The government having imposed a tax on salt in 1784, the people around Hasparren, who had hitherto been exempted, resolved to resist so heavy an impost. They rang the bell with violence to call together the inhabitants. Even the women assembled in bands with spits, pitchforks, and sickles, to the sound of a drum, which one of their number beat before them. The mob, amounting to two thousand, entrenched themselves in the public cemetery, where they received with howls of rage the five brigades the governor of Bayonne was obliged to send for the enforcement of the law. Bloodshed was prevented by the venerable curé, who rose from his sick-bed and appeared in their midst. By his mild, persuasive words he calmed the excited crowd, induced the troops to retire and the mob to disperse. The leaders being afterwards arrested, he also effected their pardon—on humiliating conditions, however, to the town. The hardest was, perhaps, the destruction of the belfry, from which they had rung the alarm; and it was not till some time in the present century they were allowed to rebuild it.
It is remarkable that the ancient Basques left no poems, no war-songs to celebrate their valorous deeds, no epic in which some adventurous mariner recites his wanderings; for the language is flexible and easily bends to rhythm. But the people seem better musicians than poets. There are, to be sure, some rude plaints of love, a few smugglers’ or fishermen’s songs, sung to bold airs full of wild harmony that perhaps used to animate their forefathers to fight against the Moors; but these songs have no literary merit. Only two poems in the language have acquired a certain celebrity, because published by prominent men who ascribed to them a great antiquity. One of these is the Chant des Cantabres, published by Wilhelm von Humboldt in 1817 in connection with an essay on the Basque language. Ushered into the world by so distinguished a linguist, it was eagerly welcomed by German savants, and regarded as a precious memorial of past ages. M. von Humboldt took it from the MSS. of a Spaniard employed in 1590 to explore the archives of Simancas and Biscay. He pretended to have found it written on an old, worm-eaten parchment, as well it might be if done soon after the invasion of the country by the Romans. We wonder he did not also find the history of the conquest of Cantabria in five books composed by the Emperor Augustus himself, said to have been in existence in the XVIIth century!
The Chant d’Altabisçar is said to have been discovered by M. La Tour d’Auvergne in an old convent at St. Sebastian, in 1821, written on parchment in characters of the XIIIth or XIVth century. It is unfortunate so valuable a MS., like the original poems of Ossian, should have been lost! The contents, however, were preserved and published in 1835, and, though now considered spurious, merit a certain attention because formerly regarded as genuine by such men as Victor Hugo, who, in his Légende des Siècles, speaks of Charlemagne as “plein de douleur” to think
“Qu’on fera des chansons dans toutes ces montagnes
Sur ses guerriers tombés devant des paysans,
Et qu’on en parlera plus que quatre cents ans!”
M. Olivier, in his Dictionnaire de la Conversation, enthusiastically exclaims: “What shall I say of the Basque chants, and where did this people, on their inaccessible heights, obtain such boldness of rhythm and intonation? Every Basque air I know is grand and decided in tone, but none more strikingly so than the national chant of the Escualdunacs, as they call themselves in their language. And yet this fine poem has for some of its lines only the cardinal numbers up to twenty, and then repeated in reverse order. Often, while listening to the pure, fresh melody of this air, I have wondered what meaning was concealed beneath these singular lines. From one hypothesis to another I have gone back to the time when the Vascon race, hedged in at the foot of the Pyrenees by the Celtic invaders, sought refuge among the inaccessible mountains. Then, it seemed to me, this Chant was composed as a war-song in which, after recounting, one by one, their years of exile, they numbered with the same regularity, but in a contrary direction, their deeds of vengeance!”
Such is the power of imagination. It is the
“Père Tournamine
Qui croit tout ce qu’il s’imagine.”