Beyond the meadow, among the poplars, the broad Gave murmurs on over shingly shallows, between aspen-fringed islets, grey with the melting snows; and beyond her again rise broken wooded hills, dotted with handsome houses; and beyond them a veil of mist and rain.
On a sudden that veil lifts; and five-and-twenty miles away, beneath the black edge of the cloud, against the clear blue sky, stands out the whole snow-range of the Pyrenees; and in the midst, exactly opposite, filling up a vast gap which is the Val d’Ossau, the huge cone, still snowy white, of the Pic du Midi.
He who is conversant with theatres will be unable to overlook the seeming art—and even artifice—of such an effect. The clouds lift like a drop-scene; the mountains are so utterly unlike any natural object in the north, that for the moment one fancies them painted and not real; the Pic du Midi stands so exactly where it ought, and is yet so fantastic and unexpected in its shape, that an artist seems to have put it there.
But lie who knows nothing, and cares less, about theatres and their sham glories, and sees for the first time in his life the eternal snows of which he has read since childhood, draws his breath deeply, and stands astounded, whispering to himself that God is great.
One hint more, ere we pass on from Pau. Here, at least in spring time, of all places in Europe, may a man feed his ears with song of birds. The copses by the Gave, the public walks and woods (wherein English prejudices have happily protected what is elsewhere shot down as game, even to the poor little cock-robins whose corpses lie by dozens in too many French markets), are filled with all our English birds of passage, finding their way northwards from Morocco and Algiers; and with our English nightingales, black-caps, willow-wrens, and whitethroats, are other songsters which never find their way to these isles, for which you must consult the pages of Mr. Gould or Mr. Bree—and chief among them the dark Orpheus, and the yellow Hippolais, surpassing the black-cap, and almost equalling the nightingale, for richness and variety of song—the polyglot warbler which penetrates, in summer, as far north as the shores of the British Channel, and there stops short, scared by the twenty miles of sea, after a land journey—and by night, too, as all the warblers journey—from Africa.
At Pau, the railroad ended when I was there; and who would go eastward had to take carriage, and go by the excellent road (all public roads in the south of France are excellent, and equal to our best English roads) over the high Landes to Tarbes; and on again over fresh Landes to Montrejeau; and thence by railway to Toulouse.
They are very dreary, these high flat uplands, from which innumerable streams pour down to swell the Adour and the Garonne; and as one rolls along, listening to the eternal tinkle of the horse-bells, only two roadside objects are particularly worthy of notice. First, the cultivation, spreading rapidly since the Revolution, over what was open moor; and next the great natural parks which one traverses here and there; the remnants of those forests which were once sacred to the seigneurs and their field sports. The seigneurs are gone now, and the game with them; and the forests are almost gone—so ruinate, indeed, by the peasantry, that the Government (I believe) has interfered to stop a destruction of timber, which involves the destruction both of fire-wood and of the annual fall of rain. But the trees which remain, whether in forest or in homestead, are sadly mangled. The winters are sharp in these high uplands, and firing scarce; and the country method of obtaining it is to send a woman up a tree, where she hacks off, with feeble arms and feeble tools, boughs halfway out from the stem, disfiguring, and in time destroying by letting the wet enter, splendid southern oaks, chestnuts, and walnuts. Painful and hideous, to an eye accustomed to British parks, are the forms of these once noble trees.
Suddenly we descend a brow into the Yale of Tarbes: a good land and large; a labyrinth of clear streams, water-meadows, cherry-orchards, and crops of every kind, and in the midst the pleasant old city, with its once famous University. Of Tarbes, you may read in the pages of Froissart—or, if you prefer a later authority, in those of Dumas, ‘Trois Mousquetaires;’ for this is the native land of the immortal Ulysses of Gascony, the Chevalier d’Artagnan.
There you may see, to your surprise, not only gentlemen, but ladies, taking their pleasure on horseback after the English fashion; for there is close by a great ‘haras,’ or Government establishment for horse-breeding. You may watch the quaint dresses in the marketplace; you may rest, as Froissart rested of old, in a ‘right pleasant inn;’ you may eat of the delicious cookery which is to be found, even in remote towns, throughout the south of France, and even—if you dare—of ‘Coquilles aux Champignons.’ You may sit out after dinner in that delicious climate, listening to the rush of the clear Adour through streets, and yards, and culverts; for the city, like Romsey, or Salisbury, is built over many streams. You may watch the Pyrenees changing from white to rose, from rose to lead colour, and then dying away into the night—for twilight there is little or none, here in the far south.
‘The sun’s rim dips, the stars rush out,
At one stride comes the dark.’