I.
Cauterets is a town at the bottom of a valley, melancholy enough, paved, and provided with an octroi. Innkeepers, guides, the whole of a famished population besieges us; but we have considerable force of mind, and after a spirited resistance we obtain the right of looking about and choosing.
Fifty paces further on, we are fastened upon by servants, children, donkey-hirers and boys, who accidentally stroll about us. They offer us cards, they praise up to us the site, the cuisine; they accompany us, cap in hand, to the very edge of the village; at the same time they elbow away all competitors: “The stranger is mine, I’ll baste you if you come near him.” Each hotel has its runners on the watch; they hunt the isard in winter, the traveller in summer.
The town has several springs: that of the King cured Abarca, king of Aragon; that of Cæsar restored health, as they say, to the great Cæsar. Faith is needed in history as well as in medicine.
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For example, in the time of Francis I. the Eaux Bonnes cured wounds; they were called Eaux d’arqtiebusades ; the soldiers wounded at Pavia were sent to them. Now they cure diseases of the throat and chest. A hundred years hence they will perhaps heal something else; with every century medicine makes an advance.
“Formerly,” said Signarelle, “the liver was at the right and the heart at the left; we have reformed all that.”