A Midsummer Drive Through the Pyrenees

by Edwin Asa Dix

We seat ourselves by a snowbank, and enjoy the pleasures of rest for a season. Enter to us, a peasant upon the scene,—a woman, crossing the col from the Lavedan side. The large bundle magically balanced upon her head-cloth wavers never a trace as she steps lithely up the last acclivities and comes upon us. From a stick held over her shoulder depends another bundle, and over all she is carrying a war-worn and ludicrous umbrella. The interest is mutual. Promptly I spring up and pull off my cap in introduction. Her round face, simple and good-tempered, a comely type of her neighborhood, opens gradually from a stare into a smile, as the ladies add their greetings. She seems rather glad of the excuse to rest and lay aside her bundles, and in a few moments has grown quite communicative. She has come, this morning, she tells us, from Arrens, a small village on the way down toward the Lavedan valley and to be our destined halting-place, we recollect, for luncheon. She is taking to Eaux Bonnes a few woolen goods, stockings and hoods and shawls, knit by herself and her old mother during the long winter. They are not for fine people; oh, no, but the guides and the hotel maids like them.

"And your husband," we ask,—"what is he?" "A charcoal-burner, monsieur; he has his pits in the forests of the Balaïtous; it is a hard life."

"It is hardest in winter, is it not?"

"It is hard always, monsieur,"—this very simply; "but we have enough, though not more.—On the left of the road, madame,—our home,—as you walk out from the inn at Arrens toward the monastery."

Again the conception of discontent is a stranger; the idea puzzles her; her life has always been thus; she did not expect anything otherwise. It is a genuine forest-nature, mute yet never inglorious, reciting uncomplainingly its lesson of passiveness and endurance.

Her dress, coarse in texture, well worn but well cared for, appears to differ little in detail from the costume of the Ossau valley we have now quitted, but is more strictly, so she tells us, that of the peasantry of the Lavedan district next to be met with. The pleasant face is framed in by the ever-favorite hood or head-mantle. This is sometimes, as here, a kerchief, of conspicuous colors, peculiarly coifed,—the precise twist varying according to the mode of each locality. Often, as with the women of Goust, the kerchief is of plain white, tied below the chin, and set off with a short outside cape, black or colored, over the crown. At times the cape alone is worn without the kerchief, and on occasion the larger capulet of red supersedes them both.

Artfully we lead the conversation into a philosophical discussion, while the camera is secretly made ready,—when, from the side we have come, enter also another peasant, an old man this time, quite as good-humored and quite as characteristic as the first comer. He has dispensed with jacket or blouse, and displays the loose, baggy-sleeved cotton shirt often worn in substitution, an outlawed pair of ouvrier's trousers, and the local berret and spadrilles. His features have the true Gascon cast of shrewdness and tolerance. We formally introduce the two to each other, and the camera is trained upon the pair. But now the woman, discovering the plot, evinces that bashful disinclination, common among women the world over, to pose for immortality when without her best finery; though the old man, I am pleased to record, does not appear in the least sensitive about his. Silver, however, is a great persuader; now it proves a worthy adjutant of its nitrate; the drivers, who are greatly absorbed in the situation, add their encouragements to the reluctant one, and finally agreeing and ably supported by her new acquaintance as leading man, accoutred as she is, she plunges in; conscious attitudes are unconsciously taken,—as taken they always are for photography, be it in Paris or the Pyrenees, by all humankind; and the two wights, humbly and happily serving their separate lives, valued items in Nature's wide summation, stand forth together in the dignity of humanity to mark this trifling meeting in permanent remembrance.

There they talk together on the road, as we finally drive down the hill, their figures silhouetted against the sky. They have been on the whole pleased and awakened by their adventure; they will discuss and compare their emotions, finger their silver, wonder and speculate, and go their separate ways, convinced anew that the ways of the world and its worldlings are verily strange and inscrutable.