The other cathedral is more interesting. It consists of a nave without aisles, and an apse constructed out of fragments of Roman buildings, and over a Roman gateway. The central tower is of the fourteenth century: octagonal, lighted by windows with triangular heads, and the whole crowned by a crenellated platform. It affects the Toulouse style, and is of brick. The magnificent cloister of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries has thirty-two round-headed arches resting on alternate single and double pillars with quaintly-carved and varied capitals. Above it is an open walk or cloister, with the pantiled roof supported on beams, dating from the fifteenth century. Probably the town would expire altogether were it not kept alive by the lunatics installed in the episcopal palace, which is lighted by electricity, and such light as is not wanted in the asylum is distributed over the town.
Like S. Bertrand, this Lyons changed its name and assumes that of one of the bishops, a native of Lerida, who is said to have saved the city from destruction by the Visigoths by his intercession. The town is built on the slopes of a hill above the Salat. It communicates with the halte by means of a steep-pitched bridge of the twelfth or thirteenth century, consisting of three unequal arches. Into one of the piers is built a votive inscription to the goddess Belisama, who was identified by the Romans with Minerva. Another inscription to this goddess has been found at Vaison. A tower formerly stood in the midst of the bridge. Above, on the right bank of the Salat, is a square tower that defended a fortified mill. This mill has been reconstructed. The old city is enclosed in the Roman ramparts forming an ellipse, flanked by a dozen towers, of which six on the north side are square, and the rest on the south are semicircular. Against the rampart within is the episcopal keep of the twelfth century, rectangular, and only to be entered by a wooden bridge that led to the first story from the palace. The lower rests on Roman foundations.
The valleys of the Couserans do not attract many visitors; they have not the boldness of those farther west. The Pic de Crabère reaches to 7200 feet, that of Mauberme to 8650, that of Roujos to 8340. There is a little lake, the Lac d’Arrainge, out of which flows the Isar, but it is insignificant; others are above Aulus. The principal business of the people in the upper valleys was the training of dancing bears, and sometimes when a father married his daughter he would hand over to his son-in-law as the dot a well-trained Bruin. But the taste for seeing these beasts led about and made to stand on their hind legs and plead for coppers has died out. There is no further demand for bears, and the industry is expiring, if not dead. Perhaps the last was seen by M. Ardouin-Dumazet:—
“No sooner had we entered the hamlet of Sérac, with its steep and muddy streets, than I asked after these strange educators. Alas! it was a lost tradition. In all the commune of Uston there was but a single little bear in training. Happily he inhabited Sérac, so I could see him.
“A little girl conducted me to the grange in which the small animal was shut up. It was still a baby, but its mark of slavery was upon it, the ring through its nostrils, by means of which the tamer can control it. The little bear, sitting up on its hind paws, waddled and hopped incessantly, as if afflicted with S. Vitus’s dance. Our visit seemed to please it; it invited caresses, and rolled about at our feet. The people said that it would be easy to tame the poor little bruin.”
Bears are no longer hunted on the French side of the Pyrenees, and those who seek for them must cross over the Spanish frontier, where a good many are still to be found in the forests. But, as already said, the demand for them has ceased, not only to be led about, but to show in barber’s yards as evidence that genuine bears’ grease is sold on the premises.
This industry having failed, the peasants have had to fall back on cattle-rearing, and dairy-farming. But this hardly suffices for their necessities, and many of the men turn into hawkers, and almost all migrate at the time of the vintage to the Bordelais and to Languedoc. Whether it be the bear association, or the migratory habits of the fathers of the household, has given a rudeness and lack of self-respect to the children cannot be said, but nowhere in the Pyrenees does mendicity prevail with such persistency and effrontery as in the valleys of the Couserans. The legend prevails in the plain that when Christ was walking over the earth with S. Peter He found these valleys unpopulated; so He took clay and moulded it into a man, and set the figure on its feet before Him, and breathed into it the breath of life; whereupon instantly the New Adam held out its hands and cried, “Un p’tit sou, siou plaît, m’ssius!” Begging has ever since been the predominant and all-prevailing instinct of the upper region of the Couserans.
The population here as elsewhere in the mountains is dwindling owing to emigration, mainly to South America, especially to the Argentine Republic. This is largely due to the peasant seeing the comfort and comparative wealth of his brother peasant in the plain, the proprietor of vineyard and olive-yard, and of mulberry trees that feed silkworms. He returns to his Alpine pastures sulky and dissatisfied with his condition. He is unwilling to change his native, deeply-rooted customs of farming, that are unscientific and wasteful, incapable maybe of realizing that he might do better if he adopted newer methods.
“Nevertheless,” says M. Ardouin-Dumazet, “he might lead a better existence if he could be brought to limit the quantity of his cattle to that number which he could rear suitably; if he would consent to make a practical use of the milk of his flocks. But everywhere in Ariège one finds every little property support three times as many beasts as the soil can well sustain; the result is lean cattle, giving poor meat and milk, giving consequently but an insufficient return of revenue.
“However, nowhere has the problem of the renovation of the pastures and the animals that overrun it been more studied and theoretically resolved. The Board of Forestry has shown by example how that the extent of meadowland and the quality of the grass might be largely extended. But everywhere it encounters invincible routine.
“Every hamlet, every farm has its stables, in which during the winter the beasts are crowded in conditions of hygiene absolutely deplorable. Air, light, litter are wanting; the fodder is measured out sparingly. If the winter be long there is dearth, for the number of beasts is out of all proportion to the resources of the forage.
“So soon as the weather becomes mild, at once the animals are despatched to the pastures or the waste lands; too numerous for the space, they ruin the turf and trample up the soil. The high pastures are squandered, and, above all, are not kept up. Juniper and rhododendrons invade them without the mountaineers concerning themselves about it. The agents of the Forestry have shown them how to get rid of these shrubs by eradication and burning, and how to make the ashes fertilize the meadows; they have shown them how by irrigation to enhance the quantity and quality of the herbage. This has been seen, understood, but not followed. Channels for irrigation have been made by the foresters and abandoned. The watering places for the cattle are choked. The paths rendering access to the mountain pastures are not kept up. The carelessness of the herdsmen surpasses all that could be imagined. It makes one despair.”
And the only remedy for their poverty that they can conceive is to turn their children out into the roads to beg for sous.
A watering-place at Aulus is coming into fashion. It is reached from S. Girons by a good road, and is distant from it thirty-three kilometres; Aulus lies high up in the valley of the Garbet.