IX.
A winter station such as Pau is a hub with many spokes. Excursions and drives are in all directions. Idle fashion enjoys its outlets to the air, and invalidism demands them. Each hamlet is a picnic resort. One has choice of time and space, from an hour's ramble in the park, to a day's long visit to the monster sight of the mountains, the Cirque of Gavarnie. The park, as we pass, deserves its hour's ramble. Its wide promenade, arched with great trees, is entered not far from the castle, and leads along the torrent of the Gave, whose source we are later to see in the snows around Gavarnie itself. It is the scene of the favorite constitutional of Pau,—a neutral ground for all social factions.
Four drives in particular point us each to its own quarter of the compass. One is long, with the watering places of Eaux Chaudes and Eaux Bonnes for its double destination. The others, nearer in distance, lead farther in event,—back through the centuries, ninety, fifty, thirty decades, in turn.
The first of these is to Morlaäs, the earliest capital of Béarn. The distance is seven miles. Though the road is flat and tame, the ride affords superb prospects of the line of the Pyrenees, and these culminate at the top of the hill just before descending to the village. Here the panorama is even finer than from Pau. Easterly ranges have come into the field. The sweep of the mountain barrier in sight is a full hundred miles, and the waste of intervening plains, no longer hidden by coteaux, increases the impression of distance without lessening that of height. The greater peaks rise now into better proportion. Mont Perdu and the Vignemale loom above their neighbors, and best of all is seen far away the crown at least of the great Maladetta.
You must enjoy Morlaäs wholly for its past. You cannot enjoy it for its present. It is a poor, dejected, straggling street, noticeable only for mud and stones and dun-coated hovels. It does not, like Fuenterrabia, retain the picturesqueness of its antiquity. There, it is the old town's to-day that carries us delightfully back into its yesterday. But at Morlaäs there is neither to-day nor yesterday.
For the prime of this place antedates old Fuenterrabia by many a hundred years. The latter may come to the former's estate as many centuries hence. Orthez is but in middle life, Pau a summer stripling, in the presence of this wreck of time. Poor Morlaäs! Thou hast seen thy long successor rise and reign and fall, succeeded in its turn by the brilliant capital that now sends hither its subjects to scoff at thy driveling old age.
To share the mood of this grey spot you must travel far back, down its dim retrospect. You must retrace long, successive eras, sensitive to the spirit of each as you pass. You must cross the sixteenth century, brightening into humanity yet still un-human,—the vivid, reckless King of Navarre its type. You must penetrate beyond the twilight where Count Gaston's armor flashes across from the brutal towers of Orthez, lawless and splendid; you must grope back farther into the gloom, four hundred years still, before you see the shadowy Morlaäs in its full stature, proud, powerful, rude, rich,—the capital of old Béarn.
Nine hundred years ago. Mohammed's name and power were still new. Charles Martel had just saved Europe from the Saracens. England had not been recreated by a Norman Conqueror. The Crusades were still undreamed of. Art, science, letters, were in custody in the East. These armed children ran riot,—passionate, intense, uncontrolled, loving fight and finery as the Trojans, or the Norse heroes of the Sagas.
A single fine portal of the original sanctuary is still to be seen. But of the old castle not a trace remains; only its name survives,—la Hourquie,—with its significant etymological story: Horcæ,—furcæ,—- fourches patibulaires,—the gibbet. For these viscounts of Morlaäs had recourse to a savage expedient to control the lawlessness of their day. They kept a gallows-tree erect before the castle gateway, a speaking symbol of vengeance, and there the blackened corpse, might hang until replaced, swinging in the winter wind. There was a mint here also, which stamped the metal of the little realm, and on the coins too appeared the device of the gibbet. There is a tradition that the executions took place only on market-days, and in the Pyrenees to this day the market-gathering is known as the Hourquie.
Eleven miles west leads us four centuries forward again from Morlaäs. This is Lescar; with its ancient cathedral, the St. Denis of Béarn, the burial-place of generations of its rulers. Morlaäs has been deposed, and Orthez reigns in its stead,—with Lescar as primate. The gleam and glory of chivalry have grown with the years. Here was the seat of the church militant in its strongest manifestation. "The bishops of Lescar," writes Johnson, satirically, "are said to have been well suited to the times in which they lived; fighting when they could, and cursing when they could not. In the early history of the province, they are found lustily taking a part in the battles of the frontier country; and when peaceful times came, getting up a comfortable trade with the intrusive infidels they had so lately belabored. The reputation for wealth acquired by this astute community seems to have brought its troubles upon the enterprising diocesans, for tradition has it that in the eleventh century Viscount Dax laid sacrilegious hands upon their property. Whether he was too strong for the carnal weapon or spiritual manifestations were deemed more appropriate to his particular case, history does not record, but certain it is that the rebellious noble, being deaf to expostulation, was excommunicated, and resenting that, was seized with a leprosy, of which he died. His successor, adopting the same line of policy as the deceased, was treated in the same way and with the same result. So that between the thunders of the church and the arms of the flesh, the Episcopality of Lescar waxed mightily, and its bishops took the position of premier barons in the province, sitting next to royalty in council and therein keeping to order all grumblers against their rights and privileges. If two of the venerable prelates themselves happened to disagree and logic failed them, then,—it being scarcely orthodox for the reverend men to fight the matter out personally,—they employed a couple of lusty varlets to settle the business for them, and upon the weakest shoulders fell all the consequent disadvantages; thus instituting a simple and expeditious method of cutting short disputes by which the ecclesiastical courts of the present day do not appear to have benefited."
Lescar was called the ville septénaire; for it had, it is said, seven churches, seven fountains, seven mills, seven woods, seven vineyards, seven gates, and seven towers on the ramparts. It is another senile hamlet now, and imagination must do all the work. Even the cathedral has been altered, and in its large, rather plain interior are few relics of its earlier state, few marks to tell of the after-despoiled tombs of Henri Quatre's ancestry. There is a satisfying legend about this sanctuary. One of the feudal rulers had a violent hatred for some neighboring seignior, and finally secured his assassination. His hatred was thereupon followed by a remorse equally violent,—these men were violent in good as in bad, which redeems much; and in atonement he rebuilt magnificently this cathedral, which was even then an old one, and added to it a monastery as well. And to complete the story of poetic expiation, the assassin he had employed became a penitent himself; was later appointed one of the monks by his penitent patron; and ended by rising to the reverend office of abbot itself.
Southeast from Pau lies our third landmark of the past,—Coarraze. It is a longer road and a dusty one, but a village will tell off each mile, the Gave de Pau brings encouraging messages along the way, and the far Pic du Midi de Bigorre keeps inspiringly in sight. Besides the commoner trees to be met in this and other directions from Pau, are occasional orange-trees, Spanish chestnuts, aloes, acacias, and here and there a magnolia; but this region is north of much tropical verdure, even now in July, and plain beech and oak play the principal parts. Coarraze can be reached by rail also, and preferably so when haste is an object, for it is thirteen miles by the highway, while the train covers the distance within the half-hour.
This spot too had its castle and its feudal barons, subject to the court at Orthez. A tower of the castle still remains. It is of Raymond, one of these barons, that Froissart tells the legend of the familiar spirit. This obliging bogey was wont to visit his host as he lay asleep, waking him to tell him what had happened during the day in distant countries. His mode of rousing his patron was unceremonious, not to say boisterous. In his first visit, he made a terrific tumult throughout the castle, pounded the doors and casements, broke the plates in the kitchen, appalled the sleeping servants, "knocking about everything he met with in the castle, as if determined to destroy all within it.... On the following night the noises and rioting were renewed, but much louder than before; and there were such blows struck against the door and windows of the chamber of the knight that it seemed they would break them down."
The baron could no longer desist from leaping out of his bed, and proceeding to investigate matters; and in the end the bogey and he became fast friends. In fact, the former "took such an affection to the Lord de Corasse that he came often to see him in the night-time; and when he found him sleeping, he pulled his pillow from under his head or made great noises at the door or windows; so that when the knight was awakened, he said, 'let me sleep.'
"'I will not,' replied he, 'until I have told thee some news.'
"The knight's lady was so much frightened, the hairs of her head stood on end and she hid herself under the bed-clothes.
"'Well,' said the knight, 'and what news hast thou brought me?'
"The spirit replied, 'I am come from England, Hungary or some other place, which I left yesterday, and such and such things have happened.'
"Thus did the Lord de Corasse know by means of this messenger all things that were passing in the different parts of the world;" and for years this invisible mediæval sprite kept his patron comfortably posted on all current events, in a ghostly adumbration of the modern newspaper press.
But Coarraze and its castle carry us on later than Froissart's days. Here young Prince Henry ran about in his hardy youth, and romped and played pranks on his future subjects. Nothing delighted him more in after life than to come back here and hunt up his old peasant playfellows, bashful and reluctant, and bewilder and charm them with his state and his bonhomie. Most of the old castle is gone now, destroyed by a storm and since replaced by a newer structure. The old baron's spirit-messenger or the "white lady" of the House of Navarre have only the single tower remaining, for their ghostly visits,—finding change over all save the far line of the Pyrenees glittering unearthly in the moonlight.