A Book of the Pyrenees

by S. Baring-Gould

The observatory was completed in 1882, and was made over by these two energetic men to the State, whereupon Vaussenat was appointed director of the observatory. He lived till 1891, when he fell ill in it. He was being conveyed down the mountain, when one of the bearers slipped, and Vaussenat was flung down a steep descent of ice. He was taken up and carried to Bagnères, where he succumbed eight days after.

Bagnères is at the mouth of the Val de Campan. In it are the ivy-mantled ruins of the Castle of Asté. They are inconsiderable, and in themselves hardly deserve a visit. But they are of some historic interest, as this Château d’Asté was the second cradle of the dukes of Grammont. The barons d’Asté, early in the sixteenth century, became viscounts, and Menard d’Aure, Viscount Asté, had the good luck to marry the heiress of Grammont. Thenceforth his descendants assumed the title of counts of Grammont and viscounts of Asté.

Their principal residence now became Grammont, in Labourde, on the Bidouze; but for hunting the wolf and the bear, and in the heat of summer they came to Asté. Here it was that the amorous Henri Quatre was wont to visit la belle Corisande, wife of Philibert de Grammont, who died at the age of twenty-eight, in 1580. Diana, or la belle Corisande, was the only daughter of Paul, Viscount Louvigny. By her husband she had Anthony, Count of Grammont, and Guiche, also of Louvigny, Seigneur of Bidache, Viscount Asté, Viceroy of Navarre, Governor and Perpetual Hereditary Mayor of Bayonne. One of his sons, Philibert, married Elizabeth, daughter of George, Earl of Hamilton. Her picture is in the National Portrait Gallery, and one wonders, looking at it, how she could have been called “la belle Hamilton” in the French Court.

Philibert and Elizabeth had a daughter, Claude Charlotte, who married Henry Howard, Earl of Stafford. It was of Philibert, born in 1621, and who died in 1707, that the entertaining memoirs were written by Anthony Hamilton. It has been well said:—

“The history of Grammont may be considered as unique: there is nothing like it in any language. In drollery, knowledge of the world, various satire, general utility, united with great vivacity of composition, Gil Blas is unrivalled; but as a merely agreeable book, the Memoirs of Grammont perhaps deserve that character more than any which was ever written; it is pleasantry throughout, and pleasantry of the best sort; unforced, graceful, and engaging. Some French critic has justly observed that if any book were to be selected as affording the truest specimen of perfect French gaiety, the Memoirs of Grammont would be selected in preference to all others.”

In the church of Asté is a white marble statue of the Virgin that is an object of great veneration; also a painting attributed to Philippe de Champagne. The village of Beaudéan was the native place of the surgeon Larrey, born in 1766, who behaved with great self-devotion in the battle of Eylau and the retreat from Moscow. Napoleon I said that he was the most honest man he had ever known, and the most disinterested. He created him a baron, and bequeathed to him 100,000 francs. Larrey died in 1847. The house in which he was born is a humble cottage; he bequeathed it to the parish that it might be turned into a school.

Campan, that gives its name to the somewhat overpraised valley, is chiefly known for the marbles it produces. The peristyle of the Grand Trianon, the new and vulgar opera-house at Paris, have employed this splendid marble. Even Berlin has had recourse to its quarries for twenty-two columns of the royal palace.

There are several mountain tarns more or less accessible from Bagnères. That most easily reached—but taking six hours—is the Lac Bleu, a beautiful sheet of water of the most intense sapphire-blue, girded about by rocks of a golden yellow. It covers 98 acres, and is 360 feet deep. The spirit of utility has mounted to this height, and bridled the outflow, and uses it for economic purposes. A tunnel 900 feet long has been bored through the rocks on the north side of the lake, to draw off the water as needed in times when the Adour has dwindled to a thread, and cannot feed the channels of irrigation needed in the plain.

Other tarns are the Lac de Peyrelade, lying in a cirque under the Pic du Midi, also the Lac d’Isaby.

Many delightful valleys open out into the Val de Campan, The longest of these is that through which flows the Oussonet, that reaches the Adour some way below Bagnères; but a good road takes directly from Bagnères to the lateral valley of Labassere, famous for its slate quarries. The excavations are in the flanks of the mountain, and are numerous. The products are brought down by a funicular contrivance worked by electricity, taking the place of the zigzag road by which oxen formerly conveyed the slates below. The men who split the slates wear heavy sabots scooped out of billets of beech that have not been shaped externally, so as better to resist, should the sharp, cutting flakes fall on the feet. The men’s legs are bound about thickly with rags to protect them from the same danger, as the slate cuts like a razor. The slate-splitters form the aristocracy of the trade, and although their labour is less considerable than that of the quarrymen, they receive double the pay of these latter. For a slate-cutter has to learn the art before he is aged fourteen, whilst the muscles are most flexible. At the age of twenty he has to undergo military service, and when he returns to his shed and tools, at the age of twenty-four, finds it very difficult to recover the skill he possessed before he donned uniform.