Castles and Chateaux of Old Navarre and the Basque Provinces
TekstCHAPTER XIV
THE PAYS DE COMMINGES
ON the first steep slope of the Pyrenees, bounded on one side by Couserans and on the other by Bigorre, is the ancient Comté de Comminges, the territory of the Convènes, whose capital was Lugdunum Convenarum, established by Pompey from the remains left by the legions of Sertorius. Under the Roman emperors the capital became an opulent city, but to-day, known as St. Bertrand de Comminges, but seven hundred people think enough of it to call it home.
It possesses a historic and picturesque site unequalled in the region, but Luchon, Montrejeau and St. Gaudens have grown at the expense of the smaller town, and its grand old cathedral church and ancient ramparts are little desecrated by alien strangers.
The view of Comminges from a distance is uncommon and startling. One may see across a valley the outline of every rock and tree and housetop of the little town clustered about the knees of the swart, sturdy church of St. Bertrand of Comminges, one of the architectural glories of the mediæval builder. The mountains rise roundly all about and give a rough frame to an exquisite picture.
What the precise date of the foundation of Comminges may be no one seems to know, though St. Jerome has said that it was a city built first by the montagnards in 79 B.C. This sacred chronicler called the founders “brigands,” but authorities agree that he meant merely mountain dwellers.
There is a profuse history of all this region still existing in the archives of the Département, which ranks among the most important of all those of feudal times still preserved in France. Only those of the Seine (Paris), Normandy (Rouen) and Provence (Marseilles and Aix) surpass it.
In autumn St. Bertrand de Comminges is an enchanted spot, with all the colours of the rainbow showing in its ensemble. It is grandly superb, the panorama which unrolls from the terrace of the old château, succeeding ranges of the Pyrenees rising one behind the other, cloud or snow-capped in turn. St. Bertrand, the ancient bishop’s seat of Comminges, with the fortress walls surrounding the town and towering cathedral is, in a way, a suggestion of St. Michel’s Mount off the Normandy coast, except there is no neighbouring sea. It is a townlet on a pinnacle.
The constructive elements of the grim ramparts are Roman, but mediæval additions and copings have been interpolated from time to time so that they scarcely look their age. In the Ville Haute were built the cathedral and its dependencies, the château of the seigneurs, and the houses of the noblesse. Beyond these, but within another encircling wall, were the houses of the adherents of the counts; while outside of this wall lived the mere hangers-on. This was the usual feudal disposition of things. Eighty thousand people once made up the population of St. Bertrand. And three great highways, to Agen, to Dax, and to Toulouse, led therefrom. This was the epoch of its great prosperity. It is one of the most ancient Roman colonies in Aquitaine, and its history has been told by many chroniclers, one of the least profuse being St. Gregoire, Archbishop of Tours.
After a frightful massacre in the ninth century the city, its churches, its château and its houses became deserted. It was a century later that Saint Bertrand de l’Isle, who had just been sanctified by his uncle the archbishop at Auch, undertook to reconstruct the old city on the ruins of its past. He re-established first the fallen bishopric, and elected himself bishop. This gave him power, and he started forthwith to build the singularly dignified and beautiful cathedral which one sees to-day. Comminges was made a comté in the tenth century, and the fief contained two hundred and eighty-eight towns and villages and nine castellanies, all owing allegiance to the Comte de Comminges. The episcopal jurisdiction varied somewhat from these limits, for it included twenty Spanish communes beyond the frontier as well.
One enters St. Bertrand to-day by the great arched gateway, or Porte Majou, which bears over its lintel the arms of the Cardinal de Foix. As a grand historical monument St. Bertrand commences well. Narrow, crooked, little streets climb to the platform terrace above where sits the cathedral. It is a sad, grim journey, this mounting through the deserted streets, with here and there a Gothic or Renaissance column built helter-skelter into a house front, and the suggestion of a barred Gothic window or a delicate Renaissance doorway now far removed from its original functions. At last one reaches a great mass of tumbled stones which one is told is the ruin of the episcopal palace built by St. Bertrand himself. But what would you? It is just this atmosphere of antiquity that one comes here to breathe, and certainly a more musty and less worldly one it would be difficult to find outside the catacombs of Rome.
Another city gate, the Porte Cabirole, still keeps the flame of mediævalism alive; and, near by, is the most interesting architectural bit of all, a diminutive, detached tower-stairway, dating at least from the fifteenth century. It is an admirable architectural note, quite in contrast with all the grimness and sadness of the rest of the ruins.
Opposite the entrance to the walled city is a curious monumental gateway, better described as a barbacane, or perhaps a great watch-tower, through which one has still to pass. The upper town had no source of water supply, so a well was cut down in the rock, and this tower served as its protection. There is another gate, still, in the encircling city walls, the third, the Porte de Herrison. After this, in making the round, one comes again to the Porte Majou, by which one entered.
Rising high above all, on the top of the hill, as does the tower of the abbey on St. Michel’s Mount, is the great, grim, newly coiffed tower of the cathedral of St. Bertrand, one of the most amply endowed and luxuriously installed minor cathedrals in all France. Its description in detail must be had from other works. It suffices here to state that the cathedral is of the town, and the town is of it to such an intermingled extent that it is almost impossible to separate the history of one from that of the other. The site of the cathedral is that of the old Roman citadel. Of the edifice built by St. Bertrand nothing remains but the first arches of the nave and the great westerly tower, really more like a donjon tower than a church steeple. In fact it is not a steeple at all. The whole aspect of St. Bertrand de Comminges, the city, the cathedral and the surroundings is militant, and looks as though it might stand off an army as well as undertake the saving of men’s souls.
The altar decorations, sculptured wood and carved stalls of the interior of this great church are very beautiful. Its like is not to be seen in France outside of Amiens, Albi and Rodez. The cloister, too, is superb.
The happenings of the city since its reconstruction were not many, save as they referred to religion. Two bishops of the see became Popes, Clement V and Innocent VIII. The end of the sixteenth century brought the religious wars, and Huguenots and Calvinists took, and retook, the city in turn. With the Revolution came times nearly as terrible; and, in the new order of things following upon the Concordat, the bishopric was definitely suppressed. The few hundred inhabitants of to-day live in a city almost as dead as Pompeii or Les Baux.
The word Comminges signifies an assembly inhabited by the Convenæ in the time of Cæsar. The inhabitants of feudal times were known as Commingeois. “The Commingeois are naturally warriors,” wrote St. Bertrand de Comminges, and from this it is not difficult to follow the evolution of their dainty little feudal city, though difficult enough to find the reason for its practical desertion to-day.
The Comtes de Comminges were an able and vigorous race, if we are to believe the records they left behind. There was one, Loup-Aznar, who lived in 932, who rode horse-back at the age of a hundred and five, and one of his descendants was married seven times. It was a Comte de Comminges, in the time of Louis XIV, who was compared by that monarch to a great cannon ball, whose chief efficiency was its size. Subsequently cannon balls, in France, came to be called “Comminges.” Not a very great fame this, but still fame, and it was still for their warlike spirit that the Commingeois were commended.
Jean Bertrand, a one-time Archbishop of Comminges, became a Cardinal of France upon the recommendation of Henri II. The king afterwards confessed that he was persuaded to urge his appointment by Diane de Poitiers, who was distributing her favours rather freely just at that time.
The “Mémoires du Comte de Comminges” was the title borne by one of the most celebrated works of fiction of the eighteenth century – a predecessor of the Dumas style of romance. It is a work which has often been confounded by amateur students of French history with the “Mémoires de Philippe de Commines,” who lived in another era altogether. The former was fiction, pure and simple, with its scene laid in the little Pyrenean community, while the latter was fact woven around the life of one who lived centuries later, in Flanders.
CHAPTER XV
BÉARN AND THE BÉARNAIS
THE Béarnais and the Basques have no historical monuments in their country anterior to the Roman invasion, and for that matter Roman monuments themselves are nearly non-existent. Medals and coins have been occasionally found which tell a story neglected by the chroniclers, or fill a gap which would be otherwise unbridged, but in the main there is little remaining of a period so far remote, save infrequent fragmentary examples of Arab or Saracen art. Of later times as well, the splendid building eras of Gothic and Renaissance architecture, there is but little that is monumental, or indeed remarkable for richness. Architectural styles were strong and hardy, but most often they were a mélange of foreign forms, combined and presented anew by local builders. This makes for picturesqueness at any rate, so, taken as a whole, what the extreme southwest of France lacks in architectural magnificence it makes up for in quaintness and variety, and above all environment.
The historic memories hovering around Béarn and Navarre are so many and varied that each will have to establish them for himself if any pretence at completeness is to be made, and then the sum total will fall far short of reality. All are dear to the Béarnais themselves, from the legendary first sip of wine of the infant Henri to the more real, but of still doubtful authenticity, tortoise-shell cradle. One absorbs them all readily enough, on the spot, or in any perusal of French history of the Middle Ages, and the names of the Centulles, the Gastons, the Marguerites and the Henris are ever occurring and recurring whichever by-path one takes.
The province of Béarn came to the Centulle house in the ninth century, and passed by marriage (in 1170) to that of Moncade, from which family it was transferred as a dowry, in 1290, to Bernard III, Comte de Foix, on condition that Béarn and Foix should be united in perpetuity. Gaston IX, a later descendant, by marrying Elénore de Navarre, in 1434, united the two sovereignties, and Catherine de Foix, his sister, in turn made over her hereditary rights to her husband, Comte de Pentièvre et de Périgord.
In spite of this, Béarn and the Béarnais have always kept a distinct and separate identity from that of their allies and associates, and Henri, Prince de Béarn, is as often thought of by the Béarnais as Henri, Roi de Navarre, even though the two titles belonged to one and the same person.
The most brilliant epoch of Béarn was that which began with Henri II and Marguerite de Valois. The old Gothic castle at Pau had become metamorphosed into a Renaissance palace, and the most illustrious princess of her century drew thither the most reputed savants, litterateurs, and artists in the world, until the little Pyrenean capital became known as the “Parnasse Béarnais.” Jean d’Albret and Catherine were succeeded by their eldest son, who became Henri II of Navarre, and Henri I of Béarn. This prince was born in the month of August, 1503, and was given the name of Henri because it was the name of one of two faithful German pilgrims who passed by, en route to pay their devotions at the shrine of St. Jacques de Compestelle. The pilgrims were given hospitality by the king of Navarre, and, because it was thought meet that the newborn prince should bear a worthy, even though humble name, he was baptized thus, though the proud countrymen of Béarn did resent it. The circumstance is curiously worthy of record.
Béarn and Navarre are above all other provinces of France proud indeed of the great names of history, and Henri Quatre and Gaston Phœbus were hung well on the line in the royal portrait galleries of their time. The first was more of a good ruler than a gallant chevalier, and the second possessed a regal personality which gave him a place almost as exalted as that of his brother prince. Together they gave an indescribable lustre to the country of their birth.
In erecting the statue of Henri IV in the Place Royale at Pau the Béarnais rendered homage to the most illustrious son of Béarn. Without Henri Quatre one would not know that Béarn had ever existed, for it was he who carried its name and fame afar. Luchon, Biarritz and Pau are known of men and women of all nations as tourist places of a supreme rank, but the mind ever wanders back to the days of the gallant, rough, unpolished Henri who went up to Paris and, in spite of opposition, became the first Bourbon king of the French after the Valois line was exhausted.
The Béarnais – the mountaineers, as they were often contemptuously referred to at the capital – had a time of it making their way at Paris, for there was a rivalry and jealousy against the southerners at Paris which was only explainable by traditionary prejudice.
When Catherine de Medici was making the first efforts to marry off her daughter Marguerite to Henri, Prince of Béarn, the feeling was at its height. It is curious to remark in this connection that the two queens of Navarre by the name of Marguerite were separated by only a half century of time, and both were to become famous in the world of letters, the first for her “Heptameron” and the second for her “Mémoires.”
The daughter of the Medici would have none of the rough prince of Béarn and told her mother so plainly, resenting the fact that he was a Protestant as much as anything.
“My daughter, listen,” said the queen mother. “This marriage is indispensable for reasons of state. The king, your brother, and I myself, like the king of Navarre as little as you do. That little kingdom in the high valleys of the Pyrenees is a veritable thorn in our sides, but by some means or other we must pluck it out.”
“I shall go to Nerac, in Gascony,” the queen mother continued, “to conclude a treaty with my sister, Reine Jeanne, the mother of Henri de Béarn. When an alliance is concluded between the queen of Navarre and myself your marriage shall take place.” This was final!
Tradition – or perhaps it is a fact, though the average traveller won’t remark it – says that the Béarnais are an irascible and jealous people. Proud they are, but there are no external evidences to show that they are more irascible or jealous than any other folk one meets in the French countryside. In the valleys the type is more delicate than that of the inhabitants of the mountain slopes, and throughout they are fervidly religious without being in the least fanatical.
The same tradition that says the Béarnais are rough, irascible spirits, says also that they seek for a summary personal vengeance rather than let the process of law take its course. There’s something of philosophy in this, if it’s true, but again it is reiterated there are no visible signs that the peasant of Béarn is of the knife-drawing class of humanity to which belong Sicilians and gypsies. The writer on more than one occasion has been stalled in the Pyrenees while blazing an automobile trail up some valley road that he ought not to have attempted, and has found the Béarnais a faithful, willing worker in helping him out of a hole (this is literal), and glad indeed to accept such an honorarium as was bestowed upon him. Nothing of brigandage in this!
The passing times change men and manners, and when it is recorded by the préfet of the Basses-Pyrénées that no department ever had so much law-business going on before in its courts, it shows at least that if the Béarnais do have their little troubles among themselves, they are now a law-loving, law-abiding people.
They are good livers and drinkers too, of much the same stamp as the gallant Gascons, of whom Dumas wrote. It was in a Béarnais inn that the Prince de Conti saw the following couplet chalked upon the wall:
“Je m’apuelle Robineau,
Et je bois mon vin sans eaux.”
Whereupon he added:
“Et moi, Prince de Conti,
Sans eaux je le bois aussi.”
The sentiment is not very high; window-pane poetry and the like never does soar; but it is significant of the good living of past and present times in France, and in these parts in particular.
The peasant dress of the Béarnais is the same throughout all the communes. They wear a woollen head-dress, something like that of the Basques. It is round, generally brown, and usually drawn down over the left ear in a most dégagé fashion. The student of Paris’ Latin Quarter is a poor copy of a Béarnais so far as his cap goes. In some parts of the plain below the foot-hills of the Pyrenees, – around Tarbes for example, – the cap is replaced by a little round hat, a sort of a cross between that sometimes worn by the Breton, and a “bowler” of the vintage of ‘83.
A long blouse-like coat, or jacket, is worn, and woollen breeches and gaiters, of such variegated colouring as appeals to each individual himself. In style the costume of the Béarnais is national; in colour it is anything you like and individual, but mostly brown or gray of those shades which were the progenitors of what we have come to know as khaki.
The shepherds and cattle guardians, indeed all of the inhabitants of the higher valleys and slopes, dress similarly, but in stuffs of much coarser texture and heavier weight, and wear quite as much clothing in summer as in the coldest days of winter.
The Béarnais speak a patois, or idiom, composed of the structural elements of Celtic, Latin and Spanish. It is not a language, like the Breton or the Basque, but simply a hybrid means of expression, difficult enough for outsiders to become proficient in, but not at all unfamiliar in sound to one used to the expressions of the Latin races. It is more like the Provençal of the Bouches-du-Rhône than anything else, but very little like the Romance tongue of Languedoc.
In cadence the Béarnais patois is sweet and musical, and the literature of the tongue, mostly pastoral poetry, is of a beauty approaching the epilogues of Virgil.
The patois is the speech of the country people, and French that of the town dwellers. The educated classes may speak French, but, almost without exceptions, they know also the patois, as is the case in Provence, where the patois is reckoned no patois at all, but a real tongue, and has the most profuse literature of any of the anciently spoken tongues of France.
The following lines in the Béarnais patois show its possibilities. They were sung when Jeanne de Navarre was giving birth to the infant prince who was to become Henri IV.
“Nouste Dame deü cap deü poün,
Adyudat-me à d’acquest’hore;
Pregats au Dioü deü ceü
Qu’emboulle bié delioura ceü,
D’u maynat qu’em hassie lou doun
Tou d’inqu’ aü haut dous mounts l’implore
Adyudat-me à d’acquest’hore.”
The significance of these lines was that the queen prayed God that she might be delivered of her child without agony, but above all that it might be born a boy.
Béarn was fairly populous in the old days with a well distributed population, and the towns were all relatively largely inhabited. Now, in some sections, as in the Pays de Baretous, for example, the region is losing its population daily, and in half a century the figures have decreased something like thirty per cent. Like many other Pyrenean valleys the population has largely emigrated to what they call “les Amériques,” meaning, in this case, South or Central America, never North America. Buenos Ayres they know, also “la ville de Mexique,” but New York is a vague, meaningless term to the peasant of the French Pyrenees.
The bastides, – the country houses, often fortified châteaux with dependencies, – originally a Béarnais institution, often remained stagnant hamlets or villages instead of developing into prosperous towns as they did elsewhere in the Midi of France, particularly in Gascogne and Languedoc. Many a time their sites had been chosen fortunately, but instead of a bourg growing up around them they remained isolated and backward for no apparent reason whatever.
This has been the fate of Labastide-Ville-franche in Béarn. One traces readily enough the outlines of the original bastide, but more than all else marvels at the great, four-storied donjon tower, planned by the father of the illustrious Gaston Phœbus of Foix. This sentinel tower stood at the juncture of the principalities of Béarn, Bidache and Navarre. Gaston Phœbus finished this great donjon with the same generous hand with which he endowed everything he touched, and it ranks among the best of its era wherever found. The bastide and its dependencies grew up around the foot of this tower, but there is nothing else to give the little town – or more properly village – any distinction whatever; it still remains merely a delightful old-world spot, endowed with a charming situation. It calls itself a rendezvous commercial, but beyond being a cattle-market of some importance, thanks to its being the centre of a spider’s web of roads, not many outside the immediate neighbourhood have ever heard its name mentioned, or seen it in print.
In this same connection it is to be noted that all of Béarn and the Basque provinces are celebrated for their cattle. What Arabia is to the horse, the Pyrenean province of Béarn, more especially the gracious valley of Barétous, called the “Jardin de Béarn,” is to the bovine race.
Another delightful, romantic corner of Béarn is the valley of the Aspe. Urdos is its principal town, and here one sees ancient customs as quaint as one is likely to find hereabouts. Urdos is but a long-drawn-out, one-street village along the banks of the Gave d’Aspe, but it is lively and animated with all the gaiety of the Latin life. On a fête day omnibuses, country carts, donkeys, mules and even oxen bring a very respectable crowd to town, and there is much merry-making of a kind which knows not modern amusements in the least degree. Continuous dancing, – all day and all night – interspersed with eating and drinking suffices. Something of the sort was going on, the author and artist thought, when they arrived at five on a delightful June day; but no, it was nothing but the marriage feast of a local official, and though all the rooms of the one establishment which was dignified by the name of a hotel were taken, shelter was found at an humble inn kept by a worthy widow. She certainly was worthy, for she charged for dinner, lodging, and coffee in the morning, for two persons, but the small sum of six francs and didn’t think the automobile, which was lodged in the shed with the sheep and goats and cows, was an excuse for sticking on a single sou. She was more than worthy; she was gentle and kind, for when a fellow traveller, a French Alpinist, would find a guide to show him the way across the mountain on the morrow, and so on down into the Val d’Ossau, she expostulated and told him that the witless peasant he had engaged to show him the road had never been, to her knowledge, out of his own commune. Her interrogation of the unhappy, self-named “guide” was as sharp a bit of cross-questioning as one sees out of court. “No, he knew not the route, but all one had to do was to go up the mountain first and then down the other side.” All very well, but which other side? There were many ramifications. He was sure of being able to find his way, he said, but the Frenchman became suspicious, and the bustling landlady found another who did know, and would work by some other system than the rule of thumb, which is a very bad one for mountain climbing. This time the intrepid tourist found a real guide and not a mere “cultivateur,” as the mistress of the inn contemptuously called the first.