If the observation is worth anything to the reader “Pau est la petite Nice des Pyrénées.” This is complimentary, or the reverse, as one happens to think. Pau’s attractions are many, in spite of the fact that it has become a typical tourist resort.
The château itself, even as it stands in its reconstructed form, is a pleasing enough structure, as imposingly grand as many in Touraine. This palace of kings and queens, which saw the birth of the Béarnais prince who was to reign at Paris, has been remodelled and restored, but, in spite of this, it still remains the key-note of the whole gamut of the charms of Pau, and indeed of all Béarn.
The Revolution and Louis Philippe are jointly responsible for much of the garish crudity of the present arrangement of the Château de Pau. The mere fact that the edifice was a prison and a barracks from 1793 to 1808 accounts for much of the indignity thrust upon it, and of the present furnishings—always excepting that exceedingly popular tortoise-shell cradle—only the wall tapestries may be considered truly great. In spite of this, the memories of the D’Albrets, of Henri IV, of Gaston, and of the “Marguerite des Marguerites” still hang about its apartments and corridors.
The Vicomte de Béarn who had the idea of transferring his capital from Morlaas to Pau was a man of taste. At the borders of his newly acquired territory he planted three pieux or pau, and this gave the name to the new city, which possessed then, as now, one of the most admirable scenic situations of France, a terrace a hundred feet or more above the Gave, with a mountain background, and a low-lying valley before.
The English discovered Pau as early as 1785, fifty years before Lord Brougham discovered Cannes. It was Arthur Young, that indefatigable traveller and agriculturalist, who stood as godfather to Pau as a tourist resort, though truth to tell he was more interested in industry and turnip-growing than in the butterfly doings of “les éléments étrangers” in French watering places of to-day.
Throngs of strangers come to Pau to-day, and its thirty-five thousand souls make a living from the visitors, instead of the ten thousand of a century and a quarter ago.
The people of Pau, its business men at any rate, think their city is the chief in rank of the Basses-Pyrénées. Figures do not lie, however, and the local branch of the Banque de France ranks as number sixty-five in volume of business done on a list of a hundred and twenty-six, while Bayonne, the real centre of commercialism south of Bordeaux, is numbered fifteen. In population the two cities rank about the same.
The real transformation of Pau into a city of pleasure is a work, however, of our own time. It was in the mid-nineteenth century that the capital of Béarn came to be widely known as a resort for semi-invalids. Just what degree of curative excellencies Pau possesses it is not for the author of this book to attempt to state, but probably it is its freedom from cold north and east winds. Otherwise the winter climate is wintry to a certain degree, and frequently damp, but an appreciable mildness is often to be noted here when the Riviera is found in the icy grip of the Rhône valley mistral.
The contrast of the new and the old at Pau is greatly to be remarked. There are streets which the French describe as neuves et coquettes, and there are others grim, mossy and as dead as Pompeii, as far as present-day life and surroundings are concerned.
Formerly the river Hédas, or more properly a rivulet, filled the moat of the château of the kings of Navarre, but now this is lacking.