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THE ROMANTIC
ROUSSILLON: in
the French Pyrenees
By Isabel Savory, with
twenty-six plates and a map from
drawings by M. Landseer MacKenzie
LONDON : T. FISHER UNWIN, LTD.
ADELPH1 TERRACE, W.C;
First published in
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Novissimarum rerum fngaces pulchritudines, earumque suavi-
tates. SAINT AUGUSTINE.
(Les beautes fugitives des choses qui se rev&ent pour la premiere
fois, et leur douceur.)
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
SALSES THE VENDANGE
CHAPTER II
THE FORT AT SALSES LA SALANQUE THE CORBIERES
OPOUL PERILLOS ...... . IO
CHAPTER III
THE VALLEY OF THE AGLI ESTAGEL TAUTAVEL FORCA
REAL QUERIBUS COUCHOUS ..... 3 2
CHAPTER IV
THE GORGES OF THE AGLI PIERREPERTUSE LE VIV1ER
SOURNIA . . . ... - -44
CHAPTER V
THE LOWER TET VALLEY ILLE-SUR-TET CHATEAU OF
CORBERE ........ 54
CHAPTER VI
SAINT MARTIN DE CANIGOU VERNET-LES-BAINS COR-
NEILLA PLA DE GUILLEM THE ASCENT OF CANIGOU 64
CHAPTER VII
THE UPPER TET VILLEFRANCHE OLETTE MANTET CANA-
VEILLES THUES THE LAKES OF NOHEDES . . 87
vii
CONTENTS viii
CHAPTER VIII
PACK
ELNE PERPIGNAN CASTEL ROSSELLO THE TRAMONTANE 98
CHAPTER IX
COLLIOURE PORT VENDRES THE ALBERES BANYULS
LES ABEILLES VALLBONA 109
CHAPTER X
THE TECH VALLEY AMELIE-LES-BAINS LE BOULOU LE
PERTHUS MAS DE"u CERET ST. GENIS-DES-FONTAINES 128
CHAPTER XI
THE TRABUCAYRES LAS ILLAS 148
CHAPTER XII
PRATS DE MOLLO A RIDE TO CAMPRODON HERMITAGE OF
ST. GUILLEM THE SOURCE OF THE TECH NOTRE-DAME-
DEL-CORAL 156
CHAPTER XIII
THE ASPRES MOUNTAINS SERRABONA CASTELLNOU VEL-
MANYA LA TRINITE 171
CHAPTER XIV
PRADES SAINT-MICHEL-DE-CUXA COL DE JAU . . 189
CHAPTER XV
THE CERDAGNE MONT LOUIS COL DE PERCHE PLANES
FONT ROMEU FORMIGUERES SOURCE OF THE TET
REPUBLIC OF LIVIA PUIGCERDA .... 20O
NOTES FOR TRAVELLERS 213
ILLUSTRATIONS
PLATK
I. DETAIL OF PRONAOS, ABBEY OF SERRABONA P,,Htpi#*
r&cnrc PACE
II. GATEWAY, FORT AT SALSES . 4 . .12
OUTER WALLS, FORT AT SALSES . . . 12
III. CHATEAU DE QUERIBUS .... 36
IV. CRUCIFIX (WOOD), CHURCH AT ESTAGEL . . 40
V. DETAIL (WOOD), SIDE CHAPEL AT ESTAGEL . 42
vi. PULPIT (PLASTER), CHURCH AT ST. PAUL DE
FENOUILLET . . . . . . 44
BAS-RELIEF (PLASTER), CHURCH AT ST. PAUL DE
FENOUILLET . ... . -44
VII. MANTELPIECE, CHATEAU DE SOURNIA . . 52
viii. HERMIT'S ROOM, N.D. DE CASAS DE PENE . 54
IX. LES ENAMORATS, STREET AT ILLE-SUR-TET . 56
X. RUBBING OF INSCRIPTION AT THE HOSPITAL,
ILLE-SUR-TET ... . . 5&
XI. CRUCIFIX (WOOD), CHAPEL OF CHATEAU DE
CORBERE 62
XII. TYMPANUM, CHURCH AT CORNEILLA . 66
XIII. MADONNA (MARBLE), CHURCH AT CORNEILLA . 68
XIV. MADONNA (WOOD), CHURCH AT CORNEILLA . 70
ILLUSTRATIONS x
PIAT* FACING PACK
XV. DETAIL OF ARCHWAY, CHURCH AT VILLE-
FRANCHE 88
XVI. THE HARBOUR AT COLLIOURE . . . .114
XVII. SCULPTURE, BUILT INTO OUTER WALL, ABBEY
OF ARLES-SUR-TECH 130
XVIII. TYMPANUM, ABBEY OF ARLES-SUR-TECH . .132
XIX. FRESCO PAINTINGS, CHAPEL AT LE BOULOU . 136
XX. FOUNTAIN, MARKET-PLACE AT CERET . . 142
XXI. LINTEL, CHURCH AT ST. GENIS-DES-FONTAINES 144
LINTEL, CHURCH AT ST. ANDRE . . . 144
XXII. CRUCIFIX (WOOD), CHAPEL OF LA TRINITE,
ASPRES 176
XXIII. PILASTER, ABBEY OF SERRABONA . . .182
XXFV. PILASTER, ABBEY OF SERRABONA . . .184
XXV. CAPITALS, ABBEY OF SERRABONA . . . 1 86
XXVI. DETAIL OF ARCHWAY, ABBEY OF ST. MICHEL-DE-
CUXA 196
MAP . . AT END OF BOOK
WORKS CONSULTED
ALART (Bernard- Julien), Suppression de 1'Ordre du Temple en
Roussillon (Perpignan, Ch. Latrobe, 1867, in 8vo).
BRUT AILS (J. A.), Notes sur 1'Art religieux du Roussillon, dans
le Bulletin archeologique du comite des travaux historiques
et scientifiques du ministere de 1'Instruction publique, 1892
(n4eti8 9 3, n 3 ).
CHAUVET (Horace), Folk-lore Catalan, Legendes du Roussillon
(Perpignan, Imprimerie de 1'Independant, 1899, in 8vo).
GAZANYOLA (Jean de), Histoire du Roussillon (Perpignan, JL B,
Alzine, 1857, in 8vo).
HENRY (D. M. J.), Histoire de Roussillon comprenant 1' Histoire
du royaume de Majorque (Paris, a rimprimerie royale,
1835, 2 vols. in 8vo).
MERIMEE (Prosper), Notes d'un voyage dans le Midi de la France
(Paris, Fournier, 1835, in 8vo).
RATHEAU (A.), Monographic du Chateau de Salses (Paris, Ch.
Tanera, 1860, gr. in 4to).
ROLLAT (1'Abbe), Saint Vincent de Collioure et son culte dans sa
paroisse natale (Perpignan, J. Comet, 1885, in 8vo).
SERISIAT (le docteur) et SOULIER (P.), Collioure et ses environs,
1902 (s.n. d'impr. et s.n. de 1., in 8vo).
THOMAS (Romain), La Route du retour : Poemes (Paris, Grasset,
1912, in i8mo).
VIDAL (Pierre), Guide Historique et Pittoresque dans le Dept.
des Pyrenees Orientales, 1879 (Perpignan, Merer, in I2mo).
VIDAL (Pierre), Histoire de la Ville de Perpignan depuis les ori-
gines jusqu'au traite des Pyrenees (Paris, H. Welter, 1897,
in 8vo).
VIDAL (Pierre) et CALMETTE (Joseph), Le Roussillon, fait partie
des publications de la Revue de Synthese historique (Paris,
Leopold Cerf, 1909, in 8vo).
VIDAL (Pierre), La citadelle de Perpignan et 1'ancien Chateau des
rois de Majorque (Perpignan, Barrire et Cie, 1911, in 8vo)
VIROS (H.j, Conference sur les Trabucayres (Perpignan, Im-
primerie de 1'Independant, 1898, in 8vo).
xii
CHAPTER I
SALSES THE VENDANGE
ONE had always thought that France where
it belongs to the Mediterranean and merges
into Spain, down in the far corner south
of Provence, must be a country to explore. There
would be much of it unknown to travellers and yet
it is within thirty hours' journey from London.
The other end of the Pyrenees on the Bay of
Biscay suggested cold winds and gilded casinos and
golf : whereas away where the mountain wall peters
out into the Mediterranean the little fishing towns
and villages had unfamiliar names, vision names such
as Port Vendres and over into Spain, Rosas, on the
Bay of Rosas ; names with the sun in them.
One guessed at crumbling walls round the towns,
at look-out towers and castles on the hills. It was
clearly a country left to itself, where a rhythmic
tenor of life would carry on from century to century,
and the people and the land suffice for each other.
i
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 2
Up against the Pyrenees, a mere fringe of France,
it would if anything get Spain into its blood : and
Spain stands for a sort of enchantment. For the
rest, one thought of it as light and shimmering in
heat.
It was early in the autumn that we first came to
grips with this country by the Mediterranean, whose
old name is the Roussillon. In the course of ten
months we walked over most of it. It is about
seventy-five miles long and less than forty wide.
In ten months we pricked many bubbles. The
little fortified city that had made history proved to
be decorously dull : the Catalan dances were never
danced : the niches of the carved wooden virgins
we set out to see were empty : the fete days we
waited for, when they came, hung heavily on hand :
the Catalan people frayed the temper : a wind tore
the earth every three days out of five : and in
January there was snow.
I hold no brief for the Roussillon. But if it chose
mostly to tumble our illusions, it also chose to give
shows of its own. It could be prodigal then with a
sort of defiance. And if it was capricious, it was
never obvious. It did not deal in startling effects
nor lend itself to startling descriptions. Perhaps
that is why tourists do not trouble about it : not
theirs, but a few dreams of its own it holds : for the
sake of these it is less easily forgotten.
September. The railway line had run from Nar-
bonne southwards close to the Mediterranean all the
3 THE ROAD IN
way, upon a No Man's Land : stretches of shore half
seaweed and shaggy grass, half salt pools : stretches
of yellower grass off which the sea had slipped bit
by bit, century after century, leaving here and there
a lagoon or level lines of sandy waste where in the
time of the Romans was open sea.
Coming along in the train in the evening the
setting sun turned the seaweed flats into an orange
desert.
On the other side of the line, stark grey moun-
tains the Corbieres were so close that only the
narrowest strip of flats gave a footing to the railway
and the white road. We were edging between the
Corbieres and the Mediterranean : then came a point
where the mountains sent a spur to meet the sea,
where it seemed impossible to pass : we squeezed
round and we were in the Roussillon. One more
short stretch of rail and the train pulled up at a
little station called Salses.
The people in the train had been talking Catalan
amongst themselves : France in a sense was left ;
this was another country. We got out and stood
on the platform in the twilight. Somebody had told
us of an inn in Salses. We walked after a porter
with our luggage ; and solid-built houses loomed up
in the darkness with a wide street seeming to lie
between, and a sense about it of the quiet of village
life and the halt at the end of the day. Good after
the long journey and the bustle of towns. The even-
ing seemed smelling of something acrid and clean, a
rare tonic smell, wine ? Something, too, burning
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 4
that was scented. In the dimness great arched door-
ways gave to half-lighted interiors, vast places where
shadows flitted by meagre candlelight, men busy at
work ; the vintage ? And where giant barrels rose
up in the darkness. At every corner of the narrower
streets more of these candle-lit " caves," and that
acrid smell : no one talking much, just the phantom
figures and the feeble flare. And carts came creaking
behind us with last loads from the vineyards : we
need not have been afraid that we should be too late
for the " Vendange."
We stumbled across goats, shaggy brown goats and
white goats ghostly in the half light, each waiting
outside her house to be let in. We heard the tap of
horned feet and felt them coming in twos and threes
and vanishing down side streets.
Then in all the smell of the wine and the quiet
and the darkness we stopped at the door of a house.
Presently we were climbing a great stone staircase
inside, and again there was the burning, aromatic-
wood scent.
The big rooms that shadowed out beyond the
guttering candle would surely suit us : great spaces
of tiled floors, long shuttered windows at the far
end. In the darkness and the strangeness it was
all more suggestion than certainty, but it felt to be
something of what we wanted.
I remember how we had to go down to the little
kitchen and half explain ourselves, only that the
cooking of dinner began, and in the room opposite
the result of that came to us according to the pace
5 VILLAGE LIFE
at which the fire cooked. And when we were sleepy
it transpired that the beds were not yet made, so
vaguely did things seem to oscillate without any
measured beat or plan. Just as we had committed
ourselves to Salses at random, so things in the Inn
never leaned on anything but a whim of the moment :
it was not a clock-ridden world.
There did not seem much sleep that first night,
the church bell declared every quarter of an hour
with a querulous dissatisfaction : before five o'clock
in the morning a harsh reveille rang from the belfry
and a quick sound of pattering feet brought us to
the windows where dawn was breaking clear over a
square "Place" planted with plane trees. Under
a pink and blue sky hurrying figures were setting off
for the vineyards : the day had begun. By breakfast-
time wheels sounded, and henceforth until dusk
grapes poured into Salses and a procession of empty
carts rumbled back to the fields, curving horns in
the distance, sheepskins nodding and swinging, brass
flashing on the harness of the great, wide-chested
horses ; the bravest show.
Across the " Place " goats began to wander, singly
and little groups, no goat-herd to be seen, collecting
themselves before going out to feed. They sauntered
casually, stopping round the planes to butt each
other and pivot on their hind legs, to pick up stray
grapes, but they all disappeared in time round the
same corner.
It was when we were leaning out of one of the
windows that we first saw Canigou, distant, in the
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 6
north-west : a blue mountain standing up alone
with its first whitening, towards the top, of early
snow. One thought of it as a high priest over the
land in some faint white vestment. It never after-
wards quite lost that connection of itself with the
country as a sort of medium and officiate.
But the moment was calling us down and out :
the vintage was in the air, irresistible. Almost every
other building we passed was a " cave " ; comportes
with their wooden handles, that are like goats' ears,
stood stacked against the houses, or passed loaded
with black grapes, or swung full of grapes on wind-
lasses to upper floors ; men with bare feet and legs
stained red with wine wandered along the street ;
red juice ran in the gutters. A few minutes' walk
and the village was left behind ; we were out in the
open ; acres and acres of vines stretched at our feet
and away over all the miles between Salses and the
sea, flat as a green carpet. Near at hand lines of
figures were stooping amongst the vines, a man with
a white umbrella stood looking on, and carts were
waiting. We made for the spot. Grapes at last :
blue grapes, blue as the sky, and some of the thick
leaves a rusty red of autumn, wine-coloured leaves.
The sun poured down on the men and women snip-
ping off the bunches and tossing them into baskets :
their clothes, drenched in the early morning dew, were
sun-dried enough now. They worked over the vine-
yard, so many locusts, up to the waists in green.
We wandered into other vineyards till the flare
of sun got too strong, and we made for an oasis of
7 THE GARDENS
willows and low fruit trees that comes almost to the
walls of the village on one side, and exists by reason
of a stream from the Corbieres.
These are the gardens of Salses, where fruits and
vegetables need no gardening, green jungles of fig-
trees, peaches, pears, almonds, battening in fat soil,
fenced in with tall reed fences, and great ditches full
of water, and a door set in each fence, locked. Some-
thing about the reed fences and the locked door
always reminded me of the Moors' gardens outside
their little cities in Morocco, where, noon over, they
used to forget intrigue and shopkeeping, and seal
out in the open the secret of their lives.
Few people seemed to work in the Salses gardens :
things were left to grow in silence and the owners
came and helped themselves. They dawdled back
with baskets full, along the foot-paths that separated
the precious holdings and ran at right angles to
them, so that one found oneself in a sort of maze,
the same paths flanked by the same green dykes
and reed fences, the plank across, the locked
door.
One woman came out of a door and, stopping by
our shady willow to talk, gave us a branch with
bunches of white muscats from her plot. She had
green figs in her basket for the Perpignan market.
We found figs for ourselves on little trees that leaned
over the paths ; and made our first lunch out of doors
with bread and cheese. And for all the months that
we were in the Roussillon we never but once or
twice lunched except under the sky.
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 8
Salses in the heat, stretched in front of us, a line
of stone houses and flattish red-tiled roofs, the little
seventeenth-century church belfry topping the line.
Away in the haze Canigou was an insubstantial
manifestation. Behind Salses came, close, the range
of the Corbieres that shut out France. One saw
those hills then only as pitilessly bleak, unwinking
in the sun, a stony glare. They could wait it was
the village, close, that attracted : the vortex that
had got such a drag on the fields all round us :
one was bound to be pulled in. We were there, in
the "caves" themselves later that afternoon,
made free of any place, as we passed, lingering.
No Co-operative Companies and machinery here. It
is still wine-making by small landowners, and they
still tread their grapes. Treading was going on, not
with any show, one or two men only, plunging half
way to their knees in the trough, wading in a shiny,
slippery mass, treading it with a light, springing
action, putting into it some of the life and joy that
the wine would give. From the trough went the
pulp into the great vat to bubble and seethe and
eddy for eight days. A squeezing of its brains for
the wine, and the eight days over, a pouring out
from the bottom of the vat of clear life. Somehow
or other the men at work seemed to answer to an
intimate demand that wine-making made on them :
it was almost as if it were a sort of sacrament at
which they officiated, the suggestion given was so
definitely a reverent feeling for the wine : themselves
part of the vintage, built up on it, saturated with
9 WIDE-AWAKE WINE
red wine, its tonic flavour in their very language,
virulent, direct.
That first day with all it had in it of heat and
work seemed to have resolved itself into hours of
idle glow. The twilight when it came moved to the
march home from the vineyards. There was singing
along the road, footsteps quick and quiet, some of
the labourers carried grapes, some went to hold
candles in the dark sheds half an hour's work more
to finish. The housewives must have gone straight
to start "potage" and "bouillabaisse," for wood
fires began to send up their scent, Salses burning
incense to its yearly rite. The goats had wandered
home : the big flock soon dispersed itself : and
waited, singly. A general idea of evening meal
brought us back to the Inn, back to a Prodigal Son's
welcome. Where had we been and what had we
been doing and what would we eat ?
Brown "potage" with vermicelli; an omelette,
haricot beans, tomatoes, there was more besides,
and the day came to an end, we were folded like the
goats, asleep in an atmosphere of wide-awake wine,
working and bubbling all over Salses.
CHAPTER II
THE FORT AT SALSES LA SALANQUE THE CORBIERES OPOUL
PERILLOS
IT was a white road that led away out of the
Roussillon, fringed sometimes with tamarisk,
sometimes with almond trees ; but the most
beautiful trees were small silver poplars shaking
white leaves against the blue sky, whose bark bore
strange marks that seemed like Egyptian eyes. The
shadows in the road were blue : a distant cloud of
dust was blue : the wind beat the salt lake on our
right into a turmoil of waves, wine-coloured, dark.
The limestone quarries in the Corbieres showed an
orange red wherever the grey stone had been exposed
so many wounds red rents that suggested the
red heart of the Roussillon and made the bon cceur
of the people seem a gift of the red land.
The road we walked, that pointed on and on
ahead, led to the source of salt water that gave
Salses its name (the Romans knew it as Fons Salsulae,
source of salt water) . This Roman road, made about
two thousand years ago, must be much where it was
when the Couriers from Rome, riding by the Via
Domitia, came through Marseilles and Narbonne,
and made of Salses one of their posting stations,
10
ii THE FORT
halting there and finding relays. When it came to
Salses, the road that has been edging its way into
the country between mountains and Mediterranean
shakes free of both. The Corbieres trend west, the
coast line bends south, and between them both opens
out the wide vineyard Plain across which the road
goes ahead like a white score.
The spot to defend the Plain and to guard the
road was obviously where this last had no play on
either side. That determined Salses. It came to
lie in the gateway of the narrow passage, holding
the key to the Plain, the only key because no in-
vading army was going to struggle over the Cor-
bieres, where were the roads ? Salses was on the
only practicable road. This was the meaning of the
Giant that lies just off the village, watchful, a Fort
that links up with the Roman Castrum whose duties
it took over. The Fort looks across the little rocky
hillock crowned by a few stunted wrecks of wind-
swept fir trees where, levelled in the sun, we found
old foundations, imperishable Roman mortar still
holding good.
One dimly guessed that Salses had a great hand
in making the history of the Roussillon, this " Gate "
that alternately barred civilization or admitted it,
turned the tide of invasion or was itself broken ;
but after all it was later, the time of Ferdinand and
Isabella, that this present Fort was built. Those
rose-coloured walls belong to the romance of Spain,
Spanish inscrutability comes into their blank secrecy,
the genius Ramirez to whom they owe their exist-
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 12
ence had perhaps a legacy of the Moor, the Arab, in
his veins. One wonders. One goes back to the bare
facts recorded, facts that tell one perhaps drily, but
at least something ; the walls are the poignant recor
after all.
They stand, to begin with, for a great necessity.
Ferdinand had grasped the fact that if he was to
keep the Roussillon he must have an impregnable
fortress at its gate. He had got before him the
warning of the invasion of Louis XI, when the old
Castle at Salses delayed 22,000 French troops, but
fell in the end, and could not save Perpignan. He
had a double warning, for his own patching up of
the Castle was useless, and it was but by the skin
of his teeth that he saved the Roussillon from falling
a second time into the hands of the French. After
that, no half measures. Ramirez' Fort was built
to supply a need that it has supplied ever since.
At the same time, it had a new emergency to meet
imposed by the march of events, imposed by the
invention of gunpowder. Ramirez' architectural
plan figures gunpowder. Constantinople fell prob-
ably before he was born, and firearms were in use
before that, though the Roussillon was slow to
adopt them : the problem he had before him was
to make the defence stronger than the attack. He
must have seen the old castles, such as Queribus,
about as useful as a house of cards against gun-
powder. He solved the problem as it stood then.
His Fort ought to be precious because it marks an
epoch, it was an original essay. It may be called
GATEWAY, FORT AT SALSES.
OUTER WALLS, FORT AT SALSES.
[12
I 3 THE BUILDER OF THE FORT
tentative, but fortifications have copied, learnt
lessons from it, and profited by its faults.
Vauban himself could not much improve on it.
He pigeon-holed a memorandum once to put it in
order, or, as he ironically wrote, to repair the pin-
pricks which the cannon made on these mighty walls,
so little effect had they.
Ramirez had not quite finished his work when the
French, as Ferdinand had foreseen, appeared in force
to rush the gate of the Roussillon. The Fort was
then and there hastily garrisoned, its command was
given to Don Sancho of Castille, and Ramirez him-
self threw in his lot with the garrison, to see how
his work stood, to test his theories.
He must have watched the French start to dig
trenches and mount their guns so close to the Fort
that to-day it makes one smile. The Spaniards
inside the Fort were puzzled to see troops entrench
themselves this was not the proud tradition of
warfare that scorns cover and they shouted de-
risively at a cowardly enemy who stooped so low,
from fear, they cried.
One thinks of a battlefield to-day, empty, not a
living sign, and the myriads of unseen men down
in their burrows.
Ramirez' own instinct had been to build low,
to build out in the open and on the flat. He must
have learnt many other things that first siege ; the
Fort was heavily bombarded and Perpignan seems
to have been able to do nothing as far as coming
to the rescue goes. Ferdinand happened to be in
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 14
Spain, in Gerona. He hurried across the Alberes,
but with an army hastily raised and marching light
dared not make a frontal attack ; the wiser course
was to follow the passes of the Corbieres and getting
round the French to cut off their base : the manoeuvre
succeeded. The result of it all was peace between
France and Spain for a time : the Fort had justified
its existence : one sees Ramirez finishing his work,
correcting, altering a little perhaps, and leaving it
at that just as we see it to-day.
One walks round the huge fosses, stares down into
them, and across at the great walls that, as far as
building can, look as though they might stand for
eternity. And the last big fight that they ever saw,
one thinks of that. Of Richelieu, waiting at Nar-
bonne, like a spider with an eye on his web of in^
trigue, for news to come along that white road from
Salses the Fort fallen at last -the Roussillon at the
mercy of the French. He must have chuckled when
the Governor was tempted by 50,000 ducats and
fell ; though want of food and a feeble garrison may
have equally accounted for his surrendering the Fort.
Richelieu must have thought better of his laugh
when the Spanish army came up and camped outside
Salses, cutting off the Plain ; he must have felt his
star had set when he heard of a French garrison
this time locked up in Salses and besieged by Spanish
troops. One guesses at his mortification as time
went on, reading the bitter little comment, " they
have put in this place either too many men to defend
it, or too little food for them to subsist upon."
I 5 A BITTER MOMENT
We could form some faint idea of the sort of time
those "too many" Frenchmen 3,000 of them
must have had. Nobody would have foreseen four
months of it, no commissariat would have been
organized to meet that. The spring we found,
welling up in the north corner, could have flooded
the place out, but nothing else than water can the
garrison have tasted in abundance.
The great square court in the middle of the Fort
must have clanked with feet in those days : all the
grass would have worn off it, the fig-trees would be
no good to starving men in the winter, they and the
acacias, if they grew then, would go as firewood.
And the well with the pink Eastern-looking dome
would mock men who died from want of bread.
And instead of the deathly silence now, of the great
walls round the courtyard, they must have hummed
then like a hive, hundreds of Frenchmen in the long
tunnel-shaped rooms dark under the barrel vaults,
and 300 horses down in the underground stables.
It must have been a forlorn hope for them all
every time they got on to the top of the walls and
saw 30,000 and more Spaniards entrenched around.
The gallant French band who died in the outer
work that covers the great gateway, rather than
retire, probably welcomed that finish.
Odd to think of the Spaniards cursing Ramirez'
genius, but it must have been so : they carried the
outer work, a couple of drawbridges, and forced the
elbow passage, but no further Ramirez had seen
to that. Even if they had carried the last fosse
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 16
and the gateway, there would have been the towers,
and each of them could be held separately. For the
most part they probably sat behind their earth-
works, earthworks which their forefathers had scoffed
at : to come out into the open was little temptation,
the depth of the fosses would make scaling work
impossible, walls thirty-six feet thick could not be
breached, and they were so built that from any point
underneath them an attacking force would be in
the line of enemies' fire.
The wintry weather was not kind to the Spaniards
either, the sort of deluge we saw in September
literally drowned them out of their trenches, roads
were impassable, provisions never came, the Etang
bred fever amongst them, they died in hundreds.
But if the Spaniards suffered, the plucky garrison
must have gone through untold misery. It was
nothing but starvation that brought the defence at
last to an end and the garrison marched out. Once
more Salses was not taken but surrendered.
The Fort had nearly earned its rest then. One
more siege, the last, this time the Spaniards starved
out, and R.I. P. might have been written ; its fighting
life was over.
Richelieu must have passed triumphantly under
the walls, in his gorgeous litter that was carried from
Nar bonne to Perpignan, perhaps halted there for
the night. He need not have owed the Fort a grudge
once his end was arrived at and the Roussillon
handed over to France, but they say he was only
prevented from razing it to the ground by the
17 THE WILL TO LIVE
Marechal de Schomberg, who pointed out its necessity
as a link between Narbonne and Perpignan.
If it could celebrate a victory over Richelieu, it
could well survive destruction at lesser hands,
though one trembles to think it only narrowly
escaped, and wonders how it eluded Vauban's later
sentence against it, or again, years after, evaded the
mandate of a War Office disinclined to spend money
on repairs. It had its narrowest escape when the
despatch ordering its complete demolition, the sort
of mine to choose, the placing of the mines, the price
to be paid the engineers, was actually upon paper,
the paper despatched. Why the counter-order
arrived with a reprimand is not explained. The Fort
cannot have been meant to perish. They could not
get further than selling all the removable effects, a
hundred years ago. They found that to destroy
the building itself would cost too much : and here
one seems to get at the reason of its survival.
Ramirez built too well : too much of the " will to
live" got put into the mass of his building for any
ill-will of the future to affect it.
We sat near it in the evening, Ramirez' long, low,
wicked -looking building, silent, inscrutable, and
ablaze with colour. Wherever the sun has not burnt
nor the rain beat, the stone is the orange-red of the
original quarrying : wherever the grey weathering
has not come there are these stains of saffron and
orange, stains of rose. The grey is pale, full of light :
the rose and the saffron are full of light, so that
sometimes the blank walls, the minarets, seem half
2
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 18
visionary : but that evening the Fort was like an
opulent poppy sucking up sunlight, as if it were
blood, and soaking itself in blood more and more as
the evening lengthened, until at sunset it burned.
The walls, rounded at the top, that cannon ball
should ricochet, looked like mammoth bolsters : a
waggon might have been driven on top. Wandering
upon the prodigious curve of them, one had felt the
stirring influence of gigantic building, the purpose-
ful witness of it, itself the actual thing with all its
meaning and aims.
At the end of the walls came the bastions like
four giant drums in stone rising out of the fosse:
and because quite half the height of the Fort is
sunk in the fosse, it would never be the target for
an enemy that Vauban's forts, built 150 years later,
were. Ramirez' lines are beautiful. Vauban's are
not. Vauban built high and he put a great slant
back on his walls, so that, though they look to stand
firm, they seem preparing for a shock. Whereas
Ramirez' walls have no fear. He built them, it is
true, from the bottom of the fosse up to ground-level
with a great batter on them a heavy footing but
above the level of the top of the fosse they rise as
straight as a plumb-line, and it was only the upright
walls we could see where we sat. Upright they
looked, but to so satisfy the eye a certain entasis
must have been given them.
Ramirez had the strongest feeling for a curve. A
living curve that never sags. The sweep of the
" drums " give that : and the rounded towers either
i 9 WALK TO THE SEA
side of the great gateway, towers like shoulders set
a little back, give it too : it is vital building.
When the sun had gone, the Fort forgot to be a
poppy, its long, low walls paled and faded into the
Corbieres behind. It was all theirs, bone of their
bone : it had inherited their level enduring lines
even if it did break into a minaret. It meant to last.
It meant to glow under the sun together with its
hills for an indefinite number of years.
We did many wanders at Salses. One, a long tramp
to Barcarres, a shadeless, dusty tramp across the
Plain where it is called " la Salanque," from
sel, salt, because it was once sea. The vines
in the Salanque have a stodgy over-fed look :
banished all the vine romance : gross, planted
precise, undeviating the endless rows so many
" roots" almost, near the road stiff and grey with
dust. Dust and grapes. Too fleshy they were,
yielding a small percentage of alcohol compared with
the grapes on the hills, but yielding a prodigious crop :
soulless grapes. The vineyards of white muscats,
the famous " macabeu," of Salses and the Salanque,
are gone for ever. No more of that liqueur since the
Phylloxera came. Looking at the vines now, settled
for a fat lifetime, the ruin of 1874 seems impossible,
every vine dead, vine-growers dead, starved, emi-
grated ; Salses lopped to half its original size,
other villages reduced to ruins. We had passed
Saint e-Colombe on the road, now a little tumble-
down, colour-stained, jumble of houses. We had
left Garrius on the left-hand : a few bones of it come
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 20
out of the sand near the salt lake, that is all, and
Garrius was Roman, must have been 2,000 years
old at least. One began half to guess at what the
Phylloxera had done. La Salanque to-day forgets
all that. The acres of rich salts-of-potash soil that
had belonged to the sea are covered now by an inter-
loper, a new green sea, the vine, and the present
vine laughs at the Phylloxera because it relies upon
the American plant that the Phylloxera will not
damage, and only has grafted upon it later the
susceptible vine of old days, the Asian vine. The
result is a success. La Salanque exudes grapes : it
goes in for Companies and machinery, it pours itself
out in endless strings of goods' trains that are like
nothing but vast barrels of wine upon wheels.
You would suspect the grape in La Salanque to
be too well done, to be prone to disease, and we saw
it on all sides doctored, sprayed with sulphate of
copper, the leaves stained blue, or powdered yellow
with sulphur, anything to fight its weaknesses. The
talk about it was as much of blight and worm as of
wine. Vineyards had become a sort of speculation ;
money running out in labour and in insect destroyer
almost as fast as it came in. La Salanque was a
very material world : if not representing a sordid
struggle, it showed rather a sordid satisfaction. The
big village we came to of Saint-Laurent, twice the
size of Salses, had all the character of dull prosperity
and attendant fatigue, the best of it played out in
money making.
Not much lingering for us in that village : one
2i THE DESERTED FISHING VILLAGE
more hot lap of road and then the sea was close.
Still the vine, nothing but the vine, insistent, even
swallowing the light sand of the Mediterranean in
its greed over land. We pressed through the furthest
outposts of wiry branches : we stood where the
waves had beaten it at last.
The vine with its feet almost in the waves : red
wine and the blue Mediterranean so nearly mixed :
the full-blooded dependable earth up against the
glassy waters of mutability.
We had come out upon the shore where the river
Agli sluggishly finds the sea, finishes with its wide
shallow channel through the vineyards. It has
grown sleepy here in the plain, half hidden under its
banks of tall yellow reeds, and it deposits a tribute
of pale sand, lazily, that silts up on the floor of the
Mediterranean.
There was no tide. Away from the Agli the same
little wave broke on the same edge, an edge that
went down steep, deep, instantly. There was Bar-
carres, a little way from the river. A white line of
fishermen's houses and a row of boats drawn up
between the houses and the sea. But Barcarres had
none of the prosperity of the vineyards : it was on the
losing side. Women were walking on the seashore,
but they were carrying baskets of grapes on their
heads, not fish. Barcarres is losing its trade and the
sea is losing ground, but the vine presses on.
It is looking back from the Etang that the Castle
of Opoul shows itself remote in the Corbieres. At
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 22
that distance, with its flat top, it might be a world's
altar raised upon the mountains, the colour of it
magical, shadows of a bodiless ether-blue and a
startling lightness of grey stone : the solidity and the
buttress way of its cliffs could not make it less
legendary.
We crossed the Roman road and the railway line,
left the Fort to the right and followed a stony track
up on to the Corbieres by a line of telegraph poles.
Till the climb began, the vines were with us, and
at the edge of the path grew a few little wiry almond-
trees. Then higher, we rose to an open country. It
seemed another world. It was all light and sun
and rock. The lightest limestone, strangely pitted,
weathered into pock marks, cracked into fissures,
worn and bleached bones of the earth. Bones out
of the sea. Made at the bottom of the sea. One
felt the sea in the level lines, no peaks, in the worn,
scarified look. There was a tide of air sweeping
across that was like nothing we had known yet.
The sun had not got its way here as it gets it in the
Plain. It was light more than heat, light and the
air of clean heights. Nothing was growing except
rosemary and thyme and lavender : the life of the
Corbieres is bees : and as we walked, brushing
through the rosemary, one thought of the scent of
burning wood in Salses, roots and brushwood of
rosemary that brought the hills down into the village.
One remembered vaguely the great chocolate-coloured
heap of dried "finished" rosemary somewhere near
Salses, left after the essence has been distilled, when
23 CASTLE OF OPOUL
in May all the women have been up in the hills
gathering rosemary for perfume. These tracks we
kept getting on that never led anywhere, were rose-
mary tracks : right up on the heights they melted
away amongst the bushes and one was left in a great
openness, a grey-green wilderness. They were such
wide, misleading tracks to start with, drew one on,
whereas the little long-distance track did not inspire
confidence : it was months afterwards that it got
really understood by us.
We were on it for the present, in all its stoniness.
No wonder the Corbieres made a good north-east
frontier : a look-out tower or two and a castle near
the principal track were all that was wanted. The
Castle of Opoul was sentinel ; then there was Castell
Veil that we saw to our left, crumbling into a hill
it had once crowned, saying nothing, but it must
have watched another track that led up to Opoul,
and have acted the humble vassal to the fierce
suzerain.
Opoul at close distance resolved itself into a block
of limestone with a flat top big enough to hold more
than a castle and a village : the cliff edge all round
looked as if no one could get up. I remember best
the desolate grimness of it : this curious great frag-
ment lying on the tops of the hills, tossed up there
by elementary forces, left stranded.
We got up to the top, somehow ; traces of the old
way slant against the cliff, which has fossils jutting
out of the face of it. When we stood on the flat
expanse we were well out of reach of most things
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 24
except the wind. Opoul belongs to the wind : there
is not much linking of it up with human associations :
there is not much re-constructing of it as it must
have been. Stones and broken masonry and a few
underground vaulted spaces stand for a village, and
steep, torn walls and vast piles of d6bris mean the
castle. We found the fabulous cisterns, but the
wind rather forbade scrambling about. Opoul insists
on being left to itself, to its stunted bushes, its tufted
rosemary, its deathlike loneliness. You feel the
savagery of the elemental block of stone : you can
hear nothing but the screaming of the wind : the
two belong to each other. The humans who built
and battled up on the top were never meant to stay ;
Opoul has gone back to itself.
We struggled down under the castle walls into
brushwood that was rattled by the gale, and pushed
our way to the track. There was the modern village
of Opoul, below us in a little coloured basin in the
light stony country ; squares of green, red, yellow
and rusty-coloured vines, squares of ploughed ground,
the red Roussillon earth, red-pink-russet. It. all
worked into a soft, rich pattern, Eastern saddle-
cloths. And the pattern focussed into one point
under the hill we came down the rose-coloured,
pantiled roofs of Opoul village. Heading for the
village snaked three white roads, drawn sharp
and distinct across the chequered valley, coming
from far divergent points to join under the red
roofs. The coloured squares and the white roads
and the red roofs were beyond anything hard-cut
25 ELUSIVE PRILLOS
and clear. There was the precision of an old Flo-
rentine landscape: it only wanted knights riding
along the three roads.
Then one looked beyond the Corbieres and down
on to the Plain. That was still green only, the
saltest-looking green sea. And the Etang was a
bitter yellowish colour : one could taste the salt in
it. But the Mediterranean lined in the horizon with
an optimistic blue pencil.
Besides Opoul there was another place in the
Corbieres we were bound to see, right on the lip of
the frontier into France, away from everywhere, called
Perillos, and Salses was the best place to start from.
We got up early in the morning to defeat Perillos.
A malevolent spirit must have said No, for the first
thing that thwarted us was the outside door of our
rooms into the passage ; the key would not unlock
it. Rose came to the rescue ; we were to drop
her down the key out of the window, and she
and "Maman" and Monsieur would certainly
unfasten the door. They all came up, and if the
" spoken word" could have had an effect, it should
have flung itself open. But as it stayed callous, a
carpenter was fetched. The civilized efforts of two
carpenters were wasted on it : in the end brute force
set us free.
Then lunch for the knapsack was not ready. We
ought not to have expected it of " Maman " : not after
the door episode. But at last we were outside the
Inn, actually on the road, soon upon the rough track,
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 26
following the telegraph posts up and up and away
over the top to Opoul.
The village of Opoul left behind, we took the track
below it on the south side that snakes away in the
direction of Tautavel. For some time we trudged
its stony line across a grey rocky infinity stretching
to the horizon, then we dipped down a little and
came round a corner where the ground dropped to
a rivulet and vines were planted. More vines fol-
lowed, ending in a little rough stone house. We
lingered a moment outside the walls, and voices
tempted us to look in and ask how long it would
take to walk from there to Perillos. The answer was
ominous : " You are on the wrong track." " Which,
then, was the right track ? " " Oh ! the other side
of Opoul." " And how far ? " " Nine kilometres
from Opoul to Perillos." We turned back, what else
could one do ? We sat down and lunched, and we
settled that there was a certain foolishness in persist-
ing after an end obviously banned, that we were
never meant to get to Perillos, that there would be
no time to see the village if we ever got there, that
it would only be a waste of energy. In short we gave
Perillos up. We would amuse ourselves at Opoul
instead.
But the amusement seemed to take us to the
other side of the great crag close to the track we
should have followed in the morning ; we had the
track before us while we collected fossils in the lime-
stone cliff, digging out a fascinating fossil sea-urchin
in the side of a cave, where there was a spring, and
27 PERILLOS AT LAST
where goats evidently sheltered at night. We said
this was more interesting than pushing on to Perillos
and making a great effort. We sat down amongst
the thyme and rosemary.
Then, near the track that we sat staring at, a
shepherd moved up over the hill with a flock. We
made for him. "How many hours to P6rillos ?
Could we be there by three o'clock ? " " Yes. By
the short cut." We did not stop to talk it over,
just the direction and we were away. An old
woman whom we met later helped by showing
us another "traverse" that docked the distance.
She was looking after sheep, and she smiled as
she spoke. So few Catalans smile, and never at
strangers.
We went on, the same grey, stony country.
Finally the distance gave us Perillos, a little huddled
collection of houses, grey as the country, crowning
a small hill, topped by a church belfry and a ruin.
A smooth road led to Perillos, so the wayward one
ended by opening its arms to us : as a matter of fact,
not one village in the whole of the Roussillon received
us so much as a matter of course and with such
hospitality.
Perillos did not stare, nor rain questions on us.
"Maman" had described its utter remoteness by
saying that the people hid themselves at the sight
of strangers. In the light of experience we viewed
not unkindly the hiding habit : but " Maman " was
wrong. Two women volunteered to show us the
little old church built on to the castle ruin, with its
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 28
round cat hole cut in the door, and when we wan-
dered about the ruins we were undisturbed.
The Castle of Perillos was the last Aragonese in-
fluence in this toutermost corner of the Roussillon,
a sort of vestige of Court removed from the world
of gay Courts and of Spain, planted in a stony wilder-
ness guarding the French frontier. From the top
of the tower it could signal to Opoul, but that was
the only link with Aragon.
One may suppose Vicomte Raymond of Perillos
to have entertained Jean I, King of Aragon, at the
castle, thinking of the friendship that linked them
together in so close a manner. History records that
at the death of Jean I the devotion of Raymond led
to his undertaking the long pilgrimage from Perillos
to Saint Patrick's Well in Ireland, where it was
possible to gather tidings of the souls of the dead.
I think it must have been the women who showed
us the church that introduced the village school-
master an unique schoolmaster : he had seven chil-
dren to teach just then, and they were all his own.
I suppose the forty-seven inhabitants of Perillos had
no children of a teachable age.
We never counted so much at any Inn as at Salses :
we belonged to Monsieur and " Maman " and Made-
moiselle Rose, and they filled every gap for us, for
they ran the Inn by themselves. Monsieur used to
come in in the evenings, a quiet dignified old man,
and talk about shooting on the Etang and about his
time in the army in the eighteen-seventies his one
bit of real life, you could see. Mademoiselle Rose
29 THE VILLAGE CIRCUS
was always being proffered by " Maman" to take
us for walks : she was a sweet thing with a huge
interest in the English : she had got the most surface
streak of wilfulness that it amused her to assume,
and yet running with that a sort of indefiniteness
that understood no self-seeking.
Mademoiselle Rose came to the circus with us ;
she must have seen lots of circuses, but our curiosity
was fed looking down out of the windows at the
hauling up of the great mushroom tent in the
"Place" underneath: the plane trees got taken
inside and an old pump : then there were the cara-
vans, and the cooking going on outside them, and
the collection of odd horses, piebald cobs, tiny ponies.
The performance was dramatically billed for "One
Night Only," and we dragged Rose to it. All Salses
was crowded round the entrance ; the lady of the
circus sat at the receipt of customs ; performers
ready in scarlet and spangles hung inside the flap
of the tent. Salses made no move : not one of the
crowd took a ticket.
" Oh, they will stop on another day, of course,"
Rose said; " they always do, and the prices will
come down and then everyone will go."
I forget what the seats were some small sum
anyhow the flutes and the trumpets blew for nothing
that evening.
Next night the draughty tent did fill up and we
were part of a fair-sized audience hanging over space
on tiers of backless boards. It was a family-party
circus : the small children of the fat, good-natured
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 30
owner did their little turns under his supervision,
and one not as good as the rest wept. The jokes of
the clowns fell flat, the audience liked horseplay.
Rose herself was not often amused. Monsieur came
and sat behind us, took things with a prosaic leniency :
what did one expect, the performance was worth a
few sous : nobody was dissatisfied : they had got
their money's worth.
"Maman" had stayed behind in the kitchen.
Monsieur and Mademoiselle Rose still seem acces-
sories, almost shadows, where "Maman" so defi-
nitely was. It was her voice that most welcomed,
her presence that folded us : a voice of unusual
range, that with all its harsh rasp broke sometimes,
with the rarest timber, on a low note. Not only her
voice coupled her in imagination with the stage, she
had the temperament and the versatility. And re-
source : it happened that the Inn did not possess a
garden of its own, but if we wanted fruit she assured
us we had only to help ourselves from any garden,
any vineyard. Naturally we pillaged right and left.
They could never come again, those early days, and
one is grateful to " Maman " for her complete lulling
of our consciences. She must have had a Spanish
streak in her : she was Spanish in her " to-morrow."
Langouste ! How often she dangled a vision of sup-
ping upon Salmis de Langouste before us, how suppers
came and went and the vision never materialized.
The little discomforts of the house, its lack of the
most primitive arrangements, she so minimized,
passing them over with a wave of the hand, that
3i " MAMAN "
not to rise to an equally moral height of sublime
indifference was unthinkable.
She had a principle of keeping back unwelcome
intelligence until it was on the top of one. The room
I had called mine, I might find locked when I went
to bed, and with another occupant, my bed moved
out into our second room and my belongings any-
where but I was spared premature brooding.
The little dark kitchen where she thrust her pots
on the smouldering logs, the great draughty barn-
like room beyond, open to the street, where she
never seemed to do anything but talk to whoever
chose to look in, where the little green parrot that she
dearly loved huddled in its cage and the rabbits
fattened in their hutch, and the thin cats hunted
for scraps, and Sultan the pointer lay in the sun, and
the flies settled all this was " Maman."
It used to worry her that we would not lunch
indoors, nor risk omelettes and chops in the knap-
sack there was a daily risk, just as we started out,
of a hasty frying : the bread and cheese we stood
waiting for was the last thing in the world that she
ever thought of getting ready beforehand.
I think " Maman" really summed up Salses : the
essence of its wood scents clung more to her kitchen,
to the staircase of the Inn than anywhere else : the
protest of its church bell got a sort of echo in her
voice : and then she gave us the freedom of its
grapes. The grapes and the wine, the sun and the
casual life, weave themselves into a memory that
can never leave " Maman" out.
CHAPTER III
THE VALLEY OF THE AGLI ESTAGEL TAUTAVEL FOR^A REAL
QUERIBUS COUCHOUS
CTOBER. Before we left Salses, our stock of
maps came out with a view to making some
sort of plan of action. We meant to spend
all our time getting to know this little country of
the Roussillon. 1
Two-thirds of the Roussillon is mountains and
valley. The broad, cultivated Plain accounts for
less than a third.
Roads and little railways run up each of the three
river valleys and are punctuated by small towns :
there could be no difficulty about taking the three
valleys and exploring them one by one with the
mountains between : the Plain would follow, though
it would depend a little on the time of year how
one took things.
Obviously rivers for us then, meant the one
nearest France to begin with, whose estuary we had
seen amongst the vines. This river, the Agli, is
banked out from France by the Corbieres frontier
line extending from the Salses and the Opoul coun-
try ; we should link up that country with the rest
1 See End-paper.
32
33 THE EAGLE RIVER
of the northern frontier. We settled to put up first
at a little town, Estagel, in the valley of the Agli.
We set off the first morning at Estagel to walk to
Tautavel. Tautavel had showed up from Salses, a
little round tower far away on a " mamelon" of its
own on the tops of the Corbieres : nobody could tell
us much beyond its name.
We crossed the shallow Agli gleaming wide and
white ; a rocky path led into the hills and we began
eating the fattest white figs. Higher up the hill the
grapes cried out to be eaten, hill grapes, so different
from the grapes of the Plain ; bright blue, blue as
Canigou behind us, and on an Indian red soil. I shall
never forget them, how we picked bunch after bunch
hot in the sun, buried our faces in the warmness of
them, how we bit not one but mouthfuls, sweet and
juicy, how we could not get to the end of them.
This same moment I suppose there would be on a
house in Gower Street a little sad, sour, tight bunch
not a quarter grown : and on the south wall of the
National Gallery there would be boot buttons that
called themselves figs : Gerard de Nerval's London
sun, une lanterne sourde, would be all the sun they
would get.
It was a climb to the castle that guarded the
hamlet of Tautavel and not much castle was left at
the top : we went on to the tower some way off.
One began to reason a little bit, to see how well the
Corbieres were provided for against French invasion :
Opoul and Castell Veil and Perillos looking after the
Mediterranean end, Tautavel watching more west-
3
34
ward, and still further west we could see an almost
unbelievable castle called Queribus : they could all
signal to each other. The whole of the Roussillon
was in touch through look-out towers and castles
with Spain, since it belonged to Spain up till 1659,
when Richelieu annexed it for France.
We could look south from Tautavel to the Spanish
frontier and to the watch towers on the mountains.
We wandered about the hills on the south side of
the Agli, a country of vines, of low forest of ilex and
cork trees, of rocky heights where only rosemary
grew. Groves of grey olives, rounded soft little
trees, gripped the hillsides and looked like green
smoke in the evenings, as intangible.
The village of La Tour de France comes a little
higher up the valley : the old French frontier used
to cut across there, Catalonia ended and Languedoc
began, so though they talked Catalan in Estagel,
they talked "Gavax" in La Tour de France, and
" Gavax " came to have a sort of disdainful meaning
as applied to anyone by the Catalan. We liked La
Tour de France, chiefly because of its Chateau that
fitted the hill like a thimble, below which the houses
clung, and we used to think of taking over some
rooms in it from the vine proprietor who owns it,
beautiful great " salles" panelled with dark chest-
nut wood : the salle-a-manger shorn of its glory
and used as a " cave" for wine: behind the wine
vats the seventeenth-century wainscoting and mould-
ings : the corniced ceiling : the old kitchen with
an immense open fireplace stacked with wood.
35 SANCHO'S EYRIE
We would have had the floor above, of long wide
rooms opening on to a "terrasse" that looked
up the valley and over the mountains. But that
plan never bore fruit : we never gloried in Le Chateau
de la Tour de France as an address. I don't know
how old our walls would have been : any age : built
of rounded stone out of the Agli: and we should
have looked down into such blue-green pools under
the walls and heard the Agli pouring over the rocks.
We should have had a well with smooth, worn, marble
edges, beneath a little dome inside the courtyard
and have come into the courtyard under a huge
gateway.
For^a Real was a very different place : we strug-
gled there right up on to the ridge of the hills that
come between the Agli valley and the Tet valley :
the name " Royal Fortress" ought to mean a great
deal, and Forga Real must have stood regally above
the country all round. We looked down into the
Tet valley, at its villages and gardens and vineyards,
and the white Roman road running up it : the road
was shaded with plane trees, it was like nothing so
much as a great woolly caterpillar. Canigou's long
shoulders lifted themselves out of the far side of
the Tet.
Only its position and its name makes Forga Real
alive for one : it must have covered two hillocks on
the ridge, perhaps a wall joined them, but Sancho,
King of Majorca, would see hardly the stones even,
of his building now. A little chapel on one hillock
had used up a few of them. For the rest there is
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 36
just left an underground cistern with the old, simple
arrangement for catching rain water. We have not
bettered that one bit to-day : at Gibraltar " catch-
ment-area" is the same thing only on a bigger
scale.
The first week in October brought the first feeling
of autumn, fresh sharp air in the early mornings and
the whole world beaded with dew till the sun came
through the mist and poured into the valley.
The vines burnt with colour, their black grapes
weighting down round their feet under gorgeous
skirts. The day we went up the valley to Maury
we saw almost the last " vendangeuses " women
bent down into a scarlet surface of leaves.
Maury is a village in the valley above Estagel,
where a road runs straight up over the Corbieres
due east into France. This road, this pass, is guarded
by the Castle of Queribus. 1
You cannot get rid of Queribus. From almost
any point in the Roussillon it crops up against the
sky-line ; watching : the eye of the Roussillon. A
castle built after a pitiless cold-blooded fashion on
an inhuman height that suggests something desperate
in the manner of living at that time. Not wicked,
but beyond hope hard. Only times of bitter exigen-
cies could have made so cruel a demand. But the
rulers of the Roussillon had more to reckon with on
this northern frontier of the Corbieres than on any
other frontier of the kingdom. They had to sentinel
France ; hence the meaning of the whole chain of
1 See illustration.
37 AN OUTPOST IN THE CLOUDS
castle outposts beginning with Salses, ending here
with Queribus and a castle called Pierrepertuse.
Queribus commanded the most likely pass by way
of the mountains into the Roussillon. As one toils up
from Maury the road winds to the top of the pass,
where the ridge of the mountain is rising and rising
like a notched backbone, following the general line of
the wall of the Corbieres. The splintered spine runs
east, and it runs up just at this point into a sharp
crest. It is here that Queribus is built. A few
windows to the south overhang sheer cliff : to the
north the rock looks pared away to the foundations :
and one remembers the silhouette of the east end
where a jag is cut out of the mountain.
Queribus seems to have folded its arms and drawn
its skirts very tight round its feet, and to stand
watching the clouds wash round underneath its walls.
It clings to its post.
How long it has stood there, tradition does not
say ; its name is a souvenir of the Ligurian language,
" Quer," meaning "rock." In the beginning of the
eleventh century Beranger, son of Bernard, Count
of Besalu and of Fenouilledes, is chronicled as having
taken an oath of fealty to his father for the two
castles of Queribus and Pierrepertuse ; the chronicles
state bare facts, the story of Queribus is wrapt in
its walls.
There are no records of its history except of one
siege in 1255 when a party of Albigensians took refuge
there. The Seneschal of Carcassonne, Pierre d' Auteuil,
who joined the Crusade against them, besieged the
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 38
castle, and finally, after an energetic defence, starved
them out. Otherwise, only names are to be read in
connection with Queribus. In 1260 a certain Michel
de Navarre was Chatelain of Queribus ; it was for
the moment out of the hands of the Aragonese kings
and had been made over to Louis XI.
The glory of Queribus as a building lay in its
Keep. A small keep built of worked stone, edges
that fit without mortar, so truly are they squared,
and stones of a great size, grey-brown.
There is a perfection in all this building that argues
that Queribus was never merely a military post or
a watch tower, but that it was built by a Count for
himself and his household to live in, built with all
the care, all the planning, and shaping that fore-
thought and experience could suggest.
One finds oneself in the hall lit by a geminated
window, a pillar in the centre supports the roof, a
stone roof with four vaults and groined, the groins
springing from the pillar and joined at the centre
of each vault with a boss. The great stone pillar
is like the trunk of a tree with branching arms losing
themselves in the shadowy canopy overhead, the
arms recurve to the corbels on the walls as branches
towards the ground. A little worn moulding round
the top of the grey pillar suggests that even inside
the hall there were wearing influences. The rubbish
heaped upon the floor gives a forlorn look; the
defiant stone support that dominates the banquet
hall seems to indicate a life that encroached the limits
of endurance, hard as stone itself. With a fire
39 THE GIPSY CAVE
blazing up the chimney and flickering on the walls,
the pillar in the middle would cast a long shadow :
you could never escape it.
Life must have been more than merely practical,
almost stepping over the edge into asceticism. It
went far to answer the question, " how much you
could do without ? " Even in those rigorous days
Queribus must have counted amongst castles much
as the top of a pillar would count amongst hermit-
ages. It was a drastic spot.
Outside Estagel on the high road there is a great
cave where gipsies are always camping, and must
have camped from prehistoric days, so that the cave
makes every ruin we ever saw young. We used to
pass its flickering fire at night, but before fire was
known, the original cave dweller used its shelter.
As for the original gipsies, legend has it that they
consisted of two Egyptian rulers and a following of
Egyptian people converted to Christianity, who
landed at Barcelona and withdrew themselves from
the province occupied by the Mohammedans in order
to preserve their faith. From the Pyrenees they
must have spread ; they were known as the Gitanos
or as " Egyptians" : the cave at Estagel would be
one of their safest retreats. They are often allotted
a corner outside the villages ; the roadside or the
arch of a bridge they are welcome to : inside they
are not allowed, but will come near for protection :
carts, caravans, donkeys, sometimes a bear. The
Catalan has the greatest disgust for them. He
complains, of course, of their being thieves, and says
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 40
that, apart from being unwashed, their skins have
a strong peculiar smell, so that when, as happens
in France, the young Gitanos are forced to do their
military service, their beds have to be set apart from
the rest.
We used to say, " They must earn plenty of money
in odd ways," judging from their savoury stews that
suggested affluence, but the answer to that was,
" The Gitanos buy the meat that has gone bad ;
they like that " : and one man went so far as to
say that he really did not know what they would
not eat that it was a funny thing, but nobody ever
heard of a dead Gitano. . . .
Not far from Estagel, on the line of the old Rous-
sillon frontier between La Tour de France and
Cassagnes, there is a chateau called Couchous. We
came on it rather suddenly, on a desolate road in
rough forest. It was just the sort of place one
wanted to see. I remember the owner's blank
astonishment at our getting there at all. He said,
"But it is not in Baedeker." I don't suppose a
" tourist " had ever come that way. But here was
our fortified house, four square walls, dark sand-
stone, battlemented, outlined against the sky. There
was not a single window.
Never a stone of it all had been touched since some
Seigneur built it seven hundred years ago. We went
inside : the walls had that thickness that weighs
upon one, the ceilings of all the rooms were stone,
barrel-vaulted : deep-set windows looked into the
inner courtyard. There were long, narrow, stone
.'
CRUCIFIX (Wood), CHURCH AT ESTAGEL.
4i BACK TO THE MIDDLE AGES
passages, little circular stone stairways leading on
to the flat roof, with the old red pantiles, and pro-
tected by battlements.
The small corner tower was a big pigeon-house,
one of the grievances of the peasant that helped on
the Revolution : nobody but a Seigneur might keep
pigeons, and the pigeons lived on the poor man's
corn. The courtyard in the middle of the chateau
contained a stone well and some fig-trees, and gave
access to stables, goat-houses, wine-cellars, store-
houses, forge : the family lived on the first floor.
Couchous must have been garrisoned for a siege
most of its life, as a lonely country chateau on the
border was bound to be. Given such walls, and the
one door protected by the " machicoulis" overhead,
it would be left unattacked, not worth the trouble
of taking.
It had seen plenty of fighting : the one thing it
had not been proof against was its own serfs under
the tricolour. The present owner, and it has been
in his family for five hundred years, told us how at
the time of the Revolution they fled for their lives
out of the country. Everything that was worth
destroying in the chateau the mob destroyed. Years
afterwards, the family came back and settled down
again, shorn of their title. One hanging of old
Spanish brocade in red and gold, and one four-post
bed, the mob overlooked out of all the silks and
periwigisms of Louis Seize.
Couchous reads like a page of history that stopped
short in 1789 and has never been brought up to
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 42
date : no wealth proclaims itself : the garden, a
double enceinte of open spaces, has " gone to grass " :
the forest of Couchous, where they still shoot wild
pig, and the vineyards, come up to the walls : there
are no indulgences. All that seems personal and
intimate of the past centres itself in one hushed little
room inside the chateau, sacred to the carved figure
of a Madonna, robed in the blue brocade and veiling
of an ancestress, and watched over by four pages,
whose heads are adorned with the hair given by
children of the family. It was something left in-
violate, in the heart of Couchous, when, the veil
replaced, the sign of the cross made, they closed
the door behind us.
The sombre walls inside the church at Estagel
contrast curiously with the east end and the side
chapels, which scintillate and dazzle with gold.
Against the cool dark walls comes a wealth of gilded
and painted pillars, twisted and festooned with
grapes, leaves, flowers : a profusion of gilded and
painted figures with tormented draperies in the taste
of the Spanish Renaissance.
The altar screen in the side chapel of the rosary
stands for the best in this materialistic effort. At
least it expresses a frank enjoyment of wealth, in
the great flat curves cut freely with the ease of a
sharp tool in soft wood, the mundane cherubs bub-
bling over with the rollick of life. 1
There has never been any asceticism or meek sub-
1 See illustration.
'
43 THE PROVIDENTIAL VINE
mission about the Catalan : he is far too healthy
for that, his grip on a material world too firm.
As we walked back to Estagel there was a brushing
amongst the vines, and the sheep and goats came
eating their way through them towards home.
Wherever the " vendange" is over and the grapes
have been picked, the goatherds may run their
flocks. Such a sound of the steady munching of
scarlet and yellow leaves, and the quick intake
between the thin greedy lips of the goat, and the
line of black and white and brown bodies moving
busily after the goatherd. The dog, important,
keeps them off the fig and olive trees. Near the
village a procession of goats fills the road, marching,
business-like, every goat meaning to be milked at
once, and turning off down her street making for her
house. Milk from vine leaves : the vine in it up to
the last : here were the leaves ; the branches will
be firewood or made into charcoal sticks for drawing ;
the grapes that have had three pressings will be
burnt for brandy : in the end the purple mass of
flattened skins and stones goes back to the land as
manure and to enrich more grapes.
Before we left Estagel we invested in " espad-
rilles," the white canvas string-soled shoes that
everybody wears. I never had anything else after-
wards, and if they wear out quickly on rocky tracks,
the lightness of them and the cheapness compen-
sates. Canvas and string* shoes, as the habit of the
country, better explain the climate than words.
CHAPTER IV
THE GORGES OF THE AGLI PIERREPERTUSE LB VIVIER SOURMIA
STAYING at St. Paul de Fenouillet it was in-
evitable that we should "do" the Gorges of
Galamus I purposely use the repellent little
word because the thought of " the picturesque "
repels me. There is also in connection with the
Gorges of Galamus, the Hermitage of St. Antoine.
We took the old footway, the pilgrim way, not
the engineered new road ; a way following the Agli,
through enchanted gardens, green and full of sun
and colour. Fig and fruit trees hung over the old
path; it wound down to the river half lost in the
deep shade of trees, it curled up to patches of heather,
again it took us down to a waterfall and transparent
blue pool, lastly a steep scramble up a rocky hillside
to join the road, that faultless gradient of level
macadam that the French so perfectly understand
engineering, of apparent ease, that, if followed, sees
that you miss the only things worth having.
There was a thickly wooded flank of mountain
threaded by a path that came to a full stop up
against the precipice where St. Anthony's cave bur-
rowed into the rock. The close box and arbutus
44
t. Ul
Q
Ste
3fc
CO <
I
x
o
45 A GRISLY CHASM
and ilex trees through which the path pushed gave
it a sinister atmosphere, but the Hermitage itself
was full in the eye of a smiling midday sun, after
which the long dark cave with the drip of water
struck chill.
St. Anthony, carved in wood, with a great pig
sitting down by him, commanded the altar at the
end of the cave : there were many votive offerings.
The Gorges of Galamus are the last word in gorges.
They are overdone : Nature touting for tourists !
After following a road tunnelled out of the living
rock that hangs on to precipices and is altogether
an artificial device ; after feeling stifled in pockets
of air, forced to look down into weird depths at
the stream [a thin thread of a corpse-like blue colour],
to look up at livid menacing heights, rock bleached
a glassy white ; it was like breathing again to come
out on the far side of the gorge.
More than that, it was to live in another world.
The Roussillon was left behind ; the valley of the
Agli, with its violent colouring, its tortured peaks,
its fighting atmosphere, its restless, half-Spanish,
independent, and suspicious people.
This other country, walled off by the Corbieres,
spread before us in quiet outline soft greens, soft
greys and smiled. The spirit of peace possessed
it. Even the peak we had seen from Tautavel, the
Pech de Bugarach, cut clear up against the sky to
the north, suggested something serene and strong,
not violent. One thought of Sussex Downs with
this cold, green, quiet country. The Pech de Buga-
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 46
rach belonged to the prosperous land of southern
France.
Somewhere in one of its shaded folds was hidden
the source of the Agli, the imperious river that did
not have to channel its own course. In a remote age
some volcanic force must have split the Corbieres
across and formed the Gorges of Calamus, and split
the opposite range of mountains on the other side
of the valley into the Gorge de la Fou. The " river
of the Eagle," according to its name " Agli," took
its flight through the two of them. It goes on after-
wards to lose itself in the white sands and sleepy
tides of the Mediterranean near Barcarres.
The Gorge de la Fou feels like a sepulchre : the
Agli has polished the rocks a ghastly bone colour,
wearing pot-holes or comportes in it and riddling the
limestone till it looks like a bed of skulls under the
water. It was a great place for fadas, or fairies :
woe to anybody who dared to touch the linen spread
out to dry on the banks their arms would be petrified
or broken like glass. The fadas take care of the
" linge " all over the Roussillon : it is always spread
out in the sun all together somewhere near the village,
and it never gets stolen. The fadas have turned
it into rock sometimes to avenge insult against
themselves. One could have mistaken linen for
rock in the Corbieres, the rock is so white in the sun.
It was from St. Paul de Fenouillet in the middle of
October that we had the strenuous day of our lives.
After missing the path outside St. Paul, we
struck the stony track that zigzags north over
47 THE SINISTER STRONGHOLD
the chain of the Corbieres. We climbed great
boulders and snaked gradually up the precipitous
height, passing a goat-herd and a big flock of goats.
At last we met the wind over the top of the ridge
and began to wind down the far side into another
valley.
Tramping on and following the valley for some
time due east, we passed a man on one of the worst
cart-tracks that ever was. We asked him after
Chateau Pierrepertuse, our goal. It was perhaps
half-past two. He indicated the whereabouts of
the castle and he added in a curious way, that it
was late in the day to be going to Pierrepertuse.
We made light of that and got all possible directions
out of him, thanks to which, after a long walk, we
found ourselves underneath the hills on the north
and could look up at the castle far above our heads,
still some way off.
I have never seen a castle that gave one quite
the feeling of Pierrepertuse. It is built of light grey
stone, exactly the colour of the cliffs it stands upon,
so that one does not see it at any distance and it
comes upon one with a sort of shock ; a great pale
length of ashlar, of loophole slits and battlements,
a tower at either end, standing up against the sky
implacable and cold.
We lost the ill-defined goat-track that led to the
top. When at last we struggled up the cliffs and
found ourselves under the east end of the castle,
it was to be faced with an abrupt slant not only
made up of immense boulders, but overgrown with
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 48
dense box bushes. Seen from longways on, Pierre-
pertuse was built to fit the ridge in a long, very
narrow oval coming to a sharp point, so that its
shape was something like the stem of a battleship ;
the point had the cruel look of a ram and its
invisible colouring was secretive as the colouring of
a man-of-war.
We climbed and slipped and hung to the box
bushes and tore our clothes. In time we came to
a ruined doorway somewhere in the centre of the
north of the castle and scrambled through. Inside
it was all greatly fallen ; there remained one glory
intact with the great outside walls, the long Chemin-
de-ronde running the whole length and supported
on the cleanest-cut corbels. That was worth much
to see. And in one of the towers we climbed into
two upper rooms, rooms so civilised as to have
small square windows set in the walls, with rebates
cut in the stone to take shutters. And there were
stone window seats. It was here that Pedro the
Cruel shut up his wife, they say, while he pursued
other amours. The windows framed blue distance,
blue mountains, a sunny still valley hundreds of
feet below, a bird's-eye picture infinitely remote,
that must have mocked a prisoner.
Once inside Pierrepertuse no power could touch
any of the Roussillon Counts or the Spanish Kings ;
they were a law to themselves and a terror to the
country. Small wonder that the valley of the Agli
was not chosen by monks as a site for monasteries !
The keep at the north end was only entered by
49 THE PRICE OF ADVENTURE
rough steps cut in the solid rock, steps without any
sort of guard on the outside to prevent slipping over
a precipice. The rock cropped up again inside,
rough, not levelled into any sort of flooring. The
steps and the rock suggested brutality ; the first
an absolute disregard for life. Pierrepertuse was
altogether a challenge, was merciless, indifferent,
could never be appeased. The " revenants" that
belonged to its stones had nothing human about
them ; there are evil influences round that castle ;
it had almost seemed implied in the manner of the
man who had explained the way to it.
We found one stone with what might have been
a knight's head carved upon it, otherwise only
debris, a tumble of masonry.
The sun set as we climbed through a breach in
the outer wall.
It was not easy to get away from Pierrepertuse.
The place was cursed : it was late, too late, when at
last we were rid of its shadows and out of its influence
upon a track well below it. But an evil eye was
upon us and the road was long ; we rose the height
at Queribus and fled down the other side into the
valley, the moon showing us the " traverse," a
short cut towards Maury, not easy to find. Some
malign earth-bound spirit saw to it that we should
miss the last train to St. Paul. That involved
another two hours tramp along the high road :
twenty-seven miles we covered that day. But then
we had chosen to visit Pierrepertuse.
The country on the other side of the Agli, between
4
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 50
it and the Tet, had something of a mournful, hanker-
ing spirit about it ; bareheaded mountains, their
slopes peeled, a general nakedness, did not offer
much chance to a feeble cultivation. There must
have been forests all over it once : the tree-bark
went to the tan yards ; the soil went next, washed
away without roots to hold it to the slopes; and
the rain went last of all. No forests no rain.
The country might pull itself together again if it
were not for the goat. As long as the goat is allowed
upon the hillsides, chestnuts and beeches and oaks
will never be seen. For the goat nips every fresh
shoot. Incidentally it ruins every hope of grass
by tearing it up. But one cannot think of the
Roussillon without its horned and hoofed company,
nor wish luck to a crusade against the goat.
This country on the south of the Agli grew one
thing perfectly, cistus ; all over the red-brown
shaling limestone grew cistus and more cistus, its
aromatic scent came in waves as one walked.
Hidden in the folding of these hills we visited a
chateau called Le Vivier. The Revolution had
dealt hard with it ; it has been deserted and picked
clean by degrees of every fitting, of the flooring,
of the beams, of the window-frames, the inn-
keeper who bought it choosing to live in the village.
He would sell Le Vivier to-morrow if he could get
an offer.
So the gaunt skeleton of the chateau is left to
itself to go down to dust and decay on the top of
its little hill. Nobody cares. In England it would
5i A CASTLE GOING BEGGING
have been bought up and restored long ago by
an American ! For us, at the moment, it was much
more interesting in its forlorn state : but the moment
will not last long. To walk through the big entrance
dated 1604, to look up through the sawn joists,
and to find a beautiful fragment of a Louis Treize
plaster ceiling that was not ripped away, with a
bold design and sharp undercutting ; to light upon
the letters V. V. intertwined, with laurel leaves
below, over a doorway and window ; to make out
medallions painted on the white walls of the great
salon; to find the little hexagonal tiles exquisite
on the floors, was something to one that Restora-
tions are not.
Louis Treize, the best of the Louis' , spoke here :
we found a fanciful keyplate on one of the doors
of Louis Quinze : it was the strangest thing to come,
in the Roussillon, upon something so cosmopolitan,
born of Paris and of the French Court.
The chateau has been through two phases : one,
when it was a fortress pure and simple, possibly
twelfth or thirteenth century ; two, when a Seig-
neur of the seventeenth century turned it into a
pleasure house. He must have left the four out-
side walls much as they were, putting in windows.
It looks now the gauntest building that was ever
seen, no trees near, desolate, high, battered-looking.
The chateau in the village of Sournia, not far off,
sheds a different light on the subject. Sournia
must be visualised as Roman, as a village existing
seven hundred years before Christ : the Roman lord
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 52
lived in a fortified house whose walls sheltered the
dwellings of his serfs. Under the Roussillon land-
owners the same plan held : the church, fortified,
was part of the castle, the porch would be used
by the Lord of the Manor as his court of justice :
that accounts for the deep loggia porch facing south
at Le Vivier.
The Revolution spared the chateau at Sournia
for the village, and it was turned into an inn and a
private house, the old chestnut-wood carved doors
untouched, the wide shallow staircase, born of
high heels, that fitted with ease its purpose we
walked up that. And there is one treasure, a
Louis Treize plasterwork mantelpiece, with the sense
of spacing that belonged to that age, the grace
and exuberance that showed a certain selection
and restraint. 1
Walking back from these antique splendours, we
saw the great yellow gourds lying ripening in the
sun on the ground catching the light of sunset.
Immense fruits, creaseless and swelled : perhaps the
most fatuously contented golden " vegetables '' one
has ever seen.
East from Estagel lies the Hermitage of Notre-
Dame-de-Pene (Pene stands for Rock), built on a
bluff of grey rock above the high road in the Agli
valley. The road to the little hermitage is far
over one's head; they are the Aspres hills that
rise on that south side of the road, the Corbieres
are on the opposite side, the Agli has grooved its
1 See illustration.
. - > * o/^" TP
fe # -' xx
.-<' -*
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- - - .--:-,., . . . _.
- 1 /
/ f
'~^H^:--'.
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jt.'-"- :
-
.^,0-^- I
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I
MANTELPIECE. CHATEAU DE SOURNIA.
53 A HERMIT'S FARE
valley between the two. Legend takes one back
to the days of Arab invasion, when the chatelaine
of the castle, pursued by Saracens, leapt out over
the cliff and was miraculously saved by our Lady.
The castle would have gone centuries ago and
the Hermit would have had the crag all to himself for
generations. The present -day Hermit lives up there
with his dog : we sat at his board and shared his
meal of white bread, wine, and water, roasted
chestnuts. He talked about Easter Monday : on
the festival de la Conception de la tres Sainte
Vierge the whole countryside makes a pilgrimage
to the Chapel.
CHAPTER V
THE LOWER TET VALLEY ILLE-SUR-TET CHATEAU OF CORBERE
FROM the valley of the river Agli we went
to the valley of the river Tet which we
had looked down upon from For$a Real.
I think the Tet can claim to be the special waterway
of the Roussillon. Running through the middle
of the country, it seems to do the chief share of the
irrigation ; takes nothing from Spain, nothing from
France ; is Catalan every drop of it. It has gone
through all sorts of turbulent moments up in the
high lands, has been responsible for torrential bursts
and destructive landslips, has steeped the upper
valleys in spring and produced a glory of green
and a wealth of fruit : it comes out down into the
Plain and steadies itself into a calm digestion of
the snow water and the rains off Canigou. It
becomes almost lethargic with age, its figure spreads
over a wide channel : it gives, philosophically
enough, its life-blood to the acres of greedy vines
and gardens that depend on its regular pulses, and
it merges its personality at last in the greater flood
of sea, where it still makes its power felt in a sedi-
ment of white sand that pushes the Mediterranean
back and a little back, age after age.
54
^
U
55 SAINT GAUDERIQUE
To the Tet belongs the distinction of Perpignan,
the capital town, on its right bank : Ruscino, the
old Roman town, was built on the same bank lower
down. The richest soil of the plain, La Salanque,
comes up to the left bank, gardens and vineyards
that have no equal. It was in the waters of the
Tet that the precious relics of the good Saint Gau-
derique used to be plunged to bring rain after a
succession of dry seasons : a procession of people
would carry the relics from Perpignan down to the
river, and so well did the Tet answer their prayers,
that it has been known to carry away bridges
in its subsequent efforts.
The Romans must have worked every practicable
acre on each side of the river from the Plain far up
into the mountains : a Roman road never left its
course, used to cling to the face of its furthermost
gorges high in the west : the Tet knew the constant
traffic of mules from time unrecorded.
The little towns up the valley have Roman
masonry still left, walls built out of the rounded
stones from the river-bed and laid herring-bone-
wise, opus spicatum.
Most of the towns are fortified, walled-in, with
the old gateways that give to a nest of houses
inside, where the streets are narrow, and seem
darkened with a mediaeval gloom. These towns
must have been impregnable till gunpowder came
into general use. That was before the fall of Con-
stantinople : and yet I do not think the Middle
Ages ended in the Roussillon till the French took
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 56
the country over in the seventeenth century, and
Vauban pulled down the castles and towers.
Up till then every town had its walls and great
gateways, and a ramification of narrow streets
inside. Fear and mutual distrust dominating the
country, fear would breed superstition. There was
no centralisation ; there could be no security.
Men were religious, warlike, artistic.
Then came gunpowder, and the attack in warfare
predominated over the defence : towns were no
longer impregnable and independent : the country
could be policed : centralisation began. And yet
all this happened comparatively lately, in the
Roussillon. Little places such as Ille-sur-Tet are
still mediaeval in hosts of ways.
We bore for a fortnight with the gloom of I lie.
Its inn was uncomfortable, the inhabitants were
uninteresting : I never wish to go there again, not
even for its gardens ; its gardens famous for their
peaches. Inside the walled town were a few things
that one likes to remember and that stand out from
the unaccountable shadow which to us lay over it.
It might be a great door that one would come sud-
denly upon, seen in a marble doorway in one of the
sunless alleys, belonging to a house with Spanish
traditions and opening into a courtyard, out of
which a wide staircase with shallow steps would lead
to a gallery and rooms with heavy woodwork and
thick walls. Dignified houses, in spite of the re-
stricted streets they flanked, coats of arms, since
defaced, over the doorways^ brass knockers, and great
;
LES ENAMORATS, STREET AT ILLE-SUR-TET.
57 A LYRIC IN STONE
handles on the doors : some of them still well fur-
nished and belonging to old families ; others chopped
up and turned into so many lodgings for the poorer
class. You might come across the half of a fine
plaster ceiling and wall in a cramped little kitchen.
Then again, walking along the little streets one
would be confronted with a fragment of sculpture
built into the wall of a house : nothing to tell its
history. It may have come out of the Rodona,
a church by far the oldest in Ille, said indeed to be
Roman, that Ille had chosen to forsake and strip
and leave, like an empty barrack. One of these
sculptured blocks had named its street La Rue des
Enamorats, and must have dated from the twelfth
century : it was rudely worked in the pinkish marble
of the country. 1 It represented two heads pressed
toward each other, the lips shot forward, meeting.
The man's head was of the Catalan type that recalls
the Visigoth, a rugged, bold modelling of feature,
short nose, wide mouth. One saw him with clear
skin and colour in the cheeks, with chestnut hair
growing thickly. The woman's head was more
characteristically Spanish, the long liquid eye : they
were her lips that had all the daring invitation,
her long neck that turned, that a tress of her hair
fell upon : his fingers draw her head towards his ;
and the motif of this rough little work of art seems
to be just an inevitable drawing together at a given
moment: it is -a thing of delight: a pure lyric.
1 See illustration.
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 58
The feeling of luscious fruit is instinct in the pink
marble : the peaches of I lie have got into it and all
the enjoyment, the sheer indulgence that peaches
and an infinity of peaches stand for.
In contrast to Les Enamorats there is a block let
into another house wall with the low relief of a
knight's head carved in profile on it. This is
later much, work with an economy of line and simple
conventionalism, the design spaced to fit perfectly
the stone and the lines chiselled cleanly, surely.
The pagan has gone and has given place to a certain
asceticism, at any rate to disciplined force. They
call it Pepin le Bref, and it was probably part of
the tomb of a knight, Pepin.
But more than these little relics and its old houses,
its hospital, founded about 1217, gives Ille something
of a cachet. Perpignan only shared the distinction
of a hospital, a fact that raises Ille head and shoulders
above all the other little towns, however it may stand
now. One reads, in the chapel of the hospital, a
Latin inscription cut in beautiful lettering in stone :
"In 1298 is dead and rests here Dame Beatrice
Vicomtesse of Fenouillet who was Hospitaliere of
the Hospital of Ille : and Dame Ave Vicomtesse of
Castelnau who was Hospitaliere of the Hospital of
Ille." '
The " donzels " and " nobles " were adminis-
trators at that time of the hospital : we had seen
1 See illustration.
59 THIRTEENTH-CENTURY V.A.D.'S
the country of Fenouillet and its castle ; were to
see Castelnou later on. Two gentle nuns take care
of the same hospital now, and a few, frail old occu-
pants sit in the long, pleasant rooms with low,
barrel-vaulted stone ceilings : the rooms have little
side alcoves, groined, and the alcoves upstairs take
each one a bed. We were there about ten o'clock
in the morning and the principal meal of the day
was just ready, meat and vegetables in bright little
pannikins. So it has gone on ever since Dame
Beatrice and Dame Ave moved about the same
red- tiled floors. The kitchen with its great open
fireplace, the chapel, the garden, the little bathing
houses, each with its marble bath, can have changed
little.
I lie was a place to see the autumn come and linger
and go. The black figs and the white figs " ladies'
thumbs " ripe and falling to the ground, being
gathered and dried in the sun, hanging in strings
from the windows, made into syrup : the best eaten
as they were, the worst given to the pigs. Girdles
of figs used to festoon the upper stories as we walked
through the streets ; the little loggias began to
be hung with maize, so that all under the pantiles
drooped a golden cornice and from the brown and
grey stone walls dangled heavy fringes of amber.
There were two mimosa trees near the Tet, and
the scent and the powdery yellow, worked in every-
where with the grey leaves, was spring not autumn.
Nor would summer be out of it : some strawberries
a woman had picked in her garden, and made us
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 60
eat, were summer, as mimosa is spring ; yet this
was early November.
We walked one Sunday to a fair at Nefiach, the
next village. Pigs were being sold and a few fair-
ings, such as cream cakes. Mass was over and the
little " Place " at eleven o'clock was moving with
life ; two or three musicians were blowing away
upon a wooden band-stand which flew red and white
pennons : down in front of them thirty couples or
so were dancing on bare ground. Round the open
space all the cafes in the place had put out chairs
and tables, and the whole of Nefiach was there sit-
ting looking on and drinking moon-coloured drinks
and amber drinks : squadrons of shining glasses and
great water-bottles were ranged on the tables : the
patrons of the cafes in white aprons moved about.
And the dancing went on to a drowsy hurdy-gurdy
little tune, pauses in each dance, and the dancers
paraded arm-in-arm round the circle ; at the end
of the dance the men went off to tables for drinks,
the girls and women went back to their friends;
there was no courting. The young men danced on
the sandy space, in their espadrilles, with an apt
neatness, and smoothly, a dignity about the head
and neck, the straight figures ; the girls did not
spoil the effect of the coiffure of their black heads
by any sort of hat. I see them now with their neat
heads and their pliant waists. One youth had the
blackest curls in front of his ears : a Catalan " buck."
The dances themselves were ordinary enough, valses,
polkas, mazurkas, or their equivalent : the thing
61 OLYMPIAN MONTALBA
one loved was seeing these people, not dressed
specially, but just as we saw them every day, dancing
for the joy of it : and at eleven o'clock on Sunday
morning in the open.
There are three walks from I lie that nobody must
miss : one is to Serrabona ; one Corbere ; one
Montalba. We walked to Montalba by way of
Belesta-sur-la-Frontiere, a village on the old French
frontier, on the Sournia hills, the soft-soil schistous
hills that are crumbled and channelled above the
Tet by the water that runs off them, shaping the cliffs
into towers and carving lines of Gothic castles down
them and pointed turrets. The road seems the only
firm tEing amongst all this shift, and wear and tear.
Belesta is an interesting little village, strongly
fortified once, the chateau much ruined, a beautiful
iron grille over one window. The carved wood
reredos in the chapel has little paintings let into it,
one of the donor, the Seigneur, with long dark hair
and plain white collar, his " vision " represented
in a corner of the picture. Montalba is one's goal,
a great green oasis on the tops of the hills, an inset
of jade into a desert; poisonously green, almost.
Tumbled here and there lie great blocks of granite,
one of them said to have been a Druid altar and
that the Catalan was calmly starting to demolish
for road metal, so little he cares. The village
rises above all the green on a hillock, a little grey
stone ant-heap topped by its chateau; never had
village such a serene outlook.
Walking from Ille to Corbere one crosses the
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 62
Aspres, the ridge of hills between the Tet and the
third and last Roussillon river, the Tech. The
chateau of Corbere is built on a spur of the moun-
tains, looking over the Tet.
Plain and square-faced, thick walls to stand a
siege, a few gloomy fir trees around it, some geese
screaming in the cobbled road up to the gateway,
Corbere has belonged to the family who live in it
now for the last eight hundred years. They are
not living in the twentieth century, we thought,
amongst their Louis Treize furniture, the spinet,
the yellowed books in the old library, the sedan
chair that they used still : something about the
kindly welcome they gave us suggested mellow
life and still days rather than the restless spirit of
nineteen-hundred. They must have been generous
landowners and loved, for they had not been forced
to emigrate as most of the noblesse were at the
time of the Revolution, and to-day their sole in-
terests would seem to lie in their land and their
tenants. They talked to us of opening their house
in Ille and going down into it for the winter months,
as the one distraction in their lives Ille that was
only a few miles away and which we associated
with utter melancholy.
The lady of the chateau came into the old church
with us and turned the wooden carillon that we might
hear it ring, and we stood together in front of a
beautiful carved wooden crucifix, a rare treasure,
that must have harked back to Spain. 1
1 See illustration.
CRUCIFIX (Wood), CHAPEL OF CHATEAU DE CORBERE.
[62
6s OUR QUEST TO BE
The other walk from I lie to the Priory of Serra-
bona was also in the Aspres country. It was a long
pull, winding up by a well-used way through low
brushwood on a bank of mountain. Finally the
track broke out upon a saddle at the top where paths
crossed and where against the sky came a lonely
little stone oratory robbed of its Saint behind the
tiny old iron grille. It was a sentinel on the ram-
part, standing for the first word of Serrabona :
we halted.
In England one connects monks with sheltered
valleys and fat, green lands : in front of us lay a
country so emphatic a denial of these notions that
it was almost staggering. On grey rocky heights
backed by a snowy Canigou a grey old church
weathered the seasons and kept faith with its
builders : their choice of so bony and gaunt a
country, offering the barest livelihood to man, was
hard to understand.
We should know the reason later.
CHAPTER VI
SAINT MARTIN DE CANIGOU VERNET-LES-BAINS CORNEILLA PLA
DE GUILLEM THE ASCENT OF CANIGOU
WE had no right to go on so far up the Tet
valley as Vernet and skip the town of
Prades, but we had reasons. The fete
day of St. Martin de Canigou was almost due, the
fete day of Vernet was to follow; at that time we
were chasing these will o' the wisps. Prades could
wait.
Every Catalan we ever met always asked us if
we came from Vernet or if we were going to Vernet.
Nobody for a moment connected English people
with any other place in the Roussillon than Vernet :
one was bound to have gone there out of self-de-
fence; as it was we went grudgingly. One's fellow-
countrymen so trail their insularity after them
and over their haunts abroad, contriving to bring
something false into the scale, that under their
influence the people of the country no longer treat
one as an ordinary individual : one is " English/'
made of gold, made to be a little fooled.
The happy thought once struck the pre-war
German management that their ttablissement might
just as well be filled with visitors all the winter as
6 4
65 THE PRICE OF HEAVEN
stand empty. The etablissement was built for the
summer and for the Spaniards, but why not contrive
a winter season ? There were the English ! Meekly
the English accepted the Casino turned into a lounge.
All the summer, of course, for the Spaniards the
Casino is open. In winter, for the English the
" Temple Anglicain."
On the day of the fete of St. Martin de Canigou
we prospected a path up Canigou, but stopped
short to give ourselves to the fete itself : so much
one had read about it : Prades had been hurried
past for its sake.
We were early through the little village of Castell
and climbing the rocky promontory where St. Martin
stands, a gaunt square tower, outpost upon a spur
of Canigou looking down and up the valley of the
Cadi.
But the Bishop of Perpignan failed to celebrate
Mass, nor rode up on his white mule. A few
people dragged up picnic baskets, a few sightseers
went over the church, later in the afternoon a few
English stood about the village below, persuading
themselves that a dozen couples dancing in a tiny
square to some reedy music was a characteristic
sight.
St. Martin de Canigou was interesting apart
from its celebration. It was so much a child of
Canigou, high in the shelter of the mountains, a
watch-tower. For the Count who built it, it was
the price of heaven : he, Guifred, driving the
Moors out of the valleys, gave a command to his
5
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 66
nephew to wait a certain signal to attack. The
nephew did not wait, the strategy failed ; Guifred
slew the culprit, and for the comfort of his soul
built and endowed the monastery of St. Martin.
He ended by taking the vows himself, and died up
there in 1049.
His wife, Guiscla, became a nun. It was an
altar-cloth of her work, in the keeping of the cure
at Castell, that we actually held in our hands,
too precious and frail a relic to be handled, the
delicate gold upon white, with the green and wine-
colour of her country worked in.
Guifred' s work took the shape of a sarcophagus
which he hewed himself out of the living rock.
It is there to-day, under the wall of St. Martin's
Church, open to the sky : his actual tomb lias
been moved down to Castell. A good deal of St.
Martin was carried off down into Castell at the
time of the Revolution. Romanesque capitals
from its little cloisters have found their way to
Vernet.
St. Martin de Canigou must have counted above
all Catalan monasteries in the days when it was
the shrine of the Blessed Relics of St. Gauderique.
Relics that brought rain to the Roussillon in dry
seasons, when they were taken down from the Abbey
to Perpignan, carried in procession to the Tet,
and dipped in its waters.
St. Gauderique is hardly ever missing out of a
Catalan church. Carved in wood and painted,
he stands as the Saint Protector of that old half-
T. 1
67 GUISCLA'S CONVENT
pagan world which lived upon legend and was
peopled by miracle- workers. It was an ungrateful
world, suspicious of the power that a mere labourer,
Gauderique, exercised over the weather. His
making his master's fortune by warding off hail
and storms and calling down rain, only brought
about his exile. He died at Vannes in Brittany.
Then the Roussillon repented itself. Some say,
stole his body from Toulouse, where it had been
taken. At any rate the efforts of Count Guifred
secured the precious relics for their native country
and his own monastery of St. Martin.
Below Vernet is the village of Corneilla, of Guifred
and Guiscla. We went again and again to the church
with its strong, simple Romanesque architecture.
Corneilla possesses a carved marble tympanum over
the doorway at the west end that has all the
Byzantine characteristics : symbolism expressed in
the simplest form ; line and pattern perfectly felt,
and felt as the outcome of the symbolism. 1 Around
was carved in Latin an inscription that may be
translated :
" O You who are in life, come to worship
That by which life is given, That by which the
world is regenerated."
There is a much later work, a fourteenth-century
marble altar-piece, inside the church, carved by a
Catalan mason.* It is full of Gothic feeling, of
1 See illustration. 2 See illustration.
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 68
romance; there is a tenderness about the carving
that warms the white marble. The marble contrasts
with a wooden Madonna, which we found in a dark
corner, carved two or three hundred years earlier.
This Byzantine conception possesses a rare dignity
of line : she has the face of a world-mother, a
Demeter. Her hands do not touch the Child on
her knees, they are raised around Him as Something
apart from the world. 1
It is wholly impersonal, this abstract of a Divinity,
whereas the fourteenth-century work embodies a
personal ideal which might be realized in flesh and
blood. Art has become Beauty's thrall.
For us Vernet meant first and foremost Canigou.
We were underneath it, in one of its own valleys :
almost you could have imagined sliding down from
the Peak into the hotel gardens : yet hours of
fierce scramble would hardly have done it. As
for the country, it was like nothing we had seen.
The flanks of the green narrow valleys, hung with
beech woods and silver birch and pine trees, were
fiery with autumn colour and smoked with misty
greys and browns : thin threads and heavier gushes
from the snows tumbled and talked in every gorge :
above, where trees never grew, the gaunt peaks
and slopes changed from hour to hour with sun and
cloud. Sometimes they attracted the sea fog, and
across the Plain from the Mediterranean drifted
the white curtain, and long cold fingers reached
up into gully after gully : no more landmarks,
1 See illustration.
I
'
' t
' <:^
^l : -
v.>-
-
' L* I-
"
MADONNA (Marble), CHURCH AT CORNEILLA.
[68
69 ROUSSILLON'S HIGH PRIEST
only chill and white silence and oblivion. Sea-fog
and snow, hail and rain, Canigou attracts them all,
and in doing so becomes a bulwark for the Plain
below. There may be tumult above and the Plain
will be serene. Canigou is the screen of the Rous-
sillon. Not only that, it is the cloud-bearer that
brings moisture to the Plain. No wonder Catalans
have a personal feeling for it. And yet their feeling
is inspired by awe, at any rate in those who live in
the high valleys, herdsmen who know something
about storms. The Catalan songs may and do sing
of Canigou' s flowers and its sunny pasturages, but
in the legends the note struck again and again is
one of superstitious dread in connection with some
evil wrought by the elements. The fadas, encan-
tadas, donas d'aygua, still people Canigou, just as
they did in the days when they were propitiated
by superstitious rites ; the wind and the snow,
chief of these the wind, brought forth a pagan
religion of Canigou' s own.
Pierre of Aragon, who was the first man to climb
Canigou, was comparatively modern, thirteenth-
century. No " ancient " would have dreamed of
doing such a thing : the Romans must have used the
pass near the Tres Vents and known all about ice
and snow; but it would never have entered their
heads to climb the peak, and I should think it would
beat them to understand the passion for high places
reached at great discomfort, for the sake of eating
sandwiches 9,000 feet above sea-level.
It would have scandalised the thirteenth century :
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON . 70
,^^*^^ V*.^ jf
Pierre made his two companions swear an oath of
secrecy before starting on the expedition. If his
feat had not been looked upon as almost blas-
phemous, it would never have been chronicled in
Latin and preserved in the Vatican to this day.
The first sentence of the Chronicle by the monk,
Fra Salimbene, gives one the thirteenth-century
point of view about Canigou. Mons Canigosus.
This mountain, never has man inhabited it and never
has the son of man dared to climb it, so great is its
height, so difficult and painful is the ascent thereof.
The monk goes on to describe the terror of the
way up, the thunder and lightning, wind and hail,
that scared the two Chevaliers out of their wits,
so that they collapsed at a great height and Pierre
went on alone up the peak. He was not to get
off without a warning, and his throwing a stone
into a lake near the peak raised out of the water
an enormous and terrible dragon, which flew, obscuring
the air and covering the whole mountain in shadow.
But M. Vidal puts the " dragon touch" down to
Fra Salimbene. He thinks Pierre would describe
the black obscurity of those sudden clouds upon
Canigou, which as quickly dissipate; Salimbene
would seize the chance of introducing the Devil
and pointing a moral. At any rate the Chronicle
shows what was thought in those days of climb-
ing mountains.
Canigou, a connoisseur, builds things straight and
beautiful, flowers as well as trees, most characteristic
flower the wild pink, sharp-cut and delicate, flat,
7o]
MADONNA (WOOD), CHURCH AT CORNEILLA
Woodcut by I. Savory, from drawing by U. L MacKtnzie
-
, -
- v v ,
'
with fringed edge, called in Catalan the clabellina.
The word hitches on to our clove, that comes from
the French clou : it is a nail-head flower.
Canigou could not help producing trees and flowers
that had a sort of intimate personal beauty of the
mountain's own. Think of what it is made. The
two aretes that meet and form its top, mica-schist,
thrown upright, all on its ends, notched and spiked
against the sky, veined with threads of quartz
that glitter like diamonds. Then comes a grey,
granitoid mass, resting in its turn on an immense
base of iron minerals set in limestone and granite.
So that when they quarry and mine the mountain-
side and turn Canigou inside out, its stuffing is all
colours. French grey and powder-blue ; the whole
gamut of the peacock's scale from silver-greys and
peacock-blues to cinnamon and fawn and chocolate.
Beautiful earth : could such magic materials grow
anything not a little fantastic ?
One might count marble another of its solid
possessions not near the peak, but the Tet valley
is hall-marked by the pink marble road : such in-
exhaustible quarries that marble mends the road.
Py, near Vernet, has white marble, as beautiful a
grain and resisting time as surely as the old Grecian.
Yet France has been content to rely on Italy and
the Roussillon marble has slept in the hills. Marble
and granite and ironstone! Canigou supplied the
Romans with iron; supplies iron and granite and
timber to-day. Small wonder that the Catalan has
been an artist. A country like the Roussillon, that
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 72
has all the materials of art ready to hand and whose
climate offers to man a certain amount of leisure
and makes possible a certain amount of luxury,
is bound to bring forth artists ; witness Corneilla
at the feet of Canigou, and the ironwork on so many
of the village church doors. The mountain has
been the giver of all sorts of things beautiful.
We made several attempts to climb Canigou,
but the November days were too short and we had
to wait till May. M. Edmond Boixo is known to all
Vernet as " le Roi de Canigou " : there is only one
mountain for Vernet, and M. Boixo is its prophet :
he gave us our sailing directions.
We meant to walk from Vernet to Prats de Mollo
across the Pla Guillem the first day : from Prats
to Velmanya the second : from Velmanya we hoped
to climb Canigou, coming down to sleep at Vernet
the third night.
We were called at five one morning. It was a
dubious moment, mist and cloud hung about the top
of the valley, but a breeze got up and a patch of
blue sky came in the north to windward. The
thick grass in the Castell valley at that hour was
grey with dew, the little apple trees rejoiced, nightin-
gales were making disjointed love, the air felt
heavy and warm. As we rose gradually, the clouds
seemed clearing above us : but coming up in the
wind there were some great rounded pink thunder-
heads and a wrack of cloud followed them. By
the time we were up on to the Col de Jau our hopes
were still high.
73 TOWARDS THE HEIGHTS
We sat there resting, hot, for knapsacks had
weighed heavy. The sun came out and there seemed
a fair chance it mignt draw all the mists to itself
and win the day. But the wind was tricky. Cani-
gou's great mass has a complex effect on things.
There were flowers all over the grass, violas,
hepaticas, violets. It was a morning for sound
that was like a morning at sea. Voices came clear
across to us from shepherds out of sight. There
was a great stillness, a calm, something waiting.
Leaving the Col de Jau, the great bony skeleton
of the mountain rounds itself solid, becomes quieter
and bigger. We looked across the gorge we were
in, up at the huge shoulders behind which the peak
lay hidden. We were working round Canigou so
that it was always on our left, working against the
sun, a fateful thing to do, but we took it that way
out of a sort of instinct that it would be the
more charming way, also because it put off till
the end the actual climbing of the peak, and the
snow up there had to be given all the days possible
to melt.
This first walk, the first day from Vernet to
Prats, was the thing beyond all we had wanted to
do, because it takes one over the Pla de Guillem.
We had seen the outline of the Pla against the sky
when we stayed at Prats. You look up at a great
ridge of mountain that runs from Canigou to the
Spanish frontier, the ridge in one place has an un-
troubled line, one level stretch; you wonder what
it can be like right away up on that flat saddle.
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 74
That is the outline of the Pla de Guillem. Its
weather was said to be uncertain and it was too
high up to be trifled with, so we had started in
some doubt from the hotel, resigned to turning
back if things went against us, having no plan, ever,
that could not be bouleverse at any given moment.
But the day improved ; we walked on, getting
higher. We had to look out for a Bourne, a stone
set up as a landmark, and instead of following
the gorge to its head we were to turn off at this
stone and to climb straight up the long, steep side
of the gorge till we stood on the crest. Somewhere
thereabouts we were to find the Croix de Fer.
Climbing the slope of the gorge after hitting off
the Bourne was hard work. We reached the Col
on the top. There was the Iron Cross : and there
was an old track along the height. We looked to
see all sorts of things from this Col, down over
Py, the Col de Mantet, the Pyrenees. We saw just
cloud, cloud or fog, banks of it, a heavy mass beating
up from the valley of Py and stopping short at our
feet at the top of the Col, driven back by a draught
that came from the direction in which we had come.
Hoping the white wall would lift, we waited,
watching it. Not a change : everything below
was shut out by the white mass facing us. Down
in the gorge there had been so little, looking up
from it one had never guessed.
It was too cold to stand there long. We looked
at the thin cross and went on. Whether it was
put up on the Col to help travellers, or whether
75 FOG THE ENEMY
to mark the graves of a French regiment I do not
know. Down in the gorge below, where there
are some ruined stone huts, the French camped
in 1793 or 1794 : they were on their way from
Villefranche to provision the Prats de Mollo garrison
and were waiting to reconnoitre the Pla and the
country above them. The Spaniards heard by
signal where they were, and lay ready on the Pla :
the French got to the top, were taken by surprise.
Close to the cross an old road passes, a fine old
military road possibly made by Vauban in the
seventeenth century to link up Prats de Mollo
with Villefranche, about the time early in the
French occupation when Prats killed its French
tax-collector, and a punitive expedition was sent
there from Villefranche.
We followed this road going south. It was
perhaps a couple of yards wide : it rose, serpenting
upwards till the Pla was reached. We looked back
once or twice, watching the wall of cloud which,
on the top of the Col, baffled by the contrary draught,
rose and hung. Two winds fighting. The last
time we looked it was not so. The white fog was
blowing all across the Col and sweeping down into
the gorge. Then the Col disappeared and the fog
began to creep after us.
We had hopes for the south, that it might still
be clear. We finished the last bit of rise, patches
of snow lying scattered each side, and coming to
a tall mass of rock saw at last the Pla stretch away
before us.
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 76
It was like a great prairie of short, sallow grass,
too lately covered with snow to have any feed on
it for the herds. Crisp, dry grass, scattered with
little fragments, chips of white marble : the Pla
was built upon white marble, a solid enough moun-
tain saddle.
It went away flat to the south and seemed to
end there in a clean, long line against grey sky.
It stretched east and west and ended in fog. We
had got that stealthy fog behind us, fog each side
of us, and we had a strong suspicion of fog in front.
We saw nothing beyond the great level of the Pla
but cloud.
Straight across ran a line of little single grey
stones, set up on end, just high enough I expect
to clear wind-driven snow and to point out the
direction, for there was no marked track whatever
on the grass. I have seen a line of telegraph posts
across the desert that suggest civilisation, a line of
communication between cities, for one of which
the traveller is bound. He imagines messages
passing overhead, feels a sort of contact with the
busier life that waits him : the lines of wire belong
to his world. But the little grey stones on the Pla
de Guillem belong exclusively to itself, taken from
its own surface. The fog crept after us, silent and
yet so alive, not like a quiet English fog : it came
up on the wind from nowhere, it was never still,
always moving, stalking us.
When we got to the edge of the Pla on the south
there was only a world of fog to be seen, drifting
77 CATALAN HOSPITALITY
straight at us this time, grey fingers creeping over
one's face. No Prats or the Tech valley or the
Spanish frontier Prats that was to guide our
steps down. We had begun the descent when we
came on a great formation of rock like the keep
of a castle, and took a few steps towards it, but a
precipice opened out under our feet down into a
sort of amphitheatre below. So it would not be
safe to wander about lost below the Pla in a bad
light.
Mile after mile we dropped, the stoniest path
over a rock-strewn slope; not a bush, not a plant.
The rain came on in torrents : it was guesswork
now about direction, but Prats was bound to lie
at the bottom of all things, to keep down was
safe. We struck a track which eventually led
to a farm-house, and we gave thanks. A delightful
room that was, upstairs, and a wood fire burning :
we dried and warmed in front of it, the girl put
the coffee pot on, pulled up the settle. She told
us about a garde-forestilre new to the country
who had lost himself on the Pla and had doubled
back on his track half-way to Py, finally fetching
up at their house after wandering for twenty-four
hours.
We were given clear directions leading down
the mountain. We passed a low block of buildings
standing against the stony slope that is called
the Stables of Pla Guillem ; they used to belong to
the Cistercian Abbey of Fontfroide, near Carcas-
sonne, and they were sold in the sixth century
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 78
to the Roussillon family of Oms ; so the name
Pla Guillem goes far enough back.
The rain began again, and again we were soaked
through; the track never left the open mountains
till we got to the walls of Prats. Finally we walked
into the Hotel Pompidor, a little more than twelve
hours after we left Vernet. Dinner was good. . . .
trout and the youthfullest shoulder of lamb and
green peas.
A day's rest and early next morning we were on
our way, winding steadily down hill to the village of
Le Tech, passing a curious bluff of mountain that
seems to crane a beak over the Tech, and is called
the Tour de Cos, a useful beacon once between
Prats and Amelie. When we walked on we came
to Sainte Ce"cile of Cos, a little Romanesque Chapel,
that goes back as far as Charlemagne's day : it
was chronicled then as the Cella of Cotso.
We passed the Mas de Cos and crossed a stream
with one or two brown houses huddled together
that called themselves Baynat de la Misery. The
houses rather suggested what the name did not
mean ; the whole of this country at the foot of
Canigou is tormented, bruised you might say,
poor land, riddled by streams and broken by
hills.
It was a joy to get to Montferrer, high on
rock, right above the feeling of contention with
a difficulty, which the country below gives one.
The castle, highest of all, used to belong to the
Castelnou family, and there is a sarcophagus of
79 PEGGING ALONG
theirs in the little granite church. We saw a
picture that was worth fifty sarcophagi.
After Montferrer we had to make for another
village, Corsavi ; a postman who overtook us
said he was going there himself, we walked on
together at a brisk pace. His former beat had been
on the Rive Droite of the river in Paris, round about
the Embassies, and he did not seem to have appre-
ciated the heights of steps up to the flats as much
as his native tracks. But he regretted his bock,
and I think he had come to see Corsavi in rather
a new light. He said that he most of all wanted
to get moved down into the Plain : the Plain was
gayer : that round Corsavi people worked hard
and lived principally on beans and rye bread.
In Corsavi we had our second drink. There had
been good wine at Montferrer, this time we had
coffee, which started us off again on the longest
and steepest part of the walk. A knapsack, how-
ever leanly packed, is a burden : one can pare things
for the night down to the thinnest margin possible,
and still it weighs heavy uphill. It was an appalling
stretch of uphill before us that afternoon. Some
way off there loomed one of Canigou's long shoulders :
it looked a mighty ridge to cross, but Velmanya
lay right over on the other side. There was no get-
ting out of it. We could see the Tour de Batere,
and had to cross well to the west of that by the
Col de Pey ; one struck the Col by a track from
the iron mines of Batere. So our objective for the
present was the iron mines.
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 80
Walking up to the mines was going to be a tough
job. To begin with, between us an^. the ridge
stretched an extent of big, troubled country, cut
up by the most awkward-looking valleys. They
were too wide for the road to bridge unless it were
at their heads, and too steep for it to go down into
and up. It therefore went roundabout, lacing into
the head of first one gorge and then the other,
rounding heaven knows how many corners, and
rising every inch of it. A ghastly road to deal with
plus knapsacks, at the end of a long day.
We did not follow it. I am not sure we did not
do a worse thing. We left the road and took " tra-
verses " across country, short cuts that made a
bee-line for the mines and the crest of the ridge.
Down into the nethermost depths the wretched path
would drop to strike up a perpendicular ascent ;
down again, up again, following the telegraph-poles
that never have any mercy, whose wires loop on so
airily towards the sky.
Our struggle was over for the moment when we
were at the mines. There was a group of Italian
miners outside their shanty, sweet smiling people,
childlike, quite content just to beam upon one.
In the canteen, where we laid our knapsacks down,
came the usual Catalan fire of questions and on-
lookers ready to push in. It was possible to get
beds there, but though one was getting stiff and it
would soon be dark, we mutually dismissed the
idea without any consultation, finished our drinks
and set off. There was a climb to begin with to
8i DOWN THROUGH DARKNESS
the top of the ridge, much farther than it had looked.
That took almost the last little bit of heart out of
one, wrestling against a cold, high wind, towards
the Col de Pey. From the stony saddle of the Col,
Canigou was nearer than it had been all day.
The path to the left we had been told to take
zigzagged steeply down over the edge of the ridge
for some way, till we came to another smaller mining
station, La Pinousa, round which some electric
lights hung like lemons in a strange land.
The last gleam of twilight went quickly. We
had a few anxious moments amongst thick bush
and scrub, but picked up the feel of the path again
under-foot. Finally, the twinkling lights of Vel-
manya showed below.
Half an hour more and we splashed into some
water at the bottom of the valley : found the bridge,
houses, the street long and dark, the inn. It was
ten o'clock.
This inn, the Poste de Secours, provided unlimited
cafe-au-lait and brown barley bread and honey
next morning. Our one question was of Canigou :
1 Will the peak be clear ? Are we going to get
to the top, this our last chance ? "
We were off early. It takes about five hours
from Velmanya to the peak. Nothing can go wrong
in the summer, but May is a different matter, when
one starts in a southern spring and walks up into
a northern winter.
We wound by the ruins of the castle above Vel-
manya and struck the chemin forestier, that soft
6
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 82
track of firpins under the little firs that runs round
such an infinity of corners one never guessed
Canigou had so many buttresses and slopes up
at the gentlest angle all the time.
We came out into the open, up on to the Prat
Cabrera pasture of the goat an upper summer
pasture. Here a muleteer met us, and told us how
one summer he had actually taken a mule with a
lady on it to the very top, and never would again ;
how one of the mounted police, fired by this exploit,
had tried to ride a horse up, and it had slipped over
the path edge, was killed. He thought we had a
chance to-day, but by the time we came near the
chalet we certainly did not think so ourselves, nor
when we passed the Lac de Perdrix, Pierre's lake :
there for one moment the cloud cleared off the peak
and we saw it hanging above us, the steep precipice
on the east face, the great glacier at the bottom ;
another instant, and the curtain of fog blew over
it again. It is just here you begin to feel the menace
of Canigou, the desperate loneliness of it, the horrid
defiance of the peak some force about the mountain
that is demoniacal.
Through snow we waded on as far as the flagstaff,
where we hid the knapsacks amongst some rocks,
meaning to drop down to Vernet from there. The
snow was thicker farther on, the slopes up to the
peak unbroken white. Should we ever keep on
the path ? Suppose the snow were frozen and
slippery on those worst places high up, as it had
been in October.
83 CANIGOU CONQUERED!
Then we heard shouting, and ahead of us, coming
down a bend in our direction, moved a string of
four little black figures on the white. They were
as surprised as ourselves. They had started out
from St. Martin de Canigou and had taken the
peak by the Breche Durier.
" We are the first people who have been up this
year," they said.
" We were the last who tried last year/' we
said.
" Oh ! we don't advise you to try to-day. One
of our party slipped several times. You would be
very foolish to go on," they told us ; and the worst
of it was their reasons were logical.
I was discovered in string-soled canvas espad-
rittes. And our sticks! Mine was an olive staff
bought at Ille, with a broad, stumpy end, originally
intended for driving pigs to market. We stood
condemned in front of iron-shod alpenstocks and
mountaineers' boots bristling with spiked nails,
and snow-spectacles, and woolly caps, and woolly
gloves.
We were quite humble. We said we grasped it
all. We would just go on a little way and then
turn back. Off they went down hill, on we slogged
up and up.
To their foot -prints we owed it that we got on at
all. They just made all the difference: the snow
was soft, we sank well into the holes ; that kept us
on the right line, zigzagging up the steep face.
There was only one place that asked for care, where
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 84
the danger lay in dislodging the bulk of snow under-
foot and slipping with it.
We breathed a long breath of more than joy when
we actually found ourselves on the little platform
on the top. One could hardly believe it ; and the
very elements were with us, for just as we got there
the cloud vanished ; we stood in sun.
Or rather, sat down ; for directly the mist rolled
off one grasped how much in the air the peak was.
The ground dropped away under-foot, we might
have been flying and have lit on a pinnacle in the
sky; it felt like that. We stood on the crest of the
wave that we had so often seen tossed up against
the sky, that seems to hang over the chasm where
the glacier lies.
The little hut that takes up most of the space
on top was buried to the roof in snow, but the map
lay clear on the highest rock an enamelled map
giving the heights and the view just as one sees it,
the directions of different points, Barcelona, Mont-
pellier, and so on. Not that we could see a great
deal. The whole of the plain was shut out by soft
cloud that drifted so close to the peak one felt one
could have touched it. We were not to see the
plain. Good. We had finished with that. But
south-west, yes, we had still to deal with the
Cerdagne. It told us so ; had shaken off the
clouds ; was clear as we had never seen it before.
Carlit, the blue mountain we did not climb, was
out to bring us back one day.
It was not a panoramic view nor one of sharp
85 THE BROKEN TRAIL
effects ; rather a world hinted at, the futurist west;
The afternoon light coloured it powder-blue and
greenish-yellow, tapestry colouring.
We sat there in the sun, looking ; there was not
even enough wind to put out a match. And all
the time at our backs, to the east, an impenetrable
wall of fog hung and swirled like the sea.
We peered over the precipice to watch the mist
recede for a second and show black rock ; to look
at the snow at the bottom that never melts, has been
there ever since Canigou was.
We had all the descent in broad sunlight, found
the knapsacks in our cache near the flagstaff, and
sprawled in the sun, mightily happy. Vernet was
at our feet. We made nothing of getting down
there, laughed at the five-and-a-half-thousand feet
we had to drop. We should be in excellent time
for dinner by this short cut down the gorge of
St. Vincent.
For the first part of our way, all we had to do
was to keep down in a straight line. There was
no path, we slid over the rough mountain edge ;
not such hard going at first. But later we were hung
up on a spur in jagged rock and rhododendron
and pine woods. At last we hit off the track above
the gorge of St. Vincent. Once there, we had a
pencil-note of a little path, so many yards to the
left, that we were to find. Discovered, after some
trouble, it led well below in the Vernet direction ;
then to our horror it was gone, swept away in a
great cascade of rock ; we cast all round for it and
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 86
there was no sign. We climbed down the moraine
of rock to be faced by the precipices of the gorge,
frankly impossible. Unless we found the path,
there was the prospect of struggling back to the
upper track and following its weary circuitous route.
Night would be upon us.
However in the end we nosed out the little broken
trail, not a bit where it was to be expected ; but then,
the avalanche had so torn away the mountain side.
Thenceforth it was plain sailing, though our joy
faded in time over the vagaries and pitfalls of a way
that nobody uses, which twisted to a heart-breaking
degree and slid under waterfalls and lost itself in
bushes.
We got in just at dark. Never again the gorge
of St. Vincent.
CHAPTER VII
THE UPPER TET VILLEFRANCHE OLETTE MANTET CANAVEILLES
THUES THE LAKES OF NOHEDES
VILLEFRANCHE, the dark little fortified town
wedged in the gorge of the Tet, where one
leaves the railway to drive up to Vernet, is
one place that the English visitors go to see. It is
sufficiently gloomy : the fourteenth and fifteenth
century houses, sombre and massive, are faced with
grey marble : there is hardly ever any sun to help
them the mountains shut that out and make the
reserve that the belt of wall drawn tight round the
town accentuates. Villefranche was bound to be
connected with a tragedy : the house of Liar in the
Rue des Juifs is shown now, and the great cave-
grotto in the hillside, associated with it, where in
1674 a band of conspirators, bent on overthrowing
the French Government in favour of the Spanish,
used to meet. Inez of Liar, daughter of one of the
conspirators, was indiscreet, the plot and the cave
were both discovered ; Liar and his sons, with the
rest, were put to death. Inez ended her tragic life
in a convent.
Villefranche has been soaked in military and
political associations, and was built for nothing
8 7
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 88
else but the defence of a pass. It has a great
Romanesque church of imposing proportions, dating
from the twelfth century : the carving on the
doorway ranks amongst the best work in marble in
the country. 1 Inside the church there is a picture
of St. Anthony that seems to have dropped out of
the count of anything precious, to have lost recogni-
tion. A tall black figure lines itself against a fading
sky, a figure that seems to drift towards one and
never comes, that is passing and never passes.
There is something nebulous too about the Holy
Child carried on the open book. The cherubs that
circle in the sky round the Saint are like scattered
thoughts of his. The picture has all the influence of
Spain in it : the asceticism of the face, the feeling
for black, the bold curve of the cape and the long
straight lines.
Growing accustomed to the dim light in the
church, the habit is seen to be dark brown, not
black ; some of the cherubims are playing mandolins
and hautbois ; the thin, sensitive hands almost
move, the face becomes rapt, the pale face against
the pale yellowish sky.
On beyond Villefranche, up the Tet, there is a
little village town called Olette.
We took knapsacks and we put up for two or three
nights at the Hotel de la Fontaine, chez Sicart.
Here one does not eat to live. Monsieur Sicart's
dinners and the quality of his wine are memorable.
At Olette two rivers run into the Tet, one from
1 See illustration.
DETAIL
OF
ARCHWAY
CHURCH AT VILLEFRANCHE.
(38
89 INACCESSIBLE MANTET
the north, one from the south. The Evol river, to
the north, comes from a great watershed, a high
country of summer pastures ; up there somewhere
lie the Lakes of Nohedes. An old track follows
the Evol valley on to these heights, takes one over
the Col de Portous into the Nohedes valley and
down to Prades ; a branch off in the mountains
goes by the Peak Madres north-west and out of the
Roussillon altogether.
There was still the southern valley to explore
towards Spain. We were bent on getting to a
village called Mantet that everybody spoke of with
a shudder. It was "beyond."
Mantet is too high to hear, too far to know ; is
on the horizon, traditional. Two paths only connect
it with the last limits of France one from Py, and
one that takes five hours or six on a mule from
Olette.
Starting to walk to this hamlet of the people of
the world's end, we passed the village of Nyer with
its old castle, and after a long climb up the solid
mountain ridge beyond, looked down upon the
desolate Chapel of the Rocks of legendary setting,
where a goatherd and flocks found some, possibly
pagan, image, that was ascribed to the Virgin, and
a chapel built for it in this rocky, lonely gorge.
Quite on the height the track takes the edge of
what the people call le grand canal, and the canal
seems to typify to them a sort of rope to help the
climber. It is a tiny runlet of water conducted
from a high mountain stream to drudge for a moun-
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 90
tain mine. This thread of swift, cold, clear water,
but a foot or two wide, secured to the face of preci-
pices, built round rocky shoulders this little hori-
zontal line forms, by means of its strong edge of
masonry, a narrow footpath that runs mile after mile
upon its very margin, only to be followed of course
in single file. Almost a giddy footpath because of
the great drop on the outside down into a gorge
that has at first a fathomless suggestion, inside
a feeling of protection is given by the shallow
stream. Mules, obviously, cannot follow le grand
canal ; there is a second track up over the top for
them.
The day we made our venture was no bad choice :
the wind that had blown strong on the edge of the
mountain left the gorge still. It was a quiet world
to be in up there, shelved away beyond any human
element, winding gradually up into the innermost
gulfs. Snow lay on the topmost ridges, patched
lower down with black pine trees, a smiting contrast
of black and white. Still lower came beech and
sycamore with leaves yellow and pink sparsely
hanging to them, so that the earth seemed to warm
the farther from the sky it came, and close to the
canal the sycamore leaves, spotted with black, were
like flames.
More often the flanks of the gorge were skimmed
bare from the very heights and represented by a
torrent of stones. These scarified slopes, loose
stone, grey granite, were powdered all over with
green lichen ; it was the rarest effect of grey-green
9 i A MENACE OF SNOW
with the misty element of powder a mountain
make-up. And leafless trees, a faint, insubstantial
purple and mauve, came against these grey-green
powdered rocks. There was never enough time to
look, since Mantet is difficult to reach and return
from in any case in an autumn day. Nor did the
weather as the morning went on encourage, and at
Olette they had warned us of sudden snow, of im-
possible lodging in the village if we ever got there.
Already snow- clouds had gathered behind and had
begun to wind sheets round the peaks.
Somewhere about half-way a countryman leading
a lamb on a string suddenly faced us, at a corner
where it happened to be possible to pass. He might
have dropped from nowhere the only human being
seen upon the whole way. It was too late in the day,
he said, for any one to be thinking of going to Mantet.
He added directions of a confusing kind and shrugged
his shoulders and went on.
After a time the stream that had been far below
us, tumbling at the bottom of the gorge, came nearer ;
its roar could be heard, a torrent. We were getting
up and up, closer to the source. At last came the
point where le grand canal started, where its water
was conducted from the torrent and the two streams
went their way.
Precipitous scarps of grey rock rose up out of the
gorge on each side, rough scrub clinging to them,
shutting away the sky and reaching down to the
cold eddies and the great boulders of the stream.
Where was Mantet ? Overhead somewhere, up in
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 92
the snows, upon a far-off plateau ? Which was the
path?
The first we tried, a long and difficult scramble
up the wooded cliff, faded away into nothingness
and ended at an arete of rock there was no climbing.
It was nothing but a wood-cutter's track. Down
again to the bottom we were no better off than
before, worse ; with the day getting on and a feeling
of snow in the air. A second little path followed
the stream upwards and over huge boulders, then
it rose and began to edge along the iface lof the
cliff.
At last, the top. Snow there and short grass, a
high mountain valley and pastures below, locked in
the mountains. Still on, skirting the height, the
little path looped corner after corner : would Mantet
never come ? The valley below us opened out, undu-
lations of the sallow, snow-buried, sunburned grass
that belongs to these high-up oases. Flocks could
be seen, not many ; there were mules and little horses
turned out to graze ; here and there round haycocks,
thatched up to a point, looking like brown tents
in the waste. Snow came down quite near them,
snow covered the mountain tops beyond them.
A snowy, rocky stream wound along the belt of
green, if such sallow grass could be called green ;
and some huts camped down by it, primitive.
A last shoulder of the valley turned, the apse of
the little church of Mantet revealed itself. Five
minutes more, and the whole collection of brown,
weather-beaten, dishevelled houses. This was Man-
93 CHEZ RAPHAEL
tet. And the snow began to fall, gently, in little
single flakes. Picking our way in mud, it was only
women we found standing about outside the
houses, knitting, busy with something or other.
The cafe was indicated, Chez Raphael, and Madame
Raphael would provide coffee. Was the church
locked ? and where was the key ? But nobody and
there were several who went to look for it could
find the key. The cure only comes to Mantet to
bury its people.
Three or four steps up into the cafe, and a long,
low room with a long, narrow table. But such a
chimney corner to warm in ! The walls were yellow-
brown with the smoke of centuries ; pots and pans,
bacon, lanterns, candles, coats and waistcoats and
caps hung to the black beams with all sorts of other
odds and ends. And firewood was stacked up in
the middle of the room : a wooden staircase in one
corner led up overhead.
We sat on content in that so mellowed and warm
interior, either side the open chimney, while Madame
Raphael boiled water on the wood fire and cleaned
two glasses. She talked little. Only yesterday,
she said briefly, her son had gone off to do his years
of soldiering. He had gone to Carcassonne. " They
say it is not far," she added, but evidently the name
conveyed nothing to her.
She talked of the snow: "Every day now we
expect snow." Told us of one winter when it was
many feet thick and the doors all snowed up ; they
had to get in and out by the window. She talked of
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 94
the village, Py, three hours off over the Col de
Mantet, where their cur6 lived, and there was a
doctor, not there, but farther away still, who would
come if he were fetched. But there was never a
word of the outside world.
Behind Mantet towards Pyrose the Col de Mantet,
crossed by a climbing mule-track of many curves :
before the village the grassy slopes fell, to the sallow
pastures with their little horses and black haystacks :
and on either side shoulders of the mountains close
round. Mantet has one " vision," to the west.
It looks straight on to its lonely pastures and the
mountains that come down to them, but the moun-
tains are cut by a long narrow valley that runs right
away up and into Spain, one of the oldest passes
into Spain. So Mantet faces a gate of Eldorado,
and often the village people must see it under a flare
of wild yellow light above the snows.
Another excursion we made was to Canaveilles,
surely the strangest little bathing establishment
that could be found. The Tet here forces its way
through a fissure in the mountain : the springs are
down at the bottom of the crack. There is just
room between the wall of rock and the river to squeeze
in a little narrow house and a thin strip of grass and
the steep path that drops to them. You sit in cold
shade on the grass with the torrent at your feet,
the din of it in your ears ; you are absolutely walled-
in by grey rock, two walls as steep as the side of a
house. You feel down at the bottom of a well : you
look up, and far above, in the crack of rock overhead,
95 NIRVANA FOR NERVES
there is a ribbon of blue sky, and you know that
there it is sunny.
We went on up the valley to the Thues Thermal
Establishment. Thues is buried in the Tet's green
gorge, bowered in woods, drunk with the noise of the
river, a narcotic spot. People who want sun, the
"nervy" legion, the city-tired Thues offers them
opaline hours. The sunny bedrooms, fragrantly,
coolly furnished, had a spell of their own : the
table d'hote and the salons were " more than usual
calm," decorated to obliterate themselves. No
peevish nerve could rise up and curse their nonde-
script, quiet tones.
Fiery hot water bubbles up out of the earth at
Thues. It comes from the rock, two million litres a
day, too hot to bear your finger in it. Beyond the
shady garden, in the depths of trees and maidenhair
fern and creepers and giant leaves grown out of
knowledge, this hot spring comes welling out over
the rocks, steaming and pouring and steaming again.
Steam rising out of the woods what a stovehouse
steam going up into the blue, a great steaming cascade
tumbling under the fig trees, chestnuts, oaks, walnuts.
You might have hot baths all your life and every
moment of your life behind the fig leaves with the
fadas and the encantadas and the donas d'aygua of
the Tet.
We were forced to leave our expedition to the
Lakes of Nohedes until May. In old days the
lakes were spoken of in terror. There is no
country in the Roussillon that exercises a bigger
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 96
influence on the people that live near than this
lake country.
The track up to it is hard on mules and a penance
on foot. We had a couple of mules : for more than
three hours one is clambering up a broken staircase
of rock, stumbling over uneven boulders and slipping
on loose stones.
The Lakes of Nohedes are beyond the high sunny
plateau, the Jassa of Evol, with its yellow daffodils
and forget-me-nots and a hundred flowers ; a long
climb. The snow grew deep, boulders and tangled
clumps of rhododendrons made walking difficult,
the mules had to be left behind. In the end the
ridge we were on dropped steeply between us and
the mountains : at the bottom were deep, wooded
hollows ; down in the hollows the lakes lay, sunk in
under the mountains.
Up to four years ago there was a yearly pilgrimage
to the Lakes from the villages round, headed by the
Cure of Evol, for the purpose of blessing the shifting,
inscrutable water.
The sinister Lac Negre reached, the procession
would go on to the Lac Bleu that reflects the sky
and is still higher up, and last of all they would
kneel by the Lac Estellat that belongs to night and
scintillates with stars because it is always ruffled
by a little wind.
This propitiation of dread, mysterious water,
must have entered largely into pagan rites. The
Lakes of Nohedes lend themselves to mystery. The
very trout out of Lac Negre were demoniacal ;
97 WIZARDS AND WATERSPRITES
immense black trout that, when they were being
fried, leapt from the pan and vanished up the
chimney. And the surface of the water, if a stone
were thrown into it, would rise in eddies and waves
and call down a tempest.
One could well imagine it all, standing on the thin
margin. How shepherds up in that grim, lonely
world, would come to brood over dark water, whose
reflections doubled the effect of rock and snow :
the sudden stirring of the surface by inexplicable
currents of air might well seem supernatural and
nothing less. There is something void about that
aloof world that would summon voices and material-
ize visions and conjure dreams.
CHAPTER VIII
BLNE PERPIGNAN CASTEL ROSSELLO THE TRAMONTANE
JUST as we had fled up to Vernet to be in time
for the fete of St. Martin de Canigou, so we
flitted to Elne, pursuing a like phantom. I
think it was at the fete at Elne that we made a vow.
No place in the Roussillon was going to be quite
like Elne. Before we had left England we had read :
" Elne is the ancient Illiberis, an important city
of the Sardones, under the walls of which Hannibal
encamped after crossing the Pyrenees B.C. 218.
It was named Helena by Constantine in memory
of his Mother the Empress. The Cathedral is a
Romanesque building of the twelfth century. The
sea, now three miles distant, formerly washed the
foot of the little hill on which Elne stands."
I think the first look of Elne as we neared it struck
our illusions a death-blow. I see a dull, dirty mound
with an uninteresting-looking medley of poor modern
houses topped by two ill-matched cathedral towers,
the fine effect of one of them vaguely spoilt. The
rest of our impressions of Elne fell, somehow or other,
into line with the first. We were not wanted there,
to begin with ; the town was crowded out for the
98
99 THE PASSING OF ELNE
fete. Outside the dull little streets, the blank
monotony of the country round appalled us, flat
fields and vineyards open to the wind, or it might be
broken by a thin, high cane fence.
As for its inhabitants, I think of them crowding
into the cathedral for the celebration of the Festa
Major de Santa Aularia y Santa Julia, and possessing
the whole building with a spirit of secularity that
went far to kill any meaning the cathedral had
ever had.
I do not quite know what is the matter with Elne :
whether the murder of the Emperor Constantius
banished for ever from it something that mattered.
Even its Bishop forsook it and removed to Perpignan :
it has been destroyed twice by French armies in wars
with Spain : it was shamefully treated at the time
of the Revolution.
The Republic seems to have wiped its feet on the
cathedral. A little creaking tin Tricolor flag is
stuck on one of the towers ; the words " Liberte,
Egalit6, Fraternite," are painted large on a white-
washed background over the old Romanesque
doorway.
Elne is dead. You cannot feel yourself in a little
city that counts perhaps three thousand years of
existence, the Illiberis of the Phoenicians. You
cannot imagine it as being one of the earliest Chris-
tian strongholds in France, so that even in A.D. 600
it possessed a bishop. But nowadays its cathedral
has dropped to the status of a parish church, the
inside of it cruelly denuded and gaunt ; its high
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 100
altar of silver sold in 1721 to be converted into coin
of the realm at Perpignan ; its vast treasure and its
relics fourteen hundred years old vanished.
One prize has been spared, in a side chapel to the
south. Entirely in shadow, it is hard to see : an
altar-piece painted on wood, representing St.
Michael and scenes in connection with him. There
is an altar-piece of the same character at Argeles-sur-
Mer, and a third at Rigarda that represents Sainte
Eulalie.
We had never found in a Catalan church anything
of the sort except these three instances, and felt
sure of their Spanish origin when, later, we dis-
covered the same work at Puigcerda, just over the
Spanish border in the Cerdagne. If these altar-
pieces belong to the fifteenth century, they are likely
to have come into the Roussillon with Ferdinand and
Isabella.
On the north side of the cathedral lie the cloisters.
Elne has been classed by the Republic as a Monument
Historique, and the blight of " les Monuments His-
toriques " has settled on the cloisters : the walls
of them have been painted white, and lined to fake
stones ; there are notices asking you not to write
your name up, there are notices forbidding you to go
into the garden in the middle.
After all we had read, it was something of a shock
to discover that only part of the cloisters were
twelfth-century work. Much of them fell in the
fourteenth century, and a good deal of the sculpture
is dull with the rather debased form that charac-
ioi PERPIGNAN
terized this later work. The earlier capitals are
many of them, in spite of their damaged condition,
deeply interesting in design and very beautiful, but
out of the best examples there is missing something
that Serrabona has.
Students of the Romanesque should go to the
Abbey of Moissac on the line from Bordeaux to
Toulouse and compare the sculpture there with the
Romanesque in the Roussillon at Elne, Villefranche,
Serrabona, St. Michel-de-Cuxa. Moissac probably
set a fashion that the Catalan sculptors were quick
to follow, Moissac was a last word in Romanesque
that they caught at. Some of the sculpture at Elne
might have been by the same workmen as the
cloisters at Moissac, except that Elne is perhaps a
little less spontaneous : they both of them suggest,
a little bit, a chilly, faultless perfection : " les
ciseaux froids et sees." It is the cool, logical brain
of the Frenchman that Elne and the cloisters at
Moissac express. The passion and fire of the
southern soul belong to Serrabona.
We spent Christmas at Perpignan.
Perpignan seems from all time to have been up
against something, avaricious lords and despotic
monarchs, or else it has been torn alternately by
France and Spain. It has never had much rest,
never been given time to think, nor been able to
afford to consider the abstract.
It is in an intermediate and unhappy stage over its
new buildings and its alterations. Eighty years ago
it was a little walled-in city tunnelled by a network
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 102
of dark, narrow streets that came out into small
open market-places and branched off again into
shadow. Its houses often bridged the street quite
over with an odd room or two and shut out the sky,
gargoyles shot the rain into the streets.
That was Spanish, and a good deal of that remains.
I remember the joy that we got out of the old
citadel on the top of the hill. One had seen it from
Salses to begin with, solid, simple, history-making,
commanding the Plain. The square of it and the
dogged, massive little church, its keep, its key,
holding the Roussillon.
The barracks group themselves round it. Armed
with a permis and shadowed by one of the guard, we
found ourselves inside the little courtyard that saw
all the magnificence of that Aragonese Court to
which the country was to owe its early civilization.
The gallery on the south side, reached by stone
staircases at either end, is Majorcan and Arab in its
pointed arches, the slim columns seem almost guilty
of a freakish trick in supporting any weight at all.
These Salas of the Kings and Queens opening on to
the gallery must have looked spacious enough to the
Seigneurs of Opoul and Queribus. Not a castle,
but a palace. The only name they could give the
ogival gallery was Paradis. Not that one can get
any adequate idea now of this " Paradis " : the
Sala de Mallorca, the Sala del Timbres, the Sola del
Ysop, the Cambra Blanca, even the Chapel Royal
of Sainte-Croix, are all turned into storehouses for
rifles, etc. The outside walls, the windows that
103 CATALAN COAT OF ARMS
faced the sun, the gallery where Isabella the Catholic
had walked, is all that one sees.
We wandered afterwards round the giant walls
and mounds and fosses of the fortifications. One
comes across a sculptured arm in stone, holding a
sword upright, on the bastion of Charles-Quint,
souvenir of a night when Charles found one of the
sentinels asleep and pushing him over into the fosse
did duty there himself till daybreak. The arm
thrust straight out from the parapet with the sword
clenched in the mailed fist is directed at Spain, seems
to defy Spain, to challenge the frontier only that
it happens to have been put there by a Spanish King.
But the grimness and the menace of it fascinate one.
It is not truculent, nor are the four huge stone
figures on the gateway into the citadel, that are
said to be swearing that never, never, " by their
beards ..." shall France possess the fortress ; two
of them hold their beards and two of them fold their
arms, and though some of their dignity has gone
with the loss of their cuirasses, they have a solid
repose and strength.
The cathedral is another good memory. I can-
not think of the inside of that without thinking of
the long hangings behind the altar, of red and
yellow, the colours of the Catalan coat of arms, that
stand for Wifred, Count of the Roussillon.
One thinks of the giving of the colours. Wifred,
mortally wounded after turning the tide of battle
for the French King ; the cry of the King, Charles
le Chauve "Ask of me anything /" the dying request
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 104
" Sire, see my shield without device. Put me arms
upon it that I can give to my people." And the quick
response of Charles, dipping his four fingers in
Wifred's blood, drawing them over the golden
shield from top to bottom : Las Cuatra Barres
Catalanas. So that the four red bars on a gold
ground have belonged to the Roussillon ever since.
The reredos, the altar, the long shallow steps
that lead up to it are all of grey marble which works,
just as the walls of the cathedral work, into a mist.
Nothing could be more ascetic than the high altar,
nothing could have been better done. Its mysteries
have been kept far away from the barbaric banners,
and yet the gold and blood was bound to be the
background of the grey, for a people who
" Buvait avec fureur ses elements cheris,
L'or et le sang."
If the east end of the cathedral takes one back to
Charles le Chauve, the west goes a little further,
to Charlemagne.
The modern history of the Roussillon begins with
the ninth century, when Charlemagne created its
first Counts, and his conquests and the exploits of
Roland still live with its people. Legends are built
into the walls about them, stamped on the rocks,
the significance of the half -mythological heroes
grows like a monumental cairn upon which every-
body tosses a stone.
People say that the font in the cathedral belongs
to the time of Charlemagne or thereabouts. It is
105 SHRIVELLED WITH COLD
equal to a cairn itself as a record, this monolith of
polished red marble, carved to represent a tonneau
or wine cask. There is a Latin inscription upon it
that suggests legendary days :
" The waters of the sacred fountain drown
the hissings of the guilty serpent."
I think some of our best hours in Perpignan were
spent reading in its unique library. That " best "
must be qualified because of the weather. Christmas
happened to bring the iciest spell of weather known
for many years, almost phenomenal. We used to be
blown through the little streets by the north wind,
devoutly wishing every yard of the old ramparts
back again. In the Reading Room at the library
this time of all others was chosen to remove the
heating apparatus, lest it should go through the old
floor and tumble upon the antiquities in the room
underneath. We had to wrap ourselves up in
manifold coats and sit reading till one's circulation
drove one out to run up and down under the famous
avenue of plane trees.
We met Monsieur Pierre Vidal at the library.
His Guide to the Pyrenees Orientates had been our
mainstay : we ended by owing all sorts of things to
him. He wanted to teach us Catalan : I don't think
he thought there was any language like it, none quite
as terse, with greater economy of words, or more
direct expression.
How the gardens used to invade Perpignan in
the great open market-place every morning ! those
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 106
acres and acres of haricot beans, artichokes, leeks.
Asparagus was later, apricots and peaches were later
still. But the list would be too long. And what
colour the market-place absorbed ! Could there be
any colour left in the Roussillon ? The soil of the
Roussillon never seems to have a "day off" : they
talk of its too great energy, say that if it were not
for the beating of the Tramontane upon it, every
growing thing would run riot.
Walking through the gardens towards the sea
there is a tower that one catches sight of standing
up above the Plain, on the bank of the Tet. It is
something like the tower of a lighthouse, a landmark
to which men must have looked as far back as history
goes, probably; because, though it is known now
as Castell Rossello in its connection as keep of an
early seigneurial castle, it stands close enough to
the site of the Greek town Ruscino to give it a
Phoenician, Greek or Roman origin. " Ruscino "
means " changing shore," and that must refer to the
time when the sea was wavering close to it, and Elne
had not yet receded and left stretches of Plain high
and dry.
The site of the Greek Rouskino or Ruscino lies
slightly southward, where they are digging now and
turning up all sorts of treasures. Ruscino saw a
great conference between Romans and Catalans
when Hannibal was in Spain ; on no account were
the Catalans to allow Hannibal across the Roussillon.
It was like the Catalan common sense to see they
would gain nothing by barring his way and lose
107 THE TRAGEDY OF SAURIMONDE
little by passing him through, so they took his
presents, let him camp near Illiberis and go on
towards Italy in spite of threats from Ruscino.
But the tower one sees to-day has done with the
great empire and its legions, the empire is buried with
Ruscino, and the tower Castell Rossello stands for
medieval power, for medieval romance.
Long ago one had read Stendhal's L 1 Amour, and
one had thought then that there could not exist in
the whole world a more beautiful or dramatic tale of
love than his translation from a Provencal manu-
script of the twelfth century. Imagine therefore the
sheer delight of discovering " Castell Rossello," of
finding that that vivid drama belonged to the old
tower, to the country round us, to the very tracks
we followed.
The twelfth century ! All those charmed years
when the world was not in bondage to asceticism,
when thought found its full delighted expression in
the school of the Gai Sfavoir, and the Troubadours
made of " L' Amour passion " a religion : it was
alive for one now. Saurimonde : her proud, tender
beauty : that " whiteness of lilies "... and Guil-
laume of Cabestany : the eager, passionate youth,
existing in the light of her eyes the eyes of Medi-
terranean blue.
We walked one day from Castell Rossello to the
little hamlet of Cabestany, following a path through
fields and vineyards that Guillaume de Cabestany
must have known well.
We went into the little Romanesque church.
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 108
There is a carved stone corbel in it that might almost
be said to have characteristics of portraiture, it is
so much alive : its date, and finding it in that
church, prompted the conceit of connecting it with
Guillaume. His chateau joins up to the church,
would all have been fortified together, the church
tower standing for the keep. Gardens slope up to
it on the south side.
On this and others of our walks abroad, tears
streamed down our faces, ears froze, the hair was
almost torn from our heads, a demon force dealt
with one's skirt, driving one backwards at moments-
This then was the " Mistral " of France, the
" Tramontane " of the Roussillon, the wind to which
the Romans raised a monument at Narbonne. It
deserves a monument : one of the greatest, most
pitiless forces one has ever met. It cut like a whip,
it swept by with a tearing, defiant sound. The
Tramontane does not moan. It scours down France,
across the gulf of Lyons to the desert of Sahara ;
the hot air having risen off the desert, the icy
Tramontane rushes from the north to fill the vacuum.
If it had not been for the weather we might have
stayed on at Perpignan. Not that it would ever,
I think, have taken much hold upon one.
It did not help us to call it an abnormal winter.
We stood it till we were shrivelled, then made up our
minds to put in a fortnight at Barcelona and give
the Roussillon time to recover.
CHAPTER IX
COLLIOURB PORT VENDRES THE ALBERES BANYULS
LES ABEILLES VALLBONA
THE Roussillon does not talk about Paris. It
talks about Barcelona. Everybody goes to
Barcelona. The Roussillon so looks to it,
sucks so many ideas from it, that we could not have
left Barcelona out.
Barcelona has the advantage of being screened by
mountains. It seemed to us the typical Mediter-
ranean sea-port : the sort of place that never lets
life drive, is never bored, and when it is not asleep
in the sun, has the widest-opened blue eyes.
On the return journey, as usual we had to change
lines from Spanish to French at the frontier station
of Cerbere. There the situation dawned on us ;
the world was snowed-up. We in Barcelona had had
the tail end of an extraordinary blizzard from the
north that had spent all the worst of itself on this
corner of France. A "worst" indeed! The plat-
form of Cerbere station was blocked with bundles of
rags and shawls and sacking. We looked, and they
were human bundles, people who were on their way
through the Roussillon to Carcassonne and Cette,
and had been held up already four days. The line
109
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON no
was hopelessly blocked down there ; it was actually
two more days before they were able to leave. Tales
of Perpignan hard up for provisions were poured
into our ears, a shortage of flour and potatoes :
tragic tales of outlying villages completely cut oft
by impassable drifts.
We ourselves, with only a short distance to go,
made our destination in the end, but slowly, through
deep cuttings of snow that came up level with the
carriage windows. We had taken rooms at a fishing
village, Collioure, down at the foot of the frontier
wall of mountains that runs out into the Mediter-
ranean and divides Spain and the Roussillon.
A day soon came for us when Collioure belonged
to the sunny south ; things thawed and dripped
well ; out walking one was too hot in a coat.
The Plain away to the north stretched white as a
sugar-cake, a milky blue Mediterranean the colour
of a blue Persian tile lapped the whitest shore, the
white Plain and the blue sea lay under a cloudless
sky in sunshine that seemed as if it must be eternal.
At Collioure the old lighthouse tower was re-
flected in a lagoon : lazy waves did not trouble to
break. Women were sitting mending fishing-nets,
the brown nets and the paler fine nets like gossamer
webs. On the narrow strip of beach, the long line
of fishing-boats was drawn up, waiting ; the raking
line of tall masts, set forward, leaned and yearned
towards the sea, naked of their lateen sails, and
hankering.
They have never forgotten Phoenicia, these boats,
in COLOURS OF THE GODS
in their prows that shape like serpents' heads, that
rear themselves erect : and the fishermen, still
carving and painting a star and crescent on the bow
of every barque, hark back to the ways of the East,
just as they still cling to classic names and call their
boats Nereid, Nautilus, and so on.
Such colours the hulls were painted ! You would
ask in vain for them at a colour man's shop in London.
They were light, fugitive colours. Sea-green and
blue-green, and a pale jade-green beautiful above all.
And one was made of apricot, another orange, one
was citron, one buff, one snuff-coloured brown.
These colours were juxtaposed with French greys
and black . This southern people delights in exquisite
greys, in colours that belong to a light land, nuances
nearly white ; a land that loves grey tree trunks
and silver leaves and white roads, that is often
drowned in light.
As the days grew warmer, the pale brown fishing-
nets were laid in the mornings on the sandy beach,
drying and bleaching in the sun. Brittany washes
and dyes its nets blue with sulphate of copper. The
Roussillon is content with its solution of pine cones
off its own hills, and the result spread on the beach
is something like warm mist belonging to the hillside.
Dark groups of fishermen sit about on the sand
near them, now and again a woman with a pail to
empty into the sea walks between them : and all
the time the black hooded figures sit mending the
nets.
You would think it a precarious livelihood, fishing,
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 112
hanging on the whims of the sardine. The boats
go out, they came in one day in the end of January
without a single fish, though tidings had been brought
from Spain that the sardine had arrived. Sardines
belong to warm water, and as long as the shallower
ports of the Mediterranean are cold they stay in the
warmer deeps : spring sees them come inland and
fishing begins.
There is little sign the evening before that the
men are going out, but about eleven o'clock at night
voices are heard, steps on the cobble-stones, the
patter of clogs, then silence as they come on to the
sand, only the sound of pulleys. Then quiet again,
and about two o'clock in the morning they steal
away, much as a caravan in the desert disappears
silently before dawn.
This was when they were trawling, and we would
catch sight of them through the day, a line of white
butterflies in the blue : but for sardines they started
earlier and were out all night : the sardine is always
caught at streak of dawn the Blue Fish belongs to
the first thought of sunrise, and to no other time
in the day.
Late in the afternoon the trawling boats come in,
are often rowed into the harbour on a milky level
of still water that reflects the hovering lateen sail
greenish- white. The men jump out, and the fish
are sold on the beach by auction. It is not going
to be a slow business, everybody wants to get home,
so they call out the top price (more than they mean
to take), so many sous the pound, and they begin to
ii 3 SUPPING OFF SEA-URCHINS
come down, twenty-five, twenty-four, twenty-three
till a buyer nicks in and says " Jo ! " It makes
for a speedy sale ; the fish are weighed and the
fishermen hurry off to a meal. Not much sleeping
is done at night. Either they are on the sea or they
are out looking at the weather, or getting ready to
sail. Collioure was never dead and still at night :
the footsteps and voices were like the country, that
does so much of its waking life under the stars.
Most of the fishermen were amphibious, possessed
a little vineyard : then* off-times went to the vines.
I remember a fisherman in a cafe", blue-eyed and
tanned by the sea, soaked in salt, getting out his
fisherman's knife and demonstrating on a little bit
of branch exactly how a vine should be pruned.
January and February are the months for fishing
in rowing boats for sea-urchins that the French call
" our sin," sea hedgehog, from ours, bear: whence
our " urchin." The our sin is such a prickly bear.
He is fished up at the end of a fork on a long stick.
There are fishermen all day among the rocks on the
coast-line, hard at work prodding in blue-green
transparent water. Baskets and baskets of them
come in and go all over the country. Break him
open and he has a little star of orange-pink flesh
inside, good to eat with bread. We were made to
sample him one day when they were eating on a
boat ; it was the saltest flavour. The Catalans call
them " sea-chestnuts."
They used to bring in other treasures : langoustes
that were Spanish in their reds and yellows ; a
8
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 114
scarlet fish all spikes and prickles ; a gold-fish ;
and caught in the nets, sea-horses, with their exquisite
design.
But for Collioure there should be only one fish,
the Blue Fish, the sardine, which for some unac-
countable reason grows scarcer every year. It is
passing, just as that relic has vanished from the
church, the Gold Sardine, the symbol of the wealth
of Collioure that used to be carried in procession on
a holy day.
There is no procession now of the Barque de St.
Vincent, a procession of boats across the bay. The
fishermen would welcome it back, there is even a
feeling that connects the neglect of the old custom
with the disappearance of the sardine from the
coast. Monsieur le Cure would willingly revive it,
but the Municipality, with the official indifference
towards religion, is a sufficient bar.
At the end of the little breakwater is set the tiny
Chapel of St. Vincent, a little white beehive.
Never a Saint's chapel belonged more to the sea,
knew better the spray and the wind and the sun.
The sea must have meant so much more to those who
built it than the land meant. The Chapel of the
fishermen's Saint had got to command the waves.
To him the care of the sea was committed, and in
his keeping the fishing lay. The Gold Sardine was
a token of that.
Standing upon the breakwater, turning away from
the sea, one faces the inlet of Collioure, 1 just as the
1 See illustration.
ii
H5 AN ARTIST'S PARADISE
fishermen face it as they come in at night, when the
blue smoke of their hearths drifts over the village.
The inlet shapes itself into two curves, one curve that
they call the Ville and the further curve called the
Faubourg. Such a small place to possess a Fau-
bourg : there was bitter rivalry between it and the
Ville over the fishing.
The castle is the keystone between the Ville
and the Faubourg a castle that seems to belong
to the kingdom under the sea. And one thinks of
the " Summer Palace " that it became to the Kings
and Queens of Aragon ; of Queen Yolande de Bar,
who used to forget time sitting up in the tower
looking out over the immensity of blue.
One makes out on the beach of the Faubourg an
old Round Tower that must have defended a landing;
Back from it stands the Dominican Convent, a
great solid grey building, the stamp of Spain on
Collioure, well hidden from the : world ; with the
loophole of the sea at its door. Plenty of menace
about it.
The other little bay, the Ville, has for watch-dog
the Phoenician tower that they call the " Phare,"
where a light must always have burned. The
church comes up against the old tower, and beyond
the church the rocky arm that shelters the inlet ends
with St. Vincent's little beehive chapel.
The opposite arm of the inlet rounds off in a cliff
that carries the road above it to Port Vendres.
And from arm to arm behind Collioure the mountains
close in. It lies in a cup of the Alberes, the railway
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 116
tunnels into the cup and tunnels out again. The
hills with the vineyards slope up behind the beach
and the houses, then steeply rise, and on their crests
stand out two towers, Madeloch and Massane, towers
that command passes into Spain, that we had seen
from the Corbidres and Canigou. The mountains
get half their meaning from the two points.
Nearer Collioure a fort, St. Elme, comes on the
skyline. The Spaniards once dropped cannon-balls
from it into the village below : you can see some of
them on a clear day lying at the bottom of the
harbour. There are plenty of fortifications up in
the hills if one peers for them, but they do not count
in the impression one gets looking at Collioure from
the breakwater.
One thinks of what this inlet has seen, this " port
of the Pyrenees " it was once called. That shows
its importance then, and the name Collioure, Iberian
Kouk-Illi-Beri, Couque or Port of Illiberis or Elne,
shows its age. One can imagine the medieval
barques, painted marigold and poppy colour, that
used to sail into the inlet with their cargoes of
spikenard, mastic, terebinth, and spice. Collioure
knew all about slaves in those days. They were
shipped from Constantinople. The barques Sanctus
Spiritus and Sanctus Johannes included slaves in
their cargoes of all sorts of vanities, mirrors and
rouge and perfumes, gold and silver dyes. What-
ever it was, Collioure gave a homely exchange in the
shape of sardines, oil, wine, bees-wax, pine kernels,
almonds. And when the barques came back from
U7
the East little St. Vincent's would be enriched with
thank-offerings.
There are no ties nowadays with Egypt and
Cyprus and Syria, but the descendants of the old sea-
farers still stand and lean over the top of the castle
wall and look out from the beach at the long blue
horizon line.
Straight away from the sea, a track leads into the
amphitheatre of hills, a Pilgrim's Way to the Her-
mitage of Notre Dame de Consolation. It winds
through the sun-baked vineyards into the innermost
folds of the mountains, to a last recess hidden away,
secret and sacred, made for a shrine, made by the
gods for the needs of men. We found a Dolphin and
the Trident, carved in the stone over the fountain,
memories maybe of an altar dedicated to Neptune.
It is a little open space under precipitous heights,
dim in the shade of huge plane trees and the dark
mass of a bay tree. There is the gleam of white
periwinkles : peace and silence : a sense of sadness :
something perhaps left behind by the souls who
found consolation.
There is just one road through Collioure, and that
leads to Port Vendres. It is half an hour's walk :
never was there a greater contrast between places as
close.
Port Vendres links up with some of the world,
Collioure is Catalan to the core, whereas Port Vendres
has a foreign strain. One thinks of Port Vendres
in connection with Algiers and Morocco, with the
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 118
Foreign Legionaries, the Chasseurs d'Afrique, the
Spahis ; twice a week boats from Africa call, and
bronzed negroes from Martinique wander on the
quay with Spahis in their loose red slacks and the
pale blue " Chasseur."
There is not a " sight " to see here. Never a
castle, nor church, nor morsel of carving. The modest
gas works are in the sacred little bay of the Temple
of Venus, so that in respect to that you are forbidden
even to weep over a tomb.
All the warlike suggestions on the hills round are
turned to mere memories and conduce to peace.
The hill with the fort has ceased to be military and
has gone back to nature : because it belongs to
Government remains wild and uncultivated. The
look-out towers are names only : effigies. Cannon
are planted nose-downwards at intervals along the
quay and serve for tying up ships.
Beautiful Port Vendres, with its polished waters,
its peace. No one is noisy, or troubled, or beggarly.
People pass softly along the quay in their string-
soled espadrilles : the long carts with the white
horses seem always at a standstill, loading : the great
quay stretches past them broad and empty and
white : the giant piles of sacks stacked on the edge
have a solid, stay-there-for-ever look, and there are
always dogs curled up asleep on them in the sun.
Port Vendres has never allowed anything sordid
to be. The very cargo brought, principally flour
and karub beans, is the cleanest cargo, and the
loading of it on the carts is done with an easy
THE PORT OF VENUS
spontaneity, women as well as men helping, with
handkerchiefs or sacks over their heads, and no one
working persistently, but standing about and talking
and looking at things going on. We have loved that
in this country : to see a porter at a railway station
wheeling luggage along the platform with a cigar in
his mouth gives one intense satisfaction.
Port Vendres does its work with a sense of comfort
which is beauty. I don't think it could do things
in an ugly way.
The water in the harbour is a luminous tiling,
mysterious in that : one wants to be in it, under it,
held up by it. Lying on the opposite side there
was a schooner like a gull ; her lines reminded one
of nothing else. And she was white, except for an
orange-red belt just above the water. Her name
Papa Nicolo, and she came from Genoa. They
had been unloading the sulphur she brought and it
had a little powdered her decks citron. Her blocks
and bulwarks had a thin line of green painted on
them, and the red orange of her hull flamed in the
sun. She was full of kindly, smiling Italians that
frank smile, one woman was playing with her baby.
Port Vendres does belong to the Italian more than
to the Catalan or Spaniard or Algerian.
Venus has never deserted it. The sea from which
Venus rose was never bluer than this sea, the Persian-
tile sea.
The great " three-master " moored to the quay
under our hotel windows is a beautiful wooden ship,
coppered as the old East Indiamen were. The ample
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 120
bulk of her hull spreads in a broad swelling line, and
she gives herself to the sea as though she loved it :
there is a charming old balustrade all round the edge
of her deck that suggests wooden balconies and fetes
champetres. She has so much room, a stately deck
to wander on and sit and enjoy. The slim white
spars across her masts and the ropes and rigging knit
together the airy framework overhead. She has
brought karub beans, and the sweet smell of them is
everywhere.
As night comes on it is a velvet, glimmering dark-
ness in which Port Vendres dreams. White quays
and white houses, shadowy water, a soft, dark
mystery everywhere. In the reflections of the white
houses, the dark windows one above another merge
into upright bars of shadow, and give the white
spaces between them the effect of pillars, so that one
sees the reflection of a Greek temple in the harbour,
the fa$ade of a marble temple.
It is pure enchantment at night Port Vendres.
The stars climb up, seem lights pinned to the masts ;
soon they are beyond and free in space. A red star
hangs over the hill in the south. The sky has lost
its light, it is a soft, dense bluish dark. And the
water in the harbour is black-blue : no longer reflects
opal and primrose and orange and green. The white
houses gleam like ivory. The dark hill opposite
outlines itself against the sky, yet in its darkness you
feel the form you cannot see. There are a few lights
on the schooner, the " three-master." The scent of
her karub beans drifting up from the quay seems to
i2i SMUGGLERS' PATHS
thicken and darken, to waft straight from Africa,
with the night.
The broad white quay glimmers and black figures
pass and re-pass.
So many voices, sounds of chains on a steamer,
perhaps Port Vendres never sleeps.
The boats are never still. The "three-master"
is heaving all the time. The harbour breathes, and
you feel her rising and falling with every breath.
The harbour is alive. All the vessels moored to the
quay lie gently moving, the masts sway lazily, hardly
perceptibly : no straining at ropes or anchor. It is
the sea's life that is in here : at night you sense it
passing in just to be reflected for a short time in the
mirror of Venus : passing out. Nothing stays.
No one could come into this part of the country
without taking into account the contraband element.
It is a country made for smugglers, the mountains
cut up by deep valleys that seem to run every way ;
you feel you could never get the exact lie of it all
by heart, the hundred hidden gullies where men
might travel or lie concealed. Think of all the passes
there are over the cols between France and Spain,
twenty-six within one day's walk of Collioure, besides
the ramification of paths and tracks across the
mountains that one is always coming upon. Taking
into consideration the absence of villages, you will
be driven to conclude that somebody has for centuries
been always on the march and wanted a choice of
paths, bolt-holes of escape in case of surprise, the
more paths the safer.
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 122
Nowadays there is little smuggling doing, a
trifling amount of sugar, cigars, petrol, and cattle :
but when France annexed the Roussillon, andtobacco,
according to French law, paid a heavy duty, with one
accord the people of the Alberes gave themselves
up to contraband trade, particularly tobacco from
Genoa. When a vessel was coming in, signals broke
out all over the mountains ; little lights watched-for
continually must have flared up from towers, from
farm-houses, from candles set in the windows, tiny
signals quickly given, the word passed on so that
in a few hours every smuggler was au fait. The
tobacco landed at some spot on the coast would be
taken up into the woods and hidden, to be carried
off by degrees on mules.
Two hundred troopers were quartered at Banyuls
near Collioure to put a stop to the trade, without
the smallest effect : the Governor of the Province
actually reported that he saw no other plan than to
rase Banyuls to the ground and banish the people
to Port Vendres. However, the Intendant, thinking
this measure " a little hard," tried the following.
He established a schoolmaster at Banyuls, opened
a road between it and Port Vendres, gave rewards to
those who planted vines, and instituted a force of
police. The next year after that, the end of the
eighteenth century, pirates from Morocco invaded
the coast and eighteen Spanish ships chased by them
ran for their lives into every creek near Banyuls.
The Intendant wrote that, seeing their danger, " /
could not describe to you the wild ardour with which
123 HISTORIC FARM-HOUSES
the people of Banyuls took up arms. The tocsin rang,
the whole population was on the move, even the women.
The pirates were driven off/" Thirteen years later
Spain went to war with France and crossed the
Alberes. Banyuls counted itself French by that
time, and under the flag of the Republic it made a
never-to-be-forgotten stand on the Col de Banyuls
and the Puig de la Calm, men and women of one little
village defying an army ; there was good stuff in
Banyuls.
Since then vines have been more and more culti-
vated, the contraband trade is pretty well dead, yet
the officers of the Douane in their blue uniforms sit
about, pairs of them, with their wallets of food and
newspapers, on the watch at cross-roads, or doze
behind rocks against the tracks on the mountains :
you see a rare paragraph in La Depeche now and again
to the effect that So-and-so has just been caught
smuggling so many sheep across the frontier : you
feel the offender must have been strangely out of luck.
Upon the mountains it is not only the thousand
well-worn tracks, grooved out of the solid rock by
the feet of countless mules, that bear witness to the
old traffic, but the lonely little stone-built farm-houses
always on a place of vantage ; the walls with their
single eye of a window, may easily be eleventh-
twelfth century. That which counts as a village
in these mountains is little more than one great
farm-house ; seen at a distance you take it for a single
house. It has always a little round look-out tower
for signalling, and for a last resort against enemies.
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 124
We walked to one such house, called " Les Abeilles,"
one day.
At the east end of the Mas stood out the rounded
apse of a little chapel. We went inside and found it
used for housing farm implements and grain. The
tribune or gallery was intact at the west end, the
stone altar step, the small altar itself ; but there was
gone from it a precious relic, the Saint that should
have stood in the niche, the carved wooden figure of
the Holy Virgin and Child that bore the name of
The Mother of the God of the Bees. We saw it later in
the old church at Banyuls : most Catalan in type,
a Mother of the Alberes.
Les Abeilles gives itself over now to cultivating
vines. And bees. They must have belonged to it long
before vines. There are bee-hives, rows of a dozen
or so at a time, backing against the hillsides, the
section of a hollow tree trunk set on one end with a
piece of wood on top as a lid and a stone on that to
keep it from blowing off. You can feel bees there,
working over a mountain covered with rosemary and
heaths and gorse and sweet-scented herbs and a
multitude of flowers. You can see them round the
sun-steeped old Mas with its big trees and wide
terrace, a stretch of grass, a well, a seat. " Miel
de Romero " the little white jars have painted on
them, and rosemary makes a bed for the hives that
are going to fill the jars. The very air must be full
of honey in the summer, a most peaceful air, rocked
with a little heat wave, drowsy with the murmur of
falling water, the sound of goat bells.
125 ROMANS AND VISIGOTHS
There are things in the sanctuaries of the Albe"res
of which one little dreams, as for instance the perfect
little Romanesque chapel of St. Laurent, hidden in
ilex woods. There is the walk to Serradillon, passing
the Tower of Massane and leading to Spain : the
same track that part of Hannibal's army may have
used, that the Romans certainly used, that Wamba
King of the Visigoths used before he took Collioure.
That was A.D. 673. He found it a difficult passage,
and Philippe le Hardi in 1282 set three thousand men
to work upon it before he led his army across, making
what was called the Pas Etroit, a road five yards
wide. We took it, the lightest finger-mark now,
hardly scored in the turf and narrow, so much have
time and weather smoothed it away ; but when we
came below the Tower of Massane there is a gash
cut in the rocky arete and the marks of the axes that
hewed a rough staircase-way through are plain. Three
years later Philippe was carried back by the same
track on a litter to die in the Roussillon. The
cleft is a landmark, a jag that can be seen from
Collioure.
Another day we walked to Castrum Vulturarium,
known now as the Chateau d'Ultrera, standing
against the sky, a nest of the Roman eagles.
All sorts of legends weave themselves round
Ultrera, of the Moors, of Charlemagne, of Roland.
Roland is said to have stayed in the Castle ; his foot-
print is in one of the rocks, in another a vast rift
where he smote it with his Durandal. He used to
amuse himself playing at " bouchon " with the towers
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 126
of Massane and Madeloch the mythical Roland,
with his "belle Angelique," Queen of Cathay.
Then there is the walk to the Abbey of Vallbona.
We crossed the Ravaner by stepping-stones, the
ravening torrent in winter rains, and thence by a deep
gorge followed a little path into the closest crack of
the mountains. Thick woods almost hid the sky :
looking up between the tree trunks it was violet, not
blue, that hot day. And by-and-by, tucked away
and hidden in a world of its own, came Vallbona.
Had the forty volumes that once belonged to the
Abbey come all along the track we followed ? After
that finding of Vallbona by its first Abbe ?
In 1242 a little band of twelve pilgrims, staff in one
hand, cross in the other, set out walking across the
Roussillon till they should meet with some oasis in
a quiet wilderness. Dom Girard led them finally up
the Ravaner to a little Chapel that grew into an
Abbey.
To help them in founding the Abbey the pilgrims
were sent contributions from the Monastery of
Fontfroide. Wheat, a hundred sheep, a mule, a
silver chalice, some gold pieces, some sacerdotal
vestments, some fine linen, forty books, and various
utensils. Monks of the Order of Citeaux, they were
governed by strict rules; none of their flocks and
herds might graze before the widow and orphan had
gleaned. And one remembers the rule of silence,
in that silent, hidden valley.
Space forbids me to describe expeditions, one
to the Tour de Madeloch, the Tour du Diable, which
127 LAND'S END OF THE ROUSSILLON
frowned down on us from its steep arete, seeming
to divide the wind that hurled itself along the
length of its saw edge out of which the tower looks
to have grown, a diabolical challenge in masonry.
Nobody knows its history. The name has been
explained as coming from the Hebrew Madaloth,
ascent, pointing to a Semitic settlement on the
coast, to the worship of Baal perhaps. It was
certainly used as a signal tower later on.
There is a long walk from Collioure to Port Bou,
over the Spanish frontier : one passes the little
erstwhile smuggling town of Banyuls, known all the
world over for its wine, richest in alcohol, sweetest
in flavour, that France can produce. The grapes
are grown on sunburnt, shady slopes. Bacchus
loves the hills.
Cape Cerbere on the frontier derives its name
from the stags cerfs of a forest that covered the
point in old days.
This point is the Land's End of the Roussillon, the
frontier dividing French from Spanish Catalonia.
CHAPTER X
THE TECH VALLEY AMELIE-LES-BAINS LE BOULOU LE PERTHUS
MAS DEU CERET ST. GENIS-DES-FONTAINES
FROM Collioure it was logical that we should
follow the frontier by working along the
Tech valley. To begin with we would have
the Plain on one side, the Alberes on the other : then
the Alberes would merge into the Pyrenees, and the
Aspres mountains would rise out of the Plain :
higher up the river the Aspres would give place to
Canigou, and the Tech valley head would come
where the spurs of Canigou meet the Pyrenees.
We set off up the Tech valley. Where the river
runs across the Plain I think of it as a far-reaching
bed of white sand and white stones, a quick, shallow
blue stream rippling down the centre. There is a
jungle of bamboos on either bank rustling with a dry,
crackling sound, and feathery green willows. It is
like an Indian river, bridges of five piers and the
water only running between two.
Further on the valley narrows, it cannot spare
much of its green strip of carpet, it is backed up too
by the solid mountain walls, so that the Tech is
repressed : it amuses itself by playing with the
boulders between its high banks, and carving them
128
129 AMELIE-LES-BAINS
out. Higher still, near its source, it becomes a pure
mountain child, rippling across rocks and grass in
little short steps there are no banks it tumbles
along, irresponsible.
When we left Collioure we fled for shelter to the
most sheltered place in the Tech valley : the Tra-
montane had become at last something not to be
borne with any longer. We decided to go well up
into the valley. Signal posts blown across the line
had held us up once or twice, the Plain was being
rent and beaten till it roared : to get out of the wild
unrest, and at last into the blessed sheltered cup
where Amelie lay, was to shake off a nightmare.
The trees were no longer tossing, so complete was
the screen round the red roofs and the mimosas;
there was calm over the whole of Amelie's own par-
ticular little valley. The town itself had backed
away against the mountains till they almost hung
over it : a sunny little town in a sunned shelter.
It is quite a modest place and French : the French
call it "practical" and come for baths, whereas
Vernet, they say, has been spoilt by the English, all
the prices put up. There was sometimes depression
about Vernet, but Amelie was never heavy, it did not
trouble to be talked about, was easy and content.
It was quite casual over its hot sulphur water that
spouted up straight out of the earth for anybody to
have and enjoy, hot water running night and day,
and wasting itself perpetually along the gutters,
steaming, always as hot hot even on Monday
mornings. Everybody came with their cans and
9
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 130
pots ; this is a kind earth, rock that wants no Moses.
What furnace below is doing all the stoking ?
We were in a little hotel, Martinet, close to the
baths, in rooms that opened on a balcony where
one used to have breakfast in the shade of a leafy
trellis of roses, and look across the gorge at the
stream splashing over rocks, or at occasional figures
strolling along the insubstantial-looking pink bridge
that sprang in one light span from side to side.
All sorts of trees and shrubs made our own strip
of hanging garden shadowed and secluded. I sup-
pose that was what the great dark violets liked.
Under the tall spear of the cypres and under the
pomegranate, wherever myrtles or an ilex shut out
the sun, the purple carpet of them hid.
Of the baths, the old Roman one had a character
apart. One could swim in its warm, blue-grey
water, with the shallow steps down into it, and the
herring-bone brick pavement. Its arcade of white
pillars and arches reflected themselves, the water
ran in with a trickling gentle sound, the mellow
light was infused with blue.
Up at Montbolo, on the northern side of the
valley, there is a good example of the fortified church ;
a church that is a solid block of masonry with the
narrowest loopholes serving as windows and the
walls immensely thick.
Palalda, a little village where the brown houses
cluster on the hill in a conical-shaped pile, has a
fine old church door, encrusted with ironwork, the
SCULPTURE, BUILT INTO OUTER WALL. ABBEY OF ARLES-SUR-TECH.
['50
I 3 i A ROMAN CUSTODIA
hinges being brought right across and split up and
worked into curves twisting round to a centre,
and more curves ; the two great round handles are
there, but the bolt, which would end in a serpent's
or dragon's head, is missing.
The name Palalda comes from Palatium Dani
the palace of Dan and one remembers other names
in the Roussillon that recall Israel.
The road from Amelie to Palalda crosses the Tech
by one of those stone bridges that might be of any
age, the little rounded arch curving far above the
stream from rock to rock, so thin and light it
is like a leap petrified.
A road winding high up along the gorge at the back
of our hotel led right into the Pyrenees. It arrived
at last at Coustouges, high up on the frontier, a
"gate" into Spain, a village where the Romans,
using the track across from Amelie, had a station
Custodia, or " post."
Two-and-a-half miles above Amelie lies the Abbey
of Arles-sur-Tech.
Inside, the Abbey does not matter much. But
outside over the doorway one stays for the sake of
the old carved marble bas-relief, a Romanesque
Christ in glory. 1
You will see and hear a great deal about the Saints
Abdon and Sennen and the relics and the miraculous
water of which the stone coffin is never empty.
Between Aries and Amelie there stands one of
the old Catalan forges, worked by a water-wheel.
1 See illustration.
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 132
How old it may be nobody can say, but there is
very little doubt that it has worked there, just in
the same way, for the last seven hundred years.
To see them smelting the raw iron from the hills is
the finest sight, smelting in the same forge that must
have turned out the ironwork on the church door
at Palalda. You get the clean, sharp edges that
only the best ore smelted in a charcoal furnace gives
We had a long walk to the Tour de Bat6re, on a
spur of Canigou. The sun glowed with a primeval
heat, yet above Montbolo, far on beyond, high on the
great ridge, there were patches of snow and a keen
air blew round the tower set on the crest Short
grass covers these heights, one is close to the sky
with a world at one's feet. Paths are obliterated,
but one tracks along by splashes of blue daubed at
intervals on rocks and stones to guide men bringing
up provisions to the iron mines.
It was at Ame*lie that we first met with a very
different type from the Catalan. We were to see
more of this type later at Prats, but I remember
the first example we came across. He was fishing
on the Tech, a man in the red Catalan bonnet faded
to an orange pink, a man with a lean face close shaven
like a priest, with a blue jowl and a long chin, a face
that lent itself to shaving, was not wrinkled nor
rugged, the eyes small and deep set, the hair black,
the lips thin. It was one of those inscrutable
Spanish faces that suggest much and tell little. He
was an old man, but he walked with a springy
movement that was lithe, that had the furtive
I
'*&
TYMPANUM, ABBEY OF ARLES-SUR-TECH.
[132
133 SPANISH STILETTOS
pard in it. His string-soled espadrilles made no
sound, he moved as softly as a cat.
Pierre Loti has described this type of man in his
" Ramuncho " as the Basque type. It must obtain
all along the tops of the Pyrenees. We met his
" Itchoua " over and over again. A man half priest,
half villain, superstitious, devout, who would knife
anybody for twopence in old days. This blue-
jowled, lean-faced, inscrutable type is as different
as it can possibly be from the Catalan in the Plain,
with his frank face and healthy air of bon viveur,
his cheeks ruddy and well filled out. He is as read-
able as a child : the other is a sphinx.
We left Amelie. Dropping our luggage at the
f
Etablissement at Le Boulou, we set off with knap-
sacks to walk up to Le Perthus, the portus, door, of
the Roman road to Spain.
The old Roman track went a vastly more interest-
ing way than the modern highroad. We began to
make out bits of the old rocky track plainly, the
marks where the rock had been carved and split to
make a narrow cut. Then we took a short line that
the Roman road obviously took up to the castle or
the enclosure that guarded the pass : it is called
L'Ecluse, Clusus.
Every now and again we had a glimpse above us
of the Fort of Bellegarde that Louis Quatorze was
bound to build to guard the Roussillon from Spain.
There had been from Roman times a strong look-out
tower up there on the top of the pass, but that only
answered as long as defence was stronger than
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 134
attack. Louis Quatorze had to add to it : the
present fort was built by Vauban, and is strongly
garrisoned. We worked gradually up under it : over
and over again it could sweep the road with its
guns : then after a last turn we came into the village
of Le Perthus. It was depressing as we walked
through it : there was little doing : it answers to
the needs of the Fort, to the duties of a frontier
where little traffic passes, where only a small local
trade goes through the Customs. Its life as a great
posting station is dead. The little inns pointed to
that : they stand flanking the road, and a few
houses on each side of them straggle for a short
distance along the highway. There are small shops,
shops with Spanish names at the far end, and a little
Spanish cafe struck a more cheerful note than any-
thing we saw ; but the actual frontier, when we came
upon it, marked by stone pillars, was devoid of
interest : a few Customs officers loafed about, Spanish
and French, and the road slid on tamely down into
Spain, marshalled still by cork trees.
It resolved itself, as we followed it to La Jun-
quera, the first Spanish village, into an immensely
broad, badly-laid stretch, and we began to meet the
Spanish carts the hammock of plaited fibre swing-
ing on wheels, that does not mind jolting nor the
pitfalls of Spanish roads. The makeshift and the
procrastination of Spain grafted on to swagger was
all that the road suggested.
Monsieur Freixe lives at Le Perthus, and has spent
fifteen years of his life writing a history of the road.
135 HANNIBAL'S ELEPHANTS
He made Le Perthus live again. He talked of the
old track, its bridges, its narrow width just to take
a Roman chariot the length of it starting at
Constantinople and ending at Cadiz. He peopled
it with the band of couriers passing every day
from Rome, with the Roman soldiers stationed at
g
L'Ecluse to see them safely across the pass and
protect them from the Barbarians. He told us the
marks of a grille are still on the wall at L'Ecluse
that barred the road when let down : and he talked
about the temple built up there containing the
trophies which Pompey brought from Spain, and a
statue of Pompey himself. And then the long pro-
cession that the road had seen, from the Kings and
Queens of Aragon, Ferdinand and Isabella, Charles
Quint, many more, down to Napoleon, to French
armies, Spanish armies. But of course the pith
of his discourse was Hannibal and his elephants.
Where exactly did Hannibal and his army cross the
Pyrenees ? There were thirty thousand men, a
multitude of women and children, chariots, mer-
chants, and forty elephants : and there are twenty-
six passes between the coast and Bellegarde.
Every scholar in the Roussillon is obsessed with the
question. Of the twenty-six ways, the first two in
the running are Le Perthus and the sea road. (The
question of the railway track was fought on the
Hannibal basis, and there is bitterness still over the
sea road having won the day : Le Perthus would
have been several miles shorter.) To test the sea
road from, what they thought, was the elephants'
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 136
point of view, its partisans have tramped round
every creek from end to end, treading their theory
home to their complete satisfaction. The backers
of Le Perthus did things comfortably in a motor-
car, feeling upon that good road above all doubts
as to the elephants' passage. It would upset every-
body's book to suggest, first, that an army feeding
on the country it went through, was bound to spread
itself and not clean out any single track ; and
second, that elephants want a good road less than
almost any animal in creation, and would have
made nothing of the forests and slopes of the Alberes.
We stayed at the hotel of the " Fontaine du
Boulou," the etablissement, close to the four sources
where the famous Eau de Boulou is bottled. One
of the four sources is named St. Martin, and the
Saint is connected with a little chapel not far off.
The water was of course looked upon as miraculous
in early days ; one sees it dripping out of the rock
and wonders over visions and faith and healing,
the associations that cling. It was the Monks of
Aries who secured the source and probably built
the farmhouse on to the little Cellule of St.
Martin as a lodging for members of the Brotherhood.
One imagines them chanting in the little barrel-
roofed chapel with the small apse which was no
doubt the original cell. In their day no door was cut
through the apse, the doorway being on the south
side ; but a body was found buried under it, and to
avoid walking over a body into church the vandalism
was committed of cutting a new doorway in the east
X-
, < < &* m
FRESCO PAINTINGS, CHAPEL AT LE BOULOU.
[136
137 BYZANTINE FRESCOES
end, facing the altar round and moving it to the
west end. They left the old font, and so it stands
now near the altar.
Plain whitewash covers the walls and must have
been intended to emphasize the richness and colour
of the frescoed spaces on the little east-end cell
that people now brush past.
Though much of the work has peeled off, and part
of it is lost through the ruthless cutting out of the
doorway, one has a fair idea of what the monks
looked upon. The looped hangings of a tent lower
down : the procession above of the Magician Kings
in Bayeux tapestry dress, green and white tunics
and white shoes : higher up the twenty-four Elders
sitting at the supper of the Lamb in pearl-
embroidered garments, holding each a gold cup and
a stringed musical instrument. 1
These and more paintings line the side walls of
the cell. The fresco of the Virgin was over the
altar, giving her the mystic cylindrical headdress :
both hands are raised, offering the prayers of the
Saints to the figure above.
This figure, painted on the ceiling, enclosed in the
lozenge-shape, represents a Christ with raised hand
giving the blessing. The significance of the few
lines in the frescoes seemed to tell most of all in this
painting. The face buff-colour, a wash or two of
shadow in red-brown, a few outlines in black, the
high lights put in with a frank streak of white on
eyebrows, nose, and lip. Yet the face had dignity,
1 See illustration.
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 138
beauty, and something of suffering in it. The quiet
figure enthroned in blue sky could not have been less
obvious or more suggestive.
These early painters put in very few lines that had
not direct symbolical meaning : form was only the
interpretation of an idea, seen inwardly.
The four figures with wings that fit in spandrels
the spaces round the Christ can be said to stand for
the four Evangelists, the man, the bull, the lion, and
the eagle, typifying the Incarnation, Passion, Resur-
rection, and Ascension.
We had come across some dilapidated fresco-
work in the interesting little Romanesque church
s
at L'Ecluse, it was hidden away on the walls of a
recess at the back of the altar, but hardly anything
of it was left : there are no such frescoes in any
other church in the Roussillon as those on the walls
of the Cell of St. Martin. St. Martin's may well
claim to be, as M. Brutails points out, " perhaps
the most ancient specimen of religious architecture
that stands on the soil of the Roussillon."
We made a long walk in the Plain, to see Banyuls
des Aspres, Villemolaque, Mas Deu and the Monastir
del Camp.
Mas Deu, the fortress of the Knights Templars,
stands on rising ground, hidden in trees ; perhaps
no site was ever better chosen. Round it slope
away the rich lands of the Plain, yet the Aspres
mountains are within reach. The road to Perpignan
is near, connecting up with France, and the Le
Perthus road into Spain: as also the two great
139 FORTRESS OF THE KNIGHTS TEMPLAR
main roads up the Tech and Tet valleys. So that
Mas Deu might be called the hub of the Roussillon.
There was probably never a fortress in the country
quite like that. To begin with, it is built calmly
in the open, at a time when castles sought every
natural fortification possible, rock and precipice
and river. And it is built on a scale dictated by
immense riches. Mas Deu (Mansus Dei) seems to
have taken up an open position for all the Roussillon
to see, to have secured the best land, to have enjoyed
undisputed possession until the crash came. One
wonders if it was always hidden in a grove of trees
with a ring wall all round ? Because such seclusion
and the defiance of the great building inside might
well provoke any suspicions. The firs and the olives,
the laurustinus and other trees seemed impenetrable,
till we came upon a road from the south-east, cutting
through them and leading on to a great gateway.
We stood in front of the gateway, and looked up
at the crest and coat-of-arms. A Templar's helmet
with the swathe of linen each side of the face, as
worn by men in the desert ; surmounted by a ram-
pant, sphinx-headed lion : an inverted crescent
in the upper half of the coat-of-arms : the motto
BELA VRAY. There was another stone shield with
three hammers carved upon it on the wall.
A hundred years ago, in the war with Spain, the
French troops used Mas Deu as a fort, and one of
the first battles of the campaign was fought outside
its walls.
Except the ponderous walls there is nothing
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 140
that can be said to represent the building of the
Templars : the inside of the fortress has seen altera-
tions since the Order was suppressed. Frere Jacques
d' Oilers, Preceptor, who was arrested with the
Brotherhood in November 1307, would find nothing
left of the chapel in which they were all tried ;
Frere Jacques, in his violet robe and black cloak
with the red cross, wearing the black headdress
over the white coiffe. It calls up a picture of the
dignity and pomp of an Order that could boast of
fifteen thousand Chevaliers, and an infinite number of
Brothers, Affiliated Members, and servants besides.
It is no great distance to walk on from Mas Deu
to the Monastir del Camp, and we went along the
same track by which Raymond Casta, Bishop of
Elne ; Bernard Hugues, Archdeacon of Urg, and
various Franciscans, Dominicans, Priors, Sacristans,
must have ridden out daily to the Trial of the Knights
Templars in their Chapel. The Commission who
held the long interrogation installed itself at the
Monastir del Camp. It must have been a profoundly
disappointing interrogation, no facts of burning
interest escaped to enliven things. However, the
Church has never encouraged secret societies who
hold receptions " en chapitre," and the Commission
did their duty.
It is recorded that the Initiates at Mas Deu were
men of very ordinary intelligence, many of whom
used to work in the fields and did not understand
the word profh initiate. One can hardly imagine
that to a simple Roussillon peasant the mysteries
I4i MYSTERIES OF BAPHOMET
of Baphomet would be confided. The Grand Master
might burn at the stake in Paris, but nothing so
drastic befel the Roussillon. Its Knights Templar
were even pensioned off, and popular sympathy
went with them as the unfortunate victims of a
political attack. The Catalan would have no love
for the French King who was at the bottom of the
spoliation.
It was interesting to compare the Monastir del
Camp with the Mansus Dei. Mas Deu is wholly
military and masculine, whereas the Monastery-
stands for everything that is sacerdotal. The
cloistered courtyard solemn, the light tempered,
hot midday far from it. From an architectural
point of view there was a certain amount of interest
in the doorway of the church its Romanesque
columns and capitals of white marble. But for
the rest the Monastery suggested a retreat devoid
of vitality.
From Le Boulou we used to walk over to the little
town of Ceret. Ceret is the centre of civilisation
in the Tech valley ; it means a great deal to the
whole of the Roussillon, has its assizes, has a musical
reputation, and it thinks. Some sense of reason
went to the building of it, not only the dour necessity
that walled in I lie. Ceret is walled too, square,
with four great gateways, but the houses do not
crush all the streets out of the straight till they
writhe, the houses are dignified and preserve a
straight front, the narrow streets take one fairly
direct into the " Place."
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 142
The fountain in the "Place" expresses Ceret. 1
A beautiful rhythm of figures forms the top part
of a column, curving round it and supporting on
their bended heads the capital ornamented with
little devils' heads which spout out the nine streams
of the fountain. On the top of all sits a lion with
head raised.
Charlemagne and the exploits of Roland inside
the town get forgotten for a mere bridge. It is
a humble admission on the part of the Ceretans
that after they had built three bridges of their own
and seen the Tech wash them all away, the Devil
should have come to their rescue and built them a
bridge. They contrived to pay nothing for it either,
not even the human soul which the Devil waited
for, standing about to drop the keystone into position
and watching for the first passenger his price.
From out the midnight shadows and from out its
sack Ceret sent flying across the bridge a great black
cat, and the Devil was undone.
There is a little of the supernatural in the Pont
de Ceret : one catches one's breath at the first sight.
It takes so sheer a bound over the river ; it is slim
beyond all slimness in stone, and seems to have shot
towards the sky in its leap, and to do it all so easily.
One thinks of Nijinski in Le Spectre de la Rose.
St. Genis-des-Fontaines is a few miles east of Le
Boulou on a high road branching off from the Roman
road that runs down the valley to Perpignan ; the
branch goes straight along under the Aspres and
1 See illustration.
FOUNTAIN, MARKET-PLACE AT CERET.
f! 4 2
143 ELEVENTH CENTURY LINTELS
joins the coast road to Collioure. Beyond St. Genis
nearer the sea there is another village on the branch
road, St. Andre.
It was the lintels over the church doorways of
St. Genis and St. Andre that held us. 1 The solid
monoliths, carved at just the best moment of
Romanesque in the Roussillon, give one the soul
of the Church in the early ages : the sculptor,
working under inspiration, confidently rejected form
that did not symbolize an idea.
People say that the lintel at St. Andre is a copy
of the bolder one at St. Genis, or rather that the
one prompted the other : it may have been so, but
there is too much beauty and originality in the
carving at St. Andre for any one to afford to
miss it.
An inscription and date is cut over the stone at
St. Genis ; the Latin reads, In the 2^th year of the
reign of King Robert, William, by the grace of God
Abbot, had this work done in honour of Saint Genis
whom they call of the Fountains.
That would be about the year 1019, when the
church still belonged to the Benedictine abbey,
the abbey which was in existence in the time of
Charlemagne ; Sanctus Genesius de Fontanis. We
hunted for signs of the Benedictine cloisters round
about the great Abbey House near the church ;
the house was bought up by a vine proprietor
and has been partly turned into a distillery. We
came upon traces of the cloisters round a yard,
1 See illustration.
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 144
built into walls ; and were invited to see one bit
of cloister which now makes beautiful a lady's
drawing-room.
Our stout landlady in the little inn at St. Genis
expressed all over herself a radiant goodwill, but
she was very busy, owning a butcher's shop next
door, and spending a good deal of time with the meat.
This left us to the mercy of the bonne, who did a
certain amount of the work in the inn, and used to
mystify us at first a thin, pale girl, moving about
round the kitchen sink, and completely indifferent
to any question or any remark addressed to her.
Orders might as well have been given to the wall.
She used to stand near, watching us as we ate, with
a close stare. Our portfolio upstairs must have
interested her in an absent-minded fit she left
the drawings one morning strewn over the room.
We put her down as stone deaf if not dumb, and gave
up shouting into her ear. In the end we found out
that all that was the matter with the bonne con-
sisted in her being a Socialist. There happened to
be held a Socialist meeting one evening in a hall
in the village; we went, and the bonne was there
and somebody explained her to us : that she was
really an excellent servant and worked well, provided
she was never told to do anything. I suppose our
stout landlady accepted that and was much too
genial herself to feel chilled by the bonne's mute-
protest attitude.
The Socialist meeting turned out to be quite
interesting : the speaker being M. Romain Thomas,
145 PAGAN RITES
the poet of the Roussillon, whose Route du Retour
we had read with delight.
We used to walk over to St. Andre from St. Genis,
a little village with the high road running through
it, much like St. Genis ; but the church had quite
a unique interest. It is saturated with Romanesque,
yet it was built when, in the north of France, Gothic
was the established style. St. Andre has absorbed
the Gothic and transmuted it into Romanesque
with a deftness extraordinarily interesting.
We were there on Palm Sunday : the whole nave,
the side chapels were crowded with people, men as
well as women and children, this Jour des Rameaux :
the children with arms full of branches of bay hung
over with flowers, sweets, cakes, oranges. When
the procession of them had passed outside with
the Cure, and the door was shut, we of the older
generation were left to a strange silence. One
looked over the black heads of the women to the
lights burning on the altar, one looked at the beauti-
ful spring of the round arches from the pillars to
the walls. Close to us there was an old Roman
votive altar let into the wall, with an inscription
to Gordianus III, created Caesar and proclaimed
Augustus by the Roman Senate in 238 A.D. The
stone dated from the following year. One sat
fascinated by the Roman lettering, the finest letter-
ing there has ever been, till the silence was broken
by three forceful knocks on the outside of the church
door, three knocks that sounded fateful to us within.
And the door being opened the procession passed
10
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 146
through, the children and the branches, spring
coming into the church after the Cure.
For it was impossible not to assimilate the Chris-
tian Palm Sunday with an older blessing and feting
of the spring and the fruits of the earth. The
children told us afterwards that they went outside
for the Cure to bless the branches because then they
were " under the sky and near the Good God."
They thought the door was shut " so that no one
should see." The blessing of the fruits of the earth
had to take place on the earth itself and not inside
any building, the branches had to be carried by
children typifying spring themselves.
There must have been Pagan spring rites for many
hundreds of years at St. Andre when the little village
was a Roman station, and a Roman temple stood
where the church now stands.
We were grateful when our days at St. Genis came
to an end, not loving the Plain, though the little
inn did its best for us : as to its fare, one precious
interlude in the daily round deserves to be chronicled.
We were apt to become apathetic over the prospect
of dinner at village inns, were too well drilled to the
inevitable soup with vermicelli, followed by the
same soup-meat with potatoes and cabbage ; to
the pale and swimming dish of haricot beans that
would precede the roast, the roast that would be
shadowed by cheese, biscuits, and dessert. But one
night at St. Genis after a rabbit entree that had
followed soup-meat, and before a little shoulder of
roast lamb, there arrived a rum omelette. Such
147 A RUM OMELETTE
an omelette! No ordinary "cooking" rum. It
was on fire and it burnt like a tar barrel. The
omelette was stout as a bursting bolster and light
as feathers. It was enormous, but there was nothing
left of it. And somehow between the entree and
the roast seemed the perfect place for a rum ome-
lette, so that one could never wish it elsewhere.
CHAPTER XI
THE TRABUCAYRES LAS ILLAS
THERE is a little village, not a great way from
Le Boulou as far as distance goes, niched
into the Pyrenees just inside the French
border: Las Illas. The people up there belong
to nobody but themselves ; the long uphill track
to the village is more of a barrier than a link with
the world below : they have the mountains, a
grim chain just above their heads where the track
from the village goes creeping up over the crest
into Spain.
Living up there with wind and sometimes snow,
and the menace of rocky heights, you can imagine
Las Illas becoming comatose in the winter, shut
in on itself, buried.
Just the place, so the Trabucayres must have
recognised, for bandits' headquarters : they seem
to have grafted themselves on to the village without
any trouble.
Even as Las Illas took them at the time it all
happened, without much talk, so it takes them now.
One asks questions the Trabucayres ? The ban-
dits ? Nobody knows what the name means,
though they were there only one generation back.
148
149 SPANISH BRIGANDS
We sat in the room large out of all proportion to
the little cafe : the walls had probably quite clear
memories and could have told one of all sorts of
carousals at the long tables when Jougla the Auber-
giste gave the " Caballero of Spain" and his band
the run of the whole place, grew fat upon their
gold.
Las I lias would have said that the Trabucayres
were Carlists and that they were good Catholics.
After all, their law of existence was not necessarily
recognised by the village : to appear and disappear
was no sin in itself. The French had plenty of
sympathy with the Carlists ; Las I lias was ready
enough to hide anybody whom the gendarmes
might be after, to hide their booty for them too.
The Trabucayres, men of their word, discreet,
taciturn, would command respect. They were
young, nearer twenty than thirty, probably all the
swagger of the Spaniard and the aristocrat about
them, gold rings on their fingers, good clothes,
a name to live up to " soldiers of Roland and
Oliver" was their password.
Las Illas made an ideal hiding-place for the
seventeen : the last of the brigands of the Pyrenees.
From this little, remote, barely known village, they
could slip into Spain, rob the farmhouses, knife
the inmates if necessary, and be back over the fron-
tier safe in France in a few hours, out of the reach
of Spanish jurisdiction. To plunder Spain they had
to live in France : they never touched French
people.
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 150
We saw the little rough stone houses in the village
where they stayed, when the villagers were not hiding
them in cellars. This was towards the end, when
the gendarmes were on the move.
Because the Trabucayres played a little too high
the end came. But a Spaniard has got to do every-
thing to excess ; he will be the leanest monk or else
his amusements must have blood in them. It
became a question of all or nothing when they brought
off their last coup of robbing the coach from Perpig-
nan to Barcelona on the high road beyond Le Per-
thus. If they had stopped short at a reasonable
ransom for the youth whom they took prisoner
and carried off, they might have saved their lives.
As it was the wretched tale of it all finally roused
the whole country, and Spain and France bound
themselves to scour every corner of the Pyrenees
until the criminals were caught.
Having got the youth, Jean Massot, half starved,
hidden in a cave near Requesens, they were haggling
over the ransom, sixty thousand francs, a sum that
his family could not possibly produce then and there.
Strange rendezvous would be arranged on the track
from Las I lias into Spain. The Massot family
would be told to send a messenger to the Chapel
of Las Salinas on the " 2gth April at eight in the
evening, the messenger to carry a white handkerchief
in his hand." When only part of the sum of money
was produced, the family were warned that next
time, unless the whole sum were sent, one of Massot' s
ears would be cut off and handed over to the
I5i MURDER AND TWO EARS
messenger : and, if that had no effect, the other ear.
In fact, piecemeal the boy would return to them.
All this time he himself, half dying of cold and
neglect, was writing the most piteous letters to his
mother. It was the diabolical cruelty of! it that
brought both countries to their feet. Finally there
must have come a day when the Trabucayres grasped
the hue and cry that had risen, saw the end for them
was in sight, that though they might have every
by-path and every cave in the mountains by heart,
there was not a moment to spare in getting out of the
Pyrenees. But first they had to rid themselves of Jean
Massot, a most dangerous witness to leave behind.
One of the band, Chicolate, volunteered for that
deed : his hands were long ago red with blood.
Before he cut the boy's throat he left him to say
his prayers. Then having cut his throat, seeing
he was not dead, stabbed him repeatedly in the
breast.
Religion was not going to be left out of this scene :
it was never left out of the lives of the Trabucayres :
the boy was given his chance for the next world.
And his body was not to be left to the mercy of
wild animals, it was hidden in the cave and the
entrance blocked up. Here it was found later by
the relatives. But the two ears, which might later
on be profitable, were cut off and handed over by
Chicolate to the Chief, who wrapped them in cabbage
leaves and put them in his portfolio.
Down and across the Tech the band made tracks.
Right out of their own country they managed to
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 152
get taken in at a lonely farmhouse near Corsavi :
the farmer being warned that he would be called
upon to put up some young men, sortis des depots,
who wanted to smuggle themselves into Spain.
He said, provided they were not the Trabucayres,
yes : and they hid their guns to allay his suspicions,
went to the house and asked to eat raw meat, not
having had any lately. A lamb was killed. They
stayed three days : meantime the farmer, who was
not satisfied, warned the police.
At the end of three days, gendarmes and Customs
officers and a company of infantry surrounded the
house. None of the gang escaped. One man hid
in a cradle.
They boasted if they had had their guns they would
never have been taken alive. No doubt they would
have had a last fling just as they brazened out their
innocence to the last. The two ears, picked up
in the straw of the farmhouse loft, were produced
in court, and Chicolate was asked what they were.
" Mushrooms," he said.
But when the game was up, they threw themselves
upon religion with something of the lust after the
other world which they had satisfied with blood in
this one. Fervent penitence, deepest humiliation
they wrung from themselves. One of them asked
to see the judge, and implored forgiveness for in-
sults he had offered him at the time he gave sentence.
The judge consented to give the kiss of Separation
and Peace.
The whole countryside evidently burned to see
153 THE LAST OF THE BRIGANDS
the execution, for some of the band were hanged at
Perpignan, some at Ceret. And the Trabucayres
must have played-up to the last. They confessed
and received the Sacrament ; said they were not
afraid to die, knew that God had pardoned them.
Dressed in their best clothes, they refused to be
taken to execution in a cart Christ had walked to
Calvary and they wished to follow His example
as an expiation for their sins. Chicolate asked for
water to drink before he mounted the scaffold :
he also asked the executioner to wash the blade
of the guillotine. They would die heroes and dandies
and die saints : nothing short of that.
There is another of their hiding-places, and perhaps
the most significant, not far from Las I lias ; a little
old fortified place, a chapel and presbytery, built
on the mountain track to Ceret. A most puzzling
building at first sight, with immensely thick walls
and battlements, yet it turns out to be a chapel,
carefully orientated, and on this high, lonely spot,
must have been used for defence, for a look-out, at
a very early age. There are a few rooms built
on to the chapel that would shelter people on the
track for the night.
Because it was a chapel, because of its lonely
position and its command of the country round,
there could not have been a more cunning refuge
for the band. Who would expect bandits at a chapel
where a Cure was hermit ?
We looked into one little room that was as its
inmates might have left it : ashes lay on the hearth,
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 154
an old church pew was drawn across the open fire-
place, but the dust upon things, the violin that
nobody cared to claim, looked as if every one had
been long gone, as if people fled the place. There
was a cupboard in one of the walls standing open :
the back of it was smashed in, and through the
yawning space one could dimly see the low loft
above the chapel roof which could have swallowed
the whole gang.
The Cure seems to have had no suspicions, to
have accepted the Trabucayres as Carlists, to have
tended their wounds and hidden them safely. He
could hardly have been hostile to men so devout,
who recited the chapelet daily and expended huge
sums in Masses for their dead comrades : in fact
he believed in them to the extent of allowing one
member to assist in the service of Mass. And all
the time, upstairs in the little room, there must
often have been hatched plots of treachery and
violence : business must have been gone into as
well : every member of the band, for instance, was
sworn to keep one of their hiding-places provided
with a store of food, of rope, of ammunition, of
espadrilles ; they would never wear anything other
than espadrilles, furtive steps, the silent string
soles.
They would do themselves well round this hearth,
eat and drink like lords, listen to the violin through
the smoke of Spanish cigars : and those thick, forti-
fied walls must have suited it all well, suited a feast
of villains : just as the little orientated chapel, bound
155 TERROR BY NIGHT
up with the old meaning of the grim place, had its
echo in the inbred religion that was so significant
a feature in the Trabucayres' lives.
One can hardly credit that only in 1846 these
Spanish desperadoes came to their end. The terror
they spread through the mountains dies hard :
even now nobody cares to be out alone after dark.
CHAPTER XII
PRATS DE MOLLO A RIDE TO CAMPRODON HERMITAGE OF ST. GUIL-
LEM THE SOURCE OF THE TECH NOTRE- DAME- DEL-CORAL
WHEN we left Le Boulou there was still the
head of the valley to see, the country
where the Tech rises.
At Aries one takes a terrible little electric tram-
car, and jolts and sways alongside the Tech, the
wheels grinding and shrieking and the vibration
indescribable. The inhuman tram-car comes to
rest at last at Prats de Mollo.
Prats de Mollo lies not far from the source of
the Tech, under the snows of Canigou and at the
foot of the frontier ridge, the last French town
up the valley. It has the high mountain levels
for its setting, the Tech valley widens out for the
last time into a green oasis, meadows multiply,
grass fields slope up into the mountains, so that
Prats is " the town of the pastures.'*
Storms sweep round Canigou, it is hidden in
driving snow, but only desultory flakes get drifted
below upon Prats, and the sun comes on it round
corners of the snow-clouds and the green pastures
are all moist colour.
Not a vine and not an olive tree anywhere near
156
157 DELIGHTFUL PRATS
Prats ; it is much too high up, is the land of chest-
nuts ; after its meadows, one thinks of the chest-
nut woods on the mountain slopes, of the orange
and red colour of the wood when it was cut, of the
scent of it fresh hewn, of the neat billets of wood
stacked by the road for mules to carry off, short
lengths that will go to make vine stakes. Prats
grows rye and barley, maize, beans and potatoes,
but the wealth of the country is in its woods, and
has been for the last seven hundred years. One
likes to think of this town, far up the valley and
dependent on itself, making its own cloth, its own
red caps for the men, its own espadrilles.
Prats seemed the little town we had looked for,
walled! around and full of character, the old gateways,
the moats and the narrow bridge. It bears its walls
happily, has no cramped sense inside, seems always
to have demanded mountain air and freedom, to
have come along with time and to belong to to-day
when walls are mere appendages.
One feels it was built by people who cared about
their land and meant to enjoy it ; privileges would
be fought for, unjust taxation would not be endured.
There would result a sense of balance and justice
about Prats, something born of the clean air and
the green pasturage and the mountains. The little
grey town suggests that it has found itself. It
seems to have shed all military feeling in spite of
the Fort that looks down on the ramparts and
reminds one of a military Prats, its garrison with an
eye on the " cols" at the head of the valley. An
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 158
enemy from over the frontier, crossing by one of
these passes, and coming down upon Aries, or
crossing by Canigou to Villefranche, was bound to
reckon with Prats. Hence the fortifications of
Louis Quatorze.
It surprised one to find that a great ravine cut
the town in two, when from the outside it looked
compact enough. The oldest quarter mounted up-
hill; they called the streets " escaliers," narrow,
cobbled ways between corners and ends of irregular
houses with rounded bumps that were ovens pro-
jecting from the walls on the first floors. From
the brown, wooden balconies hung any sort of tin
pot that could hold carnations, pots and pails that
overflowed with cold pink and warm wine-colour.
You realise the only way to grow carnations is
high up, the streams of colour coming down into
your eyes, the plant flowing free.
A tall, rugged house, the Palace of the old Counts,
stands over one of the staircase streets. The arched
doorway and the stone geminated windows and its
masonry single it out. This old Prats on the hill
is ringed in by the oldest wall : the other side of
the ravine represents the later and more spacious
Prats linked by Vauban's fortifications to the first.
Outside Vauban's walls lies the faubourg newest of
all.
The little square and the streets had nearly always
a queue of mules waiting or passing, with chestnut
wood for the sawmills, or charcoal, or potatoes,
or flour. Prats is full of muleteers and the mules
159 OUR R I DE INTO SPAIN
made a fine show, bridles and bells, tassels and tufts
and cloths of red and gold ; colours of Spain worked
into the Spanish harness.
We soon made up our minds to get hold of some
mules and to ride over the frontier. One wanted
to see the sort of country to which by narrow tracks
Prats does eventually link on. A slender link,
because Prats really belongs to itself and ends with
that more or less.
They told us that Camprodon was the place to
see in Spain. We got our mules and muleteer from
a stable near the hotel, choosing the saddles the
evening before and rejecting a red velvet "chair"
for something more like the Red Indian saddle in
its workmanship, the leather coloured green and red
and gold. The barbaric bravado of our bridles
was part of the expedition, shining discs of brass
dangling on the mules' foreheads, bright buckles
and bits of white rope, broad red leather straps
and red saddle-cloths, and tufts and tassels of red
and yellow wool wherever a tassel could hang.
There was a wide sheepskin breastplate and the
breeching was edged with badger hair ; the girths
were a strange medley of strap and rope and string.
We got on to the top of it all and jingled off about
daybreak.
The very ascent up from Prats on to the moun-
tain frontier is baffling to begin with, so steep it
seems, so long; an hour and a half of straining
effort and then not the top, but only the little ruined
building which, seen from far below, seems to be on
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 160
the crest. There are no monks now keeping the
lights burning in the chapel and in the hospice,
once open to belated travellers over the "col"
caught by snowstorms.
We followed a little path, still climbing, the
muleteer hanging on to one of the mules' tails.
The path led up to grazing lands where cattle come
in summer : and over it, the " col," whose tracks
meander on into Spain. They seem only casual
lines of communication used at the passing whim
of the few ; but these are the long-distance paths
that are always narrow and unconvincing, yet have
such definite persistence, the thin snaking score
worn in the short turf.
Right on the top, a great panorama began to
unfold. Prats was lost because it lay too steeply
underneath; this was an outlook all mountains,
that gave the buttresses and long shoulders of
Canigou, and Pla Guillem, a flat saddle of snow
on the skyline. Of the peak of Canigou nothing
could be seen, snow was having its way up there.
But the Alberes showed clearly. Yet one forgot
France and the Roussillon ; Spain absorbed all
the interest, had even an excitement about its
blue ranges, notched and full of wayward character,
its cliffs abutting abruptly on a half-hidden plain,
its gorges split in the rock. Something extreme
about it all.
We passed the stone that marked the actual
frontier and began the steady descent into Spain.
As we edged along a bare, shallow valley on the face
161 ARMED ESCORTS
of the mountain, we saw upon the slope to the right
a baraque a little stone hut where the Spanish
Customs officers live, commanding the track. We
slipped off to walk for the sake of getting warm,
the muleteer made for the hut with the mules.
At last there came a jingling and a patter of hoofs
behind us. The muleteer had picked up a couple
of Customs officers; he was talking away, sitting
on one of the mules, to an officer who had climbed
on the other ; an unmounted mule could never be
wasted.
The "Douanier" on the mule carried a gun,
the other wore the mere ghost of a uniform, a ragged
tunic with gaping slits, and from one trouser-leg
the stripe was torn wholesale. Neither of them could
be called a smart escort ; the raggedest of the two
turned off after a time, the fellow with the gun
walked with us the whole of the way to Camprodon.
We wound down across great quiet stretches of
wretchedly poor upland grass ; then we came to
some meagre cultivation going on upon a patch
of land annexed from the arid waste of the hills.
Our path was pushing along the south side of a
shoulder that we were steadily following all the way
down, never dropping off it, but keeping to the high
ground. A little village, Mollo, we were told, lay
to the right, and Rocabruna to the left.
We got down into a bottom and crossed a stream ;
looking back it seemed a great way that we had
come at this foot's pace down that long slope, the
crest of the range we had crossed was in the clouds
ii
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 162
now. We had just caught sight once of the little
town of Camprodon; there was still another hour's
march before we would reach it, along the bottom
of the valley by the stream. We got on to what the
muleteer called a road, used by ox-carts, in which
the wheels buried themselves : no attempt had been
made to level it ever so slightly, it rose over every
trifling hillock and fell into sloughs and holes, up
and down. Man is made for the road in Spain ;
so are the carts ; the grass hammock swings
to the ridges and hollows. Spain strikes one as
never having come to heel in the way the Roussillon
has been so effectively brought. Neither in Spain
has man given the land anything : it has answered
in the same spirit : it lies aloof, uncivilised, a country
of great silent places, but inhuman, a rough wolf-
cub, unloved and undomesticated.
We wandered into Camprodon under thickly
wooded heights, with the flat ribbon of the valley
winding near the road, passing miserable-looking
isolated cottages and casually worked plots of
ground; sometimes an ox-cart stuck in a slough
barred the track. Then Camprodon itself, when we
came upon it, seemed to burst into a little Spanish
ruffle and bravado, for a few tall chalets amongst
the trees, with pointed roofs and towers and coloured
tiles, reminded one faintly of the freakish houses in
Barcelona. A little way off them we caught sight
of the fine grey tower of the old monastery, cut
through with round-arched openings. We came
upon a " place," and the first thing that happened
i6s ECHOES OF SPAIN
there, was a sort of shibboleth between our muleteer
and the Customs House officers : papers had to be
signed, the height of the mules verified with a tape
measure. This done, and given the freedom of
Camprodon,we felt like walking into it and stretching
our legs. All along the streets the little shops pro-
claimed Spain, the green wool-bags worked with
black and pink, the sandals worked with shouting
colours, and espadrilles the same, the walking-sticks
with leather strapping and plaited ends and knots.
One shop was full of beeswax just as it had been
melted down.
We heard everybody talking Catalan, Camprodon
being Catalan-Spanish. The children struck one,
they were many of them fair ; Camprodon must
have preserved the Visigoth type to a great extent.
We wandered about the little town ; and voted its
best feature to be the old bridge, narrow as can be,
which led to the ruins of the castle and what was
probably the oldest church.
When at last we began lunch there was no question
of doing justice to it ; we drank the white wine
that is Spain, and finished up with excellent
Xeres. Our host sat and talked to us, clumsy
though we were over making out all that he said;
his hospitality prompted conversation.
All the long ride back we faced bad weather that
never came to much, except a few indifferent flakes
of snow, a little desultory sleet. Our escort with
the gun tramped behind us the whole way, talking
to the muleteer. We became friendly enough for
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 164
the gun to be handed to one of us to rid him of its
weight; it lay across the mule's withers.
At the " Douanier's" bar ague on the frontier
we got off and went inside the hut for the showing
up of passports once more. It might have been
a worse camp. A bedplace filled up with straw took
most of the room, there were boxes to sit upon
near the hearth by the wood fire, tools and knives
and forks were stuck into a beam with a candle
end. Casilla de Carabineros was written up on the
wall. At the side of the hut the two dogs had a little
stone house built, something like a rounded oven,
its back into the hill, just big enough for them to
curl into on straw.
Just as one gets down to Prats it strikes one
afresh the good expression the face of the little town
has, the shelter of its grey stone walls, the solidity of
the little stone bridge, the invitation of the round-
arched gateway and the well-cared-for look of the
land round it. Such space and peace. Camprodon
seemed a long way off. It felt as if a portcullis
had dropped behind us, so final is that great moun-
tain barrier.
Every morning at Prats one woke to a sun whose
mind seemed made up always to shine, to a sky
transparently blue. The mountains drew one, but
there was too much snow to get on to Pla Guillem,
whereas the Hermitage of St. Guillem, under Canigou,
was not thus debarred. This Hermitage had a
special lure about it, something suggested by its
complete withdrawal from mankind into the moun-
165 THE HERMITAGE OF THE WINDS
tains, and its belonging intimately to the Peak of
the Tres Vents.
We had a long tramp up and up to St. Guil-
lem's Hermitage. At last we rounded one of the
rocky buttresses and the head of the valley opened.
The woods came to an end near us, most green things
seemed to come to an end, stamped out, shaken
off by the stark mountain shoulders, that, rocky
and snow-sprinkled, banked the valley in on either
side.
On a little green plateau across the valley a
small grey stone building stood. Beyond, the
valley rose again, its sides striped with snow, and
one's eye followed the crease between them to its
topmost end underneath the white Peak of the
Tres Vents.
St. Guillem must have needed very much to
be alone. He cannot have wished people to come
up often with their alms. Looking back, the valley
closes behind one, the splinters and buttresses of
rock come together like the teeth of a trap, the door
between St. Guillem and the world snapped to
after him, one can almost hear the click. But the
saint who could dominate the fadas and elementals
of Canigou, who had killed the dragon of the infernal
palace in the little tarn of Comolada, had probably
not much use for the world. He was content with
the mountains, built his chapel for the shelter
of pilgrims across Canigou, and to the glory of
God.
In the earliest chronicles St. Guillem' s Hermitage
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 166
is called a Pausa, and that would indicate his
little hostelry : yet the pass, the Vieille Porte,
over Canigou by the Tres Vents, would be too pre-
carious in uncertain weather to be greatly used ;
he must have had many months of it alone.
When we got up to the grey building we found
that it does not seem to matter much that
its walls have been restored and altered. St.
Guillem belongs more to the mountains than to any
building. The illuminated missals, the relics of
Ste. Marie Magdaleine in whose honour he built
the chapel, are gone, perhaps to be treasured else-
where, and the painting is gone of the figure lying
in the grass with the goats playing near and all
wild creatures unafraid. This was St. Guillem,
and the she-goats were come to offer to the
saint their milk, scented with rosemary of the
hills.
But the bell St. Guillem made himself is still
there. It seems strange that in such solitude a
bell should be, and evidently was, so necessary to
him ; yet just as he would not have forgotten
to chant the daily office aloud, neither would he
have been without the audible voice of the bell :
St. Guillem used to evoke the tones of his bell
to dissipate cloud. One sees it hanging below a
later bell ; it is of quite a different shape, some-
thing like a mitre. Legend says that the traces
of the saint's fingers are upon it. He was getting
a bell at the village of Velmanya under Canigou,
but the remuneration asked by the blacksmith
167 THE MAKER OF THE BELL
being too large, Guillem took himself a handful of
melted iron and moulded it and rounded it in his
hands into the shape of a mitre.
Away up behind the Hermitage on a green rise
there was a stone cairn built, topped by an iron
cross, and from there one best saw the head of the
valley and the snow-peak. The cairn with the cross
upon it might well have stood as an Altar to the
Peak of the Tres Vents, that to somebody had
typified eternity . . . St. Guillem, contemplating
the Absolute, looking to the white peak.
Snow and solitude one thinks of in connection
with him, and the quiet of the velvet stretches of
grass in summer : one feels how passionately he
must have wanted country and not people most
in his life.
We wandered from Prats one day towards the
source of the Tech. The colouring of this high
country, after Amelie and the Plain, is pale, almost
wan, an ascetic country of faint greens. The green
meadows are silver with a thousand streamlets,
the rills wave across them like hair.
All along the valley the little Pyrenean horses
were grazing, mixed in with bright chestnut-coloured
cows something like Guernseys. Higher up, the
Tech gets more rocky, all pools and shallows that
suggest the small brown speckled trout we eat every
evening. The valley cuts far on, narrowing towards
the Roc Colom where the Tech rises. One looks
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 168
up at this great mountain, part of the wall shutting
out Spain, and sees where the crest of it runs off
and links Canigou with the Pyrenees.
All the herds were coming home with their flocks
as we took the road back. From morning to night
the hillsides never seem bereft, you can always pick
out a flock somewhere upon them, a shepherd, a
dog. The sheep and goats file in procession along
the narrow paths, they look like insects, sometimes
they spread themselves out and seem to hang on
perpendicular cliffs. You hear their bells. Always
sheep-bells and goat-bells somewhere, calling one
up the mountains to chase the things one never
will find. One, leaves the horses and cows down
at the bottom. On rocks where sheep do not dare
follow, the goats climb and balance at their ease,
busily nipping off rare, munchable finds, always an
eye lifting, on the watch ; a goat hears a butterfly
settle. A shepherd will be somewhere near, sitting
on a rock perhaps; an old dog, and a puppy being
schooled, will lie watching him.
The southern side of the Prats valley was a rough-
and-tumble country to walk, because of its complex
alternation of high ground with valley. There was
always a " col" to top, and the "col" only meant
dropping down into the gorge, and another climb
another " col." The pilgrimage to Notre-Dame-Del-
Coral represented this variety. The honest vision-
aries of Prats who toiled up the mountains to see
the image of the Virgin that a bull had rooted
out of the hollow of an oak, must have despaired
1 69 A PAGAN ANCESTRESS
at sight of the valleys where one loses all the height
just gained.
One wonders over this Image that Prats laboured
to honour. In any case the original Notre-Dame-
del-Coral has disappeared. Whether she became a
thorn in the flesh to some enlightened hermit or
priest, whether his discreet suggestions to the faithful
that she was " antique, out of date" or his frank
introduction of a bran-new figure, permitted first
the putting upon one side and then the quiet dis-
appearance of the original Lady, who shall say ?
We saw the three Virgins that have reigned con-
secutively in her stead. First an old wooden figure
of the Mother and Child with a Catalan attempt to
be Byzantine, that might have belonged to the
fourteenth century. Next a much-painted wooden
representation of the seventeenth century, red-
cheeked, black-eyed, without any imagination in
its conception. And lastly, an early-eighteenth-
century Madonna dressed in stiff white satin and
old lace. The Child was of earlier date. Our host,
talking that evening, remarked it was quite time
they had another Virgin up at Notre-Dame-del-
Coral.
Votive offerings abounded. There was a forest
of candles, ornamented, coloured, and gilded, tree-
trunks for thickness. And precious mementoes, a
bishop's mitre amongst others, with its hanging
ends and gold embroideries set with precious stones,
and the flash of red where the points at the top divide
and open like rose petals. Near it lay the scarlet
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 170
epaulettes that had belonged to a young soldier :
the emblems of peace and war come to rest side by
side.
The day when the " taureau " of the " bouvier"
unearthed the Image in the hollow oak has no date.
Nor does one know when the beautiful Guiselda
who looked at herself reflected in the streams was
punished by being carried off by a Moor. It was
Notre-Dame-del-Coral who heard the prayers of
Guiselda, helped her miraculously to escape from
the harem, and brought her back to the Roussillon,
to her parents and her goat Zilda.
Guiselda' s escapade may have happened some-
where about the time of Charlemagne and Roland,
whose name crops up in connection with the towers
of Cabrens, that one sees in the distance from Notre-
Dame. Roland is never going to be forgotten in
the Roussillon. There is the baton in the village
Massanet that he threw from the tower of Cabrens
it is planted in the " place" and when they dance
round in the evenings the lantern is hung on it.
THE ASPRES MOUNTAINS SERRABONA CASTELLNOU VELMANYA
LA TRINITE
WHEN Canigou first took shape, it seems in
its volcanic movements to have lifted
the old formations about its flanks, and
to have undulated them for miles and miles. These
soft, crumbling, snake-like ridges that travel in
waves from the base of Canigou and flatten out
into the Plain towards Elne, are the Aspres.
The Tet and the Tech valleys lie either side the
Aspres, and from both valleys we had explored the
mountains a little.
To go back again to Serrabona had always been
a fixed resolve. To get to know much about Ser-
rabona one was bound to stay somewhere in the
Aspres, dull and unattractive though they had
seemed : one accepted them as that, one could bear
with them for a week for the sake of Serrabona:
must bear with them, we felt.
We put up at the inn in a little village called
Boule d'Amont, a village buried in the Aspres.
The train landed us just beyond I lie at a small
station : we found that a diligence came down
from Boule d'Amont every morning before break-
fast and went back again at once. That we had
172
missed by hours, but it was a fine afternoon and
we started to walk with knapsacks, leaving luggage
for the diligence next day.
Eight years ago there was no road and there was
no diligence connecting Boule d'Amont with the
outside world. Nothing but a mule-track. I know
we thought that this new road, winding along a
gorge of the river Boules, inside the folds of the
serpent mountains, would never come to an end.
But when at last, in the dark, we lit on the quiet
little village they were waiting for us at the inn,
had had our postcard.
Boule d'Amont, a mere handful of houses, over-
hangs the stream of the Boules, has drawn close round
its little church and its bridge, and shelters itself
completely down in the valley under the flanks
of the brown hills. It looks straight up the long
narrow gorge, on the ridge of which one sees the
Tour de Bat ere. We had walked to Batere from
the other side, from Amelie, and had looked down
this valley.
The Boules rises under the Tour de Batere and
it nearly cuts the Aspres in two, with its long course
through their width and out into the Tet. The
valley of the Boules formed a natural boundary
between the land of the Vicomte of Castellnou and
the Vicomte of Corsavi. Serrabona, next Canigou,
belonged to Corsavi : the mountains on the other
side of the river that peter out into the Plain be-
longed to Castellnou.
The Aspres must have been a country of passage
173 MOUNTAINS OF PASSAGE
once and little more. Villages were non-existent.
Boule d'Amont was represented by a single metairie.
Wherever the tracks crossed the high ridges by
"cols" there would be a chapel and perhaps a
room or two built on to it to serve as guest-house
for travellers, in place of the village inn. The little
chapel overlooked the whole country, was never
built in a valley; travellers did not dare to bottle
themselves up in valleys in those days, and chose
high ground. All over the Aspres the tracks count
more than anything else, they score the country :
and the little chapels stand up against the sky,
lonely " signposts."
The Aspres never attain to the dignity of moun-
tains, and yet one does not think of them as hills.
The high tracks might only be two thousand feet
above the sea level, but some of the ridges would be
double that height, and still they lacked the conceit
of mountains. Compared with Canigou and the
Alberes and the Corbieres, one frankly ignored them :
they were just mountains of no account, mountains
of " passage," brown and plain and unpretentious :
nobody ever talked about them or troubled about
them. There seemed no definite system about their
formation ; we would find ourselves down in a net-
work of little valleys and hills and lose all sense of
direction, not able to see for the thick undergrowth
and not having an idea of the right branch to follow
when the path forked. The map would mark one
path, whereas there would be a choice of three,
and all alike, whether they led to a scrap of ploughed
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 174
land or a little house or whether it was the old long-
distance track itself. Though there was one sure
guide, that the old track would take high ground.
I remember we got hopelessly out of our way
the day we walked to Castellnou. Castellnou is
the show castle of the Roussillon, belonging to an
American ; is restored with an eye for the pictur-
esque. One is tempted to wonder whether the
Aspres will always tolerate such a contrast to the
chateau at Corbere, and not contrive some day to
bring Castellnou back to the fold, the gardens no
more, a country proprietor, a rusty bell.
I remember so well walking to Velmanya from
Boule d'Amont, and getting into the Canigou
country, and shaking the Aspres off our shoulders
for a few hours, feeling that it was good beyond
words to be back again on to the granite, with its
decision, its sharp contours, its vehement contrasts
of colour. Of course we had a "col" to cross,
and we wound our way up it, over the most parched
country that ever was, till we stood on the top,
Canigou towering straight in front of us, close to us.
Down the path went at once, the slope this side of
the " col" all grey granite boulders, the mountain-
sides gaunt and bony, no more of the soft brown
Aspres schist. And we dipped into a narrow valley
roofed over with the exquisite green of the young
beech leaves: the little stream, in its backwaters,
paved with an auburn mosaic of their red leaves.
The beeches and the blue scyllas, the mauve and
white hepaticas, the box bushes everywhere, red
175 GRANITE AND UNBELIEVABLE GREEN
and yellow burning bushes, the green moss and
orange lichen, and the grey, wiry grass, all said
granite and granite again.
No sooner had we crossed the " col" than the big
grasshoppers began, castanets, everywhere in the
grass : and it was warm and balmy, had even
brought out snakes, we saw two brown snakes
marked with black diamonds. But the revelation
of all others was the little valley of Velmanya,
pushed up against the feet of Canigou. It was an
unbelievable green. In the intense sunlight the
effect was of gold laid on green, and once more
green laid thick on gold, so solidly was it painted
green and gold. A rocky torrent tumbled and
whitened through all this richness ; level with it
and above it hung the beech woods' bewildering
green. The black pines met the beeches overhead,
and nearer the sky the pines yielded to bare rock
and patches of snow.
We thought that day, at the time, a sort of es-
cape. We made our way back to Boule d'Amont,
feeling that we must settle down now to Serrabona,
and begin the drawings there that had to be made :
we calculated just how much daylight we should
have every day, walking over in the morning and
back when the light had failed.
Before we set off to walk to Serrabona, we tried
to find out something about the track : " famille
Blanc" at the inn was vague; most of them had
never been there ; even the kind Aunt whom they
called " Ta," who knew everything, could not throw
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 176
much light ; and the ordnance map we had, stood
convicted of an optimistic spirit in the matter of
tracks. However, the track to Serrabona came
easily as we walked : a shepherd helped at a critical
point. It led right up across the heights under
Canigou, the mass of Canigou on one side, the long
valley of the Boules on the other : we were therefore
in the old country of the Vicomte of Corsavi : we
looked across the Boules to the Castellnou country.
This track, if we had gone on beyond Serrabona,
would have taken us into the Tet valley. It linked
up the Tet with the Tech, passing straight over the
Aspres, and from the Tech valley another track
would line up with it leading over into Spain. Up
above Boule d'Amont the track to the Tech crosses
a high ridge, and there stands on this " col " another
of the little old churches that was once a monks'
hospice as well perhaps as a signalling tower, La
Trinite.
From all round one could, see it. And one's
thoughts flew to the carved wooden crucifix there,
that takes a place all by itself amongst the cruci-
fixes in the Roussillon. It is not only that the lines
of the figure are at rest the face is at rest : the
whole thing emblematic not, like other crucifixes,
of a dying man but of a surviving God. 1 !
Our path to Serrabona could not be called mono-
tonous : the heights were cut by transverse valleys
that ran their streams into the Boules, we were
continually dropping into one of these gorges and
1 See illustration.
i-
CRUCIFIX (Wood), CHAPEL OF LA TRINITE, ASPRES.
I 7 y SERRABONA AT LAST
climbing steeply the opposite side. We came on
the charcoal-burners, heard their axes, heard a
great crackle of fire and flame licking over the hill-
side when they set light to the small, useless branches
lopped off the logs. These charcoal-burners belong
to the hills, sleep on the hills many nights, in little
shelters rather like their charcoal mounds, with a
dog to keep guard. They never asked us a single
question : they seemed to take things for granted,
to be content to look on. It was as if the hills
had taught them that. One thought of the char-
coal-burners in Fairy Tales, who were always good.
Then there was the white heather the Aspres
were silvered and whitened with that, the honey
scent of it was everywhere, it was the keynote of
that country : the Aspres do not trouble about
colour, only light.
Finally we came upon Serrabona. From the top
of the last ridge we looked across, and there, a little
below us, it lay. It was as incredible, in a way,
as ever, the loneliness of its position on those ex-
posed hills. A little grey Priory, itself to itself,
standing on the rise of rocky ground overhanging
the gorge, its plain square tower and the stone
roofs of its nave and transepts cut against the grey
valley of the Boules and the mountains beyond.
It seemed to have merged its individuality into the
Aspres, to have become part of them, to have let
its human side go with the passing of the Augus-
tine Canons and its Prior. It belonged much more
now to the white cherry tree leaning towards the
12
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 178
tower, to the bleached and beaten world upon
whose white spring it looked : a church of fading
day and negation rather than the hopefulness of
sunrise or the consummation of noon.
It had little to do with full, hot sun : white was
its own , white heather, white butterflies, white
cherry blossom, the whitish-purple thyme flowering
all over the rocks : this, and the end of a grey day.
It was of the west ; the tower looked out through
its two windows into the west. It had finished with
bells. It had the humming of bees instead, all
over the thyme : and it heard goat-bells and sheep-
bells from morning to night on the hills, always
that sound, a white sound.
One thought of the carillon inside the church
with all its bells torn off, and wondered if it could
be its own carillon that Serrabona still heard, rung
from the woolly necks of bell-wethers.
We walked close up to the tower, and one could
not resist letting one's fingers slip along the face
of its stones : one had never seen shaly schist
worked to such perfection. The long, thin, grey-
green blocks gleam with polish : they would have
been quarried out of the mountains close at hand,
and worked with faithful patience, and they are
so thin it must have seemed almost a puzzle fitting
the grey-green face of the tower together as per-
fectly. Just as perfectly as the huge lengths of
stone have been fitted each to each in the apse,
suggesting in the apse the pride of architecture.
We made our way to the south side. And there
179 THE VISION THAT AWAITS
a sort of glory burst upon us. A gallery open to
the sun, with carved marble columns and capitals
that centuries of sunlight had turned from white
into a soft yellow, had baked golden and burned
amber, brown in the shadows, liquid in the light.
It was the suddenness of coming upon it after the
forlorn walls and the grey stone and the ragged
ruins : this radiance : something the marble had
absorbed into itself, and gave out from itself : the
sun need not shine, you had only to turn the corner
to know the fire. Afterwards the sculpture might
and did suggest an intellectual fire : looking at
that one forgot everything else for the time being :
but in the end the impression least meant to fade
resolved itself into the simple feeling of that sun-
imbued marble, the mellow of its age.
It came upon one then that after all the Augus-
tine Canons had not foregone the sun. And they
had made their own sun too. Their work, their
sculpture, says nothing less than that it was the
time of their lives they had at Serrabona. All in
themselves that they had deliberately chosen not
so much to crush as altogether to forego, was let
loose at last, got rid of in frank, delighted expression.
We scrambled up into the gallery and inside
the church : we were like thieves stealing in by a
back way, and we had it all to ourselves for those
first moments of wandering about and discovering.
It looked as though no service had been held there
for years, seeing the neglect of things ; potatoes
were lying in a heap in one corner, maize straw was
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 180
piled up in the gallery. It does not much matter ;
if the woodwork is worm-eaten and mouldered, there
was little of it left to go. All that matters is safe ;
the roof is good overhead, and the rest of the building
is left to belong to the monks more than to any one
else.
You stand under the marble Pronaos, you see
nothing else round you except their work : the best
of it is there, the marble just as their tools left it in
the twelfth century, not a chip gone. You walk
down the church straight to that, it is all quiet
and your steps sound on the flags and the air is
cold ; the walls are very thick, bare now, the stone
flooring broken and void except for some wrecks
of chairs ; dust has it all its own way : only a little
sun comes in sometimes on the Pronaos and helps
you to see. You just marvel at seeing in so casual
a way anything as precious : you little knew what
was waiting for you. 1
One recalled Elne and the defaced carving and
recognised how little of Elne can compare in any
sort of way with Serrabona. Yet Elne is notorious,
Serrabona is practically unknown.
Prosper Merim6e writes of the sculpture that it
is " plein de caprices : d'ailleurs nul gout, nulle pro-
portion." He dismisses the capitals as " repr&sen-
tant des animaux fantastiques grossilrement sculptis.
Baron Taylor and Brutails were obviously more
interested in the construction of the church than
1 See illustrations in the chapter on Serrabona at end of book.
181 THE SOUL OF ROMANESQUE
in the sculpture. The sculpture was vraiment bar-
bare, and they left it at that.
There must have been less feeling for the Roman-
esque in Merimee's time than there is now.
The Romanesque, compared with the other schools,
was shortlived, soon ousted by the Gothic, by the
restless medieval spirit. It is precisely in con-
nection with this change from the Romanesque to
the Gothic that the value of Serrabona partly lies.
You get the vigorous Romanesque at Serrabona,
the swelling roundness of the capital never lost
in the carving, the understanding of limitations
of material. Coupled with that there has crept
in the medieval human feeling and a hint of indi-
viduality. But there is not yet doubt or perversity ;
the imagination has a wide outlook and a vivid
interest in life : it is imaginative enough, but sane
it has too big a grasp of the balance of things to
suffer excess in any form.
Some of the work has more of this medieval
feeling than the rest, so that one can logically
separate it from the rest. As a matter of fact, the
work seems to separate itself into four distinct
inspirations, each with its own marked individuality,
for each of which it seems probable one sculptor
was mainly responsible. Judging by the result,
the sculptors not only designed but cut every line
themselves, down to drilling the little sharp black
holes that give finality and the last depth to shadow.
Most of the work is too spontaneous to be other-
wise : and you feel about it that the sculptors were
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 182
left to themselves, to please themselves, that they
worked away up on those hills greatly to their
hearts' content. 1
There was certainly one sculptor full of Assyrian
tradition, the tradition of human-headed bulls and
lions, of sphinxes' heads, of winged lions: and the
palm-leaf motif comes in.
Then there is the sculptor who amused himself
with heraldic designs, bringing eagles and dragons
and serpents into beautiful pattern. And there
was one visionary Byzantine. His was an abstract
mind, and he cared less about the world round him
than an ideal world which he expressed in sweeping
line and low relief. He carved the long- winged
figures on the Pronaos, great folding wings that
overshadow the body, and count for so much more
than the body.
And last of all there was a sculptor who was most
interested in the world as he found it round him.
His monks' faces must have been portraits, men
he was always with. They are of a curiously modern
type and recall Oscar Wilde, who would have been
a monk if he had lived in the twelfth century.
This sculptor had a feeling for form, for the roundness
of flesh and the thickness of hair. No shorn heads
here, but abundance, vitality, a love of life. He
has not been the least afraid of expressing life.
Some of his ape forms are terrifying : the ape with
the man's head underneath suggests initiation into
1 See Frontispiece and illustrations at end of book.
-*/*
183 MONK-CRUSADER SCULPTORS
Eastern belief and ritual : some are evil. But not
all : he has given wings to one monk, over whose
shoulder an evil face is carved, looking out of the
background : the monk grasps a cross in his left
hand, while with his right he draws the sting out
of the serpent, the tongue out of the snake that
coils round his feet. His eyes gaze out and beyond :
he has destroyed the evil one : has not much to
do with this world now.
I think amongst other influences one should note
the classic influence at Serrabona ; some of the
columns have a strong entasis, some of the bases
suggest wreaths of laurels and claw feet at the
corners, but these are indefinite forms, not worked
out as lions' feet. It is as though the sculptor had
only seen fragments of the old Roman temples in
the Roussillon.
Nor can one ignore the frescoes that must once have
covered the walls of the church. There is only a
single trace of them left, full of Egyptian influence.
The bones in the arms and hands are indicated in
red lines : were they figures of the dead ?
But the question one asks, looking at Serrabona,
the vital question, concerns its building and its
sculpture. Who were the sculptors and builders ?
Were they the monks themselves ? Would any one
else have had the time or the interest to have
worked and polished up shaly schist ? It is certain
that the men who carved the capitals carved them
in their places or for their places : they come ex-
actly on an eye level : whereas at St. Andre the
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 184
carving has been skied by country workmen. If
monks were their own workmen at Serrabona, the
strange Assyrian and Egyptian influence is accounted
for. Some of them would have been Crusaders,
may have just come back from the storming of
Jerusalem under Godfrey de Bouillon, and have
taken the habit about the time that Serrabona was
being built. The sisters Recarde and Stephanie,
who died at Serrabona, sceurs converses, tonsured
and veiled, had made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem
in company with certain Crusaders.
These monk-Crusaders would bring back some-
thing of the East with them that they worked out
in the Aspres, just as they felt it. For the Aspres
gave them their chance. The atmosphere of Elne
or of any monastery in the Plain might not have
been as free from secheresse. The Aspres dictated
no convention, or at any rate it was not a conven-
tional atmosphere : the Augustine masons and
sculptors must have had few restrictions.
One had got to remember that the only tie Ser-
rabona had with the outside world was with Spain.
It had nothing to do with the Roussillon, the Priory
was attached to the chapter of Solsone in Spain.
That was isolation in itself, added to the isolation
of the Aspres ; Spain was a far cry. Probably
most of the monks lived and died hardly realising
even that slender tie. It was there for them when
the end came, when monasteries all over the Rous-
sillon were dissolved. Solsone received the Prior
and Canons of Serrabona. They crossed the border,
185 THE BUILDING OF SERRABONA
taking with them the Deed of the Foundation of
the Priory, all its manuscripts, vestments, and
treasures. Solsone has them still.
It was logical enough that Serrabona should belong
to Spain. Most of its endowments were in land in
the Cerdagne, its principal founder was Raymond
Vicomte of Cerdagne, and the Cerdagne was more
Spanish then anything else.
Thinking of its founder, one almost smiles over
the cynical history of the founding of the Priory,
that would never have been built at all but for the
depredations of the Vicomte of Cerdagne and the
Seigneur of Corsavi upon other lands. One marvels
at the root-hold the terrors of Purgatory and Hell
had in the twelfth-century mind, terrors that
planted Europe with monasteries and churches:
that produced the golden age of architecture.
The Vicomte of Cerdagne must have got the
raid upon the Abbey of St. Michel-de-Cuxa heavy
on his conscience, even as the Abbey of Aries
lay on the conscience of Raymond, Seigneur of
Corsavi, to result in the record, " God came and
touched their hearts." In other words they built
a Priory.
One wonders over their choosing the Aspres,
whether Serrabona did not rather choose them, the
little eighth-century chapel in the mountains where
the blind had been made to see, the lame walk,
the deaf hear, long before any Seigneur's abject
submission to the Church. Perhaps its position in
the Aspres was the reason of their choice : Serrabona
i86
would seem a safe investment, that country would
attract no pillaging hands.
In its whole life Serrabona can only have known
one day when all the world was there.
The Bishop of Urgell from the Cerdagne, the
Bishop of Elne, the Abbe of Saint-Michel-de-Cuxa,
from the valley of the Tet, the Abb of Aries from
the Tech, the Vicomte of Cerdagne and his brother
Bernard, the Seigneur of Corsavi, and one Bernard
Raymond, more nobles and a flock of country
people, would make an incredible throng for once
up on the hills that eighth of November, 1151.
Was it a grey day, or did the sun shine the day
they consecrated the Priory " built for the love of
God and for the remission of sins," and dedicated
to Ste. Marie ?
One likes to think of the personal interest the
four founders took in Serrabona, apart from endow-
ing it with tithes and land : of their indignant
refusal to accept the Bishop of Elne's choice of
Prior : it was their Priory, not his, and they
threatened to pull it down and take back their
donations unless their own monk Raymond Urmen-
gaud was made Prior.
The same interest, leading to various bequests,
goes down through the centuries : the Vicomtesse
Sebilia gives lands : another descendant of one of
the founders leaves it by will the manse of Urg in
the Cerdagne. Offerings must have poured in with
the constant stream of pilgrims, devots, penitents,
nobles, that followed directly on its foundation.
187 THE SPIRIT IN THE FLESH
Yet one would vow that there was little display
of wealth at Serrabona and never any ostentation.
Amongst all the tales of riches and loose-living that
of themselves dissolved half the monasteries round,
there are none recorded of the Augustines at Ser-
rabona. They seem to have been forgotten, lost,
as far as the Roussillon was concerned. When the
State broke up the Brotherhoods they vanished
with all their records over the border into Spain,
into the same silence that surrounds their lives in
the Aspres.
One cannot conceive indulgence and fat ease in
connection with Serrabona, not in the Aspres, where
living is frugal, thrifty, austere. It would be a
meagre crop that the monks harvested, flocks would
have to go far for a feed. It must have been a
rigorous life of brief summers and shortened days :
the sun drops early behind the ridge of mountains
to the west : for the time that it was up, the few
hours that sometimes baked the marble in the south
gallery would be precious : perhaps some of the best
hours in the Augustines' lives were spent in the
gallery.
And in snow and wind the little dark church
must have seemed better than any great cathedral.
The Aspres outside gave the monks plenty of space :
what they must have wanted was thick walls close
round them shutting out the mountains and the
weather, an intimate setting to their ritual : nothing
big and void.
They would come in when the sun set. They
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 188
would chant the Office from the so Spanish
Pronaos : they would pass in and out between its
sculptured capitals, and if by the flickering candle-
light the sculpture ever arrested their eyes, it must
have carried them right away from the Aspres,
recalling to their minds the eternal mystery of the
Spirit in the Flesh.
One wonders if it cost them anything to forsake,
when the end came, and they faced their banish-
ment.
I do not suppose for a moment they had visions
of Serrabona invaded by a curious crowd, its sculp-
ture defaced or sold. To them the Priory must
have seemed sufficiently forlorn on its barren hills,
of no count in the world, safe in the oblivion the
monks had known for themselves. And they were
right. Sacred to the Aspres and to Ste. Marie,
they left it at that. Left it in the keeping of the
winds and the mists, the charcoal-burners, the white
heather : to the sound of the goat-bells.
CHAPTER XIV
TRADES SAINT-MICHEL-DE-CUXA COL DE JAU
WE came down from Boule d' Amont to stay
in the town of Prades, in the valley of
the Tet. Almost one could have walked
the distance in a day by cutting across the Aspres
and skirting Canigou, passing the village of Rigarda,
whose church is memorable for its altarpiece re-
presenting Ste. Eulalie.
Prades lies under Canigou in a green oasis of fields
and fruit trees. Amelie had given us spring,
colour without warmth, a firework that burst into
a dazzle of stars : the Aspres had embodied a white,
spiritual spring : but Prades did not concern itself
with any unearthly renderings, the spring of Prades
was just sheer delight, shouting spring, a chorus of
sound, a rush of green, a heaven of scents.
Prades was in it up to the chin. But of all the
country round immersed in an intoxicating moment,
it was a little valley leading up to Canigou that
forgot itself most, had drunk deeper than any other
spot. You could see the grass growing, hear the
leaves overhead unfolding, feel the whole air rock
with the clamour of nightingales. There were never
deeper meadows. The earth never lived, never
pulsed more joyously than it pulsed there.
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 190
I like the Benedictines for having recognised and
sealed this valley of Saint-Michel. Our little path
under a maze of green turned into the open, crossed
the stream, the Ribereta (how lovingly named !)
and showed us their Abbey tower looking out over
its old possessions. There was nothing the Abbey
had not got : sunshine, running water, magical earth,
and the shelter of the hills ; it was close to the white
road down the Tet, close to the world. We saw it
all set in green glory, a dewy awakening, to the
throbbing of nightingales and the beat of life in
every blade of grass.
We looked across the meadows at Saint-Michel-
de-Cuxa, at its proud tower. None like it in the
Roussillon. It stood there, a square tower of grey-
brown stone, warm in the sunlight against a blue
sky, a faint entasis on the outline as it reaches up,
its face pierced with many openings, the thickness
of the walls seen through these windows giving
strength and richness, the spacing of them and
of the shallow arcading perfectly calculated and
varying in size so that the base of the tower gains
in solidity. Nothing was left to chance; it was the
result of preconception, knowledge. Of all the arts,
as Maupassant says, architecture is perhaps the
most aesthetic, the most mysterious, and the most
nourished by ideas.
We walked on towards the great wall that had shut
the valley in with an arrogant seclusion. This was
a chateau-fort as well as an Abbey : it meant a
wealth of land all over the country, of castles and
I 9 i FATEFUL WEALTH
farms, of iron mines and forests, rivers and fishing.
Saint-Michel paid no homage to the King except for
the castles it possessed elsewhere : the Abbe had
sovereign-seigneur-rights, exercising a criminal as
well as a civil jurisdiction. No seigneur in the Rous-
sillon can have had more power.
In the early life of the Abbey there cannot have
been much vanity : they would be rigorous days
of the eighth century when the five half-drowned
monks found their way to Cuxa. One is taken a
long way back thinking of the origin of that little
Brotherhood that, coming from Urgel in the Cer-
dagne, had built themselves, up in a ravine of the Tet,
the monastery and church of St. Andre d'Exalada.
Exalada, that was destroyed one night in a single
hour, church, monastery, and all, by the bursting
of a lake up in the Cerdagne that flooded the ravine
and drowned the Abbe and most of the monks.
The five survivors took refuge with a small com-
munity who had looked to St. Andre d'Exalada as
their Mother House, and were living on a farm at
the mouth of the valley of Saint-Michel. The
insignificant building one sees still must soon have
been outgrown, for in 878 the community numbered
fifty, and could write down to its account five
hundred sheep, forty pigs, twenty oxen, besides
two horses, mules and asses, and, remarkable at
such an early date, a library of thirty volumes
complete.
Long before they moved up the valley and took
possession of the green stretches above the banks
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 192
of the Ribereta, the monks must have begun build-
ing the Abbey Church ; they were working at it
for nineteen years and it was consecrated in 974.
The Abbe's house and the twelve houses under the
" Grand Sacristain," the " Vicaire General/' the
"Prevots" and the "Prieurs" would follow, with
the Cloisters and a host of other buildings : and the
great wall would enclose them all.
There is no guessing at the revenue of Saint-
Michel-de-Cuxa in its early years. The Abbey
Church must have been built under the shadow of
the coming of Anti-Christ and the Judgment, which
the Church predicted for the year 1000, but Saint-
Michel would probably reap a heavier harvest later,
when, 1000 having come and gone, the people, seeing
that the end of the world, which they had thought
par ci, par Id, was not yet, cast everything they
possessed into the Church in an ecstasy of joy
and gratitude.
Amongst all these offerings there must have been
relics brought back by the Knights Crusaders, to be
laid away in the precious Reliquary, where eighteen
silver lamps burned day and night before the
splinters of the true Cross and of the true Manger,
and the piece of Christ's tunic : there were other
relics, fragments of the bread and fishes of the
miracle, the basin in which the disciples' feet were
washed, a garment of the Holy Virgin's, the hair
of St. John Baptist, the beard of St. Peter.
As far away as the shores of the Adriatic the
name of Saint-Michel-de-Cuxa must have been
193 A PRIESTLY STRONGHOLD
known : Orseolo, Doge of Venice, would have seen
it in his mind long before he undertook the journey,
must have had a vivid picture of the valley of the
Ribereta and of Canigou above it, contrasted with
Venice and the Adriatic, to draw him finally to the
Roussillon to become one of the monks of Saint-
Michel.
One is inclined to think of rest and of peace in
connection with an Abbey, but Saint-Michel could
not have been fortified with its enceinte and two great
towers and garrisoned with fifteen fighting men for
nothing. It was too near the high road up and down
the Tet to escape attack from time to time, its wealth
was too well known : otherwise the French would
never have troubled to besiege it when they took
over the Roussillon. It must always have been
looked upon with awe by the Catalans themselves.
The Citadel at Perpignan, the Abbey of Aries, even
Elne, all of them centres in towns, had nothing of
the aloofness, the egoism and pride of Saint-Michel-
de-Cuxa, a priestly stronghold in a sybarite's world,
rearing its head in the beautiful valley under Canigou.
Its influence in the twelfth century one can a little
imagine, when, apart from its temporal power, the
ritual within its walls expressed the living impulse
of that sacerdotal age.
Nothing short of five or six hundred years, one
thinks, could have brought about a revulsion of,
popular feeling that turned awe and reverence into
contempt and vindictive malice. There must have
been considerable provocation for the change.
13
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 194
Prades and the little villages round would have
watched the gradual dissolution of the Abbey, seen
the number of monks diminish, seen those who
were left not even troubling to keep the Abbey in
repair.
They must have heard the grumbles of the barris-
ter at Perpignan who went to stay at the Abbey
to enjoy the cheery life of the monks, always at
table when not playing cards, and who found him-
self when he left, decave, and obliged to borrow
money from a friend in Prades.
And then there was Madame de Coprons, when
the French Government in the end of the eighteenth
century tried to establish some sort of decency in
Benedictine Convents, and Monsieur de Coprons,
Chief President of the Council, lured by the situation
of the Abbey, juge convenable pour en faire son siege
de plaisance pendant les ardeurs de la canicule.
Madame de Coprons also embraced the simple life
those dogdays, and doubtless the officers from
Perpignan who filled her salon in the Abbey blessed
their escape from a little stifling three-parts Spanish
city. If amongst the women in her service there
was some laxity of morals, Madame de Coprons
did her best not to shock the Catalan eye : rather
than offend any man she used to put herself to the
inconvenience, when she returned to Perpignan, of
concealing in her own litter any too palpable a
victim of human frailty. The Cloisters can never
have known before the patter of feet and the sound
of songs that came with her, and disturbed les
195 FALL OF THE ABBEY
religieux who did not understand les ardeurs de la
canicule.
But a charming staircase we found in the house
of the salon had not forgotten the rustle of silk and
frills.
For les religieux the end was near. About the
time of Madame de Coprons' moment the National
Assembly of the Demolition of Religious Orders
paid an official visit to Saint- Michel-de-Cuxa and
laid bare whatever secrets the walls had hidden
the fact, for instance, that there were only six monks
and the Abbe left in the convent, that each of
them occupied a house all to himself, and that there
was no communal life amongst them.
One likes to think that in spite of the menace of
this visit and the cutting down of their revenues,
three monks stood by Saint-Michel up to the last,
even after the old Abbe Reart had died broken-
hearted.
One Sunday in January a mob of people marched
from Prades and the villages round, led by a citizen
of Prades who had made them an inflammatory
speech to begin with. They hounded out the three
monks and began the destruction of the Abbey to
the sound of the Marseillaise. The great bells were
thrown down from the height of the towers, the
altars were destroyed, and the wooden statues
burnt. Three monoliths in red marble that came
from the tombs of the Abbes in the crypt, and bore
inscriptions with their names, went to a butcher's
shop in Prades to serve as counters. The Abbey
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 196
with its enclosure (that is the Church, Cloisters,
Sacristy, houses and gardens) was sold for a sum
of less than twenty pounds to a small landowner :
the whole place was pillaged, the sculpture disposed
of to any one who would carry it away. One sees
Sickart's ancestor loading his mules with marble
capitals and carrying them off to Olette.
The Abbey Church is a mere husk now : the east
end was used as a barn, filled half-way up to the roof
with straw. Perhaps because the Abbe's house was
taken over and tenanted, its doorways and sculpture
have been preserved. We doubted at first if the
blocks of marble were in their original position,
so botched was the masonry, but similar instances
of exquisite work badly placed and ill- joined give
colour to Brutail' s theory that, left to themselves,
the Catalans were rough and ignorant builders.
Out of the wreck of the Abbey this sculpture is
something that could least have been spared : it
can only be compared with the most interesting
and the most beautiful work at Serrabona. Indeed
there is so much of the same character in them both
that one is tempted to put them down to the same
sculptor or school. 1 The doorway at Saint-Michel
was carved by a monk or monks who certainly did
not put it up and can never have lived with it,
who may have come down from Serrabona and
worked for the Benedictines, some time of course
after the church was consecrated.
Serrabona and the Aspres seemed a long way off,
1 See illustration.
_
r
DETAIL OF ARCHWAY,
ABBEY OF 8T. MICHEL-DE-CUXA.
[196
197 THE PASSION OF LIVING
those days we spent at Saint-Michel in the valley
of the Ribereta. The white heather and the sheep-
bells faded to an insubstantial memory : nothing
counted but the moment.
The monks at Saint- Michel had every excuse. It
would not be easy to be an anchorite in a valley
that loses its head in spring, nightingales singing
their souls away day and night, a passion of flowers,
scarlet poppies and yellow buttercups and blue
cornflowers in every field, prodigal grass, fondly
indulgent earth. One must live in tune with one's
surroundings. You cannot shut your ears to the
imperative call of the cuckoo. You must see the
grapes coming on all the vines, fruit forming on
all the trees. Why even the bare hills put on mauve,
lavender, and white cistus, pure chintz we called it,
their nearest approach to festival.
Saint-Michel was too full of living. Even the
Abbey itself, the tower with its subtly simple lines,
was half an exotic, something that had had every
chance, born of hot sun, deep grass, nightin-
gales.
For a moment one contrasts it with Serrabona
and the Aspres : the Aspres must have seemed
frankly impossible to the Benedictines compared
with their valley. Yet the remoteness of the Aspres
saved Serrabona, and if the little grey Priory on
its bleak hills never had any Madame de Coprons
to visit it, neither did it attract a revolutionary
mob. Not that the Benedictines could have fore-
seen. What had they to do with an ephemeral
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 198
to-morrow ? The to-day of the valley of the
Ribereta would be all that could matter.
Rain was something to remember that first week
in May, the swish of the heavy drops, and after the
showers such a steaming, such a scent, Prades
like a hot-house of banksia roses and iris and guel-
der roses. Its meadows of thick tri folium-clover
breathed cool and green : the corn had a warm,
ripe scent, the fresh-turned fallows smelt of earth.
The plane trees on the high road seemed the most
beautiful trees we had ever seen, their pale trunks
a silver-blue and grey and green, the sensitive
skin of them, and their almost human form. How
they had turned their bodies edge on northward
to meet the Tramontane ! How clean their lines !
And no troublesome branches : only a few huge
limbs: then the sharp-cutting of the big pointed
leaves, and the tassels hanging. The avenue was
just a pale grey wall, hung down with a green
curtain.
After a day of steaming heat, up on the Col de
Jau we froze. This " col " to the north-west divides
the Roussillon from the country of the Aude. We
drove up the valley of Mosset in the diligence as
far as it went, got out at Mosset and walked by a long,
long road that wound us at last up to the top of
the " col," where we found ourselves 4,600 feet above
sea-level, and in the clouds amongst patches of
snow, a little driving rain in our faces. And then
in the soft, boggy grass we suddenly came upon
gentians, bluest of the blue, first the little gentian
199 GENTIAN AND DAPHNE
like a blue star, and then the great trumpet-shaped
flower the deepest sky. They were a revelation,
our first gentians in the Roussillon, and we found
snow buttercups, yellow up against the drifts of
snow.
We looked down into the Aude, across its forests
of pines ; we were certainly not for leaving this high
country and going back by the valley, in spite of
the clouds. There is an old track that comes up
from the Aude on to the top of the " col," and
keeping right on the crest of the ridge of mountains
which shuts the valley in to the west, follows high
land all the way till it drops down to Prades.
We followed it: arresting scents kept wafting
from Daphne by the way ; that was a strange
child to find up there, its seductive, provocative
scent on a mountain-top. There was a little pink
primula too, and a cyclamen. We were beginning
to come downhill when the clouds lifted and the
peak of Canigou suddenly revealed itself. It was
the colour of the rising moon at night; the mist
rolled away and the peak showed yellow, the snows
of it almost orange. Up there amongst the clouds,
no connection whatever with earth, no suggestion
at all of solid mountain, it materialised as an ex-
quisite flower in the sky, a yellow tulip with blue
veins faintly pencilled.
CHAPTER XV
THE CERDAGNE MONT LOUIS COL DE PERCHE PLANES FONT
ROMEU FORMIGUERES SOURCE OF THE TET REPUBLIC OF
LIVIA PUIGCERDA
WE came up to the Cerdagne by the most
amazing little electric railway ; it flew
across the Tet and plunged into tunnels
every few yards. Sometimes the river has been
pushed out of its bed to build the line : in twenty-
three miles we rose nearly three thousand feet.
Mont Louis, built on this high edge by the French
when they took the Cerdagne over, is every stone
of it seventeenth century : just a little fort all to
itself, walled and gated and fossed.
Our hotel (Figarol) abutted on the outer wall,
looking out over the broad grassy terrace of the
further side of the moat where white poplars stand
sentinel : our bedroom walls were seven feet thick :
always the feeling of a fortress. The sight of soldiers
reminded one that Mont Louis is still a garrison town.
At Mont Louis you are right on the edge of the
Cerdagne, well up it is true, on a great broad
undulating pasture-country, set round with moun-
tains. But you are not really on top. There runs
a saddle, the pastures rise gradually to it, beyond
Mont Louis. This is the Col de Perche. A quite
200
201 ROMAN HAMS
gradual rise, and yet of all watersheds round, most
full of meaning, shouldering off its rivers, one side
into France, the other side into Spain.
We soon walked up on to the top of the " col " with
its little village and rest-house. This was of course
a Roman station: the Romans fully appreciated
the Cerdagne, for its hams ! We had got the country
spread now fairly in front of us, sloping down
gradually from the "col " into Spain. The River Segre
wound away into the south-west ; the Tet was
behind us, tumbling off to the Roussillon.
Picture the Cerdagne as the floor of a dried-up
lake set amongst the mountains at an incredible
height. Picture it a great stretch of the greenest
country full of little villages and towns and slow-
running rivers and grass and corn. Then you must
see it as dipped at its far end in the deepest green
of all, where it is lowest. Puigcerda lies there just
beyond the boundary. Though you are up at such
a height on this floor, ranges of mountains tower
above it, some of the highest of the Pyrenees ; the
spread of the Cerdagne is well sheltered. It is not
the least like a narrow, squeezed-up Pyrenean
valley. It represents in the Pyrenees exactly the
same " high floor" that Kashmir represents in the
Himalayas.
They must have plenty of snow on the Col de
Perche in winter up to the windows on the first
floor, they said. We were delighted with the little
stone houses, especially their roofs, rounded stone
slates, graduated from big above the eaves to small
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 202
near the ridge, just fish-scales, grey, and where
they are weathered orange-red with lichen. Real
goldfish. And all the window frames are stone.
Stone gateposts. Stone everything. The Cerdagne
is just sprinkled over with the round granite
boulders, and all you have to do is to walk out and
quarry as much as you want of the grey speckled
stuff.
We went on through one or two more villages.
The churches have square towers that end in short,
pointed pyramids : the mountains are rounded,
the forests level-lined, the plateau has long swells
and shallow hollows, so that pointed towers insist,
contradict, are demanded.
In front of one church door there was a great
iron grille let into the paving stone to keep wolves
out. This suggests forest, and it came quite near,
the fields and the heather merging into vast firwoods.
The shaggy forest stretched for ever away up
into the mountains, green waves alternating with
open spaces : there was always a grass carpet,
not bare firpins but short grass, dappled because
all the spring green was just coming through in
patches and the other patches were the old winter
dead.
Then heather had got mixed in, and flowers:
scented Daphne, cyclamen, the little pink primula,
snow buttercups, the beautiful mauve Erythronium
with long spotted green and brown leaves, and always
gentian. All growing in the spongy grass carpet
that gets feet upon feet of snow upon it in winter.
203 VIRGINAL YOUTH
Green old tracks, long glades, must still be trodden
by pilgrims to the Hermitage of Font Romeu. We
found the hermitage at last between the trees,
amongst stretches of grass where pale Alderney-
coloured cows were feeding and shaking their bells.
The roof of the hermitage chapel belongs to the
forest. No goldfish scales, but its grey stone tiles
were powdered over with a pale, flittering green
patina. It must have roofed a world of gratitude,
the visible emblems of which hung all over the inside
walls, even from the roof itself, thousands of votive
offerings. Our Lady of the Fountain had com-
forted an endless stream of pilgrims.
The Guest House was being opened to the sun
after the winter snow, snow that had buried the
chapel up to its roof. Now the sound of cow-bells
was coming back to it, and foaming rills were bursting
up all round out of the boggy peat. Font Romeu is
virginal youth : something they would never have
missed in the early days, a spot that was always
Delphic, always spoke.
The Cerdagne is a glad country, at peace with
itself, has got beyond the glacial age and the age
of upheavals to a serene existence near the sun.
It gives one the feeling of being high above things
that worry, is free from wrinkles, clean, aired. The
mountains round it, that impassable wall to the
south-east, have no unquiet lines : they are tranquil
giants, blocked in in black with pine woods and
scored with snow, the tops deep under snow.
This country is wet with colour colour that
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 204
has never got dried. You tread on soft cushions,
on springs, feel and hear the underground waters.
You see black bog, short boggy heather coming
next the fields. There is nothing bleached, nor
dusty, nor tired. There is not the noisy shout of
spring as there was at Prades, it is too level-headed
for that. It is sanely green on all its flat expanses,
it is wide-eyed, open, and everywhere you see
BLUE a blue that astounds. Hosts of gentians
like bits of sky rifting the grass into a sudden blue
that takes one's breath.
The sky isn't an ordinary sky. The clouds are
cut long and fantastically, sometimes they have a
great movement on, sometimes they lie on the ground
as cotton-wool and drift about in wisps that never
keep far off. It seems more alive, this sky, here
where the land comes to meet it. From the Col
de Perche we turned south, to Planes, to look into
its small old church. Was it built by the Arabs or
not ? And why not the Knights Templars, full of
Eastern symbolism ? We stood under the little
dome, inside the circle. There was the triangle,
sure enough, intersecting it, something we had never
found in the Roussillon, this stout insistence on the
principle of three, the Trinity and the Mundane
Circle.
One morning broke sunny on mountains sugared
all over and forests powdered. We tramped due
north, just to see a corner of the Capcir, along a
high road leading into the Aude valley and France.
A wild country of forests and mountains. As we
205 SLANT EYES
walked, the Tet came more or less towards us for
a little way, then when the road climbed up a water-
shed there was the river Aude on the other side
running in the opposite direction off into France,
though it has risen so near the Tet. The Aude
was an unwilling companion, meandering slowly
through the valley of Formigueres between boggy,
poor-looking land.
Of all dreary valleys in creation this is the dreariest.
Its poverty-stricken houses don't whitewash them-
selves, they are brown and dejected. But then the
valley is a road into the country of the Aude, not
into Spain, and the Catalan is not happy on a French
road, his villages have a dull despondency. We
had a fearful wind against us, due north, glacial.
You could not keep a hat on, but there was no reason
to carry it: put against your chest it just stuck
there with the force of wind pressing it. There was
a good deal of snow to get through on the road : it
was inconceivable that we were only twenty-five
miles or so from Prades and summer and nightin-
gales, for we were frozen. Formigueres, once Royal
city of the Kings of Aragon, did not seem sufficient
reward : a desolate end to our struggle, the little
brown houses indifferent, sad, their steep pitch of
roof showing the sort of weather they expected.
It was rather interesting to find the Formigueres-
Cerdagne type of face had got into some carving
in the church, slight carving but personal, daring ;
just so me faces on a black marble stoop in the church,
rather broad faces, eyes a little aslant. The people
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 206
hereabouts remind one vaguely of Laps to look at,
are inclined to flat faces, high cheek-bones, slant
eyes. The Laps probably hark a long way back,
and these people may be equally primitive, cer-
tainly an older stock than the Roussillon, possibly
descended from the cave-dwellers at Estagel, the
ancient Ceretani, who were driven up into the
mountains by the Sardons, who were driven out in
their turn by the Visigoths.
As we walked the snow melted fast. We could
see Canigou out of the wrack down wind in the Tet
valley, whiter than the whitest. Even the peak
was in the blue for the shortest time, then under
cloud again. Canigou' s backbone curved round
towards the Cerdagne and showed a strong ridge.
Just as much character as ever, it has, seen from
up here : the thin crest thrown into the sky like a
wave, tossed up, and the long shoulders sloping
away from it. Because it so rears itself and defies
time and weather that thin ridge you feel the
demon Canigou is.
One day we set out to explore toward the source
of the Tet that we had followed from the Mediter-
ranean, across the Plain, up the long valley, and at
last here.
It makes a big bend at Mont Louis to the north :
even then it keeps inside the frontier, is a faithful
child. Here we see it setting out, young and head-
strong, on its long journey. One thinks of its
green, quiet waters running below Perpignan with
never a wrinkle on its placid face.
207 SOURCE OF THE TET
At the start, we had the Tet to-day tumbling
and foaming through the firs and pines on our
left ; on the right the height seemed almost overhead,
it was so steep, rocks piled on rocks, fir trees gripping
to them; even on the crest they stood, stunted,
firm. Masses of rock had fallen, everywhere it
was split all ways, so fast is this country disinte-
grating : each crack in the stone only waits a frost
to open it. But this cliff was a wonder. Wherever
there was a cranny in the rocks above us or a handful
of soil, daffodils were growing ; thousands, a rain
of stars falling down the face of the cliff, and not a
blatant yellow, but pale and greenish as early stars.
Rhododendrons came further on, the little wild
one that will flower in July. We found an anemone,
old-rose colour, and woolly all over the grey sheath
of its bud. But most of the rock plants were up
on the top, out in the open. That was after the
Tet had seemed to come down a ladder of rock from
the sky and we had climbed by the road to its high
level.
Somehow one had never guessed that Lac Bullosa
was going to lie up there, never reckoned on getting
out of the forest all in a moment ; but it was so,
the pine woods were left below directly we stood on
the high edge.
Away from one's feet stretched a huge expanse
of water, Bullosa, the lake that receives the Tet,
whose exit has been dammed and gated in order
to provide power to light the Roussillon. We
could imagine, not see, the tiny stream that some-
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 208
where between the buttresses of mountain rises
in the Lac Bleu on the edge of the Aude frontier.
Another day we must have walked about twenty-
five miles, following the high road across the Col de
Perche down the valley of the Cerdagne to Puigcerda.
Along this road must have come many of the his-
toric hams that the Romans chronicled, the hams
of Ceretani, two thousand years ago, carried down
the Tet past Prades and Castel Rossello and Salses
and Nar bonne into Italy.
In due time we came to Li via, the little republic,
neither French nor Spanish, that got left behind
when the frontier cut the Cerdagne in two : a
stranded island of eight square miles or so, all to
itself in the middle of the prairie of the Cerdagne.
Perhaps out of pure regret the French can see less
good in Livia. But to us Livia seemed the eyelet
hole of that wide green valley, the grass deeper,
richer, the trees more full, and many more horses
turned out to graze in the flat meadows. As for
the little town, its shops spread a net : the fronts
of them had gone in for the most attractive paint :
the windows knew exactly what to show and how.
Livia has not forgotten the Counts of the Cer-
dagne, that it was once itself the key to the whole
Cerdagne, had a Roman castrum up on its hill
behind, long before the Counts' castle.
So when the Bishop of Urgel came to consecrate
Serrabona, he must have stayed at the Castle of
Livia with Raymond Vicomte de Cerdagne, and
together they would have ridden down to Saint-
209 BLACK LINEN BLOUSES
Michel-de-Cuxa, to stay at the Abbey before taking
the Abbe on with them to Serrabona.
It was Livia that gave us the narcissus. The
pastures to the right and to the left were white
with pheasant' s-eye narcissus. And this is the
meaning of the blue-green patches all over the
meadows in the Cerdagne. Not daffodils, but acres
and acres, miles, of white, scented pheasant' s-eye :
because Livia is low and sheltered, they were out
there first.
By and by, when the road crossed the Spanish
frontier, with no eclat, the road was the principal
mark of any change; exactly in the middle of
the bridge across the boundary river it became
Spanish and bad. A Douanier craned his head
to see us pass, out of a trellis-work shelter, where
he was sitting chatting at a table with some others.
We were in Spain, and a long, hot road wound
us up to Puigcerda.
I think Puigcerda has its days and might exercise
much fascination. I shall remember its blue and
green shutters and balconies, and its Spanish feel,
its Spanish-looking girls in the town. The gay
little streets, the shops hung with black linen blouses
and Spanish shawls wanted Sunday to call the
world out. There should have been a great market
going on, and dancing. There was nothing doing.
Even the post office had shut for its siesta. The
whole place drowsed and nodded. It didn't want
the Spanish names of the streets and shops to tell
one it was Spain and afternoon.
14
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON 210
Livia stood out, the best of all we saw that day.
Not to be forgotten was the old church and a cru-
cifix there. It may have been carved by a monk
who was his own model. There is such certainty
about the treatment : the sculptor carved something
he had got fixed in his mind. He gave the head a
tonsure and slit eyes near together : he cut the feet
big and square, the feet of a man who had gone
barefoot most of his life.
Down from the Cerdagne we came. Back into
the valley, back into summer. We had got only
an impression of the Cerdagne. It was an impres-
sion of a sunny land where quiet people move slowly
after slow oxen, and nobody seems to labour much :
it was an impression of stately, unapproachable
mountains and gracious forests and green pastures
and still lakes. Everywhere water. And always
gentians. The Blue Country. ANGULUS RIDET.
We left the Roussillon one June day. Spain
still had her spell and her colours over the country.
Wherever there were no gardens and where the land
was less good, poppies and wild mustard stained
the stretches with Spanish colours. All along the
line this flag was flown. Sometimes an orchard
flew it, trees red and gold with cherries. So we
went out of the Roussillon with streamers of that
banner. And as the train ran across the Plain,
deeply green under its vines and rich gardens, we
saw for the last time the Catalans at work on their
2ii THE LAST IMPRESSION
own land. All the backs were bent. So many
women stooping over the crops, so many men.
Close to earth. And one knew they wouldn't over-
work; that there were little wine-gourds in the
shade at the edges of the fields; that they would
knock off early.
The vine was the last impression of the Roussillon,
the green levels of Salses, and "la Salanque"
fading into the blue of the Mediterranean. The
grapes were back again, about the size of green peas :
the great drama was going to be played all over
again this autumn. . . .
It was altogether different when we had crossed
the border beyond Salses and got into that no man's
land, the deserted strip of coast to Narbonne.
The houses looked brown and dirty and sad. No
more women with white aprons and clean prints.
The people who got into the train looked quite
different and they talked differently.
And the poppies and mustard by the line were
gone. The colours of Spain were left behind. So
sharp and suddenly did it come upon us we had
left the Roussillon.
THE END
NOTES FOR TRAVELLERS
THE single fare from London via Folkestone and
Boulogne, Paris and Toulouse, to Perpignan, quoted
by Messrs. Cook,* is 6 155 .6d. first-class ; 4 145. gd.
second-class rail, first steamer ; 3 45. third-class
rail, first-class steamer. We took second-class tickets
to Toulouse; from Toulouse onwards, seeing that
everybody travelled third, we did the same. Thence
all over the Roussillon and even to Barcelona we
went third and never regretted it.
t
At the Etablissement Vernet-les-Bains, at Font
Romeu, and at Thues-les-Bains only, can hotels
(and prices) de luxe be found.
Everywhere else tariffs range from six and a half
to ten francs a day. Comfortable quarters may be
found at Vernet outside the Etablissement ; at
Amelie-les-Bains, Le Boulou, Perpignan, Prades,
Port Vendres, Mont Louis, and Prats de Mollo.
There are so few tourists that the clientele chiefly
consists of commis voyageurs, to whose dread pro-
pensity for fault-finding the bird of passage may be
grateful.
There is also a hotel at Banyuls recommande by
the Touring Club de France, and a hotel at Port
Bou which recommends itself.
* October 1919.
15 213
NOTES FOR TRAVELLERS 214
Useful accommodation at slightly cheaper rates
can be had at Estagel, St. Paul de Fenouillet, Vel-
manya, Olette (chez Sichart, whose cooking cannot
be beaten).
At Salses, Ille-sur-Tet, St. Genis, Py, Boule
D' Amont, Argeles-sur-Mer one roughs it at the village
inn for a ridiculous sum: yet beds are clean and
cooking is good.
At Collioure we rented a little flat from Monsieur
Pascal, and the village inn catered for us excellently.
For motoring, main roads are excellent macadam.
No pave.
It is the tracks over the hills that lure : here you
must walk or mule it. Mule and muleteer cost
eight francs a day and the man's dinner. If you
walk, wear espadrilles.
ISABEL SAVORY.
Printed in Great Britain by Haiti I, Watson 6- Viney, LA.,
London and Aylesbury.
DEPARTMENT OF THE
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