PAGE 6
From Ocean To Sea
by
The Roman camp, then ‘open and grassy, with a few trees,’ says Napier, is now covered with vineyards. Everywhere the fatal slopes are rich with cultivation, plenty, and peace. God grant they may remain so for ever.
And so, along the Gave de Pau, we run on to Pau, the ancient capital of Bearn; the birthplace of Henri Quatre, and of Bernadotte, King of Sweden; where, in the charming old chateau, restored by Louis Philippe, those who list may see the tortoise which served as the great Henry’s cradle; and believe, if they list also, the tale that that is the real shell.
For in 1793, when the knights of the ‘bonnet rouge’ and ‘carmagnole complete’ burst into the castle, to destroy every memorial of hated royalty, the shell among the rest, there chanced–miraculous coincidence–to be in Pau, in the collection of a naturalist, another shell, of the same shape and size. Swiftly and deftly pious hands substituted it for the real relic, leaving it to be battered in pieces and trampled in the mud, while the royal cradle lay perdu for years in the roof of a house, to reappear duly at the Restoration of the Bourbons.
Of Pau I shall say nothing. It would be real impertinence in one who only spent three days in it, to describe a city which is known to all Europe; which is a permanent English colony, and boasts of one, and sometimes two, packs of English foxhounds. But this I may be allowed to say. That of all delectable spots I have yet seen, Pau is the most delectable. Of all the landscapes which I have beheld, that from the Place Royale is, for variety, richness, and grandeur, the most glorious; at least as I saw it for the first time.
Beneath the wall of the high terrace are rich meadows, vocal with frogs rejoicing in the rain, and expressing their joy, not in the sober monotone of our English frogs, but each according to his kind; one bellowing, the next barking, the next cawing, and the next (probably the little green Hylas, who has come down out of the trees to breed) quacking in treble like a tiny drake. The bark (I suspect) is that of the gorgeous edible frog; and so suspect the young recruits who lounge upon the wall, and look down wistfully, longing, I presume, to eat him. And quite right they are; for he (at least his thigh) is exceeding good to eat, tenderer and sweeter than any spring chicken.
Beyond the meadow, among the poplars, the broad Gave murmurs on over shingly shallows, between aspen-fringed islets, grey with the melting snows; and beyond her again rise broken wooded hills, dotted with handsome houses; and beyond them a veil of mist and rain.
On a sudden that veil lifts; and five-and-twenty miles away, beneath the black edge of the cloud, against the clear blue sky, stands out the whole snow-range of the Pyrenees; and in the midst, exactly opposite, filling up a vast gap which is the Val d’Ossau, the huge cone, still snowy white, of the Pic du Midi.
He who is conversant with theatres will be unable to overlook the seeming art–and even artifice–of such an effect. The clouds lift like a drop-scene; the mountains are so utterly unlike any natural object in the north, that for the moment one fancies them painted and not real; the Pic du Midi stands so exactly where it ought, and is yet so fantastic and unexpected in its shape, that an artist seems to have put it there.
But lie who knows nothing, and cares less, about theatres and their sham glories, and sees for the first time in his life the eternal snows of which he has read since childhood, draws his breath deeply, and stands astounded, whispering to himself that God is great.
One hint more, ere we pass on from Pau. Here, at least in spring time, of all places in Europe, may a man feed his ears with song of birds. The copses by the Gave, the public walks and woods (wherein English prejudices have happily protected what is elsewhere shot down as game, even to the poor little cock-robins whose corpses lie by dozens in too many French markets), are filled with all our English birds of passage, finding their way northwards from Morocco and Algiers; and with our English nightingales, black-caps, willow-wrens, and whitethroats, are other songsters which never find their way to these isles, for which you must consult the pages of Mr. Gould or Mr. Bree–and chief among them the dark Orpheus, and the yellow Hippolais, surpassing the black-cap, and almost equalling the nightingale, for richness and variety of song–the polyglot warbler which penetrates, in summer, as far north as the shores of the British Channel, and there stops short, scared by the twenty miles of sea, after a land journey–and by night, too, as all the warblers journey–from Africa.