n- 1 y BASQUE COT mrm PAINTED BY ROM ILLY FEDDEN DESCRIBED I! BY KATHARINE FEDDEN DC 538 CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY **< °"«''-e3r«'^e.,,,^, OUN UBRARY DATE DUE ■Wff! HHg^lT^ 6 mh¥ CAYLORD PKINTCOINU.S.A. Cornell University Library The original of tiiis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924028132912 THE BASQUE COUNTRY vi^ui^k^ fXjldU*A ST. JEAN DE LUZ, EVENING. THE BASQUE COUNTRY PAINTED BY ROMILLY FEDDEN DESCRIBED BY KATHARINE FEDDEN BOSTON HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY A, & C. BLACK, Ltd., LONDON, ENG. 1921 INTRODUCTION IT is a far cry to the days of the eighteenth century when every traveller, safely returned from the grand tour in posting-chaise and diligence, felt it his duty to write his personal impressions of the journey. To-day the whole world travels, and description savours of impertinence. We expect everyone to have seen at least as much as we have seen. Yet, strangely enough, though the Basque country is within a well-travelled zone, no single book can be found in English to answer the questions that the traveller, charmed and interested by this little people, is sure to ask. This, then, is our excuse for adding one more to the already long list of place-books, — that while we can claim no pretension to special knowledge of a subject which has long proved one of dissension to the learned, we yet hope to give some information and pleasure to the traveller who, like ourselves, may come to this fascinating country. Introduction ignorant alike of its history and traditions. To such a one we say with the Basque proverb, " Autrefois comme cela, Aujourd'hui comme ceci ; Apres, on ne sait comment ! " Katharine Fedden. CONTENTS CHAPTER I Origin and History ..... i PAGE CHAPTER n Laws and Language ..... 14 CHAPTER HI The Gate of the Basque Country . . 25 CHAPTER IV A Memory of the Second Empire . . 35 CHAPTER V The Cult of the Dead .... 40 CHAPTER VI St. Jean de Luz ..... 45 vii Contents CHAPTER VII PAGE St. Jean de Luz — The Pirates' Nest . . 5^ CHAPTER VIII St. Pee, Sare, Ainhoa, Ascain . . . (i"] CHAPTER IX Hendaye, Fontarabia and the Ile des Faisans 78 CHAPTER X A Little Journey into Bearn : Orthez — Pau 85 CHAPTER XI A Little Journey into Bearn : Oloron — Sauveterre ...... 92 CHAPTER XII A Market Day in Tardets .... 99 CHAPTER XIII Mascarades and Pastorales .... 108 CHAPTER XIV Mauleon, le plus fort Chastel de Guyenne 117 viii PAGE Contents CHAPTER XV St. Jean-Pied-de-Port — The Story of a Little Town . . . . . . ,125 CHAPTER XVI The Schoolmaster . . . . .136 CHAPTER XVn The Storm in the Cabaret . . -145 CHAPTER XVHI The Valley of the Laurhibar . . -154 CHAPTER XIX Crux Caroli . . . . . .164 CHAPTER XX St. Etienne de Baigorry .... 175 CHAPTER XXI Cambo, Itxassou . . . . .184 Books Consulted. . . . . .189 INDEX 191 b ix LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOUR St. Jean de Luz, Evening Frontispiece FACING PAGE A Basque Farmstead A River in the Basque Country Fruit Shop, Bayonne Place de la Liberte, Bayonne Bridge at Socoa . LoHOBiAGUE, St. Jean de Luz. Good Friday Evening, Church of St. Jean Baptiste, St. Jean de Luz Convent des Recollets, St. Jean de Luz Church with Pelote Court, Ainhoa Church at Ascain . A Spanish Basque Inn . View from the Terrace at Pau A Basque Inn A Basque Village St. Jean-Pied-de-Port . Gate in Old Wall, St. Jean-Pied-de-Port xi i6 28 32 46 4« 56 64 74 j6 80 88 104 120 126 130 List of Illustrations FACING PAGB Street in Old Town, St. Jean-Pied-de-Port . 132 Storm in the Valley ...... 148 A River in the Basque Country .... 152 A Basque Village — Moonlight .... 160 Church at St. Etienne de Baigorry . . . 176 Church at Itxassou . . . . . .184 An Upland Village . . . . . .186 XII LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT Bayonne ........ Windows above the River, St. Jean-Pied-de-Port 13 A Basque Rosary In the Cathedral, Bayonne Pine Tree Discoid Stone Inscription over a Door at Burguete A Basque Farmstead ..... Eighteenth-Century Inscription over a Basque Farm ....... A Basque Water- Jar Inscription over a Basque Doorway in St. Jean Pied-de-Port ...... Stone Carving on a Farm near St. Jean-Pied-de Port, formerly the Curb's House Inscription over a Door .... Church Door at Sauveterre Charlemagne's Cross on the Roadside near Ronce- VAUX . . . . . . . . Inscription above the Door of a Farm on the Road FROM St. Jean-Pied-de-Port to St. Etienne de Baigorry ...... 183 Inscription above the Door of the Cobbler's House AT St. Etienne de Baigorry . . . .188 Burguete — Arms on a Spanish-Basque House . 197 xiii PAGS xvi 24 34 39 44 Inscription over a Door, St. Etienne de Baigorry 57 107 116 124 135 144 153 163 174 ITINERARY CENTRES FOR EXCURSIONS Bayonne : To Biarritz. To Guethary, Bidart, St. Jean de Luz. To Peyrehorade, Orthez, Pau, Oloron, Tardets, Mau- leon, Sauveterre, St. Palais, St. Jean-Pied-de-Port, St. Etienne de Baigorry, Cambo, Ustaritz, Bayonne. St. Jean de Luz : To St. Pee, Sare, Ainhoa, Ascain. To Urrugne. To Hendaye, lie des Faisans, Irun, Fontarabia. Valley of the Saison Tardets : To Licq, Ste. Engrace, Etchebar, Larrau. Valley of the Laurhibar St. Jean-Pied-de-Port : To St. Jean-le-Vieux, Ahaxe, Lecumberry, Mendive. Valley of the Beherobie EsTERENfUBY : To St. Michel, Beherobie, and Forest of Iraty. xiv Itinerary Valley of the Arneguy ESTEREN?UBY : To Uhart-Cize, Lasse^ Arneguy, Val Carlos, Pass of Roncevaux, Burguete. Valley of the Aldudes St. Etienne de Baigorry : To Urepel. To the Col d'Ispeguy. Cambo : To Hasparren. To Itxassou. To Espelette. Map — Carte Routiere, No. 22. A. Taride, 18 Boulevard St. Denis, Paris. Note.— To turn kilometres into miles, divide by 8, multiply bys. XV I.. J O < XVI THE BASQUE COUNTRY CHAPTER I ORIGIN AND HISTORT POPULAR legend, which arises ever in answer to a people's questioning, recounts that a great serpent sleeps under the range of the Pyrenees, and that this creature, stirring in its dream of ages, raised the long chain of mountains above its moving length, while from its seven jaws gushed forth a fiery flood. Of this fire was the Basque country born, primeval as the source which gave it birth, and to this day it holds something elemental, a scarce- veiled Pagan spirit which has survived Christianising and the cen- turies. Its forests are still peopled with mythical creatures — in the caves of Belsola in Biscaye they dwell, whence come apparitions of primitive men and savage women to affright in tale on winter evenings ; on the heights of Mont d'Anie still echo the enchantments of mysterious nuptials, the marriage rites of the fabled Maittagorri and the young Luzaide ; poetic imaginings of this race born of fire, of the great life-giver, the sun. So much for legend. Before we ask what is known in fact of this people, let us endeavour to place them, The Basque Country to see their background and to glance at their neigh- bours. The Pyrenees are roughly figured in our minds as a wall of mountains which extends from the Medi- terranean to the Atlantic, and separates France from Spain. To be exact, it is not an unbroken chain, but two shorter ranges, one of which starts from near the Bay of Biscay and runs 124 miles east to the Peak of Sabourede ; the other of which starts from the Mediterranean and runs 117 miles west to the Pic d'Arhousse, eight miles south of Sabourede. These two ranges are joined by a saddle of hills running north and south. The character of the two faces of this chain differs greatly. On the north side, the range presents a bold and precipitous barrier to France ; here the hills and valleys run at right angles to the main range, and the total distance from summit to plain is nowhere more than twenty miles. On the Spanish side, on the contrary, the hills and valleys run in folds parallel to the main range, and the distance from summit to plain is in places as much as sixty miles. The valleys on both sides are traversed by streams called gaves in French and gahas in Spanish. Depressions in the lower ridges are called cols, and those in the main range ports, through which the passes lead from one country to the other. On the French side, the long valleys leading up at right angles to the main range all present the same general characteristics. Just under the crest of the Origin and History- mountain is a hamlet, generally giving its name to the pass into Spain ; a few miles below we find that the narrow, rock-bound valley widens into a plain or flan, once a lake-bed, where you will come upon the first mountain town. Again the valley shrinks and you may follow it a few miles down to the second flan, where a second and larger town is found. From here the valley runs widening to debouch into the plains or landes, and there, at the debouchment, stands the most important town, guarded by the ruins of a castle on a commanding height. This town not only holds the gate to the valley but also the gate to the pass, which means the guarding of larger issues of racial and national import- ance. This town is to-day the meeting-place of demand and supply, and thrives on the commerce between mountain and plain. The Pyrenees in their whole extent are the home of several distinct racial types. Astride the Medi- terranean end are the Catalans ; in the centre on the French side are the Bearnais, on the Spanish side the Aragonese ; astride the Atlantic end we find the Basques. Each of these groups of people is distinct by language, physique and character from the others. The Basque Country, astride the Atlantic end of the Pyrenees, is roughly bounded on the east by the Gave d'Oloron and the Gave d'Aspe in France, and by the Esca and Veral Rivers in Spain, on the south by the provinces of Santander, Burgos, and Logrofio, 3 The Basque Country on the west hy the Atlantic, and on the north hy the Adour River as far as Peyrehorade, where it joins the Gave d'Oloron. Such are its physical boundaries ; its political divisions were formerly the seven sister provinces (seven flames from the serpent's jaws) the Zaspiak-bat, I'Eskual Herria of Basque song and story. Of these, three are in France : Labourd, capital Bayonne ; Basse-Navarre, capital St. Jean- Pied-de-Port ; La Soule, capital Mauleon ; and foul are in Spain : Guipuzcoa, capital San Sebastian ; Biscaye, capital Bilbao ; Alava, capital Vittoria ; and Navarre, capital Pampeluna. The three French provinces are now comprised in the department of the Basses-Pyrenees. It is within these narrow limits, in this fertile, wild and beautiful corner of Europe, backed by the mountain ridges, facing the sea or the rich alluvial plains, that this strange, self-contained race has pre- served its individual type, life and language, for — how many thousands of years ? Who are this people ? Whence did they come ? These are questions as yet unanswered or, perhaps it is more correct to say, with as many answers as there are interested savants. Upon one point only are they all agreed — the antiquity of the race. " For more than thirty centuries," so reads an Essai sur la Noblesse Basque written in 1785, " the Basques have played a part in history, and for far more than twelve centuries they have been the freeholders of the country they conquered, and form in the 4 Origin and History realm of France a race apart, distinguished by a language and laws which have come down from the remotest ages." The writer confidently affirms that the Basques came into Spain about fifteen years before Christ, and gradually withdrew into the hills " rather than suffer the yoke of a con- queror." But before you give credence to this, remember that you will find the opinions of any number of other authorities to be absolutely contradictory. Baring- Gould, in his delightful book The Deserts of Southern France, published in 1894, says : " The whole of Aqui- tania was unquestionably originally peopled by the Iberian race, of which perhaps the Basques, driven into the westernmost part of the Pyrenees, are the sole remnant. . . . The name Gascon is Basque — the B has become V in Vascons, and then the V was changed into G." From this you turn to Hilaire Belloc's Pyrenees and read : " Against the theory that the Basques are the remnant of a people once from the Gascon Pyrenees and Spain, is the fact that they present a racial type quite distinct from the peoples on every side. All we know is what we have just stated, that while Basque place-names do occur throughout Spain and Gascony, the million or more people who speak the language occupy a tiny corner of the territory over which these names are to be found. The rest is all speculation." And speculation has run to wild lengths. The existence of this group of people who speak an agglutinative tongue in the 5 The Basque Country midst of Aryan idioms * is full of interest and mystery. Anthropologists do not find that the Basques are a distinct race. They are a cross between the Homo Mediterraneeus (brown, small with dolichocephallo skull) and the Homo Alfinus (small with brachy- cephalic skull), with a strain of Homo Euro-pceus. As this does not tell us very much of their origin, the students have endeavoured to solve the problem through the language. The following tentative list of theories, each of which has adherents, may give some idea of the war of speculation that is waged : That the Basques are descended from Tubal or his nephew Tarsis ; That they were one race with the Iberians of the Caucasus who peopled Spain (Humboldt holds this view) ; That they are a branch of an African stock (this theory held by Chaho and Antoine Abbadie). That they are a branch of the Aryan family and the language is akin to Sanscrit ; That the Basques are a branch of the Turanian group — related to the Finns — and came down from * It may be well to recall that the great linguistic and ethno- logical divisions of Europe and Asia are three — ^Turanian, Semitic and Aryan. The Turanian is represented by the Tartars (Chinese, etc.), Malays, Turks, Finns, Egyptians, Esquimaux, American Indians. The Semitic is represented by the Hebrews and Arabs. The Aryan is represented by Hindus, Persians, Greeks, Latins, Slavs, Celts, Germans and Scandinavians. 6 \ Origin and History the Baltic (Bergmann's theory, also that of Prince Bonaparte) ; That they are a branch of the Semitic race and came from Chaldea (Eichhoff holds this view) ; That they are related to certain tribes of North American Indians (Mahn and de Charencay) ; That they are descended from the ancient Egyptians (Claudio Giacomino and others). That they are an indigenous race who have never had any further extension than their present area. Finally, that they belong to a lost Atlantic continent whose inhabitants are represented by the Guanches of the Canary Islands and by a fair race on the Western Coast of Spain. The truth is that you are at liberty to follow which- ever theory is most sympathetic to you. It is all conjecture. For choice one would picture them as the offspring of a patriarchal race who, following the mysterious impulse towards the West, set forth thousands of years ago from Asia, that cradle of human life, on a long journey which led them to this corner of ancient Iberia, where they rested. The Celts surrounded them, failed to immerse them and passed them by ; the Phoenicians brought here their gold and precious stones ; the Carthaginians were received by them ; the Gauls beset them and were repulsed. Last of all came Rome, and this little people — whether you call them Iberians, Vascons, Basques or Canta- brians — were unique in this respect, that they dared to resist the Imperial Eagles. Rome, accustomed to 7 The Basque Country conquer, to impose her will unchecked, was amazed at such resistance. Horace, Pliny, Juvenal, Silius Italicus, wrote of these enemies of Rome who fought for their liberty bare-headed, fearing neither heat nor cold, nor hunger nor thirst, their weapon a two- edged sword. Rome, the wise maker of empires, knew the art of diplomacy as well as that of arms. Liberal concessions of autonomous power succeeded where arms failed, and the Basques became allies of the Roman Emperor and in time accepted the Roman civilisation, attracted by its arts and customs and the refinements of its manners. According to most authorities, they were one of the Nine Peoples, Novem Populanie, of ancient Aquitania. A pleasant legend, widespread and generally be- lieved, tells us that the Basques have never adored but the one God, the unknown God, Yaun Giocoa, from whom flows all light : Egia, or truth, light of the soul, Etchia, the sun, light of our earthly day, and Begia, the eye, light of the body. This legend pretends that the gods of the Romans were dis- dained, and that in response to Roman persuasion the Basques replied : " We worship one God in the universe, and we will raise no altars to the idols created by your priests. Yet to show our goodwill we are quite ready to admit that there are god- desses on earth and to adore them." When the Romans demanded to know who these privileged goddesses might be, the Basques made answer, " Our wives, if they permit " ; and they raised A BASQUE FARMSTEAD. Origin and Histoi-y altars of flowers and verdure to woman, the head of the home. Charming as is this story, it is contradicted by fact. On the wall of the church at Hasparren, you may read for yourself the famous inscription : Flamen item duumvir quaestor pagique magister, Verus ad Augustum legato munere functus, Pro novem optinuit populis seiungere Gallos, Urbe redux genio populi hanc dedicat aram. Which means that Verus, magistrate of the fagus or township, sent as delegate to the Emperor, obtained the separation of the nine peoples from Gaul. On his return he dedicated this altar to the god of the locality. If you should object that Verus was a Roman and not a Basque, and that this, therefore, proves nothing, you may look further and will find proof both in the Toulouse Museum and in M. Juhen Sacaze's book, Inscriptions Antiques des Pyrenees, that the Basques did accept the gods of Rome. They not only made offerings, built temples, offered sacrifices to the Roman gods, and dedicated funeral urns to their friends and relations, invoking the traditional Deis Manibus, — they also raised altars to their own local gods. There was the Basque Mars, deo marti leherren,* a god at once savage and terrible who crushed as well as con- quered, and Erditse, typifying fruitfulness, maternity ; and a crowd of rural divinities, in whose worship all the poetry of the Basque nature found expression. Altars were raised to the deified beech tree which * Leherren = leher, to crush, from leheren, the serpent. c 9 The Basque Country clothes the hills, in whose shade the Basque shepherd still plays his flute — a rural god with a taking name, Fagus, — FAGO DEO BONXUS TAVRINI FILIUS so one inscription runs. Other deities, Larraxon of the high pastures, Aherbelste of the black rocks, Baigorisc of the red earth, etc., are perpetuated to this day in the names of villages, Larrasona, Harri- belecketa, and Baxgorry — which last now bears a saint before it, St. Etienne de Baigorry. During the three centuries which followed their alliance with Rome, the Basque people, like all the people of Aquitania, developed the arts of peace and were saved from the first great invasions of the Vandals and their followers by this alliance. After the fall of Rome itself, from the beginning of the fifth century, existence became a struggle for life. Gaul was conquered, Aquitania submitted. But the Basques, though the Visigoths were at their gates, did not submit. They held together, retiring ever farther into the mountain fastnesses. They withdrew to the region between the two ancient Roman routes along which surged the invading hordes — the Roman road that at Roncevaux scaled the Pyrenees, and the other which led from Burdigala (Bordeaux) by the plains through Bayonne into Spain. Retired in this in- accessible region, impregnable from a military point of view, the Basques could defend themselves with a lo Origin and History small force against an army. So they remained intact while the races about them in France and Spain were overwhelmed and swept into the sea. They re- mained isolated, savage and feared in their wild sanctu- aries, spying down upon the passes from their rocky heights. Savages they still were when, in the twelfth century, Eymery Picaud the monk accompanied the noble Lady Gerberga on her pilgrimage to Cam- postello. Later it was that the Basques fought hand in hand with the Christian kings against the Moors. With the Christian knights they came to the relief of Aragon against Islam, against the redoubtable Abd-ur- Rahman. Up to the sixteenth century, the Basque con- federation of seven provinces, governed by their ancient laws, held. Then, when the English were driven from Bayonne by Gaston de Foix, Labourd became a part of the realm of France, though on the condition that it preserved certain immunities and privileges. La Soule, while remaining " a free land, free and independent by origin, without stain of servitude," became part of the Vicomte of Beam, then passed to the crown of France, then once again formed part of the domain of the Bearnais princes ; thus a domain comprising Basse-Navarre, Beam, Foix, and the Duche of Albret, formed the kingdom of Navarre, whose title was borne by the kings of France. The ancient Basque laws were respected down to the eve of the Revolution. Louis XVI was the last king to take the oath of fealty to those ancient II The Basque Country laws or fors of Navarre. When the union of Castille and Aragon gave a national unity to Spain, the Spanish Basque provinces took each its own manner of guarding its racial liberty. Biscaye constituted itself a free state of which the Spanish sovereigns take tlie title of Seigneur, but not of King, while Alava and Guipuz- coa demanded the continuance and maintenance of their ancient laws. During the religious wars, the Basques remained faithful to the Roman Catholic Church, fighting against the Huguenots till peace was established by Henry IV. Then with Gascons and Bearnais they followed his white plume across France, battling for him at Courtrai, at Arques, at Ivry, and under the walls of Paris. Although to-day the bond between the Basques on the two slopes of the Pyrenees has ceased to exist except in memory, yet on both sides of the mountains the love of the soil and the pride of race persist, in spite of all political changes. These found expression when a simple bard went forth with his guitar to sing along strange ways a song which no Basque may listen to with head covered, — a song which has become the national hymn, Guernakaco arbola, a hymn which breathes forth all the religious fervour, passion and fierce patriotism of this curiously separate people. To its strains, played after the Marseillaise, the Basque regiments, part of the very backbone of the French Army, went " over the top " in the late war, singing the wild passionate refrain : 12 Origin and History Guernakaco arbola, Adoratzen zaitugu, Arbola santua. " Tree of Guernica," they sang, " we adore thee, holy tree," their last thought, their last word, not of France, but of that corner of the Pyrenees where the tree of liberty was planted hundreds of years ago. CHAPTER II LJfVS AND LANGUAGE THE oak, that sacred tree of Zeus, whose leaves crowned the victor in the Olympic sports, whose waving boughs shaded the temples, amidst whose leaves the oracles whispered ; the sacred tree of the Druids, venerated by the Christians in the Middle Ages, is symbolic of traditions dear to the Basque. It was beneath the oak of Guernica, — that Guernakaco arbola sung by the peasant poet Jose Maria Iparraguirre in the national hymn, celebrated by Jean Jacques Rousseau, saluted by the brave Tour d'Auvergne and his grenadiers in 1794, — it was beneath that oak and the oak at Ustaritz that the Bilzaar, or the assembly of the old, met yearly. This was a congress of notables which was convened in the open air to administer justice and to maintain the laws. During the Middle Ages the Basque Provinces were states enjoying full liberty, and even when they became part of the kingdoms of France and Spain they still accorded to their sovereigns only a free and I voluntary service. The ancient laws, venerated under \ the name of jors in France and fueros in Spain, were Nbased on custom or upon written charter. These 14 Laws and Language fors embodied the usages, privileges and immunities of the seven provinces, and though they varied in form in each province they did not vary in principle. The key to the Basque laws was respect for individual ~TiHert^!rrTEere exist in Guipuzcoa certain cartas fueblas — or lists of the population — dated as early ,as 1226, which lead to the belief that the first groups of the people in that province after the great invasions were under the kings of Castille, but that these communal groups jealously guarded their fueros, the laws which they had held from time immemorial. Later the deputies met in one or another of the twenty-three towns of the province, and the first junta was held July 6, 1397, in' the marvellous ogival church of San Salvador at Guetaria, when the fueros of Guipuzcoa were first tabulated under fifty or sixty headings. In the fueros, in the juntas, in the elections of deputies, there was a constant mingling of religion and pure democracy. Before the election there was a mass, and the elected took his oath upon the cross. The juntas were presided over by the Alcalde of the place, sometimes a simple workman, or fisherman, as at Fontarabia. So, at Azcoitia, a tailor presided over a meeting where the proudest nobles of Spain were seated. Great care was also taken to secure honesty at the polls. At Tolosa, any man seen talking politics with a priest lost his right to vote. As every family was represented by its chief in the commune, so every commune was represented by 15 The Basque Country a delegate at the congress. The Basque delegates took the oath giving to their overlord the right to protect them in these words : " We who can will and do more than you, we make you our sovereign that you may protect us and that you may maintain our laws." The sovereign took the oath to respect the laws : " I swear that I will be a faithful and good sovereign to the people of this land, to each and to all ; I will maintain the fors, privileges, customs and usages, written or unwritten ; I will defend them with my might ; I will render and see justice rendered to the poor as to the rich." The peoples, through their representatives, swore '' to aid, counsel and defend " the sovereign. A contract this, based upon a noble self-respect. Where there is respect for self, there is respect for the rights of others, — in other words, for law. Where there is respect for law, there is union and strength in the nation, order and discipline in the community, fecundity and continuity in the family. The respect for law is one of the secrets of that force which has preserved the Basque people intact through the centuries. Not only had they laws governing the larger issues of life, but also for their social pleasures, their dances, their games, even for their deportment in the street. The rights of succession in the Basque Provinces are of the most ancient origin and profoundly rooted in the social character. Long before the law of primogeniture was established in other parts of the i6 A RIVER IN THE BASQUE COUNTRY. Laws and Language Pyrenees, it existed in the Basque nation without distinction of class or sex. The eldest born son or daughter was the heir to the property whether of the rich man or the poor man. The first result of this law is the fixity of the family. The family homestead acquires a personality, becomes an entity giving its name to the dwellers beneath its roof, creating for them not only duties and obligations, but also assuring to them consideration and material prosperity. One of the first things which strikes the traveller in the Basque country is the dignity of life. The ample houses, spaced in valley and on hill and mountain slope, have nothing in common with the ordinary one-storey habitations of the French peasant. These Basque homesteads impress the imagi- nation as the expression of a patriarchal life. They have an air of stability, of dignity and of permanency ; they are evidently not the transitory abode of the light-minded who are here to-day and gone to-morrow. They are houses of wide, sheltering roof- tree and wide doorway, of three and four storeys, set in the midst of a domain which includes garden, field, pasture, woodland and vineyard. This domain is considered as a whole, each part being dependent on the others, and it is the family duty and joy to keep this domain intact. The house is called in Basque Etcheonda, or stem- house. In Germany the same expression is found : Stammhaus. This is the stem, the sturdy trunk, the family tree, from which the branches shoot. Its D 17 The Basque Country preservation is the first consideration. Such a house once established, it is necessary to ensure its trans- mission in order to satisfy that ambition for per- manence which is a Basque characteristic. This, then, is the origin of the Basque laws of succession. Up to the time of the French Revolution, which brought all the provinces of France under one code, the eldest child inherited house and domain. " The result of this was that the eldest, if a son, identified himself from his early youth with his father whose old age he would sustain, and worked with ardour to save enough money to make dowries for his sisters, that they might marry with men of a fortune equal to that of their brothers. The younger sons who remained at home, received a share of the stock on their marriage to heiresses of other houses. But more often than not, the younger sons left to seek their fortune in the colonies, which, when made, enabled them to return to their native place, build homesteads, and found, in their turn, mother houses." When the Revolution, in 1793, ordained that children must inherit equally, the Basque people used every means to evade the law. The younger children were so imbued with the reverence for the old ideas that they refused to share equally with their elders. It was found so difficult to enforce the law that it was finally changed and the eldest child might be given a quarter of the whole. But law does not change tradition. The parents still use every means to ensure the protection of the property, and the younger 18 Laws and Language children still refuse to accept a share which may destroy the continuity of the home. ♦ There is no longer any law of primogeniture, but the father and mother choose their heir, who is always, by custom, the eldest son or daughter. The eldest daughter is often preferred, because she will marry earlier and often meets " an American," or wealthy Basque returned from South America, who will build up the family fortunes. The daughter, moreover, will live with her parents, and is often chosen because the mother knows her character and has more con- fidence in her as a house- mate than an unknown daughter-in-law. One interesting point about these customs of suc- cession is that the other children are never jealous of the one chosen to carry on the family. They understand that it is not from any preference for the one chosen, but with the sole aim of ensuring the persistence of the family domain, and so, the import- ance of the family in the country. The laws of succession as they exist to-day are only a feeble picture of those which flourished in old times, but they, yet maintain the evidence of a magnificent social organisation. Created to assure the stability of the patrimony and homestead, they assure at the same time the continuance of tradition ; they also are favourable to the progress of civilisation. Instead of quarrelling over the shreds of their patrimony, the children accept the lot which is theirs by custom ; one only carries on the family in the old homestead, one 19 The Basque Country or two marry in the neighbourhood, the others go into the priesthood, the army, or to the colonies. The result is that peace reigns in these quiet, spacious dwellings. The Basque homesteads are homes of peace. How often has one seen engraved in stone above the door, in Basque, the words, " May peace be in this house." Or that other at St. Etienne de Baigorry, " Cutiare quin dugun, Baquia asqui dugula," which means, " With little, have we but peacCj it is enough." This peace is not only the result of living under wise laws, true to traditions handed down from the remotest times, it has its roots, as well, in a deep religious belief. Since St. Amand brought Christ to the Basques in 631, they have held the faith. Eschaldene Fededen, "Basques and faithful," stands synonymous. The family life is animated by respect amounting to reverence for the authority of the father in things general, and for the authority of the mother in the household. The position of the woman has always been an honoured one among this people, and a high ideal of morality has been held and attained. The Basque language has no word for adultery, and public opinion condemns with the utmost severity any laxity of morals. A curious instance of the vigorous manner in which the community guards the standard of propriety came to our notice at St. Jean-Pied-de-Port in May 1919. Night was made hideous by cat-calls, drums, whistles, trumpets. It was not till this had continued for several evenings that we succeeded in discovering 20 Laws and Language the cause. A woman of sixty in the old town was about to marry a man of twenty-seven from a neigh- bouring village, and all the youth of the place were engaged for a week in thus pleasantly giving voice to the general disapprobation. The woman, who was rich but miserly, was told that she could buy them off for 500 francs to spend in feasting. As she did not pay, the charivari, as it is called, continued nightly for a week. Any house suspected of impropriety may be thus pleasantly serenaded. It was on the little steam tram winding carefully around the steep hills between Oloron and Tardets that a fellow-traveller, a French buyer of wood for the government, became communicative. He was no great admirer of the Basques. He allowed them to be sober, honest, industrious and domestic, but one'scented the bitterness of battles waged with hard- headed peasants in many a little mountain town. All his life he had passed in this business of travelling and appraising and acquiring trees and woods and forests, — a detestable vocation which barred him from any very high degree of sympathy. But he had found his ignorance of the Basque tongue such a disadvantage that he had determined that his two little boys should learn it early. To this end, he had installed two Basque servants who were to faire le menage — he allowed them to be clean and ready workers — and to speak Basque with the children. They gave the utmost satisfaction in the first capacity, but the children did not learn a word of Basque. The 21 The Basque Country mistress remonstrated with the maids, who replied that they would certainly not speak their language to the children. They did not wish the children to learn Basque, for in that case strangers would under- stand what they said. This little story is, one feels, typical of the spirit which has preserved this people. They will serve you, they are always polite and pleasant, but they will not allow you to share their lives or to speak their language, which is to know their thoughts. The very difficulty of its idiom has kept the world outside its barriers. In France the spoken limits of the Basque language are the same to-day as they have been for centuries, but in Spain it has lost ground. In Alava it will soon be an unknown tongue ; Biscaye is penetrated by the Spanish patois ; Navarre has seen, during the past century, over two hundred towns and villages exchange Basque for Spanish. The Basque language possesses a scale of fifty-three sounds with six vowels, a, e, i, o, it, u. The written language, though based on French or Spanish ortho- graphy, is phonetic. Although one of the oldest forms f speech, it has a meagre literature. The first asque book was printed as late as 1545. For this reason rules for the writing of the language may be said to still be in the making. This was amusingly proved one evening at St. Jean-Pied-de-Port. We had before us a verse in the Basque of the sixteenth century, and the same verse in modern Basque. We asked our hostess, an intelligent, educated woman, to translate 22 Laws and Language the modern Basque. Part of it she rendered into French, but some of the words she said she did not know. She thought it must be Basque of another province. She called in a lad who read the verse with the same result. Then they both read the verse written in the sixteenth-century Basque and translated it with ease. This was the Basque that they knew, and they assured us that the second version was mis-spelt. So here, to-day, in St. Jean are people who use the written form of the sixteenth century instead of the modern orthography. The Basque language (Eskuara) means " clearly speaking," and has been compared by its admirers to algebra, whose elements are simple, but whose combinations are innumerable. It is declared by them to be a model of clarity and simplicity, order and logic. All of this must be taken by the layman at second hand. But we may accept the fact that the language is unrelated to any other known and is believed to be a mother tongue. The language has no words for utensils brought into use in modern times. For such, a Latin, French or Spanish word is used with a Basque termination. As an example, the word fork, fourchette in French, becomes " four- | chetta." A knife, however, which was a primitive / implement, has a Basque name and is called nabela. | The Bearnais have a little story which they like to tell. The good God, they say, wishing to punish the devil for the temptation of Eve, sent him to the Pays Basque with the command that he should 23 The Basque Country there remain until he had mastered the language. At the end of seven years, God relented, finding the punishment too hard, and called the devil to come to Him. The devil had no sooner crossed the bridge of Gastelondo than he found he had forgotten all that he had so hardly learned. As for the Basques themselves, they believe that they descend from Adam and that the Basque tongue was spoken in the Garden of Eden. 24 CHAPTER III THE GATE OF THE BASQUE COUNTRY BAYONNE is one of the pleasantest of the smaller towns of France and yet it is difficult to explain just why. Can we ever define the charm of a given place any more than we can the attraction of certain personalities ? Places are sympathetic or not, as the case may be, and whether that quality is in them or whether we bring it to them, is another question which we cannot answer.- There is always a dual character in the old towns of the world. There is the present-day life, which we see and feel, and there is the shadowy life which history has made so real that in some places it takes possession of the present and we only live in the past. To-day in Bayonne life is vivid and full of pleasant- ness, but it has its past, its pride of history. It leaves upon the memory the impress of sun and white houses green-shuttered, of space and light and happy people. It is not all of France, this town, but has more than a hint of Spain. If you lean from your balcony in the steep street in the Quartier St. Esprit, that has lured you across the river from the hotels where one never sees anything but other people like oneself, — if you lean from your balcony to watch E 25 The Basque Country the life below, you will believe yourself in Spain. There is the wine shop, where hang the acrid goat- skin wine bottles, ready to be filled from the great casks of Spanish wine ; strings of red peppers sway by the door of the house where a black-haired girl sings all day long as she works. Strange little songs she sings, sad songs in a young voice, songs of her people, full of melancholy. Charinoak Kaiolau, the Captive Bird, is one: The little bird in its cage sings a sad song. While it has enough to eat and to drink, — it yet longs for the free air. Because — because — liberty is good. " Little bird flying free — beware of the cage. If you can, keep free. Because — because liberty is good." Last night I dreamt of my beloved. I saw him, but I could not speak. What sorrow ! what despair ! I wished that I were dead. Yet though she sings this lament, her voice is full of joy because her lover has come safe home from the war. He is the young blacksmith at the forge above, where the little donkeys stand on market days. There you may see the great cream-coloured patient oxen slung up to be shod. When the night falls, the blacksmith ■ comes down the hill, his blue beret on the side of his handsome head, to join the little song- stress and her neighbours. He has a brave tenor voice and knows many of the ancient chansons, which he has learnt from the old people in his village under the pass of Ste. Engrace. Legends in verse they are, like the guerz of the Breton peasant, though the 26 The Gate of the Basque Country- Basques are not as rich as the Bretons in historical ballad. A favourite song is Errege Jan. Would you could but hear it sung in the Basque tongue in that thrilling young voice, amidst the charmed silence of the street ! King John wounded has returned from the wars. His Madame mother meets him at the threshold, joyful. " King John, be consoled, enter bravely. Your wife of a little King, last night, was delivered." "Neither for my wife, nor for the little King may I be comforted, Mother. Do not tell them, but give me my bed to die." ' ' Madame my mother, what troubles the servants to so many sighs and tears?" " Impossible, my daughter, to hide the truth. The grey horse is dead." "Madame my mother, what troubles the servants to so many sighs and tears .? " " Impossible, my daughter, to hide the truth. They have broken a silver dish. But I beg you, weep not for a grey horse, nor for a silver dish. King John will bring back from the wars both gold and silver." "Madame my mother, listen — what are the people chanting?" "My daughter, it is nothing. Only a procession that passes below." "Madame my mother, what dress shall I wear ? It is time I arose from this bed." "My daughter, shall it be white or red ? or perhaps black is more beautiful." "Madame my mother, why is the holy ground piled so high ? " " Impossible, my daughter, to hide the truth. King John lies buried there." "Madame my mother, take here the keys, both of silver and gold. And the little King, lift him tenderly. " Oh, holy ground, open to me, that I may enter into thy depths. The grave has opened and I have found King John." The hush holds for a moment after the song has ended, then there is applause and more talk and laughter under the stars. 27 The Basque Country- All down our street is colour : houses, ochre and lenaon, yellow and pink and red, and set like a jewel is the fruit shop, glowing in the sun. Beyond are drinking shops, where the sailors from the port sit by the small, square tables and recount long tales of the whole round world ; and then come shops, little shops where cakes are sold, and little shops full of things to lure seafarers — yellow oilskins and gaudy handkerchiefs printed with the whole pack of Spanish playing-cards. Beyond on the little green square, under the arcades, more sailors sit and stare at the peasants coming in to market, as they pass by and over the Pont St. Esprit. Beyond the bridge, the twin spires of the Cathedral rise above the modern town of Bayonne, above the remains of the Roman city of Lapurdum, the head- quarters in the third century of the cohort that guarded the Novem Populanie of which we may believe that the Basques formed one. In the fourth century the Roman town was a stronghold, surrounded by walls, of which portions still exist. In the twelfth century the name of the town was changed to Baionna, but the Roman name, Lapurdum, continues to this day in that of the province Labourd. Bayonne formed part of the vast possessions of the dukes of Aquitaine, and was brought by the marriage, in 1 1 52, of Eleanor of Aquitaine to the English King Henry II as part of her dower. What a dower it was ! "A territory containing every variety of soil 28 FRUIT SHOP, BAYONNE. The Gate of the Basque Country and of natural characteristics, from the flat rich pastures of Berri and the vineyards of Poitou and Saint onge to the volcanic rocks and dark chestnut woods of Auvergne, the salt marshes, sandy dunes, barren heaths and gloomy forests of the Gascon coast and the fertile valleys which open between the feet of the Pyrenees." When we realise the welter of races in that territory, Gaul, Roman, Saracen, Gascon, Angevin, and how many others, the preservation of the Basque race and language seems a miracle, due however, as we have seen, to their own inherent qualities. Bayonne found the English rule both just and kind, and resisted the French attacks, though it fell in 1451 to Dunois, who took it in the name of his sovereign, Charles VII. The importance of Bayonne arose in its earliest days from its position at the confluence of the Adour and the Nive. Its port harboured a growing fleet when in the fifteenth century the Adour changed its course and blocked the harbour. That disaster trans- ferred much of the commerce to St. Jean de Luz, which greatly flourished in consequence ; but, for- tunately for Bayonne, the original course of the river was re-established in the sixteenth century and with it the prosperity of the town. One is glad, because one cannot think of Bayonne fallen on evil days. It is so cheerful, with its arcaded Rue du Port Neuf, lined with the gayest of confectioners' shops and fdtisseries, where you may eat marvellous cakes and 29 The Basque Country- drink tea and watch the people pass. Even the Cathedral square is not dingy, but small and bright, and the Cathedral of Ste. Marie has many tales to tell of life from the thirteeiith century down ; of royal visitors and gorgeous thanksgivings — did not Francis I and, later, Isabella of Castille and the little princes return thanks to God in this place ? You may wander happily in the cloister with its beautiful pointed arches ; you may revel in the sixteenth-century glass of St. Jerome's Chapel, partly because it was given by that little Dauphin returning from captivity in Madrid ; you may watch the trickling stream of people, old and young, who come to pray ; and you will pause before the Chapel of Jeanne d'Arc, where the great wreath and the flag of France stand to the dead who gave their lives that this Cathedral and others like it might remain ; and then you may wander softly out and find your own way, past the old curiosity shop, by an arch, on to the green-grassed ramparts, where you may walk under the huge elms, past Spanish- looking houses, by the Rue Tour-de- Sault, down to the Quai des Basques along the Nive. If you cross the bridge you may follow the arcades along the Quai Galuperie to the Musee. It is a great advantage in such a town as Bayonne to have some place of refuge for the possible rainy day — and that you will find in the Musee Bonnat. The building itself is a gift of the painter L6on Bonnat to his native town, and seldom do you have the luck to come upon as interesting a collection of pictures 30 The Gate of the Basque Country as is the small one which it houses. It will prove a resource for many an odd hour, and each time you will get more pleasure from the carefully chosen pictures. In the first room there are a number of delightful pencil portraits by Ingres, full of distinction and charm ; and each school of painting is represented by one or more examples of its masters. The centre of life in Bayonne is the Place de la Liberte, where the town takes the air. It is a cheerful crowd, animated by the exuberance of gesture and vivid expression of the Midi ; soldiers and Spaniards, Basques in beret. Frenchmen, bareheaded girls of the people and neat modish women of the middle classes pass and repass, or sit at the cafe tables under the arcades, waiting perhaps for the opening of the cinema or the play in the big arcaded building which forms one side of the Place. Then suddenly, while you sit there drinking your coffee and listening with mild amusement to the discussion between two smart French cavalry officers of the decoration which has suddenly blossomed on every American breast, the past rises like some sub- merged stratum from your memory and blots out the present. You are back in the year 1565 on this very spot, one of the crowd pressing to the great tournament which Catherine de Medici and her son Charles IX are offering to Elizabeth, wife of Philip II of Spain, who has come here, with the Due d'Albe in her train, to meet her royal mother and brother. Though it is the sixteenth century and we are of the 31 PLACE DE LA LIBERTE, BAYONNE. The Gate of the Basque Country the tram starts for Biarritz, only a twenty minutes' ride away. It will be cooler there and only pleasant ghosts upon the sands, though on the way you pass that convent of the Bernardines where the white nuns of silence tend their gardens, pleasant places of peace where white periwinkles grow. . . . Perhaps one of your most lasting impressions of Bayonne is of a city set in water ways. The Nive and the Adour fold it in, and through the shaded walks of the AUees Maritimes you may follow to where the bar breaks the full rush of the tide from the Bay of Biscay. In the old days, not so long ago, quite within memory, the old walls, planned by Vauban, still stood, their solid masonry rising from the river and crowned at the angles by watch-towers, of which only one remains, overflowing in June with the luxuriant growth of a white rose tree. That little turret guarded the great mediseval town-gate which stood where now the bridge, Pont St. Esprit, springs from the shore. Legend, which grows quickly around a loved figure, already tells a pretty story of King Edward VII, who, they say, made a royal though unsuccessful effort to save the doomed gate. He failed to awake the powers in Bayonne to a sense of their own vandalism. The ancient walls were doomed, and so to-day there remains only a length of the old solid masonry surmounted by the little turret to keep guard above the Adour River rolling out to the Bay of Biscay. F 33 The Basque Country From the bridge the sun sets behind the turret and the Cathedral spires of an evening, and all the town across the river is misty and palely gold, and the glory runs up the sky above the river and is repeated in the flowing tide. 34 CHAPTER IV A MEMORY OF THE SECOND EMPIRE IN the Bayonne library, where all is still with that peculiar sense of desertion which seems to pervade the libraries of most provincial towns, you will find a thin pamphlet, a Souvenir de Biarritz. It bears the imposing title of Monografhie de la Villa Eugenie, and its author is one E. Ardouin, and its imprint, Paris 1869. Its faded green cover lettered in gold recalls those keepsakes and tokens of an earlier date in whose steel-engraved pages ringleted beauties of sloping shoulder met with Moors, Giaours and other Byronic heroes. Biarritz, the little book perfunctorily assures, had a history as early as the tenth century. The writer thereupon dismisses in a paragraph all the centuries of adventure on the wild seas, the riches that poured in here as to St. Jean de Luz, from the hazardous deep- sea fishing, so eager is he to indulge himself in that social history which has, one must admit, established the fame of the little town. With a stroke of his pen he leaps from the tenth century to 1807, to record that the town — which had fallen from its former prosperity with the decHne of the fisheries — was 35 The Basque Country lifted to notice, shall we say ? by the visit of Queen Hortense Eugenie, wife of Louis Napoleon, lately raised to the throne of Holland by Napoleon I. Napoleon himself visited Biarritz on his way to St. Jean de Luz and Hendaye in 1808, at the time of his visit to Bayonne with the Empress Marie Louise for the crowning of Joseph Bonaparte. Biarritz did not, however, wake to life, to the life of the real world, till the Carlist troubles in Spain sent many of the Spanish grandees over the border into France. The very names of the noble exiles breathe a poetry, a romance which was probably far from them, — Due de Montemar, Comte de Altamira, Comtesse de Zaldivar, Comtesse de Toreno, Marquis de Miraflore, and so on and so on, and — the Comtesse de Montijo with her daughter, Amelie de Guzman, Comtesse de Teba, future Empress of the French. The young Countess must have cherished happy memories of her early days in Biarritz, for in 1853 we find her returning there with the Emperor for two months at the Chateau de Grammont. That visit raised Biarritz from a quiet fishing village to a resort of the great world, where kings and princely families, great fortunes, the folly and fashion and flower of that world were to meet. It is pleasant to think of the lovely young Empress revisiting the places she had known as a child : the shell- shaped cove of the Port Vieux, the sheltered Cote des Basques, and the beach which was to be 36 A Memory of the Second Empire known as the Plage de I'Imperatrice. The cliffs, the beach, the gorgeous sunsets, the wild flowers, the golden samphire growing down to the water's edge, the ebbing tide across the sand from the Chambre d'Amour, the watch-tower of L'Attalaye and the Roche Percee, the wood and the little lake of La Negresse, — it must have been just all these which with her memories wove for her the fascination of the little town, so that she lingered on until the Emperor had chosen the site for her villa — the Villa Eugenie — between the lighthouse and the Bains Napoleon decorated " in the Moorish style." The work was started in 1854, and M. Ardouin expands and expatiates with awed admiration upon the fairy palace of two hundred rooms which rose upon the cliff. The cour d'honneur, the vestibule, the salons, the various suites of rooms lose nothing at his hands. You share with him the savour of his enjoyment in every catalogued object of use and art. The hangings of the Empress's bedroom, he tells us, were of " toile perse k raies bleues, dessin petits bouquets de fleurs, roses et camelias." Persian hang- ings with a blue stripe, roses and camelias recall in a sentence the whole period of the Second Empire. If anything were needed further to complete the picture it is given in the description of the furniture of acajou and falissandre, so beautifully the setting for the ladies of the gift-book period. The wardrobe room was lined with oak armoires, and furnished with a large oak table " where the toilettes are pressed and 37 The Basque Country freshened." What billows of tulle, of India muslin, of pineapple gauze, of exquisite finery must that table have known ! We know them too, in Winter- halter's portraits, those billows from which arose the graceful figure with the sloping shoulders and small banded head. M. Ardouin goes on to give us in great detail the account of the guest rooms and the room of the Duchesse d'Albe and the apartments of the ill-starred little Prince Imperial. You may read a full description of every chair and table, every stick of furniture ; but the silly man gives us never a portrait. Let us believe that the little Prince was happy there — that they were all happy as they sat in the circular tent of striped awning on the long terrace facing the sea, in their chairs of " imitation bamboo." There would be the Emperor and the Empress, and as guests General MacMahon perhaps. Prince de la Moskowa, Merimee the poet, Monseigneur de la Villette ; and royalty sometimes, the King of Wurtemburg, King Leopold of Belgium, Princess Anne Murat, and Queen Isabella of Spain with the Prince of the Asturias — there was a dinner of forty covers when they came. Brilliant days those. The villa was now surrounded by a park of eleven acres, where 15,000 trees and shrubs were planted. There was stabling for ten horses, and barns for ten cows and forty sheep and two oxen. There was a vineyard and a garden. In 1864 the Inspecteur General des Monuments Historiques built the chapel (" in the Moorish style "), 38 A Memory of the Second Empire where three chairs and prie-dieu of ebony and gold marked the places of their Majesties. . . . The villa is now the Palace Hotel. In this season of 1919, you may pay twenty francs for dinner and dance with the boys and girls of the American Ex- peditionary Force — if you want to. But to many those rooms are still hung with toile ferse and are filled with the sway of those hoop skirts that billowed there in those far-off days before the debacle. 39 CHAPTER V THE CULT OF THE DEAD WHEN you finally reluctantly . turn your steps from Bayonne to wander farther afield, your first stopping- point will be St. Jean de Luz. Take the train then in the morning as far as Bidart, — your luggage may go on, — walk on to Guethary, two kilometres, for lunch on the terrace, and take the afternoon train to St. Jean, where you will do well to make your headquarters for a time. When you get down at the station of Bidart, take the path down the hill to the little valley where you will pass the small grey Chapelle d'Urovca, whose pilgrimage Sunday in May draws the faithful, who come to the sacred fountain to recite their pious litanies and pass a happy day under the trees. From there the path leads you on pleasantly across the fields, by flowering hedgerows, and finally up and over a steep green round hill, which brings you out close under the white walls of the church. Bidart and its churchyard have a very special charm. May you go there on a day of sun and blue sky, white clouds sailing above, shadows moving across the wide country that stretches away to the 40 The Cult of the Dead mountains. Feathery tamarisks along the grey walls wave their smoky pink plumes, bees hum, swallows dip and dart, and from beneath your feet arises the pungent breath of thyme. This is the Basque ceme- tery, Herri, land of the dead, on a hill, bright with flowers, facing the sun. You see that the wall, spaced by yews and rosemary, closing in the church and the grey tombstones, forms an uneven circle, a symbol of eternity, from ancient times, for the culte des marts in the Basque country leads you back to strange beginnings. The tombs on this quiet hillside are under the protection of the Queen of the Earth, the moon, who sheds her " light of the dead " upon these abodes of peace. As you wend your way between the flower-set graves, fragments that you have read recur to you. Here are the curious discoid stones, whose origin is traced to the round buckler placed by the Assyrians, by the Egyptians, and later by the Greeks and Romans, above the warrior's tomb. Oddly barbaric they look, these rude stone discs mounted upon a pyramidal base which represents the celestial mountain of all ancient mythologies. The date of the discoid stone is placed from the eighth to the seventeenth centuries. One side of the disc, that away from the grave, you will find, bears some conventional design ; that towards the grave has an inscription in Spanish, Latin, French or Basque. On the more ancient stones, the inscription is around the edge of the circle ; the later stones show it in the centre. G 41 The Basque Country In the Bidart churchyard many of the discoid stones bear a large roughly-cut Maltese cross, interest- ing enough as recalling the fact that the Commandery of Malta held jurisdiction here. But in other grave- yards you will find other designs upon these stones which, puzzling you at first, will, as you spell their meaning,* lead you on long roads back through and beyond the Middle Ages, by dead civilisations, Egypt, Assyria, Chaldea, to the rites of our earliest Pagan for- bears. Such a symbol is this zigzag — /\/\/\/\/ the lightning — cut across the stone disc which you will find in the cemetery at Itxassou. Here, too, is the sacred Swastika of India, the totnoye of Japan, and everywhere you find the sun, symbol of regenera- tion, immortality, eternity, in endless combination with the cross. Finding these symbols clustered about some such modest church as this at Bidart on a sunny day, with soft airs stirring the bright flowers, you will expe- rience the strangest thrill, the same half-sad, keen, almost-there feeling that you had sometimes as a child. If only these symbols could speak, what secrets, what marvellous stories they could tell! But, however deeply you are stirred, however long you gaze at the rough red-brown discs in the deep grass, they are silent still. Form and line have a power that we little dream of, but the ancients knew and the moderns are striving to regain that knowledge. Prior to the eighth century an upright tabular stone was used, of which some still remain in Biscaye? 42 The Cult of the Dead carved with the serpent, the tree, the pyramid or other primitive mythical design. The crosses which spring up everywhere amongst the climbing roses on the warm hill date from the seven- teenth century. They are often ornamented with the chalice rayed with light, the seven-branched candlestick, the sun and the moon. Usually the arms are not squared, but are rounded ornately. The crosses of to-day are often made of white wood with the design and inscription in black. The wording in Basque would run as follows : HEMENDA EHORCIA MARTIN HIRIGOYEN HILA, ECAINAREN, 22. 72, URTHE AN. Retracing your way up the hill, you will notice on the wall of the church an interesting tablet which states that Bertrand La Fargue and Simon de Larregui built this church in 1610, and under the wide and roomy porch, which is a feature of all Basque churches, you will find on the floor a slab over the La Fargue tomb with the date 161 8. Near it is a long stone which reads : " Monument de la Maisonde Garaicot," the tomb of the house of Garaicot. Again and again you will find as you go on through the Basque country, on many a stone that legend which marks the resting-place in perpetuity of the dwellers in the earthly house whose name it bears. 43 The Basque Country These stones in the floors of the porches, or often set in the paving of the churchitself,are called Tarleku and upon them the women of the family kneel on black praying rugs saying prayers for the dead. In the tabular stone, the grave and the Tarleku, students see the menhir, the tumulus and the dolmen (altar) of our prehistoric ancestors. It is certain that even to-day votive offerings of bread and wax are made at a funeral — food and light for the departed on his long journey — bread to the poor, wax for candles in the mass. Everywhere in this country you feel yourself touching hands with remote and shadowy figures, half guessed at through the mists of time. That strange round dimple in the stone on the floor of the porch is a symbol which is found in the dolmens of Brittany, on the Pyramids of Egypt, in India, in China, a symbol which has outlasted empires. What does it mean — eternity, time, the sun ? Who knows ? And still the the swallows dip the white clouds on the cliff top, from the village the cross — sym- two thousand bees hum and and dart and float above, and a short walk square, stands bol for a short years. . . . CHAPTER VI ST. JEAN DE LVZ " T CI rhomme faict ce que peut et fortune ce qu'elle JL veut." This old motto carved above the door of the house in the rue St. Jacques, built in 1636, hy Jean de Casabielha, the bailiff of the town, seems prophetic of the fortune of the little town itself. Man has done here what he could, has builded with the riches wrested from the sea great houses, bridges, ports and breakwaters — yet time and fortune have done their will, and the charm of the place lies in its feeling of a past. It is rich in that spirit of place which is felt but not explained. There are villas on the hills and through-trains from Paris, a fine golf-course, an English church and pleasant society ; but these are adjuncts to the real St. Jean de Luz, which settles down on a wide bay with its arms at the points of Socoa and Ste. Barbe ; a bay which is the debouchement of the Nivelle, a river leading back in level sweeps and bends through a wide valley to the encircling mountains. Sea and river and mountain in combination — that is to say, all imaginable beauty of atmospheric effect. St. Jean de Luz owes whatever of history there is in its past to its position, between the towns of Bayonne 45 BRIDGE AT SOCOA. St. Jean de Luz and St. Jean de Luz remained a free town as long as the French monarchy lasted. There is gorgeous reading in the old archives of Bayonne, when you turn to the roll of " nobles, squires, knights and others ' holding ' fief under the King " in Labourd. It tells how the royal herald would ride into the town square and, after sounding his trumpet three times, read in a loud voice, in the presence of the assembled notables and folk, the quota of men called to the King's service. Labourd had to furnish i,ooo men-at-arms. St. Jean de Luz raised a company with a banner. Every lord of every chateau around was on that roll : the Sieur de St. Pee was down for one man-at-arms and one archer, so too the Sieur d'Espelette and the Seigneur d'Urturbie, while men of lesser consequence furnished one man-at-arms or one archer. Thus it was that the men of St. Jean de Luz took part in the Spanish border wars, and assisted at the assault of the Chateau of Irun and the taking of Fontarabia in 1522. In 1526 the Alcazar in Madrid was the grim prison of a King of France. Francis I, that freux chevalier and patron of the arts, after the disaster of Pavia was a captive in the hands of Charles V, who, as we know, demanded the duchy of Burgundy as the price of his freedom. Ill with a grave malady and worn with captivity, Francis I, believing a forced promise to be no promise, feigned to consent to this hard condition. That he might gain the ratification 47 The Basque Country of his parliament, he was given his freedom on two conditions, — first, that his two young sons should be sent into Spain as hostages for his good faith, and, second, that he should marry Eleanor of Austria, sister of Charles V. A betrothal by proxy, considered as sacred as a marriage, took place before Francis I returned to France. He re-entered his kingdom at Hendaye, but as the Emperor had forbidden, in the terms of the agreement, any demonstration on the French shore, the monarch was received by a handful of gentlemen only, and it was not until he entered St. Jean de Luz that he was met by a burst of popular acclamation which drew from him the heartfelt words, " Ah ! I am still King of France ! " We know what followed; how Francis, once back in his kingdom, repudiated his oath, refused to fulfil his promise, leaving his two sons captives and his affianced bride languishing in Spain. Soon, however, a strong coalition formed against Charles V, and in the treaty of Cambrai the Emperor renounced his pretensions to Burgundy, exacting in its place the sum of 2,000,000 ecus, on payment of which Francis I should receive both his sons and his bride. The treaty was signed in 1529, and on January 20 of that year the good folk of St. Jean de Luz beheld the entry of the Vicomte de Turenne with a train of 300 horsemen travelling as emissary from Francis I to Queen Eleanor. Scarcely had this brilliant caval- cade halted in the little Place, when a second entered 48 ■ LOHOBIAGUE, ST. JEAN DE LUZ. St. Jean de Luz from the opposite side. This was Messire Louis de Flandres, Seigneur de Praet, Kiiight of the Golden Fleece, on his .way from Charles V to superintend the counting of the ransom at Bayonne. Francis I had appointed no less a personage than the Connetable Anne de Montmorency to guard his interests in the transfer of what was for those days an enormous sum of money. At Bayonne the two representatives met at the Chateau Vieux and the Seigneur de Praet inspected and weighed and appraised the treasure there amassed : the two mountains of shining ecus, 300,000 in one pile, 600,000 in the other, displayed upon brilliant carpets ; the sixty sacks full of gold pieces of all sorts, nobles- k-la-rose, angelots, ducats, alphonsines, rixdales, florins, philippes; the 100,000 pieces of pure silver; and the jewels, including the famous fleur-de-lis in diamonds containing a piece of the true cross. " Messieurs," said de Montmorency grandilo- quently to the Spaniards, " you see how the King, wishing to carry out the terms of peace, prepares to make payment to the Emperor for the ransom of their Royal Highnesses his children. It is indeed better to employ the treasure in this manner than in making war and causing bloodshed." Meanwhile the young Princes, who had been closely guarded in the fortress of Pedrazza de la Sierra, not only against possible surprise by arms, but against witchcraft, were entrusted to Don Pedro Hernando de Velasco who should escort them to the frontier- The Basque Country- It is an amusing sign of the times that while de Velasco feared that de Montmorency would endeavour to seize the royal children while keeping the ransom, de Montmorency mistrusted that de Velasco would seize the treasure without surrendering the hostages. In order to guard against any such foul play on either side, the most minute precautions were taken, and that he might superintend the preparations more closely de Montmorency took up his abode for three weeks at St. Jean de Luz. Hither came the heavy carts from Bayonne laden with provisions — food and fodder — for 4,000 men and 2,000 horses ; from the sea came boats freighted with fish ; from the hills came the wine of Navarre ; from the country for miles around came the peasant girls laden with milk, eggs, fruit and vegetables. The streets and drinking shops were full of soldiers, and couriers came and went at a gallop with dispatches to and from the Court or carrying messages between the King at Bordeaux and Eleanor on her progress now from Toledo to her royal lover. Turenne, returning from his gallant mission, passed through, and after him came the slow-moving pack trains, hundreds of mules gaily caparisoned, loaded with riches and precious objects, the wardrobes of the Queen and her ladies. Then comes the news that the Queen herself has reached the bank of the Bidassoa. The Connetable de Montmorency, representing the State, and the Cardinal de Tournon, representing the Church, 50 St. Jean de Luz journey the eight miles in pomp, to pay their homage. Finally all is ready for the great exchange which is to take place on June 30 at high tide — eight in the morning — on the riverj midway between Fontarabia and Hendaye. There was not much*rest that last night in St. Jean de Luz. Part of the gorgeous troop of 400 men which had come from Bayonne to escort de Mont- morency was obliged to camp at Guethary, as St. Jean was full. The sixty pack mules, with a strong guard, bearing the treasure in coffers sealed with the royal seals of France and Spain, arrived from Bayonne, and the coffers were lodged in de Montmorency's house under the custody of one Don Alvaro de Fugo and his Spaniards, who slept by the treasure. There were French sentries, however, guarding them, within and without the house. In the evening de Montmorency proclaimed through the town the royal command that, the next day, no one, under pain of death, should cross the bridge of St. Jean de Luz on the road to Spain. An hour after midnight the trumpets sounded for the assembly, and at three o'clock in the morning the head of the cavalcade started for Hendaye. Cavalry led the march, followed by foot-soldiers, then came the mules bearing the ransom, each with a guard of four men. The Connetable de Montmorency was next in the line, dressed in black velvet and gold and magni- 51 The Basque Country ficently mounted, followed by forty picked gentlemen, and 500 men-at-arms closed the procession, lance in rest. When the brilliant cortege arrived at the bank of the river at Hendaye it was seven o'clock and the boats rocked on the rising tide, but there was no sign of life across the waters at Fontarabia. The old Spanish town seemed quite asleep. Misinformed by their spies, the Spaniards refused to come out, fearing treachery, until de Montmorency sent the Spaniards in his company as witnesses to his good faith. Owing to this delay the exchange did not take place till eight at night. A wearisome day of waiting it must have been to the Queen and the little Princes. When the hour finally arrived, the exchange was carried out with scrupulous regard for etiquette. The boats, one containing the treasure, the other the royal children, left the opposite shores at the same instant, met in mid-stream, exchanged their precious cargoes and returned. It was not till then that the Queen's barge put out from the shore, and Eleanor of Austria set her foot on French soil soon after the young Princes. It was now late and the return procession was soon under weigh, the Queen in her litter of cloth of gold, the little Princes — the Dauphin and the Due d'Orleans — on horseback, and the ladies and maids of honour mounted sideways on mules in the Spanish fashion. As the night air ,grew chill the Queen, realising the fatigue of the children, took them with her in the 52 St. Jean de Luz litter. It was already dark, when suddenly from far down the road came the sound of cheering which heralded the approach of 500 young men of St. Jean de Luz bearing torches. They came down the long road, the torches flaming in the night and lighting up the way, surrounded the litter and, turning, bore it on a wave of light onward past the Chateau d'Urturbie, through Ciboure to the bridge over the Nivelle, where they were met by the clergy of the town with cross and holy water singing the Te Deum. On every height flamed welcoming bonfires, the boats in the harbour were ablaze with lights, and from every side rang out the cries : " France, France ! Vive le Roi ! Vive la Reine ! Vive le Dauphin ! " The ladies of St. Jean pressed close, in their great coifs, torch in hand, and in the bright light all the crowd could see the Queen and the Princes. The joy and enthusiasm were redoubled at the sight of the pale dark lady with the kind and charming ex- pression, with the little boys in gala dress beside her. What a night that must have been for the town! The tired travellers supped in comfort and went early to bed, so the chronicles say. But de Mont- morency was busy sending couriers forth to England, to Venice and to the other powers, bearing the glad news of the return of the children and the arrival of the Queen. It was in the afternoon of the next day that the grand cavalcade took the road to Bayonne, and one would think that, however loyal and devoted, the 53 The Basque Country good people of the town must have breathed a sigh of relief at the prospect of a return to a normal existence. And what a clearing-up there must have been ! Henri IV, who made history in Beam, brought prosperity to the Basque country as to all France, but there is no note of his turning the town upside down. Perhaps he came incognito the better to enjoy the games and the dances a la mode basque. Later there was more pomp and circumstance in St. Jean de Luz when both Anne of Austria and Elizabeth of France stopped in the town, as they journeyed, the one to become the wife of Louis XIII, the other to be the consort of Philip II of Spain. Charles IX, the weak and vicious son of an intriguing mother, twice stopped in St. Jean de Luz — once when he came to meet his sister Elizabeth, wife of Philip II of Spain, to escort her to Bayonne. The bridge over the Nivelle, we read, was rebuilt, " so that his suite might pass with ease." We mistrust that the Luzinians paid dearly for the honour of these royal visits. But none of these royal passers-by has left any imprint on the town. To-day it shines only in the reflected glory of that nuptial journey of Louis XIV, le grand monarque. Le roi soleil so dazzled the eyes of the town folk that they were blinded to all lesser lights. It was in the old church of St. Jean Baptiste that Louis XIV was married to the Spanish Infanta, Maria Theresa, in 1660. The town was so impressed by the honour that, when the royal pair had passed 54 St. Jean de Luz out after the ceremony, the church door was built up and remains so blocked to this day. Facing the square you will see the house with a turret at each corner known as Lohobiague — house of Louis XIV — where the King lodged. From the dress of the sculptured figures over the windows, it is supposed to date from Henri III or Henri IV. The Infanta and her father lodged before the marriage in the large, square, renovated house with turrets, called the Joanoenia, which stands on the bar, facing the port. It was built in 1641. Above the door you may read the following modern inscription : L'Infante j'ai refue I'an mil six cent soixante. On m'appelle depuis la maison de I'Infante. Thanks to the hospitality of the present occupant, many have enjoyed the beauty of the old rooms, their fine proportions, their lozenged and painted ceilings, and the great fireplace bearing the arms of the town where, if the day be chill, a wood fire is sure to be burning. Near the Joanoenia on the bar are other houses, all of a certain dignity and importance, which speak of the bygone prosperity of the town : the Maison Betheder ; the Maison St. Martin with a tower in the centre and a wrought-iron balcony, date 1713 ; the Maison Pendelet, built in the reign of Louis XV ; the Dasconaguerreau, where Mazarin lodged in 1659 when he came to prepare the way for his royal master's marriage. The oldest house in the town, however, 55 The Basque Country- is the Esquerenea, in the Rue Montante, which rears its square tower above its neighbours and which probably dates from the end of the reign of Louis XII. Other houses of interest are the Discontennia, built with gold taken from the English by the brave corsair Duconte ; the one known as Sopite, in the street of that name, and a fine house opposite the church. The hospital of the town is in the old Chapelle of the Hostel for the pilgrims of St. Jacques de Campos- telle, which was built in 1623 by Joanis de Hareneder and Gracie de Chiba, his wife. But what facts can give you St. Jean de Luz as does the feeling of an hour ? You must see the town at sunset, its old houses glowing rose and gold, the Nivelle flung like a broad blue ribbon up the valley, La Rhune glorified in its cloudy mantle, the distant mountains fading into purple mystery. You want to see it at that curiously expectant hour before the sun just sets, when for a space it seems lifted into a realm of romance and unreality ; or again, on a day of storm, when the hurricane sweeping in from the Bay of Biscay brings the great mountains of water to smash upon the jetty, sending up towering clouds of spray against the sky, and carries the flood rushing through the narrow entry to the port in large smooth breakers which leap the breakwater and lap the very feet of the houses in Ciboure. Or, best of all, in the old church on the night of Good Friday you may come close to the life of to-day. The gold of reredos and altar is shrouded, the lights are few ; the triple bal- 56 GOOD FRIDAY EVENING, CHURCH OF ST. JEAN BAPTISTE, ST. JEAN DE LUZ. St. Jean de Luz conies of black oak slowly fill with men and boys beret in hand ; below in the nave are the dark sil- houetted figures of kneeling women ; a votive ship sails beneath the vaulted shadow of the roof ; on the shadowed silence falls the voice of the Basque priest recalling once again to his people the old and moving story of the Passion. Then, in the faces above, about you, you may see for a moment that persistent spirit of race which has kept these people separate through the centuries. ra i^T^'% ^ * ^ '.o r V*. ■■■"""' "• *./ ■■■ '- ' _.. ^ cT; c ; ;;- £ 2 _ zt^-^ ' 57 CHAPTER VII ST. JEAN DE LUZ—THE PIRATES' NEST AS you sit under the arcade on the Place Louis XIV, drinking your orangeade pilee, and watching the children playing beneath the plane trees in reach of Spanish-looking mothers who gossip upon the low stone seats, you will find, about five o'clock, that interest is centring about the jetty, across the square. There a crowd is steadily growing, men, women and children strolling up from every quarter, waiting for something. Fisher girls, baskets, handcarts, give you the clue. They are awaiting the return of the fishing boats, as they have awaited them for hundreds of years. As the first boat comes shooting into the basin through the narrow passage from the outer bay, a thrill runs through the crowd. There is but one question : " Est-ce que la p^che est bonne ? " Everyone crowds out on the jetty. The blue boat comes alongside. There is shouting, curses, laughter. There is great excitement, and you realise then that these people of St. Jean de Luz have the sea in their blood, that the life of the town has depended upon the sea for generations. To-day the catch is good. The war which drew the Basques from their nets 58 The Pirates' Nest has left the deep sea in peace, and those who remain, the few who have returned, reap the sea-harvest. The sturdy fisher girls press close, lower the fish baskets to be filled from the silver mass in the hold ; the baskets are raised, seized by brown arms, loaded on the two-wheeled push carts, which clatter off down the square and over the bridge to the curing houses in Ciboure, the little town across the basin. It is not until the last boat has come home that the crowd disperses, still talking of the day's luck. Last to go are the fisher girls with baskets on heads, who will speed away early in the morning to outlying villages and hamlets. Not long ago it was these same hardy women who, starting by daybreak in summer, in their rapid swinging mountain stride, carried their fish twenty or thirty kilometres to market in some little mountain town. There, hot and talkative, but unfatigued, they sold their stock, retailed the news of the war, and returned in the afternoon, thinking nothing of their day's journey. As your eyes travel along the bar and the water front at Ciboure, you may see in the important houses the visible result of the riches gained in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries upon the sea. They will tell you here that it was a Basque who, one hundred years before Columbus, discovered the Western Continent. More than that, there is a legend that it was to a Basque that Christopher Columbus owed the inspiration which led to his own discovery of America. The crew of a Basque fishing ship, so 59 The Basque Country the story goes, was ill with scurvy. The pilot put in to a town in the Indies, where Columbus was living. Columbus received this pilot into his house, and when the man died, took possession of his charts and papers, which gave him the Western route which he eventually followed. Anyway, it is generally believed that the Basques discovered the fishing banks of Newfoundland, and reached the coast of Canada before 1500. From 1520 the records of Bayonne are full of the expeditions to the codfish banks. During the Middle Ages the sailors of St. Jean de Luz and Ciboure took a brave and dashing part in all the sea-fighting. They formed a large part of the crew of the Bayonne squadron which assisted in the crusade of Richard Cceur-de-Lion ; they were present at the siege of Seville, and they helped in the blockade of La Rochelle in 1242. But it was to the blocking of the port of Bayonne, by the sudden change in the course of the Adour River, that St. Jean de Luz owed its highest point of prosperity. The shipbuilders transferred their activi- ties to St. Jean de Luz. The records of those days run like some wild sea-tale. Here you read that St. Jean de Luz armed six strong ships and sailed for the Bay of Motrico, where they entered under cover of darkness and surprised and boarded a caraque laden with merchandise. This they made off with, but the captain of the caraque pursued them with six ships from San Sebastian, overhauled them at the entrance 60 The Pirates' Nest to the bay of St. Je«i de Luz, and recaptured the caraque, after a bloody engagement, in which the captain was killed by a shot from an arquebus. Indeed the Spanish corsairs seem to have had the best of the fighting in the early sixteenth century. They pushed as far as Newfoundland, determined to destroy the French fisheries, and seized many a boat returning laden with codfish. The French reprisals were so severe that the Spanish attempted again and again to destroy the corsairs' nest, and in 1542 and 1558 attacked, burnt and pillaged Ciboure and St. Jean de Luz. It is interesting to read a description of one of these fishing boats, which when attacked could return blow for blow. In 1.552 the Saint Esprit horn St. Jean de Luz went forth to seek adventure under her Captain du Halde. It was a ship of 120 tons, with forty men, each armed with an arquebus. It carried twenty cannon with powder and bullets, twenty-four pikes, thirty-six small arms, seven small boats, one cask of powder, twenty casks of wine, 120 quintaux of biscuits, ten quintaux of pork, two and a half of olive oil, twenty- two barrels of vinegar, 120 pounds of tallow candles, one cask of beans, two casks of other food. From 1535 to 1585 the corsairs of St. Jean de Luz pillaged the shores of Spanish America and swept the seas. In 1625 Louis XIII gave letters patent for the building of four large ships which were constructed in the shipyards of the Nivelle. Their captains bore 61 The Basque Country brave Basque names — Louis de Lohobiague, Jean d'Avetche, Martin de Hirigoyen, Joaquin de Hari- stegary, who were elected by the town and commis- sioned by the King. These boats were launched in 1627, flying at the masthead, beside the white standard with the fleur-de-lis, the red and yellow pennant, bearing the town arms, known and respected on the high seas. One of the great filibusters of the sixteenth century was Michel le Basque, whose adventures form the subject of many a song and story. To give a little idea of the extent to which these sea marauders carried their enterprises, it is sufficient to say that, in the year 1690, over forty laden merchant ships were captured and brought in to St. Jean de Luz. In 1692, 125 ships were captured, and de Grammont, writing to Louis XIV, says that the harbour was so full of prizes " that one may walk from the house where your Majesty lodged across to Ciboure on the decks of captured ships." These were the golden days of St. Jean de Luz. The names of captured vessels — Dutch, Spanish, English and Portuguese — show that, no country was immune. The cargoes were sold for enormous sums. In 1 69 1 the St. Francois, under Captain Duconte, in one voyage captured eleven vessels which repre- sented a sum of 113,000 pounds. Louis XIV sent for the bold Basque buccaneer, who was presented at the court of Versailles. Jean de Sopite was another great sea-captain. His ship, the Basquaise, braved 62 The Pirates' Nest the English squadrons which blockaded the French ports, ran the gauntlet and sailed the high seas, where it captured a West India merchantman laden with silks, spices and treasure. Down to the beginning of the nineteenth century the corsairs of St. Jean continued their bold game, and we see the names of American vessels added to the long list of their prey : the Spanish Lady, an American brig laden with flour bound for Jersey, the Polly, carrying cocoa, wax and clocks, the Concep- tion, laden with sugar, rice, cotton, coffee and hides. When we read the details of the cargoes on these captured vessels, we realise the actual wealth that poured in through these illicit methods to the town.. We understand full well the history of those solid houses, built by these redoubtable kings of the sea. We imagine the treasures they contained, the rich Eastern stuffs, the spoils from many a home-bound bark, which went to beautify these nests of the French corsairs. St. Jean de Luz got the bulk of the riches, but Ciboure had its share. A rivalry for long existed between these sister towns. On the island between the bridges leading from St. Jean to Ciboure stands the ancient Convent of the Recollets, which was built in 1 612, and dedicated to Notre Dame de la Paix in the hope of establishing peace between the two shores. The old well within the courtyard was given by Mazarin in 1659. To this day the men of Ciboure make the best sailors in the French Navy. There are families living 63 The Basque Country in those little streets whose men have for generations, for centuries, served the ships. There are several families there, too, whose men are famed as life- savers. Ciboure has a charm all its own. It is more quiet than St. Jean de Luz, and life there has all the intimacy of a village. From Ciboure you should take the walk that leads you along the quay, up the hill above the golden sandy cove, with its view of the whole horseshoe beach of St. Jean beyond, around the rocky point where the tamarisks wave, along the stretch beyond, in sight of the point of Socoa. Turn to your left up the hill, however, and climb to the votive chapel of Notre Dame de la Mer. This year of 1 919 finds the whitewashed walls on either side of the little shrine scribbled in pencil with passionate prayers — " Sauvez la France ! Sauvez mon pere ! Sauvez la garde ! Sauvez mon fiance ! " written in the anguished hours of the past four years. From this height at sunset there is a view transcen- dent in its beauty. The sunset light bathes the range of mountains, the Trois Couronnes is transfigured, and La Rhune, the presiding genius of all this region, looms gloriously, while as far as your eye may follow up the broad valley of the Nivelle, mountain after mountain marches away in dim purple splendour. On the other side stretches the calm bay with a destroyer at anchor where once the no less valiant buccaneer was wont to lie, awaiting the moment to dash forth and dare the English squadron. 64 CONVENT DES RECOLLETS, ST. JEAN DE LUZ. The Pirates' Nest Another delightful walk takes you out of Ciboure along the valley on the road to Urrugne, past the Chateau d'Urturbie on your right. This was the cradle of a warlike race, though the present building, restored in the eighteenth century, has remaining of the original pile only the dungeon and an ivy-covered bit of wall to the north. The family which takes its name from the Chateau shares in the annals of Labourd the title to age and importance with that of St. Pee. From the eleventh century the name appears in all records of the time. Under the English suzerains they were made guardians of Guipuzcoa, and had a castle on the Bidassoa of which no vestige now exists. In 15 14 Louis d'Algate d'Urturbie was echanson to Louis XII and bailli of Labourd. Sons of the family held positions of trust under Louis XIII, Francis I and Henri II, fought against Spain, died before La Rochelle, and grew in importance under Louis XIV and XV. To-day, failing a direct heir, the property has gone out of the family. Yet it preserves an interest to us, standing as it does on the high-road travelled by kings and princes, and being, as it often was, the scene of historic meetings. Beyond the Chateau you cross the little river Helbairen and climb the hill to Urrugne. Its fifteenth- century church is large and gloomy, and the houses lack the brightness and the whole place lacks the clean charm of most of the Basque villages. The motto on the church clock is as sombre as the town K 65 The Basque Country itself : Vulnerant omnes, ultima necat, " All strike, the last kills." On a hill north of the village stands the pilgrimage chapel of Notre Dame de Sogorry. It is worth the climb for the wonderful view of the mountains from La Haya and Juisquibel on the right, the Trois Couronnes before you, around to La Rhune which dominates the country as usual. Wherever you go in this part of the Basque country, La Rhune is above you : you feel it the titular deity of the region, and do not wonder at the legends which made it the abode of witches and evil spirits. There are days when the air is so very clear that you can see every stone and grotto, and an uncanny feeling grips you that it may be the home of unknown, unsuspected forces. Perhaps it is ! AMoB 66 . CHAPTER VIII ST. PEE, SARE, AINHOA, ASCAIN AN interesting round from St. Jean de Luz, by- diligence or motor, is to St. Pee, Sare and Ainhoa, returning by Sare and Ascain. The road from St. Jean follows the bank of the Nivelle, which runs smooth-flowing, wide and swift between field and meadow to the bridge near Ascain, where we stop to let down passengers. Here the road to St. Pee turns to the left and you get a view of the white houses of Ascain up the slopes of La Rhune, while a tumbling mountain stream rushes under a hump-backed stone bridge near us. The road runs on through quiet valley country to St. Pee upon the flat. St. Pee has little remaining in its quiet street to hint of the great days past. Of the Chateau only an angle of the donjon and a mound of grassy earth remain. Yet that square tower marked the stronghold of an ancient race of barons whose name appears as early as 1007. One Brunet de St. Pee was Governor of Bayonne in 1296. The Chateau was built by Jean de St. Pee or Sempe in 1403. In 1450 the male line ended, and the barony passed in the female line to the Baron d'Arhousse, Seigneur 67 The Basque Country de St. Pee et d'Etchecou, who was one of the two hundred gentlemen-in-waiting to Francis I and bailli for Labourd from 15 17 to 1532. Later the family gave a Chevalier of the Order of St. Michael to the court of Charles IX and a succession of baillis for Labourd down to 1659, as well as dignitaries to the state and brave officers to the army down to the present day. Yet actually there is nothing to hold your interest in St. Pee, and you will continue your way by the river bank, passing through the hamlet of Amots and along the valley till you see before you on a hill the beautiful village of Sare. If you are a fisherman you cannot do better than enlist the interest of the husband of Madame at the hotel. He is one of those ne'er-do-wells who know every winding of the stream, every corner of the country. Fish you may not get, since the poachers everywhere exhibit an industry worthy of a better cause, but he will prove an entertaining guide, full of impossible tales of impossible feats. Madame will perhaps find you rooms for the night with a friend in the little street downhill, across the small square. If so you will meet the friendly dog and the roguish Httle daughter, and perhaps be allowed to sit downstairs with them by the wood fire to warm yourself before you go to bed in the clean room above. From the stairs as you go up, you can look into the stable where the cows and the donkey and the cream-coloured oxen stand knee-deep in dried bracken, stamping and breathing hard in the warm darkness. 68 St. Pee, Sare, Ainhoa, Ascain The woman holds a candle over your shoulder that you may the better see. The farm animals always live on the ground floor of a Basque house. They are the friends of the family. You peer into the dark corner, " A mule ? " you ask, knowing how much these are valued. The woman withdraws the candle. " We are not rich," she explains, " we are poor folk. Does Madame know the Basque proverb ? When one is Basque and a good Christian, When one has two mules, He needs no more." She bows smiling as she leaves us at our door. " Some- day we shall have two mules, Madame." In the morning La Rhune looks in at your window, above the opposite roof, and you hurry to dress and to get out into the crystal air. Breakfast is ready for you in the cafe — bowls of cafe au lait and bread and butter. Monsieur is busy with fishing tackle on the terrace outside. Part of the square is filled with the grass-grown felote court, which you already recognise as a central factor of life in these Basque villages. Opposite to the felote court is the square-towered church on the side hill, with the mountain behind. Suddenly while we are breakfasting the church bell begins to toll, there is the drone of distant chanting, and across the window moves a curious mediaeval procession, headed by a man in a short cloak, bare- headed, bearing a cross, followed in Indian file by more men in capes, then by the women mourners 69 The Basque Country in voluminous cloaks, the hood drawn over the head, with a heavy fall of lace hiding the face — these cloaks are handed down from generation to generation — and finally by all the women friends and neighbours in the black mantles always worn by Basque women to mass. The long, slow-moving line of black crosses the square and is lost in the porch of the church. After the burial the man who had led the funeral procession was the first to return to the house, where he stopped at the doorstep, crossed himself and said a prayer before entering to see that all was ready for the funeral feast. He was " the neighbour " {Chen- hango) who plays so great a part in the life of the Basque family. He is nearer than any blood relation. His are all the most solemn duties of friendship. It is he who lifts the tile from the roof of the house that the soul may take its flight. It is he who while the bell of the village church tolls its solemn message, bending above the body of the dead, slowly drops from the lighted candle, blessed by the priest, seven drops of wax in the form of a cross upon the cold breast from which all life has fled. It is he who, when the mortal remains cross for the last time the doorsill of the poor habitation, lights a handful of straw that the blue smoke ascending may symbolise the soul set free, while the white ash that remains is the poor body left. It is he who acts as master of ceremonies at the funeral feast, who makes the collec- tion for masses for the dead ; and finally it is to him, 70 St. P^e, Sare, Ainhoa, Ascain when the guests have left, that the widow turns for help and advice. Eight days after the funeral, there is a second mass at which friends and relations attend and a second " wake." And during the year that follows it is the custom for some member of the family to make a daily pilgrimage to the church, where a mass is said for the deceased. Sare stands on a hill, and the white roads that lead up to it are bordered by plane trees which give grateful shade in the heat of summer. Monsieur, carrying the lunch and fishing-rods, will marshal you in the tiny square, where the few loungers under the arcades will assist with interest at your start. Not one can tell you the meaning of the tablets in the wall of the house above the cafe. SARARI BALHOREAREN ETA LEYAL TASSUNAREN SARIA EMANA LUIS XIV 1623. So runs one, which means : " A recompense given to Sare for fidelity and courage by Louis XIV, 1623," when the town took a brave part in the war against Spain. The other tablet bears this inscription : — ANTONIO ABBADIARI ESKUOL HERRIAREN ORHORT ZAPENA AGARRIHAREN I9. 1897. 71 The Basque Country " To Antoine d'Abbadie, from the Basque Country. In remembrance August 19, 1897." To Antoine Abbadie, a wise scholar and good man, who gave a great part of his life to his own people, who loved them, who encouraged them in the preservation of their old customs and dress and language, and whom they greatly loved and honoured. Once out of Sare, the wily Monsieur leading the way, you may follow up the valley of the Lourgorrieta by an ancient raised stone pavement, which leads you dryshod through muddy lanes. You will wonder at the care that went to the laying of such a way, and, of course. Monsieur can answer none of your questions. Great oaks border the pavement, and you will find . your own reply awaiting you when the stone way turns from the stream up a hill and you see above you the two square, Moorish-looking towers of an ancient house. Monsieur may point sternly stream- ward, but you will climb up and you will come to a stone-arched gateway leading to a miry courtyard. Carved above the entrance is an escutcheon and the words : PIERRE HIRREBARREN ET MARIE DE SANDOURE SIEUR ET DAME DE HARANBOURE, 1685. It may be that this is the first of these inscriptions that you have met with, and you get out your note book and scribble it down, before you cross the court- yard to the ruined house. The house of Haran- boure has fallen on evil days, and, knowing the Basque 72 St. Pee, Sare, Ainhoa, Ascain reverence for the home, your imagination is in full cry after the hidden tragedy, the fate which doomed this place. The poor woman who comes out to meet you speaks a ■ Spanish-Basque which is unintelligible, but she sees your interest and she leads you to the stables, to show you the holy-water stoup which alone tells you that it was once a chapel. Did Marie de Sandoure love the place ? Great oaks and beeches shade the house, and your eye plunges down through noble trees to where the stepping-stones span the stream in the valley below. Behind you, the hill rises to a shoulder of the mountain and the peak of La Rhune towers to the blue sky above. Marie de Sandoure — dead these centuries gone — did he woo you with the very songs that the shepherd on the heights above sings to Marie to-day ? Ma mie a la chevelure blonde, et de bonnes couleurs — la peau des mains blanche comme de I'argent fin. EUe-meme est pleine de charmes plus qu'aucune autre. " J'ai une maison, moi, qui est I'egal d'un chateau ; vous y de- meurerez assise sur un siege d' argent. . . ." Monsieur is halloing from the bridge. He has caught a gudgeon. He is delighted. It is just four inches long. From Sare to Ainhoa is seven kilometresj almost all the way uphill. But it is worth any effort you make to get there. It is such a clean, bright village, L 73 The Basque Country and the houses of the one street have such wonderful freshly whitewashed walls, such gaily painted balconies and shutters, blue, yellow, green, red. The church and the felote court, the two centres of Basque life, are comfortably back to back, the pink walls of the court finding a fine background in the grey church wall. Two small boys are playing. At any moment of the day in any Basque village some one is throwing a ball at a wall. Stone steps lead from the felotei court into the graveyard, where roses and iris grow thick amid the stones and a marechal niel rose hangs its heavy yellow heads of bloom against an ancient tomb. At Ainhoa in 1919 sugar could be bought ! The price, to be sure, was eight francs the kilo, but this was not to be haggled over, considering the sugar famine we had endured and the hazardous way by which the sugar came. It was contraband, so too was the Spanish tobacco which might be had for much money and small questioning. Ainhoa is on the frontier, and all the tales of Basque smugglers that you have read from Ramuntcho down, recur to you when you come face to face with the jaunty Spanish guards who bar the road a few yards out of the village. The Basques have the courage, coolness and agility which are necessary to the successful smuggler. In their code, which is upheld by the Church, smuggling is no sin against religion or morals. The only sin would lie in bribing a frontier guard not in successfully bringing over the frontier without 74 CHURCH WITH PELOTE COURT, AINHOA. St. Pee, Sare, Ainhoa, Ascain duty coffee or wine, tobacco or sugar, paid for in Spain and to be sold in France. If this is true in times of peace, how much more so when war has deprived the people of these necessities of life. You must remember, too, that it is Basque against Basque, not French against Spanish in these mountains. No- where more than here does the tie of race hold good. The Basques on the two sides of that imaginary frontier Hne have the same traditions, customs, language and interests. This explains the facility with which smuggling is carried on over the mountain passes or across the Bidassoa under cover of the darkness. A band of smugglers numbers ten to twelve young men, picked for endurance, fleetness and courage, who follow a chosen guide, single file, with cask or bale on shoulder, for miles over the mountain paths. If, as sometimes happens, the douaniers have been warned and the smugglers are surprised, at the first shot the line melts into the forest to meet at some given rendezvous. The Basque smuggler is a peaceful creature ; he never attacks a douanier, but once attacked gives fight to the death, and it is seldom that he gets the worst of it. In all the little villages of the frontier, smuggling is part of the life and is taken as a matter of course, and many is the story told on winter evenings of the prowess of such well- known smugglers as Gambocha, Hermoso, Joaquin and Arkaitza. As you stroll back from your meeting with the Spanish frontier guards, up the wide street, you will . 75 The Basque Country not fail to notice on a fine house to your left a most interesting inscription which reads : CESTE MAISON APELEE GORRITIA AESTE RACHETEE PAR MARIE DE GORRITI MERE D FEV JEAN DOLHAGARAY DES SOMMES PAR LUI ENVOYES DES INDES. LAQUELLE MAISON NE BE POURRA VANDRE NE ENGAIGER. FAIT EN l'aN 1662. This house called Gorritia was bought by Marie de Gorriti, mother of the late Jean Dolhagaray, with money sent by him from the Indies. This house cannot be sold or mortgaged. Built in the year 1662. Over a barn door as you drive out of the village is a long lintel stone on which you will see not only the cross and the sign of Mary, but the Alpha and Omega and the seventeenth-century date. There is also a beautiful old Basque house on the green facing the felote court — delightful in its creamy walls and pale grey shutters and spacious air. From Sare you should walk back over the height of Uhartia to Ascain. At any hour the wild way and the wide view will delight you, but if it is late afternoon with a descending sun over the sea before you, so much the better, Ascain lies on a slope of the hill and, if sophisticated, is a delightful type of Basque village. At the long, clean, white Hotel de la Rhune, with its trailing wistaria, you may get real tea a V anglais served at a little table on the gravelled terrace under interlaced plane trees. Palms and bamboo and roses give it an exotic touch on a warm spring day which is quite enchanting. The -pelote 76 CHURCH AT ASCAIN. St. P6e, Sare, Ainhoa, Ascain court, as usual, holds one end of the little flace, while the square, squat-towered church, quite orange in the light of the declining sun, presides above. Of all roomy church porches this is the deepest and would hold a whole congregation safely sheltered on a rainy day. Ascain was the manor of one Robert de Sossionde, Bishop of Bayonne in the sixteenth century, and a more pleasant place of retreat cannot be imagined. But what a brave ecclesiastic he, to face the evil' influences of the mountain! For on the slope of La Rhune dwelt the devil — Deburia-^ and there all the witches and lesser devils met to conduct their horrid rites. It was they who caused the thunderstorms, the blight upon the harvest, the murrain on the cattle. Perhaps our bishop built the very chapel on La Rhune where prayers were to be said to combat the evil influences, that chapel which was believed in the sixteenth century to be accursed and the nocturnal rendezvous of all the demons. In 1609 a royal commission was sent down from Paris to investigate the rumours which had reached even the ears of the King. Principally on the evidence of a girl of thirteen, who confessed herself to be a witch, over five hundred people were brought before the tribunal on the charge of sorcery, and hundreds were condemned to death by fire or sword. What did the bishop think of it, we wonder. It may be that he turned his eyes, not to the mountain, but to the sunset. 77 CHAPTER IX HENDATE, FONTARABIA AND THE ILE DES FAISANS IT will be impossible for you to leave St. Jean de Luz without wishing to follow the way of those many royal progresses from the Spanish frontier into France by Fontarabia, the He des Faisans and Hendaye. This is quite easy to accomplish, since the banks of the Bidassoa are but eight miles distant, and a day will give you all the time you need. Hendaye is a little French town which rejoices in a Spanish view : Hendaye will live in your memory as a view. Beyond the grey sluggish Bidassoa rise the rich umber roofs and pale walls of Fontarabia, against the bare brown mountains which sweep from the Cap de Figuier at the sea eastwards around the plain where stands Irun on its height, shining in the sun. Faizquitel is the mountain behind the town, with its pilgrimage chapel of Our Lady of Guadeloupe, whose feast-day — celebrated on the 8th September — commemorates a great victory when Cabrera, Admiral of Castille, fell upon the French forces and drove them up the mountain side. From Hendaye you will take a boat from the water 78 Fontarabia and the He des Faisans gate across to Fontarabia. You land at the little jetty where picturesque fishermen lounge by their boats along the shore. These are the fishermen who belong to that guild which from the Middle Ages down to this day have elected the Alcalde, their " Mayor of the Sea," in the month of July. The election is performed with certain classic rites amidst the bygone splendours of the old town hall. It is something to see if you are lucky enough to be there at that season. A blaze of colour in the old streets, the red and yellow flag of Spain, the red banner of the Guild with its blue escutcheon ; musicians in quaint red caps ; a young and noble-stepping woman in white bearing on her head a coffer containing the papers of the Order ; music, and the procession takes its way to the cottage of the fisherman-mayor where a feast is spread. You will enter this old town of Fontarabia by the great gateway — Puerta de Santa Maria — bearing the arms of the town. The main street, des Cavaliers, rises steeply — a Spanish street of the Middle Ages — narrow, with houses of projecting eaves, finely wrought iron balconies, heavily carved emblazonries above the arched doorways, to end in the steep massive walls of the Church of Our Lady of the Ascension. A wonderful church this, built in the eleventh century, but the interior, thoroughly Spanish with its vulgar coloured altars and gilded saints, is a disappointment. In the delightful old porch of the church which leads into the green shade of plane trees, you will find the 79 The Basque Country- following amusing warning painted upon the wall : Se prehibe jugar a la pelota en este atrio. Bajo la multa de z pesetas. It is to be imagined that there are Basques so keen as willingly to pay two pesetas for the pleasure of playing handball against that enticing wall. Under the plane trees you may walk into the large, deserted-looking square, Plaza de Armas, grass growing between its stones, where the old Castle of Jeanne la FoUe raises its massive facade, dating from the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. Entering the great door you will make your way into a ruined, grass- grown, roofless room, and mount from there the wide stair to the terrace above with its extended view of Hendaye, the Bidassoa, the ocean and the surrounding mountains. This part of the building, bare, empty and imposing, is much older than that facing the square, and was built at the beginning of the tenth century by Sanche le Fort, King of Navarre. Returning by the main street to the town gate, you will find yourself under the plane trees of the prome- nade along the ancient ramparts ; and keeping to the right in a sweep around under the bull- ring, you will find the tram for Irun. It is quite worth taking, because in these days it is an adventure to jingle along in a tram drawn by mules and to receive a little paper picture ticket for your pennies. The . road winds through the marshes which border the river, and then up an incline into the town. 80 A SPANISH BASQUE INN. Fontarabia and the He des Faisans Irun is en fete — why, we do not understand, but that it is a Basque festival we know, for we see here for the first time the flag of the Basque country- unfurled, and realise that we are in the province of Guipuzcoa. The banner flaunts the magic ZasfiakBat, and the shield of the Basque country which bears the quarterings of the seven sister provinces. The story of these quarterings is full of romance. First come the chains of Navarre and Basse-Navarre. In the year 121 2 Sanchele Fort, King of Navarre, went on a crusade with all the princes of Spain and many other Christian knights against Mahomod, grand Miramomelin of Africa. The Christian army num- bered LOO,ooo men on foot and 16,000 horsemen. Mahomod marshalled a force of 300,000 men, besides 28,000 Moors on horseback to guard his chariot which was in the shape of a throne. This magnificent throne was covered by a pavilion of scarlet silk sewn with flowers and birds in rich embroidery, and was surrounded by a palisade and a barrier of iron chains. In the centre of this great host, within this moving fort, the Moorish King advanced, as he believed, in safety. The King of Navarre made a great attack, cut his way through the host, slew 20,000 Moors, broke down the paHsade and made himself master of the throne. The chains in the form of a trellis he adopted as his emblem. The story of the three quarterings in the arms of Guipuzcoa, which have second place on the shield, is as follows : (i) The King of Navarre was a prisoner M 81 The Basque Country of the King of Aragon. His soldiers delivered him, and the people placed his image on their banner to remind their King of what he owed to them. (2) The twelve cannon were taken from the French on December 12, 15 12, hy the Spaniards under Jeanne la FoUe, at the battle of Belate, (3) The trees repre- sent the province of Guipuzcoa bathed by the waves of the sea. Biscaye carries an oak, because the great assembly, the bilzaar, met beneath the tree of Guernica in this province, and bears, as well, the wolves, the arms of de Haro, Seigneur of Biscaye. In the arms of Alava we see the mailed fist of Castille faced with defiance by the lions — the people of the province. It recalls the fact that when the Confradia of Arriaja who possessed the land recognised the King of Castille in the fourteenth century, it was only on condition that he maintained their laws. The lion is strong and ready to resist. The lion in the arms of Labourd was borne on the shields of most of the great families of the province, du Sault d'Hasparren, de Grammont, d'Armagnac, etc. The fleur-de-lis was granted as a royal concession by Charles VII in 145 1, to commemorate the annexa- tion of Labourd to France. The lion rampant, the arms of the Vicomte of Mauleon, was adopted as the arms of the town of Mauleon and of the province of La Soule. Between Irun and Hendaye is a little hamlet on the two sides of the river called Behobia in Spain and 82 Fontarabia and the He des Faisans Behobe in France. Here to-day is the international bridge between Spain and France, built in 1878. But 70U will not cross by the bridge; you will take a boat from the Spanish shore to the He des Faisans, for the sake of the historic associations. There is little to-day to tell of the glories past. The island is low, kept from complete dissolution by piles and stone walls. A modest monument in the middle of a small garden bears an inscription : " In memory of the Conferences of 1659, during which Louis XIV and PhiHp IV by a happy alliance put an end to the long state of war between their two nations. Napoleon III, Emperor of the French, and Isabel, Queen of Spain, restored this island in 1861." Surely this small space of earth, this tiny island in the slow-moving river, is historic ground if ever such there were; and standing there you will remember the momentous decisions which have here been made, and will recall the gorgeous pageantry for which this has been the theatre. How much the eye counted in those far-past days ! What thought, what care for detail, what elaborateness of preparation, what prodigality of spending went to the setting of every royal meeting here. If Louis XI chose to wear a frieze coat, its pockets were lined with gold pieces to bribe the Spanish courtiers of the King of Castille, and the frieze, you may be sure, was as nicely calculated to impress as was the magnificence of many another King. Francis I, with his pointed beard and hawk-like eye and nose 83 The Basque Country passed this way, as we know, leaving here those two . Httle sons as hostages for the faith he never meant to keep. Anne of Austria, Isabella of Valois, Eleanor of Austria, Maria Theresa — how many of them have stood upon this ground, -with, what mounting hopes, what satisfied ambition, what breaking hearts ! The height of splendour, seems to have been reached when one Don Velasquez came from Madrid as quarter- master-general of King Philip's household to lavish his incomparable knowledge of form and colour upon the arrangements for the reception of King Louis XIV and his mother Anne of Austria, of Maria Theresa and her father, Philip IV. The great painter raised here a fairy pavilion, gorgeous vdth gilding, sumptuous with priceless tapestries — beautiful, we may be sure, when it was thronged with the splendid figures of the chief actors, amongst whom Velasquez himself was distinguished. When you have read the descriptions of these great occasions, the pomp, the splendour of equipment, the gorgeous ensemble, you feel that these are indeed but grey days in which we live, when royalty walks amongst us stripped of its great prerogative of illusion. The days of black velvet lined with crimson satin, banded with cloth of gold and embroidered with precious stones, are past ; so too the plumed hat with its jewelled aigrette and the satin doublet and the silken hose. It is only on the He des Faisans that you are removed for a moment from reality and may see it all again. 84 CHAPTER X A LITTLE JOURNEY INTO BEARN : ORTHEZ—PAU Qui n'a vist lo Casteig de Paii Jamoy n'a vist arey de taii. SO in the sixteenth century the Bearnais sang in their pride and so the lovers of Pau would echo to-day. Approaching from Bayonne, however, you will choose to stop at Orthez for the day, going on to Pau by the afternoon train, for Orthez was before Pau the capital of Beam, and has moreover much of the charm remaining from the days when it had a place in the pages of Froissart. The old chroni- cler tells us that he slept at the inn, La Lune, kept by Ernauton Espasgne du Lyon, a squire of Gaston IX, Count of Beam and Foix. As you approach the town on its hill, by the wonderful old fourteenth-century bridge with the tower in the centre, you cannot imagine it as it was in that day when the now crumbling Tour de Moncade rose above a stately castle built by Gaston VI (1232-1290), where Gaston IX held a brilliant court. As we. learn from Froissart, we should have met visitors from every part of the world, hastening here, sure of a generous welcome. " It 85 The Basque Country was here," he says, " I was informed of the greater part of the events which had happened in Spain, Portugal, Navarre, England and Scotland ; for I saw during my residence knights and squires from these nations." Within the vestiges of the walls that once echoed to open-handed hospitality surely you will see, at any midnight hour, the ghost of that old Count enter once again with the flickering lights of his twelve torch-bearers leading the way to the phantom board where knights and squires await him. Orthez breathes of the Middle Ages as Pau of a more modern day, and you even grudge the story of a later date which has given its name to the old bridge — frimestro dous caferas — the window of the priests, in memory of a dark deed of the Calvinists under Montgomery in 1659, who cast the priests from this bridge into the river below. From Orthez to Pau the country grows more lovely with every mile, and every little town you see holds a legacy of interest. Castelis on the hill bears still its name of Roman derivation, above the site of a Roman fort where the peasants' plough turns Roman shards to light. Along the plain are Argagnon, Gouze, Lendresse, Arance, and off to the right on a steep eminence the larger town of -Lagor. To the left again is Lacq, which had its beginning in the tenth century. Always you are following the Gave de Pau, and you recognise with a warming of the heart the picture 86 A Little Journey into Beam which hung — in pale water-colour — in a wide white mount and narrow tarnished gold frame upon the old drawing-room wall. Here are the pale blue shallow river, the golden sand-banks, the fragile poplars, the soft green hills and the snow-capped mountains ; here running along beside us is the very posting-road they followed. Uncle John and Aunt Maria, on their somewhat self-conscious tour with their embossed leather boxes up behind. The approach to Pau is a wonderful moment, to be remembered. The town rises like a series of white cliffs from a wide green sea, and after you have climbed the winding road, surely there are few places in the world with such a view as greets you from the wide, balustraded terrace. It is a marvel which defies description. Beyond the valley of the Gave, beyond the hills, is the great panorama — no other word really expresses it — of the mountains, from the Pic du Midi de Bigorre to the east, by the Mont Aigu, le Neouville, le Pic Long, I'Ardiden, le Mont Perdu, le Marbore, la Vignemale, le Pic de Gabizos, le Pic Bonbat, le Pic de Ger, le Pic de Cezny. Your eyes reach le Pic du Midi d'Ossau, opposite Pau, then le Pic d'Aule, le Pic Buro, and finally, rising from the valley of the Aspe, le Pic d'Anie, the last mountain to the left. To live in Pau is to have that glory always before you in every imaginable atmospheric effect. You share the longing to carry some hint of that glory with you which is the excuse for that pale water- colour on the drawing-room wall. 87 VIEW FROM THE TERRACE AT PAU. A Little Journey into B6arn ie Jurangon. You may stand in that room and look upon the royal cradle, but I am not sure that Henri IV has npt rivals in your interest at the Chateau. The House of Navarre has the quality which fixes attention and commands sympathy. We find that Gaston Phoebus married in 1349 Agnes de Navarre, and there- after often left the great castle at Orthez for Pau, whither Froissart followed him and found this un moult bel chastel. In 141 6 one Jean de Beam, who had fought for the French King, stood by the side of Jeanne d'Arc at the coronation of Charles VII at Rheims. It is to his son, Gaston X, that Pau owes much, for he made the Chateau his home, and built the north and east portions and enclosed the park. But it is the following generations who live for us : Catherine of Navarre and her weak husband Jean d'Albret ; Henri II of Navarre who became by treaty the ally of Francis I of France, the two kings swearing mutually " to be the friend of your friends and the enemy of your enemies." When Charles V demanded passage through Navarre, Henri II proudly refused consent, and as a reward received from Francis I the hand of his sister, that remarkable princess. Mar- guerite de Valois, whom the poets named Marguerite des Marguerites, pearl of pearls, pearl of the Valois. It is their cipher that we see entwined in the arabesques of the great Renaissance staircase : H.R. M.R., Henri Roi, Marguerite Reine. Surrounded here by a crowd of artists, architects, sculptors and designers, the young Queen of Navarre undertook the embellish- N 89. The Basque Country ment of the Chateau, which changed under her trans- forming guidance from a severe Gothic manor to the magnificent Renaissance palace which we see to- day. To her sense of beauty we owe the court and the exquisite proportion and decoration of the series of apartments on the west. Not content with building, Marguerite surrounded the Chateau with the most beautiful gardens which were then to be found in Europe. Here for many years Marguerite held her miniature court. It became known as one of the intellectual centres of Europe. She was the friend of. the Re- formation in France and, herself a writer, was a great patroness of literature. She was a flower of the Renaissance and the Chateau is her monument. The daughter of Marguerite and Henri, Jeanne d'Albret, a woman of great goodness and sense, was the mother of Henri IV. She it is whose name will ever be associated with the cause of the Protestants in France. She was the leader of the Protestant cause for many years, though the unprejudiced reader of history must realise that, while the principles involved may have been the highest, the methods employed for their advancement differed nothing from those used by the Catholic party. So it is that the Chateau of Pau was the scene of treachery. After Montgomery in the name of the Protestant cause had massacred 3,000 Catholics at Orthez, Ferride, the head of the Catholic forces, surrendered with his ten officers. They were taken to Pau, where 90 A Little Journey into Beam they were bidden to a feast in the Chateau at which they were all slain. Henri IV, we must remember, was sent to nurse at Billere, a village not two miles from the Chateau, where he ran wild with the young peasants of his age. He married another Marguerite de Valois, daughter of Catherine de Medici, who certainly did not share the virtues of his grandmother. This brilliant and beautiful and dashing Princess brought gaiety to the Chateau of Pau, where as usual she engaged in those intrigues which have made her name notorious. She soon found the little Huguenot town too dull for her and left le petit Geneve de Pau. Her successor as chatelaine was Catherine, sister of Henri IV, beloved by the people, a wise and charming woman of studious tastes, who attracted many well-known men of the day to her court. When she was to leave for Paris to be married, a crowd besieged the Chateau imploring her not to desert them. She promised them that she would return, but she never saw Pau again, and with her departure the decadence of the Chateau began. 91 CHAPTER XI A UTILE JOURNET INTO BEARN : OLORON—SAUVEIERRE WHY we may legitimately make this journey into Beam from the Basque country needs perhaps a word of explanation. Navarre, a Basque province, became in the fifteenth century an appanage of the House of Beam, whose princes took the title of King of Navarre, and from that time the written history of Beam became the written history of the French Basque country. Beam, like the Basque provinces, was free, maintaining its own fors with a like tenacity. Yet, though sharing so much of a common past, the Bearnais to-day dislike the Basques, while the Basques distrust the Bearnais. The Basques are immovably Catholic, the Bearnais are generally Protestant. But geographically and historically Beam and the Basque country are one. From Pau it is thirty-three kilometres to Oloron. The train passes through Juran^on with its vineyards, where the pleasant white wine is made, crosses the river Neez, then mounts steadily up through wild broken country, spanning ravines, till it reaches the high plateau of Belair. Here, on an evening in 92 A Little Journey into Beam May, there was such an effect of colour as is very seldom seen. The setting sun, by some strange refraction of light, bathed hill and mountain in a quivering brilliant rosy purple. It was an intense colour and clear, as if one looked on tjie whole land- scape through the fabled rose-coloured glasses. The quiet occupants of the railway carriage, including two ancient ladies in faded black and a young soldier home on leave, crowded to the window awed by the quite unearthly beauty of the scene. From that moment events ceased to be real. The journey from Buzy was simply slipping farther into an enchanted land, till it was no surprise to see Oloron rising like some phantom city on its hills, divided by deep rush- ing rivers, twinkling with lights against a primrose sky. The guide-books tell you nothing of the place, dismiss it with a word, but surely it is very wonderful. On the walk up from the station the sense of strangeness grew with every step. There, amidst the continual rush of waters from deep ravines, high bridges finally led us to a quiet hostel in a mediaeval street. Perhaps the full moon was responsible for the wizardry of the late walk. It laid a brilliant pathway up the steep hill between dark ancient houses, fast in stillness, and brought us face to face with a deep-porched doorway in the wall of the church of Ste. Croix. The moon shone full on a white wall at our right, just where the street on the hill-top was wide and the houses tall and filled with mystery. It was all silent, black and white and wonderful ; it was all silent until 93 The Basque Country • there stole upon the air the sound of music which took us down hill on the opposite side, out into a little square where the lower windows of a building were lighted. The music went on — a flute and a guitar — a curious five-time dance tune, which drew us close, till we could see the figures within the lighted room. The elders sat about the wall clapping their hands in rhythmic time to the dance of the young men and maidens, a kind of mazurka. We stole away, and returning up the square once more into the shadow of the church with its curious square, ugly tower, found ourselves looking down over the roofs of houses to where the moon made pools of light in the smooth-flowing river. Turning from the way we had come up, we plunged down a lane", with high walls on the upper hillside, and below, through the trees of the gardens, we saw another swift-flowing river. It was not till the morning light that we discovered how Oloron stands upon three hills at the junction of two rushing mountain streams, the Gave d'Aspe and the Gave d'Oloron : Oloron-Ste. Croix, the ancient town between the Aspe and Oloron, Oloron- Ste. Marie on the west bank of the Aspe, and the new town on the east bank of the Oloron. May chance, that most alluring of guides, lead you from Oloron to Sauveterre. If you are a fisher- man you will find trout to be caught on the way, at the village of Navarrenx. Sauveterre is another surprise, for you will have read but two lines in the 94 A Little Journey into Beam guide-book and so be quite unprepared for the charm of the place — a quiet charm which may well lure you to spend a day or two at the tiny inn. Sauveterre, une ville bonne a devise, A 1' entree d'Espagne assise, as one Guillaume Suiart wrote in the thirteenth century, is on a height above the Gave d'Oloron, which here has broadened into an imposing stream. As it commands the entry to the valley, this town was often in early days the seat of political conferences between the French and English, and later between the French and Spanish. As you approach it over the modern bridge, the town stands above you nearly surrounded by its ancient walls, the great donjon of the castle still towering, as well as the ivy- grown ruin of part of the old turreted bridge. This bridge led, in past days, from the town gate in the ramparts to an island, and a second bridge connected the island with the farther shore ; this gave a double opportunity for defence against an attacking enemy, as a stand could be made on the island and again at the shore. The town was besieged in 1209 and taken by Alphonse de Castille. In 1276 Philippe le Hardi decided to press the claims of his nephew to the throne of Castille. One of his armies under the Count d'Artois marched on Navarre. Philippe, having received the oriflamme from the Abbaye of St. Denis, took the road with the Due de Bourgogne, the 95 The Basque Country Due de Brabant, and a mighty host, and as the old chronicler says : Passet per Gascoyna, per la terra en Gasto, Venue a Sauvaterra on I'endergnon el Gasco. The army lacked food on their long march from Paris, but when they reached Sauveterre their joy was great. " They occupied the gardens, the fields, and the vineyards. There you saw encamped the barons, the foot-soldiers and the archers, and you saw many men in shining armour and many beautiful banners and many nobles, many fine shields and trap- pings, black and coloured. There were so many that a two- denier loaf sold at ten because of the need of every one." The town was the scene of the meeting in 1462 between Louis XI and Jean d'Aragon, when a treaty of peace was signed. In 1523 it was besieged by Philibert de Chalons, Prince of Orange, when the town was so hard pressed that part of the old bridge was sacrificed, the tower of which still stands. The church you will find to be a most interesting combination of Romanesque and Gothic. Before the present tower was built it had a crenellated wall around the roof for men-at-arms, and must have proved an effective fortress, as it stands on an open space close to the ancient walls. From the old parapet you get a magnificent view of the valley stretching away to Mauleon and of the mountains in the distance. The church was begun in the eleventh 96 A Little Journey into Beam century, but was left unfinished, and legend has supplied the story of its final achievement in the thirteenth century. Gaston V, Count of Beam, so the story goes, part history and part legend, in order to counter the ambitious designs of Sanche V, King of Navarre, married Sanche's sister, Sancie. Gaston w^as killed some months after the marriage, leaving Sancie a widow expectant of motherhood. The peace and prosperity of the province depended upon this infant, who would unite the parties of Beam and Navarre. Unfortunately the child was bom dead, and the barons of Beam, in their rage, accused Sancie of herself causing the mischance, and they called upon King Sanche, her brother, to be her judge. He came to Sauveterre for the trial of his sister in 1170, to find 3,000 men assembled who demanded that the Countess Sancie should be tried by the ordeal of fire or water, whichever she preferred. She chose the ordeal by water. The King and the barons then ordained that her feet and her hands should be tied and that she should be thrown from the old bridge into the river. The day came; the King, the barons, priests and people were assembled; the Countess was led through the curious crowd to the bridge, where she was bound hand and foot. The sentence was read by the Bishop, and then, amidst a breathless hush, she was cast over the parapet. As she fell she made a vow in her passionate innocence, " Ste. Marie, save me ! and I will finish the church at Sauveterre." She struck o 97 The Basque Country tKe water in the deepest and swiftest part of the river ; the current caught her, swung her round and landed her safe upon a bank of sand. Thus her innocence was proven and the church at Sauveterre was finished. Above a door at one side of the church is a bit of ancient carving which is unique because the un- lettered craftsman has placed the Omega before the Alpha. This was pointed out to us by the cure, who, himself a Bearnais, takes a great interest in the history of the town. Seated in the clean, bare parlour of the sacristy, he talked with enthusiasm of his loved province. To him the Basques as a people do not exist. He regards them as unlettered folk without history or literature. " You must read the history of Beam to know the history of the Basques," he said. He exalted his church and told us the story of Sancie which we have written. As we went out he pointed to the staircase and would have us notice the stair-rail, which shone, a long, sinuous Hne of polished wood, ending at the newel in a realistic serpent's head. The old servant, who had admitted us charily, stepped from the bright-tiled kitchen with a candle to let us out into the warm, dark night. 98 CHAPTER XII A MARKET DAT IN TARDETS OF the three Basque provinces in France, Basse- Navarre, Labourd and La Soule, the last is the one to which we must look as the stronghold of the ancient customs and traditions. When you say " La Soule," you mean the valley of the Saison (Uhaitz-Handia), the river which rises in the high wild region of Bassa-Buria, under the pass of Ste. Engrace, rushes through the deep gorge of Cacouette, passes the village of Ste. Engrace, which gives its name to the pass above, waters the narrow valley where lie the villages of Licq andEtchebar, Larrau and Lichans, and runs on to Tardets, the town on the first plain, then to Mauleon, the second town, and finally, as we have seen, passes beneath the walls of Sauveterre in Beam, which guards the entrance to the valley. If you take the steam train at Oloron for Tardets, you will find yourself started upon a most amusing journey, for you wander along with the utmost deliberation, making intimate acquaintance with barn- yardvand back-doors, meandering slowly across fields 99 The Basque Country and through lanes, and threading village streets where you could shake hands with the smiling peasants in the cottage windows. As it is market day in Tardets there are crowds of peasants waiting at the stations, and you get deHghtful glimpses of life and manners as well as of the countryside itself. There is good excuse for the slowness of the train, for you are as- cending the valley of the Baretous, and you continue to rise, past the villages of Aramits and Arette and Lanne, the first Basque village, till you reach the crest of the Col de Lapixe. From there you begin a slow and winding descent, enlivened by the informa- tion of a government traveller in wood, who is eager to point out every view, every peak and village. It was he who told us about the chien de Montory, and, as the train wound around the top of a hill, pointed out to us a farm far below and on the other side of the valley. Already peasants were hanging out of the carriage windows watching for one of the pleasures of the weekly journey to market. We were not to be disappointed, for suddenly out from the farm shot a tiny black moving speck which took a mad course towards us, upward and across the opposite side of the valley. Delighted yells of recognition encouraged the moving spot, which soon resolved itself into a small and excited black dog, which came tearing up the hill below us and finally ranged himself alongside the moving train for what was evidently a glorious gallop. Barking and frisking, and positively laughing with intelligence, he kept even with us, only pausing 100 A Market Day in Tardets to catch the offerings of sugar and biscuits which were thrown to him from the carriage windows. He accompanied the train across the valley, where it finally passed close to the door of the farm. There, with one laughing frisk, he left us, and the last we saw of him he stood before the farmhouse door, panting and wagging his tail, as he watched us out of sight. From Montory, the railway follows the Gaslon down the valley to Tardets. However much you may grow in time to dislike the dust and dirt and noise of a market day, there are certain places where one should not miss the market, where the colour and movement add greatly to the picture. This is true of Tardets, where the market is held on a Monday. There the somewhat sad-looking triangular square surrounded by arcaded steep-roofed houses, grey and buff and mauve, was, already filled with baraques, where the usual wares were on sale under cream-white or red awnings. Oranges and lemons from over the passes overfiowed great baskets of Spanish weave. Dates, figs and raisins were heaped on large flat round woven trays. Set out upon a green canvas on the ground was the earthenware, pots and jugs and ecuelles of yellow and brown. Here, too, on the cobbles stood a massed array of brass and copper — cowbells and sheepbells and kettles. Goats' milk cheeses and brown and cream-coloured eggs in large panniers waited for the wholesale produce dealer to come and buy them ; red-faced, prosperous, oily loi The Basque Country young men with an urbane air, who arrive at all the markets in their small motor vans, joke with the women, lunch on the best at the inn, and then roll out of the square with waving hand to the prettiest girl. To-day all the women were buying hats, large, flat-brimmed, conical-crowned shade-hats of fine black or white straw for wear under the hot sun of the high mountain sides. Many more were buying esfadrilles, the rope-soled canvas shoe worn by the peasants everywhere in this country, and which are made with such skill by the village cordonnier. They are delightful footgear for these mountains, so light that you do not feel them, and yet strong and giving a secure hold, on the hill-sides. The little square is crowded. Under the deep arcades, along two sides, the carts are ranged closely, wheel to wheel, while horses and mules stand and stamp, tied to cart-tails, or to rings in the walls under the arcades. Wedged into every corner are the little grey donkeys with their huge panniers — the long-suffering, hardworked, clever little beasts, despised by their masters, who have a contemptuous proverb which says " The ass carries the wine and drinks water." But the little mouse- coloured beast of burden is none the less the peasant's best friend. The poorest can afford one, while mules are for the prosperous, and horses a luxury for the rich. Seeing the work they have to do, you wonder if ever they get a rest. Are the donkeys given a half-holiday in honour of St. Blaise, or does the A Market Day in Tardets Basque farmer, when he goes to the pardon of the patron saint of animals, take only a few hairs to burn from the tail of his more important farm friends — from his cows and his mules and his horses, consider- ing the Uttle ass not worth a mass at fifty centimes ? You wonder. The crowd itself is quiet. There is less gaiety, fewer jests than in Brittany. There is no vendor of songs. Here are men of typical Basque physiognomy. The young men are handsome, brown- eyed, with hair of deepest brown, fine foreheads, long noses, neat, well-shaped heads set on broad, rather square shoulders, with well-rounded throats, compact body on slim muscular legs, small hands and feet — the whole giving an impression of balance and flexibility. The older men, brown-faced with thick grey or white hair, have a crafty look in their sharp, long-nosed faces. All are clean-shaven. It is a good- looking race, which breathes self-reliance, dignity and freedom. Every man in the market carries a staff, the makila, and many carry the double-ended •sack, bussac, handwoven, generally of red and blue, which are heirlooms in the family. Most of them are dressed in short black jacket and velveteen trousers. All, without exception, wear clean white cotton shirts, open at the throat, and some have a scarlet sash folded tightly around their hips. A few wear a short Unen blouse, falHng from a yoke loose to the waist. The women, young and old, are dressed in neat black ; the married women wear a black handker- chief folded about the coil of hair, with the addition 103 The Basque Country of a gold chain and large brooch. The girls wear a lace mantilla. Beyond the square by the street which is also crowded with carts and men drinking outside the wine-shops, you reach the cattle market. Pigs and cows and oxen fill the road which is already trampled to mire. Up the rocky hillside are the sheep and the long-haired mountain goats. The Basque cows, like their masters, are small, quick and fine. They are full of intelligence and many are the tales told of their perspicacity. In summer time, when they go up to the high pastures, many hundreds from the villages of one valley are often in the care of one man. It happens that if the cows of the same village or farm do not like the pasture, they take counsel amongst themselves and, early in the summer's morning, quietly leave the mountain, following their leader sometimes as many as fifty or sixty kilometres down a way that they have only followed once and, when the evening shadows fall, the whole herd comes home. The Basques are very fond of their animals and the cows are each called by name. The dog, however, though respected as the guardian of the house, the keeper of the flock and the family friend, is always called Nagarro. The oxen, which stand yoked in pairs, are of great value. They are magnificent beasts, like the Lombardy oxen — powerful, well- trained, and of the same beautiful cream-fawn colour. Great care is taken of them. 104 A BASQUE INN. A Market Day in Tardets They always wear a heavy linen sheet, striped with dark blue at the sides, and a white sheepskin under the wooden yoke, while a net trimmed with red pompons keeps the flies from their faces. Lunch at the Hotel des Pyrenees, which you enter under the arcade, was made interesting by the keen conversation of a table full of better-class Basque farmers, who talked of the relative merits of their sporting dogs — breed, training and exploits. The trout we had reminded us of the fishing fame of the little river Licq, which runs into the Saison a short way up the valley. In the afternoon the atmosphere of the market, as usual, was one of slight inebriety ; steps were unsteady, gestures vague and tongues fluent. The women kept to themselves in groups, or patronised a Spanish fortune-teller, whose blue-black hair escaped from an orange- coloured handkerchief. Even from the balcony above, it was easy to see by her expression and manner that she was a gipsy born. With the home-returning market folk we followed the road as it winds by the river through the narrow valley between steep hills. The farther we went the thinner grew the line along the main road, as famihes turned aside to follow lanes and steep paths to the farmsteads far up on the mountain sides. The young men on foot swung along with a free, light stride, the coat thrown over the left shoulder, the beret on the side of the head. The poorer women rode sideways on their little donkeys ahead of the p 105 The Basque Country heavily laden panniers, their arms full of parcels and the inevitable umbrella. A Spanish side-saddle with a shelf for the feet, as seen in old pictures, made a comfortable seat for the woman on the back of ambling mules which carried the man astride behind. This, when the cavalier had a pretty girl seated before, was a very convenient arrangement for intimate conver- sation. The rich and elderly farmers, the heret pulled over the forehead to shade the face, were usually mounted on stout little horses, whose bridles and headstalls were of coloured leather ornamented with brass nails, and whose saddle-cloths were of homespun cloth with initials and designs inwoven, or of velvet richly embroidered. Behind the saddle the brightly colotfred bussac hung down on each side the horse's flanks, and a sheepskin protected the rider's legs from the cold and recalled the schaffes of the cowboy on the American plains. At Licq we turned back. The sun, setting in a, glory of rose and gold, flooded the valley in spaces of light, broken by deep purple shadows. The sky above was of turquoise blue, and where the last 'beams of the sun struck between the hills, it touched into transfiguration every leaf and flower of the woodside — the wild box, the spikes of blue monkshood, the white of may, the cream of elder, the snow sprays of wild cherry, the rose of wild apple, the purple jewels of the columbine, and turned ■ the swift-flowing river to aquamarine. Tardets was not free of the exhilaration of the 1 06 A Market Day in Tardets market until late in the night, when the last band of young revellers took their way homewards, breaking the mountain stillness by the wild and startling Irrezina, the Basque war-cry, which has echoed down the centuries. 107 CHAPTER XIII MASCARADES AND PASTORALES IT is in this valley of Tardets, among the peasants of the villages and of the scattered farms of the mountain, that the pastoral plays and mascarades have survived. The pastoral plays of the Basques have nothing to distinguish them from the Breton mystery plays, except that they are still acted in the Basque country while it is many years since one was seen in Brittany. But a comparative list shows many identical subjects, such as Godefroi de Bouillon, The Deliverance of Jeru- salem, Les Quatre Fils d'Aymon, Genevieve de, Brabant, Charlemagne and the Twelve Peers, Robert le Diable, etc. These plays may be divided into Biblical sub- jects, Lives of the Saints, romances of the Middle Ages and farces. The pastorales as they are still acted in La Soule are all that is left of the popular drama of the Middle Ages. In them has survived the memory of the mysteries and moralities acted in convents and churches on fSte days, as well as the chansons de geste, the romances and legends which delighted knights and io8 Mascarades and Pastorales ladies in the halls of feudal castles and the people at the fairs and markets. These dramas were written in French, in Latin and in Spanish, and only reached such unlettered centres as the Basque country and Brittany by the hands of the pedlars of books. Even to-day in Brittany you can buy these little paper books, Lives of the Saints and legends of the country, for a few sous each. These books, however, give the story only in outline, and it takes skill and dramatic instinct to produce from them a play which can be acted. This is what is still done in La Soule, and formerly in the other Basque provinces as well. In every pastorale, whatever its theme, the Basque playwright must introduce in opposition to his heroes Satans, Turks and infidels, who are meant to typify evil in the age-long struggle against good. The Basque pastorales are acted out of doors, and all the parts are taken by men and boys. The stage is usually set against the wall of some house in the central square, its wings formed by trestles covered with sheets decorated with flowers and ribbons. The entrance on the right is for the good people, and that on the left for the bad. Above the entrance for the Satans is a wooden image, called I'idole de Mahomet, which all the wicked must salute, and to which they address their speeches and prayers. Besides the actors, there is a rustic orchestra, which generally sits at an upper window of the house. At each of the four corners of the stage is a guard with a gun 109 The Basque Country whose duty it is to keep the audience quiet and to fire when the hero is killed. The parts are learned during the winter evenings, and this is no light task, as a pastorale often runs to six thousand verses and takes six, eight or ten hours to act. Finally, the day of the performance arrives. The first visit of the actors is to the barber, then to the village dressmaker, who on this occasion, as on that of a wedding, is a most important personage. The dresses are donned : Charlemagne, Abraham or Alexander wear the dress of a gendarme ; Nebudchanor, the Satans and the Turks wear scarlet ; the heroes, queens, princes and good folk wear blue. Sisters and mothers hover about to add the gold chains, brooches and bits of glass which give the last touch to the costumes. Now all is ready for the procession which, headed by the national flag, the band and the local guard, starts on a grand march around the town to call upon the mayor, the cure and any other notables. All the characters are mounted on mules or horses, the " blues," the heroes, the heroines, the queens, the princesses, the bishops and the angels riding first, followed by the "reds," the Satans, the Turks and the EngHsh. The " blues " ride decorously, but the " reds," who are mounted on fiery steeds, cause all possible commotion. Arrived at the square, the blues " dismount and ascend the ladder leading to the stage, but the " reds " attempt first to ride up no