I.
I thought that here I should find the country; a village like a hundred others, with long roofs of thatch or tiles, with crannied walls and shaky doors, and in the courts a pell-mell of carts with fagots, and tools, and domestic animals, in short, the whole picturesque and charming unconstraint of country life. I find a Paris street and the promenades of the Bois de Boulogne.
Never was country less countrified: you skirt a row of houses drawn up in line, like a row of soldiers when carrying arms, all pierced regularly with regular windows, decked with signs and posters, bordered by a side-walk, and having the disagreeably decent aspect of hotels garnis. These uniform buildings, mathematical lines, this disciplined and formal architecture make a laughable contrast with the green ridges that flank them. It seems grotesque that a little warm water should have imported into these mountain hollows civilization and the cuisine.
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This singular village tries every year to extend itself, and with great difficulty, so straitened and stifled is it in its ravine; they break the rock, they open trenches on the declivity, they suspend houses over the torrent, they stick others, as it were, to the side of the mountain, they pile up their chimneys even to the roots of the beech-trees; thus they construct behind the principal street a melancholy lane which dips down or raises itself as it can, muddy, steep, half filled with temporary stalls and wooden wine-shops, lodging-places of artisans and guides; at last it drops down to the Gave, into a nook decked out with drying linen, which is washed in the same place with the hogs.
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Of all places in the world, Eaux Bonnes is the most unpleasant on a rainy day, and rainy days are frequent there; the clouds are engulfed between two walls of the valley of Ossau, and crawl slowly along half way up the height; the summits disappear, the floating masses come together, accumulate because the gorge has no outlet, and fall in fine cold rain. The village becomes a prison; the fog creeps to the earth, envelopes the houses, extinguishes the light already obscured by the mountain; the English might think themselves in London.
The visitors look through the window-panes at the jumbled forms of the trees, the water that drips from the leaves, the mourning of the shivering and humid woods; they listen to the gallop of belated riders, who return with clinging and pendent skirts, like fine birds with their plumage disordered by the rain; they try whist in their despondency; some go down to the reading-room and ask for the most blood-stained pages of Paul Féval or Frédéric Souliê; they can read nothing but the gloomiest dramas; they discover leanings towards suicide in themselves, and construct the theory of assassination. They look at the clock and bethink themselves that the doctor has ordered them to drink three times a day; then they button up their overcoats with an air of resignation, and climb the long, stiff slope of the streaming road; the lines of umbrellas and soaked mantles are a pitiable spectacle; they come, splashing through the water, and seat themselves in the drinking-hall. Each one takes his syrup-flask from its numbered place on a sort of étagère, and the throng of the drinkers form in line about the tap. For the rest, patience is soon acquired here; amid such idleness the mind goes to sleep, the fog puts an end to ideas, and you follow the crowd mechanically; you act only at the instigation of others, and you look at objects without receiving from them any reaction.
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After the first glass, you wait an hour before taking another; meanwhile you march up and down, elbowed by the dense groups, who drag themselves laboriously along between the columns. Not a seat to be had, except two wooden benches where the ladies sit, with their feet resting upon the damp stones: the economy of the administration supposes that the weather is always fine. Wearied and dejected faces pass before the eyes without awaking any interest. For the twentieth time you look over the marble trinkets, the shop with razors and scissors, a map that hangs on the wall. What is there that one is not capable of on a rainy day, if obliged to keep moving for an hour between four walls, amidst the buzzing of two hundred people? You study the posters, contemplate assiduously some figures which pretend to represent the manners of the country: these are elegant and rosy shepherds, who lead to the dance smiling shepherdesses rosier than themselves. You stretch your neck out at the door only to see a gloomy passage where invalids are soaking their feet in a trough of warm water, all in a row like school-children on cleaning and excursion days. After these distractions you return to your lodging, and find yourselves tête-à-tête, in close conversation with your chest of drawers and your light-stand.
