You set out for BagnÈres at five o’clock in the afternoon, in the dust and amidst a train of coucous laden with people. The road is blocked, like the roads in the suburbs of Paris on a Saturday evening. The diligence, in passing, takes up as many peasants as it meets; they are put in heaps under the tilt, among the trunks, alongside the dogs; they seem proud and pleased with their lofty place. Legs, arms and heads, dispose themselves as best they can; they sing, and the coach appears like a music-box. It is in this triumphal equipage that you reach BagnÈres, after sunset. You dine in haste, are taken to the Promenade des Coustous, and find, to your utter surprise, the Boulevard de Gand among the Pyrenees. Four rows of dusty trees; regular benches at equal intervals; on both sides, hotels of modern aspect, one of which is occupied by M. de Rothschild; rows of illuminated shops, of cafÉs chantants surrounded by crowds; terraces filled with seated spectators; upon the roadway, a black throng streaming under the lights. Such is the spectacle beneath your eyes. The groups form, dissolve, close up; you follow the crowd; you learn again the art of getting on without stepping on the feet of those you meet, of grazing everybody without elbowing anybody; of not getting crushed and of not crushing others; in short, all the talents taught by civilization and the asphaltum. You meet again with the rustle of dresses, the confused hum of conversations and steps, the offensive splendor of artificial lights, the obsequious and wearied faces of traffic, the skilful display of the shops, and all the sensations you wanted to leave behind. BagnÈres-de-Bigorre and Luchon are in the Pyrenees the capitals of polite life, the meeting place of the pleasures of the world and of fashion—Paris, six hundred miles away from Paris.

The next morning, in the sunlight, the aspect of the city is charming. Great alleys of old trees cross it in every direction. Little gardens bloom upon the terraces. The Adour rolls along by the houses. Two streets are islands connected with the highway by bridges laden with oleanders, and their green windows are mirrored in the clear wave. Streamlets of limpid water run from all the open places and all the streets; they cross, dive under ground, reappear, and the city is filled with their murmurs, their coolness, and their gayety. A little girl, seated upon a slab of slate, bathes her feet in the current; the cold water reddens them, and the poor little thing tucks up her worn gown with great care, for fear of wetting it. A woman on her knees is washing linen at her door; another bends over and draws water for her saucepan. The two black and shining trenches hedge in the white road, like two bands of jet. In the inner court or in the vestibule of each house the assembled women sew and spin, some on the steps of the stairway, others at the feet of a ville; they are in the shade, but on the crest of the wall the beautiful green leaves are traversed by a ray of sunlight.

In the neighboring place, some men ranged in two lines were threshing wheat with long poles and heaping up masses of golden grain. Under its borrowed luxury the city preserves some rustic customs; but the rich light blends the contrasts, and the threshing of the wheat has the splendor of a ball. Further on are some buildings where the stream works the marbles. Slabs, blocks, piles of chips, shapeless material, fill the court for a length of three hundred paces, among clusters of rosebushes, flowery borders, statues, and kiosks. In the workshops, heavy gearings, troughs of muddy water, rusty saws, huge wheels—these are the workmen. In the storerooms, columns, capitals of an admirable polish, white chimney-pieces bordered with leaves in relief, carved vases, sculptured basins, trinkets of agate—that is the work. The quarries of the Pyrenees have, all of them, given a specimen to panel the walls; it is a library of marbles. There are white ones like alabaster, rosy like living flesh, brown speckled like a guinea fowl’s breast—the Griotte is of a blood-red. The black BaudÉan, veined with white threads, emits a greenish reflection. The Ronce de Bise furrows its fawn-colored dress with dark bands. The grayish Sarrancolin has a peculiar glitter, is marked all over with scales, striped with pale tints, and stained with a broad blood-red spot. Nature is the greatest of painters; her infiltrations and subterranean fires could alone have invented this profusion of shades and patterns: it needed the audacious originality of chance and the slow toil of the mineral forces, to turn lines so capricious and assort tints so complex.

A stream of swift water rolls beneath the workshops; another glides in front of the house, in a lovely meadow, under a screen of poplars. In the pale distance you see the mountains. It is a fortunate spot considering that it is a sawer of stone.

II.

The bathing-house is a beautiful white building, vast and regular; the long front, quite unornamented, is of a very simple form. This architecture, akin to the antique, is more beautiful in the south than in the north; like the sky, it leaves in the mind an impression of serenity and grandeur.

A half of the river washes the faÇade, and precipitates under the entrance bridge its black sheet bristling with sparkling waves. You enter into a great vestibule, follow a huge staircase with double balustrade, then corridors ending in noble porticos and commanding the terraces. Bathing rooms panelled with marble, a verdant garden, fine points of view everywhere, high vaults, coolness, simple forms, soft hues that rest the eye and contrast with the crude, dazzling light, that out of doors falls on the dusty place and the white houses; all attracts, and it is a pleasure to be ill here.

The Romans, a people as civilized and as bored as we, did as we do, and came to BagnÈres. The inhabitants of the country, good courtiers, constructed, on the public place, a temple in honor of Augustus. The temple became a church that was dedicated to St. Martin, but retained the pagan inscription. In 1641, they removed the inscription to above the fountain of the southern entrance, where it still is.

In 1823, they discovered on the site of the bathhouse, columns, capitals, four piscinÆ cased with marbles and adorned with mouldings, and a large number of medals with effigies of the first Roman emperors. These remains, found after a lapse of eighteen centuries, leave a deep impression, like that one experiences in measuring the great limestone beds, antediluvian sepulchres of buried races. Our cities are founded upon the ruins of extinct civilizations, and our fields on the remains of subverted creations.

Rome has left its trace everywhere at BagnÈres. The most agreeable of these souvenirs of antiquity are the monuments which those who had been healed erected in honor of the Nymphs, and whose inscriptions still remain. Lying in the baignoires of marble, they felt the virtue of the beneficent goddess penetrating their limbs; with eyes half-closed, dozing in the soft embrace of the tepid water, they heard the mysterious spring dripping, dripping with a song, from the recesses of the rock, its mother; the outpoured sheet shone about them with dim, greenish reflexes, and before them passed like a vision the strange eye and magic voice of the unknown divinity, who came to the light in order to bring health to hapless mortals.

Behind the bath-house is a high hill, covered with admirable trees, where wind sequestered walks. Thence you see under your feet the city, whose slated roofs reflect the powerful light of the burning sky and stand out in the limpid air with a tawny and leaden hue. A line of poplars marks on the great green plain the course of the river; towards Tarbes it strikes endlessly into the vaporous distance, amidst tender hues. Opposite, wooded and cultivated hills rise, round-topped, to the very horizon. On the right, the mountains, like so many pyramids, descend in long regular quoins. These hills and mountains cut out a sinuous line on the radiant border of the sky. From the white and smiling horizon, the eye mounts by insensible shades to the deep burning blue of the dome. This whiteness imparts a tender and delicious sensation, mingling of revery and pleasure; it touches, troubles and delights, like the song of Cherubino in Mozart. A fresh wind comes from the valley; the body is as comfortable as the mind; one finds in his nature a harmony hitherto unknown; he no longer bears the weight of his thought or of his mechanism; he does nothing but feel; he becomes thoroughly animal, that is to say, perfectly happy.

In the evening we walk in the plain. There are in the fields of maize retired paths where one is alone. The tops, seven feet high, form, as it were, a copse of trees. The great sheaf of green leaves ends in slender little columns of rosy grains, and the slanting sun slips its arrows of gold among the stalks. You find meadows cut by streams which the peasants dam up, and which, for several hours, overflow to refresh the fields. The day declines, the huge shadow of the mountains darkens the verdure; clouds of insects hum in the heavy air. The whisper of an expiring breeze makes the leaves to shiver for a moment. Meanwhile the carriages and the cavalcades return on all the roads, and the courts are illuminated for the evening promenade.

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