MIRRORS AND MOUNTAINS.
"All along the valley, stream that flashest white,
Deepening thy voice with the deepening of the night."
—TENNYSON'S Cauterets.
Cauterets confirms its first good impressions. The next day proves cloudy and foggy, and we spend it lazily, re-reading and answering letters, or wandering about the town, absorbing its streets and shops. The season is fairly afloat, and all sail is set. At the angle of two thoroughfares, a stretch of ground has been brushed together for a park or promenade, and this, sprinkled with low, flat-topped trees and a band-stand, naturally attracts us first. Booths and cafés and nicknack stalls reach around its sides, and across from us stands a fine official-looking structure of marble, which we learn is the Thermal Establishment. We stroll toward this, through the groups of promenaders, run the gauntlet of the booths, inspecting hopelessly their catchpenny wares and games, and find ourselves before it. It is well placed, and architecturally effective. To judge from the goodly patronage, it is pathologically effective as well. Within, the large, tiled hall conducts right and left to wings containing rows of white-tiled bath-apartments and two full-sized swimming-rooms. An imposing marble stairway leads upward to reading, billiard and gaming apartments, café and restaurant and a theatre-hall. Evidently the Thermal Establishment is the pivot of Cauterets. The serious use of these waters is carried to a science. You can be steamed, suffused, sprayed, sponged, showered, submerged or soaked. You can seek health from a teaspoon or a tub. Make choice, and buy a season ticket. Rather, the attendant physicians make the choice, for all is by rule here and no one moistens lip or finger without due prescription.
These springs are celebrated among French doctors. The systems of treatment are kept abreast of all modern theories. The waters are sulphureous, very hot, and abundant. They serve in throat and stomach troubles and for a wide range of ailments "where there is indicated a powerfully alterative and stimulating treatment."
We ramble back across the esplanade and out into the streets. The stores, always friendly in their hostile designs, conspire to be especially attractive in Cauterets. We waste much time—from a masculine standpoint—in an enticing lace store, where really fine Spanish nettings are purchased at tempting prices. They sell too, in Cauterets, the woolly stuffs called Barèges crape, marvelously delicate in texture, woven in various tints for mufflers and capes and shoulder-wraps. Farther up the street, we are allured during the forenoon into buying a woollen berret or two, and scarlet sashes, the badge of the country, for to-morrow's mountain excursion; and yield in the plaza to the fascination of barley-sugar candy and toothsome cakes of Spanish chocolate. But all entreaties to buy young Pyrenean dogs warranted bred in the region, are manfully resisted.
We invest too in a strange variety of umbrella, which can be folded into wondrously small compass and put into the pocket or the traveling-bag,—invest in it after a long struggle of rates, wherein each side gains the satisfaction of victory by a compromise. The eagerness of the Frenchy vendor,—his dramatic acting-out of the umbrella's workings,—his voluble deprecation of a possible lower price, and his gradual sliding down from his end of the scale as we rise in it from ours,—these accessories fully double the zest of the transaction for both. One must be wary and alert to properly enjoy European shopping; but if one is thus prepared, it can be made to furnish very solid enjoyment indeed. "As a rule," as the genial author of Sketches in the South of France observes, "the British purchaser must offer one half the price asked. Everybody does it, and it is in no way offensive, because the sum has been pre-arranged accordingly. The British costume springs the market at least ten per cent, bad French ten more, and an apparent ignorance of both market and language cannot be let off at less than thirty or forty. Expostulation is useless, even when convenient; the torrent of 'impossible', 'incroyable,' 'que c'est gentil,' 'ravissant,' 'beau' would drown any opposition. The only chance is to be deaf to argument, dumb to solicitations, to place the sum proposed before the merchant, and if it be not accepted, retire in dignified silence. Ten to one you will be followed and a fresh assault commenced; be resolute, and the same odds you get your bargain."
Variety marks the stores not only, but the streets and saunterers. All these Pyrenean resorts put on the motley. There is of course the substratum of plainly-garbed humanity; but as at Eaux Bonnes, it is set off with scarlet-coated guides, Spaniards in deep-colored mantles, peasant women with red capulets or bright-hued shoulder-wear, and the satin finish of fashion in its passing carriages. Hucksters are pleading their varied wares in the plaza, and here and there a shovel-hatted priest is given reverential right of way. We meet scarcely an English face, however, and of our own travel-loving countrymen none at all. At noon the band plays in the music pavilion, and by degrees the idle world drifts in that direction. The round café-tables under the trees gradually sort out their little coteries, and white-aproned gentry skate about with liqueur-bottles, clinking glass beer-mugs, baskets of rolls, and the inevitable long-handled tin coffee-pots. The outdoor scene tempts us more than a hotel luncheon; we cast in our lot with an alert-eyed waiter, and the syrups and chocolate he brings are doubly sweetened with the strains of Martha.