"Yet through its fairy course, go where it will,
The torrent stops it not, the rugged rock
Opens and lets it in; and on it runs,
Winning its easy way from clime to clime."
—ROGERS' Italy.
It is Monday morning at Eaux Bonnes. The dome of the sky is of unspecked blue. The departing diligence for Laruns has just rolled away down the road, and now a landau with four horses, and a victoria with two, stand before the Hotel des Princes. A formal contract, wisely yet ludicrously minute in detail, bristling with discomforting provisos for contingencies, and copied out in the usual painstaking French handwriting, has been discussed and gravely signed. We are to be conveyed to Cauterets as the first day's stage, and thereafter to have the carriages at command, for an agreed price per day, if we wish to retain them. Thus we can journey on to Luz, Gavarnie, Barèges, Bigorre and even Luchon. The memorandum is handed us; it provides for delays and breakdowns, disputes, damages, sickness; it stipulates for return prices from the place of dismissal. The average price for two such conveyances in this region, "keep" included but not pourboire, will be found to hold within from seventy-five to ninety francs a day,—thirty-five to forty-five francs for each carriage; I record it as matter of information for possible comers. The carriages, the horses and the drivers are all strong and all well-cushioned, and the drivers are resplendently tinseled besides.
We are now to enter oft the Route Thermale. This carriage-road is one of the marvels of modern engineering. The chief resorts in the French Pyrenees are imbedded each at the head of a north-and-south valley running up from the plain against the crest of the range. Between them, the huge mountain ridges, like ribs from a Typhon's spine, stretch down in irregular parallels from the backbone of the chain. Before this road was built, these resorts could only be visited successively by a tedious double journey in and out of each separate valley, or by high foot-paths over the ridges between. Thus the traveling from one to another had its serious drawbacks. The railroad came, skirting the plain, though not yet provided with the offshoots which now run partway up into the valleys; but even by rail the détours needed would be circuitous and wasting, and they missed utterly the out-of-door fascinations of true mountain travel. Something yet was called for.
The Route Thermale was the result; it is another of the wonders of Louis Napoleon's régime. It has revolutionized the comforts of Pyrenean summer travel; the ridges need no longer be skirted, for they can be luxuriously crossed,—and by one of the best carriage-roads in Europe. Beginning at Eaux Bonnes, and running in the main parallel with the central crest, it rears itself serpent-like over four of these great intervening barriers, attaining and crossing in turn the broad valleys between them, connecting northward with the stations, southward with the springs. This immense band, sinuous and unbroken, uplifting itself to the snow, plunging again from snow to the maize-fields, stretches along the central Pyrenees a full hundred miles. Four days' journey away lies its distant end at Luchon. The hostile mountains shower it with earth and stones. Winter buries it in ice, spring assaults it with freshets; it is rarely passable before June, and mountain storms even in summer measure their strength against it. But Napoleon III inspired this road, and it emerges, quickly rejuvenated, from tempest and torrent, to laugh unconquered. Of the undertakings of the Bonaparte family, only two were ever baffled by opposing forces.
Such an enterprise as this gives a new light, for the stranger, upon the popularity of the Pyrenees. This costly road-building could only have arisen from a demand great enough to require and sustain it,—from an amount of summer traffic, a multitude of summer visitors, commensurate in part at least with the outlay. Evidently, figments of lonely settlements and dark paths belong in limbo with those of dismal inns.
The next great synclinal, adjoining the Valley of Ossau, is the Valley of Lavedan, and at its head in the mountains lies Cauterets, our next point of attack. The notch of the road in each intervening ridge is called a col, that which is in the ridge that now bars us from Cauterets being the Col d'Aubisque. Over the Col d'Aubisque, accordingly, opposite the Pic de Ger, our way to-day lies.