The peasant dress of the Béarnais is the same throughout all the communes. They wear a woollen head-dress, something like that of the Basques. It is round, generally brown, and usually drawn down over the left ear in a most dégagé fashion. The student of Paris’ Latin Quarter is a poor copy of a Béarnais so far as his cap goes. In some parts of the plain below the foot-hills of the Pyrenees,—around Tarbes for example,—the cap is replaced by a little round hat, a sort of a cross between that sometimes worn by the Breton, and a “bowler” of the vintage of ‘83.
A long blouse-like coat, or jacket, is worn, and woollen breeches and gaiters, of such variegated colouring as appeals to each individual himself. In style the costume of the Béarnais is national; in colour it is anything you like and individual, but mostly brown or gray of those shades which were the progenitors of what we have come to know as khaki.
The shepherds and cattle guardians, indeed all of the inhabitants of the higher valleys and slopes, dress similarly, but in stuffs of much coarser texture and heavier weight, and wear quite as much clothing in summer as in the coldest days of winter.
The Béarnais speak a patois, or idiom, composed of the structural elements of Celtic, Latin and Spanish. It is not a language, like the Breton or the Basque, but simply a hybrid means of expression, difficult enough for outsiders to become proficient in, but not at all unfamiliar in sound to one used to the expressions of the Latin races. It is more like the Provençal of the Bouches-du-Rhône than anything else, but very little like the Romance tongue of Languedoc.
In cadence the Béarnais patois is sweet and musical, and the literature of the tongue, mostly pastoral poetry, is of a beauty approaching the epilogues of Virgil.
The patois is the speech of the country people, and French that of the town dwellers. The educated classes may speak French, but, almost without exceptions, they know also the patois, as is the case in Provence, where the patois is reckoned no patois at all, but a real tongue, and has the most profuse literature of any of the anciently spoken tongues of France.
The following lines in the Béarnais patois show its possibilities. They were sung when Jeanne de Navarre was giving birth to the infant prince who was to become Henri IV.
“Nouste Dame deü cap deü poün,
Adyudat-me à d’acquest’hore;
Pregats au Dioü deü ceü
Qu’emboulle bié delioura ceü,
D’u maynat qu’em hassie lou doun
Tou d’inqu’ aü haut dous mounts l’implore
Adyudat-me à d’acquest’hore.”
The significance of these lines was that the queen prayed God that she might be delivered of her child without agony, but above all that it might be born a boy.
Béarn was fairly populous in the old days with a well distributed population, and the towns were all relatively largely inhabited. Now, in some sections, as in the Pays de Baretous, for example, the region is losing its population daily, and in half a century the figures have decreased something like thirty per cent. Like many other Pyrenean valleys the population has largely emigrated to what they call “les Amériques,” meaning, in this case, South or Central America, never North America. Buenos Ayres they know, also “la ville de Mexique,” but New York is a vague, meaningless term to the peasant of the French Pyrenees.