At Home and Abroad

by V. S. Pritchett

  All the way from Bayonne the traveler knows he is in the Basque country, not only by the big blue pancakes of the Basque berets, or the walls of the pelota courts in the villages, but also by the names on the houses. With long overhanging roofs to hold off the rain, these houses are not as a rule called by some fanciful name, but each boldly bears the name of the family, by whose joint fortunes it was built. For, before everything else, before every human wish or adventure, the family house, to the millionaire as to the poor farmer, is preeminent. A man is not an individual man, nor a woman an individual woman. A man or a woman is his or her family. The remarrying of widows was, up to a few years ago, an unpopular enterprise; she would get a serenade of catcalls and tin cans. Families require men for the young girls, not for a woman who is already established as a family woman and may have a husband’s name on her house.

  The plains run up to the gates of the abrupt Pyrenean gorges and passes. The roads run under the shade of the close-packed plane trees, in those long tree tunnels of the French highways, tens of miles at a stretch. In this checkered shade one moves between fields of flowering maize in August, a crop feathery and light. Electric-blue hydrangeas hang over the stone walls of the villages, the vines trail the porches, peaches weigh on the trees and by the roadside bracken grows. Below the road the wide, deep river quietly flows. This is a flat, watery world where the sunlight seems itself to blow like a breeze over fields and trees. It is a quiet, sparkling region, and as you pass out of the Basque preserves into the country of Béarn it suddenly comes to your mind that what has always held you to the French countryside is some nourishing quality of nonchalance and simplicity in the very intensity with which it has been tilled and cared for. No neatness kills it, yet every inch is used. It is careless to look at, yet there is no waste. There is nothing parklike about the French landscape.

  It is at Pau that the strategic traveler can most conveniently get an idea of the terrain he has to tackle. The city stands on a long, crowded cliff above its river and from the gardens of the château of Henri IV, or from the famous promenade, you see the Pyrenees parading before you—if you are lucky. The French poet Lamartine is notorious for saying the view is as stupendous as that of the Bay of Naples; but he did not mention that it might be blotted out by rain, fog or the hazes of summer heat. It took me a week to see the view. Pau looks what it is, a fine French-gray spa of the nineteenth century, now in decline. The audience that gathers now round the bandstand in the evening is not fashionable, it comes from the mass public of scooters, motorcycles, little cars and motor buses, and only occasionally does one see some elegant case of arthritis of the Old School, being wheeled by in a Bath chair. The English made Pau fashionable—it has an excellent winter climate. One or two families went to the length of bringing out a pack of foxhounds!

  From Pau you begin one more attack upon the mountains. You have seen the wide river, the Gave, and you are going to follow that river back to its source, for that is how the French Pyrenees are penetrated. In three hours the climbing bus will take you into Lourdes. Here you are at the “gate”—that is to say at one of those points where a Pyrenean valley debouches upon the plain; or, you can call it the first step of a flight of stairs that will take you from one green valley-landing to the next, upward until you get to the final high valley, or jasse, below the summit. At most of these “gates”—at Lourdes and in Foix, for example—you will find a rising rock and on it a citadel or castle; for these were the towns that guarded the plains in the Middle Ages, the bases for the defenders of the mountains up in the passes. You realize that people on mountain frontiers are by tradition fighters. They live hard. They produce famous generals. Foch was one of them. They know that they have always lived on the routes of invasion. And when there are no invaders, they are on guard against the inhabitants of the next valley. When the Saracens had been driven out, the story of the Pyrenees became the story of the wars of Count against Count, until eventually the central power in France put a stop to it. You can still see fortified churches on both sides of the Pyrenees, and on the Spanish side, loopholes in the farm walls that were used in the Napoleonic wars and the civil wars of the last century.

  War never quite dies in the Pyrenees. In the Spanish Civil War of this century the defeated remnants fought on in the passes, the refugees streamed over; and even now, when rumors of a rising against Franco are heard, it is to the hideouts in the mountains that people turn their heads.

  But healing as well as war has also been a powerful interest of the Pyrenees, as indeed it is of the Alps. Whatever is claimed for Lourdes in the way of miracles, there is no doubt about the benefits of its mineral springs and of all the springs of the Pyrenees. Their virtues have been known by mountaineers for centuries. Lourdes represents the mysteries of healing at their most extravagant. Lourdes claims to be the most popular place of pilgrimage in Christendom, outside of Rome. A million pilgrims go there every year to see a spectacle that is part sordid, part fantastic, stirring both pity and wonder. The rigorous rejecter of miracles is bowled over by the manifestation of faith and the extraordinary emotional effect of the winding torchlight procession to the Miraculous Grotto at night, when the human crowd appears to have turned into a lashing and flaming serpent. It is strange to reflect that this pretty, medieval town, dramatically divided by its ravine, woke up in 1876—when the appalling Byzantine basilica was created—and became one of the first places in the world to perceive that to do something about pent-up mass emotion was profitable and perhaps necessary. It is impossible to see those packed trains, those loaded lines of motor coaches, the long, patient trailing queues of sick men and women in the procession, the cripples laid out on their stretchers waiting to be immersed in the miraculous water, without being saddened by human agony. A dying little town has become a rich city and, on the whole, a cheerful one.

  There is a lively market in Lourdes and a strong whiff of the mountains comes into it. You see dressed chamois skins hanging on the stalls—it is common to see herds of thirty or forty chamois prettily dotted near the higher passes. Wild-looking Spanish gypsies come down to buy. They look like bandits and are raggedly dressed, but the things that delight them on the market stalls are the baby clothes. The men crowd round the little dresses with childish pleasure. “Pretty, pretty!” they shout to one another, holding up a child’s dress, and the eyes of their women sparkle keenly. This market goes in for all the finery of the mountaineers—the mule blankets, the bedding, the rope-soled shoes. One often sees an old man sitting on a chair in the street binding the rope into the shape of a foot and stitching on the cotton top. The Sunday heat, the smell of frying and Pernod give a tang to the market. The bistros are packed, the jukeboxes are going full out. The Paras—parachute soldiers—on leave, wander about looking for pretty girls, who are very sharp with their tongues. The traffic gets in a mess at the crossroads and one sees the classic French sight of the motorist jeering at the policeman who tries, in vain, to stop him. A fire engine goes by and that, in France, is regarded for some reason as the most ludicrous sight in the world. A whole café full of men bursts into laughter.

  What would shock the tourists of the nineteenth century if they came here now would be that, like Pau, Lourdes has lost its high bourgeois elegance. In the days when Lamartine, Hippolyte Taine, George Sand, Mérimée, all the talent and fashion of France went to Pau and Luchon, the mountains were romantic, ideal and bourgeois; now the rest of us, the millions, swarm over them.

  From Lourdes the climb begins. The river is smaller, stonier. It is caught between hot ravines that turn into hotter, deeper, narrow gorges. The little towns are built into the mountainside. You sit outside some little café, breathing the mountain air, your ears full of the sound of water dragging and gushing over stone and boulder. For this is the underlying sound of the mountains, the brawling noise of water somewhere near. You look down at the gorge at Luz and cannot see the bottom of it. You can almost hear the voice of George Sand saying across the generat
ions, like any other French tourist: “C’est formidable.”

  The gorges are part of the stairway. They take you to a few miles of valley where the mountains open up in what are called plans; then the mountains close, you are winding along precipices once more, under ways that are tunneled at the points where avalanches are likely; there comes another “formidable” gorge; you ascend more and more steeply, and now the stream that was a river at Pau is a clatter of waterfalls, tumbling down. You try to sit down by the roadside and cannot find a level piece of grass or rock to sit on; all is tilting and headlong; the mountains shoot up and seem to hang over your shoulders, gang up, crowd in. The peculiar gleam of high country comes into the grass; the leaves shine here with a polish you don’t see below. Bridges are suddenly high, villages seem to be perched above. Until at last you are on the top landing but one—the poorest, bleakest of all the settlements—and against the mountain wall.

  After this the true climbing begins, rough, bone-shaking footwork to the col and the Pont d’Espagne. Most of the passes of the Pyrenees are bald patches and a dangerous optimism is likely to fill the climber as he stands against the sky and takes in the sight below him. Here the new ranges seem to break against the main wall like a jagged sea, brown in the nearer ranges, fading to unearthly blues, violets and grays; and if there is cloud below in the valleys, the sea seems to foam and the peaks to stick out like tusky rocks.

  A schoolmaster and his wife were staying at Gavarnie, a short stout middle-aged couple, who would set out in the morning at a military pace, and return in the evening dusty and scalded by the mountain sun. They were always on the march. Their life was one long epic of energy.

  “For the Pyrenees,” the schoolmaster said to me, “you must not be too optimistic. You must make your plans precisely. Until you reach the pass you can allow yourself confidence; but at the top—you must reflect. One sees three or four tracks on the descent. Be careful. One can easily be deceived. The obvious is certain to be wrong. You take it and you are lost on some spur. Twice I myself, monsieur,” he said, “have nearly lost my life.” He turned to his wife for confirmation. “Two nights I spent on that mountain without food. And remember—mountain travel goes by hours, not miles.”

  “I myself,” I boasted in return, “once got trapped into sixteen hours’ walking, the last hours in the dark, on the Spanish side. Luckily there was a moon. I slept in a room where goatskins were being cured.”

  “Ah!” he said, “the Spaniards live like rats.”

  Most Pyrenean walkers tell you it is wise to reckon on twenty-four hours from one human habitation to the next over the passes, and that it is best to find a hut for the night and be polite to the shepherd if he happens to come in and find you lying on his sack. Occasionally there are formal meetings between Spanish and French shepherds on the cols. In the valleys of Ossau and Assape, the French shepherds go up once a year in feast-day costume to meet the Spanish mayor of Roncal at a spot called La Pierre Saint-Martin, to pay dues for pasturage. The politenesses end with a loud cry of “Patz Aban!”—Peace in the future!

  Gavarnie is not a difficult crossing and is very well known, but it is hard enough. Above the cirque are the far peaks of what is called the Marbore—the Pic, the Epaule, the Tour and the Casque—also the spectacular Brèche de Roland, that sudden split in the ridge, so sharply cut that one can easily believe that Roland’s sword had really hacked through it. One can indeed believe anything at these heights, among these upper rocks that look like old teeth, human heads or coldhearted, baleful giants, and it is no wonder that the Spanish side has been populated by legendary demons, warlocks, witches. It has been suggested that the Pyrenean witch legends refer also to isolated people of the old pagan religion, and were encouraged by popular imagination or by Christian propaganda in the Middle Ages.

  But nature has required no human aid. For the inside of the Pyrenees is rich in fantastic formations. As the mineral springs show, there is an active inner life going on in the Pyrenees, sulphurous, mineral and icy. There are miles of underground rivers, the range is riddled with caves. Some of them were inhabited by prehistoric man: at Niaux, in the valley of Vicdessos, there are drawings of bison and horses on the cavern walls. At Gargas, near Luchon, there are those astonishing caves whose walls bear the imprint of more than two hundred hands. At first sight they might be thought to be hanging bats. Many have chopped-off fingers and this has been thought by some experts to indicate a ceremonial mutilation. For in many of the caves there is evidence of religious use.

  You go back down the French valleys, zigzagging your way to the eastern end of the Pyrenees toward Ax-les-Thermes. It is an up-and-down journey among beechwoods, along little transparent rivers that sparkle against the stone walls of the villages, past towns crowned by the fortified towers of Romanesque churches baked brown in the sun or gleaming in the wet. It is the mixing of steep woods, ravines, rock, water and tree-dappled pasture that is the making of the ever-changing scene. One never knows whether a new valley will open at the next turn of the road. The larger towns are sleepy; at midday when the awnings are out over the cafés and you sit among the flowers, these places are soundless. You sit eating trout, perhaps a cassoulet of Toulouse—goose and mutton browned with bacon and hard, strong sausage and haricot beans—or content yourself with pipérade, the omelet of sweet spices and tomatoes, or gargalada (snails with red pepper), and you drink the wines of Jurançon or Roussillon.

  There is Luchon, a ravishing and lively town of fine eighteenth-century houses, avenues of limes and the tinkling of water; above it the mountains become tremendous, and the hot springs bubble in the grottoes. There is St. Bertrand-de-Comminges with its Roman statuary, especially notable to me for the sight of a guest at the hotel struggling down through the woods with an enormous fungus, the size of a small hat. He came in and was soon surrounded by lady admirers. He got the cook to fry the mushroom and ate it.

  “I am going to get another,” he said. “They do me good.” And late that afternoon, as the bus took me away, there he was once more, a fat little man of fifty, in shorts, like some triumphant big-game hunter, with another monstrous kill. “You’ve got to know them,” he had said. “Or else...”

  He closed his eyes and drew his hand across his throat and did a small death scene very neatly. If it would only rain, he said, he would be out with a bag “collecting my snails.” My fungus, my snails, my soup, my cassoulet, my coffee! The French discuss these matters in detail and go into them all with the waiter before they order, with a pertinacity seen nowhere else in the world. These are the most serious things in life.

  From Ax-les-Thermes you go up to Andorra, the little roof-top republic of six thousand people, a miniature nation which has been independent since the thirteenth century and exists under the joint suzerainty of the French government and the Spanish bishop of Urgel. A wooded upland valley, snowed-up in the winter, Andorra is not as poor as might be thought: it has its sheep, it grows tobacco and it is famous for smugglers, although smuggling in the Pyrenees is an arduous trade. It is a subject on which no Pyrenean ever has any knowledge if you ask him! The utter isolation of Andorra has gone because a motor road runs through it now; its little medieval Council and peasant president have been interviewed by journalists from all over the world. Some shrewd businessman installed a radio station there, but a later attempt to turn this severe peasant Arcadia into a little Monaco for gamblers has failed. The Civil War in Spain also interfered, for Franco’s police state has sent up gendarmes, fearing that revolutionaries might use Andorra as a jumping-off place. It is, after all, on the edge of Aragon, the hearth of Spanish liberty, and of Catalonia, the center of an ardent movement for independence.

  By Ax-les-Thermes one has noticed a change in the country. The mountains are harsher, browner and burned on the heights, and in the lower valleys the Mediterranean pine replaces the beech. The lower plain of Roussillon is rich, a stretch of vineyards in the blinding Mediterranean light and of torrid flats by the
sea. Here are the great cities of Toulouse and Perpignan and that peculiar piece of stage scenery called Carcassonne, a complete medieval city artificially preserved and restored like a museum piece by Viollet-le-Duc in the nineteenth century. In the clear Mediterranean air Carcassonne looks startling, unreal and almost deathly. It is, I suppose, the most remarkable fake in the world, or rather the most remarkable architectural fly preserved in amber. Prosper Mérimée, the author of Carmen, has the credit for saving Carcassonne and Viollet-le-Duc for restoring it; but when I grew up feeling against that sort of thing was strong and I cannot overcome the prejudice.

  For most people Spain spreads into France like a deep, rich wine stain at the Catalonian end of the Pyrenees, and the Catalan tongue is near enough to Spanish, though abrupt and shortened, to keep up this illusion. You smell Spain in Toulouse; in Perpignan the oily odor comes even more strongly out of doorways as you pass. You see the Catalan bonnet on the heads of the girls. In the avenues of Perpignan the people themselves have something that looks like the Spanish gravity. No French sculptor could have carved the dramatic and violent Christ of the cathedral of Perpignan, a figure that transcends any other piece of sculpture from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean. But there is really a subtle deception. Test a Catalan with your proverb that Africa begins at the Pyrenees and wait for his rage. No, he will say, “Africa begins where Catalonia ends and Spain begins, further south, at the Ebro.”

  There were Spanish exiles in Perpignan, working as waiters or barmen, running restaurants, or living—to all appearance—as Spaniards do, simply by walking up and down. In the evenings you see three or four people sitting in a shop talking; they are Spaniards, they have created, inevitably, a tertulia, a little talking club that meets every night. You see a lonely one sitting before a glass of water in a café. If they drink a glass of wine they will put a slice of orange in it. I saw one Spanish couple add Coca-Cola to theirs! Théophile Gautier said Spanish wine was vinegar, but it is not as bad as that. Indeed the wines of French and Spanish Catalonia are sweetish but good.