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http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924028132912
THE BASQUE COUNTRY
vi^ui^k^
fXjldU*A
ST. JEAN DE LUZ, EVENING.
THE
BASQUE COUNTRY
PAINTED BY
ROMILLY FEDDEN
DESCRIBED BY
KATHARINE FEDDEN
BOSTON
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
A, & C. BLACK, Ltd., LONDON, ENG.
1921
INTRODUCTION
IT is a far cry to the days of the eighteenth century
when every traveller, safely returned from the
grand tour in posting-chaise and diligence, felt it his
duty to write his personal impressions of the journey.
To-day the whole world travels, and description
savours of impertinence. We expect everyone to
have seen at least as much as we have seen. Yet,
strangely enough, though the Basque country is
within a well-travelled zone, no single book can be
found in English to answer the questions that the
traveller, charmed and interested by this little people,
is sure to ask. This, then, is our excuse for adding
one more to the already long list of place-books, —
that while we can claim no pretension to special
knowledge of a subject which has long proved one of
dissension to the learned, we yet hope to give some
information and pleasure to the traveller who, like
ourselves, may come to this fascinating country.
Introduction
ignorant alike of its history and traditions. To such
a one we say with the Basque proverb,
" Autrefois comme cela,
Aujourd'hui comme ceci ;
Apres, on ne sait comment ! "
Katharine Fedden.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
Origin and History ..... i
PAGE
CHAPTER n
Laws and Language ..... 14
CHAPTER HI
The Gate of the Basque Country . . 25
CHAPTER IV
A Memory of the Second Empire . . 35
CHAPTER V
The Cult of the Dead .... 40
CHAPTER VI
St. Jean de Luz ..... 45
vii
Contents
CHAPTER VII
PAGE
St. Jean de Luz — The Pirates' Nest . . 5^
CHAPTER VIII
St. Pee, Sare, Ainhoa, Ascain . . . (i"]
CHAPTER IX
Hendaye, Fontarabia and the Ile des Faisans 78
CHAPTER X
A Little Journey into Bearn : Orthez — Pau 85
CHAPTER XI
A Little Journey into Bearn : Oloron —
Sauveterre ...... 92
CHAPTER XII
A Market Day in Tardets .... 99
CHAPTER XIII
Mascarades and Pastorales .... 108
CHAPTER XIV
Mauleon, le plus fort Chastel de Guyenne 117
viii
PAGE
Contents
CHAPTER XV
St. Jean-Pied-de-Port — The Story of a Little
Town . . . . . . ,125
CHAPTER XVI
The Schoolmaster . . . . .136
CHAPTER XVn
The Storm in the Cabaret . . -145
CHAPTER XVHI
The Valley of the Laurhibar . . -154
CHAPTER XIX
Crux Caroli . . . . . .164
CHAPTER XX
St. Etienne de Baigorry .... 175
CHAPTER XXI
Cambo, Itxassou . . . . .184
Books Consulted. . . . . .189
INDEX 191
b ix
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
IN COLOUR
St. Jean de Luz, Evening
Frontispiece
FACING PAGE
A Basque Farmstead
A River in the Basque Country
Fruit Shop, Bayonne
Place de la Liberte, Bayonne
Bridge at Socoa .
LoHOBiAGUE, St. Jean de Luz.
Good Friday Evening, Church of St. Jean Baptiste,
St. Jean de Luz
Convent des Recollets, St. Jean de Luz
Church with Pelote Court, Ainhoa
Church at Ascain .
A Spanish Basque Inn .
View from the Terrace at Pau
A Basque Inn
A Basque Village
St. Jean-Pied-de-Port .
Gate in Old Wall, St. Jean-Pied-de-Port
xi
i6
28
32
46
4«
56
64
74
j6
80
88
104
120
126
130
List of Illustrations
FACING PAGB
Street in Old Town, St. Jean-Pied-de-Port . 132
Storm in the Valley ...... 148
A River in the Basque Country .... 152
A Basque Village — Moonlight .... 160
Church at St. Etienne de Baigorry . . . 176
Church at Itxassou . . . . . .184
An Upland Village . . . . . .186
XII
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT
Bayonne ........
Windows above the River, St. Jean-Pied-de-Port 13
A Basque Rosary
In the Cathedral, Bayonne
Pine Tree
Discoid Stone
Inscription over a Door at Burguete
A Basque Farmstead .....
Eighteenth-Century Inscription over a Basque
Farm .......
A Basque Water- Jar
Inscription over a Basque Doorway in St. Jean
Pied-de-Port ......
Stone Carving on a Farm near St. Jean-Pied-de
Port, formerly the Curb's House
Inscription over a Door ....
Church Door at Sauveterre
Charlemagne's Cross on the Roadside near Ronce-
VAUX . . . . . . . .
Inscription above the Door of a Farm on the Road
FROM St. Jean-Pied-de-Port to St. Etienne de
Baigorry ...... 183
Inscription above the Door of the Cobbler's House
AT St. Etienne de Baigorry . . . .188
Burguete — Arms on a Spanish-Basque House . 197
xiii
PAGS
xvi
24
34
39
44
Inscription over a Door, St. Etienne de Baigorry 57
107
116
124
135
144
153
163
174
ITINERARY
CENTRES FOR EXCURSIONS
Bayonne :
To Biarritz.
To Guethary, Bidart, St. Jean de Luz.
To Peyrehorade, Orthez, Pau, Oloron, Tardets, Mau-
leon, Sauveterre, St. Palais, St. Jean-Pied-de-Port,
St. Etienne de Baigorry, Cambo, Ustaritz, Bayonne.
St. Jean de Luz :
To St. Pee, Sare, Ainhoa, Ascain.
To Urrugne.
To Hendaye, lie des Faisans, Irun, Fontarabia.
Valley of the Saison
Tardets :
To Licq, Ste. Engrace, Etchebar, Larrau.
Valley of the Laurhibar
St. Jean-Pied-de-Port :
To St. Jean-le-Vieux, Ahaxe, Lecumberry, Mendive.
Valley of the Beherobie
EsTERENfUBY :
To St. Michel, Beherobie, and Forest of Iraty.
xiv
Itinerary
Valley of the Arneguy
ESTEREN?UBY :
To Uhart-Cize, Lasse^ Arneguy, Val Carlos, Pass of
Roncevaux, Burguete.
Valley of the Aldudes
St. Etienne de Baigorry :
To Urepel.
To the Col d'Ispeguy.
Cambo :
To Hasparren.
To Itxassou.
To Espelette.
Map — Carte Routiere, No. 22.
A. Taride, 18 Boulevard St. Denis, Paris.
Note.— To turn kilometres into miles, divide by 8, multiply
bys.
XV
I.. J
O
<
XVI
THE BASQUE COUNTRY
CHAPTER I
ORIGIN AND HISTORT
POPULAR legend, which arises ever in answer
to a people's questioning, recounts that a
great serpent sleeps under the range of the Pyrenees,
and that this creature, stirring in its dream of ages,
raised the long chain of mountains above its moving
length, while from its seven jaws gushed forth a fiery
flood. Of this fire was the Basque country born,
primeval as the source which gave it birth, and to this
day it holds something elemental, a scarce- veiled Pagan
spirit which has survived Christianising and the cen-
turies. Its forests are still peopled with mythical
creatures — in the caves of Belsola in Biscaye they dwell,
whence come apparitions of primitive men and savage
women to affright in tale on winter evenings ; on the
heights of Mont d'Anie still echo the enchantments
of mysterious nuptials, the marriage rites of the fabled
Maittagorri and the young Luzaide ; poetic imaginings
of this race born of fire, of the great life-giver, the sun.
So much for legend. Before we ask what is known
in fact of this people, let us endeavour to place them,
The Basque Country
to see their background and to glance at their neigh-
bours.
The Pyrenees are roughly figured in our minds as
a wall of mountains which extends from the Medi-
terranean to the Atlantic, and separates France from
Spain. To be exact, it is not an unbroken chain,
but two shorter ranges, one of which starts from near
the Bay of Biscay and runs 124 miles east to the Peak
of Sabourede ; the other of which starts from the
Mediterranean and runs 117 miles west to the Pic
d'Arhousse, eight miles south of Sabourede. These
two ranges are joined by a saddle of hills running
north and south.
The character of the two faces of this chain differs
greatly. On the north side, the range presents a
bold and precipitous barrier to France ; here the hills
and valleys run at right angles to the main range, and
the total distance from summit to plain is nowhere
more than twenty miles. On the Spanish side, on
the contrary, the hills and valleys run in folds parallel
to the main range, and the distance from summit to
plain is in places as much as sixty miles. The valleys
on both sides are traversed by streams called gaves in
French and gahas in Spanish. Depressions in the
lower ridges are called cols, and those in the main
range ports, through which the passes lead from one
country to the other.
On the French side, the long valleys leading up
at right angles to the main range all present the same
general characteristics. Just under the crest of the
Origin and History-
mountain is a hamlet, generally giving its name to
the pass into Spain ; a few miles below we find that
the narrow, rock-bound valley widens into a plain
or flan, once a lake-bed, where you will come
upon the first mountain town. Again the valley
shrinks and you may follow it a few miles down to
the second flan, where a second and larger town
is found. From here the valley runs widening to
debouch into the plains or landes, and there, at the
debouchment, stands the most important town,
guarded by the ruins of a castle on a commanding
height. This town not only holds the gate to the
valley but also the gate to the pass, which means the
guarding of larger issues of racial and national import-
ance. This town is to-day the meeting-place of
demand and supply, and thrives on the commerce
between mountain and plain.
The Pyrenees in their whole extent are the home of
several distinct racial types. Astride the Medi-
terranean end are the Catalans ; in the centre on the
French side are the Bearnais, on the Spanish side the
Aragonese ; astride the Atlantic end we find the
Basques. Each of these groups of people is distinct
by language, physique and character from the
others.
The Basque Country, astride the Atlantic end of
the Pyrenees, is roughly bounded on the east by the
Gave d'Oloron and the Gave d'Aspe in France, and
by the Esca and Veral Rivers in Spain, on the south
by the provinces of Santander, Burgos, and Logrofio,
3
The Basque Country
on the west hy the Atlantic, and on the north hy the
Adour River as far as Peyrehorade, where it joins the
Gave d'Oloron. Such are its physical boundaries ;
its political divisions were formerly the seven sister
provinces (seven flames from the serpent's jaws) the
Zaspiak-bat, I'Eskual Herria of Basque song and
story. Of these, three are in France : Labourd,
capital Bayonne ; Basse-Navarre, capital St. Jean-
Pied-de-Port ; La Soule, capital Mauleon ; and foul
are in Spain : Guipuzcoa, capital San Sebastian ;
Biscaye, capital Bilbao ; Alava, capital Vittoria ; and
Navarre, capital Pampeluna.
The three French provinces are now comprised in
the department of the Basses-Pyrenees.
It is within these narrow limits, in this fertile,
wild and beautiful corner of Europe, backed by the
mountain ridges, facing the sea or the rich alluvial
plains, that this strange, self-contained race has pre-
served its individual type, life and language, for —
how many thousands of years ? Who are this people ?
Whence did they come ?
These are questions as yet unanswered or, perhaps it
is more correct to say, with as many answers as there
are interested savants. Upon one point only are
they all agreed — the antiquity of the race. " For
more than thirty centuries," so reads an Essai sur
la Noblesse Basque written in 1785, " the Basques
have played a part in history, and for far more than
twelve centuries they have been the freeholders of
the country they conquered, and form in the
4
Origin and History
realm of France a race apart, distinguished by
a language and laws which have come down from
the remotest ages." The writer confidently affirms
that the Basques came into Spain about fifteen
years before Christ, and gradually withdrew into
the hills " rather than suffer the yoke of a con-
queror."
But before you give credence to this, remember
that you will find the opinions of any number of other
authorities to be absolutely contradictory. Baring-
Gould, in his delightful book The Deserts of Southern
France, published in 1894, says : " The whole of Aqui-
tania was unquestionably originally peopled by the
Iberian race, of which perhaps the Basques, driven
into the westernmost part of the Pyrenees, are the
sole remnant. . . . The name Gascon is Basque —
the B has become V in Vascons, and then the V
was changed into G." From this you turn to Hilaire
Belloc's Pyrenees and read : " Against the theory
that the Basques are the remnant of a people once
from the Gascon Pyrenees and Spain, is the fact
that they present a racial type quite distinct from the
peoples on every side. All we know is what we have
just stated, that while Basque place-names do occur
throughout Spain and Gascony, the million or more
people who speak the language occupy a tiny corner
of the territory over which these names are to be
found. The rest is all speculation." And speculation
has run to wild lengths. The existence of this group
of people who speak an agglutinative tongue in the
5
The Basque Country
midst of Aryan idioms * is full of interest and mystery.
Anthropologists do not find that the Basques are
a distinct race. They are a cross between the Homo
Mediterraneeus (brown, small with dolichocephallo
skull) and the Homo Alfinus (small with brachy-
cephalic skull), with a strain of Homo Euro-pceus.
As this does not tell us very much of their origin,
the students have endeavoured to solve the problem
through the language. The following tentative list
of theories, each of which has adherents, may give
some idea of the war of speculation that is waged :
That the Basques are descended from Tubal or his
nephew Tarsis ;
That they were one race with the Iberians of the
Caucasus who peopled Spain (Humboldt holds this
view) ;
That they are a branch of an African stock (this
theory held by Chaho and Antoine Abbadie).
That they are a branch of the Aryan family and
the language is akin to Sanscrit ;
That the Basques are a branch of the Turanian
group — related to the Finns — and came down from
* It may be well to recall that the great linguistic and ethno-
logical divisions of Europe and Asia are three — ^Turanian, Semitic and
Aryan.
The Turanian is represented by the Tartars (Chinese, etc.), Malays,
Turks, Finns, Egyptians, Esquimaux, American Indians.
The Semitic is represented by the Hebrews and Arabs.
The Aryan is represented by Hindus, Persians, Greeks, Latins,
Slavs, Celts, Germans and Scandinavians.
6
\
Origin and History
the Baltic (Bergmann's theory, also that of Prince
Bonaparte) ;
That they are a branch of the Semitic race and came
from Chaldea (Eichhoff holds this view) ;
That they are related to certain tribes of North
American Indians (Mahn and de Charencay) ;
That they are descended from the ancient Egyptians
(Claudio Giacomino and others).
That they are an indigenous race who have never
had any further extension than their present area.
Finally, that they belong to a lost Atlantic continent
whose inhabitants are represented by the Guanches of
the Canary Islands and by a fair race on the Western
Coast of Spain.
The truth is that you are at liberty to follow which-
ever theory is most sympathetic to you. It is all
conjecture. For choice one would picture them as
the offspring of a patriarchal race who, following the
mysterious impulse towards the West, set forth
thousands of years ago from Asia, that cradle of human
life, on a long journey which led them to this corner
of ancient Iberia, where they rested. The Celts
surrounded them, failed to immerse them and passed
them by ; the Phoenicians brought here their gold
and precious stones ; the Carthaginians were received
by them ; the Gauls beset them and were repulsed.
Last of all came Rome, and this little people — whether
you call them Iberians, Vascons, Basques or Canta-
brians — were unique in this respect, that they dared
to resist the Imperial Eagles. Rome, accustomed to
7
The Basque Country
conquer, to impose her will unchecked, was amazed
at such resistance. Horace, Pliny, Juvenal, Silius
Italicus, wrote of these enemies of Rome who fought
for their liberty bare-headed, fearing neither heat nor
cold, nor hunger nor thirst, their weapon a two-
edged sword. Rome, the wise maker of empires,
knew the art of diplomacy as well as that of arms.
Liberal concessions of autonomous power succeeded
where arms failed, and the Basques became allies of
the Roman Emperor and in time accepted the Roman
civilisation, attracted by its arts and customs and the
refinements of its manners. According to most
authorities, they were one of the Nine Peoples, Novem
Populanie, of ancient Aquitania.
A pleasant legend, widespread and generally be-
lieved, tells us that the Basques have never adored
but the one God, the unknown God, Yaun Giocoa,
from whom flows all light : Egia, or truth, light of
the soul, Etchia, the sun, light of our earthly day,
and Begia, the eye, light of the body. This legend
pretends that the gods of the Romans were dis-
dained, and that in response to Roman persuasion
the Basques replied : " We worship one God in the
universe, and we will raise no altars to the idols
created by your priests. Yet to show our goodwill
we are quite ready to admit that there are god-
desses on earth and to adore them." When the
Romans demanded to know who these privileged
goddesses might be, the Basques made answer,
" Our wives, if they permit " ; and they raised
A BASQUE FARMSTEAD.
Origin and Histoi-y
altars of flowers and verdure to woman, the head
of the home.
Charming as is this story, it is contradicted by fact.
On the wall of the church at Hasparren, you may
read for yourself the famous inscription :
Flamen item duumvir quaestor pagique magister,
Verus ad Augustum legato munere functus,
Pro novem optinuit populis seiungere Gallos,
Urbe redux genio populi hanc dedicat aram.
Which means that Verus, magistrate of the fagus or
township, sent as delegate to the Emperor, obtained
the separation of the nine peoples from Gaul. On his
return he dedicated this altar to the god of the locality.
If you should object that Verus was a Roman and not
a Basque, and that this, therefore, proves nothing,
you may look further and will find proof both in the
Toulouse Museum and in M. Juhen Sacaze's book,
Inscriptions Antiques des Pyrenees, that the Basques
did accept the gods of Rome. They not only made
offerings, built temples, offered sacrifices to the Roman
gods, and dedicated funeral urns to their friends and
relations, invoking the traditional Deis Manibus, —
they also raised altars to their own local gods. There
was the Basque Mars, deo marti leherren,* a god
at once savage and terrible who crushed as well as con-
quered, and Erditse, typifying fruitfulness, maternity ;
and a crowd of rural divinities, in whose worship
all the poetry of the Basque nature found expression.
Altars were raised to the deified beech tree which
* Leherren = leher, to crush, from leheren, the serpent.
c 9
The Basque Country
clothes the hills, in whose shade the Basque shepherd
still plays his flute — a rural god with a taking name,
Fagus, —
FAGO DEO BONXUS TAVRINI FILIUS
so one inscription runs. Other deities, Larraxon of
the high pastures, Aherbelste of the black rocks,
Baigorisc of the red earth, etc., are perpetuated to
this day in the names of villages, Larrasona, Harri-
belecketa, and Baxgorry — which last now bears a saint
before it, St. Etienne de Baigorry.
During the three centuries which followed their
alliance with Rome, the Basque people, like all the
people of Aquitania, developed the arts of peace
and were saved from the first great invasions of the
Vandals and their followers by this alliance. After
the fall of Rome itself, from the beginning of the
fifth century, existence became a struggle for life.
Gaul was conquered, Aquitania submitted. But the
Basques, though the Visigoths were at their gates, did
not submit. They held together, retiring ever farther
into the mountain fastnesses. They withdrew to the
region between the two ancient Roman routes along
which surged the invading hordes — the Roman road
that at Roncevaux scaled the Pyrenees, and the other
which led from Burdigala (Bordeaux) by the plains
through Bayonne into Spain. Retired in this in-
accessible region, impregnable from a military point
of view, the Basques could defend themselves with a
lo
Origin and History
small force against an army. So they remained intact
while the races about them in France and Spain
were overwhelmed and swept into the sea. They re-
mained isolated, savage and feared in their wild sanctu-
aries, spying down upon the passes from their rocky
heights. Savages they still were when, in the twelfth
century, Eymery Picaud the monk accompanied
the noble Lady Gerberga on her pilgrimage to Cam-
postello. Later it was that the Basques fought hand
in hand with the Christian kings against the Moors.
With the Christian knights they came to the relief
of Aragon against Islam, against the redoubtable
Abd-ur- Rahman.
Up to the sixteenth century, the Basque con-
federation of seven provinces, governed by their
ancient laws, held. Then, when the English were
driven from Bayonne by Gaston de Foix, Labourd
became a part of the realm of France, though on
the condition that it preserved certain immunities
and privileges. La Soule, while remaining " a free
land, free and independent by origin, without stain
of servitude," became part of the Vicomte of Beam,
then passed to the crown of France, then once again
formed part of the domain of the Bearnais princes ;
thus a domain comprising Basse-Navarre, Beam,
Foix, and the Duche of Albret, formed the kingdom
of Navarre, whose title was borne by the kings of
France. The ancient Basque laws were respected
down to the eve of the Revolution. Louis XVI was
the last king to take the oath of fealty to those ancient
II
The Basque Country
laws or fors of Navarre. When the union of Castille
and Aragon gave a national unity to Spain, the Spanish
Basque provinces took each its own manner of guarding
its racial liberty. Biscaye constituted itself a free
state of which the Spanish sovereigns take tlie title
of Seigneur, but not of King, while Alava and Guipuz-
coa demanded the continuance and maintenance of
their ancient laws.
During the religious wars, the Basques remained
faithful to the Roman Catholic Church, fighting
against the Huguenots till peace was established by
Henry IV. Then with Gascons and Bearnais they
followed his white plume across France, battling
for him at Courtrai, at Arques, at Ivry, and under
the walls of Paris.
Although to-day the bond between the Basques
on the two slopes of the Pyrenees has ceased to exist
except in memory, yet on both sides of the mountains
the love of the soil and the pride of race persist, in
spite of all political changes. These found expression
when a simple bard went forth with his guitar to
sing along strange ways a song which no Basque may
listen to with head covered, — a song which has become
the national hymn, Guernakaco arbola, a hymn which
breathes forth all the religious fervour, passion and
fierce patriotism of this curiously separate people.
To its strains, played after the Marseillaise, the Basque
regiments, part of the very backbone of the French
Army, went " over the top " in the late war, singing
the wild passionate refrain :
12
Origin and History
Guernakaco arbola,
Adoratzen zaitugu,
Arbola santua.
" Tree of Guernica," they sang, " we adore thee,
holy tree," their last thought, their last word, not
of France, but of that corner of the Pyrenees where
the tree of liberty was planted hundreds of years ago.
CHAPTER II
LJfVS AND LANGUAGE
THE oak, that sacred tree of Zeus, whose leaves
crowned the victor in the Olympic sports,
whose waving boughs shaded the temples, amidst
whose leaves the oracles whispered ; the sacred tree
of the Druids, venerated by the Christians in the
Middle Ages, is symbolic of traditions dear to the
Basque. It was beneath the oak of Guernica, — that
Guernakaco arbola sung by the peasant poet Jose
Maria Iparraguirre in the national hymn, celebrated
by Jean Jacques Rousseau, saluted by the brave
Tour d'Auvergne and his grenadiers in 1794, — it was
beneath that oak and the oak at Ustaritz that the
Bilzaar, or the assembly of the old, met yearly. This
was a congress of notables which was convened in
the open air to administer justice and to maintain
the laws.
During the Middle Ages the Basque Provinces
were states enjoying full liberty, and even when they
became part of the kingdoms of France and Spain
they still accorded to their sovereigns only a free and
I voluntary service. The ancient laws, venerated under
\ the name of jors in France and fueros in Spain, were
Nbased on custom or upon written charter. These
14
Laws and Language
fors embodied the usages, privileges and immunities
of the seven provinces, and though they varied in
form in each province they did not vary in principle.
The key to the Basque laws was respect for individual
~TiHert^!rrTEere exist in Guipuzcoa certain cartas
fueblas — or lists of the population — dated as early
,as 1226, which lead to the belief that the first groups
of the people in that province after the great invasions
were under the kings of Castille, but that these
communal groups jealously guarded their fueros, the
laws which they had held from time immemorial.
Later the deputies met in one or another of the
twenty-three towns of the province, and the first
junta was held July 6, 1397, in' the marvellous ogival
church of San Salvador at Guetaria, when the fueros
of Guipuzcoa were first tabulated under fifty or sixty
headings.
In the fueros, in the juntas, in the elections of
deputies, there was a constant mingling of religion
and pure democracy. Before the election there was
a mass, and the elected took his oath upon the cross.
The juntas were presided over by the Alcalde of the
place, sometimes a simple workman, or fisherman, as
at Fontarabia. So, at Azcoitia, a tailor presided over
a meeting where the proudest nobles of Spain were
seated. Great care was also taken to secure honesty
at the polls. At Tolosa, any man seen talking politics
with a priest lost his right to vote.
As every family was represented by its chief in
the commune, so every commune was represented by
15
The Basque Country
a delegate at the congress. The Basque delegates took
the oath giving to their overlord the right to protect
them in these words : " We who can will and do more
than you, we make you our sovereign that you may
protect us and that you may maintain our laws."
The sovereign took the oath to respect the laws :
" I swear that I will be a faithful and good sovereign
to the people of this land, to each and to all ; I will
maintain the fors, privileges, customs and usages,
written or unwritten ; I will defend them with my
might ; I will render and see justice rendered to the
poor as to the rich."
The peoples, through their representatives, swore
'' to aid, counsel and defend " the sovereign. A
contract this, based upon a noble self-respect. Where
there is respect for self, there is respect for the rights
of others, — in other words, for law. Where there is
respect for law, there is union and strength in the
nation, order and discipline in the community,
fecundity and continuity in the family. The respect
for law is one of the secrets of that force which has
preserved the Basque people intact through the
centuries. Not only had they laws governing the
larger issues of life, but also for their social pleasures,
their dances, their games, even for their deportment
in the street.
The rights of succession in the Basque Provinces
are of the most ancient origin and profoundly rooted
in the social character. Long before the law of
primogeniture was established in other parts of the
i6
A RIVER IN THE BASQUE COUNTRY.
Laws and Language
Pyrenees, it existed in the Basque nation without
distinction of class or sex. The eldest born son or
daughter was the heir to the property whether of
the rich man or the poor man.
The first result of this law is the fixity of the family.
The family homestead acquires a personality, becomes
an entity giving its name to the dwellers beneath its
roof, creating for them not only duties and obligations,
but also assuring to them consideration and material
prosperity. One of the first things which strikes
the traveller in the Basque country is the dignity of
life. The ample houses, spaced in valley and on hill
and mountain slope, have nothing in common with
the ordinary one-storey habitations of the French
peasant. These Basque homesteads impress the imagi-
nation as the expression of a patriarchal life. They
have an air of stability, of dignity and of permanency ;
they are evidently not the transitory abode of the
light-minded who are here to-day and gone to-morrow.
They are houses of wide, sheltering roof- tree and wide
doorway, of three and four storeys, set in the midst
of a domain which includes garden, field, pasture,
woodland and vineyard. This domain is considered
as a whole, each part being dependent on the others,
and it is the family duty and joy to keep this domain
intact.
The house is called in Basque Etcheonda, or stem-
house. In Germany the same expression is found :
Stammhaus. This is the stem, the sturdy trunk, the
family tree, from which the branches shoot. Its
D 17
The Basque Country
preservation is the first consideration. Such a house
once established, it is necessary to ensure its trans-
mission in order to satisfy that ambition for per-
manence which is a Basque characteristic. This,
then, is the origin of the Basque laws of succession.
Up to the time of the French Revolution, which
brought all the provinces of France under one code,
the eldest child inherited house and domain. " The
result of this was that the eldest, if a son, identified
himself from his early youth with his father whose
old age he would sustain, and worked with ardour
to save enough money to make dowries for his sisters,
that they might marry with men of a fortune equal
to that of their brothers. The younger sons who
remained at home, received a share of the stock on
their marriage to heiresses of other houses. But more
often than not, the younger sons left to seek their
fortune in the colonies, which, when made, enabled
them to return to their native place, build homesteads,
and found, in their turn, mother houses."
When the Revolution, in 1793, ordained that children
must inherit equally, the Basque people used every
means to evade the law. The younger children were
so imbued with the reverence for the old ideas that
they refused to share equally with their elders. It
was found so difficult to enforce the law that it was
finally changed and the eldest child might be given
a quarter of the whole. But law does not change
tradition. The parents still use every means to ensure
the protection of the property, and the younger
18
Laws and Language
children still refuse to accept a share which may
destroy the continuity of the home. ♦
There is no longer any law of primogeniture, but
the father and mother choose their heir, who is always,
by custom, the eldest son or daughter. The eldest
daughter is often preferred, because she will marry
earlier and often meets " an American," or wealthy
Basque returned from South America, who will build
up the family fortunes. The daughter, moreover,
will live with her parents, and is often chosen because
the mother knows her character and has more con-
fidence in her as a house- mate than an unknown
daughter-in-law.
One interesting point about these customs of suc-
cession is that the other children are never jealous
of the one chosen to carry on the family. They
understand that it is not from any preference for the
one chosen, but with the sole aim of ensuring the
persistence of the family domain, and so, the import-
ance of the family in the country.
The laws of succession as they exist to-day are only
a feeble picture of those which flourished in old times,
but they, yet maintain the evidence of a magnificent
social organisation. Created to assure the stability
of the patrimony and homestead, they assure at the
same time the continuance of tradition ; they also
are favourable to the progress of civilisation. Instead
of quarrelling over the shreds of their patrimony, the
children accept the lot which is theirs by custom ; one
only carries on the family in the old homestead, one
19
The Basque Country
or two marry in the neighbourhood, the others go
into the priesthood, the army, or to the colonies.
The result is that peace reigns in these quiet, spacious
dwellings. The Basque homesteads are homes of
peace. How often has one seen engraved in stone
above the door, in Basque, the words, " May peace
be in this house." Or that other at St. Etienne de
Baigorry, " Cutiare quin dugun, Baquia asqui dugula,"
which means, " With little, have we but peacCj it is
enough." This peace is not only the result of living
under wise laws, true to traditions handed down from
the remotest times, it has its roots, as well, in a deep
religious belief. Since St. Amand brought Christ
to the Basques in 631, they have held the faith.
Eschaldene Fededen, "Basques and faithful," stands
synonymous. The family life is animated by respect
amounting to reverence for the authority of the
father in things general, and for the authority of the
mother in the household. The position of the woman
has always been an honoured one among this people,
and a high ideal of morality has been held and attained.
The Basque language has no word for adultery, and
public opinion condemns with the utmost severity
any laxity of morals.
A curious instance of the vigorous manner in which
the community guards the standard of propriety
came to our notice at St. Jean-Pied-de-Port in May
1919. Night was made hideous by cat-calls, drums,
whistles, trumpets. It was not till this had continued
for several evenings that we succeeded in discovering
20
Laws and Language
the cause. A woman of sixty in the old town was
about to marry a man of twenty-seven from a neigh-
bouring village, and all the youth of the place were
engaged for a week in thus pleasantly giving voice to
the general disapprobation. The woman, who was
rich but miserly, was told that she could buy them off
for 500 francs to spend in feasting. As she did not
pay, the charivari, as it is called, continued nightly
for a week. Any house suspected of impropriety
may be thus pleasantly serenaded.
It was on the little steam tram winding carefully
around the steep hills between Oloron and Tardets
that a fellow-traveller, a French buyer of wood for
the government, became communicative. He was
no great admirer of the Basques. He allowed them
to be sober, honest, industrious and domestic, but
one'scented the bitterness of battles waged with hard-
headed peasants in many a little mountain town.
All his life he had passed in this business of travelling
and appraising and acquiring trees and woods and
forests, — a detestable vocation which barred him from
any very high degree of sympathy. But he had
found his ignorance of the Basque tongue such a
disadvantage that he had determined that his two
little boys should learn it early. To this end, he had
installed two Basque servants who were to faire le
menage — he allowed them to be clean and ready
workers — and to speak Basque with the children.
They gave the utmost satisfaction in the first capacity,
but the children did not learn a word of Basque. The
21
The Basque Country
mistress remonstrated with the maids, who replied
that they would certainly not speak their language
to the children. They did not wish the children to
learn Basque, for in that case strangers would under-
stand what they said.
This little story is, one feels, typical of the spirit
which has preserved this people. They will serve
you, they are always polite and pleasant, but they
will not allow you to share their lives or to speak
their language, which is to know their thoughts.
The very difficulty of its idiom has kept the world
outside its barriers. In France the spoken limits of
the Basque language are the same to-day as they have
been for centuries, but in Spain it has lost ground.
In Alava it will soon be an unknown tongue ; Biscaye
is penetrated by the Spanish patois ; Navarre has
seen, during the past century, over two hundred towns
and villages exchange Basque for Spanish.
The Basque language possesses a scale of fifty-three
sounds with six vowels, a, e, i, o, it, u. The written
language, though based on French or Spanish ortho-
graphy, is phonetic. Although one of the oldest forms
f speech, it has a meagre literature. The first
asque book was printed as late as 1545. For this
reason rules for the writing of the language may be
said to still be in the making. This was amusingly
proved one evening at St. Jean-Pied-de-Port. We had
before us a verse in the Basque of the sixteenth century,
and the same verse in modern Basque. We asked our
hostess, an intelligent, educated woman, to translate
22
Laws and Language
the modern Basque. Part of it she rendered into
French, but some of the words she said she did not
know. She thought it must be Basque of another
province. She called in a lad who read the verse
with the same result. Then they both read the
verse written in the sixteenth-century Basque and
translated it with ease. This was the Basque that
they knew, and they assured us that the second version
was mis-spelt. So here, to-day, in St. Jean are people
who use the written form of the sixteenth century
instead of the modern orthography.
The Basque language (Eskuara) means " clearly
speaking," and has been compared by its admirers
to algebra, whose elements are simple, but whose
combinations are innumerable. It is declared by
them to be a model of clarity and simplicity, order
and logic. All of this must be taken by the layman
at second hand. But we may accept the fact that
the language is unrelated to any other known and is
believed to be a mother tongue. The language has
no words for utensils brought into use in modern
times. For such, a Latin, French or Spanish word
is used with a Basque termination. As an example,
the word fork, fourchette in French, becomes " four- |
chetta." A knife, however, which was a primitive /
implement, has a Basque name and is called nabela. |
The Bearnais have a little story which they like
to tell. The good God, they say, wishing to punish
the devil for the temptation of Eve, sent him to
the Pays Basque with the command that he should
23
The Basque Country
there remain until he had mastered the language.
At the end of seven years, God relented, finding the
punishment too hard, and called the devil to come
to Him. The devil had no sooner crossed the bridge
of Gastelondo than he found he had forgotten all
that he had so hardly learned.
As for the Basques themselves, they believe that
they descend from Adam and that the Basque tongue
was spoken in the Garden of Eden.
24
CHAPTER III
THE GATE OF THE BASQUE COUNTRY
BAYONNE is one of the pleasantest of the
smaller towns of France and yet it is difficult
to explain just why. Can we ever define the charm
of a given place any more than we can the attraction
of certain personalities ? Places are sympathetic or
not, as the case may be, and whether that quality
is in them or whether we bring it to them, is another
question which we cannot answer.-
There is always a dual character in the old towns
of the world. There is the present-day life, which
we see and feel, and there is the shadowy life which
history has made so real that in some places it takes
possession of the present and we only live in the past.
To-day in Bayonne life is vivid and full of pleasant-
ness, but it has its past, its pride of history.
It leaves upon the memory the impress of sun and
white houses green-shuttered, of space and light and
happy people. It is not all of France, this town, but
has more than a hint of Spain. If you lean from your
balcony in the steep street in the Quartier St. Esprit,
that has lured you across the river from the hotels
where one never sees anything but other people like
oneself, — if you lean from your balcony to watch
E 25
The Basque Country
the life below, you will believe yourself in Spain.
There is the wine shop, where hang the acrid goat-
skin wine bottles, ready to be filled from the great
casks of Spanish wine ; strings of red peppers sway by
the door of the house where a black-haired girl sings
all day long as she works. Strange little songs she sings,
sad songs in a young voice, songs of her people, full
of melancholy. Charinoak Kaiolau, the Captive Bird,
is one:
The little bird in its cage sings a sad song. While it has enough
to eat and to drink, — it yet longs for the free air. Because — because
— liberty is good.
" Little bird flying free — beware of the cage. If you can, keep
free. Because — because liberty is good."
Last night I dreamt of my beloved. I saw him, but I could not
speak. What sorrow ! what despair ! I wished that I were dead.
Yet though she sings this lament, her voice is full
of joy because her lover has come safe home from the
war. He is the young blacksmith at the forge above,
where the little donkeys stand on market days. There
you may see the great cream-coloured patient oxen
slung up to be shod. When the night falls, the
blacksmith ■ comes down the hill, his blue beret on
the side of his handsome head, to join the little song-
stress and her neighbours. He has a brave tenor
voice and knows many of the ancient chansons, which
he has learnt from the old people in his village under
the pass of Ste. Engrace. Legends in verse they are,
like the guerz of the Breton peasant, though the
26
The Gate of the Basque Country-
Basques are not as rich as the Bretons in historical
ballad. A favourite song is Errege Jan. Would you
could but hear it sung in the Basque tongue in that
thrilling young voice, amidst the charmed silence of
the street !
King John wounded has returned from the wars. His Madame
mother meets him at the threshold, joyful. " King John, be consoled,
enter bravely. Your wife of a little King, last night, was delivered."
"Neither for my wife, nor for the little King may I be comforted,
Mother. Do not tell them, but give me my bed to die."
' ' Madame my mother, what troubles the servants to so many sighs
and tears?" " Impossible, my daughter, to hide the truth. The grey
horse is dead."
"Madame my mother, what troubles the servants to so many sighs
and tears .? " " Impossible, my daughter, to hide the truth. They
have broken a silver dish. But I beg you, weep not for a grey horse,
nor for a silver dish. King John will bring back from the wars both
gold and silver."
"Madame my mother, listen — what are the people chanting?"
"My daughter, it is nothing. Only a procession that passes below."
"Madame my mother, what dress shall I wear ? It is time I arose
from this bed." "My daughter, shall it be white or red ? or perhaps
black is more beautiful."
"Madame my mother, why is the holy ground piled so high ? "
" Impossible, my daughter, to hide the truth. King John lies buried
there." "Madame my mother, take here the keys, both of silver and
gold. And the little King, lift him tenderly.
" Oh, holy ground, open to me, that I may enter into thy depths.
The grave has opened and I have found King John."
The hush holds for a moment after the song has
ended, then there is applause and more talk and
laughter under the stars.
27
The Basque Country-
All down our street is colour : houses, ochre and
lenaon, yellow and pink and red, and set like a jewel
is the fruit shop, glowing in the sun. Beyond are
drinking shops, where the sailors from the port sit
by the small, square tables and recount long tales of
the whole round world ; and then come shops, little
shops where cakes are sold, and little shops full of
things to lure seafarers — yellow oilskins and gaudy
handkerchiefs printed with the whole pack of Spanish
playing-cards. Beyond on the little green square,
under the arcades, more sailors sit and stare at the
peasants coming in to market, as they pass by and
over the Pont St. Esprit.
Beyond the bridge, the twin spires of the Cathedral
rise above the modern town of Bayonne, above the
remains of the Roman city of Lapurdum, the head-
quarters in the third century of the cohort that
guarded the Novem Populanie of which we may believe
that the Basques formed one.
In the fourth century the Roman town was a
stronghold, surrounded by walls, of which portions
still exist. In the twelfth century the name of the
town was changed to Baionna, but the Roman name,
Lapurdum, continues to this day in that of the
province Labourd.
Bayonne formed part of the vast possessions of the
dukes of Aquitaine, and was brought by the marriage,
in 1 1 52, of Eleanor of Aquitaine to the English King
Henry II as part of her dower. What a dower it
was ! "A territory containing every variety of soil
28
FRUIT SHOP, BAYONNE.
The Gate of the Basque Country
and of natural characteristics, from the flat rich
pastures of Berri and the vineyards of Poitou and
Saint onge to the volcanic rocks and dark chestnut
woods of Auvergne, the salt marshes, sandy dunes,
barren heaths and gloomy forests of the Gascon coast
and the fertile valleys which open between the feet
of the Pyrenees." When we realise the welter of
races in that territory, Gaul, Roman, Saracen, Gascon,
Angevin, and how many others, the preservation of
the Basque race and language seems a miracle, due
however, as we have seen, to their own inherent
qualities.
Bayonne found the English rule both just and kind,
and resisted the French attacks, though it fell in 1451
to Dunois, who took it in the name of his sovereign,
Charles VII.
The importance of Bayonne arose in its earliest
days from its position at the confluence of the Adour
and the Nive. Its port harboured a growing fleet
when in the fifteenth century the Adour changed its
course and blocked the harbour. That disaster trans-
ferred much of the commerce to St. Jean de Luz,
which greatly flourished in consequence ; but, for-
tunately for Bayonne, the original course of the river
was re-established in the sixteenth century and with
it the prosperity of the town. One is glad, because
one cannot think of Bayonne fallen on evil days. It
is so cheerful, with its arcaded Rue du Port Neuf,
lined with the gayest of confectioners' shops and
fdtisseries, where you may eat marvellous cakes and
29
The Basque Country-
drink tea and watch the people pass. Even the
Cathedral square is not dingy, but small and bright,
and the Cathedral of Ste. Marie has many tales to
tell of life from the thirteeiith century down ; of
royal visitors and gorgeous thanksgivings — did not
Francis I and, later, Isabella of Castille and the little
princes return thanks to God in this place ? You
may wander happily in the cloister with its beautiful
pointed arches ; you may revel in the sixteenth-century
glass of St. Jerome's Chapel, partly because it was
given by that little Dauphin returning from captivity
in Madrid ; you may watch the trickling stream of
people, old and young, who come to pray ; and you
will pause before the Chapel of Jeanne d'Arc, where
the great wreath and the flag of France stand to
the dead who gave their lives that this Cathedral
and others like it might remain ; and then you may
wander softly out and find your own way, past the
old curiosity shop, by an arch, on to the green-grassed
ramparts, where you may walk under the huge elms,
past Spanish- looking houses, by the Rue Tour-de-
Sault, down to the Quai des Basques along the Nive.
If you cross the bridge you may follow the arcades
along the Quai Galuperie to the Musee.
It is a great advantage in such a town as Bayonne
to have some place of refuge for the possible rainy
day — and that you will find in the Musee Bonnat.
The building itself is a gift of the painter L6on Bonnat
to his native town, and seldom do you have the luck
to come upon as interesting a collection of pictures
30
The Gate of the Basque Country
as is the small one which it houses. It will prove
a resource for many an odd hour, and each time you
will get more pleasure from the carefully chosen
pictures. In the first room there are a number of
delightful pencil portraits by Ingres, full of distinction
and charm ; and each school of painting is represented
by one or more examples of its masters.
The centre of life in Bayonne is the Place de la
Liberte, where the town takes the air. It is a cheerful
crowd, animated by the exuberance of gesture and
vivid expression of the Midi ; soldiers and Spaniards,
Basques in beret. Frenchmen, bareheaded girls of the
people and neat modish women of the middle classes
pass and repass, or sit at the cafe tables under the
arcades, waiting perhaps for the opening of the
cinema or the play in the big arcaded building which
forms one side of the Place.
Then suddenly, while you sit there drinking your
coffee and listening with mild amusement to the
discussion between two smart French cavalry officers
of the decoration which has suddenly blossomed on
every American breast, the past rises like some sub-
merged stratum from your memory and blots out the
present. You are back in the year 1565 on this
very spot, one of the crowd pressing to the great
tournament which Catherine de Medici and her son
Charles IX are offering to Elizabeth, wife of Philip II
of Spain, who has come here, with the Due d'Albe
in her train, to meet her royal mother and brother.
Though it is the sixteenth century and we are of the
31
PLACE DE LA LIBERTE, BAYONNE.
The Gate of the Basque Country
the tram starts for Biarritz, only a twenty minutes'
ride away. It will be cooler there and only pleasant
ghosts upon the sands, though on the way you pass
that convent of the Bernardines where the white nuns
of silence tend their gardens, pleasant places of peace
where white periwinkles grow. . . .
Perhaps one of your most lasting impressions of
Bayonne is of a city set in water ways. The Nive and
the Adour fold it in, and through the shaded walks of
the AUees Maritimes you may follow to where the bar
breaks the full rush of the tide from the Bay of
Biscay.
In the old days, not so long ago, quite within memory,
the old walls, planned by Vauban, still stood, their
solid masonry rising from the river and crowned
at the angles by watch-towers, of which only one
remains, overflowing in June with the luxuriant
growth of a white rose tree. That little turret
guarded the great mediseval town-gate which stood
where now the bridge, Pont St. Esprit, springs from
the shore. Legend, which grows quickly around a
loved figure, already tells a pretty story of King
Edward VII, who, they say, made a royal though
unsuccessful effort to save the doomed gate. He
failed to awake the powers in Bayonne to a sense of
their own vandalism.
The ancient walls were doomed, and so to-day
there remains only a length of the old solid masonry
surmounted by the little turret to keep guard above
the Adour River rolling out to the Bay of Biscay.
F 33
The Basque Country
From the bridge the sun sets behind the turret and
the Cathedral spires of an evening, and all the town
across the river is misty and palely gold, and the glory
runs up the sky above the river and is repeated in the
flowing tide.
34
CHAPTER IV
A MEMORY OF THE SECOND EMPIRE
IN the Bayonne library, where all is still with that
peculiar sense of desertion which seems to
pervade the libraries of most provincial towns, you
will find a thin pamphlet, a Souvenir de Biarritz.
It bears the imposing title of Monografhie de la Villa
Eugenie, and its author is one E. Ardouin, and its
imprint, Paris 1869. Its faded green cover lettered
in gold recalls those keepsakes and tokens of an earlier
date in whose steel-engraved pages ringleted beauties
of sloping shoulder met with Moors, Giaours and
other Byronic heroes.
Biarritz, the little book perfunctorily assures, had
a history as early as the tenth century. The writer
thereupon dismisses in a paragraph all the centuries of
adventure on the wild seas, the riches that poured in
here as to St. Jean de Luz, from the hazardous deep-
sea fishing, so eager is he to indulge himself in that
social history which has, one must admit, established
the fame of the little town. With a stroke of his
pen he leaps from the tenth century to 1807, to record
that the town — which had fallen from its former
prosperity with the decHne of the fisheries — was
35
The Basque Country
lifted to notice, shall we say ? by the visit of Queen
Hortense Eugenie, wife of Louis Napoleon, lately
raised to the throne of Holland by Napoleon I.
Napoleon himself visited Biarritz on his way to St.
Jean de Luz and Hendaye in 1808, at the time of his
visit to Bayonne with the Empress Marie Louise
for the crowning of Joseph Bonaparte.
Biarritz did not, however, wake to life, to the life
of the real world, till the Carlist troubles in Spain
sent many of the Spanish grandees over the border
into France. The very names of the noble exiles
breathe a poetry, a romance which was probably
far from them, — Due de Montemar, Comte de
Altamira, Comtesse de Zaldivar, Comtesse de Toreno,
Marquis de Miraflore, and so on and so on, and — the
Comtesse de Montijo with her daughter, Amelie de
Guzman, Comtesse de Teba, future Empress of the
French.
The young Countess must have cherished happy
memories of her early days in Biarritz, for in 1853
we find her returning there with the Emperor for
two months at the Chateau de Grammont.
That visit raised Biarritz from a quiet fishing village
to a resort of the great world, where kings and princely
families, great fortunes, the folly and fashion and flower
of that world were to meet.
It is pleasant to think of the lovely young Empress
revisiting the places she had known as a child : the
shell- shaped cove of the Port Vieux, the sheltered
Cote des Basques, and the beach which was to be
36
A Memory of the Second Empire
known as the Plage de I'Imperatrice. The cliffs,
the beach, the gorgeous sunsets, the wild flowers,
the golden samphire growing down to the water's
edge, the ebbing tide across the sand from the Chambre
d'Amour, the watch-tower of L'Attalaye and the
Roche Percee, the wood and the little lake of La
Negresse, — it must have been just all these which with
her memories wove for her the fascination of the
little town, so that she lingered on until the Emperor
had chosen the site for her villa — the Villa Eugenie —
between the lighthouse and the Bains Napoleon
decorated " in the Moorish style."
The work was started in 1854, and M. Ardouin
expands and expatiates with awed admiration upon
the fairy palace of two hundred rooms which rose
upon the cliff. The cour d'honneur, the vestibule,
the salons, the various suites of rooms lose nothing
at his hands. You share with him the savour of his
enjoyment in every catalogued object of use and art.
The hangings of the Empress's bedroom, he tells
us, were of " toile perse k raies bleues, dessin petits
bouquets de fleurs, roses et camelias." Persian hang-
ings with a blue stripe, roses and camelias recall in
a sentence the whole period of the Second Empire.
If anything were needed further to complete the
picture it is given in the description of the furniture
of acajou and falissandre, so beautifully the setting
for the ladies of the gift-book period. The wardrobe
room was lined with oak armoires, and furnished with
a large oak table " where the toilettes are pressed and
37
The Basque Country
freshened." What billows of tulle, of India muslin,
of pineapple gauze, of exquisite finery must that
table have known ! We know them too, in Winter-
halter's portraits, those billows from which arose the
graceful figure with the sloping shoulders and small
banded head.
M. Ardouin goes on to give us in great detail the
account of the guest rooms and the room of the
Duchesse d'Albe and the apartments of the ill-starred
little Prince Imperial. You may read a full description
of every chair and table, every stick of furniture ;
but the silly man gives us never a portrait. Let us
believe that the little Prince was happy there — that
they were all happy as they sat in the circular tent of
striped awning on the long terrace facing the sea, in
their chairs of " imitation bamboo." There would
be the Emperor and the Empress, and as guests General
MacMahon perhaps. Prince de la Moskowa, Merimee
the poet, Monseigneur de la Villette ; and royalty
sometimes, the King of Wurtemburg, King Leopold
of Belgium, Princess Anne Murat, and Queen Isabella
of Spain with the Prince of the Asturias — there was
a dinner of forty covers when they came. Brilliant
days those. The villa was now surrounded by a park
of eleven acres, where 15,000 trees and shrubs were
planted. There was stabling for ten horses, and
barns for ten cows and forty sheep and two oxen.
There was a vineyard and a garden.
In 1864 the Inspecteur General des Monuments
Historiques built the chapel (" in the Moorish style "),
38
A Memory of the Second Empire
where three chairs and prie-dieu of ebony and gold
marked the places of their Majesties. . . .
The villa is now the Palace Hotel. In this season
of 1919, you may pay twenty francs for dinner and
dance with the boys and girls of the American Ex-
peditionary Force — if you want to. But to many
those rooms are still hung with toile ferse and are
filled with the sway of those hoop skirts that billowed
there in those far-off days before the debacle.
39
CHAPTER V
THE CULT OF THE DEAD
WHEN you finally reluctantly . turn your steps
from Bayonne to wander farther afield,
your first stopping- point will be St. Jean de Luz.
Take the train then in the morning as far as Bidart, —
your luggage may go on, — walk on to Guethary, two
kilometres, for lunch on the terrace, and take the
afternoon train to St. Jean, where you will do well
to make your headquarters for a time.
When you get down at the station of Bidart, take
the path down the hill to the little valley where you
will pass the small grey Chapelle d'Urovca, whose
pilgrimage Sunday in May draws the faithful, who
come to the sacred fountain to recite their pious
litanies and pass a happy day under the trees. From
there the path leads you on pleasantly across the
fields, by flowering hedgerows, and finally up and over
a steep green round hill, which brings you out close
under the white walls of the church.
Bidart and its churchyard have a very special
charm. May you go there on a day of sun and blue
sky, white clouds sailing above, shadows moving
across the wide country that stretches away to the
40
The Cult of the Dead
mountains. Feathery tamarisks along the grey walls
wave their smoky pink plumes, bees hum, swallows
dip and dart, and from beneath your feet arises the
pungent breath of thyme. This is the Basque ceme-
tery, Herri, land of the dead, on a hill, bright with
flowers, facing the sun. You see that the wall,
spaced by yews and rosemary, closing in the church
and the grey tombstones, forms an uneven circle, a
symbol of eternity, from ancient times, for the culte
des marts in the Basque country leads you back to
strange beginnings. The tombs on this quiet hillside
are under the protection of the Queen of the Earth,
the moon, who sheds her " light of the dead " upon
these abodes of peace.
As you wend your way between the flower-set
graves, fragments that you have read recur to you.
Here are the curious discoid stones, whose origin is
traced to the round buckler placed by the Assyrians,
by the Egyptians, and later by the Greeks and Romans,
above the warrior's tomb. Oddly barbaric they look,
these rude stone discs mounted upon a pyramidal
base which represents the celestial mountain of all
ancient mythologies. The date of the discoid stone
is placed from the eighth to the seventeenth centuries.
One side of the disc, that away from the grave, you
will find, bears some conventional design ; that towards
the grave has an inscription in Spanish, Latin, French
or Basque. On the more ancient stones, the inscription
is around the edge of the circle ; the later stones
show it in the centre.
G 41
The Basque Country
In the Bidart churchyard many of the discoid
stones bear a large roughly-cut Maltese cross, interest-
ing enough as recalling the fact that the Commandery
of Malta held jurisdiction here. But in other grave-
yards you will find other designs upon these stones
which, puzzling you at first, will, as you spell their
meaning,* lead you on long roads back through and
beyond the Middle Ages, by dead civilisations, Egypt,
Assyria, Chaldea, to the rites of our earliest Pagan for-
bears. Such a symbol is this zigzag — /\/\/\/\/
the lightning — cut across the stone disc which you
will find in the cemetery at Itxassou. Here, too, is
the sacred Swastika of India, the totnoye of Japan,
and everywhere you find the sun, symbol of regenera-
tion, immortality, eternity, in endless combination
with the cross.
Finding these symbols clustered about some such
modest church as this at Bidart on a sunny day, with
soft airs stirring the bright flowers, you will expe-
rience the strangest thrill, the same half-sad, keen,
almost-there feeling that you had sometimes as a
child. If only these symbols could speak, what
secrets, what marvellous stories they could tell!
But, however deeply you are stirred, however long
you gaze at the rough red-brown discs in the deep
grass, they are silent still. Form and line have a
power that we little dream of, but the ancients knew
and the moderns are striving to regain that knowledge.
Prior to the eighth century an upright tabular
stone was used, of which some still remain in Biscaye?
42
The Cult of the Dead
carved with the serpent, the tree, the pyramid or
other primitive mythical design.
The crosses which spring up everywhere amongst the
climbing roses on the warm hill date from the seven-
teenth century. They are often ornamented with
the chalice rayed with light, the seven-branched
candlestick, the sun and the moon. Usually the arms
are not squared, but are rounded ornately. The
crosses of to-day are often made of white wood with
the design and inscription in black. The wording
in Basque would run as follows :
HEMENDA EHORCIA
MARTIN HIRIGOYEN
HILA, ECAINAREN, 22.
72, URTHE AN.
Retracing your way up the hill, you will notice
on the wall of the church an interesting tablet
which states that Bertrand La Fargue and Simon de
Larregui built this church in 1610, and under the
wide and roomy porch, which is a feature of all
Basque churches, you will find on the floor a slab
over the La Fargue tomb with the date 161 8. Near
it is a long stone which reads : " Monument de la
Maisonde Garaicot," the tomb of the house of Garaicot.
Again and again you will find as you go on through the
Basque country, on many a stone that legend which
marks the resting-place in perpetuity of the dwellers
in the earthly house whose name it bears.
43
The Basque Country
These stones in the floors of the porches, or often
set in the paving of the churchitself,are called Tarleku
and upon them the women of the family kneel on
black praying rugs saying prayers for the dead. In
the tabular stone, the grave and the Tarleku, students
see the menhir, the tumulus and the dolmen (altar)
of our prehistoric ancestors. It is certain that even
to-day votive offerings of bread and wax are made at
a funeral — food and light for the departed on his
long journey — bread to the poor, wax for candles
in the mass.
Everywhere in this country you feel yourself
touching hands with remote and shadowy figures,
half guessed at through the mists of time. That
strange round dimple in the stone on the floor of
the porch is a symbol which is found in the dolmens
of Brittany, on the Pyramids of Egypt, in India, in
China, a symbol which has outlasted empires. What
does it mean — eternity, time, the sun ? Who knows ?
And still the
the swallows dip
the white clouds
on the cliff top,
from the village
the cross — sym-
two thousand
bees hum and
and dart and
float above, and
a short walk
square, stands
bol for a short
years. . . .
CHAPTER VI
ST. JEAN DE LVZ
" T CI rhomme faict ce que peut et fortune ce qu'elle
JL veut." This old motto carved above the door
of the house in the rue St. Jacques, built in 1636, hy
Jean de Casabielha, the bailiff of the town, seems
prophetic of the fortune of the little town itself.
Man has done here what he could, has builded with
the riches wrested from the sea great houses, bridges,
ports and breakwaters — yet time and fortune have
done their will, and the charm of the place lies in
its feeling of a past. It is rich in that spirit of place
which is felt but not explained. There are villas
on the hills and through-trains from Paris, a fine
golf-course, an English church and pleasant society ;
but these are adjuncts to the real St. Jean de Luz,
which settles down on a wide bay with its arms at
the points of Socoa and Ste. Barbe ; a bay which is
the debouchement of the Nivelle, a river leading
back in level sweeps and bends through a wide valley
to the encircling mountains. Sea and river and
mountain in combination — that is to say, all imaginable
beauty of atmospheric effect.
St. Jean de Luz owes whatever of history there is in
its past to its position, between the towns of Bayonne
45
BRIDGE AT SOCOA.
St. Jean de Luz
and St. Jean de Luz remained a free town as long as
the French monarchy lasted.
There is gorgeous reading in the old archives of
Bayonne, when you turn to the roll of " nobles,
squires, knights and others ' holding ' fief under the
King " in Labourd. It tells how the royal herald
would ride into the town square and, after sounding
his trumpet three times, read in a loud voice, in
the presence of the assembled notables and folk, the
quota of men called to the King's service. Labourd
had to furnish i,ooo men-at-arms. St. Jean de
Luz raised a company with a banner. Every lord
of every chateau around was on that roll : the Sieur
de St. Pee was down for one man-at-arms and one
archer, so too the Sieur d'Espelette and the Seigneur
d'Urturbie, while men of lesser consequence furnished
one man-at-arms or one archer.
Thus it was that the men of St. Jean de Luz took
part in the Spanish border wars, and assisted at the
assault of the Chateau of Irun and the taking of
Fontarabia in 1522.
In 1526 the Alcazar in Madrid was the grim prison
of a King of France. Francis I, that freux chevalier
and patron of the arts, after the disaster of Pavia
was a captive in the hands of Charles V, who, as
we know, demanded the duchy of Burgundy as the
price of his freedom. Ill with a grave malady and
worn with captivity, Francis I, believing a forced
promise to be no promise, feigned to consent to this
hard condition. That he might gain the ratification
47
The Basque Country
of his parliament, he was given his freedom on two
conditions, — first, that his two young sons should
be sent into Spain as hostages for his good faith, and,
second, that he should marry Eleanor of Austria,
sister of Charles V. A betrothal by proxy, considered
as sacred as a marriage, took place before Francis I
returned to France. He re-entered his kingdom at
Hendaye, but as the Emperor had forbidden, in the
terms of the agreement, any demonstration on the
French shore, the monarch was received by a handful
of gentlemen only, and it was not until he entered
St. Jean de Luz that he was met by a burst of popular
acclamation which drew from him the heartfelt
words, " Ah ! I am still King of France ! "
We know what followed; how Francis, once back
in his kingdom, repudiated his oath, refused to fulfil
his promise, leaving his two sons captives and his
affianced bride languishing in Spain.
Soon, however, a strong coalition formed against
Charles V, and in the treaty of Cambrai the Emperor
renounced his pretensions to Burgundy, exacting in
its place the sum of 2,000,000 ecus, on payment of
which Francis I should receive both his sons and his
bride.
The treaty was signed in 1529, and on January 20
of that year the good folk of St. Jean de Luz beheld
the entry of the Vicomte de Turenne with a train of
300 horsemen travelling as emissary from Francis I
to Queen Eleanor. Scarcely had this brilliant caval-
cade halted in the little Place, when a second entered
48 ■
LOHOBIAGUE, ST. JEAN DE LUZ.
St. Jean de Luz
from the opposite side. This was Messire Louis de
Flandres, Seigneur de Praet, Kiiight of the Golden
Fleece, on his .way from Charles V to superintend
the counting of the ransom at Bayonne.
Francis I had appointed no less a personage than
the Connetable Anne de Montmorency to guard his
interests in the transfer of what was for those days an
enormous sum of money.
At Bayonne the two representatives met at the
Chateau Vieux and the Seigneur de Praet inspected
and weighed and appraised the treasure there amassed :
the two mountains of shining ecus, 300,000 in one
pile, 600,000 in the other, displayed upon brilliant
carpets ; the sixty sacks full of gold pieces of all sorts,
nobles- k-la-rose, angelots, ducats, alphonsines, rixdales,
florins, philippes; the 100,000 pieces of pure silver;
and the jewels, including the famous fleur-de-lis in
diamonds containing a piece of the true cross.
" Messieurs," said de Montmorency grandilo-
quently to the Spaniards, " you see how the King,
wishing to carry out the terms of peace, prepares to
make payment to the Emperor for the ransom of
their Royal Highnesses his children. It is indeed
better to employ the treasure in this manner than in
making war and causing bloodshed."
Meanwhile the young Princes, who had been closely
guarded in the fortress of Pedrazza de la Sierra, not
only against possible surprise by arms, but against
witchcraft, were entrusted to Don Pedro Hernando
de Velasco who should escort them to the frontier-
The Basque Country-
It is an amusing sign of the times that while de Velasco
feared that de Montmorency would endeavour to
seize the royal children while keeping the ransom,
de Montmorency mistrusted that de Velasco would
seize the treasure without surrendering the hostages.
In order to guard against any such foul play on either
side, the most minute precautions were taken, and
that he might superintend the preparations more
closely de Montmorency took up his abode for three
weeks at St. Jean de Luz. Hither came the heavy
carts from Bayonne laden with provisions — food and
fodder — for 4,000 men and 2,000 horses ; from the
sea came boats freighted with fish ; from the hills
came the wine of Navarre ; from the country for
miles around came the peasant girls laden with milk,
eggs, fruit and vegetables. The streets and drinking
shops were full of soldiers, and couriers came and went
at a gallop with dispatches to and from the Court
or carrying messages between the King at Bordeaux
and Eleanor on her progress now from Toledo to her
royal lover.
Turenne, returning from his gallant mission, passed
through, and after him came the slow-moving pack
trains, hundreds of mules gaily caparisoned, loaded
with riches and precious objects, the wardrobes of
the Queen and her ladies.
Then comes the news that the Queen herself has
reached the bank of the Bidassoa. The Connetable
de Montmorency, representing the State, and the
Cardinal de Tournon, representing the Church,
50
St. Jean de Luz
journey the eight miles in pomp, to pay their
homage.
Finally all is ready for the great exchange which
is to take place on June 30 at high tide — eight in the
morning — on the riverj midway between Fontarabia
and Hendaye.
There was not much*rest that last night in St. Jean
de Luz. Part of the gorgeous troop of 400 men
which had come from Bayonne to escort de Mont-
morency was obliged to camp at Guethary, as St.
Jean was full.
The sixty pack mules, with a strong guard, bearing
the treasure in coffers sealed with the royal seals
of France and Spain, arrived from Bayonne, and the
coffers were lodged in de Montmorency's house under
the custody of one Don Alvaro de Fugo and his
Spaniards, who slept by the treasure. There were
French sentries, however, guarding them, within and
without the house.
In the evening de Montmorency proclaimed through
the town the royal command that, the next day, no
one, under pain of death, should cross the bridge of
St. Jean de Luz on the road to Spain. An hour after
midnight the trumpets sounded for the assembly,
and at three o'clock in the morning the head of the
cavalcade started for Hendaye. Cavalry led the
march, followed by foot-soldiers, then came the
mules bearing the ransom, each with a guard of four
men. The Connetable de Montmorency was next in
the line, dressed in black velvet and gold and magni-
51
The Basque Country
ficently mounted, followed by forty picked gentlemen,
and 500 men-at-arms closed the procession, lance in
rest.
When the brilliant cortege arrived at the bank of
the river at Hendaye it was seven o'clock and the
boats rocked on the rising tide, but there was no sign
of life across the waters at Fontarabia. The old
Spanish town seemed quite asleep. Misinformed by
their spies, the Spaniards refused to come out, fearing
treachery, until de Montmorency sent the Spaniards
in his company as witnesses to his good faith.
Owing to this delay the exchange did not take place
till eight at night. A wearisome day of waiting it
must have been to the Queen and the little Princes.
When the hour finally arrived, the exchange was
carried out with scrupulous regard for etiquette.
The boats, one containing the treasure, the other
the royal children, left the opposite shores at the
same instant, met in mid-stream, exchanged their
precious cargoes and returned. It was not till then
that the Queen's barge put out from the shore, and
Eleanor of Austria set her foot on French soil soon
after the young Princes.
It was now late and the return procession was soon
under weigh, the Queen in her litter of cloth of gold,
the little Princes — the Dauphin and the Due d'Orleans
— on horseback, and the ladies and maids of honour
mounted sideways on mules in the Spanish fashion.
As the night air ,grew chill the Queen, realising the
fatigue of the children, took them with her in the
52
St. Jean de Luz
litter. It was already dark, when suddenly from far
down the road came the sound of cheering which
heralded the approach of 500 young men of St. Jean
de Luz bearing torches. They came down the long
road, the torches flaming in the night and lighting up
the way, surrounded the litter and, turning, bore it
on a wave of light onward past the Chateau d'Urturbie,
through Ciboure to the bridge over the Nivelle,
where they were met by the clergy of the town with
cross and holy water singing the Te Deum.
On every height flamed welcoming bonfires, the
boats in the harbour were ablaze with lights, and from
every side rang out the cries : " France, France !
Vive le Roi ! Vive la Reine ! Vive le Dauphin ! "
The ladies of St. Jean pressed close, in their great
coifs, torch in hand, and in the bright light all the
crowd could see the Queen and the Princes. The
joy and enthusiasm were redoubled at the sight of
the pale dark lady with the kind and charming ex-
pression, with the little boys in gala dress beside her.
What a night that must have been for the town!
The tired travellers supped in comfort and went
early to bed, so the chronicles say. But de Mont-
morency was busy sending couriers forth to England,
to Venice and to the other powers, bearing the glad
news of the return of the children and the arrival of
the Queen.
It was in the afternoon of the next day that the
grand cavalcade took the road to Bayonne, and one
would think that, however loyal and devoted, the
53
The Basque Country
good people of the town must have breathed a sigh of
relief at the prospect of a return to a normal existence.
And what a clearing-up there must have been !
Henri IV, who made history in Beam, brought
prosperity to the Basque country as to all France, but
there is no note of his turning the town upside down.
Perhaps he came incognito the better to enjoy the
games and the dances a la mode basque.
Later there was more pomp and circumstance in
St. Jean de Luz when both Anne of Austria and
Elizabeth of France stopped in the town, as they
journeyed, the one to become the wife of Louis XIII,
the other to be the consort of Philip II of Spain.
Charles IX, the weak and vicious son of an intriguing
mother, twice stopped in St. Jean de Luz — once when
he came to meet his sister Elizabeth, wife of Philip II
of Spain, to escort her to Bayonne. The bridge
over the Nivelle, we read, was rebuilt, " so that his
suite might pass with ease." We mistrust that the
Luzinians paid dearly for the honour of these royal
visits.
But none of these royal passers-by has left any
imprint on the town. To-day it shines only in the
reflected glory of that nuptial journey of Louis XIV,
le grand monarque. Le roi soleil so dazzled the eyes
of the town folk that they were blinded to all lesser
lights. It was in the old church of St. Jean Baptiste
that Louis XIV was married to the Spanish Infanta,
Maria Theresa, in 1660. The town was so impressed
by the honour that, when the royal pair had passed
54
St. Jean de Luz
out after the ceremony, the church door was built up
and remains so blocked to this day.
Facing the square you will see the house with a
turret at each corner known as Lohobiague — house
of Louis XIV — where the King lodged. From the
dress of the sculptured figures over the windows, it
is supposed to date from Henri III or Henri IV.
The Infanta and her father lodged before the marriage
in the large, square, renovated house with turrets,
called the Joanoenia, which stands on the bar, facing
the port. It was built in 1641. Above the door you
may read the following modern inscription :
L'Infante j'ai refue I'an mil six cent soixante.
On m'appelle depuis la maison de I'Infante.
Thanks to the hospitality of the present occupant,
many have enjoyed the beauty of the old rooms,
their fine proportions, their lozenged and painted
ceilings, and the great fireplace bearing the arms of
the town where, if the day be chill, a wood fire is
sure to be burning.
Near the Joanoenia on the bar are other houses, all
of a certain dignity and importance, which speak
of the bygone prosperity of the town : the Maison
Betheder ; the Maison St. Martin with a tower in
the centre and a wrought-iron balcony, date 1713 ;
the Maison Pendelet, built in the reign of Louis XV ;
the Dasconaguerreau, where Mazarin lodged in 1659
when he came to prepare the way for his royal master's
marriage. The oldest house in the town, however,
55
The Basque Country-
is the Esquerenea, in the Rue Montante, which rears
its square tower above its neighbours and which
probably dates from the end of the reign of Louis XII.
Other houses of interest are the Discontennia, built
with gold taken from the English by the brave corsair
Duconte ; the one known as Sopite, in the street of
that name, and a fine house opposite the church.
The hospital of the town is in the old Chapelle of
the Hostel for the pilgrims of St. Jacques de Campos-
telle, which was built in 1623 by Joanis de Hareneder
and Gracie de Chiba, his wife.
But what facts can give you St. Jean de Luz as
does the feeling of an hour ? You must see the town
at sunset, its old houses glowing rose and gold, the
Nivelle flung like a broad blue ribbon up the valley,
La Rhune glorified in its cloudy mantle, the distant
mountains fading into purple mystery. You want
to see it at that curiously expectant hour before the
sun just sets, when for a space it seems lifted into a
realm of romance and unreality ; or again, on a day
of storm, when the hurricane sweeping in from the
Bay of Biscay brings the great mountains of water
to smash upon the jetty, sending up towering clouds
of spray against the sky, and carries the flood rushing
through the narrow entry to the port in large smooth
breakers which leap the breakwater and lap the very
feet of the houses in Ciboure. Or, best of all, in the
old church on the night of Good Friday you may come
close to the life of to-day. The gold of reredos and
altar is shrouded, the lights are few ; the triple bal-
56
GOOD FRIDAY EVENING, CHURCH OF ST. JEAN BAPTISTE,
ST. JEAN DE LUZ.
St. Jean de Luz
conies of black oak slowly fill with men and boys
beret in hand ; below in the nave are the dark sil-
houetted figures of kneeling women ; a votive ship
sails beneath the vaulted shadow of the roof ; on the
shadowed silence falls the voice of the Basque priest
recalling once again to his people the old and moving
story of the Passion. Then, in the faces above, about
you, you may see for a moment that persistent spirit
of race which has kept these people separate through
the centuries.
ra
i^T^'% ^ * ^ '.o r V*. ■■■"""' "• *./ ■■■ '- '
_.. ^ cT; c ; ;;- £ 2 _ zt^-^ '
57
CHAPTER VII
ST. JEAN DE LUZ—THE PIRATES' NEST
AS you sit under the arcade on the Place Louis
XIV, drinking your orangeade pilee, and
watching the children playing beneath the plane
trees in reach of Spanish-looking mothers who gossip
upon the low stone seats, you will find, about five
o'clock, that interest is centring about the jetty,
across the square. There a crowd is steadily growing,
men, women and children strolling up from every
quarter, waiting for something. Fisher girls, baskets,
handcarts, give you the clue. They are awaiting the
return of the fishing boats, as they have awaited them
for hundreds of years. As the first boat comes shooting
into the basin through the narrow passage from the
outer bay, a thrill runs through the crowd. There is
but one question : " Est-ce que la p^che est bonne ? "
Everyone crowds out on the jetty. The blue boat
comes alongside. There is shouting, curses, laughter.
There is great excitement, and you realise then that
these people of St. Jean de Luz have the sea in their
blood, that the life of the town has depended upon
the sea for generations. To-day the catch is good.
The war which drew the Basques from their nets
58
The Pirates' Nest
has left the deep sea in peace, and those who remain,
the few who have returned, reap the sea-harvest.
The sturdy fisher girls press close, lower the fish
baskets to be filled from the silver mass in the hold ;
the baskets are raised, seized by brown arms, loaded
on the two-wheeled push carts, which clatter off down
the square and over the bridge to the curing houses
in Ciboure, the little town across the basin.
It is not until the last boat has come home that the
crowd disperses, still talking of the day's luck. Last
to go are the fisher girls with baskets on heads, who will
speed away early in the morning to outlying villages
and hamlets. Not long ago it was these same hardy
women who, starting by daybreak in summer, in
their rapid swinging mountain stride, carried their
fish twenty or thirty kilometres to market in some
little mountain town. There, hot and talkative, but
unfatigued, they sold their stock, retailed the news
of the war, and returned in the afternoon, thinking
nothing of their day's journey.
As your eyes travel along the bar and the water
front at Ciboure, you may see in the important houses
the visible result of the riches gained in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries upon the sea.
They will tell you here that it was a Basque who,
one hundred years before Columbus, discovered the
Western Continent. More than that, there is a legend
that it was to a Basque that Christopher Columbus
owed the inspiration which led to his own discovery
of America. The crew of a Basque fishing ship, so
59
The Basque Country
the story goes, was ill with scurvy. The pilot put
in to a town in the Indies, where Columbus was
living. Columbus received this pilot into his house,
and when the man died, took possession of his charts
and papers, which gave him the Western route which
he eventually followed.
Anyway, it is generally believed that the Basques
discovered the fishing banks of Newfoundland, and
reached the coast of Canada before 1500. From 1520
the records of Bayonne are full of the expeditions to
the codfish banks.
During the Middle Ages the sailors of St. Jean
de Luz and Ciboure took a brave and dashing part
in all the sea-fighting. They formed a large part of
the crew of the Bayonne squadron which assisted in
the crusade of Richard Cceur-de-Lion ; they were
present at the siege of Seville, and they helped in
the blockade of La Rochelle in 1242.
But it was to the blocking of the port of Bayonne,
by the sudden change in the course of the Adour
River, that St. Jean de Luz owed its highest point of
prosperity. The shipbuilders transferred their activi-
ties to St. Jean de Luz. The records of those days
run like some wild sea-tale. Here you read that
St. Jean de Luz armed six strong ships and sailed for
the Bay of Motrico, where they entered under cover
of darkness and surprised and boarded a caraque laden
with merchandise. This they made off with, but the
captain of the caraque pursued them with six ships
from San Sebastian, overhauled them at the entrance
60
The Pirates' Nest
to the bay of St. Je«i de Luz, and recaptured the
caraque, after a bloody engagement, in which the
captain was killed by a shot from an arquebus. Indeed
the Spanish corsairs seem to have had the best of the
fighting in the early sixteenth century. They pushed
as far as Newfoundland, determined to destroy the
French fisheries, and seized many a boat returning
laden with codfish. The French reprisals were so
severe that the Spanish attempted again and again to
destroy the corsairs' nest, and in 1542 and 1558
attacked, burnt and pillaged Ciboure and St. Jean
de Luz.
It is interesting to read a description of one of
these fishing boats, which when attacked could return
blow for blow. In 1.552 the Saint Esprit horn St. Jean
de Luz went forth to seek adventure under her
Captain du Halde. It was a ship of 120 tons, with
forty men, each armed with an arquebus. It carried
twenty cannon with powder and bullets, twenty-four
pikes, thirty-six small arms, seven small boats, one
cask of powder, twenty casks of wine, 120 quintaux
of biscuits, ten quintaux of pork, two and a half of
olive oil, twenty- two barrels of vinegar, 120 pounds
of tallow candles, one cask of beans, two casks of other
food.
From 1535 to 1585 the corsairs of St. Jean de Luz
pillaged the shores of Spanish America and swept
the seas. In 1625 Louis XIII gave letters patent for
the building of four large ships which were constructed
in the shipyards of the Nivelle. Their captains bore
61
The Basque Country
brave Basque names — Louis de Lohobiague, Jean
d'Avetche, Martin de Hirigoyen, Joaquin de Hari-
stegary, who were elected by the town and commis-
sioned by the King. These boats were launched in
1627, flying at the masthead, beside the white standard
with the fleur-de-lis, the red and yellow pennant,
bearing the town arms, known and respected on the
high seas.
One of the great filibusters of the sixteenth century
was Michel le Basque, whose adventures form the
subject of many a song and story.
To give a little idea of the extent to which these
sea marauders carried their enterprises, it is sufficient
to say that, in the year 1690, over forty laden merchant
ships were captured and brought in to St. Jean de Luz.
In 1692, 125 ships were captured, and de Grammont,
writing to Louis XIV, says that the harbour was so
full of prizes " that one may walk from the house
where your Majesty lodged across to Ciboure on the
decks of captured ships."
These were the golden days of St. Jean de Luz.
The names of captured vessels — Dutch, Spanish,
English and Portuguese — show that, no country was
immune. The cargoes were sold for enormous sums.
In 1 69 1 the St. Francois, under Captain Duconte,
in one voyage captured eleven vessels which repre-
sented a sum of 113,000 pounds. Louis XIV sent
for the bold Basque buccaneer, who was presented
at the court of Versailles. Jean de Sopite was another
great sea-captain. His ship, the Basquaise, braved
62
The Pirates' Nest
the English squadrons which blockaded the French
ports, ran the gauntlet and sailed the high seas, where
it captured a West India merchantman laden with
silks, spices and treasure.
Down to the beginning of the nineteenth century
the corsairs of St. Jean continued their bold game,
and we see the names of American vessels added to
the long list of their prey : the Spanish Lady, an
American brig laden with flour bound for Jersey,
the Polly, carrying cocoa, wax and clocks, the Concep-
tion, laden with sugar, rice, cotton, coffee and hides.
When we read the details of the cargoes on these
captured vessels, we realise the actual wealth that
poured in through these illicit methods to the town..
We understand full well the history of those solid
houses, built by these redoubtable kings of the sea.
We imagine the treasures they contained, the rich
Eastern stuffs, the spoils from many a home-bound
bark, which went to beautify these nests of the French
corsairs. St. Jean de Luz got the bulk of the riches,
but Ciboure had its share. A rivalry for long existed
between these sister towns. On the island between
the bridges leading from St. Jean to Ciboure stands
the ancient Convent of the Recollets, which was
built in 1 612, and dedicated to Notre Dame de la
Paix in the hope of establishing peace between the
two shores. The old well within the courtyard was
given by Mazarin in 1659.
To this day the men of Ciboure make the best
sailors in the French Navy. There are families living
63
The Basque Country
in those little streets whose men have for generations,
for centuries, served the ships. There are several
families there, too, whose men are famed as life-
savers. Ciboure has a charm all its own. It is more
quiet than St. Jean de Luz, and life there has all the
intimacy of a village. From Ciboure you should
take the walk that leads you along the quay, up the
hill above the golden sandy cove, with its view of
the whole horseshoe beach of St. Jean beyond, around
the rocky point where the tamarisks wave, along the
stretch beyond, in sight of the point of Socoa. Turn
to your left up the hill, however, and climb to the
votive chapel of Notre Dame de la Mer.
This year of 1 919 finds the whitewashed walls on
either side of the little shrine scribbled in pencil with
passionate prayers — " Sauvez la France ! Sauvez mon
pere ! Sauvez la garde ! Sauvez mon fiance ! "
written in the anguished hours of the past four
years.
From this height at sunset there is a view transcen-
dent in its beauty. The sunset light bathes the range
of mountains, the Trois Couronnes is transfigured,
and La Rhune, the presiding genius of all this region,
looms gloriously, while as far as your eye may follow
up the broad valley of the Nivelle, mountain after
mountain marches away in dim purple splendour.
On the other side stretches the calm bay with a
destroyer at anchor where once the no less valiant
buccaneer was wont to lie, awaiting the moment to
dash forth and dare the English squadron.
64
CONVENT DES RECOLLETS, ST. JEAN DE LUZ.
The Pirates' Nest
Another delightful walk takes you out of Ciboure
along the valley on the road to Urrugne, past the
Chateau d'Urturbie on your right. This was the
cradle of a warlike race, though the present building,
restored in the eighteenth century, has remaining of
the original pile only the dungeon and an ivy-covered
bit of wall to the north.
The family which takes its name from the Chateau
shares in the annals of Labourd the title to age and
importance with that of St. Pee. From the eleventh
century the name appears in all records of the time.
Under the English suzerains they were made guardians
of Guipuzcoa, and had a castle on the Bidassoa of
which no vestige now exists. In 15 14 Louis d'Algate
d'Urturbie was echanson to Louis XII and bailli of
Labourd. Sons of the family held positions of trust
under Louis XIII, Francis I and Henri II, fought
against Spain, died before La Rochelle, and grew in
importance under Louis XIV and XV. To-day,
failing a direct heir, the property has gone out of
the family. Yet it preserves an interest to us, standing
as it does on the high-road travelled by kings and
princes, and being, as it often was, the scene of historic
meetings.
Beyond the Chateau you cross the little river
Helbairen and climb the hill to Urrugne. Its fifteenth-
century church is large and gloomy, and the houses
lack the brightness and the whole place lacks the
clean charm of most of the Basque villages. The
motto on the church clock is as sombre as the town
K 65
The Basque Country
itself : Vulnerant omnes, ultima necat, " All strike, the
last kills."
On a hill north of the village stands the pilgrimage
chapel of Notre Dame de Sogorry. It is worth the
climb for the wonderful view of the mountains from
La Haya and Juisquibel on the right, the Trois
Couronnes before you, around to La Rhune which
dominates the country as usual. Wherever you go
in this part of the Basque country, La Rhune is above
you : you feel it the titular deity of the region, and
do not wonder at the legends which made it the abode
of witches and evil spirits. There are days when the
air is so very clear that you can see every stone and
grotto, and an uncanny feeling grips you that it
may be the home of unknown, unsuspected forces.
Perhaps it is !
AMoB
66
. CHAPTER VIII
ST. PEE, SARE, AINHOA, ASCAIN
AN interesting round from St. Jean de Luz, by-
diligence or motor, is to St. Pee, Sare and
Ainhoa, returning by Sare and Ascain.
The road from St. Jean follows the bank of the
Nivelle, which runs smooth-flowing, wide and swift
between field and meadow to the bridge near
Ascain, where we stop to let down passengers. Here
the road to St. Pee turns to the left and you get a
view of the white houses of Ascain up the slopes of
La Rhune, while a tumbling mountain stream rushes
under a hump-backed stone bridge near us. The
road runs on through quiet valley country to St.
Pee upon the flat. St. Pee has little remaining in
its quiet street to hint of the great days past. Of the
Chateau only an angle of the donjon and a mound
of grassy earth remain. Yet that square tower marked
the stronghold of an ancient race of barons whose
name appears as early as 1007. One Brunet de St.
Pee was Governor of Bayonne in 1296. The Chateau
was built by Jean de St. Pee or Sempe in 1403. In
1450 the male line ended, and the barony passed in
the female line to the Baron d'Arhousse, Seigneur
67
The Basque Country
de St. Pee et d'Etchecou, who was one of the two
hundred gentlemen-in-waiting to Francis I and bailli
for Labourd from 15 17 to 1532. Later the family gave
a Chevalier of the Order of St. Michael to the court
of Charles IX and a succession of baillis for Labourd
down to 1659, as well as dignitaries to the state and
brave officers to the army down to the present day.
Yet actually there is nothing to hold your interest
in St. Pee, and you will continue your way by the
river bank, passing through the hamlet of Amots and
along the valley till you see before you on a hill the
beautiful village of Sare.
If you are a fisherman you cannot do better than
enlist the interest of the husband of Madame at the
hotel. He is one of those ne'er-do-wells who know
every winding of the stream, every corner of the
country. Fish you may not get, since the poachers
everywhere exhibit an industry worthy of a better
cause, but he will prove an entertaining guide, full of
impossible tales of impossible feats.
Madame will perhaps find you rooms for the night
with a friend in the little street downhill, across the
small square. If so you will meet the friendly dog
and the roguish Httle daughter, and perhaps be allowed
to sit downstairs with them by the wood fire to warm
yourself before you go to bed in the clean room above.
From the stairs as you go up, you can look into
the stable where the cows and the donkey and the
cream-coloured oxen stand knee-deep in dried bracken,
stamping and breathing hard in the warm darkness.
68
St. Pee, Sare, Ainhoa, Ascain
The woman holds a candle over your shoulder that
you may the better see. The farm animals always
live on the ground floor of a Basque house. They
are the friends of the family. You peer into the dark
corner, " A mule ? " you ask, knowing how much
these are valued. The woman withdraws the candle.
" We are not rich," she explains, " we are poor folk.
Does Madame know the Basque proverb ?
When one is Basque and a good Christian,
When one has two mules,
He needs no more."
She bows smiling as she leaves us at our door. " Some-
day we shall have two mules, Madame."
In the morning La Rhune looks in at your window,
above the opposite roof, and you hurry to dress and
to get out into the crystal air. Breakfast is ready for
you in the cafe — bowls of cafe au lait and bread and
butter. Monsieur is busy with fishing tackle on the
terrace outside. Part of the square is filled with the
grass-grown felote court, which you already recognise
as a central factor of life in these Basque villages.
Opposite to the felote court is the square-towered
church on the side hill, with the mountain behind.
Suddenly while we are breakfasting the church bell
begins to toll, there is the drone of distant chanting,
and across the window moves a curious mediaeval
procession, headed by a man in a short cloak, bare-
headed, bearing a cross, followed in Indian file by
more men in capes, then by the women mourners
69
The Basque Country
in voluminous cloaks, the hood drawn over the head,
with a heavy fall of lace hiding the face — these cloaks
are handed down from generation to generation —
and finally by all the women friends and neighbours
in the black mantles always worn by Basque women
to mass.
The long, slow-moving line of black crosses the
square and is lost in the porch of the church.
After the burial the man who had led the funeral
procession was the first to return to the house, where
he stopped at the doorstep, crossed himself and said
a prayer before entering to see that all was ready for
the funeral feast. He was " the neighbour " {Chen-
hango) who plays so great a part in the life of the
Basque family. He is nearer than any blood relation.
His are all the most solemn duties of friendship. It
is he who lifts the tile from the roof of the house
that the soul may take its flight. It is he who while
the bell of the village church tolls its solemn message,
bending above the body of the dead, slowly drops
from the lighted candle, blessed by the priest, seven
drops of wax in the form of a cross upon the cold
breast from which all life has fled. It is he who,
when the mortal remains cross for the last time the
doorsill of the poor habitation, lights a handful of
straw that the blue smoke ascending may symbolise
the soul set free, while the white ash that remains
is the poor body left. It is he who acts as master of
ceremonies at the funeral feast, who makes the collec-
tion for masses for the dead ; and finally it is to him,
70
St. P^e, Sare, Ainhoa, Ascain
when the guests have left, that the widow turns for
help and advice.
Eight days after the funeral, there is a second
mass at which friends and relations attend and a
second " wake." And during the year that follows
it is the custom for some member of the family to
make a daily pilgrimage to the church, where a mass
is said for the deceased.
Sare stands on a hill, and the white roads that lead
up to it are bordered by plane trees which give grateful
shade in the heat of summer. Monsieur, carrying the
lunch and fishing-rods, will marshal you in the tiny
square, where the few loungers under the arcades
will assist with interest at your start. Not one can
tell you the meaning of the tablets in the wall of the
house above the cafe.
SARARI BALHOREAREN ETA LEYAL TASSUNAREN
SARIA EMANA LUIS XIV
1623.
So runs one, which means : " A recompense given to
Sare for fidelity and courage by Louis XIV, 1623,"
when the town took a brave part in the war against
Spain.
The other tablet bears this inscription : —
ANTONIO ABBADIARI
ESKUOL HERRIAREN
ORHORT ZAPENA
AGARRIHAREN I9. 1897.
71
The Basque Country
" To Antoine d'Abbadie, from the Basque Country.
In remembrance August 19, 1897." To Antoine
Abbadie, a wise scholar and good man, who gave a
great part of his life to his own people, who loved them,
who encouraged them in the preservation of their
old customs and dress and language, and whom they
greatly loved and honoured.
Once out of Sare, the wily Monsieur leading the
way, you may follow up the valley of the Lourgorrieta
by an ancient raised stone pavement, which leads
you dryshod through muddy lanes. You will wonder
at the care that went to the laying of such a way, and,
of course. Monsieur can answer none of your questions.
Great oaks border the pavement, and you will find .
your own reply awaiting you when the stone way
turns from the stream up a hill and you see above
you the two square, Moorish-looking towers of an
ancient house. Monsieur may point sternly stream-
ward, but you will climb up and you will come to a
stone-arched gateway leading to a miry courtyard.
Carved above the entrance is an escutcheon and the
words :
PIERRE HIRREBARREN ET MARIE DE SANDOURE
SIEUR ET DAME DE HARANBOURE, 1685.
It may be that this is the first of these inscriptions
that you have met with, and you get out your note
book and scribble it down, before you cross the court-
yard to the ruined house. The house of Haran-
boure has fallen on evil days, and, knowing the Basque
72
St. Pee, Sare, Ainhoa, Ascain
reverence for the home, your imagination is in full
cry after the hidden tragedy, the fate which doomed
this place. The poor woman who comes out to meet
you speaks a ■ Spanish-Basque which is unintelligible,
but she sees your interest and she leads you to the
stables, to show you the holy-water stoup which
alone tells you that it was once a chapel. Did Marie
de Sandoure love the place ? Great oaks and beeches
shade the house, and your eye plunges down through
noble trees to where the stepping-stones span the
stream in the valley below. Behind you, the hill
rises to a shoulder of the mountain and the peak of
La Rhune towers to the blue sky above. Marie de
Sandoure — dead these centuries gone — did he woo
you with the very songs that the shepherd on the
heights above sings to Marie to-day ?
Ma mie a la chevelure blonde, et de bonnes couleurs — la peau des
mains blanche comme de I'argent fin. EUe-meme est pleine de
charmes plus qu'aucune autre.
" J'ai une maison, moi, qui est I'egal d'un chateau ; vous y de-
meurerez assise sur un siege d' argent. . . ."
Monsieur is halloing from the bridge. He has
caught a gudgeon. He is delighted. It is just four
inches long.
From Sare to Ainhoa is seven kilometresj almost
all the way uphill. But it is worth any effort you
make to get there. It is such a clean, bright village,
L 73
The Basque Country
and the houses of the one street have such wonderful
freshly whitewashed walls, such gaily painted balconies
and shutters, blue, yellow, green, red. The church
and the felote court, the two centres of Basque life,
are comfortably back to back, the pink walls of the
court finding a fine background in the grey church
wall. Two small boys are playing. At any moment
of the day in any Basque village some one is throwing
a ball at a wall.
Stone steps lead from the felotei court into the
graveyard, where roses and iris grow thick amid the
stones and a marechal niel rose hangs its heavy yellow
heads of bloom against an ancient tomb.
At Ainhoa in 1919 sugar could be bought ! The
price, to be sure, was eight francs the kilo, but this
was not to be haggled over, considering the sugar
famine we had endured and the hazardous way by
which the sugar came. It was contraband, so too
was the Spanish tobacco which might be had for
much money and small questioning. Ainhoa is on
the frontier, and all the tales of Basque smugglers
that you have read from Ramuntcho down, recur
to you when you come face to face with the jaunty
Spanish guards who bar the road a few yards out of
the village. The Basques have the courage, coolness
and agility which are necessary to the successful
smuggler. In their code, which is upheld by the
Church, smuggling is no sin against religion or morals.
The only sin would lie in bribing a frontier guard
not in successfully bringing over the frontier without
74
CHURCH WITH PELOTE COURT, AINHOA.
St. Pee, Sare, Ainhoa, Ascain
duty coffee or wine, tobacco or sugar, paid for in
Spain and to be sold in France. If this is true in
times of peace, how much more so when war has
deprived the people of these necessities of life. You
must remember, too, that it is Basque against Basque,
not French against Spanish in these mountains. No-
where more than here does the tie of race hold good.
The Basques on the two sides of that imaginary
frontier Hne have the same traditions, customs,
language and interests. This explains the facility
with which smuggling is carried on over the mountain
passes or across the Bidassoa under cover of the
darkness. A band of smugglers numbers ten to twelve
young men, picked for endurance, fleetness and courage,
who follow a chosen guide, single file, with cask or
bale on shoulder, for miles over the mountain paths.
If, as sometimes happens, the douaniers have been
warned and the smugglers are surprised, at the first
shot the line melts into the forest to meet at some
given rendezvous. The Basque smuggler is a peaceful
creature ; he never attacks a douanier, but once
attacked gives fight to the death, and it is seldom
that he gets the worst of it. In all the little villages
of the frontier, smuggling is part of the life and is
taken as a matter of course, and many is the story
told on winter evenings of the prowess of such well-
known smugglers as Gambocha, Hermoso, Joaquin
and Arkaitza.
As you stroll back from your meeting with the
Spanish frontier guards, up the wide street, you will
. 75
The Basque Country
not fail to notice on a fine house to your left a most
interesting inscription which reads :
CESTE MAISON APELEE GORRITIA AESTE
RACHETEE PAR MARIE DE GORRITI MERE D FEV JEAN
DOLHAGARAY DES SOMMES PAR LUI ENVOYES DES
INDES. LAQUELLE MAISON NE BE POURRA VANDRE
NE ENGAIGER. FAIT EN l'aN 1662.
This house called Gorritia was bought by Marie de Gorriti,
mother of the late Jean Dolhagaray, with money sent by him from
the Indies. This house cannot be sold or mortgaged. Built in the
year 1662.
Over a barn door as you drive out of the village
is a long lintel stone on which you will see not only
the cross and the sign of Mary, but the Alpha and
Omega and the seventeenth-century date. There is
also a beautiful old Basque house on the green facing
the felote court — delightful in its creamy walls and
pale grey shutters and spacious air.
From Sare you should walk back over the height
of Uhartia to Ascain. At any hour the wild way
and the wide view will delight you, but if it is late
afternoon with a descending sun over the sea before
you, so much the better, Ascain lies on a slope of
the hill and, if sophisticated, is a delightful type of
Basque village. At the long, clean, white Hotel de
la Rhune, with its trailing wistaria, you may get real
tea a V anglais served at a little table on the gravelled
terrace under interlaced plane trees. Palms and
bamboo and roses give it an exotic touch on a warm
spring day which is quite enchanting. The -pelote
76
CHURCH AT ASCAIN.
St. P6e, Sare, Ainhoa, Ascain
court, as usual, holds one end of the little flace,
while the square, squat-towered church, quite orange
in the light of the declining sun, presides above.
Of all roomy church porches this is the deepest and
would hold a whole congregation safely sheltered on
a rainy day. Ascain was the manor of one Robert
de Sossionde, Bishop of Bayonne in the sixteenth
century, and a more pleasant place of retreat cannot
be imagined. But what a brave ecclesiastic he, to
face the evil' influences of the mountain! For on
the slope of La Rhune dwelt the devil — Deburia-^
and there all the witches and lesser devils met to
conduct their horrid rites. It was they who caused
the thunderstorms, the blight upon the harvest, the
murrain on the cattle. Perhaps our bishop built
the very chapel on La Rhune where prayers were to
be said to combat the evil influences, that chapel
which was believed in the sixteenth century to be
accursed and the nocturnal rendezvous of all the
demons. In 1609 a royal commission was sent
down from Paris to investigate the rumours which
had reached even the ears of the King. Principally
on the evidence of a girl of thirteen, who confessed
herself to be a witch, over five hundred people were
brought before the tribunal on the charge of sorcery,
and hundreds were condemned to death by fire or
sword.
What did the bishop think of it, we wonder. It
may be that he turned his eyes, not to the mountain,
but to the sunset.
77
CHAPTER IX
HENDATE, FONTARABIA AND THE ILE DES FAISANS
IT will be impossible for you to leave St. Jean de
Luz without wishing to follow the way of those
many royal progresses from the Spanish frontier into
France by Fontarabia, the He des Faisans and Hendaye.
This is quite easy to accomplish, since the banks of
the Bidassoa are but eight miles distant, and a day
will give you all the time you need.
Hendaye is a little French town which rejoices
in a Spanish view : Hendaye will live in your memory
as a view. Beyond the grey sluggish Bidassoa rise
the rich umber roofs and pale walls of Fontarabia,
against the bare brown mountains which sweep from
the Cap de Figuier at the sea eastwards around the
plain where stands Irun on its height, shining in the
sun. Faizquitel is the mountain behind the town,
with its pilgrimage chapel of Our Lady of Guadeloupe,
whose feast-day — celebrated on the 8th September —
commemorates a great victory when Cabrera, Admiral
of Castille, fell upon the French forces and drove them
up the mountain side.
From Hendaye you will take a boat from the water
78
Fontarabia and the He des Faisans
gate across to Fontarabia. You land at the little
jetty where picturesque fishermen lounge by their
boats along the shore. These are the fishermen who
belong to that guild which from the Middle Ages
down to this day have elected the Alcalde, their
" Mayor of the Sea," in the month of July. The
election is performed with certain classic rites amidst
the bygone splendours of the old town hall. It is
something to see if you are lucky enough to be there
at that season. A blaze of colour in the old streets, the
red and yellow flag of Spain, the red banner of the
Guild with its blue escutcheon ; musicians in quaint
red caps ; a young and noble-stepping woman in
white bearing on her head a coffer containing the
papers of the Order ; music, and the procession takes
its way to the cottage of the fisherman-mayor where
a feast is spread.
You will enter this old town of Fontarabia by the
great gateway — Puerta de Santa Maria — bearing the
arms of the town. The main street, des Cavaliers,
rises steeply — a Spanish street of the Middle Ages —
narrow, with houses of projecting eaves, finely wrought
iron balconies, heavily carved emblazonries above the
arched doorways, to end in the steep massive walls
of the Church of Our Lady of the Ascension. A
wonderful church this, built in the eleventh century,
but the interior, thoroughly Spanish with its vulgar
coloured altars and gilded saints, is a disappointment.
In the delightful old porch of the church which leads
into the green shade of plane trees, you will find the
79
The Basque Country-
following amusing warning painted upon the wall :
Se prehibe jugar a la pelota en este atrio. Bajo la multa de z
pesetas.
It is to be imagined that there are Basques so keen
as willingly to pay two pesetas for the pleasure of
playing handball against that enticing wall.
Under the plane trees you may walk into the large,
deserted-looking square, Plaza de Armas, grass growing
between its stones, where the old Castle of Jeanne
la FoUe raises its massive facade, dating from the
fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. Entering the great
door you will make your way into a ruined, grass-
grown, roofless room, and mount from there the wide
stair to the terrace above with its extended view of
Hendaye, the Bidassoa, the ocean and the surrounding
mountains. This part of the building, bare, empty
and imposing, is much older than that facing the
square, and was built at the beginning of the tenth
century by Sanche le Fort, King of Navarre.
Returning by the main street to the town gate, you
will find yourself under the plane trees of the prome-
nade along the ancient ramparts ; and keeping to the
right in a sweep around under the bull- ring, you will
find the tram for Irun. It is quite worth taking,
because in these days it is an adventure to jingle
along in a tram drawn by mules and to receive a
little paper picture ticket for your pennies. The .
road winds through the marshes which border the
river, and then up an incline into the town.
80
A SPANISH BASQUE INN.
Fontarabia and the He des Faisans
Irun is en fete — why, we do not understand, but
that it is a Basque festival we know, for we see here
for the first time the flag of the Basque country-
unfurled, and realise that we are in the province of
Guipuzcoa. The banner flaunts the magic ZasfiakBat,
and the shield of the Basque country which bears
the quarterings of the seven sister provinces. The
story of these quarterings is full of romance. First
come the chains of Navarre and Basse-Navarre. In
the year 121 2 Sanchele Fort, King of Navarre, went
on a crusade with all the princes of Spain and many
other Christian knights against Mahomod, grand
Miramomelin of Africa. The Christian army num-
bered LOO,ooo men on foot and 16,000 horsemen.
Mahomod marshalled a force of 300,000 men, besides
28,000 Moors on horseback to guard his chariot
which was in the shape of a throne. This magnificent
throne was covered by a pavilion of scarlet silk sewn
with flowers and birds in rich embroidery, and was
surrounded by a palisade and a barrier of iron chains.
In the centre of this great host, within this moving
fort, the Moorish King advanced, as he believed, in
safety. The King of Navarre made a great attack,
cut his way through the host, slew 20,000 Moors,
broke down the paHsade and made himself master
of the throne. The chains in the form of a trellis
he adopted as his emblem.
The story of the three quarterings in the arms of
Guipuzcoa, which have second place on the shield,
is as follows : (i) The King of Navarre was a prisoner
M 81
The Basque Country
of the King of Aragon. His soldiers delivered him,
and the people placed his image on their banner to
remind their King of what he owed to them. (2) The
twelve cannon were taken from the French on
December 12, 15 12, hy the Spaniards under Jeanne
la FoUe, at the battle of Belate, (3) The trees repre-
sent the province of Guipuzcoa bathed by the waves
of the sea.
Biscaye carries an oak, because the great assembly,
the bilzaar, met beneath the tree of Guernica in this
province, and bears, as well, the wolves, the arms of
de Haro, Seigneur of Biscaye.
In the arms of Alava we see the mailed fist of
Castille faced with defiance by the lions — the people
of the province. It recalls the fact that when the
Confradia of Arriaja who possessed the land recognised
the King of Castille in the fourteenth century, it
was only on condition that he maintained their laws.
The lion is strong and ready to resist.
The lion in the arms of Labourd was borne on the
shields of most of the great families of the province,
du Sault d'Hasparren, de Grammont, d'Armagnac,
etc. The fleur-de-lis was granted as a royal concession
by Charles VII in 145 1, to commemorate the annexa-
tion of Labourd to France.
The lion rampant, the arms of the Vicomte of
Mauleon, was adopted as the arms of the town of
Mauleon and of the province of La Soule.
Between Irun and Hendaye is a little hamlet on the
two sides of the river called Behobia in Spain and
82
Fontarabia and the He des Faisans
Behobe in France. Here to-day is the international
bridge between Spain and France, built in 1878.
But 70U will not cross by the bridge; you will take
a boat from the Spanish shore to the He des Faisans,
for the sake of the historic associations.
There is little to-day to tell of the glories past.
The island is low, kept from complete dissolution by
piles and stone walls. A modest monument in the
middle of a small garden bears an inscription : " In
memory of the Conferences of 1659, during which
Louis XIV and PhiHp IV by a happy alliance put
an end to the long state of war between their two
nations. Napoleon III, Emperor of the French, and
Isabel, Queen of Spain, restored this island in 1861."
Surely this small space of earth, this tiny island in
the slow-moving river, is historic ground if ever such
there were; and standing there you will remember
the momentous decisions which have here been made,
and will recall the gorgeous pageantry for which this
has been the theatre. How much the eye counted
in those far-past days ! What thought, what care
for detail, what elaborateness of preparation, what
prodigality of spending went to the setting of every
royal meeting here.
If Louis XI chose to wear a frieze coat, its pockets
were lined with gold pieces to bribe the Spanish
courtiers of the King of Castille, and the frieze, you
may be sure, was as nicely calculated to impress as
was the magnificence of many another King. Francis I,
with his pointed beard and hawk-like eye and nose
83
The Basque Country
passed this way, as we know, leaving here those two
. Httle sons as hostages for the faith he never meant to
keep. Anne of Austria, Isabella of Valois, Eleanor of
Austria, Maria Theresa — how many of them have
stood upon this ground, -with, what mounting hopes,
what satisfied ambition, what breaking hearts !
The height of splendour, seems to have been reached
when one Don Velasquez came from Madrid as quarter-
master-general of King Philip's household to lavish
his incomparable knowledge of form and colour upon
the arrangements for the reception of King Louis XIV
and his mother Anne of Austria, of Maria Theresa
and her father, Philip IV. The great painter raised
here a fairy pavilion, gorgeous vdth gilding, sumptuous
with priceless tapestries — beautiful, we may be sure,
when it was thronged with the splendid figures of
the chief actors, amongst whom Velasquez himself
was distinguished.
When you have read the descriptions of these great
occasions, the pomp, the splendour of equipment,
the gorgeous ensemble, you feel that these are indeed
but grey days in which we live, when royalty walks
amongst us stripped of its great prerogative of illusion.
The days of black velvet lined with crimson satin,
banded with cloth of gold and embroidered with
precious stones, are past ; so too the plumed hat with
its jewelled aigrette and the satin doublet and the
silken hose. It is only on the He des Faisans that
you are removed for a moment from reality and may
see it all again.
84
CHAPTER X
A LITTLE JOURNEY INTO BEARN :
ORTHEZ—PAU
Qui n'a vist lo Casteig de Paii
Jamoy n'a vist arey de taii.
SO in the sixteenth century the Bearnais sang
in their pride and so the lovers of Pau would
echo to-day. Approaching from Bayonne, however,
you will choose to stop at Orthez for the day, going
on to Pau by the afternoon train, for Orthez was
before Pau the capital of Beam, and has moreover
much of the charm remaining from the days when it
had a place in the pages of Froissart. The old chroni-
cler tells us that he slept at the inn, La Lune, kept
by Ernauton Espasgne du Lyon, a squire of Gaston IX,
Count of Beam and Foix. As you approach the town
on its hill, by the wonderful old fourteenth-century
bridge with the tower in the centre, you cannot imagine
it as it was in that day when the now crumbling Tour
de Moncade rose above a stately castle built by
Gaston VI (1232-1290), where Gaston IX held a
brilliant court. As we. learn from Froissart, we
should have met visitors from every part of the world,
hastening here, sure of a generous welcome. " It
85
The Basque Country
was here," he says, " I was informed of the greater
part of the events which had happened in Spain,
Portugal, Navarre, England and Scotland ; for I saw
during my residence knights and squires from these
nations."
Within the vestiges of the walls that once echoed
to open-handed hospitality surely you will see, at
any midnight hour, the ghost of that old Count
enter once again with the flickering lights of his
twelve torch-bearers leading the way to the phantom
board where knights and squires await him.
Orthez breathes of the Middle Ages as Pau of a
more modern day, and you even grudge the story of
a later date which has given its name to the old bridge
— frimestro dous caferas — the window of the priests,
in memory of a dark deed of the Calvinists under
Montgomery in 1659, who cast the priests from this
bridge into the river below.
From Orthez to Pau the country grows more lovely
with every mile, and every little town you see holds
a legacy of interest. Castelis on the hill bears still
its name of Roman derivation, above the site of a
Roman fort where the peasants' plough turns Roman
shards to light. Along the plain are Argagnon,
Gouze, Lendresse, Arance, and off to the right on a
steep eminence the larger town of -Lagor. To the left
again is Lacq, which had its beginning in the tenth
century.
Always you are following the Gave de Pau, and you
recognise with a warming of the heart the picture
86
A Little Journey into Beam
which hung — in pale water-colour — in a wide white
mount and narrow tarnished gold frame upon the
old drawing-room wall. Here are the pale blue shallow
river, the golden sand-banks, the fragile poplars, the
soft green hills and the snow-capped mountains ;
here running along beside us is the very posting-road
they followed. Uncle John and Aunt Maria, on their
somewhat self-conscious tour with their embossed
leather boxes up behind.
The approach to Pau is a wonderful moment, to
be remembered. The town rises like a series of
white cliffs from a wide green sea, and after you have
climbed the winding road, surely there are few places
in the world with such a view as greets you from the
wide, balustraded terrace. It is a marvel which
defies description. Beyond the valley of the Gave,
beyond the hills, is the great panorama — no other
word really expresses it — of the mountains, from the
Pic du Midi de Bigorre to the east, by the Mont
Aigu, le Neouville, le Pic Long, I'Ardiden, le Mont
Perdu, le Marbore, la Vignemale, le Pic de Gabizos,
le Pic Bonbat, le Pic de Ger, le Pic de Cezny. Your
eyes reach le Pic du Midi d'Ossau, opposite Pau, then
le Pic d'Aule, le Pic Buro, and finally, rising from the
valley of the Aspe, le Pic d'Anie, the last mountain to
the left. To live in Pau is to have that glory always
before you in every imaginable atmospheric effect.
You share the longing to carry some hint of that glory
with you which is the excuse for that pale water-
colour on the drawing-room wall.
87
VIEW FROM THE TERRACE AT PAU.
A Little Journey into B6arn
ie Jurangon. You may stand in that room and look
upon the royal cradle, but I am not sure that Henri IV
has npt rivals in your interest at the Chateau. The
House of Navarre has the quality which fixes attention
and commands sympathy. We find that Gaston
Phoebus married in 1349 Agnes de Navarre, and there-
after often left the great castle at Orthez for Pau,
whither Froissart followed him and found this un
moult bel chastel. In 141 6 one Jean de Beam, who
had fought for the French King, stood by the side of
Jeanne d'Arc at the coronation of Charles VII at
Rheims. It is to his son, Gaston X, that Pau owes
much, for he made the Chateau his home, and built
the north and east portions and enclosed the park.
But it is the following generations who live for us :
Catherine of Navarre and her weak husband Jean
d'Albret ; Henri II of Navarre who became by treaty
the ally of Francis I of France, the two kings swearing
mutually " to be the friend of your friends and the
enemy of your enemies." When Charles V demanded
passage through Navarre, Henri II proudly refused
consent, and as a reward received from Francis I
the hand of his sister, that remarkable princess. Mar-
guerite de Valois, whom the poets named Marguerite
des Marguerites, pearl of pearls, pearl of the Valois.
It is their cipher that we see entwined in the arabesques
of the great Renaissance staircase : H.R. M.R., Henri
Roi, Marguerite Reine. Surrounded here by a crowd
of artists, architects, sculptors and designers, the
young Queen of Navarre undertook the embellish-
N 89.
The Basque Country
ment of the Chateau, which changed under her trans-
forming guidance from a severe Gothic manor to
the magnificent Renaissance palace which we see to-
day. To her sense of beauty we owe the court and
the exquisite proportion and decoration of the series
of apartments on the west. Not content with
building, Marguerite surrounded the Chateau with
the most beautiful gardens which were then to be
found in Europe.
Here for many years Marguerite held her miniature
court. It became known as one of the intellectual
centres of Europe. She was the friend of. the Re-
formation in France and, herself a writer, was a great
patroness of literature. She was a flower of the
Renaissance and the Chateau is her monument.
The daughter of Marguerite and Henri, Jeanne
d'Albret, a woman of great goodness and sense, was
the mother of Henri IV. She it is whose name will
ever be associated with the cause of the Protestants
in France. She was the leader of the Protestant
cause for many years, though the unprejudiced reader
of history must realise that, while the principles
involved may have been the highest, the methods
employed for their advancement differed nothing
from those used by the Catholic party. So it is
that the Chateau of Pau was the scene of treachery.
After Montgomery in the name of the Protestant
cause had massacred 3,000 Catholics at Orthez, Ferride,
the head of the Catholic forces, surrendered with
his ten officers. They were taken to Pau, where
90
A Little Journey into Beam
they were bidden to a feast in the Chateau at which
they were all slain.
Henri IV, we must remember, was sent to nurse
at Billere, a village not two miles from the Chateau,
where he ran wild with the young peasants of his age.
He married another Marguerite de Valois, daughter
of Catherine de Medici, who certainly did not share
the virtues of his grandmother. This brilliant and
beautiful and dashing Princess brought gaiety to the
Chateau of Pau, where as usual she engaged in those
intrigues which have made her name notorious.
She soon found the little Huguenot town too dull for
her and left le petit Geneve de Pau. Her successor
as chatelaine was Catherine, sister of Henri IV,
beloved by the people, a wise and charming woman
of studious tastes, who attracted many well-known
men of the day to her court. When she was to leave
for Paris to be married, a crowd besieged the Chateau
imploring her not to desert them. She promised them
that she would return, but she never saw Pau again,
and with her departure the decadence of the Chateau
began.
91
CHAPTER XI
A UTILE JOURNET INTO BEARN :
OLORON—SAUVEIERRE
WHY we may legitimately make this journey
into Beam from the Basque country needs
perhaps a word of explanation. Navarre, a Basque
province, became in the fifteenth century an appanage
of the House of Beam, whose princes took the title
of King of Navarre, and from that time the written
history of Beam became the written history of the
French Basque country. Beam, like the Basque
provinces, was free, maintaining its own fors with a
like tenacity. Yet, though sharing so much of a
common past, the Bearnais to-day dislike the Basques,
while the Basques distrust the Bearnais. The Basques
are immovably Catholic, the Bearnais are generally
Protestant. But geographically and historically Beam
and the Basque country are one.
From Pau it is thirty-three kilometres to Oloron.
The train passes through Juran^on with its vineyards,
where the pleasant white wine is made, crosses
the river Neez, then mounts steadily up through
wild broken country, spanning ravines, till it reaches
the high plateau of Belair. Here, on an evening in
92
A Little Journey into Beam
May, there was such an effect of colour as is very
seldom seen. The setting sun, by some strange
refraction of light, bathed hill and mountain in a
quivering brilliant rosy purple. It was an intense
colour and clear, as if one looked on tjie whole land-
scape through the fabled rose-coloured glasses. The
quiet occupants of the railway carriage, including
two ancient ladies in faded black and a young soldier
home on leave, crowded to the window awed by the
quite unearthly beauty of the scene. From that
moment events ceased to be real. The journey from
Buzy was simply slipping farther into an enchanted
land, till it was no surprise to see Oloron rising like
some phantom city on its hills, divided by deep rush-
ing rivers, twinkling with lights against a primrose sky.
The guide-books tell you nothing of the place, dismiss
it with a word, but surely it is very wonderful. On
the walk up from the station the sense of strangeness
grew with every step. There, amidst the continual
rush of waters from deep ravines, high bridges finally
led us to a quiet hostel in a mediaeval street. Perhaps
the full moon was responsible for the wizardry of
the late walk. It laid a brilliant pathway up the
steep hill between dark ancient houses, fast in stillness,
and brought us face to face with a deep-porched
doorway in the wall of the church of Ste. Croix. The
moon shone full on a white wall at our right, just
where the street on the hill-top was wide and the
houses tall and filled with mystery. It was all silent,
black and white and wonderful ; it was all silent until
93
The Basque Country
•
there stole upon the air the sound of music which
took us down hill on the opposite side, out into a
little square where the lower windows of a building
were lighted. The music went on — a flute and a
guitar — a curious five-time dance tune, which drew
us close, till we could see the figures within the lighted
room. The elders sat about the wall clapping their
hands in rhythmic time to the dance of the young
men and maidens, a kind of mazurka. We stole
away, and returning up the square once more into
the shadow of the church with its curious square,
ugly tower, found ourselves looking down over the
roofs of houses to where the moon made pools of
light in the smooth-flowing river. Turning from
the way we had come up, we plunged down a lane",
with high walls on the upper hillside, and below,
through the trees of the gardens, we saw another
swift-flowing river.
It was not till the morning light that we discovered
how Oloron stands upon three hills at the junction
of two rushing mountain streams, the Gave d'Aspe
and the Gave d'Oloron : Oloron-Ste. Croix, the
ancient town between the Aspe and Oloron, Oloron-
Ste. Marie on the west bank of the Aspe, and the new
town on the east bank of the Oloron.
May chance, that most alluring of guides, lead
you from Oloron to Sauveterre. If you are a fisher-
man you will find trout to be caught on the way, at
the village of Navarrenx. Sauveterre is another
surprise, for you will have read but two lines in the
94
A Little Journey into Beam
guide-book and so be quite unprepared for the charm
of the place — a quiet charm which may well lure
you to spend a day or two at the tiny inn.
Sauveterre, une ville bonne a devise,
A 1' entree d'Espagne assise,
as one Guillaume Suiart wrote in the thirteenth
century, is on a height above the Gave d'Oloron,
which here has broadened into an imposing stream.
As it commands the entry to the valley, this town
was often in early days the seat of political conferences
between the French and English, and later between
the French and Spanish. As you approach it over
the modern bridge, the town stands above you
nearly surrounded by its ancient walls, the great
donjon of the castle still towering, as well as the ivy-
grown ruin of part of the old turreted bridge. This
bridge led, in past days, from the town gate in the
ramparts to an island, and a second bridge connected
the island with the farther shore ; this gave a double
opportunity for defence against an attacking enemy, as
a stand could be made on the island and again at the
shore.
The town was besieged in 1209 and taken by
Alphonse de Castille. In 1276 Philippe le Hardi
decided to press the claims of his nephew to the
throne of Castille. One of his armies under the
Count d'Artois marched on Navarre. Philippe, having
received the oriflamme from the Abbaye of St. Denis,
took the road with the Due de Bourgogne, the
95
The Basque Country
Due de Brabant, and a mighty host, and as the old
chronicler says :
Passet per Gascoyna, per la terra en Gasto,
Venue a Sauvaterra on I'endergnon el Gasco.
The army lacked food on their long march from
Paris, but when they reached Sauveterre their joy
was great. " They occupied the gardens, the fields,
and the vineyards. There you saw encamped the
barons, the foot-soldiers and the archers, and you
saw many men in shining armour and many beautiful
banners and many nobles, many fine shields and trap-
pings, black and coloured. There were so many
that a two- denier loaf sold at ten because of the need
of every one."
The town was the scene of the meeting in 1462
between Louis XI and Jean d'Aragon, when a treaty
of peace was signed. In 1523 it was besieged by
Philibert de Chalons, Prince of Orange, when the
town was so hard pressed that part of the old bridge
was sacrificed, the tower of which still stands.
The church you will find to be a most interesting
combination of Romanesque and Gothic. Before the
present tower was built it had a crenellated wall
around the roof for men-at-arms, and must have
proved an effective fortress, as it stands on an open
space close to the ancient walls. From the old
parapet you get a magnificent view of the valley
stretching away to Mauleon and of the mountains in
the distance. The church was begun in the eleventh
96
A Little Journey into Beam
century, but was left unfinished, and legend has supplied
the story of its final achievement in the thirteenth
century.
Gaston V, Count of Beam, so the story goes, part
history and part legend, in order to counter the
ambitious designs of Sanche V, King of Navarre,
married Sanche's sister, Sancie. Gaston w^as killed
some months after the marriage, leaving Sancie a
widow expectant of motherhood. The peace and
prosperity of the province depended upon this infant,
who would unite the parties of Beam and Navarre.
Unfortunately the child was bom dead, and the barons
of Beam, in their rage, accused Sancie of herself
causing the mischance, and they called upon King
Sanche, her brother, to be her judge. He came to
Sauveterre for the trial of his sister in 1170, to find
3,000 men assembled who demanded that the Countess
Sancie should be tried by the ordeal of fire or water,
whichever she preferred. She chose the ordeal by
water. The King and the barons then ordained that
her feet and her hands should be tied and that she
should be thrown from the old bridge into the river.
The day came; the King, the barons, priests and
people were assembled; the Countess was led through
the curious crowd to the bridge, where she was bound
hand and foot. The sentence was read by the Bishop,
and then, amidst a breathless hush, she was cast over
the parapet. As she fell she made a vow in her
passionate innocence, " Ste. Marie, save me ! and I
will finish the church at Sauveterre." She struck
o 97
The Basque Country
tKe water in the deepest and swiftest part of the
river ; the current caught her, swung her round and
landed her safe upon a bank of sand. Thus her
innocence was proven and the church at Sauveterre
was finished.
Above a door at one side of the church is a bit
of ancient carving which is unique because the un-
lettered craftsman has placed the Omega before the
Alpha. This was pointed out to us by the cure,
who, himself a Bearnais, takes a great interest in the
history of the town. Seated in the clean, bare parlour
of the sacristy, he talked with enthusiasm of his loved
province. To him the Basques as a people do not
exist. He regards them as unlettered folk without
history or literature. " You must read the history
of Beam to know the history of the Basques," he
said. He exalted his church and told us the story of
Sancie which we have written. As we went out he
pointed to the staircase and would have us notice
the stair-rail, which shone, a long, sinuous Hne of
polished wood, ending at the newel in a realistic
serpent's head.
The old servant, who had admitted us charily,
stepped from the bright-tiled kitchen with a candle
to let us out into the warm, dark night.
98
CHAPTER XII
A MARKET DAT IN TARDETS
OF the three Basque provinces in France, Basse-
Navarre, Labourd and La Soule, the last is
the one to which we must look as the stronghold of
the ancient customs and traditions. When you say
" La Soule," you mean the valley of the Saison
(Uhaitz-Handia), the river which rises in the high
wild region of Bassa-Buria, under the pass of Ste.
Engrace, rushes through the deep gorge of Cacouette,
passes the village of Ste. Engrace, which gives its name
to the pass above, waters the narrow valley where lie
the villages of Licq andEtchebar, Larrau and Lichans,
and runs on to Tardets, the town on the first
plain, then to Mauleon, the second town, and
finally, as we have seen, passes beneath the walls
of Sauveterre in Beam, which guards the entrance
to the valley.
If you take the steam train at Oloron for Tardets,
you will find yourself started upon a most amusing
journey, for you wander along with the utmost
deliberation, making intimate acquaintance with barn-
yardvand back-doors, meandering slowly across fields
99
The Basque Country
and through lanes, and threading village streets
where you could shake hands with the smiling peasants
in the cottage windows. As it is market day in Tardets
there are crowds of peasants waiting at the stations,
and you get deHghtful glimpses of life and manners
as well as of the countryside itself. There is good
excuse for the slowness of the train, for you are as-
cending the valley of the Baretous, and you continue
to rise, past the villages of Aramits and Arette and
Lanne, the first Basque village, till you reach the
crest of the Col de Lapixe. From there you begin a
slow and winding descent, enlivened by the informa-
tion of a government traveller in wood, who is eager
to point out every view, every peak and village. It
was he who told us about the chien de Montory, and,
as the train wound around the top of a hill, pointed
out to us a farm far below and on the other side of
the valley. Already peasants were hanging out of
the carriage windows watching for one of the pleasures
of the weekly journey to market. We were not to
be disappointed, for suddenly out from the farm shot
a tiny black moving speck which took a mad course
towards us, upward and across the opposite side of
the valley. Delighted yells of recognition encouraged
the moving spot, which soon resolved itself into a
small and excited black dog, which came tearing up
the hill below us and finally ranged himself alongside
the moving train for what was evidently a glorious
gallop. Barking and frisking, and positively laughing
with intelligence, he kept even with us, only pausing
100
A Market Day in Tardets
to catch the offerings of sugar and biscuits which
were thrown to him from the carriage windows.
He accompanied the train across the valley, where
it finally passed close to the door of the farm. There,
with one laughing frisk, he left us, and the last we
saw of him he stood before the farmhouse door,
panting and wagging his tail, as he watched us out
of sight.
From Montory, the railway follows the Gaslon
down the valley to Tardets. However much you
may grow in time to dislike the dust and dirt and noise
of a market day, there are certain places where one
should not miss the market, where the colour and
movement add greatly to the picture. This is true
of Tardets, where the market is held on a Monday.
There the somewhat sad-looking triangular square
surrounded by arcaded steep-roofed houses, grey and
buff and mauve, was, already filled with baraques,
where the usual wares were on sale under cream-white
or red awnings. Oranges and lemons from over the
passes overfiowed great baskets of Spanish weave.
Dates, figs and raisins were heaped on large flat round
woven trays. Set out upon a green canvas on the
ground was the earthenware, pots and jugs and
ecuelles of yellow and brown. Here, too, on the
cobbles stood a massed array of brass and copper —
cowbells and sheepbells and kettles. Goats' milk
cheeses and brown and cream-coloured eggs in large
panniers waited for the wholesale produce dealer to
come and buy them ; red-faced, prosperous, oily
loi
The Basque Country
young men with an urbane air, who arrive at all the
markets in their small motor vans, joke with the
women, lunch on the best at the inn, and then roll
out of the square with waving hand to the prettiest
girl.
To-day all the women were buying hats, large,
flat-brimmed, conical-crowned shade-hats of fine
black or white straw for wear under the hot sun of
the high mountain sides. Many more were buying
esfadrilles, the rope-soled canvas shoe worn by the
peasants everywhere in this country, and which are
made with such skill by the village cordonnier. They
are delightful footgear for these mountains, so light
that you do not feel them, and yet strong and giving
a secure hold, on the hill-sides. The little square is
crowded. Under the deep arcades, along two sides,
the carts are ranged closely, wheel to wheel, while
horses and mules stand and stamp, tied to cart-tails,
or to rings in the walls under the arcades. Wedged
into every corner are the little grey donkeys with their
huge panniers — the long-suffering, hardworked, clever
little beasts, despised by their masters, who have a
contemptuous proverb which says " The ass carries
the wine and drinks water." But the little mouse-
coloured beast of burden is none the less the peasant's
best friend. The poorest can afford one, while
mules are for the prosperous, and horses a luxury for
the rich. Seeing the work they have to do, you
wonder if ever they get a rest. Are the donkeys given
a half-holiday in honour of St. Blaise, or does the
A Market Day in Tardets
Basque farmer, when he goes to the pardon of
the patron saint of animals, take only a few hairs to
burn from the tail of his more important farm friends
— from his cows and his mules and his horses, consider-
ing the Uttle ass not worth a mass at fifty centimes ?
You wonder. The crowd itself is quiet. There is
less gaiety, fewer jests than in Brittany. There is no
vendor of songs. Here are men of typical Basque
physiognomy. The young men are handsome, brown-
eyed, with hair of deepest brown, fine foreheads,
long noses, neat, well-shaped heads set on broad,
rather square shoulders, with well-rounded throats,
compact body on slim muscular legs, small hands and
feet — the whole giving an impression of balance and
flexibility. The older men, brown-faced with thick
grey or white hair, have a crafty look in their sharp,
long-nosed faces. All are clean-shaven. It is a good-
looking race, which breathes self-reliance, dignity
and freedom. Every man in the market carries a
staff, the makila, and many carry the double-ended
•sack, bussac, handwoven, generally of red and blue,
which are heirlooms in the family. Most of them are
dressed in short black jacket and velveteen trousers.
All, without exception, wear clean white cotton
shirts, open at the throat, and some have a scarlet
sash folded tightly around their hips. A few wear a
short Unen blouse, falHng from a yoke loose to the
waist. The women, young and old, are dressed in
neat black ; the married women wear a black handker-
chief folded about the coil of hair, with the addition
103
The Basque Country
of a gold chain and large brooch. The girls wear a
lace mantilla.
Beyond the square by the street which is also
crowded with carts and men drinking outside the
wine-shops, you reach the cattle market. Pigs and
cows and oxen fill the road which is already trampled
to mire. Up the rocky hillside are the sheep and the
long-haired mountain goats.
The Basque cows, like their masters, are small,
quick and fine. They are full of intelligence and many
are the tales told of their perspicacity. In summer
time, when they go up to the high pastures, many
hundreds from the villages of one valley are often in
the care of one man. It happens that if the cows
of the same village or farm do not like the pasture,
they take counsel amongst themselves and, early in
the summer's morning, quietly leave the mountain,
following their leader sometimes as many as fifty or
sixty kilometres down a way that they have only
followed once and, when the evening shadows fall,
the whole herd comes home.
The Basques are very fond of their animals and the
cows are each called by name. The dog, however,
though respected as the guardian of the house, the
keeper of the flock and the family friend, is always
called Nagarro.
The oxen, which stand yoked in pairs, are of great
value. They are magnificent beasts, like the Lombardy
oxen — powerful, well- trained, and of the same beautiful
cream-fawn colour. Great care is taken of them.
104
A BASQUE INN.
A Market Day in Tardets
They always wear a heavy linen sheet, striped with
dark blue at the sides, and a white sheepskin under
the wooden yoke, while a net trimmed with red
pompons keeps the flies from their faces.
Lunch at the Hotel des Pyrenees, which you enter
under the arcade, was made interesting by the keen
conversation of a table full of better-class Basque
farmers, who talked of the relative merits of their
sporting dogs — breed, training and exploits. The
trout we had reminded us of the fishing fame of the
little river Licq, which runs into the Saison a short
way up the valley.
In the afternoon the atmosphere of the market, as
usual, was one of slight inebriety ; steps were unsteady,
gestures vague and tongues fluent. The women kept
to themselves in groups, or patronised a Spanish
fortune-teller, whose blue-black hair escaped from
an orange- coloured handkerchief. Even from the
balcony above, it was easy to see by her expression
and manner that she was a gipsy born.
With the home-returning market folk we followed
the road as it winds by the river through the narrow
valley between steep hills. The farther we went the
thinner grew the line along the main road, as famihes
turned aside to follow lanes and steep paths to the
farmsteads far up on the mountain sides. The
young men on foot swung along with a free, light
stride, the coat thrown over the left shoulder, the
beret on the side of the head. The poorer women
rode sideways on their little donkeys ahead of the
p 105
The Basque Country
heavily laden panniers, their arms full of parcels and
the inevitable umbrella. A Spanish side-saddle with
a shelf for the feet, as seen in old pictures, made a
comfortable seat for the woman on the back of ambling
mules which carried the man astride behind. This,
when the cavalier had a pretty girl seated before, was
a very convenient arrangement for intimate conver-
sation. The rich and elderly farmers, the heret pulled
over the forehead to shade the face, were usually
mounted on stout little horses, whose bridles and
headstalls were of coloured leather ornamented with
brass nails, and whose saddle-cloths were of homespun
cloth with initials and designs inwoven, or of velvet
richly embroidered. Behind the saddle the brightly
colotfred bussac hung down on each side the horse's
flanks, and a sheepskin protected the rider's legs from
the cold and recalled the schaffes of the cowboy on
the American plains.
At Licq we turned back. The sun, setting in a,
glory of rose and gold, flooded the valley in spaces of
light, broken by deep purple shadows. The sky
above was of turquoise blue, and where the last 'beams
of the sun struck between the hills, it touched into
transfiguration every leaf and flower of the woodside —
the wild box, the spikes of blue monkshood, the
white of may, the cream of elder, the snow sprays of
wild cherry, the rose of wild apple, the purple jewels
of the columbine, and turned ■ the swift-flowing river
to aquamarine.
Tardets was not free of the exhilaration of the
1 06
A Market Day in Tardets
market until late in the night, when the last band of
young revellers took their way homewards, breaking
the mountain stillness by the wild and startling
Irrezina, the Basque war-cry, which has echoed down
the centuries.
107
CHAPTER XIII
MASCARADES AND PASTORALES
IT is in this valley of Tardets, among the peasants
of the villages and of the scattered farms of the
mountain, that the pastoral plays and mascarades have
survived.
The pastoral plays of the Basques have nothing to
distinguish them from the Breton mystery plays,
except that they are still acted in the Basque country
while it is many years since one was seen in Brittany.
But a comparative list shows many identical subjects,
such as Godefroi de Bouillon, The Deliverance of Jeru-
salem, Les Quatre Fils d'Aymon, Genevieve de, Brabant,
Charlemagne and the Twelve Peers, Robert le Diable,
etc. These plays may be divided into Biblical sub-
jects, Lives of the Saints, romances of the Middle Ages
and farces.
The pastorales as they are still acted in La Soule
are all that is left of the popular drama of the Middle
Ages. In them has survived the memory of the
mysteries and moralities acted in convents and churches
on fSte days, as well as the chansons de geste, the
romances and legends which delighted knights and
io8
Mascarades and Pastorales
ladies in the halls of feudal castles and the people at
the fairs and markets.
These dramas were written in French, in Latin and
in Spanish, and only reached such unlettered centres
as the Basque country and Brittany by the hands of
the pedlars of books. Even to-day in Brittany you
can buy these little paper books, Lives of the Saints
and legends of the country, for a few sous each. These
books, however, give the story only in outline, and
it takes skill and dramatic instinct to produce from
them a play which can be acted. This is what is
still done in La Soule, and formerly in the other
Basque provinces as well.
In every pastorale, whatever its theme, the Basque
playwright must introduce in opposition to his heroes
Satans, Turks and infidels, who are meant to typify
evil in the age-long struggle against good.
The Basque pastorales are acted out of doors, and
all the parts are taken by men and boys. The stage
is usually set against the wall of some house in the
central square, its wings formed by trestles covered
with sheets decorated with flowers and ribbons.
The entrance on the right is for the good people,
and that on the left for the bad. Above the entrance
for the Satans is a wooden image, called I'idole de
Mahomet, which all the wicked must salute, and to
which they address their speeches and prayers. Besides
the actors, there is a rustic orchestra, which generally
sits at an upper window of the house. At each of
the four corners of the stage is a guard with a gun
109
The Basque Country
whose duty it is to keep the audience quiet and to
fire when the hero is killed.
The parts are learned during the winter evenings,
and this is no light task, as a pastorale often runs
to six thousand verses and takes six, eight or ten
hours to act. Finally, the day of the performance
arrives. The first visit of the actors is to the barber,
then to the village dressmaker, who on this occasion,
as on that of a wedding, is a most important
personage. The dresses are donned : Charlemagne,
Abraham or Alexander wear the dress of a gendarme ;
Nebudchanor, the Satans and the Turks wear
scarlet ; the heroes, queens, princes and good folk
wear blue.
Sisters and mothers hover about to add the gold
chains, brooches and bits of glass which give the last
touch to the costumes.
Now all is ready for the procession which, headed
by the national flag, the band and the local guard,
starts on a grand march around the town to call
upon the mayor, the cure and any other notables.
All the characters are mounted on mules or horses,
the " blues," the heroes, the heroines, the queens,
the princesses, the bishops and the angels riding first,
followed by the "reds," the Satans, the Turks and
the EngHsh. The " blues " ride decorously, but the
" reds," who are mounted on fiery steeds, cause all
possible commotion. Arrived at the square, the
blues " dismount and ascend the ladder leading
to the stage, but the " reds " attempt first to ride up
no
<c
Mascarades and Pastorales
the steps on their chargers, then pretend to be unable
to move, until finally a prayer to Mahomet enables
them, too, to reach the stage.
Before the performance begins one of the actors
makes the lehen pheredikia (first sermon), which begins
always with the same words : " Good people, may
God give you the patience to listen to us with atten-
tion." This inevitable beginning is followed by a
synopsis of the pastorale sung in a monotone. Then
follows the play, which carries the stranger back to
other centuries, so naive it is : the " blues " are calm,
majestic, grave; the "reds" are malicious, mis-
chievous, dancing and jumping. All the acting is
done with conviction. The actors take their roles
with great seriousnessj
The play over, the asken fheredikia (second sermon)
is recited hke the first, thanking the audience for
their kind attention and asking for money to help
pay the expenses. After this comes a still more
curious custom, the bidding for the right to dance
the saut basque upon the stage before the audience.
The competitors for the honour are the young
men of the neighbouring villages who wish to
show their skill. Ten, twenty, up to a hundred
francs, is offered, and the highest bidder gets the
floor.
In the mascarades we see a Hkeness to the Christ-
mas miracles played in Oxfordshire, Dorset and other
English counties within the last century. But in the
Basque country it is at carnival time that in the
III
The Basque Country
villages of La Soule the dances and the mascarades
take place.
Imagine yourself, then, in one such village close
to the pass of Ste. Engrace. Word has come that
the neighbouring village is organising a magnificent
mascarade and that they intend making a visit to
our village. All the youth prepare to give them a
cordial reception, mindful of the fact that it may
be their own turn next year.
The day arrives and the children bring the news of
the approach of the masqueraders. All our village
turns out to welcome — no, to oppose their entrance.
For this is part of the game. Girls and boys and
children with sticks and brooms form a Hne across
the street, pretending to make a furious resistance,
which is soon overcome by the visitors, with the
Cherrero or courier at the head, who is dressed in gay
colours with strings of bells around his waist and
ankles. He is followed by a dancing 'cantiniere and
a second dancer called Gathid, the cat, dressed in
white. Following them comes the star of the day,
Zamalzain, of whom Chaho gives the following
description :
" Next flies, bounds, pirouettes, the master dancer,
Zamalzain. On his head he wears an indescribable
turban of gauze, crowned with pearls and paste jewels,
ornamented with ribbons which fall over the shoulders
and back of this handsome lad, this incomparable
dancer ; Basque shoes, light and elegant, white
stockings with red garters, white breeches and red
TI2
Mascarades and Pastorales
coat — all this is less important than the horse which
the dancer bestrides.
" This wicker horse has its well-rounded rump
and chest covered with a saddle-cloth of red-fringed
silk ; its little black head, with its arched neck, carries
a bridle with a silver bell ; it has no legs, but is
winged. The lad holds the reins in his left hand and
cracks a whip in his right. The saddle-cloth
falls below the dancer's knees— you see only his
feet beneath. He dances, he twists, he seems never
to touch the ground, the road is hardly wide
enough for the marvellous evolutions which he
executes."
Next in the cortege come the Kukuilleros, who form
the suite of Zamalzain, dancing and gambolling behind
him two by two. Three blacksmiths come next, ready
to shoe Xamalzain's horse. They are dressed in red
coats, white trousers, great aprons of yellow leather,
red caps falling over one ear, and carry nails and
hammer. Next arrives the gentleman Jaona, with
sword and cane, dressed in frock-coat and top hat,
with his wife Anderia on his arm ; then the peasant
Laboraria, and his wife Laborarisa ; next come two
Hungarians, Kherestonak, in coat and breeches of
velvet, top boots, and bright cravat floating on the
breast ; next, two knife-grinders, master and servant,
Chorrotchak, with great leather aprons, old soft hats
and the tools of their trade, who bombard the com-
pany with original verse, improvised on the moment,
and sung to the tune of Au clair de la lune ; following
Q 113
The Basque Country
them arrives Bontame-Jaon, the gipsy-gentleman,
who carries a gun and looks a robber, leading his
gipsy band ; then, leaping, bounding, dancing, come
the coppersmiths, Kaouterak, with their poor little
donkey loaded with pots and pans, the apothecary,
the doctor, the barber with an immense wooden
razor, and finally the beggars in rags.
The procession dances in this order through the
streets, calls on the notables of the village, receiving
gifts, money and wine, and then goes on to the square
to dance the farandole. Zamalzain, Jaon and Labor aria
invite the young girls of the best families to join in
this, and their example is followed by the others, and
soon the dancers of both sexes in a long chain are
winding hand in hand through the measures of the
dance.
The farandole is followed by the real enter-
tainment of the day, the ballet, danced within
a circle traced by Cherrero, — a succession of
marvellous fas seuls, which are but a prelude to
Zamalzain^s final effort, the goblet dance, gobalet
dantza.
A glass full of wine is placed in the centre of the
circle. Around this glass Zamalzain dances the steps
laid down by tradition, then, planting his left foot
upon the glass, he makes the sign of the cross in
the air with his right foot, bounds as high as possible,
and returns to earth without upsetting the glass or
spilling a drop of the wine. It is danced to the
following ancient tune :
114
Mascarades and Pastorales
MUTCHIKOAK.
Allegro vivo.
I ^^-P fe ^^^^^ ^g^^
f.mP -r-
eS
^m
^^m
Z2I
±d
^S^
S^S^^
zz:
se
i
is
fH^-'-iti
^l ^NB^Sj^
la. 2a.
^^
fn^r l rrj- l r-r l r ^i ^ 3t^ ^
i
^m^
a
p^ge
The Zamalzain's dance is followed by square
dances, in which the other various characters take part,
IIS
The Basque Country
and the f^te ends with the saut basque, danced by all
the masqueraders.
Every stage of the mascarade has a special tune,
some of which are modern, others of which are as old
as the fifteenth century.
Since August 1914 the Basque valleys have known
no dancing, no mascarades or pastorales. Now that
the shadow of war has hfted, let us hope that the
music and the dance which seem so natural an ex-
pression of the versatile Basque character may be
revived once more.
)a$»-
116
CHAPTER XIV
MAULEON, LE PLUS FORT CHASTEL DE GUTENNE
FROM Tardets the river flows, ever broadening,
through a smihng valley, fresh woodland,
green meadow and rich pasture to Mauleon, the
capital of the province of La Soule. From there, a
wide and shallow though swift-running stream, it
continues its course to Sauveterre, where it loses
itself in the Gave d'Oloron.
Mauleon is dominated by the remains of the ancient
fortress of Malo Leone on its hill. Once formid-
able, holding armed hosts at bay, " le plus fort Chastel
de Guyenne assis sur un moult hault rocq," as the old
chronicler says, it is now peopled only with spring
flowers. The roofless salle des gardes is brave with
lilac and rose, wallflowers spring from the creviced
masonry and stand in straight ranks of gold against
the grey, and from every loophole and crenellation
valerian thrusts its dusty foliage and heads of pink
and white. Yet this was once a stronghold of the
English kings in Guyenne. It was held for the
English in the fifteenth century by Louis de Beaumont,
lieutenant of the Duke of Gloucester. La Soule
was, at that date, torn by the feuds of de Luxe and
117
The Basque Country
de Grammont. Louis de Beaumont favoured the de
Luxe faction, and it is he who is supposed to be the
Governor of the Castle referred to in the favourite
Basque comflainte called La Chanson de Bertereche.
This song has immortalised one incident only of many
in that. long chain of civil wars, an incident which
evidently touched the imagination and sympathies of
the people. It is a very good example of these
poetic legends, of which others well known are
Errege Jan (already given), Urrutiako Anieria or The
Lady of Ruthie, Atharratze Janregiko Anderia or The
Lady of the Chateau of Tardets, and Egun Bereko
Alharguntsa or The Widow of the Wedding Day. In
all these legends of the Basque country, as in the
guerz of Brittany, you find a vivid picture of the Hfe
of the times. In a verse of such a ballad the whole
past relives more strikingly than in many pages of
history. The song of Bertereche tells of sorrow in
the valley of the Andoce, that little valley which you
may follow from Larrau to Licq, near Tardets.
Like all these ballads, this is dramatic in its simplicity.
The valley of Andoce, '
Oh, the long valley,
Three times it has broken my heart.
Young Bertereche from his bed
Speaks to the servant kindly,
" Look : do you see any men ? "
The servant replies
That she can see
Thirty men prowling from window to window.
ii8
Mauleon
Bertereche from his window
Parleys with the Seigneur Count,
Offering him a hundred heifers with a bull at their head.
The Seigneur Count replies
Like a traitor,
" Bertereche, come down to the door ; fear nothing."
" Mother, give me my best linen shirt,
It may be for the last time ;
This Easter Monday will be long remembered."
Oh, the long journey of Marie-Santz
Down the hill of Bost Mendicta ;
She has entered the house of Bust.anoby du Lacarry on her knees.
" Young Bustanoby,
My beloved brother,
If you do not help me my son is lost."
" Be quiet, my sister ;
I pray you, do not weep.
Your son, if he lives, is perhaps now at Mauleon."
Oh, that long journey of Marie-Santz
To the door of the Seigneur Count.
" Aie, aie. Seigneur, where is my gallant son ? "
" Had you no other son
Than Bertereche f
Then he is dead near Espeldoy ; go and find him."
Oh, the people of Espeldoy,
The unfeeling people.
Who harboured the dead and pretended they knew it not !
119
The Basque Country
The daughter of Espeldoy
Is named Marguerite ;
Her hands are dabbled with the blood of Bertereche.
The washing at Espeldoy,
Oh, what a rich washing !
Three dozen linen shirts, so they say, of the young Bertereche.
Near the village of Etchebar stands to-day the house
of Espeldoy, and in the farmyard is the cross which
marks the spot where young Bertereche was so foully
murdered. This was only one of the murders with
pillage that held all the country in a state of terror.
The last stanza, in the usual allusive form, conveys
the fact of the pillage of the house.
This story, like the others mentioned, is a rhymed
version of current incident, probably by some local
tmprovisateur, for this gift of improvisation is still
found among the Basques of La Soule. In almost
every village there is some one so dowered, who will
improvise for you at any length in passable rhyme on
any given theme.
From the Chateau a road leads through fields to
the old town. There, a very wide, irregularly paved
street runs steeply down between sixteenth and seven-
teenth century houses of deep eaves and broad door-
ways to a market square at the bottom. It is an
open square with the arched rose-coloured walls of
the felote court at -one end, and a large oval basin of
water at the side on whose broad margin children
sit and play. Grey-green plane trees are planted in
1 20
A BASQUE VILLAGE.
, Mauleon
a double row around, between whose gnarled trunks
the white awnings of the market stalls are stretched
to-day.
Under the deep arcade of a pale grey house close
by, a tall woman in black stands at ease beside her
mouse-coloured donkey. Up the street to the left
comes a girl, bearing on her head a classic water jug
of terra-cotta, while outside the drinking shops the
great oxen stand chewing the cud and flicking their
tails lazily.
The pale grey and buff of the grey-shuttered
houses, the grey-green of the plane trees, the grey of
mountain asses, the buff of the oxen, accentuated by
the black dresses of the crowds, remain as a memory
of beautiful and distinguished colour.
From the old town the road leads down and takes
you by a bridge over the river to the pleasant prome-
nade under the chestnuts, which is the centre of the
Hfe of the modern town. Here, at the corner, is
the fine Renaissance Chateau of Andurain.
The modern town has Uttle to impress one. It
does not recall, as do the still imposing ruins of the
old fortress, the great role played by Mauleon for
so many centuries ; for La Soule has always been
the heart of the fays basque, the province where
the ancient customs were most jealously preserved.
Through all changes, as its allegiance was transferred
during the centuries by treaty from one sovereign to
another, it still kept its liberty, its own individuality.
Here, alone, were all men equal. The poorest
R 121
The Basque Country
citizen had the same rights as the highest noble.
Every man could own and bequeath property to his
descendants, every man could pay for treason at
the block, both privileges reserved for the nobihty
in France. They levied no taxes for the king,
though they acknowledged no other head than
he.
The province was governed by an assembly repre-
senting the three estates — though the clergy took
small part — and this assembly was convoked by the
governor of Mauleon. The nobles met for a day and
deliberated. The result was transmitted to thirteen
representatives of the third estate, the people, who
returned to their divisions to report and to consider
the questions under discussion. A fortnight later
these representatives met the clergy and nobles to
state the opinions of the people of their divisions,
and at these meetings any citizen had the right to be
present.
You imagine that you can read the result of the
centuries of respect for the dignity of man in the
very faces and carriage of the Basques of La Soule.
Even more than elsewhere in the Basque country,
you recognise and admire here the open look, the
high carriage, the noble freedom, which must cer-
tainly be the expression of the just laws which pre-
vailed at a time when the people in other countries
had no rights.
When the French Revolution swept France, in
the days of reconstruction that attended the birth
122
Mauleon
of the Republic, La Soule, like other provinces, was
summoned to sacrifice her ancient customs.
The assembly was convened to consider whether
the province should obey the call, and the speech
which turned the scale for the RepubHc is amusing.
The orator draws a picture of the French as light-
minded, frivolous, ignorant of Hberty for a thousand
years, and proceeds : " In this reconstruction we
have less to do than has France, for we have never
lost our liberty. The ancient constitution of France
was almost as good as ours, but she lost hers a thousand
years ago. We have the fortune to be poor ; luxury
has not corrupted us ; we love our fathers, our mothers,
our wives, our children. Our country counts to us
for much. We have not lost the courage of our
forefathers ; their customs and virtues are ours.
" What have we to fear in any new order f Our
people are brave. They are ready to die for t^ieir
honour and their liberty, but we are few and weak,
and we stand between two strong powers. We need
one as a prop. If we break from France, we shall be
at the mercy of Spain. We shall no longer be a free
people, but slaves."
' And the decision stood that " the welfare of the
country and the good of the empire can only be found
in the union of all parts in one." Thus passed the fors
of La Soule. Unity was vital to the hfe of the new
RepubHc, and France has had no better citizens, no
better soldiers or sons than the Basques.
It was on the morning of the battle of Jena that
123
The Basque Country
the Emperor Napoleon, passing hy the 4th Light
Infantry, a regiment composed of Basques, remarked :
" You have a beautiful regiment. Colonel."
" More brave than beautiful. Sire," replied the
Colonel Harispe.
" We shall see," the Emperor answered.
That night, after the victorious day, the Colonel,
made a General on the field, was carried wounded to
Napoleon to offer the homage of his three brothers
killed that day on the field of honour.
Marechal Harispe is the Basque hero of arms as
St. Francis Xavier is the Basque saint. Both were
born of the country. At Lacarre is the house where
the Marechal lived and died at eighty-six in the
country he had loved and defended. At Jaxu is
the pilgrimage chapel to which on March 12, by
mountain paths and country roads, crowds of pious
pilgrims wend their way to the shrine of the great
missionary saint, who, in the sixteenth century, faced
untold privations and dangers that he might carry
the gospel of Christ to such far lands as Japan, Mozam-
bique, Coro- ;j««aa^ mandel and
A-I a 1 a c c a , i| ^-:' **-- ^.^^ only t o die
on the island 11 ''^ ^!^r of Sancian,
in sight of «|p^' / the land to
which he was ? bound, at the
early age of ■■ms<^^ forty-six, before
his great project "SHBiIK^el of ^^^tering
China was accom- plished.
124
CHAPTER XV
ST. JEAN-PIED-DE-PORT—THE STORY OF
A LITTLE TOWN
AS its name in every form indicates — Sand
Johannis Pede fortiensi, San Juan del fie de
puerto, St. Jean-Pied-de-Port, Donafouna — this town
at the foot of the pass into Spain has always had a
certain importance from the Roman days down through
the centuries. Always a military centre, the terri-
tory under its guardianship was the key to the safety
of the realm. This territory reaches from the Pic
d'Orly on the west, through the forest of Iraty, to
the Cols d'Orgambide and Bentarte, follows the
Spanish frontier to the Pic de Lindux, takes in the
Aldudes, the Baztan, Baigorry and the town of
Osses ; within this area there are no less than eleven
passes into Spain : Col d'lraty, Col d'Orba'iceta,
Col de Bentarte (by which lies the old Roman route
over the peaks), Col d'Ibaneta, Col de Lindux, Col
de Bendaritz, pass of Aldudes to Elizondo, Col d'lspe-
guy, Col d'Arieta, the pass of Aarfa to Bidarray and
the pass at Ainhoa.
The mere writing of these names calls up the wild
beauty of the country, a country even to-day but
125
The Basque Country
sparsely settled, and where the deep valleys leading
to the passes are divided by steep, w^ooded hills rising
to the bare black peaks, Pic-neres, which have given
their name to the range — Pyrenees. A perfect country
in which to play at military hide-and-seek, as Welling-
ton found in the last century. A thousand years ago
and more it must have been full of unknown dangers,
a savage country indeed when Rome, tracing her
great road from Bayonne to Pampeluna along the
heights, founded a settlement, three kilometres from
St. Jean-Pied-de-Port, where St. Jean-le-Vieux now
stands. To-day all that remains of it is a mound
where the spade brings to light trivial evidence of
the long-dead empire — evidence, whether in shard or
coin or mosaic, which you can never behold without
a thrill.
It was in the eighth century that the barbarians
made a swift descent upon this settlement, burnt
it and drove out the inhabitants, who fled to the
nearest hill for refuge, that which dominates the
present town of St. Jean-Pied-de-Port. One can
imagine the terror, the haste with which they fortified
the heights, determined never to return to the un-
defended valley. Here, from their nucleus, tradition
says, Garcia Ziminez I, King of Navarre, founded the
town of St. Jean-Pied-de-Port in 716.
An Arab geographer in 1154 writes of the place as
possessing a fine church. But the chateau fort on
the hill-top was the most important feature of the
town. Under its protection the houses huddled up
126
ST. JEAN-PIED-DE-PORT.
St. Jean-Pied-de-Port
the hillside, and in order to be doubly safe, a strong
wall was built enclosing houses, church and Chateau.
The governor of the Chateau was called the Alcaid ;
his full title was Chdtelain de St. Jean et Garde de la
Terre d! Outre Porte. He was not only head of the
garrison, with the custody of the arms and ammunition,
but he also administered justice and imposed the
taxes for the whole territory.
He had the right to a tithe on every mill, oven,
and winepress in the territory, which very consider-
able revenue he shared with his suzerain, the King
of Navarre. The town, though of Navarre, was not
under the jors of Navarre, but had its own special
rights which were confirmed by the King in 1329 and
jealously guarded down t6 the Revolution.
In addition to the regular tithes already mentioned,
the records in Pampeluna prove how constantly the
governor requisitioned the people for rations and
labour. In 1360 Charles le Mauvais ordered the for-
tress to be repaired : " All are expected to contribute
and aid in the work. Take any who are disobedient
or rebellious, seize their goods and throw them into
prison."
In time of trouble, the governor had the right to
call up nobles, priests and inhabitants from any part
of his territory to garrison the fortress. We find in
the records that in 13 15 he called up eight men from
Osses, twenty miles distant, who refused to serve and
petitioned the King for exemption thereafter.
Another of the governor's duties was to aid the
127
The Basque Country
pilgrims of St. Jacques on their way. It was in the
sixth century that St. Jacques became the patron
saint of Spain. He had preached in Judsea and had
come into Spain to spread the gospel of Christ.
There he had retired to an oratory in Salduba, which
has since been famed as the shrine of Notre Dame de
Pilar. He later returned to Jerusalem, and after his
death by the sword in the reign of Herod Agrippa,
the King of Spain asked for his body, which was
received and interred at Compostela. When the
Basques of Basse and Haute Navarre united with
the Spanish to defend the country from the invasions
of the Moors, they took St. Jacques as their patron
saint and with the Spaniards fought in his honour.
The pilgrimage of St. Jacques was the most popular
of the Middle Ages. It was undertaken by all classes
of the community as an act of devotion and morti-
fication. The pilgrims went bare-foot, dressed in one
garment, and carried a staff six feet long and a gourd.
They followed well-defined routes, chemins de St.
"Jacques, along which the pious won much praise
by building chapels, hostels and inns for their use.
One much frequented route came by Bordes, Cosaile,
Sames, Bergovey, Lacarre, St. Jean-le-Vieux (chapel),
La Madeleine (chapel), St. Jean- Pied- de-Port, Uhart-
Cize, Moccosail, Arneguy, Col d'Ibaneta (chapel) to
Roncevaux (great hostel). When the watchman
announced the arrival of a band of pilgrims at the
fortress, a guard of soldiers was deputed to meet and
escort them on their way. But such escort could not
128
St. Jean-Pied-de-Port
take them far, and we read in the Codex de Compstela,
written in the fourteenth century : " You arrive at
the pass of Cize in the Basque country. This country,
where they speak a barbarous tongue, is full of forests
and mountains, without bread, wine, or any other
food but apples and milk. In this region brigands
haunt the villages of Ostabat, St. Jean (Pied-de-Port)
and St. Michel. These men will be damned eternally
because they lie in wait to fall upon the pilgrims with
javeHns and wrest unjust tribute from them.
" If the travellers refuse to give the money demanded,
they are beaten and insulted, and robbed. These
people are savages, uncultivated and barbarous, and
their appearance is as terrible as their speech. They
ought only to levy tribute upon the merchants, but
they seize whatever they can get from the pilgrims
and other travellers.
" For this reason we demand : that the guardians
of the pass, the King of Aragon and other princes
who receive tribute from these fellows, as well as all
persons who are parties to such extortion, such as
Raymond de Soule, Bebian de Grammont, le Vicomte
de St. Michel, with their descendants, Arnaud de
Gingue and his posterity, also the priests who give
the sacrament of penance and the eucharist to those
, people or who celebrate the mass for them and receive
them in their churches, that all these should be
excommunicated, not only by their bishops, but in
the church of St. Jacques at Compostela in the
presence of the pilgrims."
s 129
The Basque Country
The more we read in the ancient archives of the
history of this Httle town, the more do we reaHse
that the normal condition of its life, and the life of
the Basque country, was for centuries one of continual
warfare : La Soule, Navarre, Guipuzcoa, Labourd and
Beam were for three centuries the theatre of a blood-
thirsty feud between the rival factions of de Luxe
and de Grammont. These two powerful famiUes
divided the Basque country into two rival camps,
de Luxe champion of the Catholic party, and de
Grammont the head of the Protestant faction.
Navarre was dismembered in 15 12, divided into
Haute and Basse Navarre, and by the treaty of the
Pyrenees in 1569 Basse-Navarre became part of France.
But no change of overlord stopped the local dissen-
sions. In 1560 Jeanne d'Albret abjured the Catholic
faith, and the fire of the religious wars swept over the
country. On her command, the Protestant religion
was preached in the towns of La Soule and Basse-
Navarre. The de Grammont faction joined with
Montgomery to enforce these commands, abolishing
mass, razing the churches and persecuting the priests.
Opposed to them were de Luxe, d'Echaux, d'Amen-
daritz and their followers. In 1569 Montgomery
took Mauleon and pushed on to St. Jean-Pied-de-Port.
" As the Queen wished to convert all Basse-Navarre
to her religion, she sent Baron d'Arros, a Bearnais
gentleman, with 220 well-armed men to St. Jean, to
force the people to submit to her will. He conferred
with the governor, begging him to exhort the men
130
St. Jean-Pied-de-Port
and women to practise the instructions preached by
the Protestant ministers, under penalty, if they
disobeyed, of fire and sword. The Catholics firmly
replied that they would continue in their ancient
religion. Seeing that they could not shake the faith
of the Basques, the baron and his men retired."
The sack of the town by Montgomery followed. The
church was fortified. The CathoHc chiefs, under
de Luxe, attacked, took St. Jean, and reprisals were
taken upon the partisans of the Queen.
In 1584 the people, weary of the terror of sword
and fire, appealed to the King for protection. Charles
le Mauvais called the offending parties to the thir-
teenth-century church of Notre Dame at St. Jean-
Pied-de-Port. Here appeared Armand Raymond de
Grammont, Chevaher Seigneur et Baron de Gram-
mont, Bidache, Baigorry, Bordes, etc., and Arnaut
Sanche de Tardets, Chevalier Seigneur de Luxe,
Ostabat, Tardets, Ahaxe, etc. After hearing the
quarrel, the King declared the differences to be
annulled, imposed silence on all parties, and ordered the
offenders jointly to build a chapel celebrating their
peace. But when the King had departed the quarrels
broke out again, and civil war continued to rage.
Such were the vicissitudes to which this httle town
was subject down to the beginning of the seventeenth
century. The seventeenth century in France held
no respite for the people, as taxes were ever more
oppressive, and the history of this one little mountain
town, typical of so many hundreds more, pursued
131
The Basque Country
its course to its logical conclusion, the French Revo-
lution.
When, in answer to the demand of the nation,
Louis XVI determined to convoke the Tiers-Etat in
Paris, excitement ran high and hope awoke in the
little town of St. Jean-Pied-de-Port. Was it possible
that, after hundreds of years of exploitation, the King
would give the people justice ?
A public meeting of all classes was held in 1789, in
the Hotel de Ville on the Uttle Place, " to consider
the great question " — we quote from the minutes
of that meeting — " which is of interest to the whole
nation, that is, a just, free and equal representation
of the Third Estate (the people), and the just appor-
tionment of taxes amongst all the subjects of the
King." Expressing their loyal devotion to his Majesty,
they implore both him and his ministers, " who have
shown such a noble courage in their reply to the
universal demand," to influence the privileged classes,
the nobles 'and the clergy, who are " so used to ex-
ploiting their privileges that they do not realise the
injustices inflicted on the people."
At the close of this meeting, which was distinguished
by a calm and tolerant spirit, six members were
chosen as a committee to draw up a memoir for the
King. On this committee were two priests, one
noble, the mayor and two tradesmen, and the minutes
were signed by all present.
The committee drew up a paper asking : (i) For
proportionate taxation. They state that in 1789, of
132
STREET IN OLD TOWN, ST. JEAN-PIED-DE-PORT.
St. Jean-Pied-de-Port
the 118,123 francs raised in taxes in the province,
the nobles and clergy together only contributed
10,942 francs, while the Third Estate, the people,
paid 107,181 francs, (2) They ask that in all future
representation, as the clergy always vote with the
nobles, there should be a representation of the Third
Estate equal to that of clergy and nobles. (3) They
ask that justice for Basse-Navarre should be adminis-
tered there, and not in Beam. Forty-six signatures
were appended, and the paper was forwarded to the
King " as the expression of the interest of the citizens
of this town in the happiness and prosperity of the
nation and the prosperity of the kingdom of Navarre."
How signally such moderate demands failed of
fulfilment, how vacillation and misjudgment ended
in bloodshed, we all know. The change from tolera-
tion to violence is well seen in the comparison of the
above memoir and of the following letter from the
Sans-Culottes of St. Jean-Pied-de-Port to the Sans-
Culottes of Paris on the execution of Louis XVI :
" We thank you for our deHverance from the
Vampire who for so long has drunk our blood. As
long as the Monster lived, his impure breath would
have infected the healthful air of our mountains,
and our dissensions would have been constant. We
have long groaned under the yoke, as have our brothers
in the eighty-four other departments. Like them,
we saw that the cause of our dissent lay in Hugues
Capet. We are not afraid to tell you now that you . . .
have given us ground in the past to fear that you
133
The Basque Country
would not act for the public good. But the events
of the 15th, 17th, 19th and 21st 'of January have
restored our faith.
" Despots are forming a coalition to overthrow the
superb structure of our liberty. Let the tyrants
tremble ! Their fate is sealed. They will learn that
men filled with the sacred love of country are capable
of all.
"Hasten to arm us for vengeance, and you shall
see our proud mountains fall down before the tricolour
flag and open a free passage to the defenders of liberty.
Hasten to adopt a constitution worthy of the people
you represent, that from all the great Republic you may
hear the cry ' You have done well for your country.'
" The Society of Sans-Culottes, Friends of Liberty
and Equality, at St. Jean-Pied-de-Port."
Yet the response of this little town to the new
order was not only one of words : for, when summoned
to give a supreme proof of devotion to the new Re-
pubHc, Basse-Navarre was not found wanting. The
great work of social reorganisation began by an appeal
to sacrifice. On the altar of a common country
every province was called upon to lay its rights, its
privileges, its immunities, that France might be one.
The feeling in Navarre, in La Soule, in Labourd
and in Beam was intense. Should they submit ?
Should they, could they, sacrifice their sacred and
ancient fors ? What do we read in the archives of
St. Jean-Pied-de-Port ? " Encouraged by the example
of other provinces in the kingdom, who have re-
134
St. Jean-Pied-de-Port
nounced their privileges, we are unanimously resolved
to sacrifice to the country our ancient constitution."
That is how the Basques of this little town proved
themselves worthy of the great gift of liberty, and
prepared to sign the oath of allegiance to the Repubhc
of France, which stands in the old archives in the
words :
" We swear to maintain the law as decreed by the
National Assembly, to suppress Royalty, to uphold
the Republic, to respect property, to assure the
liberty of citizens, to make our subordinates respect
discipline and military rule, to oppose all invasion
of the territory of the Republic. We swear death
to tyrants, peace to the cottage, brotherhood to the
people, and to Hve and die free."
135
CHAPTER XVI
THE SCHOOLMASTER
OF all places in the world where a friend of
the country is useful, nay, indispensable,
the Basque towns stand amongst the first. Unless
you have a kindly interpreter, not only of the language
but of custonas, you are not going to get far under
the appearance of things, which, as we know, is
deceitful. How kind Fate sometimes is to the real
aspirant ! No one could have imagined that the
need of fixative would lead to the chemist, and the
chemist point the way to the schoolmaster, who,
in turn, was to hold the key to all the Basque mysteries
in Basse-Navarre. But so it was. The school-
master, so the chemist said, was interested in old
things, in the old days. He could be found at the
school, on the road out of the village, after four.
We were there. The uncompromising school build-
ing met us with blank unresponse. No answer,
the door surely shut, and we were turning away,
when an upper window opened and a round and
rosy old woman poked out her becapped head.
Her son was absent, but she was evidently deeply
gratified to hear that strangers knew of his pet hobby.
136
The Schoolmaster
A note was left, and the evening saw the school-
master drinking coffee and cognac in our bleak sitting-
room at the inn. The instant he entered the room
we knew that he was an enthusiast. He was small
and wiry. He was middle-aged. His face was pale,
his eyes weak, his hair unkempt, his coat shabby —
but he breathed enthusiasm, and the joy of finding
an audience not uncongenial to his pursuits fairly
irradiated him. Poor man, he seldom met anyone,
it seemed, who cared to hear of what was his Hfe-work
— the real work of his life — pursued in odd moments,
in holidays and late into the nights of winter. The
history of the towns and villages of his province was
to him a passion. Archives, dusty, musty old papers,
were his joy. To supply some missing link in the
story of the smallest hamlet, he would willingly go
on his knees to Pampeluna, where he assured us most
of the records of Navarre are to be found. The visit
ended in a meeting arranged for the following day.
This time he met us at the schoolroom door, his
feet in white espadrilles, a sack coat of blue serge on
his back and a floating black tie under his chin. His
mother, rounder and rosier than ever, hovered behind
him surreptitiously brushing the dust from his coat
and filled with pride. Then he showed us his treasures.
In one corner of the dreary, desk-filled room was a
table on a small platform within reach of a narrow
set of shelves. These shelves were filled with small
manuscript books, each bearing the name of a town or
village, and each the fruit of patient work, of loving
T 137
The Basque Country
research and careful transcription. What tender
pride Hghted his face as he Hfted the Httle volumes,
eagerly turning the pages to show plans, postcards,
photographs, inscriptions which helped to their illus-
tration. He ended with a sweep of the arm : " They
are yours, Madame. Anything that you can use."
Then he seized his beret, cutting short the grateful
speeches, and waved us to the door, talking fast now
about the walk we were to take. But the little
mother clearly did not feel that the heret was the
headgear for the occasion, for she circumvented him
at the door, seized it and forced a battered straw hat
into his unwilling hand. He looked at it as if he
had never seen it before, rammed it on his head and
led the way. How he talked and how fast he walked !
We plunged down through a wood and were soon
out into the country road, going, we discovered,
to see some houses, as he was sure that we did not
understand the Basque dwellings. Lasse was the first
village, where we arrived somewhat out of breath.
We came up to the little square through a lovely
lane. Men, women and children • knew the school-
master. It was a blaze of colour, wistaria blue
against the salmon-pink and red of the balconied
houses, along whose fronts hung strings of red peppers,
dried beans and maize. In the tiny square the school-
master stood still and uncovered. " It was here,"
he said solemnly, " that Charlemagne stopped. In
the old days Lasse had a hostel for the pilgrims.
Charlemagne has trod this very square. When you
138
The Schoolmaster
go to Arneguy up this valley, look out for the mill,
Moulin de Faigasse. It is built on the foundations
of the Commanderie of Moccosail. It was there
that Charlemagne held a council of twenty bishops :
Mon-Conseil, which was corrupted into Moccosail."
He waved his arms, waxing eloquent. " When you
go," he said, " to Roncevaux, what will you see ?
The slopes are gentle, the passes between the moun-
tains are wide and easy. There are none of those
wild defiles, those steep paths that we imagine. The
Pass of Roncevaux which is represented in legend as a
terrible gcrge, between steep rocks, is a valley winding
and tranquil. The mountain d'Altabiscar rises to
the east in a long sweep where the pink heather grows.
An old convent with crenellated walls bars the route
to Pampeluna. A charming path leads down through
the shadow of the beech trees to the grassy hills
crowned by the old chapel of Ibaneta. Here was the
battlefield of Roncevaux, where Roland died. There
is not one single rock from which the Basques could
have rolled the fabled stones on the troops of Charle-
magne ! They won that battle by sheer fighting."
Thus did the schoolmaster explode one fiction of the
guide-books. He looked a very Don Quixote tilting
at the age-old windmill.
As we climbed from the valley to higher ground,
we saw the distant gathering storm-clouds. The
straight road before us ran through farm lands.
Farmhouses stood to left and right, wide-roofed,
spacious, clean and prosperous. Before each the
139
The Basque Country
schoolmaster stopped to translate the Basque in-
scription on the stone above the door. One read :
" Pause and reflect upon your last hour — you wiU not
regret it." Another, more cheerful, ran : " May peace
be in this hduse."
In the face of the gathering storm we went down
the hill, between the pretty white houses of Uhart,
and then we knew what the schoolmaster had brought
us to see, a most perfect example of a Basque home-
stead in all its spacious dignity. It was three storeys
high, five windows across ; the wide eaves of the roof,
the balcony, and the shutters were paintad hedge-
sparrow blue. A vine festooned the whitewashed
front above the lower windows. The doorway was
ample and arched, and, above, a stone tablet bore a
cross and the date 1610.
The schoolmaster led us through the gate in the
wall of the grassed fore-court, and was met at the
door by an elderly man of assured manner and dignified
presence, to whom we were introduced and who led
us into the great hall, called in Basque UEy Kahatcia.
It was a vast empty place, with a stone-paved floor
and beamed ceihng. Its only furniture were two
great oak chests. Two flights of stairs led from here
to the upper regions. In their kindness our two
hosts talked together, explaining the many uses of
this room. Here, in poorer houses, the carts and
harness and tools are nightly housed. Here the
feasts of the year are held — the harvest feasts when
the grain is threshed or the corn is shucked, the
140
The Schoolmaster
celebration of the annual pig-killing. Here the
domestic festivals of marriage and birth take place,
and here, too, the wake is held. The schoolmaster
snapped his fingers. " Dance ! " he cried. " Dance !
— the Basque dances ; and the master plays cards
here on a Sunday — Muss, four partners, a great
game, when the women are out of the way." Our
stately host chuckled and led us into the kitchen
at the left. Like, all the Basque kitchens, a place of
order, cleanliness and cheer, with its blue- and- white
tiled walls, its huge fireplace, its polished buffet-
dresser filled with plates and pewter, its table with
the red-squared oilcloth. Near the door hung the
holy-water stoup with a sprig of box above it, while
the walls were very gay with the flamboyant chromos
of saints sold in the ambulant bazaars of the market.
On the mantelpiece stood a crucifix, the calendar of
posies et telegraphes, and all the photographs of the
family. The kitchen is the centre of the family life,
and it is here in the long winter evenings that the
circle, enlarged by the addition of a neighbour or two,
sit by the fire of logs and entertain one another with
song and story. From the kitchen the door opened
into the dining-room. The third room back was the
dairy which led into the hall. Upstairs we found
the bedrooms, large and exquisitely clean, with floors
of polished oak, filled with massive old furniture.
It was easy to imagine the patriarchal life of this
house. Up at daybreak, an early breakfast of coffee
or milk. The father gives the signal to the sons to
141
The" Basque Country
start for the fields. The mother and the daughters
prepare the breakfast for eight o'clock, ham, bread
and cheese, to which the men return. The younger
men drive the carts or do the ploughing, but they
work under the eye of the elders. The girls work
in the house, and in the fields when it is necessary.
There are odd distinctions as to what woman may or
may not do. She may not use the scythe, she may
not milk, nor take charge of the wine. She may riot
kill a pig, but she may kill a lamb. She may not sew.
She may weed the cornfield and the vineyard, feed
the oxen, raise the ducks and the chickens. She
may make the bread, but the man lights the oven fire ;
she may spin and shuck the corn ; she may split
osier for tying the vines and husk the chestnuts ; she
may pluck the hedgehog; but always she must keep
her place, although the Basque law has always given
her the right to hold and dispose of property. " Tout
de mSme," our host ended with a smile, "I'homme est
touj ours homme, meme dans le panier " * ; and leading
the way to the stone bench outside the house along
the wall where the household sit on summer evenings,
he told us the Basque story. " There was a woman,
a masterful woman, — such there are even in the Basque
country, — who married a little man no higher than her
shoulder. She was a very clever woman and he was
a useless little man, and, as time went on, she grew
more and more bored and tired of her bargain. So
she finally decided that she could not stand him any
* The man is always master, even in the basket.
142
The Schoolmaster
longer and that she would drown him. So she put
him in a basket and started with the basket on her
head for the river. Now the woman, although so
clever, was afraid of a dog, and as she passed by a
farm a great black hound sprang out barking furiously.
Terrified she screamed : ' Oh, my man, shout at
this ferocious beast with your great voice and frighten
him away.' ' I will shout if you will put down the
basket.' ' Shout, shout,' she cried and lowered the
basket. Her husband gave one fierce growl and the
dog ran away. The little man stepped out proudly :
' Ah, my woman,' he said, ' you see a man is always
a man, even in the basket.' So they walked back
together and the woman respected him ever after."
The old man puffed at his pipe. " We trust our
women," he said. " They rule the house — eh, school-
master f It is the wife who keeps the granary key."
"That is the cheque-book of the modern," the
schoolmaster explained. " Here cpmes your daughter."
" They return from the river. It is the washing
day." The women, daughter, niece and grand-
daughter of our host, who all lived under the same
roof, came to greet us in their tucked-up skirts, red
petticoats and bare feet, with a manner full of personal
dignity. They were well-proportioned, dark-haired
women with the mobile features of the Basques.
They had little time to waste, we felt, as we heard
the sounds of the returning farm carts and saw the
long line of cows come slowly down the lane. The
men would be waiting for their early supper.
H3
The Basque Country
So we turned our back on what seemed like a page
out of some old book, and faced a black sky and a
stillness more ominous than wind. In spite of the
schoolmaster's cheerful flow of words, there was
something really terrifying in the storm that we saw
mounting from every quarter of the valley. The
sky was as black as the mountains around Us, We
wondered if the schoolmaster did not see.
\ V Yi
144
CHAPTER XVII
THE STORM IN THE CABARET
BUT indeed, as we afterwards knew, the school-
master felt the storm as only a Basque could.
His words gave wings to his feet which led
us swiftly over the vineyard-covered hills between
Uhart and Uhart-Cize. The heavy stillness op-
pressed us. The black sky was torn with lightning,
which showed us the great beeches on the citadel
hill at St. Jean-Pied-de-Port tossing in the wdnd.
We had reached the outskirts of Uhart-Cize when
the lightning ripped the black sky behind Orisson, and
at the same moment the first crash of thunder was
answered by the cracked, strident, furious ringing
of the bell in the little church above us. The school-
master crossed himself — and now with a glance
around the horizon hurried us on. Not a drop of
rain had yet fallen. Through the streets of Uhart-
Cize we tore, the mounting clangour of the bell
mingled with the rumble of the thunder. The
schoolmaster vainly endeavoured to maintain an
unmoved exterior in the face of that frenzied din
which touched some elemental chord in his apparently
u 14s
The Basque Country
conventional soul. It was, he explained, an absurd
anachronism. The people, the ignorant people still
believed that the devils lived on the mountains and
made the thunderstorms, and the bell rang to drive
away the evil spirits, to avert the rain and hail, and
to calm the storm.
Little gusts of wind now came to meet us, driving
the dust in spirals down the street. As we turned
the corner in sight of the outer walls of St. Jean, the
rain struck us — a sheet of rain. Following the school-
master, we made a breathless dive for a cabaret, but
were held at the door, which was unbarred by an old
woman from within. She was white — she had barred
it against the storm. We stood inside, alteady wet
and excited, and looked around the little room. The
old woman had retired behind the small counter
with its poor array of bottles and glasses. There
were three bare tables and chairs between us and
another woman who stood leaning against the closed
door into the next room. The atmosphere was
electric, not with the storm only, but with some
spiritual disturbance which may be felt but not as
yet explained. Outside, during the pleasant after-
noon, we and the schoolmaster had been friends.
Here we felt alone, outsiders cut off from some cult
of which he formed one with the two strange women.
We sat down at a table. The woman by the door
never stirred, but not for a second were we uncon-
scious of her presence. The storm battled above the
house, the wind shrieked, the hail beat against the
146
The Storm in the Cabaret
windows, the thunder crashed, and through it all
came the insistent note of the bell — ding-ding-ding,
ding- ding- ding. It gained a personality, it seemed
a feeble human voice imploring the ruthless Heaven —
ding- ding- ding, ding-ding-ding. The -old woman
crossed herself, the schoolmaster followed suit. Then
the woman by the door slowly moved forward, an
evil look in her thin face, one hand on her hip. Her
dress was ragged, her feet bare, a tattered shawl
was around her shoulders, and her black hair fell
over her tired eyes, half closed and dark lined. She
swaggered — no other word better expresses the, action
— into the room, talking a tongue that we did not
recognise.
The schoolmaster kept his back resolutely turned,
but we felt his chill of fear, of fascination and
repulsion. Her voice rose. She was speaking to
him with an insistence which took no denial. He
turned his chair and removed his battered hat as if
for air, though by this time the chill of the storm
was in the room and we were shivering. We saw
that his white forehead was clammy under the thin
hair. He answered her in a low voice, apologetic.
She drew nearer, stiU talking, with free rapid gestures
to the black sky, to us. He called for red wine.
The old woman brought a bottle and glasses, speak-
ing with some remonstrance mixed with deference to
these vivid figures in the centre of the small room.
Anathema seemed to answer her, , for she shrivelled
and withdrew behind the bar. The gipsy — for we
H7
The Basque Country
knew her for that — drew nearer and touched the
schoolmaster's arm. She laughed, smoothing his
shoulder. He turned a foolish, frightened face to us.
We felt his longing to hold the respect of the strangers,
his dread of offending the woman. We strove to
convey our understanding, though we only partly
understood. He poured the wine in the glasses,
which he offered to us and to the woman. A mo-
mentary lull in the storm brought with it again the
strident appeal of the bell, followed by a more appalling
crash of thunder and an outburst of greater fury.
The l^ilstones rattled and danced and lay like snow
on the road ; the wind found its way through every
crevice, and a blackness of night seemed to have
settled upon the earth. We sat nerve-bound and
miserable, when the climax was reached. The woman
dropped her glass with a crash and without a word
rushed out into the storm. We saw her pass the win-
dow as if swept by on the blast, while with trembling
fingers the schoolmaster filled his glass and turned
to us a face in which apology strove with relief. The
old woman muttered a prayer. We dared not ask
a question, but as the storm abated and the ringing
of the bell grew slower and finally stopped, the school-
master regained his jaunty air. He shrugged :
"C'est une Bohemienne," he volunteered. "The
people, the ignorant people believe that she is a witch.
Oh yes, even to-day they believe it ; that she can bring
you bad luck. It is absurd, Madame. But what will
you — the gipsies have lived for centuries in the country,
148
STORM IN THE VALLEY.
The Storm in the Cabaret
always feared and hated, always tracked by the authori-
ties and by the people. They have been beaten out
of the towns with whips. Laws were made against
them, but every one feared to carry them, out, magis-
trates, nobles and people. And so they have remained,
always strangers to the customs of the country,
keeping to themselves. They live pell-mell, all
together in old houses or barns, the walls black with
smoke. You see them along the rivers gathering
reeds to make baskets. They can charm the fish.
The men are horse-dealers. They are strange people.
You have seen, Madame. And the ignorant people,
the people without education, are afraid. Indeed
they are. Is it not so, ma mere ? " turning to the
old woman who busied herself with her knitting
behind the counter. " If a gipsy knocks at the door
at night, the people dare not open ? " The old
woman volubly assented. " Yet there are people
who fear their spell so much that they give them
whatever they ask." He paused. He was almost
himself again.
" In the eighteenth century," the schoolmaster
continued, " there was a price, twenty- four livres, on
their heads, and the tocsin rang to chase the gipsies,
women and children out of St. Jean and to imprison
the men. But the people were afraid, and so they
, always came back." He sighed. " They will always
be with us," he said.
The thunder was rumbling away across the hills,
but the rain still came down steadily, and as
149
The Basque Country
steadily, with a little persuasion, over hot coffee
and cognac, the little man talked on, of sorcery and
superstitions, subjects which seemed born of the past
hour, and all that we can remember of that talk is
here :
" There is another race, besides the Bohemians,
who were here long before them, despised by Chris-
tians — the Cagots." The old woman crooned to
herself. " They were the descendants of the lepers of
the early Middle Ages. Yes. Yes, horrible indeed —
outcasts. The churches had a special corner for
them, a special door and special holy water. They
were isolated. They were beggars and lived no one
knew how till the sixteenth century, when they com-
plained to the Pope against their hard lot. There
was a medical examination then, and Louis XIV
commanded that the social ban under which they
lived should be removed. They were allowed to
marry, to choose a trade, and had to pay a tax. But
there are places that I could mention where you find
their descendants still, who inspire one with horror.
No, they never practised witchcraft. They were
simply a. low and despised race. And what is witch-
craft, Madame ? Was it not Paracelsus himself
who said when he burned his books of medicine at
Bale that all he knew he had learned from the sorcerers?
The only physicians who existed for a thousand years
were the sorcerers, the witches. If one succeeded in
her cures she was respected and called Bonne Dame,
or Bella Donna. It was after her own name that her
150
The Storm in the Cabaret
favourite plant was called, the poison which she used
as an antidote to the plagues of the Middle Ages.
If she failed to cure, she was burnt. These are indeed
strange subjects. Onl^ the people, the ignorant,
believe in these things now. They know spells
against evil and charms against Trufadec, the far-
fadet, who worries the housewife, makes the milk to
turn, ties knots in the horses' manes^a mischievous
sprite "
" Puck in English," we said.
" Puck ? " the schoolmaster repeated. " Then,
Madame, they believe in these charms in Eng-
land ? "
" Oh, only the ignorant," we hastened to
assure.
" And I suppose there are charms such as we have
in the Basque country ? "
" Such as ? "
" Well," explained the schoolmaster, " there is
the charm against an infant's crying. The ignorant
people believe that if the one carrying the baby to
baptism looks back on the way to church, the child
will cry for a year. So, if this happens by mischance,
when they return to the house after the baptism,
someone takes the baby out to the pig-sty, and there,
just for a moment, they lay it on a rake with nine
points while they say something like this : ' My baby
whom the tempter has caused to weep, cease thy
weeping in the miseries of this pig-sty. Now, come
and laugh in thy home where no one wishes thee
151
The Basque Country
harm. You will have food and sleep and kisses and
clothes and play. If you want anything else you
shall have it. Little friend, do not cry. From this
moment you shall lack nothing.'
" Then there is another, if the baptism has to be
postponed. The baby is always baptised the day
of its birth, if possible; if not, the devil may get
possession of it in the night. So, to keep it safe, you
must set two holy candles by its cot and say, * Sleep,
sleep, dear little one. You are safe with your little
angel. To-morrow you shall have a holy name.
Sleep.'
" But Puck ? "
"Oh," he answered, "for your Puck, Madame
there are many charms. To be quite safe and keep
him out, you must pluck a sprig of fennel. Madame
knows ! it has not a pleasant smell. Then this
you will put in the keyhole of the door and you will
say, ' If to-night any evil spirit through this keyhole
will pass, fright him, fennel, with thy smell that he
may not enter.' It is Trufadec who tries to spoil
the sponge that is set for bread. He knocks on the
door early, and the housewife thinks it is the baker
come to fetch the sponge for the oven, and she gets
up and runs down in the early light and opens the
door and sees no one there, and so, Trufadec gets
in to turn the baking sour. So, when she goes to
bed at night, she says, ' At the knock of the baker
alone, my God, may I awake. If Trufadec comes,
may he bump his nose against the door.' But in
152
A RIVER IN THE BASQUE COUNTRY.
The Storm in the Cabaret
England, doubtless, Madame has the same charms,
and I am wearying her with these foolish things
which are only for the ignorant. A la bonne heure !
The rain is over, and Madame will pardon if I leave
her here, as it is late and my old mother is waiting."
Y7y^TTr^^«r^^^^
CHAPTER XVIII
THE V ALLEY OF THE LAURHIBAR
AFTER a few market days in the little town,
with the attendant dust and crowd and noise,
you will be glad to escape into the country. But you
may be sure that, by any road you take, you will meet
the market coming to you.
Over the bridge, as you go out of the town on the
road that leads to St. Jean-le-Vieux and the villages
up the valley of the Laurhibar, sits a beggar by the
roadside, mumbling prayers while he jingles a few
suggestive pennies in his extended hat. Jogging
along towards you is a small donkey carrying a very
bony old woman who holds up an umbrella to keep
off the already hot sun, sitting so far back on the
little, beast that her feet in their black espadrilles
stick out at right angles. She gives you a pleasant
greeting, as do all of the long procession that follows :
the farmer with the litter of clean, fat little pigs
under a wire netting in the back of his cart ; the
pretty girls with best boots and blouses, and the
produce of dairy or poultry-yard in the baskets on
their arms ; the old man vvdth the alert step and lined
154
The Valley of the Laurhibar
brown face who shepherds the flock of long-haired
mountain sheep ; the buxom matron driving the
handsome black mule to a high market cart; the
grave young man with the fine head who preserves
his dignity even at one end of a rope with a sow at
the other ; the blue-bloused father and son urging
on the drove of cream-coloured calves and bullocks ;
the woman mounted on a bony mule with a lamb
slung across its withers ; the patriarch on the slow-
stepping pony with the rich trappings ; the cure
driven by the young soldier in a dog-cart ; and to
end the procession which unwinds like a frieze, comes
a small and shabby victoria driven by a peasant in
heret and blouse, drawn by a pair of mismated
rough ponies going at a good pace and bearing along
the lady of the neighbouring chateau. There is
only a glimpse of her dignified figure in black, and
of her snow-white hair and face so typically French,
with its half-humorous look of lessons learned, of
ripe judgment, of rare common-sense combined with
charm and overlaid with sadness.
The four kilometres to St. Jean-le-Vieux are
quickly sped. It is only here that you find a dis-
appointment, for, in spite of its name, there is very
little that is old or interesting in the place. It is
hard to believe that it was once a town of importance.
It is too old and not old enough. The square is
small and sleepy, and the stone market-cross has no
date or hint of its history. The church has a beautiful
early Romanesque portal with fantastically carved
155
The Basque Country
capitals. As you see by the legend cut in stone
above by,
VIYCAISY RECTORE
FAIT REPARATIO 163O.
Above, within the arch, is the same design as that
over the portal at Sauveterre, but here the letters
of the Alpha and Ortega are in the usual sequence.
Just inside the church door is the ancient stoup in
the wall for the holy water. The confessionals bear
the names of the Basque priests, Yaun Essetore,
Yaun Bikavioa, and written up clearly are the prices
of the masses :
Messe basse — ^Pretre . ... 3 fr.
La Benoite . . . 3° c.
Enfant de choeur . . 10 c.
Fabrique . . . 10 c.
3 fr- 50 c.
which is not so very expensive for the comfort it gives.
In the churchyard, among the flowers and the
gravestones, we meet the benign cure, who is not the
mine of information we had hoped. But if he is
not wise as to dates, he at least knows the road to
Bussunarits : the first to the right out of the square.
It proves to be a lane rather than a road, and leads
you past a house or two and then through woods,
with a sweep down between great chestnuts to a stone
bridge over a stream which has come straight down
from the Col d'Ascombolia, one of the many mountain
streams to join the Nive and finally swell the Nivelle.
1^6
The Valley of the Laurhibar
It was a glorious spot. A huge bed of yellow lilies
grew just over the wall, reflected in the water, and
beyond the turf of the bank was short and green and
shaded by a huge beech tree. The very place for
lunch when we should have returned from the village,
which lay another kilometre away across the fields,
by a path which led along hedges of blossoming
may. Bussunarits was deserted. Everyone was at
the market at St. Jean. The place was silent in the
heat ; only two fat puppies rolled in the dust of the
straggling street. The few houses were of wide,
spreading air, which seemed to gather under their
wings both livestock and humans with a large charity.
Returning by the road, we found that our bridge
was the approach to the Chateau of Sarrasquette, the
only one standing in all this part of the country
which dates from the eleventh century. Through the
luxuriant growth of tree and creeper and flower in
the garden, the old walls and towers gleamed coolly
violet, their windows shuttered with faded greenish
blue. There were roses everywhere, bamboos and
figs and shrubs of a sweet, unfamiliar pink flower.
The chateau seemed as deserted as the village.
After our lunch upon the river bank, we followed
a lane to the left which led up through sweeps of
turf and young brackenj flecked with the bright rose
of foxglove, beneath great oaks and chestnuts, to
the top of the height between the Bussunarits valley
and the valley of the Laurhibar river, which rises
under the Col de Currutch some ten miles distant.
157
The Basque Country
Here, towering quite at hand was the grey point of
Behorleguy, which stands at the end of every vista
west from St. Jean-Pied-de-Port. The mountains
were all hazy in the heat. A lane led down from
here to the left which brought us out at the centre
of the village of Ahaxe on the hill. Although a tiny
hamlet it makes, with its suburbs of Alciette and
Bascassan in the valleys, quite a fair-sized commune.
Upon the green irregular square, with a cross and
a great walnut tree in the centre, stand four
houses and a church. The church looks patched,
the new masonry running into the old stone of the
tower and portal. A peasant girl was busy inside,
where, as usual in this month of May, the altar to
the Virgin was abloom with flowers. This was the
Virgin of Lourdes in white robe and blue scarf, the
golden roses budding on her bare feet, with Berna-
dette, the shepherdess, kneeling rapt beside her. A
subject for innocent dreams, for spiritual fervour, when
on the May evenings the women and the girls kneel
here and mingle their voices in the Basque refrain :
Yainkoaren'Anna,
Anna guyiz ona,
Dezagem maita"! , . ^
Bethi ! bethi ! / ""
Then are the tapers of remembrance lighted to the
dear dead, those coils of wax taper which now wait
in their baskets swathed in crape upon the empty chairs.
* Mere de Dieu, Mere toute bonne,
Que nous vous aimons, toujours ! toujours !
158
The Valley of the Laurhibar
The slanting porch of red tiles oflFered a cool shade,
from which in the heat we drowsily studied the
family names on the old tombstones, such curious
Basque names, Jaureguiberry, Apecteche, Echegaray,
Domezain, Olhaiby, and others with their unusual
combinations of letters.
Here, as at Bidart, on the floor of the porch were
the family tombstones where at certain seasons. All
Saints' Day and Good Friday, the women kneel on
those black carpets stitched with white applique
of crosses and of tears, to make their pious prayers
for the dead.
The quiet peasant girl, her duties done, came out
and lingered as we talked to her. She was alone,
everyone had gone to the market at St. Jean. Only
she was left because the grantCmere was dead — up
there. She nodded to the house at the top of the
square. Oh, quite quietly she had died, but first she
had arranged everything for the enterrement. We
thought we had not heard aright. Yes, for her own
enterrement — but why not ? The grandmother was
very lively and she would have everything done in
order. She made them get out her wedding-dress
which she would wear— yes — and ordered many
candles, and black ribbons to tie up her head and
her hands on her breast. She had not even forgotten
the bees. Grandmother was always very particular
to keep friends with the bees. And surely no other
bees gave as much honey. Grandmother said that
you must talk to them. You must be very polite
159
The Basque Country
and address them by their names, Mesdemoiselle
Belles et Bonnes, so she had had to go and tell the
bees that grandmother was dead. She hoped they
would not go away, but they had seemed very angry.
A line of Kipling came back to one : —
" And if you'll not deceive your bees,
Your bees will never leave you,"
which enabled us to reassure her.
Eh bien, she must be going. There was much to
prepare for the funeral feast. There would be many
guests. She ended with an aphorism : " Death,"
she said, " comes to us all. There is no use making
phrases. It is but natural. A chaque jour suffit la
peine, et Dieu est toujours la." She walked stolidly
away from us across the close green grass, and we
watched her till she disappeared into the big grey
house, where the beehives stood against the garden
wall. And this is the race whom Voltaire described
as "Un petit peuple qui saute et qui danse au haut
des Pyrenees ! "
Going down the hill to join the main road to
Lecumberry and Mendive, we fell in with a farmer
who naively regretted his inability to speak English.
He assured us with apologies that he only spoke
French and Basque, une langue brute. He pointed
us out our way. From Lecumberry and Mendive,
close under Behorleguy, there is a mountain path
by which those who are blessed with time may go
over the hills to the villages on the Alphoura river and
so to Tardets.
1 60
A BASQUE VILLAGE— MOONLIGHT.
The Valley of the Laurhibar
Returning from the head of the valley on the main
road near Ahaxe, you will find a group of two or three
houses, where, while you drink a cooling glass of white
wine and citron in a small cabaret, you discover two
Latin inscriptions upon two tablets let into the wall of
a house opposite. With patience and difficulty, owing
to the lack of spacing between words, partial eflEacement
by weather, and the stone-cutter's free handling of an
unknown tongue, you may decipher the legend :
ISTA . CAPELANIA . S
ANCITA. FUIT . A . GUILL
ERMO . DE . CURUCHET . A
NNO . DOMINI . 167I . GUI
US . SUMMA . PRINCIPALIS .
EST . TER . SEPTEMILLIA . LI
BRARUM . MINISTER . HUIUS . CA
PELANIE . TENEBITUR . CELEB
RARE. MISSAM . OMNIBUS . DI
EBUS . ET . ETIAM . INSTRUE
RE . OMNES . CUI . ILLUC.ACC
ESSERINT. DISCENDI . CA
USA . DOCTRINAM .
ADDO . 2000. LIBRAS. OPTANDO. EX
EARUM . FLORE . CELEBRETUR.
SINGULIS .DIEBUS
VENERIS . UNA . MISSA
IN . OPEM . ANIMARUM
IN . PURGATORIO .EXISTENT
lUM . ANN O . 1675.
y 161
The Basque Country
The English translation of which runs :
" This chaplaincy was founded hy William de
Curuchet in 1671, of which the capital is twenty-one
thousand pounds. The minister of this chaplaincy will
be bound to celebrate Mass every day and also to
instruct all who may resort thither for the purpose of
learning (Christian) doctrine.
" I add 2,000 pounds, wishing that out of the
revenue one Mass may be celebrated every Friday for
the succour of souls in purgatory. In the year 1675."
How often have we come upon tiny votive chapels
in the woods and fields of Brittany, all trace of whose
origin is lost ! Here we have the record of the intention,
but the chapel has vanished so completely that even
the woman who lives in the house behind the tablet
can tell you nothing of its fate.
But the joy of this May day is, after all, not in the
past, but in the blue of the sky, the great lazy clouds,
the shadow and light on the mountain, the wonderful
variation of the way, moorland, woodland, ploughed
field, meadow, river. If you would enjoy it to the full,
take the path following the left bank of the river from
Ahaxe back to St. Jean-le-Vieux, and again from St.
Jean-le-Vieux on to St. Jean-Pied-de-Port. You will
then have green memories to store against grey winter
days. An island stormed around by the rocky stream,
carpeted in the shade of trees by lily-of-the-valley, a
hillside meadow fringing a waterfall with silvery
campion and feathery mountain-pink, a marshy bit
162
The Valley of the Laurhibar
by the long reach where orchis patch the ground
with rose and white and purple, jolly meadows all
aglow with every meadow flower, blossom in the
orchard, blossom in the hedges, and, in the oak wood
along the water, the sun slanting through beds of
tall purple columbine above a sheet of blue forget-
me-nots. Such was the glory, faintly described,
that held us all the way to La Madeleine, that chapel
on the pilgrim's way. There, as a last gift of the
day, we had the chateau on the hill, like a dream of
Italy pale amidst the dark of cypress trees and towering
stone pines, against the far mountains rosy in the
last rays of the setting sun.
CHAPTER XIX
CRUX CAROLI
" T N the territory of the Basques there is a moun-
JL tain where is the Pass of Cize. It is 8,000
feet up and 8,000 feet down. It is so high that it
seems to reach the sky and those who make its ascent
feel that they can touch the sky with their hands.
From the height you can see the sea of Brittany and
the frontiers of three countries, Castille, Aragon and
France. On the top of this pass is a place called
Crux Caroli, because Charlemagne going into Spain
here traced his road with axe and spade, and having
raised a cross to the Saviour on the highest point,
bent his knee, his face turned to Gaul, and made a
prayer to St. Jacques. Since then the pilgrims kneel
at this spot, their eyes turned to Compostela, make
a prayer and plant each one his cross. You find
thousands of them there.
" On this same mountain is a valley called Val
Carlos in which Charlemagne and his army were
received when death had overtaken his warriors at
Roncevaux. Many of the pilgrims pass this way.
When you have descended the mountain on the other
164
Crux Car oil
side, you find the hostel and the church in which
is the rock that Roland, the great hero, cleft with
three strokes of his sword. Next comes Roncevaux
where the great battle was fought in which there
fell King Marsile, Roland, Oliver and 140,000 warriors,
as many Christians as Saracens."
Pastorales and legends sing the valour of the paladins
of Charlemagne. They hold a place within the blue-
and-gold covers of the Book of Romance. The echo
of the song of Roland has come down across the gulf
of time and stirred us with pride for the far-off
days of brave deeds. Now here at St. Jean-Pied-
de-Port you are at the foot of that fabled pass.
You may tread this battlefield of Roncevaux and
stand where Roland fell. You may follow the
pilgrims' way, but in safety, not as in the days
when they sang :
Changer nous fallut nos gros blancs
Quand nous fumes dans Bayonne,
Nos quarts d'ecus, qu'on nomme francs,
Que notre monnaie en somme,
Semblement notre couronne.
C'est pour les Basques passer,
Ou il y a d'etrange monde,
On ne les entend pas parler.
And have no fear that you must climb the 8,000 feet
pf the old writer of the Codex de Com-postela. It
doubtless seemed as high to the weary pilgrims who
had come half across Europe, but in fact it is only
somewhat over 3,000 feet above the sea.
165
The Basque Country
If you leave St. Jean on a Sunday on foot for Val
Carlos, you will pass through Uhart-Cize where you
may meet all the town coming from vespers. You
may turn aside to enter the church, with its double
gallery across the end for the men. The women
always sit in the nave, their social rank determined
by their nearness to the choir, and outside you will
find that here, as in some of the other churches, the
men enter the galleries by an exterior stone stair.
You pass out over the iron grating at the church-
yard gate that serves to keep out the ruminative
pig and the grazing cow, which find full liberty on
the village green outside.
Some lads are playing a game of felote against the
pink wall, practising for the matches which later in
the summer will be held on every Sunday afternoon
between rival villages.
From Uhart-Cize your way leads up the broad
valley of the Arneguy, where woods of oak, chestnut
and beech are spaced by fields of wheat and maize, by
vineyards and orchards. White Basque houses smile
from their gardens, and, it being Sunday, around
every cluster of houses there is an air of holiday.
For Sunday is a day of rest from labour, when the
families come down from their remote homes to join
in the innocent amusements of the nearest hamlet.
Under the shadow of every church, as at Uhart, boys
are playing at felote, and here along the roadside
where the households all unite, the women and
men are playing a game of bowls in the dust amidst
i66
Crux Caroli
much friendly laughter. Inside the little cafe you
see the old men busy at cards.
The farther you go, the later the hour, the more
whole-hearted the fun, till at a tiny village you stop
to watch an impromptu dance upon the green —
girls and men dancing to the chiriliou, the flute,
played by an old man seated on a barrel, as in Brittany,
the wine bottle at hi^ side. The tune he is playing
is the Mutchikoak, and the dancers dance a kind of
mazurka.
We reached the village of Arneguy, the frontier
town, and, wishing to get on to Val Carlos for dinner,
hastened to produce our passports. The French
guards at the French side of the bridge over the
dividing river, looked, smiled and passed us on to
two surly-looking Spaniards who looked and invited
us into a small guard-house. They inspected our
papers from every angle, discovered we were English,
an officer and a lady who had something to do with
the Red Cross. This seemed the last trial to their
civility, and they rudely declared that the papers were
not in order and that we could not pass. It was in
vain that we showed them the Spanish visa in Bayonne
which had taken us into Fontarabia. They declared
that we must have a signature from the Spanish
consul at St. Jean, who had assured us only the day
before that our passports lacked nothing to carry us
to Madrid, if we liked.
We returned over the bridge, crestfallen and dis-
appointed, to be met by the sympathetic French.
167
The Basque Country
A brilliant thought ! Would some one ride back
the eight kilonaetres on a bicycle with the papers
and a note to get the necessary signature ? The
mayor of the village introduced himself and invited
us to the mayoral parlour, which was a stuffy cafe,
helped compose the note to the consul, procured a
boy and sent off the papers. The whole village seemed
to take a delight in trying to circumvent the Spanish
guards.
Dinner in the front room of a cabaret was over,
to the accompaniment of dancing and noise at the
back, where a dozen men were drinking, when the
messenger returned — with the signature. At nine
o'clock, in the starlight, cheered on our way by the good
wishes of the mayor and the village, we started across
the bridge, passed the guards and were on the road
to Val Carlos, four kilometres along the valley. But
though the name of the town is Val, the winding road
was always mounting. In the dark the distance
lengthened and our footsteps sounded loud in the
night. It seemed ages before we saw the glimmer
of a light above us, to which by the circling road
we at length arrived. It was an outpost of the town,
which stretched a mile. Every house here was dark,
and we wondered how we should find the inn, when
we met a Spanish gentleman in a cloak who answered
our inquiries kindly and undertook to pilot us to
the Fonda Marcellino. When we reached the square
we had no further need of a guide, for the fonda,
a large Basque house, was brightly lighted and we
i68
Crux Caroli
saw by the church clock opposite that it was only-
ten.
Yet when we reached the huge arched and open
door, the fonda looked like no inn that we had ever
seen. Within was the large, stone-flagged hall of
the Basque house, filled with an odd collection of
men who were drinking at a long table, of children
half asleep under foot, of dogs and women coming
and going between a kitchen on one side and a
dining-room at the back where half a dozen people
were still at table. Into this room we were shown,
and were left, when the ladies retired, drinking our
hot coffee with an intelligent young Spanish doctor
who assured us that confusion was the normal
state of the house ; that the fatron of the fonda,
old Marcellino, was the father of a large family,
all of whom lived with their families beneath the
roof; and that he, moreover, ruled them all with
a rod of iron.
Old Marcellino, himself, was , on the box of our
carriage in the morning — a dignified, reserved old
man with a fine head and features under the beret.
As we drove up the defile of Val Carlos, the road
ascending in zigzags, the sun shone gloriously hot
above, while the valley below was still in deep shadow,
every httle green field and bank by the river white
with the heavy dew. The road mounts along the flanks
of Caindela and Doray, hills which He in Spain, while
the river in the valley forms the frontier line. Beyond
the hamlet of Ganicotela, the road mounts the side
z 169
The Basque Country
of Altabiscar, higher and higher, giving us every
moment more glorious views back down the valley.
Our -patron drove dashingly, with a jingling of bells
and a crack of the whip, and the two ponies quickly
overtook and passed the mule teams, three and four
harnessed tandem, with the Spanish muleteers, drawing
great empty wine casks back over the mountains
to be filled again with Spanish wine. We played
a game of hide-and-seek with a herd of cows, which
were being driven up to the high pastures by two
men and a little boy on horseback. We would over-
take and pass them, only to find them before us on
the road some miles or so ahead. I think the little
boy enjoyed the game as much as we did. But we
never once managed to see them take to the cattle
trails which cut off the longer windings of the carriage
road. When we arrived at the Venta Gorosgaray,
perched at a bald peak of the road like an eyrie hanging
over the precipice below, we knew we were in Spain.
Two mule trains had met and were standing before
the door, and the herd of cows was strung out along
the road ahead. Drivers and muleteers, whose cos-
tumes were enlivened with scarlet sashes, as the mules
were brightened by scarlet tassels and pompons,
stood drinking together. Old MarceUino joined them
with a lordly manner and was listened to with defer-
ence. Indeed the conversation was too long and
uninteresting for patience, and we were glad when
the herders trotted ahead shouting to their cows,
and the muleteers cracked their long whips and we
170
Crux Caroli
all started on the steepest part of our journey together.
From here the road mounts through magnificent
beech woods gently and gradually, as the schoolmaster
said, and as gradually reaches the top of the divide
where from the little plateau you may look back,
" to the sea of Brittany " if your imagination serves
you well. Here are the ruins of that chapel which
Charlemagne built, browsed around by sheep, for-
gotten by everyone.
The road descends from the pass in an easy sweep,
through grassy banks starred with violets beneath the
shade of the great beeches, and brings you out suddenly
on a level with the roof of the famous Royal College
of Roncevaux, with its courtyard and cloisters and
church tower. It sweeps around the buildings,
through the village, and on you go four kilometres to
Burguete for lunch. It is an ugly village, yet full
of character, on a plain, lifted so high that the tops
of the encircling blue mountains, patched with snow,
seem near. You understand the old writer's feeling
that " those who make the ascent feel that they
can touch the sky," for the sky is very close and the
air is so rarefied that you touch another realm.
The inn, more than Val Carlos, is Spain — the Spain
that we have known — though it is the Basque country
as well. The fonda was a place of cool, big spaces —
grateful after the glare of the hot noon-tide, and it
provided us with an astounding lunch of many courses,
cooked in the Spanish style with oil and garlic and
mysterious sauces, among which figured peppers and
171
The Basque Country
a dish of tiny snails in their shells cooked with rice.
The wine of the country was delicious.
Many of the houses in Burguete, like those every-
where in the Spanish Basque country, bear carved
escutcheons above the doors. This reminds you that
here one man in every four had the hereditary right
to sit in judgment and that this distinction ennobled
the family. Nobility, thus, did not depend upon
property, but upon character. Here, too, you will
see in the kitchens the central hearth in the middle
of the room, piled with wood, the smoke ascending
by a funnel-shaped hood through the roof.
From Burguete we made our pilgrimage back to
Roncevaux on foot, most of the way through beech
woods. Near the village, for quite half a mile, the
beeches are planted in ranks known as the Abbe's
walk. On the plain which stretches away on the
opposite side of the road, tradition says that the
battle of Roncevaux was fought on August 15, 778.
Over that hill, beyond the roof of the Royal College,
Charlemagne and the main body of his army passed,
when the Basques and the Saracens fell upon that
rear-guard to whom was given the honour of defending
the retreat. They were the picked knights of Charle-
magne, Roland, Oliver, and the twelve peers cele-
brated by the Troubadours. You can still hear the
note of Roland's horn calling for help, a note as
loud and clear as only he could blow, resounding up
the valley, but never, alas, reaching the ears of Charle-
magne over the pass. It is a great story, The Song
172
Crux Caroli
of Roland, greatly told, and here before you at the
entrance to the village stands the tiny chapel, Chapelle
du Saint-Esprit, built above the grave where the
paladins were buried. Here in May masses are said
for the repose of the soul of Roland and his com-
panions.
Near the chapel is a very ancient cross. Is this the
Crux Caroli ? It is, at any rate, a pilgrim's cross, on
the road which the pilgrims still take on the Wednes-
day before Pentecost. At daybreak on the morning
of that day the little Spanish villages, for thirty miles
around, are emptied of their folk. Village after
village falls in to swell the procession which ascends
the mountain, winding its penitential way through
the exquisite beauty of these mountain roads — five
hundred men, cowled, walking two abreast, carrying
each upon his back a cross of wood. The mayors
of the villages in' capes, hat in hand, space the pro-
cession, as do the deacons in surplices carrying the
gold banners of ' the villages. The women in black
mantillas end the procession, intoning their endless
litanies. Through the green paradise of the beeches
this noiseless procession passes to the convent church,
where they are lost in the great arched doorway of
the massive pile. Roncevaux ranks in Spain as one
of the most sacred shrines of the Christian faith, and
takes its place after Jerusalem, Rome and Compostela.
What a tradition it is that can keep alive for a thousand
years and more a faith to inspire poor humanity to
sacrifice ! And yet — the roofs of that convent are
173
The Basque Country
repaired with corrugated iron, and dirt and neglect
mark its courts to the very doors of the sanctuary.
We follow the broad, peaceful, gradual ascent of
the road, back to the pass, rejoicing in the flowers
along the way, the close green turf thick with long-
stemmed violets, the banks beautiful with a wealth
of pink silenes, amourettes, the spires of the foxglove,
columbine, campanulas, saxifrages and ferns. From
the young green of beech woods we come out upon
the bare plateau at the pass,
cropped close by the sheep. There
at the ruined door of Charle-
magne's chapel we pause to pick
a sprig of everlasting, semper-
num — the Virgin's flower, which
has the magic to guard from
evil and to speed the parting
soul. " Flower of the gar-
den and the field," so runs
the ancient prayer, " live
beneath my roof — that I
may obtain forgiveness for
my sins, and help me to
die." Before us stretched
the far view "to ^-Mm^'
the sea of Brittany "
that the pilgrims
saw.
174
CHAPTER XX
ST. ETIENNE DE BAIGORRT
ST. Etienne de Baigorrj^ is the end of a branch
Hne from Osses on the line from Bayonne to St.
Jean-Pied-de-Port. But we approached it by an
easy road which leads pleasantly from St. Jean. It
mounts imperceptibly, and leads through hamlets and
by the vineyards of Irouleguy, famed for its wine.
Here the peasants were busy amongst the vines.
Each coteau up which the vineyards stretch is topped
by a small, square white house where the tools are
kept and where during the vintage season a guard
sleeps to watch over the grapes. The church of
Irouleguy stands on one such hill, and sent its double
notes of the hours floating down the valley, for like
all the Basque churches it strikes the hour twice over.
It was a busy valley, where everyone was working ;
even a small boy of ten was driving a plough, while
his minute sister walked at the oxen's heads, holding
the long stick to guide them. They are wonderful
little people, these Basque children. The four-year-
olds drive the cows to pasture with a solemn air of
importance. When they are twelve they go up on
175
The Basque Country
the mountain to guard the sheep from May to Sep-
tember. Sometimes, more often than not, they are
quite alone except for the weekly messenger from the
village who brings bread and ham and wine. This
makes for self-reliance, if anything could — meeting
whatever may come, whether storm or heat or a
stray wild beast. Even when they are babies, the
mother, though so devoted to her family, has little
time for caresses, and it is to the grandmother, A'ita-
Anna, that they go for comfort. The grandmother
is an institution in the Basque family, where she is
reverenced and where her word is law.
In the village of Irouleguy an itinerant umbrella-
mender had gathered about him all the unemployed.
Umbrellas are an indispensable article in these moun-
tains. Every peasant carries one, whether afoot or
on horseback, on road or in field. Even more than
the prevailing greenness and the abundant verdure
do they tell of the frequent rains. The man had a
great assortment of umbrellas with their owners
around him, and was entertaining his audience,
doubtless with the gossip of his wanderings.
From the village a paved lane brought us, between
fern-hung walls, out to the crest of the hill which
separates this valley from the Baigorry valley, and we
zigzagged down-hill through woods and fields till we
came to the gate of a farm where we stopped to see
the amusing inscription above the door. The farmer's
wife came out with chairs for us and stood within
the half- door prepared to be friendly. These peasant
176
CHURCH AT ST. ETIENNE DE BAIGORRY.
St. Etienne de Baigorry
homesteads certainly are delightful. This house was
roomy and cool, with its fresh whitewash and green
shutters. A balcony ran along under the upper
windows, and a vine found support there to drape
the front of the house. At one side great stacks of
dried bracken were stored ready for fodder and food
for .the cows. The bracken is cut on the highest
slopes of the mountains from October to December.
It is very hard work in which all the family assist.
The bracken is cut with hooks, corded into great
bundles, and is then rolled down the steepest slopes
and carried on the heads or dragged on sledges to
the farm.
In a shed the cut wood for the fires was piled.
Behind the yard was the garden, growing four kinds
of salad, onions, beans, peas, thyme, cabbages, arti-
chokes, radishes, carrots and beets, clumps of iris
and roses growing on the walls. Beyond grew pota-
toes, then a field of grain, a vineyard up the hillside,
and a little wood with a dancing stream enclosed the
demesne. This, the picture of so many Basque
homesteads, seemed to us to hold all that any peasant
heart could desire, the wherewithal for content and
dignity and comfort.
But the farmer's wife had a different story to tell.
Her only son had gone to the United States. He
was working in a saw-mill in Portland, Oregon. It
seemed incredible that anyone could choose the
position of labourer in the west of America rather
than that of freehold proprietor of this self-contained
AA 177
The Basque Country
paradise. " Ah, yes," she said, " all the boys go to
America, and only some of them return. They are
not satisfied with the wages here, and as soon as they
are fifteen they want to go. They are not happy
any longer. And some go at fifteen and some at
twenty, but they all go in the end." Her boy had
come over with the American Army to fight. Lots
of the Basque boys had, and had come home on leave,
and then all had gone away again.
There was a rumbling and cracking of whip, and
her husband arrived at the yard driving his oxen
to one of the classic carts with the small solid wheels
which look like a chariot. He joined his wife shortly
inside the half-door. They were a fine pair, still in
miadle age. He said it was his father who had built
the house. Why, we asked, was the man on horse-
back, above the door, blowing a hunting horn ?
Because his father was an American. Great surprise
on our part. That is to say, his father had gone to
South America, and there he had hunted on horseback
and made much money, so when he came home he
built this house, and he had that carved above the
door to remind him of his life in foreign lands. Oh
yes, they assured us, anyone who has been to America,
North or South, even for a few weeks, is called an
American.
Someone spoke to the woman from vdthin, and the
husband explained that it was the tailoress, who
came, he said, to sew — not clothes for him, but the
village tailoress who does the sewing. No, his wife
178
St. Etienne de Baigorry
never sewed — no women had time to sew. They
were too busy helping out of doors. He laughed.
Their fingers, he said, were too stiff. No, it was
the tailoress who went from house to house and did
the sewing for everyone.
When they heard that we were going on to St.
Etienne, they suggested that Le Trinquet was the
best hotel. It was kept by his brother. They ex-
plained its excellencies and superiorities, and we
decided that Le Trinquet and no other hostel should
house us that night.
At the bend of the road below the farm, we found
a small chapel in a farmyard facing the valley. An old
woman who spoke only Basque came trundling out
to open the door, and called a very small girl to an
upper window to translate for her. It was the Chapel
of San Salvatore and there were four masses every
year. But, it was kept so beautifully, surely someone
came to pray f The little maiden smiled. It was
she and her friends in the next farm down the hill
who took care of the chapel, and indeed they often
came to pray. Not now so much, but during the
war. Her father was away in the army, but he was
safe. She as much as said it was all due to San Salva-
tore. But the old woman had an especial interest
in Ste. Barbe, who hung from a rafter in the middle,
dressed in a stiffly starched white robe.
The sun was getting low as we went down the hill
through the poplars of Occo, and thence to the
bridge over the Aldudes, where the road branches to
179
The Basque Country
Baigorry. We turned to the left up the valley, with
a new range of mountains on our right making a
sharp, jagged line against the sky. St. Etienne de
Baigorry runs for a mile along the stream, just one
long street. We bravely passed the hump-backed
bridge leading across to the guide-book hotel, and
kept on under the walls of the Chateau d'Echaux, and
were rewarded, for Le Trinquet was fresh and clean,
and possessed a terrace all set round with flowers in
green pots along the river in the shade of interlaced
plane trees. It is opposite the church and the cure's
garden, where fig and bamboo and wistaria hang over
the wall. The church, which has no history, needed
none that night to make it interesting against the
sunset sky.
The next morning a toot signalled the arrival of
the baker woman in her cart, and soon after a girl,
tall and handsome, came bearing the carcasses of
three lambs on a flat basket on her head, while down
a rocky lane stepped a man leading a donkey laden
with wine from Spain. Bread, meat and wine —
we had no lack for our lunch on the height of the
Col d'Ispeguy.
It is an easy ascent of only eight kilometres by the
winding road, but takes two hours and a quarter
because it is so steep. You can come down in half
an hour, but you should not want to. From the top,
where springy heather in the shade of beech trees,
makes a soft seat, you get a view more interesting
than many more famous views. You look down on
i8o
St. Etienne de Baigorry
a bowl-shaped valley in Spain, surrounded by moun-
tains and dotted with villages, and it is quite possible
to follow your wandering spirit down the zigzag
mountain road and through the valley and behind
the hills, and so, twelve kilometres, to Elizondo, and
from there to Pampeluna and so to Roncevaux.
That makes a good round. But you may also sit
on the height with great contentment, filled with
the tonic of the high air, and eat your lunch and
sleep, or watch the cows browsing the fresh beech
leaves and the long-haired goats and the wild ponies
outlined against the sky on the farther slopes. The
Spanish guards will interest you too, the low stone
hut with the bit of garden and the friendly dog.
They are melodramatic, the Spanish guards, in olive-
green uniforms and gold braid and high odd patent-
leather hats. They only desire to be pleasant, and
wave aside the papers you hastily produce.
It is the going down again that is wonderful, with
the view down the clear-cut gorges through black
rock, to the lovely little green fields in the bottom.
You see your road following these gorges in and out,
always lower and lower, to the end of the valley. All
the way the sound of running water is with you.
There are streams everywhere. If it is hot, you
may be lured high up a cleft in the hills to a hidden
pool fringed with fern and columbine for a dip in
the crystal water, with only the mountain goats
near and a slanting sun-baked rock on which to dry.
Above you, far up, on the high pastures are the
i8l
The Basque Country
flocks grazing and the summer huts where the shep-
herds live. And over all, circling and circling, is a
black speck, a watching hawk. The lizards, too, like
the sun, tiny brown ones and emerald green. A bird
of orange plumage flits by like a streak of light, while
a hedge-sparrow sings its gurgling song on a bush
close at hand. Life seems happy and glad and good
up there.
The other valley which starts from St. Etienne de
Baigorry, an even lovelier valley, is the Baztan — the
rat's tail. It runs winding between steep, wild hills,
following the Aldudes River, for eighteen kilometres
to Urepel.
All of this country came under the jurisdiction
of the Governor of St. Jean-Pied- de-Port. It formed
part of Basse-Navarre. The history seems confused
in the local mind. The carpenter who came out to
translate an inscription in the village knew they had
had a king once, but was equally sure that they had
always been free. That inscription carved in Basque
above the old door in the main street reads : " With
little, have we but peace, it is enough." Near it
is the charming old door of the cobbler's shop. Nearly
opposite another house bears the Latin inscription :
MEMORARE NOISSIME TUA ET IN STERNUM
NON PECCAVIS.
It is amusing to see how the fashion in inscriptions
will run through a certain period or a certain village.
182
St. Etienne de Baigorry
In Baigorry itself several houses of the eighteenth
century have the inscription in this form :
VIVA PEDRO DELCRAGUI
VIVA JO AN A DEBELLA
FAIT LE 27 VILLET I 773-
At Osses there are some very interesting inscriptions.
183
CHAPTER XXI
CAMBO, I1XASS0U
DO not be misled by the space given to Cambo
in the guide-books. That is, if you are
looking for anything beyond a pleasant health-resort,
with many villas in dense shade on a bluff above the
river giving a fine view over the valley. But from
Cambo you may reach one of the most charming
corners of the fays basque, the little village of
Itxassou, as well as Hasparren, where the great
cattle markets of the Basque country are held,
and the pretty village of Espelette on the Bessabure
river.
Itxassou is only a group of houses clustered about
a church, with no attempt at regularity, and one of
these houses is called the Hotel Teillery. There is
nothing to show you that it is an hotel. It is a big
white house set down on the close turf of the wild
hillside, under huge oaks, in one of which you will
find a platform where you may sit on a Sunday and
look down on the churchyard and the long double-
ended felote court. You can look over the valley
184
CHURCH AT ITXASSOU.
Cambo, Itxassou
too, and watch the peasants coming by the lanes and
roads and field-paths to mass. They enter the church-
yard from the opposite side behind the cypresses,
and are swallowed up by the porch without your
seeing them. Then suddenly a growing chant begins,
and out from the arch of the porch towards you comes
a procession headed by the choir boys, composed of
hundreds of men, women and children, followed by
the clergy, which takes its way three times around
that ancient grey church, between those ancient
round stones, singing a robust chant. When mass
is over, a nun in black stands by the grey arched
porch under a cypress tree holding a bag for alms.
The men, young and old, come out first, in their
best Sunday clothes, and stand along the path in
knots. The women come out last, and pass the men
and go out of the graveyard without a glance. It is
only when they are under my oak that they all begin
to talk and the men join them, and they walk as far
as the mossy stone steps which form an estrade the
length of the felote court. Here parties of friends
seat themselves and have not long to wait before
the cure, a famous felote player, appears with his
partner to play a trial game. In the graveyard
now only scattered figures in black remain
kneeling at the graves of their dead, saying
their beads.
Pelote is a beautiful game to watch played by the
young Basques with muscles of steel. The felote is
a baU, small and very hard. It is played against a
BB 185
The Basque Country
wall, either with bare hands, which is the ancient
Basque game, or with the chistera, a kind of hollow
osier hand which is strapped to the forearm. The
game varies as much as does fives as played in our
different public schools. The game played against
one wall with two or three on a side is called Maid;
that played against two opposite walls, with five
players to a side, is called rebot ; and that played in a
covered court is called trinquet. But the charm of
the game lies very much in its surroundings. The
court is usually the centre of the village, and some-
times most beautifully situated, as here at Itxassou
on this lovely hillside backed by the height of I'Arsa-
mendi, or as at St. Jean-Pied-de-Port where it stands
surrounded by giant elms within the sixteenth-century
walls.
The great day of the year at Itxassou is the feast of
St. Fructueux in August, which is celebrated with
dancing and games. Certainly the people of the
valley do well to keep on good terms with this saint,
if it is he who is responsible for its fruitfulness.
Itxassou is the centre of the cherry country, and in
May the cherry trees which border the roads are red
with fruit. Cherries are offered you everywhere,
and judging from the stained little faces, the children
enjoy the abundance.
In the churchyard you will find a great number of
discoid stones, with a greater variety of design than
anywhere else in the French Basque country. From
the gate on the farther side you pass into a triangle
i86
AN UPLAND VILLAGE.
Cambo, Itxassou
of grass in the shade of trees, in the centre of which
stands an ancient stone cross. It bears no date and
the inscriptions are only deciphered with difficulty be-
cause of the Hchen which has filled the letters of the
words, which are all run together, as on many of the
old tombstones. The first one runs : Profitte, fecheur,
du Sang. The other reads : O Crux, ave, sfes
unica, hoc passiones tempora.
There are lovely walks about Itxassou in every
direction. The most popular is that leading to the
Pas de Roland, up the rocky chasm of the Nive. It
is a rock jutting from the roadside, in the form
of an arch. Why this is associated with the
name of Charlemagne's paladin no one seems
to know.
It is possible to sail from Itxassou down the Nive
to Ustaritz in a local skifi called a chaland. Ustaritz
was the ancient capital of Labourd. In a grove of
oaks on the hill behind the town the bilzaar met. But
to-day it is quite modern and gay in its appearance,
extending along the bank of the Nive in a succession
of gardens and villas, and it certainly is not the
picture of Ustaritz which you will carry away as
typical of the Basque land.
Your memory will be rather of a little country of
beech forests, of clear streams, of smiling vineyards ;
a country full of flowers and perfume, yet whose
valleys are tinged with the melancholy inseparable
from the hills ; a country whose people you love
for their past and for the quaHties which endear ; a
187
The Basque Country
country which calls you, a stranger, back to it, and of
which the Basques may well sing :
There is no country
Comparable to my country.
In my eyes, it resembles
An ancient oak
Which, partly uprooted.
Is ever young and verdant.
i88
BOOKS CONSULTED
Les Basques et le Pays Basque Paris, 1882, J. Vinson
Le Folk-lore du Pays Basque Paris, 1883, J. Vinson
La 'fombe Basque Paris, 1889, Henry O'Shea
Les Armoir'ies du Pays Basque 1 9 1 9
ne Pyrenees Hilaire Belloc
T^he Deserts of Southern France Baring-Gould
Essai sur la Noblesse Basque 1785
'The Basque Provinces Ency. Brit.
The Basques „ „
La Tradition du Pays Basque 1899
Le Pays Basque. La Femme etT Enfant Mde. d'Abbadie
Harispe et les Chasseurs Basques Labouche
Recherches Historiques sur le Pays Basque Heristoy
Ramuntcho Pierre Loti
Le Pays Basque Michel
Voyage en Navarre 1836, Chaho
Itineraire Pittoresque „
INDEX
Aarfa, 125
Abbadie, Antoine, 6
Abd-ur-Rahman, 11
Adour, 4, 33, 60
Ahaxe, 161, 162
Ainhoa, 67, 73, 125
Alava, 4, 12
Alciette, 158
Aldudes, 125, 179, 182
All Saints' Day, 159
Alplioura River, 160
Altabiscar, 170
America, 178
American Army, 178
Amusements, Sunday, 166
Ancient laws, 14
Andurain, Chateau of, 121
Anne of Austria, 54, 84
Anne de Montmorency, 49, 50, 51
Animals, Basque, 104
Antiquity of the Race, 4
Antoine d'Abbadie, 72
Apecteche, 159
Aquitania, 5, 8
Aquitaine, Eleanor of, 28
Aragon, 12
Aragonese, the, 3
Aramits, loo
Arance, 86
Arette, 100
Arms of the Basque Country, 81,82
Arneguy, 166, 167
Aryans, 6
Ascain, 67, 76
Hotel de la Rhune, 76
Aspe, Valley of the, 87
Azcoitia, 15
Baigorry, 175, 176, 180, 183
Baring-Gould, 5
Barony of St. Jean de Luz, 46
Bascassan, 158
Basque animals, 104
children, 175
churches, 175
country, arms of the, 81, 82
customs, 142
dances, 11 1
donkey, 102
homesteads, 20, 177
house, 140
inscription, 140
language, the, 22, 23
kitchens, 141
names, 159
poetic legends, 1 1 8
priests, 156
proverb, 69
regiments, 12
superstitions, 151
tongue, the, 21
war-cry, Irrezina, 107
women, 143
Basques of La Soule, 120
Bassa-Buria, gg
Basse-Navarre, 130, 136
Basses-Pyx^n^es, 4
Bay of Biscay, 56
Bayonne, 4, 25, 2g, 85
AUees Maritimes, 33
Bishop of, Robert de Sossionde,
77
Cathedral of St. Marie, 30
The Library, 35
Musee Bonnat, 30
Place d'Armes, 32
Place de la Liberty, 31
Pont St. Esprit, 28, 33
Port of, 60
Quai des Basques, 30
191
Index
Bayonne — continued
Quai Galuperie, 30
Quartier St. Esprit, 25
Rue du Pont Neuf, 29
Rue Tour-de-Sault, 30
Baztan, 182
Beam, 97, 130
Bearnais, the, 3
Behobe, 83
Behobia, 82
Behorl6guy, 158, 160
Belair, 92
Belief, religious, 20
Beloc, Hilaire, 5
Belsola, i
Bergmann, 7
Bernardines, Convent of the, 33
Biarritz, 35
Cote des Basques, 36
Lake La Negresse, 37
Palace Hotel, 39
Plage de I'lmperatrice, 37
Port Vieux, 36
Roche Percee, 37
Villa Eugenie, 37
Bidarray, 125
Bidart, 40
Bidassoa, 78
Bilbao, 4
BillSre, 91
Bilzaar, 14
Biscay, Bay of, 2
Biscay e, i, 4, 12
Bishop of Bayonne, Robert de
Sossionde, 77
Blaid, 186
Bohemians, 150
Bonnat, L^on, 30
Bridge of Gastelondo, 24
Brittany, 167
sea of, 164
Brunet de St. P^e, 67
Burgos, 3
Burguete, 172
Bussunarits, 157
Buzy, 93
Cabrera, 78
Cagots, 150
Caindela, 169
Cambo, 184
Cambrai, Treaty of, 48
Campostello, 11
Cap du Figuier, 78
Captain du Halde, 61
Cardinal de Tournon, 50
Carlist, 36
Casabielha, Jean de, 45
CasteUs, 86
Castelondo, bridge of, 24
CastUle, 12
Isabella of, 30
Catalans, the, 3
Catherine, 91
Catherine de Medici, 31
Catherine of Navarre, 89
Catholics, 131
Chaho, 6, 112
Chanson de Beriereche, 118
Chapelle du Saint- Esprit, 173
Chapelle d'Urovca, 40
Charivari, 21
Charlemagne, 139, 165, 172.
Charles V, 47, 48
Charles VII, 29
Charles IX, 31, 54
Charles le Mauvais, 127, 131
Chateau d'Echaux, 180
Chateau de Pau, 88, gi
Chateau d'Urturbie, 53, 65
Chateau of Irun, 47
Chateau of Sarrasquette, 157
Chateau, St. P6e, 67
Chemins de St. Jacques, 128
Cherry country, 186
Chien de Montory, 100
Children, Basque, 175
Churches, Basque, 175
Ciboure, 53, 56, 59, 61, 63
Codex de Compostela, 129
Commanderie of Moccosail, 139
Col d'Arieta, 125
Col (f'Ascombolia, 156
Col de Bendaritz, 125
Col de Bentarte, 125
Col de Currutch, 157
Col d'Ibaneta, 125
Col d'lraty, 125
Col d'Ispeguy, 125, 180
Col de Lapixe, 100
192
Index
Col de Lindux, 125
Col d'Orbaiceta, 125
Columbus, 59, 60
Convent of the Bernardines, 33
Convent of the Recollets, 63
Crux Caroli, 164, 173
Customs, Basque, 147
funeral, 70
of succession, 19
d'Abbadie, Antoine, 72
Dance, the Goblet, 114
Dances, Basque, iii
Dauphin, 52
d'Auvergne, Tour, 14
de Charencay, 7
de Grammont, 62, 118, 130, 131
deLuxe, 117, 130, 131
Discoid stones, 41, 186
Don Alvaro de Fugo, 51
Donkey, Basque, 102
Don Velasquez of Madrid, 84
Doray, 169
Due d'Albe, 31, 32
Due d'OrlSans, 52
du Halde, Captain, 61
Dunois, 29
d'Urturbie, family of, 65
Seigneur, 47
Echegaray, 159
Edward VII, 33
Eichhoff, 7
Eleanor of Aquitaine, 28
Eleanor of Austria, 48, 52, 84
Elizabeth of France, 54
Elizondo, 125, 181
Emperor Napoleon, 124
Empress Marie Louise, 36
Espeldoy, House of , 120
Espelette, 184
Etchebar, 99, 120-
Etcheonda, 17
Family homestead, 17
Farandole, the, 114
Ferride, 90
Filibusters, 62
Fishermen's Guild, 79
Fishing, 68
Flower, the Virgin's, 174
CC
Fonda Marcellino, 168
Fontarabia, 15, 47, 78, 167
Castle of Jeanne la Folle, 80
Church of Our Lady of the
Ascension, 79
Plaza de Armas, 80
Puerta de Santa Maria, 79
Fors, 14, 16
Fors of La Soule, 122, 123
Fors of Navarre, 127
Francis I, 47, 49, 83
French guards, 167
French Revolution, 122, 132
Froissart, 85
Fueros, 14, 15
Fueros of Guipuzcoa, 15
Funeral customs, 70
Funeral procession, 69
Ganicotela, 169
Gascon, 5
Gastelondo, Bridge of, 24
Gaston VI, 85
Gaston IX, 85
Gaston X, 89
Gave d'Aspe, 3
Gave de Pau, 86
Gave d'Oloron, 3, 117
Giacomino, Claudio, 7
Gipsies, 105, 146, 148
Goblet dance, the, 114
Good Friday, 56, 159
Gouze, 86
Grandmother, 176
Guards, French, 167
Spanish, 168
Guernakaco arbolo, 12
Guernica, Oak of, 14, 82
Guetaria, Church of San Salvador,
15
Guethary, 40, 51
Guild of Fishermen, 79
Guipuzcoa, 4, 12, 15, 81, 130
fueros of, 15
Guyenne, 117
Haranboure, House of, 72
Harisp6, Mar6chal, 124
Harribelecketa, 10
Hasparren, 9, 184
193
Index
Height of Uhartia, 76
Helbairen, 65
Hendaye, 51, 78
Henry II, 28, 88, 89
Henry IV, 54, 91
Homestead, family, 17
Homesteads, Basque, 20, 177
Hortense Eugenie, 36
Hotel Teillery, 184
House, Basque, 17, 140
House of Haranboure, 72
House of Navarre, the, 89
House, the, 17
Houses, St. Jean de Luz, 55
Humboldt, 6
Ibaneta, 139
Iberians, 6
He des Faisans, 46, 78, 83
Ingres, 31
Inscription, Basque, 140
Inscriptions, 76, 182
International Bridge, 83
Iparraguirre, Jos6 Maria, poet, 14
Irouleguy, 175
Iroulegay Church, 175
Irouleguy wine, 175
Irrezina, the Basque war-cry, 107
Irun, 78, 81
Isabella of Castille, 30
Isabella of Valois, 84
Isabel, Queen of Spain, 83
Itxassou, 184, 187
Hotel Teillery, 184
Jauriguiberry, 159
Jaxu, 124
Jean d'Albret, 89
Jeanne d'Albret, 90, 130
Jean d'Aragon, 96
Jeanne d'Arc, 89
Jean de Beam, 89
Jean de Casabielha, 45
Jeanne La FoUe, Castle of, 80
Jena, 123
Joseph Boneparte, 36
Juisquibel, 66
Juntas, 15
Juranjon wine, 92
King Edward VII, 33 .
Kitchens, Basque, 141
Labourd, 4, 47, 130
Lacarre, 124
Lacq, 86
Lagor, 86
La Madeleine, 163
Language, Basque, 22, 23
Lanne, 100
Lapurdum, 28
La Rhune, 56, 64, 66, 67, 77
Larrasona, 10
Larrau, 99
I'Arsamendi, 186 •
La Soule, 4, 117, 130
Lasse, 138, 139
I'Attalaye, 37
Laurhibar, 154, 157
Laws of succession, 18
Lecumberry, 160
Legend, i
Legend of Sancie, 97
Legends in verse, 26
Lendresse, 86
Le Trinquet, 179, 180
I'Eskual Herria, 4
Licq, 99, 105
Lichau, 99
Logroiio, 3
Louis de Beaumont, 117
Louis XI, 46, 83, 96
Louis XII, 46
Louis XIII, 61 ■
Louis XIV, 46, 54, 62; 71, 83, 84
marriage of, 54
Louis XV, 46
Lourgorrieta, 72
Luzaide, i
Mahn, 7
Mahomod, 81
Maittagorri, i
Malta, Commandery of, 42
Marcellino, 169
Mar^chal Harisp6, 124
Marguerite de Valois, 89, 91
Maria Theresa, 54, 84
Marie de Sandoure, 73
Market day, 154
Tardets, loi
[94
Index
Mascarades, 112
Massacre of St. Bartholomew, 32
Maul^on, 4, 117, 121
May, month of, 158
Mazarin, 55
Mendive, 160
Michel le Basque, 62
Moccosail, 139
Monographie de la Villa Euginie,
35
Mont Aigu, 87
Mont d'Anie, i
Month of May, 158
Montory, loi
Mont Perdu, 87
Napoleon, Emperor, 124
Napoleon III, 83
Navarre, 4, 12, 92, 97, 130
fors of, 12, 127
King of, Sanche le Fort, 80
Sanche V, King of, 97
the House of, 89
Navarrenx, 94
N6ez, 92
Newfoundland, 60, 61
Nive, 29, 33, 156, 187
Nivelle, 45, 53, 56, 64, 67
shipyards of the, 61
Notre Dame de la Mer, 64
Notre Dame de Pilar, 128
Notre Dame de Sogorry, 66
Novem Populanie, 8
Oak of Guernica, 14
Oliver, 172
Oloron, 21, 92, 93, 94
Church of Ste. Croix, 93
Olorou-Ste. Croix, 94
Oloiron-Ste. Marie, 94
Orisson, 145
Orthez, 85, 86
Tour de Moncade, 85
Oss§s, 127, 183
Our Lady of Guadeloupe, 78
Pampeluna, 4, 139, 181
Pas de Roland, 187
Pass of Cize, 164
Pastoral plays, 108
Pau, 85
approach to, 87
Chateau of, 89, 90
English Club, 88
gaiety of, 88
Pedrazza de la Sierra, 49
Pedro Hernando de Velasco, 49
Pelote, 69, 74, 76,' 80, 166, 185
Peyrehorade, 4
Philibert de Chftlons, Prince of
Orange, 96
Philip IV, 83, 84
Philippe le Hardi, 95
Pic Bonbat, 87
Pic Euro, 87
Pic d'Anie, 87
Pic d'Aule, 87
Pic de Cezny, 87
Pic de Gabizos, 87
Pic de Ger, 87
Pic du Midi de Bigore, 87
Pic du Midi d'Ossau, 87
Pic Long, 87
Pilgrims of St. Jacques de Cam-
postelle, 56, 128
Playing pelote, 80
Poetic legends, Basque, 118
Poet Jos6 Maria Iparriguirre, 1 4
Point of Socoa, 64
Portland, 177
Port of Bayonne, 60
Priests, Basque, 156
Prince Imperial, 38
Procession, funeral, 69
Roncevaux, 173
Protestant cause, 90
Protestant religion, 130
Proverb, Basque, 69
Puck, 152
Pyrenees, i, 126
Reiot, 186
Religion, Protestant, 130
Religious belief, 20
Revolution, French, 122, 132
Rights of succession, 16
Robert de Sossionde, Bishop of
Bayonne, 77
Roche Perc6e, 37
19s
Index
Roland, 139, 165, 172, 173
song of, 173
Roman town, 28
Romans, 7, 8
Roncevaux, 10, 139, 173, 181
procession, 173
Royal College of, 171
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 14
Ste. Barbe, 45, 179
Ste. EngrS.ce, 99
Pass of, IJ2
St. Amand, 20
St. Etienne, CheLteau d'Echaux,
180
Hotel le Trinquet, 179, 180
St. Etienne de Baigorry, 10, 180,
182
St. Francis Xavier, 124
St. Fructueux, 186
St. Jacques de Campostelle, pil-
grims of, 56, 128
St. Jean Baptiste, 54
St. Jean de Luz, 40, 45
Barony of, 46
Corsairs of, 61
Dasconaguerreau, 55
Discontennia, 56
Esquerenea, 56
House in the Rue St. Jacques,
45
Joanoenia, 55
Lohobiague, 55
Maison Betheder, 55
Maison Pendelet, 55
Maison St. Martin, 55
Marriage of Louis XIV, 54
Place Louis XIV, 58
St. Jean-le-Vieux, 155, 162
St.Jean-Pied-de-Port, 4, 126, 186
Cli5,teau of, 127
Church of, 127
St. P6e, 67
Sieur de, 47
Sabourede, 2
SaUors, the best, 63
Saison (Uhaitz-Handia), 99
Sanche V, King of Navarre, 97
Sanche le Fort, Kang of Navarre,
80
Sancie, legend of, 97
San Salvador, Church of, 15
San Salvatore, 179
San Sebastian, 4
Sans-Culottes, 133
Santander, 3
Sare, 67
Sarrasquette, Chdteau of, 157
Sauveterre, 94, 98, 99, 156
the church, 96
legend of Sancie, 97
Sea-fighting, 60
Shipyards of the Nivelle, 61
Smuggling, 74
Socoa, 45
Point of, 64
Scmg of Roland, 173
Spain, 181
Spanish Basque Country, 172
Spanish guards, 74, 168, 181
South America, 178
Succession, customs of, 19
laws of, 18
rights of, 16
Sunday amusements, 166
Superstitions, Basque, 151
Tailoress, 178
Tardets, 21, loi, 160
Hotel des Pyr6n6es, 105
market day, loi
Tarsis, 6
Tolosa, 15
Tombstone inscriptions, 42, 43
Tongue, the Basque, 21
Toulouse Museum, 9
Tour d'Auvergne, 14
Town, Roman, 28
Treaty of Cambrai, 48
" Tree of Guernica," 13
Trinquet, 186
Trois Couronnes, 64, 66
Trufadec, 151, 152
Tubal, 6
Turanians, 6
Uhart, 145
Uhart-Cize, 136, 145, 166
Uhartia, Height of, 76
Umbrellas, 176
196
Index
United States, 177
Urepel, 182
Urrugne, 65
Ustaritz, 14, 187
Val Carlos, 167, 168, 169, 171
the Fonda Marcellino, 168
Vandals, 10
Vauban, 33
Velasquez, 84
Venta Gorosgaray, the, 170
Verse, legends in, 36
Villa Eugenie, 37
Vin de Jurangon, 89
Virgin of Lourdes, 158
Virgin's Flower, the, 174
Vittoria, 4
Witchcraft, 77
Yaun Giocoa, 8
Zaspiak-bat, 4, 81
V-^s
Printed by Hazell, Watson &■ Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury.
GOLDEN DAYS
FROM THE FISHING LOG OF A PAINTER IN
BRITTANY
ROMILLY FEDDEN
Large crown Svo, with a frontispiece from a pencil drawing.
Price 7/6 net ; by post 8/3
WHAT THE PRESS SAYS
"Here is a book full of quiet charm and humour, written by one who
is evidently not only an artist and a sportsman, but also a true lover and
' observer of Nature and her ways. The angler will be fascinated by the vivid
descriptions of trout and salmon-iishing in Brittany." — Nature.
"Mr. Fedden has the eye of the painter, and he can paint with his pen.
Nor is his skill confined to landscape. He gives us remarkable portraits
also, inspired not only by the outward features of his sitters, but also by the
souls that look out of their eyes, souls that have grown and developed in a
land where ancient mysteries have never died, l^an and the Little People
are not forgotten in Brittany. . . . The book does not profess to be a guide to
Breton trout streams, but it gives a good deal of information, chiefly by a
process of careful warning." — The Field.
"Fishermen will put Mr. Romilly Fedden's 'Golden Days' on their
shelves to be taken down often and dipped into. Others will find interest
in it besides fishing. . . . He writes about the country with a painter's eye,
and about the people with the pen of a connoisseur in character." — Daily
Mail.
" Mr. Fedden writes extraordinarily well, and many of his touches of
description are more than happy. . . . The book is so full of humanity that,
to adapt the immortal phrase of Isaac Walton, it could have been written ' only
by an angler or a very honest man.' " — Guardian.
" . . .as good a book of essays on Brittany and fly fishing as one is likely
to meet." — Everyman.
" Mr. Fedden's book will delight anglers and many folk who have never
wet a line." — Spectator.
"'Golden Days in Brittany' is a book which combines the peculiar
charm of angling with appreciation of scenery and a shrewd insight into the
character of a remarkable race like the Bretons. . . . Mr. Fedden's book is
much more than a fishing log, yet the fishing stories are full of interest and
practical hints to fishermen. Altogether, a most delightful book." — Ladies'
Field.
Published by A. & C. BLACK, Ltd., 4, 5 & 6 SoHO Squark, London, W.i
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