[Gutenberg 44429] • A Tour Through the Pyrenees

A Tour Through The Pyrenees by Hippolyte Taine

This, my dear Marcelin, is a trip to the Pyrenees; I have been there, and that is a praiseworthy circumstance; many writers, including some of the longest-winded, have described these scenes without leaving home.

And yet I have serious shortcomings to confess, and am deeply humbled thereat. I have not been the first to scale any inaccessible mountain; I have broken neither leg nor arm; I have not been eaten by the bears; I have neither saved any English heiress from being swept away by the Gave, nor yet have I married one; I have not been present at a single duel; my experiences include no tragic encounter with brigands or smugglers. I have walked much, and talked a little, and now I recount the pleasures of my eyes and ears. What sort of a man can he be who comes home from a long absence bringing all his limbs with him, is not the least in the world a hero, and yet does not blush to confess it? In this book I have talked as if with thee. There is a Marcelin whom the public knows, a shrewd critic, a caustic wit, the lover and delineator of every worldly elegance; there is another Marcelin, known to but three or four, a learned and thoughtful man. If there are any good ideas in this work, half of them belong to him; to him, then, I restore them.