In the Heart of the Vosges by Matilda Betham-Edwards (digital e reader TXT) 📖

ninety at least; what further miracle can he expect, having already lived the life of three generations?

The last litter drawn by, the enormous crowd breaks up; tall candles are offered to those standing near, and a procession is formed, headed by the bishop under his gold and white baldachin, a large number of priests following behind, then several hundred men, women, and children, the black and white robes of the priests and nuns being conspicuous. Chanting as they go, outsiders falling on their knees at the approach of the baldachin, the pilgrims now wind in solemn procession round the statue in front of the church, and finally enter, when another religious celebration takes place. Services are going on all day long and late into the night. Hardly do these devotees give themselves time for meals, which are a scramble at best, every hotel and boarding-house much overcrowded. The _table d'hote_ dinner, or one or two dishes, are hastily swallowed, and the praying, chanting, marching and prostrating begin afresh. At eight o'clock from afar comes the sound of pilgrims' voices as the procession winds towards the grotto.

There is picturesqueness in these nocturnal celebrations, the tapers twinkling against the dark heavens, the voices dying away in the distance. Superstition has its season as well as sulphur-baths and chalybeate springs. The railway station is a scene of indescribable confusion; enormous contingents come for a few hours only, the numbered trains that brought them are drawn up outside the main lines awaiting their departure. Here we are hustled by a motley throng; fashionable ladies bedizened with rosaries, badges, and medallions; elegant young gentlemen, the _jeunesse doree_ of a vanished _regime_, proudly wearing the pilgrim's badge, all travelling third-class and in humble company for their soul's good; peasant women from Brittany in charming costumes; a very, very few blue blouses of elderly civilians'; enormous numbers wearing religious garb.

It seems a pity that a bargain could not be struck by France and Germany, the Emperor William receiving Lourdes in exchange for Metz or Strasburg! Lourdes must represent a princely revenue, far in excess, I should say, of any profit the Prussian Government will ever make out of the annexed provinces; and as nobody lives there, and visitors only remain a day or two, it would not matter to the most patriotic French pilgrim going to whom the place belonged.

The tourist brings evil as well as good in his track, and the tax upon glorious scenery here is not the globe-trotter but the mendicant. Gavarnie is, without doubt, as grandiose a scene as Western Europe can show. In certain elements of grandeur none other can compete with it. But until a balloon service is organized between Luz and the famous Cirque it is impossible to make the journey with an unruffled temper. The traveller's way is beset by juvenile vagrants, bare-faced and importunate as Neapolitans or Arabs. Lovers of aerial navigation have otherwise not much left to wish for. Nothing can be more like a ride in cloudland than the drive from Pierrefitte to Luz and from Luz to Gavarnie. The splendid rock-hewn road is just broad enough to admit of two carriages abreast. On one side are lofty, shelving rocks, on the other a stone coping two feet high, nothing else to separate us from the awful abyss below, a ravine deep as the measure of St. Paul's Cathedral from base to apex of golden cross. We hear the thunder of the river as it dashes below by mountains two-thirds the height of Mont Blanc, their dark, almost perpendicular sides wreathed with cloud, on their summits gleaming never-melted snow, here and there the sombre parapets streaked with silvery cascades. At intervals the Titanic scene is relieved by glimpses of pastoral grace and loveliness, and such relief is necessary even to those who can gaze without giddiness on such awfulness. Between gorge and gorge lie level spaces, amid dazzlingly-green meadows the river flows calm and crystal clear, the form and hue of every pebble distinct as the pieces of a mosaic. Looking upwards we see hanging gardens and what may be called farmlets, tiny homesteads with minute patches of wheat, Indian corn, and clover on an incline so steep as to look vertical. Most beautiful and refreshing to the eye are the little hayfields sloping from the river, the freshly-mown hay in cocks or being turned, the shorn pasture around bright as emerald. Harvest during the year 1891 was late, and in the first week of September corn was still standing; nowhere, surely, corn so amber-tinted, so golden, nowhere, surely, ripened so near the clouds. In the tiny chalets perched on the mountain ridges, folks literally dwell in cloudland, and enjoy a kind of supernal existence, having for near neighbours the eagles in their eyries and the fleet-footed chamois or izard.

These vast panoramas--towering rocks of manifold shape, Alp rising above Alp snow-capped or green-tinted, terrace upon terrace of fields and homesteads--show every variety of savage grandeur and soft beauty till we gradually reach the threshold of Gavarnie. This is aptly called "chaos" which we might fancifully suppose the leavings, "the fragments that were left," of the semicircular wall now visible, thrown up by transhuman builders, insurmountable barrier between heaven and earth. No sooner does the awful amphitheatre break upon the view, than we discern the white line of the principal fall, a slender silvery column reaching, so it seems, from star-land and moon-land to earth; river of some upper world that has overleaped the boundaries of our own. No words can convey the remotest idea of such a scene.

We may say with regard to scenery what Lessing says of pictures, we only see in both what we bring with us to the view. More disconcerting than the importunities of beggars and donkey-drivers are the supercilious remarks of tourists. To most, of course, the whole thing is "a sad disappointment." Everything must necessarily be a disappointment to some beholders; and with critics of a certain order, the mere fact of not being pleased implies superiority. The hour's walk from the village to the Cirque is an event also in the life of the flower-lover. We have hardly eyes for Gavarnie, so completely is our gaze fascinated by the large luminous gold and silver stars gleaming conspicuously from the brilliant turf. These are the glorious flower-heads of the white and yellow Pyrenean thistle that open in sunshine as do sea-anemones, sending out lovely fringes, sunrays and moonbeams not more strikingly contrasted. As we rush hither and thither to gather them--if we can--their roots are veritable tentaculae, other lovely flowers are to be had in plenty, the beautiful deep-blue Pyrenean gentian, monk's-hood in rich purple blossom, rose-coloured antirrhinum, an exquisite little yellow sedum, with rare ferns. On one side, a narrow bridle-path winds round the mountain towards Spain; on the other, cottage-farms dot the green slopes; between both, parting the valley, flows the Gave, here a quietly meandering streamlet, whilst before us rises Gavarnie; a scene to which one poet only--perhaps the only one capable of grappling with such a subject--has done justice--

"Cirque, hippodrome,
Stage whereon Stamboul, Tyre, Memphis, London, Rome,
With their myriads could find place, whereon Paris at ease
Might float, as at sundown a swarm of bees,
Gavarnie, dream, miracle!"

[Footnote: "Un cirque, un hippodrome,
Un theatre ou Stamboul, Tyre, Memphis, Londres, Rome,
Avec leurs millions d'hommes pourraient s'asseoir.
Ou Paris flotterait comme un essaim du soir.
Gavarnie!--un miracle! un reve!"--Victor Hugo, "Dieu."]

How to give some faint conception of the indescribable? Perhaps the great French poet has best succeeded in a single line--


"L'impossible est ici debout."


We feel, indeed, that we are here brought face to face with the impossible.

Let the reader then conjure up a solid mass of rock threefold the circumference of St. Paul's Cathedral; let him imagine the facade of this natural masonry of itself exceeding the compass of our great Protestant minster; then in imagination let him lift his eyes from stage to stage, platform to platform, the lower nearly three times the height of St. Paul's from base to apex of golden cross, the higher that of four such altitudes; their gloomy parapets streaked with glistening white lines, one a vast column of water, although their shelving sides show patches of never-melted snows; around, framing in the stupendous scene, mountain peaks, each unlike its majestic brother, each in height reaching to the shoulder of Mont Blanc. Such is Gavarnie.

My next halting-place was a remote Pyrenean village admirably adapted for the study of rural life. Within a few hours' journey of the Spanish frontier, Osse lies in the beautiful valley of Aspe, and is reached by way of Pau and Oloron. At the latter town the railway ends, and we have to drive sixteen miles across country, a delightful expedition in favourable weather. The twin towns, old and new Oloron, present the contrast so often seen throughout France, picturesque, imposing antiquity beside utilitarian ugliness and uniformity. The open suburban spaces present the appearance of an enormous drying-ground, in which are hung the blankets of the entire department. Blankets, woollen girdles or sashes, men's bonnets are manufactured here. "Pipers, blue bonnets, and oatmeal," wrote an English traveller a hundred years ago, "are found in Catalonia, Auvergne, and Suabia as well as in Lochaber." We are now in the ancient kingdom of Beam, with a portion of Navarre added to the French crown by Henry IV, and, two hundred years later, named the department of the Basses Pyrenees.

Every turn of the road reveals new features as we journey towards Osse, having always in view the little Gave d'Aspe, after the manner of Pyrenean rivers, making cascades, waterfalls, whirlpools on its way. Most beautiful are these mountain streams, their waters of pure, deep green, their surface broken by coruscations of dazzlingly white foam and spray, their murmur ever in our ears. When far away we hardly miss the grand contours of the Pyrenees more than the music of their rushing waters. No tourists meet us here, yet whither shall we go for scenes sublimer or more engaging? On either side of the broadening velvety green valley, with its tumbling stream, rises a rampart of stately peaks, each unlike its neighbour, each having a graciousness and grandeur of its own. Here and there amid these vast solitudes is seen a white glittering thread breaking the dark masses of shelving rock, mountain torrent falling into the river from a height of several hundred feet. Few and far between are the herdsmen's chalets and scattered cornfields and meadows, and we have the excellent carriage road to ourselves. Yet two or three villages of considerable size are passed on the way; of one, an inland spa much frequented by the peasants, I shall make mention presently.

For three hours we have wound slowly upward, and, as our destination is approached, the valley opens wide, showing white-walled, grey-roofed hamlets and small towns all singularly alike. The mountains soon close round abruptly on all sides, making us feel as if we had reached the world's end. On the other side of those snow-capped peaks, here so majestically massed before our gaze, lies Spain. We are in a part of France thoroughly French, yet within a few hours of a country strikingly contrasted with it; manners, customs, modes of thought, institutions radically different.

The remoteness and isolation of Osse explain the existence of a little Protestant community in these mountain fastnesses. For centuries the Reformed faith has been upheld here. Not, however, unmolested. A tablet in the neat little church tells how the original place of Protestant worship was pulled down by order of the king in 1685, and only