Pioneers: The “Discovery” of the Pyrenees
Where are the scientists when the Pyrenees offer such beautiful objects of meditation? In the name of science, where are they and how have they forgotten them? I find them on the ice of Mont Blanc, on the basalt of Antrim, on the lava of Etna . . . They are everywhere, but I find myself alone here, and on Monte Perdido I have not seen anyone else.
—Louis-Ramond de Carbonnières, 17971
At 9,439 feet (28,777 meters), the Pic du Midi de Bigorre is one of the most visited mountains in the Hautes-Pyrénées, and this is largely due to the cable car that connects the summit to the ski resort of La Mongie about 3,300 feet (1,000 meters) down below. Every summer thousands of tourists ride up to the summit from the commercial complex of La Mongie, and those who can afford to do so can spend a night looking at the stars from the astronomical observatory on the summit. The summit was not always so accessible. In August 1776 an English traveler named Henry Swinburne arrived at the nearby hamlet of Tremes-Aigües in search of a guide to take him on what he believed to be a first ascent. Swinburne came from a wealthy Northumberland landowning family, but he was more interested in European travel than in his estates.
The previous winter he had left his family in Tarbes and crossed the Pyrenees into Spain, a journey that produced the bestselling Travels in Spain: In the Years 1775 and 1776. On returning to his wife and children, he embarked on a 350-mile (563-kilometer) horseback tour of the Pyrenees, which he later described in a supplement to his Spanish travelogue. It was in the course of these explorations that he came to climb the Pic du Midi. Swinburne initially struggled to find a guide, but he eventually hired a local shepherd boy to take him to the summit. About a third of the way up they reached a place where “not a trace of man or his improvements was to be discerned; no tree, no paths, no animals; all dreary, silent, and savage.”2 At this point the young guide refused to go on, saying that no one had ever been any farther. Swinburne continued alone in his “espartilles or packthread shoes,” despite the heat and the absence of any water except what he was able to scoop from the occasional brackish puddle.
Eventually he reached the summit in a state of exhaustion, where he “strove to enjoy, as much as possible, the charms of the most extensive and superb view the imagination can conceive, or the eye admit,” before making his descent. Swinburne’s account of his Pyrenean journeys was one of the first English-language texts to bring the mountains to the attention of the gentleman traveler, and many of his readers would have been surprised by his depiction of the Pyrenees as a “grand style of landscape” where “nature exhibits her boldest features. Here every object is extended upon a vast scale, and the whole assemblage impresses the spectator with awe as well as admiration.”3
This was not how the Pyrenees were generally perceived in the second half of the eighteenth century. When Swinburne undertook his horseback tour, the mountains were rarely visited and little was actually known about them. Their summits had not been climbed or measured, and many had not even been named. More than a century after the signing of the Treaty of the Pyrenees, the mountains had yet to be definitively mapped and the few maps of the Pyrenees that did exist were basic and often left out much more than they included. Contours were generally absent, and cartographical depictions of the Pyrenees consisted mostly of one-dimensional profiles or “horseback rider” perspectives. Beyond their main passes and crossing points, therefore, much of the Pyrenees remained essentially a terra incognita.
Much of this applied to the Alps, too, but the Alps enjoyed a very different reputation in the eyes of the outside world, as a daunting but nevertheless essential destination on the aristocratic Grand Tour, through which travelers endured the discomforts of carriages and sedan chairs in order to gain access to the cultural glories of classical civilization in Italy. The Pyrenees, by contrast, continued to constitute a remote and forbidding periphery on the southern fringes of Europe, a route to an Iberian world that few travelers except the religiously devout were inclined to visit.
In the century that followed Swinburne’s solitary ascent of the Pic du Midi, all this began to change, as a stream of scientists, explorers, climbers, and adventurers made their way to the Pyrenees and presented the outside world with new information about the mountains. It was in this period, in which the Pyrenees were drawn ever-more closely into the orbits of their respective states and the wider world, that they were “discovered” for the first time as an object of scientific scrutiny, as a cultural and historical landscape and a travel destination in their own right. This “discovery” was not simply a consequence of the accumulation of information and scientific facts; it also resulted in an imaginative reinvention of the savage frontier that would make the outside world increasingly familiar with the “grand style of landscape” that Swinburne described.
Scientists and Explorers
The advent of modern science in the Pyrenees was driven by a number of overlapping factors. The intellectual curiosity unleashed by the Enlightenment and the mania for classification and exploration that accompanied it certainly played a part. So, too, did the strategic and military considerations of Spain and France, which sought to map the Pyrenees and exploit their resources in terms of minerals and energy. New scientific disciplines such as geology, paleontology, and prehistory all began to identify the Pyrenees as a landscape worthy of study from the late eighteenth century onward. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, the first study of the Pyrenees “based on modern scientific methods” was not carried out until as late as 1933, and many of the methods and techniques that have since been used by geologists and paleontologists, such as radiocarbon dating, DNA and pollen analysis, and satellite photography, were still in their infancy even then.
As early as 1601 Henry IV commissioned an official named Jean de Malus to carry out an investigation into the mineral wealth in the Pyrenees, which resulted in the publication of La recherche et déscouverte des mines des montagnes Pyrénées (The Search for and Discovery of the Mines of the Pyrenean Mountains). Until the late eighteenth century such efforts were sporadic. In 1779 the Swiss physicist, geologist, and climber Horace Bénédict de Saussure (1746–99) published the first volume of Voyages dans les Alps (Travels in the Alps)—an innovative combination of alpine adventure, scientific study, and travelogue that inspired many writers and adventurers to follow in his footsteps.
In the last decade of the eighteenth century, some of the first important studies of the Pyrenees began to appear in French, many of which were inspired by de Saussure’s work. In 1789, the year of the French Revolution, Louis-François Ramond Elizabeth de Carbonnières published Observations faits dans les Pyrénéees (Observations Made in the Pyrenees), a landmark in Pyrenean literature. That same year Jean Boudon de Saint-Amans published Bouquet des Pyrénées. These studies were followed by Philippe-Isidore Picot de Lapeyrouse’s herbarium Figures de la flore des Pyrénées (1795), a catalogue of Pyrenean plants illustrated with beautifully executed lithographic color prints by a Toulouse architect; Jean-Joseph Dusaulx’s Voyage a Barèges et dans les Hautes Pyrénées (Journey to Barèges and in the High Pyrenees, 1796); and François Pasumot’s Voyages physiques dans les Pyrénées (Physical Journeys in the Pyrenees, 1797).
In El Pireneo (The Pyrenees, 1832) the Aragonese soldier, magistrate, and writer José de Viu y Moreu describes an encounter with a group of French geologists and botanists in Vignemale, during an excursion from his native Torla in Aragon. De Viu was somewhat disconcerted when one of the Frenchmen asked what led his countrymen to “disregard the great trunk of knowledge of the whole peninsular system” when more than twenty French writers had already written about the Pyrenees. His interlocutor attributed this negligence to a lack of patriotic interest in a mountain range that reflected the “honor of the Fatherland,” and he also suggested that Spaniards were not particularly interested in science.
Galvanized by these criticisms, de Viu set out to write his own “homage to the natural history of our Pyrenees” for the benefit of his countrymen, but the fact that it was not published until 2015 to some extent bears out the Frenchman’s observations. Spanish studies of the Pyrenees were not entirely absent in the eighteenth century. Books such as Francisco de Zamora’s Viaje por el alto Aragón (Journey Through Upper Aragon, 1794), José Cornide y Saavedra’s Descripción física, civil y militar de los montes Pirineos (Physical, Civil and Military Description of the Pyrenean Mountains, 1794), and the self-taught Catalan botanist Josep Peix’s 1780 herbarium Plantas usuals illuminidas (Common Illuminated Plants) all testified to the emerging scientific interest in the mountains in Spain.
Nevertheless, such studies were rare in comparison with France’s output. Even in the Spanish Pyrenees, the majority of scientists and explorers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were Frenchmen and foreigners. Between 1750 and 1850, 209 articles on the Aragonese Pyrenees alone were published by French and foreign writers. In the 1820s a team of French military cartographers spent weeks lugging heavy surveying equipment through some of the most inaccessible areas of the Pyrenees to map the range for the Carte de France. The Swiss geologist and glaciologist Jean de Charpentier (1786–1855) spent four years studying the most remote parts of the Pyrenees for the research that resulted in Essai sur la constitution geognostíques des Pyrénées (Essay on the Geognostic Constitution of the Pyrenees, 1823).
In 1829 the Russo-German naturalist Johann Jacob Friedrich Wilhelm Parrot (1791–1841) became the first person to walk the length of the Pyrenees from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean. In 1835 the Scottish traveler James Erskine Murray crossed the range for the first time from the opposite direction, through a combination of walking and riding horses and mules. In the summer of 1835 the Scottish physicist James David Forbes (1809–68), professor of natural philosophy at Edinburgh University, studied mineral streams between the Bréche de Roland and the Port de Benasque to research his paper “On the Temperatures and Geological Relations of Certain Hot Springs, Particularly Those of the Pyrenees” (1836).
Many of the early scientific studies of the Pyrenees were carried out by amateurs and autodidacts. The artist and cartographer Franz Schrader (1844–1924) devoted much of his life to the study of the Pyrenees. The son of freethinking parents who were influenced by the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Schrader never entered school in his native Bordeaux, in keeping with his parents’ Rous-seauian leanings, but he went on to become a gifted painter, draftsman, geographer, and cartographer who spoke five languages and became one of the great figures of nineteenth-century Pyrenean history. Among Schrader’s many contributions to the study of the Pyrenees was the orographe, a device used for measuring elevations and distances. Schrader invented it in 1873 and used it to draw a 1:40,000-scale map of the area around Gavarnie and Mont Perdu / Monte Perdido, which caused a sensation when it was published by the Bordeaux Societé des Sciences et Physiques in 1875. Schrader’s map contained the most detailed cartographical description of any part of the Pyrenees, and it attracted the attention of the Hachette publishing company and the French military engineering corps. Between 1882 and 1900 he produced a series of outstanding maps of the Pyrénées Centrales for Hachette and the French Alpine Club, which earned him the Légion d’Honneur and the presidency of the French Alpine Club from 1900 to 1903.
Local inhabitants of the Pyrenees also studied the mountains that they knew at firsthand. The village of Béost-Bagès in the Vallée d’Ossau has planted a botanical trail containing numerous endemic species in honor of the “shepherd-botanist” Pierrine Gaston-Sacaze (1797–1893), who was born in the village. Gaston-Sacaze worked as a shepherd, but he was also an accomplished ornithologist, geologist, minerologist, and musician, who initially turned to botany while searching for plant remedies to cure sick sheep. To further his botanical interests, Gaston-Sacaze taught himself Latin and identified and classified hundreds of plants according to the system devised by the great Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus, and his findings were published in the bulletin of the Société des Sciences, Lettres et Arts in Pau, in addition to various herbariums, some of which were illustrated with his own drawings.
Alphonse Meillon (1862–1933), a hotel owner from Cauterets, drew up a number of maps of the surrounding mountains, including the first 1:20,000 map of Vignemale, during his holidays, and he was one of the first cartographers to use photography in the course of his work. For Meillon, science also provided an opportunity to express his “profound love and most intense admiration” for the mountains that had first excercised their “force of seduction” during his Cauterets childhood.4 Piérrine Gaston-Sacaze similarly regarded his work as a labor of love and insisted that the study of nature “reduces the taste for frivolous entertainments, it prevents an excess of passion and brings beneficial nourishment to the soul, filling it with the most worthy object of contemplation.”5
Franz Schrader’s beautiful maps, like his paintings, were a tribute to the mountains that he first saw during a visit to Pau as a young man. Schrader often compared cartography to art and he once wrote of “those moments of profound poetry in which one enjoys one or two hours of the full and strong flavour of life” that he experienced in the Aragonese Pyrenees.
Cartography as art: Franz Schrader, Carte du massif de Gavarnie et du mont Perdu, 1914 (Wikimedia Commons).
The Baron in the Mountains
This passionate response to the mountains was as much a part of the “discovery” of the Pyrenees as the accumulation of scientific knowledge about the mountains. The term pyrénéisme was coined in 1897 by the historian, geographer, and publisher Henri Béraldi, in the first volume of his monumental history Cent ans aux Pyrénées (One Hundred Years in the Pyrenees, 1897). For Béraldi, “The picturesque knowledge of the Pyrenees—not to be confused with their scientific knowledge—is now complete. It has taken a century of effort, whose traces in a series of writings form the history of Pyreneism—one says Pyreneism as one says Alpinism.”6
This emphasis on “picturesque knowledge” was very different from the physical mountain challenges and conquests of iconic peaks associated with Alpinism. In an address to the Societé de Géographie in Paris 1902, Béraldi argued that even visitors who confined themselves to Pyrenean valleys and spa towns could be pyrénéistes, since “the pyreneist’s ideal is to know how to climb, write and feel, all wrapped-up in one. If he writes without climbing, he can do nothing. If he climbs without writing, he leaves nothing.” The most influential exponent of this “picturesque knowledge” was the politician, writer, explorer, geologist, and botanist Louis-François Elizabeth Ramond de Carbonnières (1755–1827). Ramond was born in Strasbourg and studied medicine and law at the University of Strasbourg at the same time as Goethe, but he never became a doctor or a lawyer. In 1777 he traveled to the Swiss Alps, where he read the English traveler and future archdeacon of Salisbury William Coxe’s Sketches of the Natural, Civil and Political History of Switzerland.
Ramond translated Coxe’s book into French and accompanied his translation with his own commentary and observations, which often contradicted its author’s. These unsolicited observations did not please Coxe himself, but the book was well received in France. In 1781 Ramond became secretary to Cardinal Louis de Rohan, archbishop of Strasbourg and a confidant of Louis XVI. In 1787 Rohan was exiled from the French court, following his involvement with a crooked scheme involving the occult fraudster Cagliostro and Marie Antoinette.
Ramond accompanied his patron into a temporary exile at the spa town of Barèges. While the disgraced archbishop took the waters, Ramond joyfully roamed the mountains. Whether climbing through ice fields above the Cirque du Gavarnie to measure glaciers, or scrambling up the Cilindro de Malboré to study rock formations, Ramond combined the meticulous research skills and eye for detail of a gifted amateur scientist with a disregard for his own safety that reflected his belief that the naturalist should “leave behind him those mountains which are vulgarly famous . . . to abandon himself in company with the shepherd, the hunter of the izard, and the smuggler, to the dangers of their secret paths.”7
These explorations resulted in the remarkable Observations faites dans les Pyrénées, which combined scientific descriptions of rock formations, glaciers, and flowers with a streak of melancholic romanticism. Jules Michelet once dismissed Ramond as a disillusioned follower of “the dreams of Cagliostro and the worship of Nature” who “took his stand on the threshold of the Revolution, hoping for the deliverance of the human race” and subsequently turned “with the same vehemency toward Nature.”8 This harsh assessment is not entirely inaccurate. Though Ramond initially welcomed the Revolution and was elected to the Legislative Assembly in 1791 as a moderate constitutionalist, in the summer of 1792 his opposition to the Jacobins obliged him to withdraw to Tarbes in order to escape the political turmoil in the capital.
In 1794 he spent ten months under house arrest, and on his release he became professor of natural history at l’école central in Tarbes, a position that allowed him to devote his time to his studies of the Pyrenees. In 1797 he made the first of three attempts to climb Mont Perdu / Monte Perdido, an expedition that resulted in Voyages au Mont-Perdu et dans la partie adjacente des Hautes-Pyrénées (Journeys to Monte Perdu and the Neighboring Parts of the High Pyrenees, 1801). Ramond was a methodical geologist, botanist, and naturalist, and he also compiled an unpublished herbarium with more than 10,000 different plants, 850 of which were Pyrenean species.
His contribution to the Pyrenees was not due simply to his scientific discoveries, however, but also to his romantic and often rapturous epiphanies, such as his description of the Campan Valley as “an apparition by which we may anticipate the future world. It exemplifies that state of calmness and peace, so well announced . . . so capable of foreseeing what may be expected from the perfectibility of the earth. Such will be, hereafter, all the vallies of the Pyrenees and of the Alps, of the Caucasus, of the Atlas and the Andes, when the powers of production shall have attained an equilibrium with those of destruction.”9
Ramond’s writings are filled with similar passages about the mountains that defined his professional and personal life. Ramond never entirely turned his back on what he called “the horizontal plane” and continued to alternate among politics, science, and the Pyrenees throughout his life, but he was always happiest in the mountains, in the company of guides, smugglers, and shepherds. In 1802 he moved back to Paris, where he became a member of the French Academy of Science and married. In 1806 he was appointed by Napoléon as prefect of Puy-de-Dôme and was subsequently made a baron of the empire for his contributions to science. In 1813 the first English translation of Observations faites dans les Pyrénées was published, at a time when “the banners of British soldiers are floating over the Pyrenees,” as its translator put it, to provide information to Wellington’s invading armies.
The following year Ramond’s Paris house was ransacked by Cossacks during the Allied occupation of France, and a number of his unpublished manuscripts were destroyed. His beautifully illustrated herbarium survived and provided him with consolation in his old age. “I find myself now with my herbarium and the memories that accompany it. Outside of this everything else has become superfluous to me,” he said shortly before his death in 1827.10 He was buried in Montmartre, far from the mountains that his expeditions and writings had done so much to bring to the attention of his compatriots and the wider world.
In the summer of 2015 I drove up the Vallée d’Ossau with my wife and daughter toward the 9,461-foot (2,884-meter) Pic du Midi d’Ossau, which Ramond first climbed in 1787. “Here upon the Pic du Midi we are not beyond the sphere of the world,” he wrote. “We are above it and observe it; the dwellings of man are still beneath us; their agitations fresh in the memory, and the expanding heart still trembles with a somewhat of remaining passion.”11 We had not come to climb the summit ourselves, but to do the circuit walk of the mountain that locals call “Jean-Pierre.” Ramond was nevertheless very much on my mind as we left the car at the Lac de Bious-Artigues and walked up through the forest to the Bious pasturelands at the base of the mountain.
The year 2015 was a particularly bad one in the twenty-first-century “horizontal plane,” with the Islamic State running amok in Iraq and Syria and thousands of refugees drowning in the Mediterranean, and it was not difficult to understand how Ramond had once found solace from the tumultuous and often brutal events of his own time. After about forty minutes we crossed the little stream and walked into the Bious pasturelands, and found ourselves in a landscape that was as perfect as anything I had ever seen. All over the meadow, hikers and picnickers were making their way past semiwild Pyrenean ponies cavorting in the grass and herds of long-horned cattle and sheep that seemed indifferent to their presence. Directly in front of us, the forest gave way to the distinctive twin peaks of Jean-Pierre, which reached up toward the sky like a gaping mouth. It was a classic Pyrenean combination of the savage and the pastoral, and it seemed to me then like an image of peace on earth that recalled the first tryptich of Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights.
I felt euphoric and slightly intoxicated by this spectacle, as if the weight of the world had suddenly grown lighter, as the path began to zigzag up steeply through the forest to our left. After about two hours of hard, sweaty climbing we found ourselves walking beneath the great mass of pink and rust-colored rock covered with patches of green lichen that constituted the mighty southern face of Jean-Pierre, and we continued up and around the mountain, scrambling over piles of giant boulders till we reached a high ridge looking toward the Col de Suzon. The walk was supposed to take only about five hours, but it was late afternoon before we reached the col and heard the muted voices of climbers drifting down from the summit that Ramond had once ascended more than two centuries ago.
I had no desire to join them. It was enough to contemplate the mountain from where we were, and as we made our way down marshy glens and valleys, I saw a large flock of sheep whose bells rang out across the mountains, and I felt “that charm, which I have so often known, so often tasted upon the mountains, that vague content, that lightness of body, that agility of limb, and that serenity of mind, which are all so sweet to experience, but so difficult to paint” that Ramond once described so well. I thought of him then, as a Pyrenean variant on Italo Calvino’s allegory The Baron in the Trees—the Enlightenment aristocrat who resolves to live in trees and never touches ground for the rest of his life—and I quietly thanked him for making this unforgettable day possible and for bringing these remarkable mountains to the attention of an outside world that had previously tended to regard them as something to be avoided.
The King of Vignemale
Ramond’s life and writings inspired many people to follow in his footsteps. His most famous disciple was Count Henry Patrick Marie Russell-Killough, Baron of Ulster (1834–1909), the most colorfully exotic pyrénéiste of the nineteenth century.12 Born in Toulouse into a rich Irish-French family, Russell first saw the Pyrenees as a child, during a day trip from Pau, and he spent much of his adult life exploring the mountains, sometimes alone or accompanied by a guide or members of the select band of friends who called themselves “le happy few.” Like Ramond, Russell rarely used ropes, ice axes, or even crampons, crossing glaciers and ice fields in a tweed jacket and waistcoat, boots and gaiters, with his alpenstock and the occasional “microscopic pocket axes” that he and his companions used to cut steps in ice.
He spurned tents and preferred to camp out in his tight-fitting sheepskin sleeping bag. Even the most life-threatening nights spent in snowstorms or torrential rain did not incline him to change his modus operandi. A thin, wiry man with piercing eyes and a goatee, Russell combined this hardiness with a taste for the waltzes, good food, wine, and classical music that he enjoyed in Pau. But like Ramond, his spiritual home was in the Pyrenees. “The worship of mountains has a profound effect on the spirit,” he declared. “They offer a sublime perspective of the material world. What is gas, electric light and fireworks when one has seen the moon rise resplendent, on a beautiful summer night on the austere glaciers of the Maladetta?”13
In his most famous book, Souvenirs d’un montagnard (Souvenirs of a Mountain Man, 1878), Russell looked back on his years spent on “the bare and lonely summits where the pale northern light illuminates . . . in the brilliancy and calm of the eternal dome, in the sanctuary of that Thabor of snow, where circled by space, by frost, and by death, one meditates with as much love as sorrow on the happy hours, on the thrice blessed days, on the tranquil years which will never return.” No summit moved him more than Vignemale (10,820 feet / 3,298 meters), the highest mountain in the French Pyrenees, straddling the French-Spanish border above Gavarnie, for which he developed something of an amour fou.
On September 14, 1861, he made the first of thirty-two ascents of the summit, and his passion for Vignemale went beyond mere contemplation. On August 26, 1880, he and his guides made a seven-hour climb to the summit, which they celebrated with hot punch and Chartreuse. Russell ordered his servants to dig a ditch and bury him in his sheepskin sleeping bag beneath a pile of earth and stones, leaving only his head exposed. For the rest of the night he remained buried on the summit, while his men descended to a more sheltered spot farther down. “There I was alone in the darkness on one of the wildest coldest peaks of the Pyrenees,” he recalled. “Three hundred meters below was an immense ocean of clouds from which rose islands of snow or granite, which seemed to quiver in the subtle light of the moon. There was an unnatural deathly silence. Without being able to see the horizon, it seemed as though I had left the earth.”14
These sensations instilled in Russell a desire to spend even more extended periods on Vignemale. Tents and huts were out of the question, since he regarded them as an indecorous civilized intrusion. Instead he decided to construct an “artificial cave” close to the summit, and he promptly obtained a lifelong lease of Vignemale from the commune of Cauterets for the purpose. In 1881, Russell’s workmen blasted and dug out a cave above the Ossoue glacier, which he equipped with wine, champagne, food, and even a carpet that his long-suffering servants brought up from Pau.
The king of Vignemale overseeing the construction of a new cave. Russell is in the foreground on the right. (Eugène Trutat, ca. 1882–1884; Bibliothèque de Toulouse, Wikimedia Commons)
Like his earlier “burial,” Russell’s caves were not simply an expression of aristocratic eccentricity; they were places of worship, where he and his friends could pay homage to a mountain landscape that Russell regarded as an expression of the sacred and the anteroom to the next world. On August 12, 1884, he invited two priests and a group of friends to celebrate mass in front of one of his caves at sunrise, a ceremony that he described as “more moving and eloquent than all the pomp of a basilica. Paris or Rome had never seen anything like it. One seemed closer to heaven than under the most splendid vaults of the world.”15 Russell had seven caves built, including one specifically for women, culminating in the grotto he called Le Paradis, which was built just below the summit in 1893. Visitors often came to “Paradise” in search of “the King of Vignemale” and “le Robinson des Pyrénées.” In 1892 Russell’s great friend Baron Bertrand de Lassus spent five nights sheltering with him from a gale in one of the lower caves. When the wind finally subsided just after midnight, Lassus suddenly announced that he wished to climb to the summit. Russell naturally approved of this suggestion, and Lassus later described how he and his porters and guides set out across the “gigantic chaos of ice, ancient as the world” and circumnavigated “a vast labyrinth of unfathomable abysses” before reaching Le Paradis in the early hours of the morning.16
Shortly before dawn Lassus made himself some more punch and went up to the summit with a blanket wrapped around him and immersed himself a “solitude, touched by the universal meditation of nature” as the sun came up. Finally he descended to the grottoes, where Russell greeted him with a “real banquet” and the two friends “solemnly promised, if it pleased Providence, to meet again the following year at the Paradise.” By this time Russell’s years of climbing were drawing to a close. In 1904, he reached the Bellevue caves for the last time at the age of seventy, and retired to his family home in Biarritz, where he took to signing Christmas cards with names like Le Solitaire du Vignemale and the Dreamer of Vignemale, before his death in 1910, far from the cave where he had once contemplated paradise.
Both Russell’s writings and his romantic temperament place him firmly within the tradition of “picturesque knowledge” defined by Béraldi and have fimly enshrined him as the most influential of the “pioneers” who defined pyrénéisme in the second half of the nineteenth century, many of whom, such as Schrader and Béraldi himself, were members of his circle. Not all of them were cut from the same cloth. The Englishman Charles Packe (1826–96) was a friend of Russell’s and a cofounder of the Société Ramond, which was established at Gavarnie in 1865 to promote the study of the Pyrenees. Educated at Eton and Oxford, Packe was another of the upper-class travelers who dominated nineteenth-century pyrénéisme and whose inherited wealth enabled him to dedicate his life to his love of the outdoors. Packe made numerous expeditions into the Pyrenees, sometimes accompanied by his two Pyrenean mountain dogs, and sometimes by Russell. He shared Russell’s spartan toughness, describing a typical walking schedule in which he would “rise at daybreak after night on the hard ground, take a cup of tea and a nibble of bread, and thereupon walk for five, six or seven hours before breakfast; after that there was no more eating till we made our bivouac a little before sunset, and no rest, except perhaps an hour’s siesta in the hottest part of the day.”17
In other respects he was a very different character. In 1865 he and Russell spent the summer together in the Maladeta. “Whilst I indulged in eccentric, solitary ascents of untrodden and snowy peaks . . . Packe did more useful things,” Russell wrote. “He mapped those peaks, he measured and named them, botanized in their valleys, and read their history in their rocks and fossils.”18 In 1867 Packe published A Guide to the Pyrenees: Especially Intended for the Use of Mountaineers, the first English-language guide to the Pyrenees. Packe’s matter-of-fact prose avoided the rapturous passages to which Ramond and Russell were prone, on the not unreasonable grounds that “in the face of Nature itself, which speaks to its admirers in a language so far more eloquent than pen or pencil, description is worse than useless.”19
Instead his guidebook contained detailed nuts-and-bolts information on train times, walking routes, distances, and timings, which he hoped would attract his countrymen to visit the mountains. In it Packe expressed his exasperation at the lack of such visitors and complained that “so many Englishmen and Englishwomen cross the Channel every summer for the sake of a holiday tour of a month or six weeks among the Alps of Switzerland, while so very few in proportion think it is worth their while to pay a visit to the Pyrenees, that magnificent mountain barrier that separates France and Spain.” This, Packe declared, was a “matter of astonishment” to him, because even though the Pyrenees were “inferior, indeed, to the Alps in height and expanse of barren glacier, they were “far more picturesque in form as well as colour.”20
Such language was firmly within the pyrénéiste tradition. This emphasis on the picturesque did not mean that pyrénéisme was an exclusively aesthetic or cultural pursuit. One of Packe’s clients was the British scientist and pioneer of eugenics Sir Francis Galton, who later described how he first became “bitten by the mania for mountain climbing” during a series of excursions around Luchon in 1860.21 Galton described Packe as “an authority on the mountains and botany of the locality,” and the pleasure that he took in the fauna, the vagaries of the Pyrenean climate, and the physical resilience required to explore it would certainly have appealed to his guide. Franz Schrader climbed numerous Pyrenean peaks, including a first ascent of Grand Batchimale (10,423 feet / 3,177 meters), on August 11, 1878, which was subsequently named Pic Schrader. Henri Brulle (1854–1936), a French lawyer and another member of Russell’s circle, made more than two hundred ascents in the Pyrenees before World War I. Brulle was a climber more than a walker, who relished his ability to withstand hailstorms, ice, and other difficult winter conditions. On August 7, 1889, he made the first ascent of the Couloir de Gaube, a vertiginous gash in the north face of the Vignemale considered to be one of the most difficult climbs in the Pyrenees, with a team that included one of Russell’s most trusted guides, Célestin Passet.
Brulle’s attitude to mountaineering was summed up by the motto on his ice axe: In utremque paratus (Prepared for either alternative). After the death of his wife and son during World War I, he never returned to the Pyrenees. In 1936 he attempted to climb Mont Blanc at the incredible age of eighty-two; he died as a result of pneumonia contracted while descending in a heavy snowstorm. Other nineteenth-century pyrénéistes came from a similar social background, such as Roger de Monts, (1850–1914) another friend of Russell’s, who took up mountain climbing to escape a broken heart and went on to make numerous historic ascents, such as the north face of Mont Perdu/Monte Perdido, before he finally married the object of his affections in 1896 and abandoned the mountains.22
If the Pyrenees did not have any mountains to match the macabre fascination of the Matterhorn, they were not without risks. In 1824 two mining engineers, Edouard Blavier and Edouard de Bully, attempted to climb the Pic de la Maladeta with their guide, a man called Barreau. While looking for a way around the snow-covered glacier that connected the mountain to the nearby Pico d’Aneto, Barreau sank into a concealed crevasse, shouting, “My God, I’m finished. I’m drowning!” His two companions were unable to come to his assistance and forced to spend the night on the mountain listening to his dying calls for help.
For the most part pyreneism was a male pursuit, but women were not absent. Though Vignemale is most famously associated with Russell, the first touristic ascent of the summit was made in 1837 by an Englishwoman known as Anne Lister (1791–1840). Lister was a Tory landowner and a lesbian, known as “Gentleman Jack” in her native Yorkshire for her masculine appearance, who once declared in her diaries, “I love and only love the fairer sex and thus beloved by them in turn, my heart revolts from any love but theirs.”23 She was also a prolific traveler and mountaineer. On August 7, 1838, she contracted with a local guide named Henri Cazaux to take her to the summit of Vignemale. Lister had already attempted an ascent two days before, but she had been forced to turn back because of bad weather. While waiting for the weather to change she heard that Napoléon Ney, Prince of Moskowa, the son of Napoléon Bonaparte’s legendary marshal, intended to make an ascent on the summit that week, and she decided to make another attempt.
Wearing a cloak and petticoat with her dress taped up around her knees, Lister and her party reached the summit at one o’clock, where they wrote their names in a bottle and left it under a pile of stones. Four days later Moskowa made the same ascent with Cazaux, who neglected to tell his employer that Lister had already reached it, so that Moskowa claimed to have made the first ascent. When Lister found out she was so furious that she refused to pay Cazaux and threatened legal action until he agreed to sign a statement saying that she had reached the summit first. Though Moskowa acknowledged that Cazaux had deceived him, he subsequently wrote an account of the climb for the journal Galigni’s Messenger that contained an account of his climb claiming that he had reached the summit first.
In September the Messenger published a corrective written by Lister herself, which admitted that “an English lady had, four days before, ascended with three guides to the same summit.” Two years later Lister died of fever while traveling in the Caucasus mountains in Georgia. That same year Chambers Edinburgh Journal reported—inaccurately—that the Prince of Moscow and his brother had been the first to make the ascent in 1837, and included the prince’s own account of the journey with a guide named “Cantoux.” It was not until 1968 that a full account of Lister’s ascent, based on her own diaries, was published in the Alpine Journal, which definitively recognized her place in Pyrenean history.
Pathfinders
Such climbs would not have been possible without the mountain guides, like Cazaux, most of whom behaved more honorably than he did. Many of the guides who participated in the “heroic age” of nineteenth-century pyreneism were farmers, shepherds, or smugglers, who initially worked as guides for chamois and izard hunters before turning to mountaineering. In addition to navigation, these guides often carried out the more “proletarian” tasks that climbing entailed, such as carrying food and supplies or cutting steps in ice and snow. Some became professional or semiprofessional and formed guiding dynasties, such as the Passet family from Gavarnie. Henri Passet (1845–1919) accompanied Charles Packe on some of his trips to the Pyrenees, the Alps, and the Sierra Nevada. His cousin Célestin Passet (1845–1917)—one of Russell’s favorite guides—began guiding hunters and went on to become one of the most famous guides of the nineteenth century. Elegantly dressed even in the mountains, Passet was one of the few Pyrenean guides to have a place named after him, the Punta Célestin Passet in the Vall de Boí in the Catalan Pyrenees.
In most cases, the first ascents that such men facilitated were named after their wealthier clients. By 1900, mountain guiding had become a highly competitive profession in the Pyrenees, and the demand for guides had begun to outstrip availability. In July that year guides from the town of Cauterets organized a race to Vignemale in an attempt to challenge the traditional dominance of the profession by their counterparts in Gavarnie and establish a reputation for themselves that would enable them to attract more clients. On Sunday, July 29, a large crowd of tourists and locals gathered at dawn in the main square to watch dozens of professional and amateur guides from across the Pyrenees walk the 32-mile (52-kilometer) circular route to the Vignemale summit and back again. Some contestants were barefoot, while others wore only espadrilles. As its sponsors had hoped, the race was won by three guides from Cauterets, who completed the route in six hours and seventeen minutes. Whether they succeeded in displacing the guides of Gavarnie is not known, but the race proved so popular that it began an annual competition for the “Vignemale trophy,” which continues to this day.
The Second Wave
The increased popularity of the Pyrenees also meant that the aristocratic and upper-middle-class adventurers who had dominated pyreneism for most of the century no longer had the mountains to themselves. In 1874 the newly formed French Alpine Club built the first of a chain of refuges and shelters in the Pyrenees on a narrow pass overlooking the north face of Mont Perdu/Monte Perdido. In 1902 the Centre Excursionista de Catalunya (Catalan Excursionist Centre) began to publish the first guidebooks to the Catalan Pyrenees. This was followed by the formation of the Federación Española de Deportes de Montaña y Escalada (the Spanish Alpine Club) in 1922, and the Groupe Pyrénéiste de Haute-Montagne (High Mountain Pyreneist Group), dedicated to the more challenging Pyrenean climbs known generically as “difficulty pyreneism,” which was founded in Lourdes on July 11, 1933.
The climbers, hikers, and “excursionists” of the twentieth century tended to come from a humbler social background than their nineteenth-century predecessors. Unlike the nineteenth-century adventurers, they included Spaniards, such as the Aragonese climbers Alberto Rabadá and Ernesto Navarro, two friends and workmates from Zaragoza, who carried out a number of pioneering climbs in the Aragonese Pyrenees before they died attempting to climb the north face of the Eiger in 1963. For the most part, however, the most famous names in twentieth-century pyreneism were Frenchmen. They included the five sons of a French Protestant pastor named Alfred Cadier, who undertook a series of 10,000-foot (3,000-meter) climbs and explorations of the Pico d’Aneto and the Balaïtous from their home village of Osse-en-Aspe in the Aspe Valley. The British diplomat and mountaineer Sir Douglas Busk (1906–90) lived in Osse-en-Aspe in the Vallée d’Aspe while studying French as a student, and some of his first climbs were carried out with locals from the village, including the Cadier brothers themselves, whose achievements had already made them legendary.
Many years later Busk looked back fondly on these improvised expeditions in which he and his friends cycled out into the mountains on the weekends and slept under blankets in improvised bivouacs before heading up onto snow-covered slopes without crampons, ice axes, or the “hated ropes” that these “free-striding hill folk” and “magnificent natural mountaineers” spurned, for “the great Cadier brothers and their relations loved freedom as much as they loved their hills, and in such ‘safe’ country they need and would only rarely submit to the shackles.” Other twentieth-century pyrénéistes also spurned these “shackles.”24 The twin brothers Jean and Pierre Ravier opened up some two hundred routes in the Pyrenees between 1950 and the mid-1970s, using the most rudimentary equipment. The Ravier brothers were born in Paris in 1933 and moved to Bordeaux with their family, where they began to climb the Pyrenees during holidays and on the weekends. By the age of seventeen, they had already climbed the fearsome Couloir de Gaube, and they went on to make numerous iconic Pyrenean ascents. Both brothers were pacifists and conscientious objectors and brought their techniques to bear in a number of political protests. During the Algerian War, Pierre Ravier was imprisoned for six months because of his opposition to the war, and in 1960 the twins climbed Bordeaux Cathedral and draped a banner opposing the war.
The Hollow Pyrenees
The English writer and Pyrenean expert Kev Reynolds has written of the “headlong search for ever-greater difficulties, leading to the exploration of novel routes on little-touched spires and long-forgotten faces” that characterized modern pyreneism, and such explorations were not limited to the surface of the mountains. In 1850 Frédéric Petit, the director of the Toulouse Academy of Science and the recently built Toulouse astronomical observatory, startled his colleagues by informing them that the Pyrenees were hollow. Petit based his conclusions on astronomical calculations made from his observatory, using pendulum oscillations and observations of the stars, which led him to conclude that “the inside of the Pyrenees was almost totally empty.” This proposition was roundly rejected by Alexandre Leymerie, one of Petit’s colleagues at the Toulouse Academy, and a leading exponent of the emerging science of geology.25
Leymerie argued that Petit had failed to take into account certain valleys “which cut the mountains throughout their length” without any obvious cavities that would have revealed hollowness, and that “an experienced geologist can follow . . . all the strata on top of one another around the granite core without the least interruption.” Petit responded by accusing Leymerie of a lack of knowledge of astronomy, and the acrimonious debate spilled out into the local newspapers, until the science faculty ordered both scientists not to publish any more exchanges on the matter.
Posterity has found in Leymerie’s favor, but Petit cannot be blamed entirely for thinking that the Pyrenees were “hollow” in a mountain range where the combination of limestone and running water has produced some of the largest caves in Europe. The giant Mas-d’Azil cave in the Ariège is 164 feet (50 meters) high and nearly 1,640 feet (500 meters) long, and easily incoporates the D119 road that now runs through it. The 29-mile (39-kilometer) Grotte de Lombrives cave system at the eastern edge of the Pyrénées Ariégeoises Natural Regional Park is the largest cave system in Europe and contains galleries that reach as high as 262 feet (80 meters). The caves of the Pyrenees also contain a high concentration of Paleolithic parietal (wall) paintings and portable cave art, whose discovery coincided with the emergence of prehistory as an academic discipline in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
As early as the 1860s a French scholar named Félix Garrigou had begun to explore the caves of the Pyrenees, where he found various cave pictures and carved pebbles. At this time few academic experts were willing to consider the possibility that “cave art” had Stone Age origins, and such findings were usually dismissed as the work of Roman soldiers, Celts, or children. In 1879 the Spanish nobleman Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola discovered a series of animal pictures in the Altamira cave in Cantabria, which he argued shared the same age as the Paleolithic remains he discovered on the cave floor. This thesis was initially dismissed by the academic establishment, most famously by Émile Cartailhac (1845–1921), the doyen of French prehistorians.
In 1902 Sanz de Sautuola was officially vindicated, when Cartailhac visited Altamira and issued a mea culpa. Cartailhac was one of various prehistorians attending the Montauban Congress of the French Association for the Advancement of Sciences that same year who went off to inspect various decorated caves in the Dordogne, in what was effectively the first official recognition that cave art had prehistoric origins. As a result of this breakthrough, Pyrenean caves also became an object of study for palaeontologists, archaeologists, and amateur explorers. The bison paintings in the Marsoulas cave in 1897; the animal pictures of the Mas-d’Azil in 1901; the clay animal sculptures discovered by Count Henri Begouen and his three sons during their explorations of the Tuc d’Audobert cave in 1913; the handprints at the Grottes de Gargas in 1906; the decorated galleries of the Trois-Frères caves at Montesquieu-Avantès, with their 350-odd pictures that included the anthropomorphic figure known as “the Sorcerer”—all these discoveries and explorations established the Pyrenees as a new “page” on which humanity’s prehistoric origins were written.
Such explorations often demanded a similar level of physical commitment to the mountains themselves. Count Begouen and his sons explored the Tuc d’Audobert on an improvised raft, and on one occasion spent twelve hours on a ledge during a flash flood. The French clergyman and archaeologist Abbé Henri Breuil (1877–1961), the “Pope of Prehistory,” explored caves in his cassock, which he was forced to take off when the shafts obliged him to crawl through them. Breuil spent hours using florist’s or rice paper to trace drawings directly from cave walls, while his assistants held out candles or carbide lamps to guide his progress, or while lying on his back on sacks filled with ferns.
One of the most daring French speleologists of the twentieth century was Norbert Casteret (1897–1997), who first became enamored with caves and caving as a consequence of his boyhood reading of Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth. Casteret’s first Pyrenean descent took place as a boy, when he found a pamphlet in his father’s attic describing the discovery of prehistoric animal bones that included hyena skeletons at the Cave of Montsaunès near his home in the Midi-Pyrénées. The next day he headed out to the cave, equipped with only a candle and a box of matches. “Lying on my stomach, candle in hand, eyes searching the gloom, I felt myself a new Argonaut on the brink of an unknown world, trying to pierce the darkness of the past,” he later recalled.26
Casteret’s physical resilience was strengthened by his experiences in the trenches in World War I. His claustrophobic memoir Ten Years Under the Earth (1939) is laced with military references to “forcing” and “assaulting” caves that “resisted” his efforts, such as the cave of Montespan, near Saint-Gaudens, where he made his first historic discovery. In 1923 Casteret entered the cave through a crevice using his standard modus operandi. After stripping naked he descended into the cave with a candle and matches and a rubber hat that he used to keep them dry. After he had waded through shallow water for 150 yards (137 meters), the cave began to dip. Casteret continued till he was up to his neck.
Alone in “the awful silence and loneliness,” Casteret considered the various possibilities of death that awaited him, and then left a burning candle on a ledge before lowering himself into the water, swimming and using his fingertips to guide him, till he finally surfaced and found himself in total darkness. At this point he turned back, but he returned the next day till he found a bison’s tooth, which convinced him that the cave had once been inhabited. The following year he came back to Montespan with his friend the swimmer Henri Godin, and the two men penetrated farther into the cave, until Casteret discovered the large clay statue of a bear with its head missing. “I was moved as I have seldom been moved before or since,” he wrote. “Here I saw, unchanged by the march of aeons, a piece of sculpture which distinguished scientists of all countries have since recognized as the oldest statue in the world.”27
In addition to the statue of the cave bear, Casteret and Godin found statues and engravings of lions, horses, hyenas, bison, and other animals, and human footprints and the claw marks of animals of Magdalenian origin. These sensational discoveries transformed Casteret himself into a national figure and eventually earned him a gold award from the Académie des Sports. Like any pyreneist, Casteret also wrote, combining gripping descriptions of his dangerous adventures with a celebration of the beauty of the subterranean world that he explored and the sense of wonder and exhilaration that he took from his discovery of the prehistoric artifacts beneath the mountains.
The Cradle of Pyreneism
In the summer of 1881, the art critic Henry Blackburn and the artist Gustave Doré visited Gavarnie, where they found Charles Packe staying at the same inn. Packe had spent much of the summer in Gavarnie by himself, and echoed the same complaint in his guidebook that so many of his compatriots still preferred the Alps to the Pyrenees. “There is something about the life of this solitary Englishman among the mountains, that seems to us pathetically interesting,” Blackburn observed, “because notwithstanding all he has done to lay down routes and lead the way through the Pyrenees, he has but few sympathizers and scarcely any followers, even amongst his confrères, the members of the Alpine Club.”28
Within a few years this situation had already begun to change dramatically. By the end of the century so many tourists had begun to arrive in Gavarnie every summer that a new Grand Hotel was built to accomodate them. In 1900 Henri Brulle described how “a tide of progress changed Gavarnie, the tourists, the auberges, even the traditional storm of 20 August forgot to arrive.” Today Packe would have little reason to complain. Gavarnie belongs to a UNESCO World Heritage Site that spans 75,711 acres (30,639 hectares) in Spain and France, and which attracts more than a million visitors every year, who pass through to picnic, take photographs, or explore the mountains on foot or on horseback. Most walkers follow well-trod paths and trails that were once known only to smugglers and shepherds in Ramond’s time, and stay in refuges and shelters that are often booked up for weeks in the summer months. In the mornings these shelters echo to the sound of scraping Velcro and the swishing of Gortex, as bleary-eyed hikers strap on state-of-the-art equipment and follow the routes that were once taken by men wearing tweed coats and carrying alpenstocks.
“Nature’s colosseum.” The Cirque of Gavarnie, ca. 1890–1900 (Library of Congress).
I came to Gavarnie when it was less busy, on a chilly overcast day in early September, in a taxi from Lourdes. At the entrance to the village, we passed a bronze sculpture of Russell seated in a pensive position with his chin resting on one hand, looking up toward Vignemale. On turning the corner we saw the great cirque rising out of the flat valley floor. Even after all the descriptions I had read, and the numerous paintings, drawings, and photographs that I had seen, “the Colosseum of the Pyrenees,” as Victor Hugo once described it,29 is a moving and incredible sight, with its enormous cataract tumbling 4,500 feet (1,380 meters) down the massive bowl-shaped rock with puffs of cloud hovering over it.
The village of Gavarnie is unprepossessing and purely functional, with a permanent population of 150-odd inhabitants, most of whom make their living through the chalet-style hotels, restaurants, and outdoor shops that line the streets selling postcards, walking sticks, and outdoor gear among the more stolid and grander buildings left over from another era. The creamy-white Hôtel des Voyageurs, where Russell, Packe, Brulle, and so many of the nineteenth-century pyrénéistes once stayed, is a burned-out wreck, still awaiting redevelopment after a fire that destroyed the interior of the building in 2000. On the outskirts of the village a little cemetery next to the twelfth-century church contains some of the most celebrated names of nineteenth-century pyreneism, from the great guides Célestin Passet and Francois-Bernat Salles, to twentieth-century climbers such as Dr. Jean Arlaud (1896–1938), mountaineer and president of the French Skiing Federation, who was buried here after his premature death in a climbing accident.
In one corner of the cemetery a mound of rock and earth contains various plaques commemorating “our dear martyrs dead in the mountains” who have died exploring, climbing, or walking in the mountains. Another plaque is dedicated to the pyrénéistes who died during World War I. Walk out up and beyond the village to the right, and the path climbs gently upward toward a little plateau overlooking the cirque, known as the Turon de la Courade. Here a flat tomb just out of the nearby rock face bears two plaques, for Louis and Margalide Le Bondidier, (1878–1945, 1880–1960) two of the great figures of twentieth-century pyreneism. In 1921, the Bondidiers persuaded the local authorities in nearby Lourdes to establish the first museum dedicated exclusively to the Pyrenees. Acting on the principle that “nothing Pyrenean must be foreign to us,” the Le Bondidiers became curators of the Pyrenean Museum at Lourdes castle, which now contains the most comprehensive collection of books and documents relating to the history, culture, folklore, and ethnography of the Pyrenees in the world. For the Le Bondidiers, like Franz Schrader’s maps and paintings, this initiative was an homage and a labor of love. Their tomb is inscribed with an observation that Schrader once made; it serves as an epitaph for Ramond, Russell, and the pyrénéistes who first brought the mountains to the attention of the outside world, and for those who followed them:
When the mountain has captured your heart
Everything comes from her and everything returns to her.