I.
Cauterets is a town at the bottom of a valley, melancholy enough, paved, and provided with an octroi. Innkeepers, guides, the whole of a famished population besieges us; but we have considerable force of mind, and after a spirited resistance we obtain the right of looking about and choosing.
Fifty paces further on, we are fastened upon by servants, children, donkey-hirers and boys, who accidentally stroll about us. They offer us cards, they praise up to us the site, the cuisine; they accompany us, cap in hand, to the very edge of the village; at the same time they elbow away all competitors: “The stranger is mine, I’ll baste you if you come near him.” Each hotel has its runners on the watch; they hunt the isard in winter, the traveller in summer.
The town has several springs: that of the King cured Abarca, king of Aragon; that of Cæsar restored health, as they say, to the great Cæsar. Faith is needed in history as well as in medicine.
[FULL-SIZE] -- [Medium-Size]
For example, in the time of Francis I. the Eaux Bonnes cured wounds; they were called Eaux d’arqtiebusades ; the soldiers wounded at Pavia were sent to them. Now they cure diseases of the throat and chest. A hundred years hence they will perhaps heal something else; with every century medicine makes an advance.
“Formerly,” said Signarelle, “the liver was at the right and the heart at the left; we have reformed all that.”
A celebrated physician one day said to his pupils: “Employ this remedy at once, while it still cures.” Medicines, like hats, have their fashions.
Yet what can be said against this remedy? The climate is warm, the gorge sheltered, the air pure, the gayety of the sun is cheering. A change of habits leads to a change of thoughts; melancholy ideas take flight. The water is not bad to drink; you have had a beautiful journey; the moral cures the physical nature; if not, you have had hope for two months—and what, I beg to know, is a remedy, if not a pretext for hoping? You take patience and pleasure until either illness or invalid departs, and everything is for the best in the best of worlds.