We took the long way around, twenty kilometres more out of our direct road, for novelty of driving our automobile through the Grotto of Mas D'Azil. We had been through grottoes before, the Grotte de Han in the north of France, the caves where they ripen Rochefort cheeses, the Mammoth Cave of Kentucky, and some others, but we had never expected to drive an automobile through one. The Grotte de Mas-D'Azil is much like other dark, damp holes elsewhere, and the only novelty is the magnificent road which pierces it. The sensation of travelling over this road is most weird, and it was well worth the trouble of making the experiment.
From St. Girons to St. Gaudens and Montrejeau is sixty odd kilometres. Nothing happened on the way except that the road was literally thronged with great slow-moving ox-teams transporting great logs down the mountainside to the sawmills in the lower valley.
Montrejeau was a surprise and a disappointment. It was a surprise that we should find such a winsome little hill-town, and such a very excellent hotel as was the Grand Hôtel du Parc, which takes its name from a tiny hanging garden at the rear; but we were disappointed in that for a mortal half-hour we tried to make our usually willing automobile climb up on to the plateau upon which the town sits. Three separate roads we tried, each three separate times, but climb the machine would not. No one knew why, the writer least of all, and he had been chauffeur and driver of that automobile for many long months, and had never found a hill, great or small, that it would not climb. Automobiles are capricious things, like women, and sometimes they will and sometimes they will not. At last, after the natives had had sufficient amusement, and had told us that they had seen many an automobile party go without lunch because they could not get up that steep little kilometre, we found a sort of back-door entrance which looked easy, and we went up like the proverbial bird. It was not the main road into town, and it took some finding. The writer hopes that others who pass this way will be as successful. Montrejeau, with its three steep streets, its excellent hotel (when you finally got in touch with it), its old-world market-house, and its trim little café-bordered square, will be long remembered.
We debated long as to whether we should drop down to Luchon, and come around by Bagnerres-de-Bigorre or not, but since they were likely to be full of "five-o'-clockers" at this season we thought the better of it, and left them entirely out of our itinerary. When one wants it he can get the same sort of conventionality at Ermenonville, and need not go so far afield to find it.
We arrived at Tarbes, at the Hôtel des Ambassadeurs, late on Sunday afternoon. The name of the hotel augured well for good cheer, and on the whole we found it satisfactory enough. One of its most appealing features is the fact that the kitchens and the garage were once a convent. It has undergone a considerable change since then, but it lent a sort of glamour to things to know that you were stabling your automobile in such a place.
Tarbes is a great busy, overgrown, unlovely big town, which flounders under the questionable dignities of being a station of an army corps and a préfecture: Bureaucracy and Officialdom are writ large all over everything, and a poor mortal without a handle to his name, or a ribbon in his buttonhole, is looked upon as a sort of outcast when he enters a café, and accordingly he waits a long time to be served.
We got out of Tarbes at a très bonne heure the next morning without a regret, headed for Pau. All of us had always had an affection for Pau, because, in a way, we admired old Henri Quatre, even his rascality.
We found Pau, too, a great, overgrown, fussy town, a bit more delightfully environed than Tarbes, but still not at all what we had pictured it. We knew it to be a tourist resort, but we were hardly prepared for the tea-shops and the "bars" and the papers—in English and "American," as a local newsdealer told us when we went to him to buy the inevitable picture postcards.
We found out, too, that Pau has long held a unique position as the leading hunting centre on the Continent. It costs sixty francs a day for the hire of a saddle-horse, and from 350 francs to four hundred francs for the month—certainly rather dear. There are, as a rule, from thirty to forty hunters available for hire each year, but many of them are reserved by old stagers. Of privately owned horses following the hunt, the number would usually somewhat exceed two hundred. The hounds meet three times a week, and the municipality of Pau shows its appreciation of the good that hunting does for the Pyrenees resort by voting a subsidy of five thousand francs.
What history and romance there is about Pau is pretty well blotted out by twentieth-century snobbism, it would seem.