THE Gave de Pau, a swiftly-flowing stream which comes down from its icy cradle in the Cirque de Gavarnie and joins with the Adour near Bayonne’s port, winds its way through a gentle, smiling valley filled with gracious vistas, historic sites and grand mountain backgrounds.
Next to the æsthetic aspects of the Gave de Pau are its washhouses. The writer in years of French travel does not remember to have seen a stream possessed of so many.
One sees similar arrangements for washing clothes all over France, but here they are exceedingly picturesque in their disposition, and the workers therein are not of the Zola-Amazon type, nor of the withered beldam class. How much better they wash than others of their fraternity elsewhere is not to be remarked.
There are municipal washhouses in some of the larger towns of France, great, ugly, brick, cement and iron structures, but as the actual washing is done after the same manner as when carried on by the banks of a rushing river or a purling brook there is not much to be said in their favour that cannot as well be applied to the washhouses of Pau, Oloron or Orthez in Navarre, and artist folk will prefer the latter.
Coarraze, twenty kilometres above Pau, on the banks of the Gave, is a populous centre where the hum of industry, induced by the weavers who make the toile du Béarn, is the prevailing note. Toile du Béarn and chapelets are the chief output of this little bourg, and many francs are in circulation here each Saturday night that would probably be wanting except for these indefatigable workers who had rather bend over greasy machines at something more than a living wage, than dig a mere existence out of the ground.
The little bourg is dull and gray in colour, only its surroundings being brilliant. Its situation is most fortunate. Opposite is a great tree-covered plateau, a veritable terrace, on which is a modern château replacing another which has disappeared—“comme un chevreau en liberté,” says the native.
