III.
[FULL-SIZE] -- [Medium-Size]
Tarbes is a good-sized city that looks like a market town, paved with small stones, mediocre in appearance. You alight in a place where great dusty elms make a shade. At noon the streets are empty; it is evident that you are near the sun of Spain. A few women merely, with red foulards on the head, were selling peaches at the corners. A little further on some cavalry soldiers stretched their great awkward legs in the narrow shadow of their wall. You run across a square of four buildings, in the midst of which rises a bell-tower flaring at the base. It is the church; it has but a single aisle, very high, very broad, very cool, painted in dark colors, which contrast with the stifling heat outside and the glare of the white walls; above the altar, six columns of mottled marble, surmounted with a baldachin, make a pretty effect. The pictures are like those everywhere else: A Christ, mingled fresh butter and pale rose in hue, a passion in colored engravings at six sous each. A few, hung very high in dark corners, seem better because you can make nothing out of them. A little further on they have just built a court-house, clean and new as a judge’s robe; the ashler work is well dressed, and the walls perfectly scraped. The front is adorned with two statues: Justice, who looks like a fool, and Force, who looks like a girl. Force has on low boots and the skin of an animal. Instead of fine statues we have ugly riddles. Since they had a fancy for symbols, could they not have dressed Force as a policeman? To compensate ourselves for the statues, we went to visit the horses. In this place, the homely city becomes an elegant city. The buildings of the stud are simple and in good taste. Turf, rosebushes, stairways filled with flowers, a beautiful meadow of high grass; in the distance are poplars ranged as a screen to the limpid horizon. The habitation of the horses is a pleasure-house. There are fifty beasts in a long stable that might serve at need for a ball-room; they are superb creatures with shining coats, firm croup, gentle eye, calm front: they feed peaceably in their stalls, having a double mat under their litter; everything is brushed, wiped, rubbed. Grooms in red vests come and go incessantly to clean them and see that nothing is wanting. Man in the earthly paradise was less happy.