Castles and Chateaux of Old Navarre and the Basque Provinces. M. F. Mansfield
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other ferruginous. Mostly the waters of Cambo are drunk; for bathing purposes they are always heated. Napoleon first set the pace at Cambo, but its fame was a long while becoming widespread. In 1808 the emperor proposed to erect a military hospital here, and one hundred and fifty thousand francs were actually appropriated for it, but the fall of the Empire ended that hope as it did many others. In the commune of Salies is a source, a fontaine, which gives a considerable supply of salt to be obtained through evaporation; also in the mountains neighbouring upon Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, and in the Arrondissement of Mauléon, are still other springs from which the extraction of salt is a profitable industry.
In the borders of the blue Gave de Pau, in full view of the extended horizon on one side and the lowland plain on the other, one appreciates the characteristics of the Pyrenees at their very best.
One recalls the gentle hills and vales of the Ile de France, the rude, granite slopes of Bretagne, the sublime peaks of the Savoian Alps, and all the rest of the topographic tableau of “la belle France,” but nothing seen before—nor to be seen later—excels the Pyrenees region for infinite variety. It is truly remarkable, from the grandeur of its sky-line to the winsomeness and softness of its valleys, peopled everywhere (always excepting the alien importations of the resorts) with a reminiscent civilization of the past, with little or no care for the super-refinements of more populous and progressive regions. The Pyrenees, as a whole, are still unspoiled for the serious-minded traveller. This is more than can be said of the Swiss Alps, the French Riviera, the German Rhine, or the byways of merry England.
CHAPTER IV
THE PYRENEES—THEIR HISTORY AND PEOPLES
IT may be a question as to who discovered the Pyrenees, but Louis XIV was the first exploiter thereof—writing in a literal sense—when he made the famous remark “Il y a des Pyrénées.” Before that, and to a certain extent even to-day, they may well be called the “Pyrénées inconnues,” a terra incognita, as the old maps marked the great desert wastes of mid-Africa. The population of the entire region known as the Pyrénées Françaises is as varied as any conglomerate population to be found elsewhere in France in an area of something less than six hundred kilometres.
The Pyrenees were ever a frontier battle-ground. At the commencement of the eleventh century things began to shape themselves north of the mountain chain, and modern France, through the féodalité, began to grow into a well-defined entity.
Charles Martel it was, as much as any other, who made all this possible, and indeed he began it when he broke the Saracen power which had over-run all Spain and penetrated via the Pyrenean gateways into Gaul.
The Iberians who flooded southern Gaul, and even went so far afield as Ireland, came from the southwestern peninsula through the passes of the Pyrenees. They were of a southern race, in marked distinction to the Franks and Gauls. Settling south of the Garonne they became known in succeeding generations as Aquitains and spoke a local patois, different even from that of the Basques whom they somewhat resembled. The Vascons, or Gascons, were descendants of this same race, though perhaps developed through a mixture of other races.
Amidst the succession of diverse dominations, one race alone came through the mill whole, unscathed and independent. These were the Basques who occupied that region best defined to-day as lying around either side of the extreme western frontier of France and Spain.
A French savant’s opinion of the status of this unique province and its people tells the story better than any improvisation that can be made. A certain M. Garat wrote in the mid-nineteenth century as follows:—
The Basques of the Mountains
“Well sheltered in the gorges of the Pyrenees, where the Gauls, the Francs and the Saracens had never attacked their liberties, the Basques have escaped any profound judgments of that race of historians and philosophers which have dissected most of the other peoples of Europe. Rome even dared not attempt to throttle the Basques and merge them into her absorbing civilization. All around them their neighbours have changed twenty times their speech, their customs and their laws, but the Basques still show their original characters and physiognomies, scarcely dimmed by the progress of the ages.”
Certainly they are as proud and noble a race as one remarks in a round of European travel.
A Basque will always tell you if you ask him as to whether he is French or Spanish: “Je ne suis pas Français, je suis Basque; je ne suis Espagnol, je suis Basque; ou—tout simplement, je suis homme.”
This is as one would expect to find it, but it is possible to come across an alien even in the country of the Basque. On interrogating a smiling peasant driving a yoke of cream-coloured oxen, he replied: “Mais je ne suis pas Basque; je suis Périgourdin—born at Badefols, just by the old château of Bertrand de Born the troubadour.”
One may be pardoned for a reference to the cagots of the Basque country, a despised race of people not unlike the cretins of the Alps. As Littré defines them they are distinctly a “people of the Pyrenees.” The race, as a numerous body, practically is extinct to-day. They lived in poor, mean cabins, far from the towns and under the protection of a seigneurial château or abbey. All intercourse with their neighbours was forbidden, and at church they occupied a space apart, had a special holy water font, and when served with blessed bread it was thrown at them as if they were dogs, and not offered graciously.
This may have been uncharitable and unchristianlike, but the placing of separate holy water-basins in the churches was simply carrying out the principle of no intercourse between the Basques and the cagots, not even between those who had become, or professed to be Christians. “The loyal hand of a Basque should touch nothing that had previously been touched by a cagot.”
From the Basque country, through the heart of the Pyrenees, circling Béarn, Navarre and Foix, to Roussillon is a far cry, and a vast change in speech and manners.
Life in a Pyrenean village for a round of the seasons would probably cure most of the ills that flesh is heir to. It may be doubtful as to who was the real inventor of the simple life—unless it was Adam—but Jean Jacques Rousseau was astonished that people did not live more in the open air as a remedy against the too liberal taking of medicine.
“Gouter la liberté sur la montagne immense!” This was the dream of the poet, but it may become the reality of any who choose to try it. One remarks a certain indifference among the mountaineers of the Pyrenees for the conventions of life.
The mountaineer of the Pyrenees would rather ride a donkey than a pure bred Arab or drive an automobile. He has no use for the proverb:—
“Honourable is the riding of a horse to the rider,
But the mule is a dishonour and a donkey a disgrace.”
When one recalls the fact that there are comparatively few of the bovine race in the south of France, more particularly in Languedoc and Provence, he understands why it is that one finds the cuisine à l’huile d’olive—and sometimes huile d’arachide, which is made from peanuts, and not bad at that, at least not unhealthful.
In the Pyrenees proper, where the pasturage is rich, cattle are more numerous, and nowhere, not even in the Allier or Poitou in mid-France, will one find finer cows or oxen. Little, sure-footed donkeys, with white-gray muzzles and crosses down their backs, and great cream-coloured oxen seem to do all the work that elsewhere is done by horses. There are ponies, too—short-haired, tiny beasts—in the Pyrenees, and in the summer months one sees a Basque or a Béarnais horse-dealer driving his live stock (ponies only) on the hoof all over France, and making sales by the way.
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