A Tour Through The Pyrenees

livities or in the plains, everywhere the richest verdure, the luxury of nature and civilization, the earth and man vying with each other to enrich and decorate the happiest val

he right and to the

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inous blood which chokes it; the powerful liquor still ascends into its limbs with the sa

s, they abruptly lift their great startled eyes and stand motionless, uneasy at the noise that has troubled their solitude. Man does not fare well here,-he dies or degenerates; but it is the country of animals, and especially of plants. They abound in this desert, free, certain of living. Our pretty, cutup valleys are but poor things alongside of these immense spaces, leagues upon leagues of marshy or dry vegetation, a level

in this twilight, a wood confusedly marks its spot, like a rock at the bottom of a lake; everywhere around are vague depths, veiled and floating forms, indistinct and fantastic creatures melting into each other, fields that look like a billowy sea, clumps of trees that

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small-clothes; you hear the sharp, sonorous music of the tongue spoken beyond the mounta

they have laid on a rude plaster of stone. The old invalid is a sad spectacle alongside of the new houses and busy shops which crowd around its grimy flanks. I was quite troubled at this decrepitude, and when once I had entered, I became still more melancholy. Darkness

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l here what men felt six hundred years ago, when they swarmed forth from their hovels, from their unpaved, six-feet-wide streets, sinks of uncleanness, and reeking with fever and leprosy; when their unclad bodies, undermined by famine, sent a thin blood to their brutis

lowered heads, drag the beams that are being unloaded. Rope-makers, girt with a wisp of hemp, walk backward tightening their threads, and twining their ever-growing cable. The ships in file are made fast a

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d of mother-of-pearl. The sky is like an arch of lapis-lazuli. Its vault rests on the confines of the flood which advances waveless and effortless, under the glitter of its peaceful undulations, between two ranges of dec

I

arcades; I am bored at the café, and am acquainted with nobod

d and very amiable, explains everything to me, guides, informs and installs me. Here I am then in a corner, alone at a table, with the documents o

gs. He hoisted on his galleys red flags signifying death and no quarter, and led to the battle of Ecluse the great Genoese ship Christophle, and managed his hands so well that no Frenchman escaped; for they were all drowned or killed, and the two admirals, Quieret and Bahuchet, having surrendered themselves, Bahuchet had a cord tightened around his neck, while

them any, he should have his hand cut off. Pierre Cambo, indeed, a poor man, having carted two hogsheads of it by night, was led out upon the market-place, before Notre Dame de Saint-Léon, which was then building, and had his han

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ing the sovereignty of the sea, might with justice impose a tax in all the places to which the sea rose, as if they were in its port, and that accordingly the Basques should henceforth pay for passing to Villefranche, to the bridge of the Nive, the limit of high tide.

at he would do, nor urge him on, nor indeed breathe a word. From the first Saturday in April to the middle of August, several men wer

ir red sashes and white breeches, appeared adroit and handsome. That night came a man who talked low to the mayor, and he, who ordinarily wore a grave and judicial air, suddenly had eyes as bright as those of a youth who sees the coming of his bride. He went down his staircase

d have power to defend themselves or time to flee; but the Bayonne marines, with their great axes, hewed down the planks, and split the first brains which happened to be near. The mayor, seeing that the Basques were tightly girt with their red sashes, went about saying (for he was usually facetious on days of battle): "Lard these fine gallants for me; forward the spit into their flesh justicoats;" and in fact the spits went forward, so that all were perforated and opene

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, he ordered them to set fire to the castle. It was a fine sight, for the castle burned from midnight until morning; as each turret, wall or floor fell, the people, delighted, raised a great shout. There were volleys of sparks in the smoke and

ho were lowest; their throats gurgled as when bottles are filled, and the people applauded, saying that the drunkards swallowed too fast, and were going to strangle themselves out of pure greediness. There remained only the two men, d'Urtubie, bound to the principal arch, father and son, the son a little lower down. When the father saw his child choking, he stretched out his arms with such force that a cord broke: but that was all, and the hemp cut into his flesh without his being able to get any further. Those above, seeing that the youth's eyes were rolling, while the veins on his forehead were purple and swollen, and that the water bubbled around him with his hiccough, called him baby, and asked why he had sucked so hard, and if nurse was not coming soon to put him to bed. At this th

g more than twenty villages in the Soule with the story of fire and drowning. The younger men, with several older heads, had set out forthwith by crooked circuitous paths, barefoot, that they might make no noise, well armed with cutlasses, crampoons and several slender rope-ladders; and, adroit as foxes, they had stolen to the base of the tower, to a place on the eastern side where it plunges straight down to the bed of the river, a real quagmire, so that here there was no guard, and the rolling of the water on the pebbles mi

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the Pyrenees, ofte

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ned to the small door of the ante-room. Jean Amacho gave a sign to the two men who had mounted immediately after him, and all jumped together with a single leap, and so nicely that, at the same moment, their three knives pierced the throats of the Bayonnais, who, bowing thei

that this wine was quite warm, he took some on his finger, then touched his tongue, and saw, by the insipid taste, that it was blood. He proclaimed this aloud, and the Bayonnais starting up grasped their pikes and ran for the staircase. Thereupon the Basques who had waited, not being sufficiently nu

on nor wield their spits with such nicety. At this moment, Jean Amacho and several young Basques, having espied their moment, leaped more than twenty feet clear into the middle of the hall, to a place where no halberds were ready, and began cutting throats with great promptness, then, thrown upon their knees, fell to ripping open bellies; they killed far more than they lost, because they

of all,-he held his head too near, and the jet from the two great veins of the neck spirted into his face like the froth from a jar of perry as it is uncorked, and suddenly shu

ais, as anybody will on feeling an iron point prick through his skin, stepped back and rolled together into the cellar. Just at this moment the torches went out, and the Basques, in order not to wound each other, dressed the whole armful of pikes, and harpooned at random forward into the cellar during more than a quarter of an hour, so as to make sure that no Ba

g their fingers after the handles of their daggers; several, wounded and whitelipped, no longer felt their wounds or their loss of blood, remained crouching beside the man they had last killed, and then involuntarily leaped to the

hat they might go down thus to their sea, and that this cartful of dead flesh was such toll as the Basques would pay. The congealed wounds we

tlemen drowned without confession, which, perchance, were in purgatory, and had need of many masses in order to get out. But the Basques were unwilling that Pê de Puyane, the mayor, should be included in this peace, either he or his sons, and they reserved the right to pursue them until they had taken vengeance on his flesh and his race. The mayor retired to Bordeaux, to the house of the Prince of Wales, of whom he was a great friend and good servant, and during two o o years did not go outside of the city, excepting three or four times, well steeled, and attended by men-at-arms. But one day, when he had gone to see a vineyard he had bought, he withdrew a little from his troop to lift a g

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