TARBES
does not make appeals to the passing tourist. It is the centre of the great horse-breeding industry carried on in the fertile plain, which grows tobacco, vines and maize, and is a loosely built, unpicturesque town, having been half destroyed in the religious wars of the sixteenth century. In 1569 Montgomery, the Huguenot leader, captured Tarbes, drove out the inhabitants, and burnt the churches and monasteries. Scarcely had the people returned when the Huguenots again took the town, this time levelling the walls and leaving the place in ruins.
Mr. Baring-Gould calls the cathedral the ‘most cumbrous, ungainly minster in all France.’ There are three windows of the twelfth century in the apse, and a thirteenth-century rose-window in the north transept. The fourteenth-century Church of St. Jean is not very interesting, and that of Ste. Thérèse is a modernized building of the fifteenth century.
On the door of the Lycée a Latin inscription, dated 1699, says: ‘May this building endure, until the ant has drunk the waters of the ocean and the tortoise made the tour of the globe.’
The Jardin Massey was given to the public by the manager of the gardens at Versailles in the time of Louis Philippe. Massey was a native of Tarbes, who began life as a working gardener.
On the western side of the town is the Haras, or breeding-station, where the English and Arab stallions are kept.
Barère, the regicide, whom Macaulay regarded as approaching ‘nearer than any person mentioned in history or fiction, whether man or devil, to the idea of consummate and universal depravity,’ was born at Tarbes in 1755.
The road becomes exceedingly hilly as soon as the plain of Tarbes is left behind near Barbazan-Debat, and new views of steep-sided valleys, wooded ridges, and the snowy Pyrenees, appear every few minutes.
After passing the railway viaduct at Lhez, the road goes south-westwards to Tournay, a small town renamed after Tournai in Hainault, but of no particular interest.
The road ascends for several miles in a beautiful wooded valley, and after passing under a bridge one goes to the left across the railway, turning at once to the right parallel with it and nearly due east.