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From Ocean To Sea
by
At Pau, the railroad ended when I was there; and who would go eastward had to take carriage, and go by the excellent road (all public roads in the south of France are excellent, and equal to our best English roads) over the high Landes to Tarbes; and on again over fresh Landes to Montrejeau; and thence by railway to Toulouse.
They are very dreary, these high flat uplands, from which innumerable streams pour down to swell the Adour and the Garonne; and as one rolls along, listening to the eternal tinkle of the horse-bells, only two roadside objects are particularly worthy of notice. First, the cultivation, spreading rapidly since the Revolution, over what was open moor; and next the great natural parks which one traverses here and there; the remnants of those forests which were once sacred to the seigneurs and their field sports. The seigneurs are gone now, and the game with them; and the forests are almost gone–so ruinate, indeed, by the peasantry, that the Government (I believe) has interfered to stop a destruction of timber, which involves the destruction both of fire-wood and of the annual fall of rain. But the trees which remain, whether in forest or in homestead, are sadly mangled. The winters are sharp in these high uplands, and firing scarce; and the country method of obtaining it is to send a woman up a tree, where she hacks off, with feeble arms and feeble tools, boughs halfway out from the stem, disfiguring, and in time destroying by letting the wet enter, splendid southern oaks, chestnuts, and walnuts. Painful and hideous, to an eye accustomed to British parks, are the forms of these once noble trees.
Suddenly we descend a brow into the Yale of Tarbes: a good land and large; a labyrinth of clear streams, water-meadows, cherry-orchards, and crops of every kind, and in the midst the pleasant old city, with its once famous University. Of Tarbes, you may read in the pages of Froissart–or, if you prefer a later authority, in those of Dumas, ‘Trois Mousquetaires;’ for this is the native land of the immortal Ulysses of Gascony, the Chevalier d’Artagnan.
There you may see, to your surprise, not only gentlemen, but ladies, taking their pleasure on horseback after the English fashion; for there is close by a great ‘haras,’ or Government establishment for horse-breeding. You may watch the quaint dresses in the marketplace; you may rest, as Froissart rested of old, in a ‘right pleasant inn;’ you may eat of the delicious cookery which is to be found, even in remote towns, throughout the south of France, and even–if you dare– of ‘Coquilles aux Champignons.’ You may sit out after dinner in that delicious climate, listening to the rush of the clear Adour through streets, and yards, and culverts; for the city, like Romsey, or Salisbury, is built over many streams. You may watch the Pyrenees changing from white to rose, from rose to lead colour, and then dying away into the night–for twilight there is little or none, here in the far south.
‘The sun’s rim dips, the stars rush out,
At one stride comes the dark.’
And soon from street to street you hear the ‘clarion’ of the garrison, that singularly wild and sweet trumpet-call which sends French soldiers to their beds. And at that the whole populace swarms out, rich and poor, and listens entranced beneath the trees in the Place Maubourguet, as if they had never heard it before; with an order and a sobriety, and a good humour, and a bowing to each other, and asking and giving of cigar-lights between men of every class–and a little quiet modest love-making on the outskirts of the crowd, which is very pleasant to behold. And when the music is silent, and the people go off suddenly, silently, and soberly withal (for there are no drunkards in these parts), to their early beds, you stand and look up into the ‘purple night,’ as Homer calls it–that southern sky, intensely dark, and yet transparent withal, through which you seem to look beyond the stars into the infinite itself, and recollect that beyond all that, and through all that likewise, there is an infinite good God who cares for all these simple kindly folk; and that by Him all their hearts are as well known, and all their infirmities as mercifully weighed, as are, you trust, your own.