The cathedral itself is somewhat more interesting than we expected to see; it is a Basque rather than a French church, has a very high chancel and altar and no transepts, and the altar is marked by a striking profusion of color and of gilding, which does not degenerate into the tawdry and which lights up vividly under the entering noon light. The chapels at the sides are similarly decorated. Dark oaken balconies, elaborately carved, run in three tiers along the upper part of the nave. The seats in these are reserved for the men, the women being relegated to small black cushions placed on the chairless floor.
St. Jean's one great event was the marriage of Louis XIV with the Infanta of Spain, which took place in this same church. "A raised platform extended from the residence of Anne of Austria to the entrance of the church, which was richly carpeted. The young queen was robed in a royal mantle of violet-colored velvet, powdered with fleurs-de-lis, over a white dress, and wore a crown upon her head. Her train was carried by Mesdemoiselles d'Alençon and de Valois and the Princess of Carignan. After the ceremony, the queen complained of fatigue, and retired for a few hours to her chamber where she dined alone. In the evening, she received the court, dressed in the French style; and gold and silver tokens commemorative of the royal marriage were profusely showered from the windows of her apartment."[[6]]
Without, as we turn for an idle stroll, we find a fair-sized town, with provincial streets like much of Bayonne. Often the stories of the houses jut out, one over the other. These projections give a relish of local color to the crooking ways, intensified by the round-tiled roofs and by occasional red or blood-colored beams and doorposts. Although we are still on the French side of the frontier, Spanish influence is already marked, while that of the Basques predominates over both. St. Jean is also a summer resort, in a modest way, chiefly for quiet Spanish families; and from the heavy stone sea-wall built along the beach we see many of their villas. In days before the railroad went beyond, the port exchanged regular and almost daily steamers with San Sebastian and Santander, thus connecting with the Spanish rail, and giving a rather important traffic advantage. It fostered, besides, extensive cod-fishing and even whaling enterprises. Its harbor has suffered since; the rails too have gone through to Spain, and St. Jean is left mildly and interestingly mournful, in its lessened power, its decayed gentility.
IV.
In St. Jean de Luz, we are fairly in the country of the Basques. One sees so many of that singular people in the streets, and along the Biscayan shore generally, that inquiries about them are almost forced upon the attention. The Basques are still the curiously ill-explained race they have always been; the learned still disagree over their origin, and the world at large scarcely knows of them more than the name. They are scattered all through this lower sea-corner of France, shading off near Bayonne; and are in yet greater numbers in the adjoining upper edges of Spain. It seems strange that the beginnings of this isolated race should to-day be almost no better settled than in the time of Humboldt or Ramond. Yet they contrive still to embroil the philologists and historians. Here the race has lived, certainly since the days of the Romans, probably since long before, out of kin with all the world, and the world's periods have passed on and left them. No one knows their birth-mark; they have forgotten it themselves. Of theories, numberless and hopelessly in discord, each still offers its weighty arguments, and each destroys the certainty of any.
This appears incredible. What mystery is insoluble in the sharp light of modern research? Yet until the defenders of the view that the Basques came from Atlantis can make truce with the advocates of their Phoenician origin,—until the well-attested theory of their affinity with certain South American races can overthrow the better-attested theory that they are the remains of the ancient Iberians,—until Moor and Finn,[[7]] Tartar and Coptic, can amicably blend their claims to relationship, the Basques must remain as they are,—foundlings; or rather, a race whose length of pedigree has swallowed up its beginnings.
It is these unattached sea and mountain races who are always hardest to conquer. Hence the boast of the Basques. Even the Romans, though they could defeat, could not subdue them. The strong Roman fortress of Lapurdum (now Bayonne) did not succeed in even terrifying them, though they were worsted several times by its legions. Down through all the early part of the long Christian era, the forefathers of these frank-faced fishers and mountaineers we see here in the streets of St. Jean kept their hills stubbornly to themselves. Later, as much perhaps from policy as necessity, the race came gradually to fall in with the general governments crystallizing about them. The Spanish Basques came first into the traces, though not until the thirteenth century; they were then finally incorporated into the Castilian monarchy. But they claimed and held marked rights in compensation. While special privileges—fueros—were accorded to certain other provinces as well as to them, theirs were the widest and endured the longest. They had five special exemptions: they were not subject to military conscription; nor to certain imposts and taxes, (paying a gross composition in their place;) nor in general to trial outside their province; nor to the quartering of troops; nor to any regulations of their internal affairs beyond that of the corregidor, a representative magistrate appointed by the king. These fueros lasted in substance even up to 1876, when Alfonso's government finally repealed them. While thus the Spanish Basques have, even under allegiance, held stoutly to the right of virtual self-government, their brethren north of the Pyrenees long preserved a still fuller autonomy, only coming into the national fold of France under the impetus of the Revolution.
Thus the Basques have a stiff record of independence; it keeps them in no little esteem, both with themselves and with their neighbors. Trains, travel, traffic, eat into their solidarity, and may in time disintegrate it; but a Basque has not yet lost a particle of his pride of clan; it is inborn and ineradicable; he would be no other than he is; "je ne suis pas un homme" he boasts, "je suis un Basque." You note instinctively his straighter bearing among the neighboring French peasantry; you can often single out a Basque by his air. This hardens into a peculiar result: since they are all of the same high lineage, all are aristocrats; every Basque is ex officio a nobleman; this is seriously meant and seriously believed. There are no degrees of caste, the highest is the only; the entire race is blood-proud, ancestor-proud. A Basque family might not improbably have been the originators of that celebrated family tree which remarked, in a marginal note only midway back, that "about this time the Creation took place."
They are not stilted in their pride, however; your true Basque cares much for his descent and little for its dignities. "Where the McGregor sits," he would affirm, "there is the head of the table," and so he cares nothing about the nominal headship. He lives a free, busy life in the hill-country or near the sea, stalwart, swarthy, a lover of the open air, apt at work and sufficiently enterprising, self-respecting, "proud as Lucifer and combustible as his matches," in no case pinchingly poor, but rarely rich, and never in awe of his own coat-of-arms.