Cauterets is a town at the bottom of a valley, melancholy enough, paved, and provided with an octroi. Innkeepers, guides, the whole of a famished population besieges us; but we have considerable force of mind, and after a spirited resistance we obtain the right of looking about and choosing.

Fifty paces further on, we are fastened upon by servants, children, donkey-hirers and boys, who accidentally stroll about us. They offer us cards, they praise up to us the site, the cuisine; they accompany us, cap in hand, to the very edge of the village; at the same time they elbow away all competitors: “The stranger is mine, I’ll baste you if you come near him.” Each hotel has its runners on the watch; they hunt the isard in winter, the traveller in summer.

The town has several springs: that of the King cured Abarca, king of Aragon; that of CÆsar restored health, as they say, to the great CÆsar. Faith is needed in history as well as in medicine.

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For example, in the time of Francis I. the Eaux Bonnes cured wounds; they were called Eaux d’arqtiebusades ; the soldiers wounded at Pavia were sent to them. Now they cure diseases of the throat and chest. A hundred years hence they will perhaps heal something else; with every century medicine makes an advance.

“Formerly,” said Signarelle, “the liver was at the right and the heart at the left; we have reformed all that.”

A celebrated physician one day said to his pupils: “Employ this remedy at once, while it still cures.” Medicines, like hats, have their fashions.

Yet what can be said against this remedy? The climate is warm, the gorge sheltered, the air pure, the gayety of the sun is cheering. A change of habits leads to a change of thoughts; melancholy ideas take flight. The water is not bad to drink; you have had a beautiful journey; the moral cures the physical nature; if not, you have had hope for two months—and what, I beg to know, is a remedy, if not a pretext for hoping? You take patience and pleasure until either illness or invalid departs, and everything is for the best in the best of worlds.

II.

Several leagues away, among the precipices, sleeps the lake of Gaube. The green water, three hundred feet in depth, has the reflexes of an emerald.

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The bald heads of the mountains are mirrored in it with a divine serenity. The slender column of the pines is reflected there as clear as in the air; in the distance, the woods clothed in bluish mist come down to bathe their feet in its cold wave, and the huge Vignemale, spotted with snow, shuts it about with her cliffs. At times a remnant of breeze comes to ruffle it, and all those grand images undulate; the Greek Diana, the wild, maiden huntress, would have taken it for a mirror.

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How one sees her come to life again in such sites! Her marbles are fallen, her festivals have vanished; but in the shivering of the firs, at the sound of the cracking glaciers, before the steely splendors of these chaste waters, she reappears like a vision. All the night long, in the outcries of the wind, the herdsmen could hear the baying of her hounds and the whistling of her arrows; the untamed chorus of her nymphs coursed over the precipices; the moon shone upon their shoulders of silver, and on the point of their lances. In the morning she came to bathe her arms in the lake; and more than once has she been seen standing upon a summit, her eyes fixed, her brow severe; her foot trod the cruel snow, and her virgin breasts gleamed beneath the winter sun.

III.

The Diana of the country is more amiable; it is the lively and gracious Margaret of Navarre, sister and liberatress of Francis I. She came to these waters with her court, her poets, her musicians, her savants, a poet and theologian herself, of infinite curiosity, reading Greek, learning Hebrew, and taken up with Calvinism. On coming out of the routine and discipline of the middle ages, disputes about dogma and the thorns of erudition appeared agreeable, even to ladies; Lady Jane Grey, Elizabeth took part in these things: it was a fashion, as two centuries later it was good taste to dispute upon Newton and the existence of God. The Bishop of Meaux wrote to Margaret: “Madame, if there were at the end of the world a doctor who, by a single abridged verb, could teach you as much grammar as it is possible to know, and another as much rhetoric, and another philosophy, and so on with the seven liberal arts, each one by an abridged verb, you would fly there as to the fire.” She did fly there and got overloaded. The heavy philosophic spoil oppressed her already slender thought. Her pious poems are as infantile as the odes written by Racine at Port-Royal. What trouble we have had in getting free from the middle ages! The mind bent, warped and twisted, had contracted the ways of a choir-boy.

A poet of the country composed in her honor the following pretty song:—

Is it not graceful and thoroughly southern? Margaret is less poetic, more French: her verses are not brilliant, but at times are very touching, by force of real and simple tenderness.

A moderate imagination, a woman’s heart thoroughly devoted, and inexhaustible in devotion, a good deal of naturalness, clearness, ease, the art of narration and of smiling, an agreeable but never wicked malice, is not this enough to make you love Margaret and read here the Heptameron?

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IV.

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She wrote the Heptameron here; it seems that a journey to the waters was then less safe than now-a-days.

The first day of the month of September, as the baths of the Pyrenees mountains begin to have virtue, were found at those of Caulderets several persons, from France and Spain as well as other places; some to drink the water, others bathe in it, others to take the mud, which things are so marvellous, that invalids abandoned by the physicians return from them completely cured. But about the time of their return, there came on such great rains, that it seemed that God had forgotten the promise given to Noah never again to destroy the world by water; for all the cabins and dwellings of the said Caulderets were so filled with water that it became impossible to live in them.

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“The French lords and ladies, thinking to return to Tarbes as easily as they had come, found the little brooks so swollen that they could scarcely ford them. But when they came to pass the Bearnese Gave, which was not two feet deep when they first saw it, they found it so large and impetuous, that they made a circuit to look for the bridges, which, being nothing but wood, were swept away by the vehemence of the water.

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"And some, thinking to break the violence of the course by assembling several together, were so promptly swept away, that those who would follow them lost the power and the desire of going after.” Whereupon they separated, each one seeking a way for himself. “Two poor ladies, half a league beyond Pierrefitte, found a bear coming down the mountain, before which they galloped away in such great haste that their horses fell dead under them at the entrance of their dwelling; two of their women, who came a long time after, told them that the bear had killed all their serving men.

“So while they are all at mass, there comes into the church a man with nothing on but his shirt, fleeing as if some one were chasing and following him up. It was one of their companions by the name of GuÉbron, who recounted to them how, as he was in a hut near Pierrefitte, three men came while he was in bed; but he, all in his shirt as he was, with only his sword, wounded one of them so that he remained on the spot, and, while the other two amused themselves in gathering up their companion, thought that he could not escape if not by flight, as he was the least burdened by clothing.

“The abbÉ of Saint-Savin furnished them with the best horses to be had in Lavedan, good Bearn cloaks, a quantity of provisions, and pretty companions to lead them safely in the mountains.”

But it was necessary to busy themselves somewhat, while waiting for the Gave to go down. In the morning they went to find Mme. Oysille, the oldest of the ladies; they devoutly listened to the mass with her; after which “she did not fail to administer the salutary food which she drew from the reading of the acts of the saints and glorious apostles of Jesus Christ.” The afternoon was employed in a very different fashion: they went into a beautiful meadow along the river Gave, where the foliage of the trees is so dense, “that the sun could neither pierce the shade nor warm the coolness, and seated themselves upon the green grass, which is so soft and delicate that they needed neither cushions nor carpets.” And each in turn related some gallant adventure with details infinitely artless and singularly precise. There were some relating to husbands and yet more about monks. The lovely theologian is the grand-daughter of Boccaccio, and the grand-mother of La Fontaine.

This shocks us, and yet is not shocking. Each age has its degree of decency, which is prudery for this and blackguardism for another.

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The Chinese find our trousers and close-fitting coat-sleeves horribly immodest; I know a lady, an Englishwoman in fact, who allows only two parts in the body, the foot and the stomach: every other word is indecent; so that when her little boy has a fall, the governess must say: “Master Henry has fallen, Madame, on the place where the top of his feet rejoins the bottom of his stomach.

The habitual ways of the sixteenth century were very different. The lords lived a little like men of the people; that is why they talked somewhat like men of the people. Bonnivet and Henri II. amused themselves in jumping like school-boys, and leaping over ditches twenty-three feet wide. When Henry VIII. of England had saluted Francis I. on the field of the cloth of gold, he seized him in his arms and tried to throw him, out of pure sportiveness; but the king, a good wrestler, laid him low by a trip. Fancy to-day the Emperor Napoleon at Tilsitt receiving the Emperor Alexander in this fashion. The ladies were obliged to be robust and agile as our peasants. To go to an evening party they had to mount on horseback; Margaret, when in Spain, fearful of being detained, made in eight days the stages for which a good horseman would have required fifteen days; one had, too, to guard one’s self against violence; once she had need of her two fists and all her nails against Bonnivet. In the midst of such manners, free talk was only the natural talk; the ladies heard it every day at table, and adorned with the finest commentaries. BrantÔme will describe for you the cup from which certain lords made them drink, and Cellini will relate you the conversation that was held with the Duchess of Ferrara. A milkmaid now-a-days would be ashamed of it. Students among themselves, even when they are tipsy, will scarce venture what the ladies of honor of Catherine de Medicis sang at the top of their voice and with all their heart. Pardon our poor Margaret; relatively she is decent and delicate, and then consider that two hundred years hence, you also, my dear sir and madam, you will perhaps appear like very blackguards.

V.

Sometimes here, after a broiling day, the clouds gather, the air is stifling, one feels fairly ill, and a storm bursts forth. There was such an one last night. Each moment the heavens opened, cleft by an immense flash, and the vault of darkness lifted itself entire like a tent. The dazzling light marked out the limits of the various cultures and the forms of the trees at the distance of a league. The glaciers flamed with a bluish glimmer; the jagged peaks suddenly lifted themselves upon the horizon like an army of spectres.

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The gorge was illumined in its very depths; its heaped-up blocks, its trees hooked on to the rocks, its torn ravines, its foaming Gave, were seen under a livid whiteness, and vanished like the fleeting visions of an unknown and tortured world.

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Soon the voice of the thunder rolled in the gorges; the clouds that bore it crept midway along the mountain side, and came into collision among the rocks; the report burst out like a discharge of artillery. The wind rose and the rain came on. The inclined plane of the summits opened up under its squalls; the funeral drapery of the pines clung to the sides of the mountain. A creeping plain came out from the rocks and trees. The long streaks of rain thickened the air; under the flashes you saw the water streaming, flooding the summits, descending the two slopes, sliding in sheets over the rocks, and from all sides in hurried waves running to the Gave. In the morning the roads were cut up with sloughs, the trees hung by their bleeding roots, great patches of earth had fallen away, and the torrent was a river.

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