IV.
We no sooner reach Lestelle, than we are assured on all sides that we must visit the chapel. We pass between rows of shops full of rosaries, basins for holy-water, medals, small crucifixes, through a cross-fire of offers, exhortations and cries. After which we are free to admire the edifice, a liberty which we are careful not to abuse. On the portal, indeed, there is a pretty enough virgin in the style of the seventeenth century, four evangelists in marble, and in the interior several tolerable pictures; but the blue dome starred with gold looks like a bonbonnière, the walls are disgraced with engravings from the rue Saint-Jacques, the altar is loaded with gewgaws. The gilded den is pretentious and gloomy; for such a beautiful country the good God seems but ill harbored.
The poor little chapel nestles close to a huge mountain wooded with crowded green thickets, which stretches out superbly in the light, and warms its belly in the sun. The highway is abruptly checked, makes a curve and crosses the Gave. The pretty bridge of a single arch rests its feet upon the naked rock and trails its ivy drapery in the blue-green eddies of the stream. We ascend beautiful wooded hills where the cows are grazing, and whose rounded slopes dip gently down to the river’s brink. We are nearing Saint Pé, on the confines of Bigorre and Beam.
Saint-Pe contains a curious Roman church writh sculptured doorway. A luminous dust was dancing in its warm shadows; the eyes penetrated with pleasure into the depths of the background; its reliefs seemed to swim in a living blackness. All at once comes a clatter of cracking whips, of rolling and grinding wheels, of hoofs that strike fire from the pavement; then the endless hedge of white walls running away to the right and the left, flecked with glaring lights; then the sudden opening of the heavens and the triumph of the sun, whose furnace blazes in the remotest depths of the air.