These people are descendants of Clemence Isaure. Their advertisements are odes. By way of compensation many odes are advertisements.
In fact, you are here not far from Toulouse; like the character, the type is new. The young girls have fine, regular, clear-cut faces, of a lively and gay expression. They are small, with a light step, brilliant eyes, the nimbleness of a bird. In the evening, about a lottery-shop, these pretty faces stand out animated and full of passion beneath the flickering light, fringed with a black shadow. The eyes sparkle, the red lips tremble, the neck tosses with the little abrupt movements of the swallow; no picture can be more full of life.
If you leave the lighted and tumultuous alley, at the distance of an hundred paces, you find silence, solitude and obscurity. At night, the valley is of great beauty; it is framed and drawn out between two chains of parallel mountains, huge pillars which stretch in two files and support the dark vault of heaven.
Their arches mark it out like a cathedral ceiling, and the immense nave vanishes several leagues away, radiant with stars; these stars fling out flames. At this moment, they are the only living things; the valley is black, the air motionless; you can only distinguish the tapering tops of the poplars, erect in the tranquil night, wrapt in their mantle of leaves. The topmost branches stir, and their rustle is like the murmur of a prayer echoed by the distant hum of the torrent.
III.
[FULL-SIZE] -- [Medium-Size]
The valley is not a gorge, but a beautiful level meadow marked with trees and fields of maize, among which the river runs, but does not leap. Luchon is surrounded with alleys of plane-trees, poplars and lindens. You leave these alleys for a pathway which follows the waves of the Pique and winds amidst the high grass. The ashes and oaks form a screen along the two banks; big brooks come from the mountains; you cross them on trunks laid bridge-wise or on broad slabs of slate. All these waters flow in the shade, between knotted roots which they bathe, and which form trellises on both sides. The bank is covered with hanging herbage; you see nothing but the fresh verdure and the dark waters. It is here that at noon the pedestrians take refuge; along the sides of the valley wind dusty roads where stream the carriages and the horsemen. Higher up, the mountains, gray or browned with moss, display their soft lines and noble forms as far as the eye can reach. They are not wild as at Saint Sauveur, nor bare as at Eaux-Bonnes; each of these chains advances nobly toward the city and behind it leaves its vast ridge to undulate to the very verge of the horizon.