CHAPTER IV. THE ROAD TO BA GNÈRES-DE-LUCHON.

I.

Every man who has the use of his eyes and ears ought, in travelling, to climb up to the imperial. The highest places are the most beautiful; ask those who occupy them. You break your neck if you fall from them; consult the same people about this. But you enjoy yourself while you are there.

In the first place, you see the landscape, which produces descriptions that you offer to the public. In the coupé, your only spectacle is the harness of the horses; in the interior, you see through a tiny window the trees trooping by like soldiers carrying arms; in the rotunda, you are in a cloud {469}of dust that dims the landscape and strangles the traveller.

In the second place, at the top you will have comedy. In the lower places, the people preserve decorum and are silent. The peasants here perched aloft, who are your companions, the postilion and the conductor, make open-hearted confidences: they talk of their wives, their children, their property, trade, neighbors, and above all of themselves; so that at the end of an hour you imagine their housekeeping and their life as clearly as if you were at home with them. It is a novel of manners that you skim through on the road. Not one of them gives ideas so vivid and so truthful. You get to know the people only by living with them, and the people from three-quarters of the nation. These bits of conversation teach you the number of their ideas and the hue of their passions; now, on these ideas and passions depend all the great events. Besides their rude manners, their loud bursts of laughter, their frank respect for bodily strength, their acknowledged inclination for the pleasure of eating and drinking, offer a contrast to the humbug of our politeness and our affectation of refinement. The conductor told the postilion how the evening before they had eaten the half of a sheep among three of them. It was good, fat mutton; they served up no better at the Hotel of the Great Sun: {470}there were sirloins, cutlets, a neat leg of mutton. They had emptied six bottles. The other made him tell it over, and seemed to eat in imagination, by the reaction, by recoil, as it were.

After the banquet, he had made the horses gallop; he had passed by Ribettes. Ribettes had swallowed dust for a whole hour; Ribettes wanted to get ahead again, but wasn’t able. Ribettes grew very angry. They had dared Ribettes. The story of Ribettes and the mutton was told eight times in an hour, and seemed the last time as delightful and as new as the first. They laughed like the blest.

In the third place, that is the only spot where you can breathe. The other divisions are sweating-rooms whose partitions and black cushions hold and concentrate the heat. Now, there is no man, no matter how he may love colors and lines, who can enjoy a landscape shut up in a box without air. When the creature is cramped, the soul is cramped. {471}Admiration presupposes comfort, and when you are broiled by the sun you curse the sun.

II.

The coach starts very early in the morning and climbs a long ascent under the gray brightness of the dawn. The peasants come in troops; the women have five or six bottles of milk on the head, in a basket. Oxen, with lowered brows, drag carts as primitive and Gallic as at-Pau. The children, in brown _berets_, run in the dust, alongside their mothers. The village is coming to nourish the city.

Escaladieu shows at the wayside the remains of an ancient abbey. The chapel is still standing and preserves fragments of gothic sculpture. A bridge is at the side, shaded by tall trees. The pretty river Arros runs, with _moiré_ reflexes and guipures of silver, over a bed of dark pebbles. No one could choose a situation better than the monks: they were the artists of the time.

Mauvoisin, an ancient stronghold of robber-knights, lifts its ruined tower above the valley. Froissart relates how they besieged these honest folk; of a truth, in those times, they were as good as their neighbors, and the Duke of Anjou, their enemy, had done more harm than they. {472}“A Gascon squire, an able man-at-arms, named Raymonet de l’Epèe, was at that time Governor of Malvoisin. There were daily skirmishes at the barriers, where many gallant feats were done by those who wished to advance themselves....

“The castle of Malvoisin held out about six weeks, there were daily skirmishes between the two armies at the barriers, and the place would have made a longer resistance, for the castle was so strong it could have held a long siege; but the well that supplied the castle with water being without the walls, they cut off the communication: the weather was very hot, and the cisterns within quite dry, for it had not rained one drop for six weeks, and the besiegers were at their ease, on the banks of this clear and fine river, which they made use of for themselves and horses.

“The garrison of Malvoisin were alarmed at their situation, for they could not hold out longer. They had a sufficiency of wine, but not one drop of sweet water. They determined to open a treaty; and Raymonet de l’Epêe requested a passport to wait on the duke, which, having easily obtained, he said: ‘My lord, if you will act courteously to me and my companions, I will surrender the castle of Malvoisin.’ ‘What courtesy is it you ask?’ replied the Duke of Anjou:{473}

{474}

{475}“‘Get about your business each of you to his own country, without entering any fort that holds out against us; for if you do so, and I get hold of you, I will deliver you up to Jocelin, who will shave you without a razor.’ ‘My lord,’ answered Raymonet, ‘if we thus depart we must carry away what belongs to us, and what we have gained by arms and with great risk.’ The duke paused awhile, and then said, ‘I consent that you take with you whatever you can carry before you in trunks and on sumpter horses, but not otherwise; and if you have any prisoners, they must be given up to us.’ ‘I agree,’ said Raymonet. Such was the treaty, as you hear me relate it; and all who were in the castle departed, after surrendering it to the Duke of Anjou, and carrying all they could with them. They returned to their own country, or elsewhere, in search of adventures.”

These good folk who wished to keep the fruits of their labor, had spent their time “in fleecing the merchants” of Catalonia, as well as of France, “and in making war on and harrying them of Bagnères and Bigorre.” Bagnères was then “a good, big, closed city.” People fortified everywhere, because there was fighting everywhere. They went out only with a safe-conduct and an escort: instead of gendarmes they met plunderers; instead of umbrellas they carried off lances. A secure {476}house was a fine house; when a man had immured himself in a thick tower built like a well, he breathed freely, he felt at his ease. Those were the good old times, as every one knows.

III.

Encausse is very near here, at the turn of the road. Chapelle and Bachaumont came there to restore their stomachs, which needed and deserved it well, for they used them more than some do. They wrote their travels, and their style flows as easily as their life.

They go by short stages, drink, chat, feast among the friends they have everywhere, court the ladies, make game very pleasantly of the provincial folk. They drink the health of the {477}absent, enjoy the muscatel as much as possible, and trifle in prose and verse. They are the epicureans of their time, easy poets who are troubled about nothing, not even about glory; graze all that they touch, and write only for their own amusement.

“Encausse,” say they, “is far from all commerce, and a man can have no other diversion in it than that of watching the return of his health. A small stream that, a score of paces away from the village, winds among willows and the greenest fields imaginable, was our only consolation. We used to go every morning to take our water in this pretty spot, and after dinner to walk there. One day when we were on the brink, seated on the grass, there came suddenly from the midst of the reeds that were nearest a man who had apparently been listening to us; it was an old man, all white, pale and lean, whose beard and locks hung below his girdle, such (an one) as Melchisedec is painted; or rather the figure is that of a certain old Greek bishop, who, with many a salaam, tells everybody’s fortune; for he wore a top-piece like a cauldron-lid, but of exceeding size, which answered him for a hat. And this hat, whose broad brim went drooping upon his shoulders, was made of branches of willow, and covered nearly all his body. His coat of greenish hue was woven of rushes, the whole {478}covered with great bits of a thick and bluish crystal.

“At sight of this apparition, fear caused us to make the sign of the cross twice over, and go three paces backward. But curiosity prevailed over fear, and we resolved, although with some little palpitation of heart, to await the extraordinary old man, whose approach was thoroughly courteous, and who spoke to us very civilly as follows:

“Gentlemen, I am not surprised that with my unexpected appearance you should be a little startled in mind, but when you shall have learned in what rank the fates have set my birth to you unknown, and the motive of my coming, you will calm your minds.

{479}“I am the god of this stream, who, with an ever inexhaustible urn, tilted at the foot of that hill, take the task in this meadow of pouring unceasingly the water, which makes it so green and flowery. For eight days now, morning and evening, you come regularly to see me without thinking to pay me a visit. It is not that I do not deserve that you should pay me this respect; for, in short, I have this advantage, that a channel so pure and clear is the place of my appanage. In Gascony such a portion is very neat for a cadet.”

{480}The two travellers were talking of the tides of the Garonne, and of the reasons for them given by Gassendi and Descartes. This very obliging god relates to them how Neptune thereby punishes an ancient rebellion of the rivers. “Then the honest river-god takes himself off, and when he has gone a score of paces the good soul is melted entirely into water.”

Nowadays this mythology seems unmeaning, and the thought flat. Look at the environs, the surroundings save it. Carelessness, intoxication, are on one side. It is born between two glasses of good wine thoroughly relished, in the midst of an unpremeditated letter. Are people so very nice at table? It is a refrain they are humming; flat or not, is of no consequence. The main thing is good humor and the inclination to laugh. I picture to myself the honest fellows, well-dressed, portly, their eyes still shining from the long dinner of yesterday, with rubies on their cheeks, perfectly ready to sit down to dine at the first inn and to bedevil the maid. La Fontaine did so, especially when he travelled. They made stops, forgot themselves, the broad jokes flew.{481}

{482}

{483} They didn’t cross France as nowadays, after the fashion of a cannon-ball or an attorney; they allowed five days for going to Poitiers, and in the evening, on going to bed, they fed the body. It was the last age of the good corporeal life, that heavy _bourgoisie_ which had its flower and its portrait in Flemish art. It was already disappearing; aristocratic propriety and lordly salutes were taking possession of literature; Boileau gave us serious verse, thoroughly useful and solid, like pairs of tongs. Nowadays when the middle-class man is a philosopher, ambitious, a man of business, it is far worse. Let us not speak ill of those who are happy; happiness is a sort of poetry; it is in vain that we boast ourselves, that poetry we have not.

IV.

The road is bordered with vines, each of which carries up its tree, elm or ash, the crown of a fresh verdure, and lets its leaves and tendrils fall again in plumes. The valley is a garden long and narrow, between two chains of mountains. On the lower slopes are beautiful meadows where the living waters run in orderly fashion in trenches, nimble, prattling irrigators; the villages are seated {484}alone the little river; vine-stocks climb alone the dusty wall. The mallows, straight as tapers, lift above the hedges their round flowers, brilliant as roses of rubies. Orchards of apples pass continually on both sides of the coach; cascades fall in every hollow of the chain, surrounded with houses that seek a shelter. The heat and the dust are so terrible that they are obliged every time we pass a spring to sponge the nostrils of the horses. But at the end of the valley a mass of dark, rugged mountains lifts itself, with tops that are white with snow, feeding the river and closing the horizon. Finally, we pass beneath an alley of fine plane-trees, between two rows of villas, gardens, hotels, and shops. It is Luchon, a little city as Parisian as Bigorre. {485}