A Tour Through The Pyrenees - free ebook by Hippolyte Taine

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A Tour Through The Pyrenees

Hippolyte Taine

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The Publishers take pleasure in acknowledging their indebtedness to Mr. Henry Blackburn for valuable hints in the arrangement of this volume. CONTENTS BOOK I. THE COAST. CHAPTER I. BORDEAUX.—ROYAN. CHAPTER II. LES LANDES.—BAYONNE. CHAPTER III. BIARRITZ.—SAINT-JEAN-DE-LUZ. BOOK II. THE VALLEY OF OSSA CHAPTER I. DAX.—ORTHEZ. CHAPTER II. PAU. CHAPTER III. EAUX BONNES. CHAPTER IV. LANDSCAPES. CHAPTER V. EAUX-CHAUDE S. CHAPTER VI. THE INHABITANTS. BOOK III. THE VALLEY OF LUZ. CHAPTER I. ON THE WAY TO

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TO MARCELIN. (EMILE PLANAT.)

TO MARCELIN. (EMILE PLANAT.)

T his, my dear Marcelin, is a trip to the Pyrenees; I have been there, and that is a praiseworthy circumstance; many writers, including some of the longest-winded, have described these scenes without leaving home. And yet I have serious shortcomings to confess, and am deeply humbled thereat. I have not been the first to scale any inaccessible mountain; I have broken neither leg nor arm; I have not been eaten by the bears; I have neither saved any English heiress from being swept away by the Gave

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I.

I.

T he river is so fine, that before going to Bayonne I have come down as far as Royan. Ships heavy with white sails ascend slowly on both sides of the boat. At each gust of wind they incline like idle birds, lifting their long wing and showing their black belly. They run slantwise, then come back; one would say that they felt the better for being in this great fresh-water harbor; they loiter in it and enjoy its peace after leaving the wrath and inclemency of the ocean. The banks, fringed with pal

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II.

II.

The boat is made fast to a boom, under a pile of white houses: it is Royan. Here already are the sea and the dunes; the right of the village is buried under a mass of sand; there are crumbling hills, little dreary valleys, where you are lost as if in the desert; no sound, no movement, no life; scanty, leafless vegetation dots the moving soil, and its filaments fall like sickly hairs; small shells, white and empty, cling to these in chaplets, and, wherever the foot is set, they crack with a sound

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III.

III.

The next evening, a fresh sea-breeze has brought us to Bordeaux. The enormous city heaps its monumental houses along the river like bastions; the red sky is embattled by their coping. They on one hand, the bridge on the other, protect, with a double line, the port where the vessels are crowded together like a flock of gulls; those graceful hulls, those tapering masts, those sails swollen or floating, weave the labyrinth of their movements and forms upon the magnificent purple of the sunset. The

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Each tree bears on its side the scar of wounds where the woodmen have set flowing the resinous blood which chokes it; the powerful liquor still ascends into its limbs with the sap, exhales by its slimy shoots and by its cleft skin; a sharp aromatic odor fills the air. Beyond, the monotonous plain of the ferns, bathed in light, stretches away as far as the eye can reach. Their green fans expand beneath the sun which colors, but does not cause them to fade. Upon the horizon a few scattered trees l

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Bayonne is a gay city, original and half Spanish. On all sides are men in velvet vest and small-clothes; you hear the sharp, sonorous music of the tongue spoken beyond the mountains. Squatty arcades border the principal streets; there is need of shade under such a sun. A pretty episcopal palace, in its modern elegance, makes the ugly cathedral still uglier. The poor, abortive monument piteously lifts its belfry, that for three centuries has remained but a stump. Booths are stuck in its hollows,

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I was looking upon the spectre of the middle ages; how opposed to it are the security and abundance of modern life! Those sombre vaults, those slender columns, those rose windows, blood-dyed, called up dreams and emotions which are now impossible for us. You should feel 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 fam

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You are pleased to feel that man is working and prosperous. And here nature too is as happy as man. The broad silver river unrolls itself under the radiance of the morning. Slender clouds throw out on the azure their band 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 declivity, away to a hill where pine-woods of a tender green sl

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III.

III.

It rains: the inn is insupportable. It is stifling under the arcades; I am bored at the café, and am acquainted with nobody. The sole resource is to go to the library. That is closed. Fortunately the librarian takes pity on me, and opens for me. Better yet, he brings me all sorts of charters and old books; he is both very learned 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 of a fine and thoroughly

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I.

I.

H alf a league off, at the turning of a road, may be seen a hill of a singular blue: it is the sea. Then you descend, by a winding route, to the village. A melancholy village, with the taint of hotels, white and regular, cafés and signs, ranged by stages upon the arid coast; for grass, patches of poor starveling turf; for trees, frail tamarisks which cling shivering to the earth; for harbor, a beach and two empty creeks. The smaller conceals in its sandy recess two barks without masts, without s

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II.

II.

There is a light-house to the north of the village, an esplanade of beach and prickly plants. Vegetation here is as rough as the ocean. Do not look to the left; the pickets of soldiers, the huts of the bathers, the ennuyés, the children, the invalids, the drying linen, it is all as melancholy as a caserne and a hospital. But at the foot of the light-house the beautiful green waves hollow themselves and scale the rocks, scattering upon the wind their plume of foam; the billows come up to the assa

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III.

III.

It has rained all night; but this morning a brisk wind has dried the earth; and I have come along the coast to Saint-Jean-de-Luz. Everywhere the wasted cliffs drop perpendicularly down; dreary hillocks, crumbling sand; miserable grasses that strike their filaments into the moving soil; streamlets that vainly wind and are choked, pushed back by the sea; tortured inlets, and naked strands. The ocean tears and depopulates its beach. Everything suffers from the neighborhood of the old tyrant. As you

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IV.

IV.

A noble hotel, with broad halls, and grand antique apartments, displays itself at the corner of the first basin facing the sea. Anne of Austria lodged there in 1660, at the time of the marriage of Louis XIV. Above a chimney is still to be seen the portrait of a princess in the garb of a goddess. Were they not goddesses? A tapestried bridge went from this house to the little church, sombre and splendid, traversed by balconies of black oak, and loaded with glittering reliquaries. The married pair

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I.

I.

I saw Dax in passing, and I recall only two rows of white walls of staring brightness, into which low doorways here and there sank their black arches with a strange relief. An old and thoroughly forbidding cathedral bristled its bell-turrets and dentations in the midst of the pomp of nature and the joyousness of the light, as if the soil, burst open, had once put forth out of its lava a heap of crystallized sulphur. The postilion, a good fellow, takes up a poor woman on the way, and sets her bes

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II.

II.

Orthez, in the fourteenth century, was a capital; of this grandeur there remains but the wreck: ruined walls and the high tower of the castle hung with ivy. The counts of Foix had there a little state, almost independent, proudly planted between the realms of France, England and Spain. The people have gained in something, I know; they no longer hate their neighbors, and they live at peace; they receive from Paris inventions and news; peace, trade and well-being are increased. They have, however,

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III.

III.

The good Froissart came here in the year 1388, having ridden and chatted about arms all along the route with the chevalier Messire Espaing de Lyon; he lodged in the inn of the Beautiful Hostess, which was then called the hotel of the Moon. The count Gaston Phoebus sent in all haste to seek him: “for he was the lord who of all the world the most gladly entertained the stranger in order to hear the news.” Froissart passed twelve weeks in his hotel: “for they made him good cheer and fed well his ho

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IV

IV

Nothing can be pleasanter than to journey alone in an unknown country, without a definite end, without recent cares; all little thoughts are blotted out. Do I know whether this field belongs to Peter or to Paul; whether the engineer is at war with the prefect, or if there is any dispute over a projected canal or road? I am happy indeed in know-all that; happier still in first time, finding fresh sensations, and not being troubled by comparisons and souvenirs. I can consider things through-genera

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I.

I.

P au is a pretty city, neat, of gay appearance; but the highway is paved with little round stones, the side-walks with small sharp pebbles: so the horses walk on the heads of nails and foot-passengers on the points of them. From Bordeaux to Toulouse such is the usage, such the pavement. At the end of five minutes, your feet tell you in the most intelligible manner that you are two hundred leagues away from Paris. You meet wagons loaded with wood, of rustic simplicity, the invention of which goes

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II.

II.

She sang an old Bearnese song when she brought him into the world. They say that the aged grandfather rubbed the lips of the new-born child with a clove of garlic, poured into his mouth a few drops of Jurançon wine, and carried him away in his dressing-gown. The child was born in the chamber which opens into the tower of Mazères, on the south-west corner. “His grandfather took him away from his father and mother, and would have this child brought up at his door, reproaching his daughter and his

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III.

III.

The park is a great wood on a hill, embedded among meadows and harvests. You walk in long solitary alleys, under colonnades of superb oaks, while to the left the lofty stems of the copses mount in close ranks upon the back of the hill. The fog was not yet lifted; there was no motion in the air; not a corner of blue sky, not a sound in all the country. The song of a bird came for an instant from the midst of the ash-trees, then sadly ceased. Is that then the sky of the south, and was it necessary

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IV.

IV.

To-day the sun shines. On my way to the Place Nationale , I remarked a poor, half-ruined church, which had been turned into a coachhouse; they have fastened upon it a carrier’s sign. The arcades, in small gray stones, still round themselves with an elegant boldness; beneath are stowed away carts and casks and pieces of wood; here and there workmen were handling wheels. A broad ray of light fell upon a pile of straw, and made the sombre corners seem yet darker; the pictures that one meets with ou

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VI.

VI.

The harvests, pale in the north, here wave with a reflex of reddish gold. A warmer sun makes the vigorous verdure shine more richly; the stalks of maize spring from the earth like discharges of rockets, and their strong, wrinkled leaves fall over in plumes; such burning rays are needed to urge the sap through those gross fibres and gild the massy spike. Toward Gan, the hills, over which undulates the road, draw nearer together, and you travel on through little green valleys, planted with ash and

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I.

I.

I thought that here I should find the country; a village like a hundred others, with long roofs of thatch or tiles, with crannied walls and shaky doors, and in the courts a pell-mell of carts with fagots, and tools, and domestic animals, in short, the whole picturesque and charming unconstraint of country life. I find a Paris street and the promenades of the Bois de Boulogne. Never was country less countrified: you skirt a row of houses drawn up in line, like a row of soldiers when carrying arms

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II.

II.

People who have any appetite take refuge at the table; they did not count upon the musicians. First we saw a blind man come in, a heavy, thick-headed Spaniard, then the violinists of the country, then another blind man. They play pot-pourris of waltzes, country dances, bits from operas, strung one upon another, galloping along, above the note or below it, with admirable fearlessness, despoiling every repertory in their musical race. The next day we had three Germans, tall as towers, stiff as sto

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III.

III.

On sunny days, we live in the open air. A sort of yard, called the English garden, stretches between the street and the mountain, carpeted with a poor turf, withered and full of holes; the ladies constitute it their drawing-room and work there; the dandies, lying on several chairs at once, read their journal and proudly smoke their cigar; the little girls, in embroidered pantalons, chatter with coquettish gestures and graceful little ways; they are trying in advance the parts they will play as l

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IV.

IV.

Anomalous beeches sustain the slopes here; no description can give an idea of these stunted colossi, eight feet high, and round which three men could not reach. Beaten back by the wind that desolates the declivity, their sap has been accumulating for centuries in huge, stunted, twisted and interlaced branches; all embossed with knots misshapen and blackened, they stretch and coil themselves fantastically, like limbs swollen by disease and distended by a supreme effort. Through the split bark may

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V.

V.

Toward four o’clock the cavalcades return; the small horses of the country are gentle, and gallop without too much effort; far away in the sunlight gleam the white and luminous veils of the ladies; nothing is more graceful than a pretty woman on horseback, when she is neither imprisoned in a black riding-habit, nor topped with a chimney-pot hat. Nobody here wears this funereal, poverty-stricken English costume; in a gay country people assume gay colors; the sun is a oood counsellor. It is forbid

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VI.

VI.

On Sunday a procession of fine toilets goes up toward the church. This church is a round box, of stone and plaster, built for fifty persons but made to hold two hundred. Every half-hour the tide of the faithful ebbs and flows. Invalid priests abound and say as many masses as may be wanted: everything at Eaux Bonnes suffers for want of room; they form in line for prayers as for drinking, and are as crowded at the chapel as at the tap. Occasionally a purveyor of public pleasures undertakes the dut

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I.

I.

I have determined to find some pleasure in my walks; have come out alone by the first path that offered itself, and walk straight on as chance may lead. Provided you have noted two or three prominent points, you are sure of finding the way back. You can now enjoy the unexpected, and discover the country. To know where you are going and by what way is certain boredom; the imagination deflowers the landscape in advance. It works and builds according to its own pleasure; then when you reach your go

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II.

II.

The course of the Valentin is nothing but a long fall between multitudes of rocks. All along the promenade Eynard, for half a league, you may hear it rumbling under your feet. At the bridge of Discoo, its standing-ground fails it altogether; it falls into an amphitheatre, from shelf to shelf, in jets that cross each other and mingle their flakes of foam; then under an arcade of rocks and stones, it eddies in deep basins, whose edges it has polished, and where the grayish emerald of its waters di

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III.

III.

At the bottom of an ice-cold gorge rolls the cascade of Larresecq. It does not deserve its renown: it is a sort of dilapidated stairway with a dirty stream, lost among stones and shifting earth, awkwardly scrambling down it; but, in getting there, you pass by a profound steep-edged hollow, where the torrent rolls along swallowed up in the caverns it has scooped out, obstructed by the trunks of the trees that it uproots. Overhead, lordly oaks meet in arcades; the shrubs steep their roots far belo

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IV.

IV.

Going down the Valentin, on the slope of the Montagne Verte , I found landscapes less austere. You reach the right bank of the Gave d’Ossau. A pretty streamlet slips down the mountain, encased between two walls of rounded stones all purple with poppies and wild mallows. Its fall has been turned to account in driving rows of saws incessantly back and forth over blocks of marble. A tall, bare-footed girl, in rags, ladles up sand and water for wetting the machine; by the aid of the sand the iron bl

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V.

V.

The view from Mount Gourzy is much admired; the traveller is informed that he will see the whole plain of Beam as far as Pau. I am obliged to take the word of the guide-book for it; I found clouds at the summit and saw nothing but the fog. At the end of the forest that covers the first slope lay some enormous trees, half rotten, and already whitened with moss. Some mummies of pine trees were left standing; but their pyramids of branches showed a shattered side. Old oaks split open as high up as

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ABOVE GABAS.

ABOVE GABAS.

Mountains then may have another beauty than that of grandeur? "Yes, since they sometimes have a different expression. Look at that little isolated chain, against which the Thermes support themselves: nobody climbs it; it possesses neither great trees, nor naked rocks, nor points of view. And yet I experienced a genuine pleasure there yesterday; you follow the sharp backbone of the mountain that protrudes its vertebrae through its meagre coating of earth; the poor but thickset turf, sunburnt and

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I.

I.

O n the north of the valley of Ossau is a cleft; it is the way to Eaux-Chaudes. An entire skirt of the mountain was torn out in order to open it; the wind eddies through the hollows of this chilly pass; the precipitous cut, of a dark iron-color, lifts its formidable mass as if to overwhelm the passerby; upon the rocky wall opposite are perched twisted trees in rows, and their thin, feathery tops wave strangely among the reddish projections. The highway overhangs the Gave which eddies five hundre

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II.

II.

In spite of myself I have been dreaming here of the antique gods, sons of Greece, and made in the likeness of their country. They were born in a similar country, and they spring to life again here in ourselves, with the sentiments which gave birth to them. I imagine idle and curious herdsmen, of fresh and infantile souls, not yet possessed by the authority of a neighboring civilization and an established dogma, but active, hardy, and poets by nature. They dream—and of what, if not of the huge be

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I.

I.

O n the eighth of August, at nine o’clock in the morning, the piercing note of a flageolet was to be heard at half a league’s distance from Eaux-Bonnes, and the bathers set out for Aas. The way there is by a narrow road cut in the Montagne Verte, and overhung with lavender and bunches of wild flowers. We entered upon a street six feet in width: it is the main street. Scarlet-capped children, wondering at their own magnificence, stood bolt upright in the doorways and looked on us in silent admira

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II.

II.

Laruns is a market-town. Instead of a hogshead there were four times two hogsheads and as many musicians, all playing together, and each one a different portion of the same air. This clatter excepted and a few magnificent pairs of velvet breeches, the festival was the same as that at Aas. What we go there to see is the procession. At first everybody attends vespers; the women in the sombre nave of the church, the men in a gallery, the small boys in a second gallery higher up, under the eye of a

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III.

III.

The Ossalais, however, have ordinarily a gentle, intelligent, and somewhat sad physiognomy. The soil is too poor to impart to their countenance that expression of impatient vivacity and lively spirit that the wine of the south and the easy life give to their neighbors of Languedoc. Three-score leagues in a carriage prove that the soil moulds the type. A little farther up, in the Cantal, a country of chest-nut-trees, where the people fill themselves with a hearty nourishment, you will see counten

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IV.

IV.

We had a wish to know if the fathers were equal to the sons; and we have found the history of Bearn in a fine red folio, composed in the year 1640, by Master Pierre de Marca, a Béarnais, counsellor of the king in his state and privy councils, and president in his court of the parliament of Navarre; the whole ornamented with a magnificent engraving representing the conquest of the Golden Fleece. Pierre de Marca makes several important discoveries in his book, among others, that of two kings of Na

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V.

V.

These rude manners, filled with chances and dangers, produced as many heroes as brigands. First comes the Count Gaston, one of the leaders of the first crusade; he was, like all the great men of this country, an enterprising and a ready-minded man, a man of experience and one of the vanguard. At Jerusalem he went ahead to reconnoitre, and constructed the machines for the siege; he was held to be one of the wisest in counsel, and was the first to plant upon the walls the cows of Bearn. No one str

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VI.

VI.

I return to my Béarnais; they were the most active and circumspect of the band. The counts of Bearn fought and treated with all the world; they hover between the patronage of France, Spain and England, and are subject to no one; they pass from one to the other and always to their own advantage, “drawn,” says Matthew Paris, “by pounds sterling, or crowns, of which they had both great need and great abundance.” They are always first where fighting is to be done or money to be gained; they go to be

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I.

I.

T he carriage leaves Eaux-Bonnes at dawn. The sun is scarcely yet risen, and is still hidden by the mountains. Pale rays begin to color the mosses on the western declivity. These mosses, bathed in dew, seem as if awakening under the first caress of the day. Rosy hues, of an inexpressible softness, rest on the summits, then steal down along the slopes. One could never have believed that these gaunt old creatures were capable of an expression so timid and so tender. The light broadens, heaven expa

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II.

II.

Beyond Pau stretches a smiling country, golden with harvests, amongst which the Gave winds its blue folds between white and pebbly beaches. On the right, far away in a veil of luminous mist, the Pyrenees lift their jagged tops, and the naked points of their black rocks. Their flanks, furrowed by the torrents of winter, are deeply scored and, as it were, turned up with an iron rake. The picturesque country and the great mountains are seen to disclose themselves; the fences of the fields are of sm

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III.

III.

Coarraze still preserves a tower and gateway, the remains of a castle. This castle has its legend, which Froissart recounts in a style so flowing and agreeable, so minute and expressive, that I cannot refrain from quoting it at length. The Lord of Coarraze had a dispute with a clerk, and the clerk left him with threats. About three months after, when the knight least thought of it, and was sleeping in his bed with his lady, in his castle of Coarraze, there came invisible messengers, who made suc

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IV.

IV.

We no sooner reach Lestelle, than we are assured on all sides that we must visit the chapel. We pass between rows of shops full of rosaries, basins for holy-water, medals, small crucifixes, through a cross-fire of offers, exhortations and cries. After which we are free to admire the edifice, a liberty which we are careful not to abuse. On the portal, indeed, there is a pretty enough virgin in the style of the seventeenth century, four evangelists in marble, and in the interior several tolerable

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V.

V.

Near Lourdes, the hills became bald and the landscape sad. Lourdes is only a mass of dull, lead-colored roofs, heaped up below the highway. The two small towers of the fort outline their slender forms against the sky. A single enormous, blackish rock lifts its back, corroded by mosses, above the enclosure of a slight wall that winds to shut it in, and suggests an elephant in a boarded shed. The neighborhood of the mountains dwarfs all human constructions. Heavy clouds rose in the sky, and the du

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I.

I.

L uz is a little city, thoroughly rustic and agreeable. Streams of water run down the narrow, flinty streets; the gray houses press together for the sake of gaining a little shade. The morning sees the arrival of flocks of sheep, of asses laden with wood, of grunting and undisciplined hogs, and bare-footed peasant girls, knitting as they walk alongside of their carts. Luz is in a spot where four valleys come together. Men and beasts disappear on the market-place; red umbrellas are fixed in the g

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II.

II.

The church is cool and solitary; it once belonged to the Templars. These monk-soldiers obtained a foothold in the most out-of-the-way corners of Europe. The tower is square as a fortress; the enclosing wall has battlements like a fortified city. The dark old door-way would be easily defended. Upon its arch, which is very low, may be distinguished a half-obliterated Christ, and two fantastic, rudely colored birds. As you enter, a small uncovered tomb serves as font, and you are shown a low door t

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III.

III.

Luz was formerly the capital of these valleys, which formed together a sort of republic; each commune deliberated upon its own private interests; four or five villages formed a vic and the deputies from every four vics assembled at Luz. The list of the assessments was, from time immemorial, made upon bits of wood called totchoux, that is to say, sticks. Each community had its totchoti, upon which the secretary cut with his knife Roman ciphers, the value of which was known only to himself. In 178

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IV.

IV.

This valley is everywhere refreshed and made, fertile by running water. On the road to Pierrefitte two swift streams prattle under the shade of the flowering hedges: no travelling companion could be gayer. On both sides, from every meadow, flow streamlets that cross each other, separate, come together, and finally together spring into the Gave. In this way the peasants water all their crops; a field has five or six lines of streams which run hemmed in by beds of slate. The bounding troop tosses

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I.

I.

S aint-Sauveur is a sloping street, both pretty and regular, bearing no trace of the extemporized hotel or of the scenery of an opera, and without either the rustic roughness of a village or the tarnished elegance of a city. The houses extend without monotony, their lines of windows encased in rough-hewn marble: on the right, they are set back to back against pointed rocks, from which water oozes; on the left they overhang the Gave, which eddies at the bottom of the precipice. The bath-house is

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II.

II.

The Gave is strewn with small islands, which may be reached by jumping from one stone to another. These islands are beds of bluish rock spotted with pebbles of a staring white; they are submerged in winter, and now there are trunks stripped of their bark still lying here and there among the bowlders. In some hollows are remains of ooze; from these spring clusters of elms like a discharge of fireworks, and tufts of grass wave over the arid pebbles; around the hushed water grows warm in the cavern

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III.

III.

In clear weather I have often climbed the mountain before sunrise. During the night, the mist of the Gave, accumulated in the gorges, has filled them to overflowing; under foot there is a sea of clouds, and overhead a dome of tender blue radiant with morning splendor; everything else has disappeared; nothing is to be seen but the luminous azure of heaven and the dazzling satin of the clouds; nature wears her vesture of purity. The eye glides with pleasure over the softly rounded forms of the aer

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IV.

IV.

Paul and I have gone to Bareges; the road is a continual ascent for two leagues. An alley of trees stretches between a brook and the Gave. The water leaps from every height; here and there a crowd of little mills is perched over the cascades; the declivities are sprinkled with them. It is amusing to see the little things nestled in the hollows of the colossal slopes. And yet their slated roofs smile and gleam among the foliage. There is nothing here that is not gracious and lovely; the banks of

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V.

V.

Soon the mountains grow bald, the trees disappear; nothing upon the slopes but a poor brushwood: Bareges is seen. The landscape is hideous. The flank of the mountain is creviced with whitish slides; the narrow and wasted plain disappears beneath the coarse sand; the poor herbage, dry and weighed down, fails at every step; the earth is as if ripped open, and the slough, through its yawning wound, exposes the very entrails; the beds of yellowish limestone are laid bare; one walks on sands and trai

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VI.

VI.

In order to console ourselves here, we have read some charming letters; here is one of them from the little Duc du Maine, seven years old, whom Mme. de Maintenon had brought here to be cured. He wrote to his mother Mme. de Montespan, and the letter must certainly pass under the king’s eyes. What a school of style was that court! “I am going off to write all the news of the house for thy diversion, my dear little heart, and I shall write far better when I shall think that it is for you, madame. M

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I.

I.

C auterets is a town at the bottom of a valley, melancholy enough, paved, and provided with an octroi. Innkeepers, guides, the whole of a famished population besieges us; but we have considerable force of mind, and after a spirited resistance we obtain the right of looking about and choosing. Fifty paces further on, we are fastened upon by servants, children, donkey-hirers and boys, who accidentally stroll about us. They offer us cards, they praise up to us the site, the cuisine; they accompany

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II.

II.

Several leagues away, among the precipices, sleeps the lake of Gaube. The green water, three hundred feet in depth, has the reflexes of an emerald. The bald heads of the mountains are mirrored in it with a divine serenity. The slender column of the pines is reflected there as clear as in the air; in the distance, the woods clothed in bluish mist come down to bathe their feet in its cold wave, and the huge Vignemale, spotted with snow, shuts it about with her cliffs. At times a remnant of breeze

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III.

III.

The Diana of the country is more amiable; it is the lively and gracious Margaret of Navarre, sister and liberatress of Francis I. She came to these waters with her court, her poets, her musicians, her savants, a poet and theologian herself, of infinite curiosity, reading Greek, learning Hebrew, and taken up with Calvinism. On coming out of the routine and discipline of the middle ages, disputes about dogma and the thorns of erudition appeared agreeable, even to ladies; Lady Jane Grey, Elizabeth

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IV.

IV.

She wrote the Heptameron here; it seems that a journey to the waters was then less safe than now-a-days. The first day of the month of September, as the baths of the Pyrenees mountains begin to have virtue, were found at those of Caulderets several persons, from France and Spain as well as other places; some to drink the water, others bathe in it, others to take the mud, which things are so marvellous, that invalids abandoned by the physicians return from them completely cured. But about the tim

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V.

V.

Sometimes here, after a broiling day, the clouds gather, the air is stifling, one feels fairly ill, and a storm bursts forth. There was such an one last night. Each moment the heavens opened, cleft by an immense flash, and the vault of darkness lifted itself entire like a tent. The dazzling light marked out the limits of the various cultures and the forms of the trees at the distance of a league. The glaciers flamed with a bluish glimmer; the jagged peaks suddenly lifted themselves upon the hori

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I.

I.

U pon a hill, at the end of a road, are the remains of the abbey of Saint-Savin. The old church was, they say, built by Charlemagne; the stones, eaten and burned, are crumbling, the disjointed flags are incrusted with moss; from the garden the eye takes in the valley, brown in the evening light; the winding Gave already lifts into the air its trail of pale smoke. It was sweet here to be a monk; it is in such places that the Imitation should be read; in such places was it written. For a sensitive

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I.

I.

F rom Luz to Gavarnie is eighteen miles. It is enjoined upon every living creature able to mount a horse, a mule, or any quadruped whatever, to visit Gavarnie; in default of other beasts, he should, putting aside all shame, bestride an ass. Ladies and convalescents are taken there in sedan-chairs. Otherwise, think what a figure you will make on your return. “You come from the Pyrenees; you’ve seen Gavarnie?” “No.” What then did you go to the Pyrenees for? You hang your head, and your friend triu

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II.

II.

We leave at six o’clock in the morning, by the road to Scia, in the fog, without seeing at first anything beyond great confused forms of trees and rocks. At the end of a quarter of an hour, we hear along the pathway a noise of sharp cries drawing near: it was a funeral procession coming from Scia. Two men bore a small coffin under a white shroud; behind came four herdsmen in long cloaks and brown capuchons, silent, with bent heads; four women followed in black mantles. It was they who uttered th

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III.

III.

We turn a second bridge and enter the plain of Gèdres, verdant and cultivated, where the hay is in cocks; they are harvesting; our horses walk between two hedges of hazel; we go along by orchards; but the mountain is ever near; the guide shows us a rock three times the height of a man, which, two years ago, rolled down and demolished a house. We encounter several singular caravans: a band of young priests in black hats, black gloves, black cassocks tucked up, black stockings, very apparent, novi

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IV.

IV.

Beyond Gèdres is a wild valley called Chaos, which is well named. After quarter of an hour’s journey there, the trees disappear, then the juniper and the box, and finally the moss; the Gave is no longer seen; all noises are hushed. It is a dead solitude peopled with wrecks. Three avalanches of rocks and crushed flint have come down from the summit to the very bottom. The horrid tide, high and a quarter of a league in length, spreads out like waves its myriads of sterile stones, and the inclined

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V.

V.

Gavarnie is a very ordinary village, commanding a view of the amphitheatre we are come to see. After you have left it, it is still necessary to go three miles through a melancholy plain, half buried in sand by the winter inundations; the waters of the Gave are muddy and dull; a cold wind whistles from the amphitheatre; the glaciers, strewn with mud and stones, are stuck to the declivity like patches of dirty plaster. The mountains are bald and ravined by cascades; black cones of scattered firs c

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VI.

VI.

After the glaciers we find a sloping esplanade; we climb for ten minutes bruising our feet upon fragments of sharp rock. Since leaving the hut we have not lifted our eyes, in order to reserve for ourselves an unbroken sensation. Here at last we look. A wall of granite crowned with snow hollows itself before us in a gigantic amphitheatre. This amphitheatre is twelve hundred feet high, nearly three miles in circumference, three tiers of perpendicular walls, and in each tier thousands of steps. The

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I.

I.

W e ought to be useful to our fellow-mortals; I have climbed the Bergonz in order to have at least one ascent to tell about. A stony, zigzag pathway excoriates the green mountain with its whitish track. The view changes with every turn. Above and below us are meadows with girls making hay, and little houses stuck to the declivity like swallows’ nests. Lower down, an immense pit of black rock, to which from all sides hasten streams of silver. The higher up we are, the more the valleys are contrac

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II.

II.

Geology is a noble science. Upon this summit theories grow lively; the arguments of the books breathe new life into the story of the mountains, and the past appears grander than the present. This country was in the beginning a solitary and boiling sea, then slowly cooled, finally peopled by living creatures and built up by their debris. Thus were formed the ancient limestones, the slates of transition and several of the secondary rocks. What myriads of ages are accumulated in a single phrase! Ti

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III.

III.

Paul has climbed the Pic du Midi of Bigorre: here is his journal of the trip:— “Set out in the mist at four o’clock in the morning. The pastures of Tau through the mist; the mist is distinctly visible. The lake of Oncet through the mist; same view. “Howker of the Five Bears. Several whitish or grayish spots on a whitish or grayish ground. To form an idea of it, look at five or six wafers, of a dirty white, stuck behind a leaf of blotting-paper. “Beginning of the steep rise; ascent at a footpace,

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I.

I.

T he beeches push high upon the declivities, even beyond three thousand feet. Their huge pillars strike down into the hollows where earth is gathered. Their roots enter into the clefts of the rock, lift it, and come creeping to the surface like a family of snakes. Their skin, white and tender in the plains, is changed into a grayish and solid bark; their tenacious leaves shine with a vigorous green, beneath the sun which cannot penetrate them. They live isolated, because they need space, and ran

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II.

II.

But the real inhabitants of the mountains are the pines, geometrical trees, akin to the ferruginous blocks hewn by the primitive eruptions. The vegetation of the plains unfolds itself in undulating forms with all the graceful caprices of liberty and wealth. The pines, on the other hand, seem scarcely alive; their shaft rises in a perpendicular line along the rocks; their horizontal branches part from the trunk at right angles, equal as the radii of a circle, and the entire tree is a cone termina

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III.

III.

Higher up, on the barren steeps, the yellowish box twists its knotty feet beneath the stones. It is a melancholy and tenacious creature, stunted and thrust back upon itself; overborne amidst the rocks, it dares not shoot upward nor spread. Its small thick leaves follow each other in monotonous rows, clumsily oval and of a formal regularity. Its stem, short and grayish, is rough to the touch; the round fruit encloses black capsules, hard as ebony, that must be broken open for the seed. Everything

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IV.

IV.

At the summit grow the mosses. Battered by the wind, dried by the sun, they lose the fresh green tint they wear in the valleys and on the brink of the springs. They are reddened with tawny hues, and their smooth filaments have the reflexes of a wolf’s fur. Others, yellowed and pale, cover with their sickly colors the bleeding crevices. Then there are gray ones, almost white, which grow like remnants of hair upon the bald rocks. Far away, upon the back of the mountain, all these tints are mingled

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V.

V.

The climate shapes and produces animals as well as plants. The bear is a serious beast, a thorough mountaineer, curious to behold in his great-coat of felted hair, yellowish or grayish in color. It seems formed for its domicile and its domicile for it. Its heavy fur is an excellent mantle against the snow. The mountaineers think it so good, that they borrow it from him as often as they can, and he thinks it so good that he defends it against them to the best of his ability. He likes to live alon

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VI.

VI.

You often hear for a half-hour a tinkling of bells behind the mountain; these are the herds of goats changing their pasture. Sometimes there are more than a thousand of them. You find yourself stopped in crossing the bridges until the whole caravan has filed over. They have long hanging hairs which form their coat; with their black mantle and great beard, you would say that they were dressed for a masquerade. Their yellow eyes stare vaguely, with an expression of curiosity and gentleness. They s

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VII.

VII.

Why should not I speak of the happiest animal in creation? A great painter, Karel du Jardin, has taken a liking for it: he has drawn it in all its attitudes, and has shown all its pleasures and all its tastes. The rights of prose are indeed equal to those of painting, and I promise that travellers will take pleasure in considering the hogs. There, the word is out. Now mind that in the Pyrenees they are not covered with tainting filth, as on our farms; they are rosy or black, well washed, and liv

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VIII.

VIII.

Myriads of lizards nestle in the chinks of slate and in the walls of rounded pebbles. On the approach of a passer-by, they run like a streak across the road. If you stand quiet for a moment, you see their little restless, sly heads peep out between two stones; the rest of the body shows itself, the tail wriggles, and, with an abrupt movement, they climb zigzag upon the gravelly ledges. There they have as much sun as they please, sun to roast alive in; at noon, the rock burns the hand. This power

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I.

I.

H ere one must submit to long, stifling ascents; the horses trudge on at a foot-pace or pant; the travellers sleep or sweat; the conductor grumbles or drinks; the dust whirls, and, if you go out, your throat is parched or your eyes smart. There is only one way of passing the evil hour: it is to tell over some old story of the country, as, for example, the following:— Bos de Bénac was a good knight, a great friend of the king Saint Louis; he went on a crusade into the land of Egypt, and killed ma

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II.

II.

A little beyond Lourdes begins the plain, and the sky opens out over an immense space: the azure dome grows pale toward the edges, and its tender blue, graded down by insensible shades, loses itself on the horizon in an exquisite whiteness. These colors, so pure, so rich, so sweetly blended, are like a great concert where one finds himself enveloped in harmony; the light comes from all sides; the air is penetrated with it, the blue vault sparkles from the dome to the very horizon. Other objects

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III.

III.

Tarbes is a good-sized city that looks like a market town, paved with small stones, mediocre in appearance. You alight in a place where great dusty elms make a shade. At noon the streets are empty; it is evident that you are near the sun of Spain. A few women merely, with red foulards on the head, were selling peaches at the corners. A little further on some cavalry soldiers stretched their great awkward legs in the narrow shadow of their wall. You run across a square of four buildings, in the m

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IV.

IV.

Poor mankind has no city which is not full of lamentable memories. The Protestants took this one in 1570 and butchered all the inhabitants. One of them had taken refuge in a tower whose only ascent was by a narrow staircase; they sent one of his friends, who called to him under pretext of a parley; no sooner had he put his head at the window than he was killed by an arquebusade. The peasants who came to give burial to the dead interred two thousand of them in the ditches. Five years after, the c

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I.

I.

Y ou set out for Bagnères at five o’clock in the afternoon, in the dust and amidst a train of coucous laden with people. The road is blocked, like the roads in the suburbs of Paris on a Saturday evening. The diligence, in passing, takes up as many peasants as it meets; they are put in heaps under the tilt, among the trunks, alongside the dogs; they seem proud and pleased with their lofty place. Legs, arms and heads, dispose themselves as best they can; they sing, and the coach appears like a mus

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II.

II.

The bathing-house is a beautiful white building, vast and regular; the long front, quite unornamented, is of a very simple form. This architecture, akin to the antique, is more beautiful in the south than in the north; like the sky, it leaves in the mind an impression of serenity and grandeur. A half of the river washes the façade, and precipitates under the entrance bridge its black sheet bristling with sparkling waves. You enter into a great vestibule, follow a huge staircase with double balus

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I.

I.

E verybody agrees that life at watering-places is very poetic, abounding in adventures of every sort, especially adventures of the heart. Read the novels L’Anneau d’Argent of Charles de Bernard, George Sand’s Lavinia , etc. If watering-place life is a romance, it is in the books that it is so. To see great men in these places, you must carry them bound in calf in your trunk. It is equally agreed that conversation at watering-places is extremely brilliant, that you meet only artists, superior men

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II.

II.

The street is full of downcast faces; lawyers, bankers, people tired with office work, or bored with having too much fortune and too little trouble. In the evening, they go to Frascati or watch the loungers who elbow each other among the shops on the course. During the day they drink and bathe a little, ride and smoke a good deal. The bloated patients, stretched on arm-chairs, digest their food; the lean study the newspapers; the young men talk with the ladies about the weather; the ladies are b

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FIRST.

FIRST.

The first has long legs, lean body, head bent forward, large and powerful feet, vigorous hands, excellent at grasping and holding on. It is provided with canes, ferruled sticks, umbrellas, cloaks, india-rubber top-coats. It despises dress, shows itself but little in society, knows thoroughly guides and hotels. It strides over the ground in an admirable manner, rides with saddle, without saddle, in every way and all possible beasts. It walks for the sake of walking, and to have the right of repea

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SECOND.

SECOND.

The second variety comprises thoughtful methodical people, generally wearing spectacles, endowed with a passionate confidence in the printed letter. You know them by the guide-book, which they always carry in their hand. This book is to them the law and the prophets. They eat trout at the place named in the book, make all the stops advised by the book, dispute with the innkeeper when he asks more than is marked in the book. You see them at the remarkable points with their eyes fixed on the book,

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THIRD.

THIRD.

The third variety walks in troops and makes its excursions by families. You see from afar a great peaceable cavalcade; father, mother, two daughters, two tall cousins, one or two friends and sometimes donkeys for the little boys. They beat the donkeys, which are restive; they advise the fiery youths to be prudent; a glance retains the young ladies about the green veil of the mother. The distinctive traits of this variety are the green veil, the bourgeois spirit, the love of siestas and meals on

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FOURTH.

FOURTH.

Fourth kind: dining tourists. At Louvie, a family from Carcassonne, father, mother, son, daughter and servant, alighted from the interior. For the first time in their life they were undertaking a pleasure trip. The father was one of those florid bourgeois, pot-bellied, important, dogmatic, well-clad in fine cloth, carefully preserved, who educate their cooks, arrange their house en bonbonnière , and establish themselves in their comfort, like an oyster in its shell. They entered stupefied into a

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FIFTH.

FIFTH.

Fifth variety; rare: learned tourists. One day, at the foot of a damp rock, I saw a little lean man coming toward me, with a nose like an eagle’s beak; a hatchet face, green eyes, grizzling locks, nervous, jerky movements, and something quaint and earnest in his countenance. He had on huge gaiters, an old black, rain-beaten cap, trousers spattered to the knee with mud, a botanical case full of dents on his back, and in his hand a small spade. Unfortunately I was looking at a plant with long, str

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SIXTH.

SIXTH.

Sixth variety; very numerous: sedentary tourists. They gaze on the mountains from their windows; their excursions consist in going from their room to the English garden, from the English garden to the promenade. They take a siesta upon the heath, and read the journal stretched on a chair; after which they have seen the Pyrenees....

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SEVENTH.

SEVENTH.

There was a grand ball yesterday. Paul presented there a young creole from Venezuela in America; the young man has as yet seen nothing; he has just left ship at Bordeaux, whence he comes here; a very fine fellow, however, of a fine, olive complexion; great hunter, and better fitted for frequenting mountains than drawing-rooms. He comes to France to form himself, as they say; Paul pretends that it is to be deformed. We have taken our place in a corner; and the young man has asked Paul to define t

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EIGHTH.

EIGHTH.

Two days after there was a concert. The creole said in coming out that he was very tired, and had understood nothing of all that buzzing, and begged Paul to explain to him what pleasure people found in such noise. “For,” said he, “they have enjoyed it, since they paid six francs for admission, and applauded vehemently.” “Music awakes all sorts of agreeable reveries.” “Let us see.” “Such an air suggests scenes of love; such another makes you imagine great landscapes, tragic events.” “And if you d

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NINTH.

NINTH.

In the evening our creole, who had been thinking, said to Paul: "Since you are such musicians in France, your well-educated girls must all learn music?” “Three hours of scales every day, for thirteen years, from seven to twenty; total, fourteen thousand hours.” “They profit by it?” “One out of eight; of the other seven, three become good hand-organs, four poor hand-or-gans.” “I suppose for a compensation they are made to read?” “Le Ragois, La Harpe, and other dictionaries, all sorts of little tr

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LIFE AND PHILOSOPHICAL OPINIONS OF A CAT. I.

LIFE AND PHILOSOPHICAL OPINIONS OF A CAT. I.

I was born in a cask, at the back of a hay-loft: the light fell on my closed eyelids, so that the first eight days, everything appeared rose-colored to me. The eighth, it was still better; I looked, and saw a great fall of light upon the dark shade; the dust and insects danced in it. The hay was warm and fragrant; the spiders hung in sleep from the tiles; the gnats hummed; everything seemed happy; that emboldened me; I wanted to go and touch the white patch where those little diamonds were whirl

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II.

II.

When my paws had become firm, I went out and soon made friends with a goose, an estimable creature, for she had a warm belly; I cowered underneath, and during this time her philosophic conversation was forming me. She used to say that the poultry yard was a republic of allies; that the most industrious, man, had been chosen for chief, and that the dogs, although turbulent, were our guardians. I shed tears of emotion under my kind friend’s belly. One morning the cook appeared looking as if butter

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III.

III.

My uncle, a very old and experienced animal, taught me universal history. At the beginning of things, when he was born, the master being dead, the children at the funeral and the servants at a dance, all the animals found themselves free. It was a frightful hubbub; a turkey, whose feathers were too fine, was stripped by his comrades. In the evening, a ferret, which had slipped in, sucked the jugular vein of three-quarters of the combatants, who, naturally, made no further outcry. The spectacle i

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IV.

IV.

My uncle, although surly, acknowledges that things are better than they used to be. He says that at first our race was savage, and that there are still in the woods cats who are like our first ancestors, which, at long intervals, catch a mole or dormouse, but oftener the contents of a shot-gun. Others, lean, short-haired, run over the roofs and think that mice are very rare. As for us, brought up on the summit of earthly felicity, we whisk a flattering tail in the kitchen, we utter tender little

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V.

V.

Music is a heavenly art, and it is certain that our race has the privilege of it; it springs from the depths of our entrails; men know this so well that they borrow them from us when they want to imitate us with their violins. Two things inspire in us these heavenly songs: the view of the stars and love. Men, clumsy copyists, cram themselves ridiculously into a low hall, and skip about thinking to equal us. It is on the summit of the roofs, in the splendor of the night, when all the skin shivers

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VI.

VI.

I have thought much on the ideal happiness, and I think I have made thereupon some notable discoveries. It evidently consists, in warm weather, in sleeping near the barnyard pool. A delicious odor arises from the fermenting dung; lustrous straws shine in the sunlight. The turkeys ogle lovingly, and let their crest of red flesh fall on their beak. The fowls scratch up the straw, and bury their broad bellies to take in the rising heat. The pool gleams, swarming with moving insects which make the b

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VII.

VII.

My mind has been greatly enlarged by reflection. By a sure method, sound conjectures and sustained attention, I have penetrated some of the secrets of nature. The dog is an animal so deformed, of such an unruly character, that from the earliest times it has been considered to be a monster, born and moulded in despite of all laws. Indeed, when rest is the natural state, how explain an animal that is forever in motion and busy, and that without aim nor need, even when he is gorged and not afraid?

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VIII.

VIII.

Little by little the mind frees itself from the prejudices in which it was reared; light dawns; it thinks for itself; thus it is that I have attained to the true explanation of things. Our first ancestors (and the gutter cats have retained this belief) said that heaven is a very lofty granary, well covered, where the sun never hurts the eyes. In this granary, my great-aunt used to say, there are troops of rats so fat that they can hardly walk, and the more we eat of them, the more there are to e

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I.

I.

E very man who has the use of his eyes and ears ought, in travelling, to climb up to the imperial. The highest places are the most beautiful; ask those who occupy them. You break your neck if you fall from them; consult the same people about this. But you enjoy yourself while you are there. In the first place, you see the landscape, which produces descriptions that you offer to the public. In the coupé, your only spectacle is the harness of the horses; in the interior, you see through a tiny win

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II.

II.

The coach starts very early in the morning and climbs a long ascent under the gray brightness of the dawn. The peasants come in troops; the women have five or six bottles of milk on the head, in a basket. Oxen, with lowered brows, drag carts as primitive and Gallic as at-Pau. The children, in brown berets , run in the dust, alongside their mothers. The village is coming to nourish the city. Escaladieu shows at the wayside the remains of an ancient abbey. The chapel is still standing and preserve

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III.

III.

Encausse is very near here, at the turn of the road. Chapelle and Bachaumont came there to restore their stomachs, which needed and deserved it well, for they used them more than some do. They wrote their travels, and their style flows as easily as their life. They go by short stages, drink, chat, feast among the friends they have everywhere, court the ladies, make game very pleasantly of the provincial folk. They drink the health of the absent, enjoy the muscatel as much as possible, and trifle

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IV.

IV.

The road is bordered with vines, each of which carries up its tree, elm or ash, the crown of a fresh verdure, and lets its leaves and tendrils fall again in plumes. The valley is a garden long and narrow, between two chains of mountains. On the lower slopes are beautiful meadows where the living waters run in orderly fashion in trenches, nimble, prattling irrigators; the villages are seated alone the little river; vine-stocks climb alone the dusty wall. The mallows, straight as tapers, lift abov

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I.

I.

T he street is a broad alley, planted with large trees, and lined with rather handsome hotels. It was opened by the intendant d’Ètigny, who, for this misdeed, was near being stoned. It was necessary to call in a company of dragoons to force the Luchonnais to endure the prosperity of their country. At the end of the alley a pretty chalet, like those in the Jardin des Plantes, shelters the du Pr’e spring. Its walls are a fantastic trellis of gnarled branches, adorned with their bark; its roof is t

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III.

III.

The valley is not a gorge, but a beautiful level meadow marked with trees and fields of maize, among which the river runs, but does not leap. Luchon is surrounded with alleys of plane-trees, poplars and lindens. You leave these alleys for a pathway which follows the waves of the Pique and winds amidst the high grass. The ashes and oaks form a screen along the two banks; big brooks come from the mountains; you cross them on trunks laid bridge-wise or on broad slabs of slate. All these waters flow

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IV.

IV.

Above Luchon is a mountain called Super-Bagnères. At the outset I run across the Fountain of Love; it is a hut of planks where beer is sold. A winding staircase, crossed by springs, then steep pathways in a black forest of firs lead you in two hours to the pastures on the summit. The mountain is about five thousand feet high. These pastures are great undulating hills, ranged in rows, carpeted with short turf and thickset, fragrant thyme; here and there in crowds are broad tufts of a sort of wild

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V.

V.

Toward the south the river becomes a torrent. Half a league from Luchon it is swallowed up in a deep defile of red rocks, many of which have fallen; the bed is choked with blocks; the two walls of rock close together in the north, and the dammed-up water roars to get out of its prison; but the trees grow in the crevices, and along the wall the white flowers of the bramble hang in locks. Very near here, on a round eminence of bare rock, rises the ruin of a Moorish tower, named Cas-tel-Vieil. Its

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I.

I.

W hen, after a two months’ sojourn in the Pyrenees, you leave Luchon, and see the flat country near Martres, you are delighted and breathe freely: you were tired, without knowing it, of those eternal barriers that shut in the horizon; you needed space. You felt that the air and light were usurped by those monstrous protuberances, and that you were not in a land of men, but in a land of mountains. Unknown to yourself you longed for a real champaign, free and broad. That of Martres is as level as

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II.

II.

Toulouse appears, all red with bricks, amidst the red dust of evening. A melancholy city, with narrow and flinty streets. The town hall, called Capicole , has but one narrow entrance, commonplace halls, a pronounced and elegant façade in the taste of the decorations for public festivals. In order that no one may doubt its antiquity, they have inscribed on it the word Capitolium. The cathedral, dedicated to St. Stephen, is remarkable only for one pleasant memory: “Towards the year 1027,” says Pie

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III.

III.

Below the museum is a square tower enclosed by a gallery of slender columns, which towards the top bend and are cut into trefoils, forming a border of arcades. They have gathered under this gallery all the antiquities of the country: fragments of Roman statues, severe busts of emperors, ascetic virgins of the middle ages, bas-reliefs from churches and temples, knights of stone lying all armed upon their tombs. The court was deserted and silent; tall slender trees, tufted shrubbery, were bright w

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