A Book of the Pyrenees

Sarrance takes its name from the situation —sarrada in Béarnais is “narrow” and ance is a “passage.” A bridge wreathed with ivy spans the stream, near a chapel. A terrace shaded with plane trees has its walls ablaze with snap-dragon, sprouting out of every crevice. From the chapel a stair leads down to the riverside, where is a niche containing a statue of the Virgin and Child, indicating the spot where, according to tradition, the image of N. D. de Sarrance was found.

The old monastery stands on an elevation at the southern extremity of the village. There is a little grass-grown square with a fountain in it. On one side of the square are untenanted houses, formerly guest-rooms of the convent; on the other is the monastery with its church. This latter is of no interest, as the old church, considered to be the finest in Béarn, was completely destroyed by the Calvinists. The tower is absolutely hideous. In a side chapel is a rude black Madonna, an object of superstitious devotion.

It was here that Marguerite, sister of Francis I and Queen of Navarre, composed her Heptameron. This is what she says in the introduction: —

“On the first day of September, when the baths of the Pyrenees begin to have their virtue, several persons – some of France, some of Spain, and others from elsewhere – were united at Cauterets, the marvellous waters of which have cured sick who were given up by the doctors. When the party was about to separate it was found that the floods were out so that there was no reaching Tarbes. So, having halted awhile at the Abbey of Saint Savin, the whole company met again at the monastery of Notre Dame de Sarrance, in Béarn. In order to reach Pau it was necessary that the bridge over the Gave should be repaired, and this occupied ten days. In order to relieve the tedium of our stay in the convent of monks, the company arranged a time-table for proceedings. In the morning we met in the rooms of the Lady Oysille, the eldest present. An hour was spent in reading the sacred Scriptures. Then we heard Mass. At ten o’clock came dinner; after that every one retired to his or her chamber about their own affairs. At noon no one failed to go to the beautiful meadow, by the side of the Gave, where the trees are so covered with foliage that the sun cannot pierce through nor take the freshness out of the air. There, seated at our ease, every one relates tales, either true or invented to amuse, as did Boccaccio. At four o’clock the merry tales are interrupted in order that we may pray; and no one fails devoutly to attend vespers.”

There are certain points to be noted in this. In the first place, neither here nor anywhere else, does the Queen let fall a word by which one can see that she appreciated the beauty of the mountain scenery through which she travelled. Yet the localities for some of her tales are Cauterets, Sarrance, Odos, and Pau.

In the next place, the stories that these ladies told, and which the Queen of Navarre collected, are so indecent, and contain such foul expressions, that we are amazed to think that any woman, however corrupt may have been the times, should not blush to hear, and be ashamed to write them down.

And lastly, what a jumble of occupations! Bible-reading in the morning, obscene stories in the evening, and then – prayers.

The meadow is there still, and one may sit in it now as then; but now it is with thoughts of thankfulness on the change that has been accomplished in manners and in sense of decency. A little above Sarrance, on the east, opens the entrance to a cirque. The southern wall, which is most precipitous, supports a plateau strangely regular in form, like a cone with its head sliced off, 4700 feet high. On the right bank of the Gave opposite Bedous are four little heights, two pointed, one rounded, the other flattened at top. They are eruptive dykes of ophite, a rock somewhat abundant in this valley.

Bedous is now the most considerable place in the valley, much more busy and fuller of inhabitants than the cantonal capital Accous.

At Accous is an obelisk erected to the memory of the Béarnais poet, Despourrins (1690–1759), who was a native of the place.

One day an English general, crossing from Spain and descending the Val d’Aspe, encountered a little shepherd boy with quick eye and intelligent face, whom he questioned about objects of interest in the neighbourhood. Pleased with the lad, he invited him to enter his service as valet, and the youth, who had a rough time at home, without more ado clambered on to the box to travel to distant and unknown regions. This little shepherd was called Loustaunau, and he followed the officer to India. When his master died he sought to make his fortune by starting a house of commerce in the territory of the Mogul. Then war broke out between the Emperor of Delhi and the Nabob of Lahore.

Chancing to witness a battle between them from an eminence, Loustaunau remarked to a Banian that the disposition of the Mogul army was faulty. “If,” said he, “I had the command of 1200 horsemen, and had a couple of cannon, I would soon determine the battle.” What he had said was reported to the Great Mogul, who at once gave him what he desired. The Béarnais jumped on the back of a horse, took the command of a troop, and ranged it behind a bit of rising ground, placed his guns where he could rake the enemy, and charged the centre of the enemy, and broke it, whilst his cannon pounded the troops of the Nabob. The victory was complete.

Loustaunau was richly rewarded, and given a princess to wife, by whom he had several children. In a battle fought against the Maharattas he lost his left hand, and had it replaced by one of silver.

A quarter of a century had elapsed since he left the Pyrenees; he had amassed a fortune, and a longing came over him to revisit his native valley. Accordingly he returned to France and invested his money in factories, and in châteaux that he purchased within Béarn and in Bigorre.

But disaster came. His factories were burnt by the Spaniards, and his fortune melted away. He meditated a return to India, and started for the East. But unhappily he made the acquaintance of Lady Hester Stanhope, who gained complete possession of his mind. Forgetting the needs of his family, and the object of his journey, he stayed with her at the foot of Lebanon, where he led the life of a prophet and illuminé. Lamartine met him there, and there he died. He had left his children at Tarbes. Three of his daughters were alive in 1860, living in poverty, maintaining themselves by needlework, and looking back sadly on their early days as a dream out of the Arabian Nights.

The village of Osse, planted between strangely shaped hills of ophite, facing the south, is the last refuge of Protestantism in the valley. The population is 560, the majority of whom are Calvinists, and they maintain a pastor and have a “Temple.”

Urdos, the Forum Ligneum of the Ancients, is the last town in France. The fortress commanding the pass is hewn in the natural rock, in a buttress of the mountains rising in stages from the road to the height of 500 feet. Externally the mountain gives little token of what it is, honeycombed with galleries, batteries, stairs. A façade of masonry battlemented and flanked by turrets at the foot of the rock, and a few loopholes and embrasures for cannon, pierced in the face of the cliff, are all that show that this is a French Gibraltar, capable of containing a garrison of 3000 men.

Mauleon, the ancient capital of the little viscounty of Soule, that passed to Béarn, is prettily situated on the banks of the Saison, at the foot of a hill that is crowned by a castle reached by a bridge over the moat or chasm artificially cut in the rock.

The huge roofs of the Hôtel d’Andurrain form the hat to a Renaissance building.

Mauleon, after remaining stagnant for centuries, has begun to stir, and has become the centre of manufacture of the espadrillos, or shoe with canvas top and twisted rope sole, so much in use in the Pyrenees and in Spain.

A dozen years ago the whole population of Mauleon was a thousand, and now two thousand men and five hundred women are engaged in the factories; for in Senegal the natives have all at once taken a fancy to the espadrillos, and the fashion is spreading from Senegal; there is no saying where it may end in wide Africa.

The workmen and women employed are not, however, Basques or Béarnais, but are Spaniards. Here is trade, and that a growing trade, in their midst, and the native population shrug their shoulders, leave it to foreigners to carry on, and depart for South America in shoals.

CHAPTER VIII

THE VAL D’OSSAU

The gap of the Val d’Ossau – Gan – Original course of the Gave – Buzy – Gorges de Germe – Arudy – Destruction of forests – Boxwood – Cromlechs – Bielle – Independence of the Republic of Ossau – Costume – Dances – Laruns – Eaux Chaudes – Beggary – Gabas – Eaux Bonnes – Death of the Rev. Merton Smith.

Looking south from the terrace at Pau one sees a noble portal in the mountain chain apparently leading to the roots of the Pic du Midi d’Ossau. But it is a mistake to suppose that the drainage of those snowy crests can descend at once into the Gave at one’s feet. Between the Val d’Ossau and that of the Gave de Pau a region of hills intervenes. Moreover, the valley that gapes does not lead to the foot of that noble pyramid. It leads to Laruns only, and there the broad trough ends, and above that the Gave descends through a cleft painfully cut through intervening strata.

On the railway from Pau to Laruns the first station is at Gan. In this village, as I remember it fifty years ago, there were but two houses with glass windows, the parsonage and a Renaissance dwelling that belonged to Corisande d’Andouins, one of the many mistresses of Henri Quatre. When cold weather arrived, then the peasants closed their shutters, perforated with a few holes – a heart, a cross, an S – and through this opening derived their light. The train clambers up the heights past Buzy, and then all at once bursts on the sight the broad Val d’Ossau – rich, fertile, smiling with maize and vines, and villages, and beyond the Pic du Midi. The Gave d’Ossau descending from the snowy range on the frontier of Spain ran due north, as if to reach Pau in one direct channel, but was arrested by the hills, and turned along the depression at Buzy and turned westward where now goes the branch line to Oloron. But dissatisfied with this bed, it tore at the rocks near Arudy, and sawed for itself the Gorges de Germe, a savage ravine, very tortuous, cut through hills covered with woods. The abandoned bed was taken possession of by man. It lies at a lower level than the actual channel, and the river must have been deflected by immense piles of rubbish brought down from the mountains. At the west end of the church at Buzy may be seen a huge boulder rounded by rolling, used as the pedestal to the village cross. The ancient channel furnishes turf for fuel, and in it are grown beds of rank bulrushes.

Beyond Buzy, on the way to Arudy, is a dolmen already referred to, but not on its original site. When the road was altered it was removed and re-erected.

The train halts again at Arudy, only interesting for the view, and for the tomb of a bishop, and a fifteenth-century church with a reredos.

The Val d’Ossau in its lower parts is a wreck. The mountain spurs on each side were once clothed with magnificent forests of pine.

“The Pyrenees,” says Michelet, “exhibit to us the disappearance of the Old World. Antiquity is no more, the Middle Age is at the point of death. The mountains themselves, strange as it may seem, have their very existence attacked. The fleshless peaks reveal the fact that they are in their senile decay. It is not that they have failed to withstand the blows of the storm, it is man who has assisted in their ruin from below. That deep girdle of forests which veiled the nakedness of the ancient mother, has been plucked away by man. The vegetable soil, which the herbage retained on the slopes, is now carried below by the waters. The rock stands up bare; chapped, exfoliated by the glare of the sun, by the tooth of frost, undermined by the melting snow carried down by avalanches. In the place of succulent pastures nothing remains but a dry and ruined soil. The agriculturist who has driven away the hunter, gains nothing thereby. The water which formerly trickled down gently into the valley athwart pastures and forests, now roars down in devastating torrents, and covers the fields with the ruins it has made. A vast number of hamlets in the high valleys have been abandoned, through lack of fuel, and the inhabitants take refuge in the lowlands, flying from the results of their own improvidence.

“In 1673 the mischief done caused alarm. Orders were issued by Government that every inhabitant should annually plant at once one tree in the domain, and two in the communal lands. In 1669 and 1756 and still later new regulations made give evidence to the panic caused by the progress of the evil. But, at the Revolution, every barrier gave way, the population being poor, set to work to enrich itself by completing the destruction of the forests. They climbed, axe and firebrand in hand, to the nests of the eagles, they swung over abysses, hacking and destroying. Trees were sacrificed to the most trivial needs. Two pines were cut down to make one pair of sabots. At the same time the sheep and goats, multiplying, fell on the forests, gnawed the trunks, devoured the young trees, destroyed the shrubs, killed the future. The goat above all, that most destructive of all creatures, and the most daring of all, introduced a reign of terror into the mountains. That was not one of the least of the labours of Bonaparte, when he set to work to control the ravages of this beast. In 1813 the number of goats had been reduced to a tenth of the number that they had been in the year X. But he was not powerful enough to put a finish to the war against Nature.”

The pines have been succeeded by boxwood that brings in a certain revenue. It is not cut till the stem has attained a girth of three inches; but it would be well if it were allowed to reach a girth of four or five, as it serves as a valuable cover for young pines where attempts are made to replant. The box never grows very high, but some bushes arrive at the height of fifteen feet, and a girth of trunk of fifteen inches. The wood is made use of for the turning the beads of the rosaries, made at Betharam, Saumur, and Lalouvesc in the Boutierès. It cannot be utilized till the stem has arrived at the diameter of a two-franc piece. In 1892 the boxwood from Laruns sold for 3185 francs, but in 1895 for not more than a thousand francs.

At Louvie Juxon and above Bielle and Bilhères, near the entrance of Benon, are what the French call cromlechs, circles of stones, supposed to be prehistoric monuments. These are, however, very small, the stones insignificant, and the shepherds of the district state that precisely similar stones are planted by themselves about temporary huts of branches and turf that they erect when obliged to spend nights as well as days on the mountain.

Bielle was the ancient capital of Ossau. This valley was a republic under the suzerainty of the viscounts of Béarn. It governed itself, and had its own courts of justice, and absolutely refused to suffer the soldiers of the viscount to enter their little republic. He himself was not recognized till he had sworn to respect its rights and privileges as contained in the ancient fors.

At the present day a candidate for election to the Assembly addresses the electors always as “Messieurs d’Ossau.” It was by this title that the princes of Béarn spoke to them. In Ossau there were no nobles; there was no appeal from the judgment of their court to Viscount of Béarn or to the King of France.

The constitution of former days still exists in regard to communal property. This is divided into two categories: the particular mountains belonging to each separate commune, and the general mountains in the canton of Laruns pertain to a syndicate formed of representatives of seventeen parishes. In addition the Ossalois own the lande of Pont-long, of which I have already spoken. In recognition of their having ceded to Gaston Phœbus, or before him to the first viscount who built a castle at Pau, sufficient ground for his castle and park, they obtained the privilege to sit at table with their viscounts.

The valley bottom is fertile, but tillage is pursued only there. Cattle and sheep spend the summer on the high pastures, and the sheep are driven in winter to the Pont-long.

Costume is fast disappearing. On Sunday at Bielle and Laruns may be seen the old women still wearing their scarlet capulets lined with silk and edged with black velvet; the black corset is faced on the breast with crimson silk. A woollen skirt descends in symmetrical folds to a little way below the calf; the leg is clothed in white stockings, unfooted, that widen over the foot. The male costume is quite gone. The only part retained is the beret. It is a pity, for the costume was admirably adapted to the men’s life in the mountains. The thick, red, brown, and white jackets, waistcoats, and breeches were of home make and handloom weaving, from the wool of their own sheep, and lasted for years without becoming threadbare.

Even the musical instruments general when there was a dance have gone, the tambouri of six strings, struck by a fiddlestick, whilst a piper played a flageolet of four holes, from which he could draw six or seven notes. The great fête at Laruns is on 15 August, and if the charm of this is gone with the abandonment of the pretty costumes, it is still an animated and gay scene.

At Laruns the broad trough of the Val d’Ossau comes abruptly to an end. Here from the left comes down the Valentin of Eaux Bonnes in a series of cascades, the drainage of the snows of the noble mountains at the head of the Val d’Azun, where they spill westward. But the Gave d’Ossau, that has its source under the Pic du Midi, has sawn for itself a way through rocks, and gushes forth through a notable chasm directly above Laruns. This, the ravine in which lies the thermal establishment of Eaux Chaudes, is by far the most interesting, it gives access to the elevated village of Gabas, and to the Col d’Aneou, by which one can pass into Spain. All the upper part of the course of the Gave is of surpassing beauty, and the Alpine pastures yield rich spoil to the botanist, owing to the variety of geological formation, limestone, schist, granite, and porphyry.

The road to Eaux Chaudes, made in 1847, has been in part superseded by one made later, but for pedestrians it is the most pleasant, as it is the shortest. It enters the Gorge du Hourat, and runs the whole way between precipitous walls of rock, beside the torrent which roars down with tremendous velocity. At one point the road has had to be built up against the side of the precipice as a bridge, to allow a torrent, which falls from a height of several hundred feet, to pass under it, and so join the Gave, the river that has formed the cleft of the valley. At Eaux Chaudes there is little space; in winter hardly any sun, in summer there is a sense of oppression from the contraction of the mountains and the exclusion of distant view. But many delightful excursions may be made from it. Eaux Chaudes owes its origin to Henri Quatre, who required his chancellor, the Bishop of Oloron, to build there an establishment for one of Henri’s many mistresses, la Fousseuse, that she might there drink the waters.

The sturdy independence and self-respect of the peasantry of Ossau have been broken down sadly by the influx of visitors. Mr. Blackburn observes truly enough: —

“It is said that English visitors have completely demoralized the Valley of Chamounix, and that the curés are in despair; but whatever sins we have committed in Switzerland, the French people have done worse, the difference between the two nations being this, that the latter enjoy indiscriminate almsgiving, and we do not. The result in this valley is demoralizing to an extent that would scarcely be credited excepting by eye-witnesses. As we drive along we see the peasantry leaving their work in the fields at the sound of approaching wheels, and crouching at the roadside in attitudes of pain and misery; girls and boys leave their play to follow the carriages, and whine for quelquechose; crops are half-gathered, and work of all kinds is neglected during the season of the sous; the cry is everywhere, ‘Give, give!’

“A girl of sixteen, well dressed and evidently well-to-do, comes up with a bouquet of wild flowers; she asks ten sous for it (about the wages of a day’s work), but will take no less; and on receiving the money will immediately ask for the bouquet back again, to sell to some one else.

“And this is not all, for those of the inhabitants who have not brought up their children to the liberal profession of begging, have invented another ingenious and profitable mode of life, that of turning the cascades in the neighbourhood into penny peepshows, shutting them off so that they can only be approached by a wicket gate kept by one of themselves.”7

One of the pleasantest short walks is to the Grotte des Eaux Chaudes, passing before a little cave from which issues a stream that proceeds at once to dash headlong down the crags into the Gave. Beyond this is the large cave opening in the face of a cliff. This grotto is traversed by a stream which may be crossed by a bridge of wood to where, in the depth of the cave, it leaps down out of a fissure in the wall in a cascade. It is probably fed by the drainage of the Plateau d’Anouillas, where the water descending from the Pic de Gers disappears. When the stream has left the cavern it again dives underground, and flows below the rocks in stages that descend to the bottom of the valley, and reappears only just before it enters the Gave. But the finest excursion from Eaux Chaudes is to Bious-Oumettes, a plateau whence a superb view is obtained of the Pic du Midi d’Ossau. This peak is 9800 feet high, of porphyry and granite, cleft by a profound vertical fissure, and is perhaps the finest, certainly the quaintest, of the Pyrenean mountains.

Gabas, the last village on the French side of the chain, is a halting-place for travellers and for muleteers conveying goods from Spain. It is a cantonment of custom-house officers; and here may be seen picturesque groups of shepherds in their fleecy jackets, Spaniards in their richly-coloured blankets, and the uniformed douaniers. The path leading to the plateau is lined with fir trees, but on all sides may be seen the ravages of fire, the axe, and winter storm, in charred stumps, twisted or hewn-down trunks, thrown down to be floated by the Gave through its stages to the lower valley.

The distance from Laruns to Eaux Bonnes is much the same as it is to Eaux Chaudes. On reaching the former watering-place – “Je comptais trouver ici la campagne,” wrote M. Taine. “Je rencontre une rue de Paris et les promenades du Bois de Boulogne!” It is a place of big hotels, baths, pensions, shops where toys, trinkets, and trumpery are displayed for sale, and, of course, a casino.

“In whichever direction we turn,” says Mr. Blackburn, “there are houses built into and often forming part of the mountain, resting on ledges of rock, like to eyries; but so cleverly contrived is the arrangement of the place, so admirably has space been economized, that there is a feeling of freedom about it, quite inconsistent with living in a bird’s nest.

“Thus, with the mountains several thousand feet above our heads, and the Val d’Ossau stretching away for many miles at our feet, with rocks overhanging and tree-tops waving, through which we can see the blue sky – with scarcely a foot of level ground anywhere, save the Promenade Horizontale, with cascades and waterfalls at our windows, we find ourselves as comfortably and luxuriously housed as in any modern city.”

Speaking of the church Taine says: “Cette église est une boïte ronde, en pierre et plâtre, faite pour cinquante personnes, ou l’on en met deux cents.” This box of stone and plaster has disappeared to make room for one of more suitable dimensions in what is caricature of Romanesque.

There is a good carriage road from Eaux Bonnes over a fine pass into the Val d’Aruns and to Argelez. The chief excursion is to the Pic de Gers, 8570 feet high.

The Eaux Bonnes springs have been known for centuries. The Béarnais soldiers wounded in the battle of Pavia in 1525, were sent here to be healed; and for some time after that the springs went by the name of les Eaux d’arquebusades. But they owe their modern renown to the works of Théophile Bordeu. There are seven sources of sulphurated waters, which are good for throat disorders, wounds, sores, and morbid maladies.