II.
The bathing-house is a beautiful white building, vast and regular; the long front, quite unornamented, is of a very simple form. This architecture, akin to the antique, is more beautiful in the south than in the north; like the sky, it leaves in the mind an impression of serenity and grandeur.
A half of the river washes the façade, and precipitates under the entrance bridge its black sheet bristling with sparkling waves. You enter into a great vestibule, follow a huge staircase with double balustrade, then corridors ending in noble porticos and commanding the terraces. Bathing rooms panelled with marble, a verdant garden, fine points of view everywhere, high vaults, coolness, simple forms, soft hues that rest the eye and contrast with the crude, dazzling light, that out of doors falls on the dusty place and the white houses; all attracts, and it is a pleasure to be ill here.
The Romans, a people as civilized and as bored as we, did as we do, and came to Bagnères. The inhabitants of the country, good courtiers, constructed, on the public place, a temple in honor of Augustus. The temple became a church that was dedicated to St. Martin, but retained the pagan inscription. In 1641, they removed the inscription to above the fountain of the southern entrance, where it still is.
In 1823, they discovered on the site of the bathhouse, columns, capitals, four piscinæ cased with marbles and adorned with mouldings, and a large number of medals with effigies of the first Roman emperors. These remains, found after a lapse of eighteen centuries, leave a deep impression, like that one experiences in measuring the great limestone beds, antediluvian sepulchres of buried races. Our cities are founded upon the ruins of extinct civilizations, and our fields on the remains of subverted creations.
Rome has left its trace everywhere at Bagnères. The most agreeable of these souvenirs of antiquity are the monuments which those who had been healed erected in honor of the Nymphs, and whose inscriptions still remain. Lying in the baignoires of marble, they felt the virtue of the beneficent goddess penetrating their limbs; with eyes half-closed, dozing in the soft embrace of the tepid water, they heard the mysterious spring dripping, dripping with a song, from the recesses of the rock, its mother; the outpoured sheet shone about them with dim, greenish reflexes, and before them passed like a vision the strange eye and magic voice of the unknown divinity, who came to the light in order to bring health to hapless mortals.
Behind the bath-house is a high hill, covered with admirable trees, where wind sequestered walks. Thence you see under your feet the city, whose slated roofs reflect the powerful light of the burning sky and stand out in the limpid air with a tawny and leaden hue. A line of poplars marks on the great green plain the course of the river; towards Tarbes it strikes endlessly into the vaporous distance, amidst tender hues. Opposite, wooded and cultivated hills rise, round-topped, to the very horizon. On the right, the mountains, like so many pyramids, descend in long regular quoins. These hills and mountains cut out a sinuous line on the radiant border of the sky. From the white and smiling horizon, the eye mounts by insensible shades to the deep burning blue of the dome. This whiteness imparts a tender and delicious sensation, mingling of revery and pleasure; it touches, troubles and delights, like the song of Cherubino in Mozart. A fresh wind comes from the valley; the body is as comfortable as the mind; one finds in his nature a harmony hitherto unknown; he no longer bears the weight of his thought or of his mechanism; he does nothing but feel; he becomes thoroughly animal, that is to say, perfectly happy.
In the evening we walk in the plain. There are in the fields of maize retired paths where one is alone. The tops, seven feet high, form, as it were, a copse of trees. The great sheaf of green leaves ends in slender little columns of rosy grains, and the slanting sun slips its arrows of gold among the stalks. You find meadows cut by streams which the peasants dam up, and which, for several hours, overflow to refresh the fields. The day declines, the huge shadow of the mountains darkens the verdure; clouds of insects hum in the heavy air. The whisper of an expiring breeze makes the leaves to shiver for a moment. Meanwhile the carriages and the cavalcades return on all the roads, and the courts are illuminated for the evening promenade.
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