A Midsummer Drive Through the Pyrenees Part 1

A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees.

by Edwin Asa Dix.

"How comes it to pa.s.s," wondered a traveler, over twenty years ago, "that, when the American people think it worth while to pay a visit to Europe almost exclusively to see Switzerland and Italy; when in 1860 twenty-one thousand Americans visited Rome and only seven thousand English; so few should think it worth while to visit the Pyrenees? It is certainly the only civilized country we have visited without finding Americans there before us. Is it accident or caprice, or part of a system of leaving it to the last,--which 'last' never comes? The feast is provided,--where are the guests? The French Pyrenees form one of the loveliest gardens in Europe and a perfect place for a summer holiday.

'La beaute ici est sereine et le plaisir est pur.'"

The query is still unanswered to-day. The stream of summer journeyings to Europe has swollen to a river; it has overflowed to the Arctic Ocean, to the Baltic, to the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. The Pyrenees--a garden not only, but a land of sterner scenery as well,--almost alone remain by our nation of travelers unvisited and unknown.

CHAPTER I.

IN PERSPECTIVE.

"In fortune's empire blindly thus we go; We wander after pathless destiny, Whose dark resorts since prudence cannot know, In vain it would provide for what shall be."

A trip to the Pyrenees is not in the Grand Tour. It is not even in any southerly extension of the Grand Tour. A proposition to exploit them meets a dubious reception. Pictures arise of desolate gorges; of lonely roads and dangerous trails; of dismal roadside inns, where, when you halt for the night, a "repulsive-looking landlord receives the unhappy man, exchanges a look of ferocious intelligence with the driver,"--and the usual melodramatic midnight carnage probably ensues. The Pyrenees seem to echo the motto of their old counts, "_Touches-y, si tu l'oses_!"

the name seems to stand vaguely for untested discomforts, for clouds and chasms, and Spanish banditti in blood-red _capas_; to be, in a word, a symbol of an undiscovered country which would but doubtfully reward a resolve to discover.

Yet there is a fascination in the project, as we discuss a summer tour.

There, we know, are mountains whose sides are nearly Alpine, whose shoulders are of snow and glacier, whose heads rise to ten and eleven thousand feet above the sea. There, we know, must be savage scenery,--ravines, cliffs, ice-rivers, as in the Alps; valleys and streams and fair pastures as well, and a richer southern sunlight over the uplands; besides a people less warped by tourists, intensely tenacious of the past, and still tingling with their old local love of country,--a people with whom, "to be a Bearnais is greater than to be a Frenchman."

To visit the Pyrenees, too, will be almost to live again in the Middle Ages. The Roman, the Moor, the Paladin, Froissart, Henry of Navarre, have marked the region both in romance and in soberer fact. Its valleys have individual histories; its aged towns and castles, stirring biographies. The provinces on its northern flanks, once a centre, a nucleus, of old French chivalry, are saturated with mediaeval adventure.

One visits the Alps to be in the tide of travel, to find health in the air, to feel the religion of n.o.ble mountains. In the Pyrenees is all this, and more,--the present and the past as well. As we call down the shades of old chroniclers from the dust of upper library tiers, we grow more and more in desire of a closer acquaintance. Caesar, Charlemagne, Roland, the Black Prince, Gaston Phoebus, Montgomery and knightly King Henry stand in ghostly armor and beckon us on.

II.

Facts of detail prove farther to seek. We inquire almost in vain for travelers' notes on the Pyrenees. Those who had written on Spanish travel spoke of the range admiringly. But these authors, we find, invariably, only pa.s.sed by the eastern extremity, or the western, of the great mountain wall; the mountains themselves they did not visit. Search in the large libraries brings out a few scant volumes of Pyrenean travel, but all, with two or three exceptions, bear date within the first three-fifths of the century. It is with books, often, as with the _Furancon_, the wine of the Pyrenees, and with certain other vintages: age improves them only up to a certain limit; when put away longer than a generation, they lose value.

Taine's glowing _Tour_,[1] itself made nearly thirty years ago, is a delight, almost a marvel; the style, the torrent of simile, the vivid thought, rank it as a cla.s.sic. But M. Taine's is less a book of travel than a work of art; in the iridescence of the descriptions, you lose the reflection of the things described. Even hand-books, the way-clearing lictors of travel, prove, as to the Pyrenees region, first scarce and then scanty. The few we unearth in the stores are armed only with the usual perfunctory fasces of facts,--cording information into stiff, labeled bunches, marshaling details into cramped and characterless order, scrutinizing the ground with a microscope, never surveying it in bird's-eye view. Two recent novels we eagerly buy, hearing that their scenes are laid in that vicinity; but each merely speaks, in easy omniscience, of the "distant chain of blue mountains," or of the "far-off snow-peaks outlined against the horizon," and the fiction proves hardly worth sifting for so little fact. Plainly the Pyrenees lack the voluminous literature of the Alps. Plainly we shall have, in part, to grope our way. The grooves of Anglo-Saxon travel are many and deep, lined increasingly with English speech and customs; but they have not yet been cut into these Spanish mountains.

[1] _Voyage aux Pyrenees_.

The search enlarges the horizon, however. The lonely roads we learn to qualify in thought with occasional branches of railway; the dangerous trails, with certain cultivated highways; the dismal road-side inns, with spasmodic hotels, some even named confidently as "palatial." We read of spas and springs and French society, more than of chasms and banditti. We realize in surprise that over all the past of these mountains flows now in bracing contrast the easy, laughing tide of modern French fashion,--life so different in detail, so like in kind, to the day of trapping and tourney.

It is enough:

"Now are we fix'd, and now we will depart, Never to come again till what we seek Be found."

III.

Difficulties always lessen after a decision. I casually question a doughty Colonel, who has been an indefatigable traveler; he has twice girdled the earth, and has many times cross-hatched Spain; he has not been to the Pyrenees, but heartily urges the trip. He a.s.sures me that the banditti there have become, he believes, comparatively few; that they now rarely slit their captives' ears, and that present quotations for ransoms, so he hears, are ruling very low, much lower than at any previous epoch. Thus comforted, we interview other traveled friends; but our goal is to all an unvisited district. We find no kindly Old Travelers returned from Pyrenees soil, to counsel us, advise us, and inflict well-meant and inordinate itineraries upon us. At least, then, we are not alone in our ignorance; it is evident that our knowledge of the region is not blamably less than that of others, and that the Pyrenees are in literal fact a land untrodden by Americans.

Questions of accessibility now arise. It seems a far cry from Paris to the doors of Spain. The Pyrenees are not on the way to Italy, as are the Alps. They are not on the way around the world, as are the Mountains of Lebanon and the Sierras. They are not strictly on the way even to Spain.

But we consider. Our country men are streaming to Europe, quick-eyed for unhackneyed routes, throwing over the continent new and endless net-works of silver trails. They travel three full days to reach the Norway fjords, and five in addition to see the high noon of midnight.

They journey a day and night to Berlin, and forty-two hours consecutively after, without wayside interest, to visit the City of the Great Czar; if they persevere toward the Kremlin, and around by "Warsaw's waste of ruin," they will have counted a week in a railway compartment. Constantinople and Athens lie two thousand miles away, Naples and Granada nearly as far; all sought, even in summer, though quivering in the tropics' livid heat. We came round to our Pyrenees: it needs from Paris but nine hours to Bordeaux, with coigns of vantage between; in four hours from Bordeaux, you are by the waters of the Bay of Biscay, or in six, in the centre of the Pyrenees chain.

IV.

And so _La Champagne_ leaves its long wake across the Atlantic, and we journey down from Paris to the little city of the Maid of Orleans; wander to Tours, the approximate scene of the great Saracenic defeat; drive along the quays of Bordeaux, and visit its vineyards and finally come on, in the luxurious cars of the _Midi_ line, to the sh.o.r.es of Cantabria and the popular watering-place of Biarritz.

CHAPTER II.

A BISCAYAN BEACH.

Clearly we are in advance of the summer season at Biarritz. It is the latter part of June. The air is soft and warm, the billows lap the sh.o.r.e enticingly. But fashion has not yet transferred its court; the van of the column only has arrived. A few adventurous bathers test the cool surf; the table-d'hote is slimly attended; the liverymen confidentially a.s.sure us, as an inducement for drives, that their prices are now crouching low, for a prodigious leap to follow.

But everything has a pleasing air of antic.i.p.ation. Since we are to be out of the season at all, we are glad we are in advance of it. This is the youth of the summer, not its old age. People are looking forward; events are approaching, instead of receding; the coming months seem big with indefinite promise of benefit and pleasure.

We quickly become imbued with the general hopefulness of the place.

Every one has the look of one making ready. You hear, all day long, when far enough from the waves, a vague, joyous hum of bustle pervading the town. The enterprising click of hammer or trowel falls constantly on the ear. The masons are at work upon the new villas, and our hotel is completing a fine addition for a cafe; the stores along the busy little main street are being put in order, the windows alluringly stocked, and bright awnings unrolled above them, fenders from the summer's heat. The hotels are fairly awake. Everything is rejoicing that the semi-hibernation is over.

[Ill.u.s.tration: RELIEF MAP OF THE CENTRAL PYRENEES]

Biarritz, the town, is as delightful, if not as picturesque, as we had hoped. Perhaps it is too modern to be picturesque. In this part of the world at least, one rather requires the picturesque to be allied with the old. The nucleus of Biarritz is old, but that is out of sight in the modern overgrowth; Biarritz, as it is, is of this half century.

This is not, on the whole, to be regretted. Biarritz has no history, no past of a.s.sociations, no landmarks to be guarded. Vandalism in the form of the modern rebuilder can here work more good than harm. Save for its location at the edge of the wild Basque country, and what it has seen, itself sheltered by obscurity, of the forays of that restless people, the place has little to tell. It is a watering-place, pure and simple, buoyed entirely by the prospering ebb and flow of modern fashion. Let us take it as of to-day, not of yesterday, content to seek its charms under that aspect alone, enjoying it for itself, not for its pedigree.

Biarritz is a prerogative instance of the magnetism of royalty,--of the social power of the court as an inst.i.tution. It was a watering-place, in a small way, before Eugenie's advent; but there was not a t.i.the of its present size and popularity. In 1840, it numbered in all not more than fifty houses, a few of them lodgings or humble cafes, but the greater part staid little whitewashed summer-dwellings with green verandas and occasional roof-balconies; set down irregularly, without street or system, along the sunny slopes of the bluff. Murray's _Handbook_ for 1848 gives it pa.s.sing notice, and disrespectfully styles it the dullest place upon earth for one having no resources of friends upon the spot.

But in the modern edition of forty years later, the same manual has come to describe the place in a very different strain; a.s.signs it a population of nearly 6,000; details, with respect, its fashionable rank, its villas and increasing hotels, its graded streets and driveways; and among other things adds the simple remark that "about twenty-one thousand strangers now visit Biarritz every year." Evidently there has been some advance within the span.

It was the Empress of the French who distilled the life-elixir for the quiet little resort. As a maiden, she had spent long summers by its sh.o.r.e, and when she was become the first lady in the land, she turned still to Biarritz, and the midsummer tide of fashion followed after her.

Across the downs, on the bluff, stands the _Villa Eugenie_, the handsel of Biarritz's prosperity; and here about us is the town that grew up to make her court.

Fair France lost as well as gained when the burning walls of the Tuileries crashed in. In these days of the plain French Republic,--of its sober, unornamental, business government,--the contrast is vivid with the glitter and "go" of Louis Napoleon's regime. And the nation feels it, and involuntarily grieves over it. The twenty years have far from sufficed to smother that certain inborn Gallic joy in monarchy,--autocratic rule, a brilliant court, leadership in fashion, and all the pomp and pageantry which the French love so well.

Little more than a century ago, stable governments seemed at last to be ruling the world; civilization had come to believe itself finally at peace; war, it was complacently said, had finished its work; the coming cycles would prove so far tamed as to have outgrown fightings and revolutions. Cultured modern history, like Nature, would refuse to proceed _per saltum_. Yet the hundred years since gone by have brought wars as fierce, "leaps" of government as tremendous, as any century in the past. It is this same fair France that has contributed more than her share of them, and the Fall of the Second Empire was one of the most dramatic. The world is not, after all, so securely merged from the darkness of the Dark Ages. Within that short century, in Paris itself, the very capital of cultured Europe, there has twice uprisen a human savagery immeasurably exceeding all the tales we are to tell of the fierce past of the Pyrenees.

It needs an effort to-day to picture the social power of France and Eugenie twenty years ago. The mantle has not fallen to England and Alexandra. Only a people like the French can endue fashion with absolutism.

So it was, that when the Empress came to Biarritz, "all the world" came also. From the building of her villa dates the true origin of Biarritz.

From that time its growth was progressive and sound. When the empire finally fell, this creature of its making had already pa.s.sed the danger-point, and so stood unshaken; Biarritz had become too popular, its clientele too devoted, to part company. Even in the winter it has its increasing colony; in summer its vogue is beyond caprice. The sparkle of the royal occupation has gone, and the royal villa is tenantless; but the place no longer needs a helping hand, for it is abundantly able to walk alone.

[Ill.u.s.tration: BEACH AND VILLA EUGeNIE AT BIARRITZ.]

II.