They want me to sing Ebben’, per mia memoria this evening. . . . I did not come to Cauterets to go to parties and find Paris in this countryside full of antelopes and eagles. No, I am going off to see the snows, waterfalls, and bears, God willing.
—George Sand1
By the end of the nineteenth century, the Pyrenees were very different from the isolated and inaccessible mountains that Henry Swinburne had visited more than a century before. When Swinburne entered Spain through Le Perthus Pass in the company of a traveling circus in 1775, he commented on the recently built road on the French side, which “reflects great honour on the engineer who planned it. It is now very wide, the rocks are blasted, and spread out, and bridges are laid over the hollows, which formerly were most dangerous precipices.”2 At that time such roads were rare in France, and even rarer in Spain. In 1759 Antoine Mégret d’Etigny (1719–67), intendant of Gascony, Béarn, and Navarre, instigated a major road-building program using the corvée forced-labor system in and around the historic spa town of Bagnères-de-Luchon. In addition to a new road through the Vallée d’Aspe along the pilgrimage route to the Somport Pass, d’Etigny also commissioned a series of public works to make Bagnères-de-Luchon more accessible and attractive to outsiders, and he astutely invited members of the French court to see what he had achieved, thereby attracting a stream of eminent visitors, whose visits would subsequently transform Luchon into the “Queen of the Pyrenees.”
These efforts were later expanded by Napoléon III. After an 1859 visit to nearby Luz-Saint-Sauveur, the emperor commissioned a vast public works program that eventually resulted in the construction of a new carriage road connecting the spa towns of the Pyrenees, and an extension of the railway network from Lourdes to Pierrefitte.
With the opening of the “Route Thermale” in 1864, the Pyrenees were now directly connected by road and railway to Paris and other European capitals. In Spain, once again, the communications infrastructure connecting the Pyrenees to the rest of the country lagged behind that of France. In the late 1860s the border town of Puigcerdà became a popular summer resort for the Barcelona elite. Yet until 1914 most Spanish visitors were obliged to reach the town from France, via bus or rail from Perpignan or from the “Little Yellow Train” that connected Puigcerdà to Villefranche-de-Conflent that was built in 1903.
The new proximity of the Pyrenees to the wider world was reflected in other ways. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the first large reservoirs on both sides of the range brought hydroelectrical power to major Spanish and French cities and to the Pyrenees themselves. In 1896 Cauterets was equipped with electric lighting. Four years later an electric tramline was built to connect the town to Pierrefitte and Luz-Saint-Sauveur and transport the visitors who were now converging on Cauterets and other spa towns each summer. These infrastructural developments inevitably attracted visitors. As early as the end of the Napoleonic Wars, some of Wellington’s officers were so impressed by the hunting and mild winter climate in Béarn that they settled there with their wives and families. Within a few decades a permanent English colony of affluent expatriates had established itself in Pau that increased to some four thousand in the winter, with a year-round sporting calendar that included cricket, card parties, polo, golf, Anglican churches, and a tri-weekly fox hunt.
Pau also attracted a smaller colony of rich Americans, such as James Gordon Bennett Jr., the proprietor of the New York Herald and sponsor of Henry Morton Stanley’s expedition in search of David Livingstone, and Abraham Lincoln’s widow, Mary Todd Lincoln, who spent four years there for health reasons from 1876 to 1880. In 1878, as part of a European tour, Ulysses Grant passed through Pau, where the British and American expatriate community held a lavish banquet in the former president’s honour. Other English “colonies” sprung up in Pyrenean towns such as Vernet-les-Bains and Bagnères-de-Bigorre. In the last decades of the century Cauterets was receiving an average of twenty thousand visitors a year. On the one hand these visitors were a consequence of the “discovery” of the Pyrenees. At the same time they also contributed to the imaginative reinvention of the Pyrenean landscape through their travel writings, letters, paintings, and photographs, thus bringing the mountains even closer to the consciousness of the modern world—even as that world penetrated deeper into the Pyrenees themselves.
The route to la vie des eaux: The Pont Napoléon at Luz Saint-Sauveur, one of the great feats of nineteenth-century Pyrenean engineering, ca. 1890–1906 (Library of Congress).
Pyrenean Sublime
The “discovery” of the Pyrenees was also a consequence of a wider aesthetic and cultural discovery of mountain landscapes that took place from the late eighteenth century onward. In 1276 King Pedro III of Aragon (1239–85) made the first recorded ascent of Mount Canigou (9,134 feet / 2,784 meters) in the present-day Pyrénées-Orientales. According to the Italian monk and chronicler Salimbene di Adamo, who visited Aragon in this period, the king set out on horseback accompanied by two well-armed knights before continuing the ascent on foot. The party had not gone far when a thunderstorm broke, which so alarmed the king and his attendants that they “fell to the ground and became as dead men for the fear and anguish that was come upon them.” Even when the storm had abated the two knights were too terrified to continue, and the intrepid king went on alone. On approaching the summit, Pedro passed a lake and threw a stone into it, whereupon “a monstrous dragon of loathly aspect issued therefrom, hovering round in the air until the face of heaven was darkened with the vapour of his breath.”3
Pedro survived this encounter, and his successful ascent no doubt added to his kingly luster, but the terror of his knights was a more accurate indication of the prevailing attitudes toward mountains in the Middle Ages than his precocious desire to climb an unconquered summit. For most medieval Europeans, mountains were loci horridi—fearful places, to be avoided whenever possible, whose summits were inhabited by dragons, devils, or witches.4 Seventeenth-century English travelers in the Alps were horrified by the “high and hideous” mountains that they regarded as the “rubbish of the earth.” Such attitudes were not as universal as some writers have suggested. In 55 BCE, the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius celebrated the pleasures of walking in mountains and included mountains among the landscapes that enable the goddess Venus to “strike love into the hearts of all.”5
In 1336, the poet Petrarch and his younger brother climbed Mont Ventoux in Provence “to see what so great a height had to offer.”6 In a letter to a friend in 1541, the Swiss botanist and humanist Conrad Gesner wrote of his “admiration of mountains” and declared his determination “as long as God grants me life to climb every year several mountains, or at least one, in the flower-seasons, partly for the sake of botanical studies, partly for honest bodily exercise, and for my own satisfaction.”7 In 1693 John Dennis described a journey across the Alps in which “we walk’d upon the very brink, in a literal sense, of Destruction; one Stumble, and both Life and Carcass had been at once destroy’d.” Yet Dennis also found, “The sense of all this produc’d different emotions in me, viz., a delightful Horrour, a terrible Joy, and at the same time, that I was infinitely pleased, I trembled.”8 From the late eighteenth century onward, mountains were increasingly seen as landscapes of delight rather than dread, and even as worthy objects of adoration. The initial impetus behind this transformation came from the Romantic movement, with its quasi-religious yearning for grandiose natural spectacles. By the mid-nineteenth century, the Victorian art critic John Ruskin explicitly rejected the dread and horror that had previously been attached to mountain landscapes and hailed “these great cathedrals of the earth” as the epitome of natural beauty. The new appreciation of mountains did not dispense entirely with the negative emotions that they had once inspired. “Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime,” Edmund Burke declared in 1757.9
To connoisseurs of the sublime, mountains embodied many of these qualities. “None but these children of God know how to join so much beauty with so much horror,” wrote the poet Thomas Gray of the Scottish Highlands in 1765. Many travelers sought these qualities in the Alps in the last decades of the eighteenth century, but a growing number also went in search of this combination in the Pyrenees. In 1797, the French politician and poet Charles-François Brisseau de Mirbel (1776–1854) climbed the Pic du Midi de Bigorre and celebrated the “mountains, precipices, glaciers, ancient snows, aerial lakes, the immense and silent workshops of nature and fruitful fields, watered by fertilizing streams of the mountain currents.”10 De Mirbel contrasted this landscape with his own expectations, noting how “those peaks, which once seemed to me only a useless chaos, and the result of some strange caprice of Nature, now appeared as the sublime work of a beneficent hand.”
The English novelist Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823) set the first part of her eighteenth-century Gothic bestseller The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) in the Pyrenees. Radcliffe had never actually visited the mountains, and the landscape she described was quite literally a landscape of the imagination, made up of barren summits, dizzying crags and precipices, lingering melancholy sunsets, gloomy forests, towers, and tumbling cataracts, inhabited by shepherds and lawless “banditti.” In a long travelogue at the beginning of the novel, Radcliffe’s heroine Emily St. Aubert travels with her ailing father across the Pyrenees to the Mediterranean, a journey that has little narrative purpose except to take her readers through a classic landscape of the sublime in which her heroine is able to contemplate the “higher regions of the air, where immense glaciars exhibited their frozen horrors” past crags of “stupendous height, and fantastic shape; some shooting into cones; others impending far over their base, in huge masses of granite, along whose broken ridges was often lodged a weight of snow, that trembling even to the vibration of a sound, threatened to bear destruction in its course to the vale.”11 Such descriptions are softened by descriptions of meadows, forests, and running streams to complete her picture of what she called “a perfect picture of the lovely and sublime, of ‘beauty sleeping in the lap of horror.’”
Many travelers who did visit the Pyrenees came to the mountains already steeped in the vocabulary of the sublime. Ramond’s writings are filled with references to “terrible cataracts,” “frightful ravines,” “hideous” precipices, and “desolated heights.” The nineteenth-century English traveler Louisa Stuart Costello described her first sight of the “long chain of the magnificent Pyrenees” from Pau and the “everlasting awful mountains, purple and transparent and glowing with delight.”12 Adjectives like “awful” and “hideous” were intended to be complimentary. Writing to his wife of a nocturnal walk above a waterfall near Cauterets, Victor Hugo described how “a hideous, terrible roar arose out of the darkness below, from the precipice under my feet. . . . All around me was dark and as though pensive. The immense spectres of the mountains showed themselves to me through the rifts of the clouds as though across torn shrouds.”13
Even the authors of an avowedly scientific text such as A History of Mountains, Geographical and Mineral (1809) described the “disorder and confusion” of Pyrenean rivers spating in springtime, and the “gloomy terrible silence which precedes this scene of horror,” while still insisting that “the woods, the rocks, and the torrents, display all the characteristics of the sublime and the beautiful.”14 Like Radcliffe’s, such descriptions were often accompanied by references to the gentler “picturesque” qualities of the Pyrenean landscape. In a book of essays that first defined the concept of the “picturesque,” the English artist and Anglican priest William Gilpin (1724–1808) argued that the beauty of picturesque landscapes lay in their forms, colors, and “accompaniments” rather than the grandeur associated with the sublime.15
The Pyrenees contained many such accompaniments. In 1840 the Scottish writer Henry David Inglis compared the “Eden” of the Argelès-Gazost Valley near Cauterets to his travels through the Alps. “More sublime scenes—as picturesque scenes—may be found in many places,” he wrote, “but none where the union of beauty and picturesqueness is so perfect—no spot in which the charm of mountain scenery is so mingled with the softest and loveliest features of fertility.”16 In A Motor-Flight Through France Edith Wharton praised “the sweetness and diversity of the Pyrenean border. Nowhere are the pastoral and the sylvan so happily mated, nowhere the villages so compact of thrift and romance, the foreground so sweet, the distances so sublime and shining.”17
Writing the Pyrenees
For Henry Russell these contrasts in the landscape not only distinguished the Pyrenees from the Alps, but also evoked a very different response in those who visited them. Where the former inspired terror, Russell insisted, the latter “seduced. The Pyrenees were for artists and poets.”18 This was not strictly factual. Poetry and the Alps were by no means mutually exclusive, as a long line of poets from Wordsworth to Emily Dickinson can attest, but there is no doubt that the Pyrenees have often found their way into poetry, and the variations in the landscape have often inspired surprising and unpredictable literary responses. In 1831 the youthful Alfred Tennyson, then a student at Cambridge, passed through Cauterets with his close friend and fellow poet Arthur Hallam. In a letter to his brother, Tennyson lyrically evoked a classic romantic Pyrenean landscape of “precipitous defiles, jagged mountain tops, forests of solemn pine, tavelled by dewy clouds, and encircling lawns of the greenest freshness, waters in all shapes and all powers, from the clear runnels babbling down over our mountain paths at intervals, to the blue little lake whose deep, cold waters are fed eternally from neighbouring glaciers, and the impetuous cataract, fraying its way over black, beetling rocks.”19
In 1838, however, the seventeen-year-old Charles Baudelaire spent the summer at Barèges with his stepfather and painted a very different picture of the mountains in his miserabilist poem “Incompatibilité,” in which he wrote of the “mournful waste” of a mountain lake dominated by “silence, that makes you wish to escape; / that eternal silence of the mountainous bed / of motionless air, where everything waits.”20 Many years later, Baudelaire recalled the same “motionless little lake” in “Cake,” one of the “little poems in prose” that make up Paris Spleen, as an example of “inexpressible grandeur and sublimity” in which “my thoughts fluttered about, as light as the atmosphere. Vulgar passions, like hatred and profane love, now struck me as being as far away as the clouds that processed by in the depths of the abysses that lay beneath my feet. My soul seemed to me as vast and pure as the cupola of the sky that enveloped me.”21
This reverie does not last long. When the poet sits down to eat a piece of bread, he is interrupted by a starving urchin who mistakes it for cake. Baudelaire cuts him a “generous piece,” but before the child can eat it he is set upon by “another little savage” who turns out to be his brother and who tries to take it from him. The two boys fight viciously “for possession of the previous booty, neither one willing to share it with the other,” till the second boy bites off a piece of the first child’s ear and the crumbs of “cake” are scattered on the ground, “indisguishable from the grains of sand with which they were mingled.” Even here, in the Pyrenean paradise of his youth, Baudelaire reminds us, man is not born good after all, and “there is a superb country where bread is called cake and is so rare a delicacy that it is enough to start a war, literally fratricidal!”
In the spring of 1862 the English “decadent” poet Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909), a great admirer of Baudelaire, came to Cauterets to stay with his family. A descendant of the traveler and writer Henry Swinburne, Swinburne was an avid wild swimmer and he also suffered from epileptic convulsions that occasionally made him pass out. His family often worried about his health, and they would not have been pleased at his willingness to swim in the freezing waters of Lake Gaube. These solitary dips nevertheless produced one of the most remarkable English-language poems of the nineteenth century, “The Lake of Gaube,” and one of the greatest poems ever written about the Pyrenees.22 Swinburne begins his poem with an evocation of a classic Pyrenean landscape that many of his readers would already have been familiar with, where “the sun is lord and god, sublime, serene / and sovereign on the mountain. . . . The lawns, the gorges, and the peaks, are one Glad glory / thrilled with sense of unison / In strong compulsive silence of the sun.”
The poet then dives into the lake and presents his readers with very different sensations, where “that Heaven, the dark deep heaven of water near / Is deadly deep as hell and dark as death / The rapturous plunge that quickens blood and breath / With pause more sweet than passion.” These extremes of heat and cold, light and darkness, become a process of sensual/spiritual transition that Swinburne compares to the salamanders that populate the surrounding forest: “As the bright salamander in fire of the noonshine exults and is glad of his day / The spirit that quickens my body rejoices to pass from the sunlight away / To pass from the glow of the mountainous flowerage, the high multitudinous bloom / Far down through the fathomless night of the water, the gladness of silence and gloom.”
In a review of Victor Hugo’s travel writings written in 1890, Swinburne recalled how he had once captured and tamed salamanders at Lake Gaube and described his fascination with “the fiery exuberance of flowers among which the salamanders glide like creeping flames radiant and vivid up to the very skirt of the tragic little pine wood, at whose heart the fathomless little lake lies silent; with dark dull gleam on it as of half-tarnished steel.”23 Many holi daymakers regularly swim in Lake Gaube, but very few will have experienced the sensations that Swinburne described when he dived into its snow-fed waters in the spring of 1862 and found “far down through the fathomless night of the water, the gladness of silence and gloom / Death-dark and delicious as death in the dream of a lover and dreamer may be.”
The Pyrenees also featured in another classic nineteenth-century poem, when the German poet Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) visited Cauterets in the summer of 1841 in search of a cure to the unspecified illness—probably venereal disease—that would reduce him to a half-blind prisoner in his “mattress-vault” seven years later. Heine’s Pyrenean health cure coincided with a low point in his Parisian exile, in which he was embroiled in various literary and political feuds. In a letter to a friend, he denied rumours of impending blindness and death but described himself “very slack as a consequence of the baths which I am taking here; very slack, and it costs me much to hold my pen in my hand.”24
Heine took consolation from his treatment and also from the mountains themselves: “The springs work miraculous cures every day, and I too hope to recover. We hear little of politics. People live a quiet, peaceful life, and it is hard to believe that revolution and war, the savage sport of our time, passed even over the Pyrenees.” That “savage sport” was unfolding in parts of the Pyrenees even as Heine took his cure, in the form of the first Carlist War, and Heine included both Cauterets and the war in his mock-epic poem Atta Troll, which he began in the autumn that year. The “final Woods-song of Romanticism,” as Heine described it, describes the attempts of Atta Troll, an escaped dancing bear from Cauterets, to lead an animal revolution against human domination. From this premise, Heine launched a series of scabrous attacks on the many objects of his scorn, including God, the Swabian poetry school, egalitarianism, literary pretentiousness, and Prince Felix Lichnowski, a German prince who fought in the Carlist War, known in the poem as “Schnapphahnski.”
The poem also references various known Pyrenean landmarks, including the Pont d’Espagne, Bagnères, Roncesvalles, and Lake Gaube. Heine’s attack on Romanticism did not allow him to celebrate the mountains (“What to thee seemed blue and gold/Is, alas, but idle snow/Idle snow, which, lone and drear/Bores itself in solitude”), and the landscape he described, where “Hulking and enormous cliffs/Of deformed and twisted shapes/Look on me like petrified/Monsters of primeval times” was very different from Tennyson’s delicate lyricism—and from the Pyrenees that he described in his correspondence.25
Other nineteenth-century writers expressed a more unambiguously positive vision of the mountains. “I am so captivated by the Pyrenees, that I will never dream, or speak, my whole life, of anything but mountains, torrents, grottoes and precipices,” wrote the twenty-one-year-old Aurore Dupin, better known as George Sand (1804–76), to her mother during her first visit to the mountains.26 Sand’s friend Ivan Turgenev later remembered his 1845 walking tour of the Pyrenees as the “happiest period of my life”—a recollection that was inextricably bound up with his love for the singer Pauline Viardot. Years later he recalled in a poem how “I walked among tall mountains / By gay rivers and through dales / And everything that met my gaze / Spoke of just one thing to me: / I was loved! I was loved!”27
The English-speaking world was also beginning to discover the Pyrenees through a burgeoning genre of travel writings in the nineteenth century. J. Hardy’s A Picturesque and Descriptive Tour in the Mountains of High Pyrenees (1825); Frederick H. Johnson’s A Winter’s Sketches in the South of France and the Pyrenees (1857); James Erskine Murray’s A Summer in the Pyrenees (1837); Thomas Clifton Paris’s Letters from the Pyrenees During Three Months’ Pedestrian Wanderings (1843); Louisa Stuart Costello’s Béarn and the Pyrenees (1844); Ernest Bilborough’s ’Twixt France and Spain; or, A Spring in the Pyrenees (1883); Mary Boddington’s Sketches in the Pyrenees (1837); the Princeton history graduate Edwin Asa Dix’s A Midsummer Drive Through the Pyrenees (1890)—the seemingly endless stream of travel books led one underwhelmed reviewer of Johnson’s A Winter’s Sketches in the Spectator in 1857 to observe wearily that “Pau and the Pyrenees are not so haeknied as Italy and the common lines of travel in France and Germany, but they have been described by various writers of various pursuits.”
French travel books such as the Comtesse de la Granville’s Retour des Pyrénées (1841) and Jules de Fer’s Souvenirs pittoresques des Pyrénéees (1843) also helped to make their authors’ compatriots more familiar with the mountains. Adolphe Thiers’s descriptions of his travels in the Cerdagne were translated into English, as was Hippolyte Taine’s Voyage aux Pyrénées (1857) and Jules Michelet’s La Montagne (1885). In 1895, Victor Hugo’s Alpes et Pyrénées, based on letters written to his wife from two journeys to the Alps and Pyrenees in 1839 and 1843, was published in English for the first time.
Many of these books followed a very similar formula, combining appealing descriptions of the Pyrenean landscape with descriptions of towns and cities, local color, and historical background. Some have stood the test of time, such as the English priest, novelist, and polymath Sabine Baring-Gould’s A Book of the Pyrenees (1907). The English traveler Harold Spender spent two summers walking and camping with friends in the more remote French and Spanish Pyrenees and Andorra in 1896 and 1897, and his account of these excursions “for pleasure and exercise” in Through the High Pyrenees (1898) remains one of the essential works of Pyrenean literature.
Hilaire Belloc’s The Pyrenees (1909) combined a nuts-and-bolts compilation of essential travel information with an erudite overview of Pyrenean history and geography. Belloc was a mountain purist who ventured out into the Pyrenees alone with a rucksack, a map, a few essential provisions, and a pair of espadrilles rather than boots. Belloc was scornful of the “cosmopolitans, colonials, nomads, and the rest” at Cauterets and other spa towns. For Belloc, “cosmopolitan” was generally synonymous with Jewish—a category that he held in only marginally lower esteem than the vulgar rich he observed in Cauterets, who “destroy the things that they themselves desire. And the things that they desire are execrable to the rest of mankind.”28
John Bingham Morton, the Daily Express columnist and travel writer known as “Beachcomber,” was a friend of Belloc’s who shared similar views. In Pyrenean (1938), his account of a solo trek across the Pyrenees from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, Morton depicted the Pyrenees as an antidote to a modern world made up of “the herds penned in garden suburbs,” “Bolshevik-barrack flats and hotels,” and the “unwieldy” French tourists he observed at Gavarnie who “in the very shadow of the great solemn peaks . . . flounder and waddle along, the oaths of the perspiring men mingling with the shrill giggling and screaming of the monstrous women.” Morton found solace in high mountain places, such as the “delightful little valley” he encountered near Roncesvalles, which “looked as fresh as though the world had been created that morning, and I stopped dead in my tracks, as though I had met Youth and Innocence face to face. For it was a landscape so evidently unaware of the evil ways of the world, so confident.”
Artists
The reimagining of the Pyrenees was not simply due to the written word. From the eighteenth century onward, the Pyrenees attracted a stream of artists and illustrators, whose paintings, engravings, and illustrations provided the wider European public with their first visual impressions of the mountains. Such images featured regularly in French publications such as La nature, Le tour du monde, and L’illustration, and also in books about the Pyrenees, which were often illustrated by their authors. Ramond’s books contained his own sketchings and drawings, as did James Erskine Murray’s and Lady Georgiana Chatterton’s. The French lithographer Louis-Julien Jacottet (1806–80) made the Pyrenees the subject of two albums, Souvenir des Pyrénées (1835–36) and Souvenir des Pyrénées, nouvelle excursion (1841–42). Albert Tissandier’s account of his journeys through the Aragonese and Catalan Pyrenees in 1889 was illustrated with his own immaculately rendered drawings.
Some artists focused on the more dramatic Pyrenean landmarks, such as Gavarnie. Others were attracted by more intimate details and contrasts in the landscape and terrain. In a letter to a friend from the spa town of Eaux-Bonnes in 1845, Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) complained that “the beauty of this nature of the Pyrenees is not something that one can hope to capture happily through painting. Regardless of the work that follows, all of it is so gigantic that one does not know where to begin amongst these masses and the multitude of details.”29 Delacroix eventually published a series of drawings and watercolors of the mountains and their inhabitants in an Album des Pyrénées that same year. Gustave Doré visited the Pyrenees on numerous occasions, and both his paintings and the haunting pencil-and-ink drawings of blasted tree trunks, cataracts, and stormy skies that illustrated Taine’s and Blackburn’s travel books contained images that could easily have accompanied Ann Radcliffe’s imagined Pyrenees.
Franz Schrader’s Pyrenean paintings tended to focus on the shapes and shades of rocks and mountains, in keeping with his belief that art, cartography, and the study of topography were complementary pursuits.30 The Parisian artist and engraver Charles Jouas (1866–1942) was known largely as a painter of Parisian opera sets before presenting himself to the writer and publisher Henri Béraldi in 1896. Béraldi was so impressed with his work that he promptly dispatched him to Luchon to come up with the illustrations to accompany 100 Years of the Pyrenees. Jouas subsequently made numerous visits to the Pyrenees, and these visits transformed the urban artist into the quintessential “illustrator of the Pyrenees,” whose elegant and deftly drawn sketches and watercolors focus on people as well as landscape, from shepherds sitting in front of fires to courting couples skipping down mountain paths and teams of roped men and women walking up through the snow-covered ridges.
The differences in climate, light, and terrain from one end of the Pyrenees to the other appealed to artists across a wide spectrum of styles and sensibilities. Most artists focused on the sunnier Eastern Pyrenees and came to them through visits to the southern coast of France. In 1908 the consumptive young Welsh painter James Dickson Innes (1887–1914) followed Matisse’s footsteps to the port of Collioure, near Banyuls-sur-Mer, with a fellow artist, in the first of various visits. A graduate of the Slade School of Fine Art and a close friend of Augustus John, Innes was known for his moody studies of the Arenig Fawr mountain in Snowdonia, and also for a taste for the gypsy lifestyle that led him to sleep outdoors in the open air despite its adverse impact on his fragile health. His visits to southern France produced some striking studies of Mount Canigou and the Pyrénées-Orientales, whose moody intensity was partly due to Innes’s habit of painting at sunset or twilight in order to avoid the Mediterranean heat, and perhaps also to intimations of his own mortality and the tuberculosis that killed him in August 1914.
Pyrenean sublime: Gustave Doré, illustration from Hipployte Taine’s A Tour Through the Pyrenees, 1875 (Flickr API).
Death and ill health stalked the Scottish modernist architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868–1928), who came to paint in Collioure and nearby Port-Vendres with his wife, Margaret, in 1924. Mackintosh’s move to France was a form of self-imposed exile from a country where he felt marginalized and ignored, and his decision to abandon architecture and concentrate on painting produced a dazzling late creative flourish, as he dedicated himself to watercolors of Port-Vendres and the surrounding coast—and also of the villages and flowers of the Eastern Pyrenees. Mackintosh’s portraits of Pyrenean forts and villages are flooded with bright light, in which the physical details of walls and buildings are brought to life by sharp contrasts of light and shade. Despite his constant financial difficulties, Mackintosh set himself an objective of fifty paintings that he wanted to exhibit in London, and he had completed forty of them before he died of throat and tongue cancer in 1928. These paintings have never been exhibited as a complete body of work in the UK. It was not until 2004 that Mackintosh’s marvellous artistic swan song received official recognition in France with the inauguration of the Chemin de Mackintosh—the Mackintosh Way—starting at Port-Vendres, where visitors can see the places that he painted so unforgettably.31
The Pyrenees also featured in the work of the French anamalière—animal painter—Rosa Bonheur (1822–99), the most famous female artist of the nineteenth century. A feminist, a lesbian, and the daughter of Christian-Socialist parents, Bonheur had just begun to establish a reputation as an animal painter when she visited the Pyrenees for the first time in 1850 following the death of her father the previous year. Together with her lifelong friend and fellow artist Nathalie Micas, she traveled to Eaux-Bonnes, Luz-Saint-Sauveur, and Lourdes on horseback, after receiving permission from the police to wear men’s clothing—something that Bonheur always preferred. The trip was financed by Micas’s mother, who was concerned about her daughter’s health, and the two women rode from town to town taking the waters, while Bonheur mostly sketched and painted.
On one occasion, the two women climbed Mount Bergons, where Nathalie described to her mother the view of the Marboré and the Brèche de Roland, the sight of eagles and Rosa “sketching while I’m being lazy and writing you this letter. It’s five, and the sun is casting its last rays; the cows are moving from one meadow to another with leisurely moos. The tinkle of their bells is drawing near, and the poor beasts seem to be thanking God for the evening cool. When you see them running around the mountains, you’d think that they were deer. They’re not only fleet of foot, but rather small.”32
What their guides made of the two women in men’s clothing can only be imagined, but Bonheur frequently returned to the Pyrenees to paint chamois, cows, sheep, and muleteers with her distinctive naturalist precision. In Bonheur’s Pyrenean paintings the mountains are always in the background, but works such as Muleteers Crossing the Pyrenees (1857) and Chamois (1888) are some of the most compelling and alluring visual representations of the High Pyrenees in nineteenth-century art. Bonheur’s less famous brother, Auguste Bonheur (1824–84), was also a gifted artist and anamalière, who painted animals in the Pyrenees, such as the marvelously dramatic portrait of cattle fighting in the high mountains, Le Combat (1862).
The Mecca of Cubism
The Pyrenees also became a source of inspiration for Pablo Picasso. In 1906 Picasso spent the spring and summer with his then girlfriend Fernande Olivier at the town of Gósol, in the province of Lleida, near Andorra, where he painted and sketched the local inhabitants and the arid, ochre-colored mountains. Picasso’s joyful rediscovery of his Spanish and Catalan roots was expressed in his touching portraits of peasant women in scarves or without clothes, naked swineherds, and his nonagenerian landlord Josep Fondevila, whom Olivier described as “a fierce old fellow, a former smuggler, with a strange, wild beauty.” Picasso was so fascinated by Fondevila’s stark, shaved appearance and smuggler past that he made a model of his shaven head, and even shaved his own as a tribute.
Picasso’s fondness for the Pyrenees inadvertently gave a small town in the Pyrénées-Orientales a special place in the history of modern art. Today the French town of Céret, the capital of the comarca (district) of Vallespir near the French-Catalan border, is a pretty, well-heeled country town, surrounded by cherry orchards and vineyards. Only a few miles away to the northeast lies the border pass of Le Perthus, and farther east you can see Mount Canigou. Beneath the tall pastel-colored buildings and enormous plane trees, the proliferation of cafés and trendy shops and a museum of modern art are a testament to Céret’s unlikely place in the artistic history of the twentieth century that began in 1909, when a French painter named Frank Burty Haviland and the Spanish sculptor Manolo arrived in the town from Paris intending to follow in Picasso’s footsteps to Gósol.
These aspirations had to be placed on hold when war broke out between Spain and Morocco. Unwilling to risk being drafted, Manolo returned with Haviland to Paris. In February the following year they came back to Céret, at the instigation of Manolo’s wife, and decided to settle there, and in the summer of 1911 Haviland invited his friend Picasso to join them. The year 1911 was a particularly momentous one in Picasso’s career. In April, the term “Cubism” was used in the French press for the first time to describe two collective exhibitions in Paris and Brussels that appeared to mark a radical—and to many critics scandalous—departure from Impressionism.
Picasso’s work was not exhibited at either exhibition, but he and his friend and collaborator Georges Braque were regarded as the spiritual founders of the new movement. Braque famously compared their relationship to “a pair of climbers roped together,” and the two painters spent three weeks together in Céret in the summer of 1911. By the time Picasso returned to Paris in September, he had painted Landscape at Céret and the iconic cubist painting L’homme à la pipe—a startling conglomeration of triangular geometrical shapes, which ironically referenced Van Gogh’s painting of the same name. Braque remained in Céret until the following January, and his iconic Man with a Guitar was probably painted there. The two painters spent the following summer in Céret, and in the spring of 1913 Picasso returned once again in March, accompanied by the poet Max Jacob and Olivier. Picasso had intended to spend that summer painting in the mountains, but he returned to Paris when his lover Olivier developed terminal cancer, and his beloved dog Frika also fell ill and had to be put down by a local hunter. In August that year he returned to the town once again, where a local newspaper reported, “The small town of Céret is rejoicing. The Master of Cubism has arrived, ready to enjoy a well-earned rest.”
That same year Haviland and Manolo established an art school in an abandoned Capuchin monastery near the town, and this initiative soon began to attract a succession of Parisian artists, including Juan Gris, Jean Marchand, Marc Lafargue, and Joaquim Sunyer, to Céret. Though Haviland and his wife briefly left Céret during World War I, the town continued to attract a steady flow of artists looking for a cheap place to live and paint in the years that followed. They included the tormented Russian Expressionist painter Chaim Soutine, who spent two years here between 1919 and 1921, together with the Russian-French artist Pinchus Krémègne.
It is something of an understatement to say that Soutine did not settle easily into his country retreat. He was prone to violent rages in which he tore up canvases that displeased him, and left those he finished in a dank toolshed while he eked out an impoverished and disorderly existence that scandalized the locals. “He was raving mad, constantly drunk and dirty,” Krémègne recalled. “People took him for the village idiot. He always hated Céret. When people would ask him how old he was, he’d say that his two years in Céret didn’t count.”33 Soutine nevertheless produced more than two hundred finished paintings in those two years, including some savagely idiosyncratic studies of the surrounding landscape that revealed more about his inner state of mind than they did about the Pyrenees. Following the Nazi occupation, a number of writers and artists, including Marc Chagall, Jean Dubuffet, and Jean Cocteau, passed through Céret on their way out of France, and some of them are now represented in the Musée d’Art Moderne, established in Céret by Haviland in 1950, with the support of Picasso and Matisse, in a tribute to the town that the art critic André Salmon once called “la Mecque du cubisme”—the Mecca of Cubism.
At the Forest’s Edge
In the early twenty-first century many of the world’s most famous and far-flung landscapes are already engraved in our minds long before we see them and even if we never see them. A quick Internet search can pull up high-quality photographs of almost anywhere in the world, and even the most unskilled photographer with a mobile phone can now take pictures of a much higher standard than was possible even a few decades ago. New technologies have made it possible to capture even familiar landscapes from the most improbable angles and perspectives. Given these possibilities, it is easy to forget that there was once a time when images of the world’s more distant places were entirely dependent on the vision and skill of individual artists, and it is also easy to ignore the very particular subjective vision that painters can bring to landscapes that we think we already know.
One of the few major contemporary artists working in the Pyrenees is the English plein air painter Ray Atkins. A graduate of Bromley College of Art in Kent and the Slade School of Fine Art, Atkins is a former pupil of Frank Auerbach’s whose reputation is largely due to his giant studies of industrial landscapes such as the Reading gasworks and Millwall Docks. In 2009, at the age of seventy-three, Atkins took the radical decision to relocate to a remote farmstead near the village of Aspet in the French Pyrenees. In July 2015 I saw an exhibition of Pyrenean paintings at the Art Space gallery. The paintings were deeply impressive; vibrant semi-abstract studies of woods, fields of haricot beans, flowering pear trees painted at different times of the year that blazed with light and color. I was also struck by the absence of the Pyrenees themselves from these paintings. The mountains were inevitably relegated to the distant background, in paintings that focused primarily on the subtle variations in texture and color in the immediate foreground. The following month my wife and I went to visit Atkins in his Aspet farmhouse. To reach it, you have to drive along a narrow 2.5-mile (4-kilometer) dirt and gravel road, through hills that are covered for miles around in dense green forest that often blots out the mountains completely and feels quite claustrophobic and oppressive.
Atkins greeted us with his partner, the dancer and choreographer Hsiao-Hwa Li, at his immaculately restored farmhouse. With his ponytail, beard, and glasses, Atkins looks like an aging hippie, with a touch of a Taoist monk and tai chi master. He was in a good mood, having just finished a four-foot canvas that he had been working on for some weeks. Atkins is wary of discussing his work and prefers to let the paintings speak for themselves but he obligingly answered my questions as we sat in the kitchen and ate Hsiao-Hwa’s homemade cakes.
His initial decision to come to Aspet was the result of his divorce, which obliged him to sell the Cornwall barn next to his ex-wife’s house and find storage for his six hundred paintings. Having made the complicated move to the Pyrenees to save his paintings, Atkins found a new subject that was ostensibly at odds with his preference for factories, gasworks, docklands, scrapyards, and Cornish tin mines over what he calls “simplistic, idyllic landscapes.” Atkins initially struggled to come to terms with an environment that he described to Frank Auerbach as “too rural.” From his garden you can see the Pic de Ger protruding in the distance out of the Vallée d’Ossau, as it appears in many of his paintings. For Atkins the mountain was an unwelcome reminder of Cézanne’s classic paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire—a legacy that he felt obliged to escape from.
Atkins was not satisfied with his initially “over-romantic” work in the Pyrenees, nor was his dealer, Michael Richardson, who described his work as “chamber music without a symphony”—a reference to Atkins’s love of classical music. When Richardson suggested that he focus on the forest rather than the mountains, Atkins took to the idea immediately, because “very often the real subject is so obvious you don’t see it, and thinking along those lines I suddenly thought, yeah, it’s the forest. Because I hate it. Sometimes I hate it. It’s so dark. Very oppressive.” This decision was a practical as well as an aesthetic choice. Atkins suffers from serious macular degeneration and can only see bright colors with his peripheral vision, “beyond the rim of the glasses.”
Where Charles Jouas once declared that “nature dictates to me,” Atkins is obliged to rely on memory and guesswork to find the colors that burst out of his paintings—a process that he describes as “working in the dark.” His macular degeneration also explains to some extent his lack of interest in the mountains beyond his garden. “Now when I look at the distant landscape I can see it’s there, but I don’t see any detail,” he says. “I really see very little, so it doesn’t interest me so much. Everything’s out of focus, so that affects what I choose now.” Atkins was fatalistic and matter-of-fact about his predicament, but for a painter with his commitment I could not imagine anything worse, and it made the sumptuous mesh of flowers, leaves, and bushes displayed on the canvas in his garden even more astonishing.
As he showed us around his barn-warehouse and his beautiful light-filled studio, it seemed to me that he was truly a painter’s painter, literally raging against the dying of the light, on the margins of the forest and of the British and French art establishments, the sole custodian and curator of the hundreds of paintings in his storeroom. For an artist who eschewed romanticism, he was a strikingly romantic figure, and as we drove back out the long dirt road, I wondered whether his paintings would find a permanent home, and whether one day visitors would come to the forest-covered hills for the same reason that travelers now followed the trail of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, because they knew that Ray Atkins had once lived here, and because they wanted to see the landscape that he had painted.
La Vie aux Eaux
Many of the poets, artists, and writers who came to the Pyrenees in the nineteenth century initially came as tourists, holidaymakers, or visitors to Pyrenean spa towns. Since Roman times, the sulfurous hot springs of Pyrenean spa towns such as Ax-les-Thermes and Luchon have been used for hydrotherapeutic purposes. For centuries, visitors have come to drink and bathe in the waters or take mud baths in order to heal sicknesses and wounds or simply to make themselves healthier. In the nineteenth century many of these towns benefited from a boom in “health tourism” that was initially due to the patronage of Napoléon III and the empress Eugénie, who began to visit Pyrenean spas during their holidays in Biarritz. Napoléon’s Pyrenean public works program was partly inspired by the wretched French military veterans from the battle of Solferino whom he encountered at Bagnères-de-Bigorre in the summer of 1859, and he specifically asked for a new military hospital to be built in the town.
In the decades that followed, well-established spa towns such as Cauterets, Bagnères-de-Bigorre, Vernets-les-Bains, Luz-Saint-Sauveur, and Eaux-Bonnes experienced an exponential increase in the number of visitors, while smaller Pyrenean towns rushed to take advantage of what Graham Robb has called the “mineral water bonanza” and obtain medical and scientific confirmation of the healing properties of their waters.34 Some towns culled the bear and wolf populations and banished pigs, sheep, and paupers from their streets in order to provide a more civilized environment for the new urban clientele. Others advertised cures for particular illnesses. Aulus-les-Bains offered a cure for “invalids of love” (syphilitics). The thermal waters at Barèges have a reputation for curing wounds and skin diseases that has attracted Roman legionnaires and veterans of the French wars in Indochina.
As these towns became popular they also attempted to widen their touristic appeal. Railway posters offered Parisians the enticing prospect of a rural arcadia only eight hours from the capital, with images of snow-covered mountains and shepherds in regional costume. The more prominent spas transformed themselves into summer resorts, replete with fairs, magic shows, donkey races, brass bands, smoking rooms and casinos, Parisian comiques and “singing cafés,” peep shows, stalls selling tourist tat, and rides in the small two-wheeled carts known as vinaigrettes. Some of these towns were transformed into mountain seaside resorts. The actress Sarah Bernhardt first came to Cauterets with her family in the 1850s following her confirmation and remembered it as an “abominable but charming little hole of a place, with plenty of verdure, and a great many huts belonging to the mountain people.”35
By the end of the century Cauterets was a very different place. In the summer of 1878 clients on the town’s main thoroughfare, the Promenade des Oeufs, included Sarah Bernhardt, Randolph Churchill, Émile Zola, the mayor of Saint Petersburg, and assorted marquises, counts, and dukes. In 1888 the fifty-four-year-old Edgar Degas came here in an attempt to cure his bronchitis and returned for two more consecutive summers. Pyrenean spa towns also attracted a number of illustrious foreigners. Rudyard Kipling and his rheumatic wife, Carrie, were frequent visitors to Vernet-les-Bains, a spa town that was thoroughly anglicized by the end of the nineteenth century, with a botanical gardens, a gentlemen’s club, and horse races.
Kipling was heartened by the positive impact of sulfur drinks and water massage on his wife’s health, and enraptured by the nearby presence of Mount Canigou. “I came here in search of nothing more than a little sunshine,” he wrote in a letter to the French Alpine Club in 1911. “But I found Canigou, whom I discovered to be a magician among mountains, and I submitted myself to his power. . . . I watch him with wonder and delight.” Other visitors to the “paradise of the Pyrenees” at Vernet-les-Bains included Kipling’s friend Lord Frederick Sleigh Roberts, the commander of British forces during the Boer War, and Marshal Joseph Joffre, commander in chief of French forces on the western front during the first two years of World War I.
Bagnères-de-Bigorre also attracted a significant British colony in the nineteenth century, such as the Anglo-Irish Brooke family, whose seventh child Alan was born there in 1883, and went on to become Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, chairman of the British chiefs of staff during World War II. In October 1933, Bagnères played host to a more unlikely visitor, when the exiled Leon Trosky and his wife Natalya spent three weeks there recuperating from a series of disastrous personal and political events that included the suicide of his daughter Zina and the nomination of Hitler as chancellor of Germany that same year. Trotsky later referred to his Pyrenean sojourn to refute allegations at the Moscow show trials that he had been conspiring against the Soviet Union in Italy at the time.
It is difficult to imagine that Trotsky would have taken to the lifestyle described by the art critic Henry Blackburn at Eaux-Bonnes, in which walks along the “Promenade Horizontale” were slotted in “between the time of taking each glass of water, the after-breakfast cascade, the noon siesta, the ride at three, another cascade and more water, or a bath, at four, promenade at five, dinner at six, ‘promenade horizontale’ until eight, then the Casino, balls, ‘societé,’ écarté, or a moonlight walk—and then, decidedly early to bed.”36
For some visitors, the season offered the possibilities of aventures de coeur, which were fanned by the racy novels and magazines in spa town libraries and reading rooms with titles such as Un chevalier d’amour, Les femmes d’aujourd’hui, Le dernier amour, and Nymphes des eaux. In 1829, the sixty-one-year-old writer and diplomat François-René de Chateaubriand visited Cauterets to take the waters before leaving for Italy to take up a post as French ambassador. In Memoirs from Beyond the Tomb he describes how he was writing poetry in the forest when “I saw a young girl sitting on the bank of a mountain stream; she rose and came straight towards me: she knew, by a rumour at large in the hamlet, that I was in Cauterets. I found that the unknown girl was an Occitanian, who had written to me two years previously without my ever having met her; the mysterious unknown unveiled for me: patuit Dea: the Goddess revealed herself.”37 The “Occitanian” was the twenty-six-year-old Léontine de Villeneuve, Countess of Castelbajac, Chateaubriand’s “last love,” with whom he enjoyed a short affair before proceeding onward to Rome.
Not all visitors were impressed by such behaviour. The architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc was appalled by the wealthy old men he observed at Cauterets in 1833 who “go to pick up girls at Pierrefitte to take them to Barèges. . . . They are masters of debauchery; they keep themselves going with good wines, sulphur baths, and pure air. Take that away from them and their legs will refuse to work, their emaciated features will turn pale, all their limbs will lose their strength and rot.”38 Eugène Delacroix despised the “disjointed life” he was obliged to lead at Eaux-Bonnes, where he was obliged to take the waters in the summer of 1845 following an outbreak of tubercular laryngitis, and expressed his horror at the “sad spectacle” of sick people seeking cures who had already been “condemned by all their faculties.”39
Today Barèges is a popular base for walkers and skiers, with a cinema and a swimming pool as well as a spa. In 1890 Edwin Asa Dix described it as an “incubus of depressingness” and a “shuddering, shivering, banshee-haunted line of hospitals” filled with “sad-faced invalids, who have tried other baths in vain and have been ordered hither as a last resort; wounded or broken-down soldiers; cripples, who stump their crutches past us down the earthen road.”40 Hippolyte Taine described the “pitiable spectacle” of “lines of umbrellas and soaked mantles” on rainy days at Eaux-Bonnes and the “worried and dejected faces” drinking one glass of water each hour, followed by ubiquitous musicians “galloping along, above the note and below it, with admirable fearlessness, despoiling every repertory in their musical race,” and reading rooms whose users “read nothing but the gloomiest dramas; they discover leanings towards suicide in themselves, and construct the theory of assassination.”41
Octave Mirbeau (1848–1917), the writer and anarchist fellow traveler and author of The Torture Garden and The Diary of a Chambermaid, viciously satirized la vie aux eaux in his hilariously misanthropic novel Twenty-One Days of a Neurasthenic. Mirbeau’s protagonist, Georges Vasseur, comes to an anonymous spa town to escape from civilization, only to find it populated with generals, politicians, and other human fauna he has been trying to escape from. “What I loathe most about the Pyrenees is that they are mountains,” Vasseur writes. “Now, I have a wild, boundless and poetic appreciation for mountains, as much as the next man: nonetheless they represent for me everything the universe can possibly bear of incurable melancholia, hopeless discouragement, an unbreathable, deadly air. . . . I admire their grandiose shapes, their changing light. But their inner life terrifies me . . . I feel as though the land of the dead must be nothing but mountains upon mountains, like these which I am staring at now, as I write.”42
Today the golden age of hydrotherapy has long since passed. Some spa towns have updated their facilities for a new clientele. The thermal buildings at Vernet-les-Bains offer aquafit, aquagym, and aquaboxing in addition to courses of thermal “séances” that hover around the $620 (€500) mark. The casino and botanical gardens where so many English tourists once whiled away their summer months are still immaculately preserved, and contemporary visitors can now visit a Kipling museum and follow a trail of “Kipling walks.” Aulus-les-Bains calls itself “the Cholesterol Spa” and its location at the head of the Garbet Valley makes it popular with walkers and day-trippers looking to explore the surrounding mountains. Cauterets has reinvented itself as a base for skiers and walkers, with cable cars leading up to Lake Gaube. Some of its spa facilities have closed, but its winding streets combine an appealingly faded belle epoque elegance with the flavor of a seaside town. In the summertime the Promenade des Oeufs, where Sarah Bernhardt, George Sand, and Degas mingled with generals and politicians, is filled with families, hikers, and holidaymakers who can enjoy a range of twenty-first-century pleasures from yoga classes, classical music, and jazz concerts to more energetic pursuits such as canyoning and a via ferrata—protected climbing route—that are available in the surrounding mountains and forests.
Other towns have fallen on hard times. In 1830 Eaux-Bonnes played host to three hundred invalids. In 1856 it received 6,400, largely as a result of its patronage by the empress Eugénie. Looking down from his hotel balcony in 1881, Henry Blackburn observed, “The noise and bustle in the square (instruments playing more discordant music than any Italian organs), the squeaks and rattles of juvenile civilisation, the chattering of their bonnes, the incessant ringing of bells, the shouts and cracking of whips, the voices of different nations—all confined within a limited space, and echoed back from the surrounding rocks, can scarcely be conceived.”43
Today Eaux Bonnes is a hollowed-out ghost town, with a population of less than five hundred, surrounded by a magnificently dramatic landcape of forest, crags, and steep gorges. Its hotels and apartments are mostly empty, its streets and parks deserted, and many buildings are visibly falling apart. The once-splendid six-storey Hôtel des Princes, with its terra-cotta walls and marble window frames, is a hollow relic of the belle epoque that shows no sign of imminent resuscitation. We stayed at a hotel that might have been an appropriate location for The Shining, with darkened empty corridors, faded carpets, and a stairway that was sealed off from the empty attic, and the sound of melancholy piano music drifting from the back room like music from another century.
The staff kept all this going with stoical dignity, in a town where everything exuded the same decay, from the boarded-up or empty windows to the signs with letters missing, the post office with the blocked-up mailbox, and the spooky cathedral, which protruded above the town like a rocket ship. Even the postcards had been left so long that they were bent out of shape. At the “Promenade Horizontale” we passed the dizzying pink checkerboard casino with its plaque from the YMCA thanking the town for allowing American soldiers to use its facilities “for rest and recreation” during World War I, and the rows of giant plane trees planted under the empress Eugénie’s orders.
A little supermarket named after the empress provided a plaintive reminder of the glory days of the nineteenth-century spa boom. The town’s inhabitants are putting their hopes for the future in the Projet de Bulle (Bubble Project)—the spectacular new facility in the former spa where clients can float in hot water in a giant glass ball that looms over the surrounding decay like a spaceship, and listen to music when they dip their heads in water or “cover themselves with chocolate,” as our hotel receptionist described it, with a faintly incredulous irony. The “bubble” was originally scheduled to open in 2016. By January 2018 it had still not been opened, though it was very near completion, and it remains to be seen whether twenty-first-century ingenuity can prevent the Empress Eugénie’s former playground from further disintegration and bring in the visitors that this still-charming spa town deserves.
Europe’s Second Playground
The Pyrenees have also benefited from other forms of “health tourism”—as a reacreational landscape offering fresh air, exercise, and an escape from industrialized cities. Today this kind of tourism is a major part of the Pyrenean economy, from the walkers and hikers who swarm through the High Pyrenees each summer to Scout groups and schoolchildren who come to the mountains for weekends and summer camps. In the French and Spanish Pyrenees, holiday companies compete to offer rafting trips, canyoning expeditions, slalom and cross-country skiing, cycling, camping, hunting, snowboarding, and treewalking adventure parks. Until the late 1970s and early 1980s, canyoning—the rappeling, swimming, and scrambling in wet suits and helmets through river gorges—was barely known in the Pyrenees. Now it has become a major tourist attraction in the Sierra de Guara of Aragon and other parts of the Spanish and French Pyrenees.
All these activities are so much a part of the appeal of the Pyrenees that it is easy to forget how recent they are. In 1870 the British mountaineer Leslie Stephen famously described Switzerland as the “playground of Europe” in an account of his climbs and travels in the Swiss Alps.44 At this time the Pyrenees were only just beginning their evolution into a different kind of mountain “playground.” In 1881 Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine ironically observed that “the true Pyrenees—the Pyrenees of the present French mind and of the present French traveller—are only mountains by accident. Their function is not to be high but to be pleasant, to behave as a summer district of amusement and health, and to conduct themselves properly as rivals of Vichy and Trouville: they have no other use or destination, and to persist in regarding them as mountains is nonsense.”
Not all visitors followed this advice. “The grandest scenery of these vast solitudes is alone accessible to the pedestrian,” declared Thomas Clifton Paris.45 Henry David Inglis preferred to travel on foot through the Pyrenees and insisted that there were “few occupations more agreeable than sitting down with a good map, and tracing one’s future route through a country that is yet untravelled by us.”46 George Sand reveled in her joyous climbs through “inaccessible mountains, which neither carriages nor even horse could ever reach,” and boasted to her mother that she had rejected the offer of a sedan chair in order to walk. “Bridges of snow, over which pass processions of shepherds and flocks of sheep!” she wrote in her autobiography. “How can I describe it! You cannot see enough; you cannot take it all in with your eyes. It is astonishing. You do not even think of danger. My husband is the most intrepid of men. He goes everywhere, and I follow him.”47 “Mountains seem to crush me and stifle me,” complained Sarah Bernhardt. “I must, at any cost, have the horizon stretching out as far as the eye can see and skies to dream about. I wanted to go up the mountains, so that they should lose their crushing effect. And consequently we went up always higher and higher.”48 In 1911 the local French paper at Vernet-les-Bains reported with some astonishment that a party of fourteen English ladies had ascended the summit of Mount Canigou.
By this time walking and climbing were well-established activities in the Pyrenees, and other sports began to establish themselves in the early twentieth century. In the last decades of the nineteenth century the French Alpine Club began holding its first annual skiing competitions in the Alps, the Vosges, and the Pyrenees. In his history of skiing, E. John Allen describes how the French Alpine Club saw the new sport as a “moralizer” that emphasized Gallic virtues such as suppleness, sangfroid, and courage that were considered essential to the survival of the French nation against the threat of Germany.49 One competition at Eaux-Bonnes in 1910 was overseen by a patronage committee that included the minister and undersecretary of war and five generals. It was not until the aftermath of World War I that skiing acquired a more purely recreational purpose and became firmly established in the Pyrenees. In 1921 the first Pyrenean ski resort was built in the spa village of Barèges, thus beginning the evolution of the Grand Tourmalet into the largest ski area in the French Pyrenees.
By this time the Col du Tourmalet was already well established in the French sporting calendar as one of the toughest stretches of the Tour de France. In May 1910 Henri Desgrange, the editor of L’Auto newspaper and the organizer of the new competition, sent his friend Alphonse Steinès to investigate a possible route for the tour through the Pyrenees. While driving up the 9,639-foot (2,115-meter) Col du Tourmalet, Steinès’s hired car was blocked by a snowdrift. Steinès’s driver refused to continue to the top, and Steinès continued alone on foot. He soon got lost in the snow and fell into a ravine, before he was eventually rescued by a search party, and famously sent a telegram to his boss informing him: “No trouble crossing Tourmalet. Roads satisfactory. No problem for cyclists. Steinès.”50
In July that same year the Pyrenees were included in stages nine and ten of the race’s fifteen stages in a 202-mile (326-kilometer) route through four Pyrenean mountain passes, including the Tourmalet. On the last stage of stage ten at the Col d’Aubisque, Steinès and an assistant stationed themselves high up the pass with a crowd of spectators and waited anxiously for the first riders to appear. To their amazement the first rider was an unknown outsider who was so exhausted that he did not even answer their requests for his name. The second rider was the favorite and and the Olympic bronze medalist Octave Lapize, who exclaimed, “Vous êtes des assassins! Oui, des assassins!” (You are murderers! Yes, murderers!) at the sight of Steinès and his assistant and announced his intention to quit the race.
Lapize remained in the competition and went on to win the general classification that year, and the Col du Tourmalet became one of the four Pyrenean passes that constitute the “Circle of Death”—an astonishingly grueling ordeal that required an average of fourteen hours in the saddle on poor roads that were often little more than dirt mule tracks. The Col du Tourmalet is also associated with one of the great legends of the tour. In the village square of Sainte-Marie-de-Campan stands a curious metal sculpture of a large, thickset man, standing on a bed of flames, triumphantly holding a bicycle fork in an upraised hand. With its brawny arms and legs, the figure looks like a Stakhanovite shock worker monument from Stalinist Russia and commemorates an episode in 1913 when the “three times unlucky” French cyclist Eugène Christophe reached the top of the Col du Tourmalet after a neck-and-neck race with the Belgian cyclist Philippe Thys.
Christophe was then eighteen minutes clear and was the favorite to win the stage and the race itself. While descending to Luchon, his fork broke and he was obliged to carry his bicycle some 6 miles (10 kilometers) down to Sainte-Marie-de-Campan, weeping as he watched the riders he had previously passed streaming past him. According to the strict rules of the tour, Christophe was not allowed to replace his bike or have it repaired. He was allowed to repair it himself, however, and he eventually found a local blacksmith in Sainte-Marie-de-Campan who allowed him to use his forge. Though he was penalized ten points (later reduced to three) for allowing a seven-year-old boy to work the bellows, he completed the remaining 37 miles (60 kilometers) of the stage four hours later to finish at number twenty-nine in the stage classification.
Christophe never won the tour, but his refusal to give in made him an exemplary figure in French cycling history, “victorious in the face of bad luck” as the monument puts it. When we drove over the pass on a foggy afternoon, cyclists of all ages were grinding their way up toward the huge statue of a naked cyclist known as the Géant du Tourmalet that commemorates Octave Lapize’s legendary 1910 ascent. With its straining muscles and agonized face, the statue is an eloquent expression of the physical torment associated with Tourmalet. As we made our way cautiously down toward the thick fog, cyclists hurtled perilously down the precipitous mountain road in bright flashes of yellow and orange Lycra, or strove toward the pass with gritted teeth, in the shadow of the naked cyclist in whose historical slipstream all of them were moving.
The Mystic Pyrenees
The Pyrenees have also attracted visitors with more otherworldly aspirations. No history of the mountains can ignore the fourteen-year-old peasant girl named Bernadette Soubirous, who claimed to have seen the Virgin Mary fourteen times in the grotto of Massabielle at the little market town of Lourdes in 1858. Though the Catholic Church was initially skeptical, the papacy eventually endorsed these visitations and transformed Lourdes into the most well-known Marian shrine in the world, attracting 4 to 6 million pilgrims each year. Some come merely to pay homage to the Virgin, while the grotto’s supposedly curative waters also attract the sick, the disabled, and the dying in search of miracle cures.
The Lourdes pilgrimage has transformed this little Pyrenean market town into a garish outpost of Catholic religious kitsch, in which fast-food restaurants alternate with endless shops selling Marian souvenirs and windows filled with nothing but plaster statuettes of the Virgin. This transformation was already well advanced in 1903, when Edith Wharton visited the town and expressed her horror at “this vast sea of vulgarism—the more aggressive and intolerable because its last waves break against one of the loveliest landscapes in this lovely country.”51 Two decades later Leon Trotsky was equally contemptuous of what he called “a shop for miracles, a business office for trafficking in Grace,” which combined “the paltry miracles of the Gospels side by side with the radio-telophone . . . the union of proud technology with the sorcery of the Roman chief druid.”52
In the interwar years, the Pyrenees also began to attract devotees of a very different cult, as a result of their proximity to the former strongholds of the medieval Cathar heresy. In 1931–32 a young German scholar named Otto Rahn (1904–39) came to the former Cathar fortress of Montségur, in the Ariège département, where the Cathars held their last stand before their military defeat in 1244. Rahn’s interest in the castle was largely due to Wolfram von Eschenbach’s thirteenth-century epic poem Parzifal, which also inspired Wagner’s opera of the same name. A romantic and erratic literary scholar, Rahn, like Wagner, believed that the poem contained coded messages dictated by the Cathars to an Occitanian troubadour who had made his way to Germany. These messages allegedly proved that the Cathars had once possessed the mystical cup or container known as the Holy Grail, and both Rahn and Wagner believed that the “Gral Castle” Muntsalvatsche in Eschenbach’s poem was located near Montségur.
Rahn first began to develop these crackpot theories in a book entitled Kreuzzug gegen den Gral (1933), which was translated into English as Crusade Against the Grail: The Romantic Culture in Creation and in Death. These efforts caught the attention of Heinrich Himmler’s “ancestral-clairvoyant” guru, the runologist Karl Maria Wiligut, more commonly known by the pseudonym Weisthor, who worked for the Department for Pre- and Early History at the SS Race and Settlement Main Office in Munich. Weisthor and Himmler were both fascinated by Holy Grail mysticism and they were so thrilled by Rahn’s ideas that they invited him to join the SS. This was not an invitation that could be refused lightly, and any lingering inclination Rahn may have had to refuse it was swiftly overcome by a 1,000-reichsmark advance to write a sequel. Asked by a friend at the 1936 Olympic Games why he was sporting an SS uniform and dagger, Rahn reportedly replied, “My dear Paul, one must eat.”
The SS ensured that Rahn ate well. In 1936 he went to Iceland with a team of twenty SS-supplied “researchers” to look for the Grail. The same quest brought him back to Montségur and resulted in the publication of Luzifers Hofgesind, eine Reise zu den guten Geistern Europas (Lucifer’s Court: A Heretic’s Journey in Search of the Light Bringers, 1937)—a grab bag of allusions, insinuations, and improbable fantasies that requires an almost total suspension of logic and disbelief to accept even its most basic premises. Many readers might share Rahn’s disgust at the Catholic Church’s brutal suppression of the Cathars but struggle to accept that the Holy Grail was made from a jewel fallen from Lucifer’s crown that was kept in Montségur by the Cathar “queen” Esclarmonde de Foix, or that the Cathars were descended from Hercules, Jason and the Argonauts, and the god Apollo “the lightbringer,” all of whom belonged to “Lucifer’s court.”
Rahn believed—or allowed his readers to believe—that the Cathars had buried the Grail and other treasures in a cave somewhere near Montségur, and he spent many hours looking for it, accompanied by his Senegalese servant and bodyguard Habdu. It would be something of an understatement to observe that these investigations generally lacked empirical rigor. On the contrary, Rahn’s portentous and overblown prose often hints at dark mysteries and secrets that might have pleased his SS sponsors but are likely to have little appeal to readers with a modicum of common sense or critical analysis. He was prone to exaggeration and even falsification. On one occasion he was caught in one of the Montségur caves tracing an extension of a painting that he found there. He also wrote various draft replies for a written interview in which he claimed to have found a “sculpted stone dog-figure” in the Fontanet Cave, whose dimensions he changed from 10 feet to 30 (3 meters to 9). In another episode he kills a viper in the Val de L’Incant (Enchanted Valley) near Montségur, which he suggests was protecting the Grail.53
Rahn’s hazy quest for “the ghosts of the pagans and heretics who were my ancestors” nevertheless pleased Himmler sufficiently to earn him a promotion to the rank of SS-Obersturmführer in September 1938. Later that year “the original Indiana Jones,” as some of his admirers have called him, fell from grace, possibly because of his homosexuality and/or his alcoholism. In March 1939 he was found frozen to death in the Kufstein mountains near Tyrol, in circumstances that have been disputed by “secret historians” with very similar ideas and preconceptions. Some claim he was murdered by the SS. One of his biographers insists that Rahn was himself an “Argonaut” who found the Holy Grail and heroically concealed its location so that Hitler would not be able to make use of its mystic powers.54
Rahn’s writings may not have carried much scholarly weight, but they were instrumental in establishing the Pyrenees as a sacred landscape in the Nazi imagination, where the Holy Grail and other arcane mysteries were waiting to be discovered. In November 1938 a Dutch Nazi paleontologist named Assien Böhmers visited the mountains on behalf of the SS’s esoteric research unit, the Ahnenerbe, in order to investigate Himmler’s belief in the divine origins of the Aryan race. Böhmers did not believe this theory himself; he saw this mission as an opportunity to prove his own belief that the Aryan race was descended from Cro-Magnon origins and thought he had found confirmation of this hypothesis in the antlered shamanlike painting of “the Sorcerer” in the cave complex of Les Trois-Frères in Montesquieu-Avantès, in the Ariège.
These findings did not please Himmler, who informed Böhmers that the notion that Aryans were descended from primates was “insulting to humans,” and the “Pyrenean Holy Grail” theory continued to haunt the Nazi imagination even during the war.55 According to the Catalan writer Montserrat Rico Góngora, Himmler personally visited the Catalan abbey of Santa María de Montserrat during a state visit to Barcelona in October 1940 in an attempt to find out whether the monastery really was the “marvellous castle of Montsalvat in the Pyrenees.”56 Other stories speculate that Otto Skorzeny—the SS colonel who led the rescue mission to liberate Mussolini—was sent on a secret mission to the Pyrenees in 1944, where he located a number of Cathar treasures, including the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Grail, and hid them in the Schleigeiss Glacier; and that a plane carrying the Nazi racial ideologue Alfred Rosenberg flew over Montségur during a 1944 ceremony to mark the seven hundredth anniversary of the destruction of the Cathars, and formed the shape of a giant Celtic cross in the sky as a mark of respect.
The Cathar lands of southern France have also generated more recent quasi-religious fantasies as a result of books such as Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and Michael Baigen, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln’s 1980s bestseller Holy Blood, Holy Grail (1982), which the New York Times once described as “one of the all-time great works of pop pseudohistory.” Both books were based on the conspiracy uncovered by Bérenger Saunière, the priest at the town of Rennes-le-Château near Montségur, when he found parchments hidden inside a hollow altar pillar in the town’s church in the 1890s. These documents allegedly revealed the existence of a secret centuries-old Catholic society called the Priory of Sion, supposedly established to conceal the fact that Mary Magdalene had married Jesus and escaped to France after the Crucifixion, where she founded the Merovingian dynasty of French kings, thereby transforming the san greal (Holy Grail) of Christ’s bloodline into the sang real (royal blood) of the Merovingians.
In the 1990s these documents were revealed to have been planted in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France by a fraudster named Pierre Plantard in 1956 as part of an elaborate hoax to establish his own connections to the Merovingians. This debunking has not diminished the flow of visitors to Rennes-le-Château and its environs. In December 2012 hundreds of visitors and journalists converged on the nearby village of Bugarach, in the foothills of the Eastern Pyrenees, in the belief that the world was going to end on December 21 that year and that Bugarach would be the only place left standing. This prediction appears to have originated from an Internet story that claimed that the five-thousand-year-old Mayan “Long Count Calendar” had predicted this outcome.
It was never clear why the Mayans would have selected a sleepy Pyrenean village of two hundred residents to be one of the few places left standing, or whether they agreed that the Pic du Bugarach, which overlooks the village, was a UFO landing site from which aliens would emerge to take the surviving humans to another planet. But in the febrile and often evidence-free world of the twenty-first century, this combination of Cathars, Mayans, aliens, and the end of days proved irresistible, and Bugarach found itself so overwhelmed with visitors in the winter of 2012 that canny locals were selling “Apocalypse Pizza” and “End of the World” vintage, and renting rooms for $1,600 (€1,300) a night. On December 21, dozens of journalists converged on Bugarach, none of whom reported seeing any UFOs arriving or departing. The world did not end, but the Pyrenees were once again confirmed as a treasure trove of secret histories and grand conspiracies, where ancient mysteries are always hidden, but never found.