A Book of the Pyrenees

by S. Baring-Gould

The situation is delightful. The monastery is planted on the summit of a hill above the waters of the Riberetta. About it is an amphitheatre of mountains, opening out to the south to afford a full view of the Canigou. Springs of pure cold water gush forth in many places. The great abbey is now in such complete ruin that it is difficult to distinguish the parts of the monastic building. The splendid cloister has been destroyed, and portions have been transferred to adorn the baths at Prades. The church is Romanesque, with a pointed choir. The nave is now roofless, and is used for a storehouse. The church formerly possessed two towers: one fell in 1839, the other leans. The story goes that the architect who built it, finding that his erection was out of the perpendicular, ran away, and was never heard of again. The fine Renaissance doorway of the abbot’s house is intact. It is richly carved in white marble, yellowed by the sun, and is surmounted by a sundial, on which is represented a Benedictine monk looking up at the sun, and bearing the inscription, Sub uno solis radio omnem mundum collectum conspexit.

Five miles above Prades is Villefranche, the terminus of the railway. It is a dreary little place built of grey marble that discolours and stains black. Moreover, it consists of two streets only, usually empty; and the houses are too many for the small population, numbering less than five hundred. The town was built by William Raymond, Count of Cerdagne, in 1095. He surrounded the town with a wall flanked by towers. The castle was erected by Vauban, on a spur of the limestone mountain of Belloch, 450 feet above the river Tet, and reached by a subterranean staircase of 999 steps. In this castle were confined for the rest of their lives two of the assistants of the infamous Marquise de Brinvilliers. These were La Chappelain and Guesdon. A very brief notice of the Marchioness and her crimes must suffice. She was a young and beautiful woman, connected both by birth and marriage with some of the noblest families of France, and was married to the Marquis de Brinvilliers, a man of depraved conduct. She formed a guilty attachment for Sainte Croix, a gay, handsome man, who had learned in Italy the manufacture of slow poisons, especially the Succession Powder. The Marquis and Marchioness separated, but were not divorced. Sainte Croix, who had no fortune of his own, depended on what was given him by his mistress, and as this did not suffice, he proposed to her to poison her old father and brothers and sister, so as to gather into her own hands all their succession. She agreed without hesitation, and herself administered the fatal draught to her father. The brothers were next got rid of, and the sister would have been similarly destroyed had not her suspicions been roused, and she hastily quitted Paris. Others who were inconvenient in one way or another were similarly got rid of, but all was done with such caution that no charge could be made against either. But the day of retribution was at hand, and a terrible mischance brought the murders to light. The nature of the poisons was so deadly that when Sainte Croix worked in his laboratory, he was obliged to wear a mask, to preserve himself from suffocation. One day the mask slipped off, and the miserable wretch perished in his crimes. His corpse was found on the following morning in the obscure lodging where he had fitted up his laboratory, and with it papers which disclosed the whole series of murders perpetrated by the pair. The Marchioness fled to England, where she remained for three years, but went early in 1676 to Liège. There she was caught, brought to Paris, executed, and her body burnt.

La Guesdon, along with her husband, had been in the service of Sainte Croix, and before her marriage had been in that of the Marchioness. She had been implicated in the poisonings. La Chappelain had acted in Paris the part of a fortune-teller. By means of her supposed prevision of the future she was able to presage the death of those marked down by Mme. de Brinvilliers and Sainte Croix for destruction. La Guesdon died in the prison at Villefranche in 1717, La Chappelain in 1724.

In the place itself is the opening into an extensive cavern. In 1674 a conspiracy was raised to capture the citadel and deliver it over to the Spaniards. It was widely ramified through the Cerdagne and Roussillon, neither content at having been made over to France by the Treaty of the Pyrenees. Some of the leading spirits in the plot were the men of the family of Llar, in Villefranche, whose dilapidated and dingy hôtel may be seen in the Rue des Juifs. The cavern mentioned served as a place of meeting and a storehouse for arms. The conspiracy was betrayed by Inez de Llar, daughter of the chief man in the plot, Charles de Llar. He and her brother and relatives involved in it were executed. The unfortunate Inez, broken-hearted at having brought ruin on her family, ended her days in a convent.

In 1793 the Spanish general Crespo succeeded in making himself master of Villefranche, on 4 August; but on 19 September, Gilly, at the head of the second battalion of the Grenadiers of Gard, composed of 450 men, retook the place by an act of audacity. He disposed his men on the heights as though the vanguard of an army, and then rode up to the outposts with sixty grenadiers behind him, and haughtily summoned the Spanish commandant to surrender to General Dagobert, whose army, he said, was at hand, and who would give no quarter if the place were not immediately given up.

The frightened Crespo consented, and an hour later Gilly entered Villefranche at the head of the little army.

From Villefranche the distance is hardly five miles to Vernet, up the valley of the Riu Major. The road passes Corneilla, where there is a curious Romanesque church with a square tower and a fine marble, sculptured doorway, as also, what is a rare feature, a retable of carved marble of 1345, by an artist named Carcall de Berga. It represents incidents in the life of our Lord. At the Revolution it was pulled down, but was re-erected by an unintelligent mason, who put it together badly, as may be seen by the disorder into which the inscriptions have been thrown. The counts of Cerdagne were much attached to Corneilla, and erected here a palace, which was abandoned later and given up to the Augustinian canons.

Vernet is built in an amphitheatre of verdure, commanded by the buttresses of the Canigou. It is composed of two distinct parts, of very different aspect. The upper town is a tangle of little streets between mean, black houses with broken windows and rickety doors, above whose red tiled or slated roofs rise the church and the castle. New Vernet lies along the road lower down, and there are found the baths, the hotels, and the casino. The watering-places of Bagnères de Luchon, Cauterez, S. Sauveur, etc., are frequented only in the months of June, July, August, and rarely September; but at Vernet the season begins in April, and bathers linger on to November. For the use of winter residents a jardin d’hiver has been formed. The cold here is never great; and the salubrity of the spot has induced the erection of an open-air cure sanatorium at the height of 2250 feet, in an isolated position, for the use of consumptives.

From Vernet the ascent of the Canigou can be made on foot or by the newly-constructed cog-railway. There is a station at S. Martin de Canigou, an abbey founded at the edge of a precipice in 1007 by Count Waifre of Cerdagne, and his wife Gisella. Tradition will have it that he was engaged in warfare with the Moors, and had planned to surround them. He committed one detachment of troops to his son, with strict injunctions to delay attack till he himself should appear. But the young man, in his impetuosity, fell on the unbelievers before the arrival of the Count, and was defeated. Waifre in a rage killed him, and then repenting of what he had done, went to Rome, where the Pope required him to build and endow a monastery in expiation of his crime. This is, however, mere fable. As a matter of fact, the foundation was wholly voluntary, and Count Waifre, after having built it retired from the world within its walls, and occupied his leisure in scooping out a sarcophagus that was to contain himself eventually, which sarcophagus, now empty, is still shown. He died in 1049. The abbey, having been dismantled at the Revolution, fell into complete ruin, but has been purchased, and the church restored by Bishop du Pont of Perpignan. He has also revived the pilgrimage to it, which takes place on S. Martin’s Day (11 November), when a procession winds up the mountain from Vernet. Whether procession and pilgrims will henceforth go up in trucks by the cog-railway remains to be seen. The church is a very interesting example of earliest Romanesque, the aisles are separated from the nave by granite columns very massive, with Byzantine ornament on the capitals. Beneath the church is the crypt.

The second way to reach the roots of the Canigou, and, if it be desired, to ascend it, is to take the branch line from Elne to Arles-sur-Tech. At Le Boulou (lo Volo) the line crosses the Great Eastern highway into Spain, the main pass from Narbonne to Barcelona in Roman and medieval times, and used by Celts and Iberians before ever Narbonne and Barcelona were thought of. Le Boulou did well as a place through which travellers and merchandise streamed this way and that. But then came the days of steam; the iron road was carried along the coast from Perpignan to Barcelona, and Le Boulou’s occupation and prosperity were gone never to return.