In due time we reached Pau in the Pyrenees, the capital of the Basses Pyrénées, and the old Bearnais. The little town on the Gave de Pau was no summer place. The heats are intense, and all who can, rush off to the Pyrénées, which are in sight, and distant only forty miles. Our family followed suit, and went off to Bagnières de Bigorres, where we hired a nice house in the main Square. There were few foreigners in the Bagnières de Bigorres; it was at that time a thoroughly French watering-place. It was invaded by a mob of Parisians of both sexes, the men dressed in fancy costumes intended to be "truly rural," and capped with Basque bonnets, white or red. The women were more wonderful still, especially when on horseback; somehow or other the Française never dons a riding-habit without some solecism. Picnics were the order of the day, and they were organized on a large scale, looking more like a squadron of cavalry going out for exercise than a party of pleasure. We boys obtained permission to accompany one of those caravans to the Brêche de Roland, a nick in the mountain top clearly visible from the plains, and supposed to have been cut by the good sword "Joyeuse."
Here we boys were mightily taken with, and tempted to accept the offer made to us by, a merry party of contrabandistas, who were smuggling to and fro chocolate, tobacco, and aguardienta (spirits). Nothing could be jollier than such a life as these people lead. They travelled au clair de la lune, armed to the teeth; when they arrived at the hotels the mules were unloaded and turned out to grass, the guitar, played à la Figaro, began to tinkle, and all the young women, like "the Buffalo girls," came out to dance. Wine and spirits flowed freely, the greatest good humour prevailed, and the festivities were broken only sometimes by "knifing or shooting."
We also visited Tarbes, which even in those days was beginning to acquire a reputation for "le shport;" it presently became one of the centres of racing and hunting in France, for which the excellent climate and the fine rolling country admirably adapted it. It was no wonder that the young French horse beat the English at the same age. In the Basque Pyrénées a colt two years old is as well grown as a Newmarket weed at two and a half.
When the great heat was over, the family returned to Pau, where they found a good house over the arcade in the Place Gramont. Pau boasts of being the birthplace of Henry IV., Gaston de Foix, and Bernadotte. Strangers go through the usual routine of visiting the Castle, called after the Protestant-Catholic King, Henry IV.; driving to Ortez, where Marshal Soult fought unjustifiably the last action of the Peninsular War; and of wandering about the flat, moor-like landes, which not a little resemble those about Bordeaux. The society at Pau was an improvement upon that of Naples. The most remarkable person was Captain (R.N.) Lord William Paget, who was living with his mother-in-law (Baroness de Rothenberg), and his wife and children, and enjoying himself as usual. Though even impecunious, he was the best of boon companions, and a man generally loved. But he could also make himself feared, and, as the phrase is, would stand no nonsense. He had a little affair with a man whom we will call Robinson, and as they were going to the meeting-place he said to his second, "What's the fellow's pet pursuit?" "Well!" answered the other, "I don't know—but, let me see—ah, I remember, a capital hand at waltzing." "Waltzing!" said Lord William, and hit him accurately on the hip-bone, which spoilt his saltations for many a long month. Years and years after, when both were middle-aged men, I met at Shepherd's Hotel, Cairo, his son, the boy whom I remembered straddling across a diminutive donkey—General Billy Paget. He had also entered the Anglo-Indian army, and amongst other things had distinguished himself by getting the better (in an official correspondence) of General John Jacob, the most obstinate and rancorous of men. "Billy" had come out to Egypt with the intention of returning to India, but the Red Sea looked so sweltering hot and its shores so disgustingly barren, that he wrote to Aden to recall his luggage, which had been sent forward, then and there retired from the service, married a charming woman, and gave his old friends a very excellent dinner in London.
There were also some very nice L'Estranges, one of the daughters a very handsome woman, some pretty Foxes, an old Captain Sheridan, with two good-looking daughters, and the Ruxtons, whom we afterwards met at Pisa and the Baths of Lucca. Certain elderly maidens of the name of Shannon lived in a house almost overhanging the Gave de Pau. Upon this subject O'Connell, the Agitator, produced a bon mot, which is, however, not fit for the drawing-room. Pau was still a kind of invalid colony for consumptives, although the native proverb about its climate is, "that it has eight months winter, and four of the Inferno." Dr. Diaforus acts upon the very intelligible system of self-interest. He does not wish his patients to die upon his hands, and consequently he sends them to die abroad. In the latter part of the last century he sent his moribunds to Lisbon and to Montpellier, where the vent de bise is as terrible as a black east wind is in Harwich.
Then he packed them off to Pisa, where the tropics and Norway meet, and to damp, muggy, reeking Madeira, where patients have lived a quarter of a century with half a lung, but where their sound companions and nurses suffer from every description of evil which attend biliousness. They then found out that the dry heat of Teneriffe allowed invalids to be out after sunset, and, lastly, they discovered that the dry cold of Canada and Iceland, charged with ozone, offers the best chance of a complete cure. I proposed to utilize the regions about the beautiful Dead Sea, about thirteen hundred feet below the level of the Mediterranean, where oxygen accumulates, and where, run as hard as you like, you can never be out of breath. This will be the great Consumptive Hospital of the future.
At Pau the education went on merrily. I was provided with a French master of mathematics, whose greasy hair swept the collar of the redingote buttoned up to the chin. He was a type of his order. He introduced mathematics everywhere. He was a red republican of the reddest, hating rank and wealth, and he held that Le Bon Dieu was not proven, because he could not express Him by a mathematical formula, and he called his fellow-men Bon-Dieusistes. We were now grown to lads, and began seriously to prepare for thrashing our tutor, and diligently took lessons in boxing from the Irish groom of a Captain Hutchinson, R.N. Whenever we could escape from study we passed our hours in the barracks, fencing with the soldiers, and delighting every piou-piou (recruit) by our powers of consuming the country spirit (the white and unadulterated cognac). We also took seriously to smoking, although, as usual with beginners in those days, we suffered in the flesh. In the later generation, you find young children, even girls, who, although their parents have never smoked, can finish off a cigarette without the slightest inconvenience, even for the first time.