The following legend of a dragon who once lived in a cavern on the banks of the Nive is worthy of preserving in print; at any rate it sounds plausible, as told the writer by an old dealer in bérets and sabots. He had an eye for the picturesque, though, and if his facts are correct he would make a very good historian.
A young Bayonnais went out one day to attack this fabled monster whom no one yet had been able to kill. By name he was Gaston Armaud de Belzunc, and his father was governor of Bayonne in 1372.
After a day and a half of journeying, the young Tartarin of other days came upon his quarry. The beast, furious, jumped upon the cavalier and threw him to the ground, but his lance pierced the scaly neck and so weakened the monster that man and beast grappled together. The two died, and Gaston’s companions, who had ungallantly fled precipitately at the first encounter, found them later laced in each other’s embrace.
To perpetuate the memory of this act of bravery, the king of Navarre granted the family De Belzunc the privilege of adding a dragon to its arms. Up to the Revolution there existed a fund in behalf of the clergy of a Bayonne church to pray for the repose of the soul of this gallant young knight of the Middle Ages.
High above the banks of the upper reaches of the Nive are the grim ruins of the Château de Laustan. Practically it was, in its palmy days, a fortress-château. It was built by the Seigneur de Laustan, who possessed great privileges in the neighbourhood, to turn the tide of aggression of his jealous neighbours, and of the Spaniards. It was constructed of a sort of red sandstone, with walls of great thickness, as evidences show to-day, and must have been a very successful feudal habitation of its class. The family De Laustan was one of the most celebrated in Basse-Navarre. It gave three archbishops to Spain, and its archives are now kept in the royal library at Madrid.
Cambo, in the mid-valley of the Nive, is as delightful a spot of its class as is marked on any map, far more so than many pretentious resorts where bridge, baccarat and the bumptious pretence of its habitués are the chief characteristics.
Cambo is simple, but pleasant, and besides its quiet, peaceful delights it has two historical institutions which are as un-French as they are really and truly Basque. First: its remarkable church, with its golden rétable and its galleries surrounding the nave, is something distinctively local, as is also its churchyard. The other feature is the court or fronton where is played the jeu de paume, or, to give it its Basque nomenclature, pelota. Here meet from time to time, all through the year, the most famous players of the French Basque country and of Guipuzcoa, the chief Spanish centre, across the border.
This game of pelota is the passion of the Basques, but as the habitant says, “the game plays out the player, and in four or five years his suppleness disappears, his muscles become hardened, and he is superannuated.”
Still one cannot get away from the fact that Cambo’s present-day vogue is wholly due to the coming of Edmond Rostand. It was famous before, among a select few, but the craze is on, and the land-boomer and the resort-exploiter have already marked its acres for their own.
Rostand’s country home “Arnaga” is something like a palace of an Arabian Nights tale. The walls of the apartments, whose windows look out over the crests of the Pyrenees, are covered with paintings by some of the most celebrated French artists. One room has a decorated frieze taken from the ever-delightful tales immortalized by Andersen and the Grimm brothers, and the gem of this poet’s dwelling is Madame Rostand’s boudoir. Familiar stories of “Cinderella” and the “Beauty and the Beast” are told again, with a wealth of colour and fantasy, by that whimsical artist Jean Weber.