II.

Laruns is a market-town. Instead of a hogshead there were four times two hogsheads and as many musicians, all playing together, and each one a different portion of the same air. This clatter excepted and a few magnificent pairs of velvet breeches, the festival was the same as that at Aas. What we go there to see is the procession.

At first everybody attends vespers; the women in the sombre nave of the church, the men in a gallery, the small boys in a second gallery higher up, under the eye of a frowning schoolmaster. The young girls, kneeling close to the gratings of the choir, repeated Ave Marias, to which the deep voice of the congregation responded; their clear, metallic voices formed a pretty contrast to the hollow buzzing of the resounding responses. Some wolfish-looking old mountaineers, from thirty miles away, made the blackened wood of the balustrade creak as they clumsily bent the knee. A twilight fell on the dense crowd, and made yet darker the expression of those energetic countenances. One might have fancied himself in the sixteenth century. Meanwhile the little bells chattered joyously with their shrill voices, and made all possible noise, like a roost full of fowls at the top of the white tower.

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At the end of an hour, the procession arranged itself very artistically and went forth. The first part of the cortege was amusing: two rows of little scapegraces in red vests, their hands clasped over their bellies, in order to keep their book in place, tried to give themselves an air of compunction, and looked at each other out of the corners of their eyes in a manner truly comical. This band of masquerading monkeys was led by a jolly stout priest, whose folded bands, cuffs, and hanging laces fluttered and waved like wings. Then a sorry beadle, in a soiled douanier’s coat; then a fine maire in uniform, with his sword at his side; then two long seminarians, two plump little priests, a banner of the Virgin, finally all the douaniers and all the gendarmes of the country; in short, all the grandeurs, all the splendors, all the actors of civilization.

The Barbarians however were more beautiful: it was the procession of men and women who, taper in hand, filed by during three-quarters of an hour. I saw in it true Henry IV. faces, with the severe and intelligent expression, the proud and serious bearing, the large features of his contemporaries. Especially there were some old herdsmen in russet great-coats of hairy felt, their brows not wrinkled but farrowed, bronzed and burned by the sun, their glances savage as those of a wild beast, worthy of having lived in the time of Charlemagne. Surely those who defied Roland were not more savage in physiognomy. Finally appeared five or six old women, the like of whom I could never have imagined: a hooded cloak of white woollen stuff enfolded them like a bed-blanket; only the swarthy countenance was visible, their eyes deep and fierce like the she-wolf’s, their mumbling lips, that seemed to be muttering spells. They called to mind involuntarily the witches in Macbeth; the mind was transported a hundred leagues away from cities, into barren gorges, beneath lone glaciers where the herdsmen pass whole months amidst the snows of winter, near to the growling bears, without hearing one human word, with no other companions than the gaunt peaks and the dreary fir-trees. They have borrowed from solitude something of its aspect.