V.
Coming out again upon the street, we stray down into one of the shops,—a shop local and naïve, a veritable French country-store. We have noticed the hemp-soled sandals worn by many of the mountaineers, and incline to test them for the approaching excursion to Gavarnie. The dark-eyed little proprietor and his wife spring to greet us; foreign customers, especially English or American, are with them a rare sight,—St. Sauveur, a mile away, being a more usual stopping-place for travelers than Luz; and soon the floor is littered with canvas-topped footwear, solicitously searched over for the needed sizes. A running fire of conversation accompanies the fitting. They show the usual French interest in ourselves and our country; we enlarge their views considerably on the latter score, though heroically refraining from romancing. They make a fair livelihood from their store, they inform us; many farmers and peasants outside of the village come to buy at Luz. In fact, the small shopkeepers such as these are generally the prosperous class in a place like Luz, though the standard of prosperity might not coincide with that of the cities. But as compared with that of their customers among the peasantry of the district, it seems to include not only necessity but comfort.
For notwithstanding the luxuriance of these valleys, little of their luxury, even to-day, goes to the tillers of their soil. The Pyrenean farmer or mountaineer has to support his family now, as in past ages, in poverty. Little beyond the most meagre of diet can he commonly provide them, and it is the joint anxiety of ensuring even this, that wears and disfeatures him and them, as much doubtless as its meagreness. Bread, of barley or wheat or rye, is the great staple, supplemented by what milk can be spared from the town's demands. Eggs and butter go oftener to the market. Vegetables, such as lentils and beans, are also important, a few potatoes, occasional fruits and berries, and above all the powerful and omnipresent onion or garlic stew, signaling its brewing for rods around. In the summer, if he moves with his family to the higher pasture-lands to better pasture the herds, his daily menu expands in some directions and contracts in others. Fête-days and Sundays and trips to the town are usually the occasions of some indulgence, and a thin wine and perhaps macaroni or a pullet or a cut of beef or pork make the event memorable. But the chief fact is that he is fairly contented under all. His life has work and poverty and care, but it has its freedom in addition; he accepts it as it is, fully and without envy; it is not his class who are first to swell the numbers of the sans-culottes. When Henry IV pressed his old peasant playfellows to ask some gift or favor at his hands, their modest ambition stopped at a simple permission to "pay their tithe in grain without the straw."
Often there is even a little fund put by, or anxiously invested; France is noted for the number of abstemious husbandmen who add their mite of savings to her financial enterprises, and the distress and discouragement caused when one of these fails is easily conceivable. On the whole, the French small proprietor or peasant is thrifty and uncomplaining to a rather surprising degree, considering the national trait of restiveness. The revolutions of France are bred in her great cities, not in the provinces.
"But pastoral occupations form only a small part of the business of the Pyrenees," observes a recent writer in Blackwood's, in a summary so compact and accurate as to merit quoting. "There are large, various and constantly increasing industries, all special to the country. As water power is to be found everywhere, there are flour-mills and saw-mills in many of the villages. In certain valleys,—round Luz, for instance,—almost every peasant has rough little grinding stones and converts his own barley, buckwheat and maize into flour. Handlooms are numerous, and coarse woollen stuffs for the peasants' clothes are largely made. At Nay, near Pau, are factories where blue berrets for the Pyrenees and red fezzes for Constantinople are woven side by side. The scarlet sashes that the men wear round their waists are produced at Oloron. The manufacture of rough shoes in jute or hemp (espadrillas) is a growing element of local trade. Marble and slate works are plentiful, mainly concentrated round Lourdes and at Bagnères de Bigorre.... Persons who are insensible to marble can turn to the knitted woollen fabrics of which such quantities are made at Bagnères; many of them are as fine as the best Shetland work, with the additional merit of being as soft as eider-down. The barley-sugar which everybody eats at Cauterets must also be counted; for it rises there to a position which it possesses nowhere else in the world,—it is regarded as a necessity of life; the commerce in it attains such proportions that 10,000 sticks are sold each day during the season. The little objects in boxwood which are hawked about by peddlers must be included too; and the list of special Pyrenean industries may be closed by bird-catching, which is carried on in the autumn months, especially round St. Pé and Bagnères de Bigorre.
"There remains one trade more, however,—the greatest of all,—the traffic in hot water. Numerous as are the natural beauties of the district,—varied as are its attractions and its products,—it owes its success, its prosperity and its wealth to its mineral springs. Some two millions of gallons are supplied each day by them. Fifty-three towns and villages exist already round the sources, and others are being invented each year. The inhabitants of the valleys are making money out of them in every form; for though the harvest is limited to the warm months, it is so various, so widespread, and so productive while it lasts, that everybody has a share in it, from the land-owner who sees his grass converted into building ground, to the half naked boy who cries the Paris newspapers when the post comes in.
"That hot water should become a civilizer and should mount in that way to the level of religion, education, monogamy, wealth and the fine arts, is a new view of hot water; but it is a true one in this case, for nothing else could have evolved the Pyrenees so widely or so fast. Neither commerce nor conquest has ever changed a region as hot water has transformed these valleys."