays twice a day. Old Aulus lay on the farther side of the river, but the new site is better exposed to the sun. Aulus lies in a cul-de-sac; no road goes farther – at least none that can be utilized by a carriage. Some little mountain tarns are objects of a visit by those who spend a few days at Aulus, ascending to them on the backs of mules. The largest of these lie in the valleys scooped out of the mass of the Pic de Bassiès, 8165 feet.

But it must be allowed that in this portion of the chain the Pyrenees go in for breadth rather than height. In fact, in Ariège they become somewhat dishevelled, unwind, and straggle into separate threads. The loftiest ridge is that along which runs the frontier; the second is that which starts from the Pic de Camporeile, and is called the Montagne de Tabe, attaining in the Pic de Campzas only to 7670 feet. The third chain is the limestone Planturel that reaches its supreme elevation in the Montagne de Roquefixade, 3010 feet. This is a curious ridge running parallel with the Pyrenees, very regular, but cut through in several places, and ending at Foix. Those who desire to visit a portion of the Pyrenees less in resort than the mountains of the Haute Garonne and the Hautes Pyrénées will not fail to find in this section many delightful sites.

CHAPTER XVII

FOIX

Department of Ariège – Watershed – The counts of Foix – Raymond Roger – The Albigenses – Abuses in the Church – Manicheism – Council of Albi – Innocent III – Murder of Peter of Castelnau – Raymond VI of Toulouse – Crusade proclaimed – Simon de Montfort – Subtlety of the Pope – Massacre at Béziers – And at Cascassonne – Battle of Muret – Council of the Lateran – A second Crusade – Simon de Montfort killed – Count Roger Bernard – Béarn annexed – The town of Foix – The Castle – S. Volusinian – Nailmakers – Hermitage – Grotto de l’Herme – Mas d’Azil – The River Ariège – Tarascon – Richelieu – Ste. Quiterie – Iron mines – Sabarthès – Vicdessos – Iron industry – Cavern of Lombrive – Slaughter and smothering of heretics – Les Cabannes – Lordat – Talc – Ax-les-Thermes – Self-created nobles – Hôtel Dieu – Andorra – The Republic – The capital – Urgel – The Count of Spain – His death.

The county of Foix, now constituting the major portion of the department of Ariège, is and always was in Languedoc. The Couserans was, however, ever regarded as forming a part of Gascony. The ridge between the Volp and the Salat separates two hydrographic basins and two provinces. Geographically the department of Ariège belongs nevertheless to the basin of the Garonne; all its streams, with the exception of a few at the extreme east, flow into that great artery, and finally discharge into the Atlantic. Linguistically only the Couserans is Gascon; yet Foix from an early date was united to Béarn and Bigorre.

Of the earliest history of the counts of Foix we know very little. Roger Bernard, who died in 1188, was an excellent prince. His son, Raymond Roger, lived in difficult times, and was involved in the troubles arising out of the attempt of Pope Innocent III to stamp out the heresy of the Albigenses.

To understand the spread of this heresy and the Crusade which devastated these fair lands in the South, a few words must be said.

There can be little doubt that Christianity had not struck deep roots in Languedoc. The clergy had acquired but a smattering of Latin, and a meagre knowledge of doctrine in the monastic schools. They entered on their cures not much raised above their parishioners in culture, and in morals not infrequently sank below their level. Enforced clerical celibacy was evaded, but this evasion left a scar on the conscience. Bishoprics and abbacies were the provision of cadets of noble houses, whether religiously or morally qualified was of no account.

In what is now the department of Ariège, no bigger than an ordinarily sized English county, there were three episcopal sees – S. Lizier, Pamiers, and Mirepoix – and many abbeys.

A persecution of the Manichees in the Byzantine Empire sent a stream of refugees into Lombardy, Provence, and Languedoc, and these heretics speedily acquired a strong hold on the popular imagination. The Church had done so little to awaken the spiritual life in the souls of men, that instinctively, but blindly, they turned to welcome such as promised something better.

The Cathari, i.e. Puritans, as they called themselves, offered a very simple creed and easy conditions of salvation. The fundamental principle of this religion was a Dualism of Good and Evil principles, equally matched; the Evil Principle, the author of the visible Creation; the Good Principle, the author of the invisible, the Spiritual world. The opposition of matter and spirit formed the basis of their moral system. All that pertained to the body, all its functions, its needs, its passions, were of the Evil One; all the aspirations of the soul emanated from the Good Principle. To the people of Provence and Languedoc and Gascony the Cathari seemed to be inoffensive, self-denying enthusiasts. These had their high-priests – the “Perfect” or “Very Elect” – and it was the function of these men to “console” the believers; but the sacrament of Consolation was never administered till it was supposed that a believer was on his death-bed, for this reason, that after it had been administered the recipient might not touch food under pain of committing the unpardonable sin. If there should appear signs of convalescence after the performance of the rite, the person consoled was bled to death, or given pounded glass to swallow.

This new Manichæism offered to the people of the South just what they wanted. They had set before them a class of enthusiasts, the Very Elect, who led austere lives; but they themselves were not required to adopt a life of abstinence, even of self-restraint, for at death free justification was offered them by a simple formula. Moreover, the theological system of the Cathari was simplicity itself.

The whole of the South was infected. A council, held at Albi in 1176, condemned the heresy, and thenceforth the heretics were called Albigenses.

The princes, notably the counts of Toulouse and of Foix, did not interfere. The Albigenses were inoffensive people. If they held odd opinions, that was their own affair, with which their feudal lords were not concerned to meddle.

But the Court of Rome thought otherwise. The flow of contributions into its treasury from the rich South dwindled to nothing. What to the Pope was even more serious was that his authority was openly flouted.

Pope Innocent – is there not bitter satire in the name – in 1203 sent a legate into the southern provinces, Peter of Castelnau by name. This man visited Toulouse, but his efforts there to confute the heresy failed completely. Hopeless of success and mortified in his vanity Peter appealed to Pope Innocent to adopt drastic measures, and Innocent bade him require Raymond, Count of Toulouse, to suppress Albigensianism throughout his dominions by fire and sword. He was ordered, on pain of excommunication, to become the inquisitor and executioner of his subjects. At the same time he deposed Raymond, Bishop of Toulouse, an amiable, liberal-minded man, and put in his place the firebrand Foulques, who had been a troubadour, and notorious for his licentious verses.

Raymond VI of Toulouse promptly refused to do what was required of him, whereupon Innocent, in 1207, pronounced his excommunication.

Possibly the Count may have let slip some expression of disgust at the conduct of the papal legate, and a wish to be well rid of him, as did Henry II with reference to Becket. The result was the same; a knight killed Peter of Castelnau in 1208 as he was crossing the Rhone. This filled up the measure of Innocent’s wrath. He hurled the most dreadful imprecations against the Count, and loudly summoned all Christendom to a war of extermination against the Albigenses. “Anathema to the Count of Toulouse! Remission of all sins to such as arm against these pestilential Provincials. Go forward, soldiers of Christ! May the heretics perish out of the land, and let colonies of Christians be established in their room!”

Dukes and bishops, counts and viscounts, flew to the standard of the Cross, eager to glut themselves on the spoil of the South, so rich with merchandise, and at the same time to gain eternal salvation by violation and murder. Three armies invaded the South under the supreme command of a needy northern knight, Simon de Montfort.

The Pope was as subtle as he was remorseless. In order to weaken the opposition in the South he had entered into negociation with Raymond of Toulouse, and had deluded him into expectations of pardon, till the Crusaders were on him. They began with Béziers, although the viscount was known to be a Catholic. The city was taken and the inhabitants massacred. The Abbot of Citeaux, the legate, wrote regretfully to Innocent that he could only answer for having cut the throats of twenty thousand.

Then the papal host marched to Cascassonne, where they hung fifty prisoners, and burned four hundred Albigenses alive.

Raymond was now offered pardon if he would dismiss his soldiers, level his castles and the walls of his towns, give the Inquisition a free hand in his domains, and make every householder pay a tax of four deniers to the papal treasury. The Count indignantly refused, and the legate again sounded the attack. Raymond was defeated at Castelnaudary, and compelled to fly to Aragon. The conquerors seized on his territory, which the needy knights of the north parcelled out among themselves; and they diverted themselves in hunting out the heretics and burning them.

Urged on by his kinsman, the Count of Toulouse, Peter II, King of Aragon, passed the Pyrenees with an army, and was at once joined by the Count of Foix and many other nobles. A battle was fought at Muret in 1213, in which the King was killed, the army routed, and the nobles of Languedoc dispersed. This sealed the fate of the country. The Council of the Lateran, held two years later, ratified the deposition of Raymond, who, along with the counts of Foix and Cominges, had appeared before the Council, with bitter complaints in their mouths of the way in which their subjects had been slaughtered wholesale and the country laid waste. At once up sprang Foulques, Bishop of Toulouse. “Foix,” said he, “swarms with heretics. The sister of the Count intercepted and cut to pieces six thousand Germans, Crusaders, on their way to join the legate.”

“Soldiers of the Cross!” retorted the Count of Foix fearlessly. “They were mere robbers, committing every possible outrage in the country.”

Then the Baron de Vilamour rose, and in a cold voice gave a detailed account of the horrors, the rapes, the murders, the ravages committed by the Soldiers of the Cross, those sent forth by the Holy See with assurance of gaining Heaven thereby. As he spoke Innocent’s head sank on his breast, and he heaved a sigh; some sense of shame stole into his heart. He went to meet his account in 1216, and was succeeded by Honorius III.