INTRODUCTION: FROM THE SACRED MOUNTAIN
1. Friedrich Nietzche, The Gay Science, ed. Bernard Williams (1882, repr., Cambridge University Press, 2001), 230.
2. Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (Vintage, 1996).
3. Robert MacFarlane, Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination (Granta, 2008).
4. William Hazlitt, “On the Fear of Death,” in William Hazlitt, Essayist and Critic: Selections from His Writings, ed. Alexander Ireland (Frederick Warne, 1889).
5. M. Ramond, Observations on the Glacieres, and the Glaciers, in A Tour in Switzerland, vol. 2, by Helen Maria Williams, appendix (G.G. and J. Robinson, 1798), 348–49.
6. Matsuo Bashō, The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches (Penguin Books, 1966), 143.
7. Nietzsche, Gay Science, 230.
1. THE LAND
1. The Geographical Journal, col 3, no. 2, Fe., 1894, p. 52.
2. Quoted in À la découverte des Pyrénées/El descubrimiento de los Pirineos (Château Fort Musée Pyrénéen de Lourdes, 2011), 62–63 (my translation).
3. Robin Fedden, The Enchanted Mountains (John Murray, 2002), 32.
4. Harold Spender, Through the High Pyrenees (A.D. Innes, 1898), 240.
5. Jules Michelet, The Mountain (Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1886), 83.
6. Silius Italicus. Punica, vol. 1, Loeb Classical Library Edition (William Heinemann Ltd, 1927), 147.
7. Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca historica, in The Library of Diodorus Siculus, vol. 3, Loeb Classical Library edition (Loeb, 1939), 197.
8. Strabo, The Geography of Strabo, vol. 2, trans. H.C. Hamilton and W. Falconer (Henry G. Bohn, 1856).
9. Ahmed ibn Mohammed al-Makkari, The History of the Mohammedan Dynasties in Spain, vol. 1, trans. Pascual de Gayangos (Routledge, 2002), 21–22.
10. Stendhal, Travels in the South of France, trans. Elizabeth Abbott (One-World Classics, 2009), 102.
11. Emmanuel de Martonne, Geographical Regions in France (Heinemann, 1962), 184.
12. Britan Jackman, “The Pyrenees: Walking with Condors,” Daily Telegraph, February 9, 2002.
2. THE VANISHING BORDER
1. F.J. Routledge, England and the Treaty of the Pyrenees (University Press of Liverpool, 1953), 66.
2. For a more detailed description of Velázquez’s unfortunate mission to the Isle of Pheasants and the many tasks it entailed, see Carl Justi, Velázquez and His Times (Parkstone Press International, 2006).
3. Elisée Reclus, The Universal Geography, vol. II. (J.S.Virtue & Co., Limited, 1876), 97.
4. Pliny, Natural History, Preface and Books 1–7, trans H. Rackham (Folio Society, 2012), 147–48.
5. Thomas Glick, Islamic and Christian Spain in the Early Middle Ages (Brill, 2005), 53.
6. For a comprehensive history of the Peace of the Pyrenees and the Pyrenean border in general, see Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (University of California Press, 1989).
3. “AFRICA BEGINS AT THE PYRENEES”
1. Stendhal, Vie de Napoléon (Arvensa Éditions, 2015), 93 (my translation).
2. Dominique-Georges-Frédéric de Fourt de Pradt, Mémoires historiques sur la revolution d’Espagne (Perronneau, 1816), 70 (my translation).
3. William Z. Ripley, The Races of Europe: A Sociological Study (D. Appleton, 1899), 272.
4. Robert Harrison, trans., The Song of Roland (Signet Classics, 2002).
5. Albert Jean Michel de Rocca, In the Peninsula With a French Hussar (Greenhill Books, Lionel Levanthal Limited, 1990), 21.
6. Quoted in Charles Esdaile, Popular Resistance in the French Wars (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 210.
7. Vita Sackville-West, Pepita (Virago, 1986), 3.
8. Quoted in Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (University of California Press, 1989), 282.
9. Louis-Gabriel Suchet, Memoirs of the War in Spain, from 1808 to 1814, vol. 1 (Henry Colburn, 1829), 46–47.
10. Richard Ford, A Handbook for Travellers in Spain (John Murray, 1888), 514.
11. Caleb Cushing, Reminiscences of Spain, the Country, Its People, History, and Monuments (Carter, Hendee, 1833), 4.
12. Adolphe Thiers, The Pyrenees and the South of France During the Months of November and December 1822 (Treuttel and Würtz, Treuttel, Jun. and Richter, 1823), 114.
13. Ford, Handbook for Travellers in Spain, 1103.
14. Jules Michelet, The Mountain (Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1886), 74.
15. Juan Valera, “Sobre el concepto que hoy se forma de España,” Revista de España 1, no. 1 (1868), from Obras completas, vol. 2 (Aguilar, 1958), 737–51 (my translation).
16. Daniel Alexander Gómez-Ibáñez, The Western Pyrenees: Differential Evolution of the French and Spanish Borderland (Clarendon Press, 1975), 47.
17. Victor Fairén Guillén, Una encuesta sobre las regulaciones internaction-ales de pastos en los Pireneos (Instituto de Estudios Políticos, 1952).
18. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou (Penguin Books, 1990), 107.
PART II: PYRENEAN CROSSINGS
1. Will Durant and Ariel Durant, The Story of Civilization: Rousseau and Revolution: A History of Civilization in France, England, and Germany from 1756, and in the Remainder of Europe from 1715 to 1789 (Simon & Schuster, 1967), 293.
4. SCHOLARS, PILGRIMS, AND TROUBADOURS
1. Quoted in John Tolan, Petrus Alphonsi and His Medieval Readers (University of Florida, 1993), 172–73.
2. J. Nicholas Entrikin and Vincent Berdoulay, “The Pyrenees as Place: Lefebvre as Guide,” Progress in Human Geography 29, no. 2 (2005): 129–47.
3. For accounts of Gerbert’s life and his intellectual adventures in Iberia, see Nancy Marie Brown, The Abacus and the Cross: The Story of the Pope Who Brought the Light of Science to the Dark Ages (Basic Books, 2010). See also Marco Zuccato, “Gerbert of Aurillac and a Tenth-Century Jewish Channel for the Transmission of Arabic Science to the West,” Speculum 80, no. 3 (July 2003): 742–63.
4. William of Malmesbury’s Chronicles of the Kings of England. From the Earliest Period to the Reign of King Stephen, trans., J.A. Giles (Henry G. Bohn, 1847), 173.
5. Philip K. Hitti, History of the Arabs from the Earliest Times to the Present (Macmillan, 1951), 589.
6. John V. Tolan, xiii.
7. It is not known exactly which routes Peter took on his journeys to and from Spain, but the fact that he visited a number of Cluniac houses, received a donation from King Alfonso VII of Castile, and assembled his team of translators at Nájera in La Rioja suggests that he stuck very closely to the main pilgrimage route through the Pyrenees.
8. William Melczer, trans., The Pilgrim’s Guide to Santiago de Compostela (Italica Press, 1993), 93.
9. For more detail on this poignant and fascinating journey, see R.W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (Yale University Press, 1953), 20–25.
10. Quoted in Andreas Petzold, Romanesque Art (George Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1995), 18.
11. See Jeffrey A. Bowman, “The Bishop Builds a Bridge: Sanctity and Power in the Medieval Pyrenees,” Catholic Historical Review 88, no. 1 (2002): 1–16.
12. Quoted in Roger Boase, “Arab Influences on European Love-Poetry,” in The Legacy of Muslim Spain, ed. Salma Jayyusi (Brill, 1992), 465–66.
13. Ibid, 466.
14. M. Defourneaux, Les Français en Espagne aux xIe et xIIe siècles (Presse universitaires, 1949), (my translation).
15. Henry Kamen, Early Modern European Society (Routledge, 2005), 186.
16. Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (University of California Press, 1989), 174.
5. THE ZONE OF WAR
1. John Malcolm, Reminiscences of a Campaign in the Pyrenees and the South of France, in 1814 (Constable, 1828), 254.
2. Malcolm, Reminiscences of a Campaign, 260.
3. Malcolm, Reminiscences of a Campaign, 261.
4. Titus Livius (Livy), The History of Rome, trans. Rev. Canon Roberts (E.P. Dutton, 1912), bk. 21, chap. 30.
5. W.A. MacDevitt, trans., De Bello Gallico & Other Commentaries of Caius Julius Caesar (Cosimo, 2006), 238.
6. Jean Froissart, Sir Jean Froissart’s Chronicles of England, France, Spain, and the Adjoining Countries (Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1808), 273.
7. Lynne H. Nelson, trans., The Chronicle of San Juan de la Peña: A Fourteenth-Century Official History of the Crown of Aragon (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 76.
8. For an account of this little-known episode, see Jesús Gascón Pérez, “La ‘Jornada de los bearneses’: epílogo de la resistencia aragonesa contra Felipe II,” Bulletin hispanique 106, no. 2 (2004): 471–96.
9. W.F.P. Napier, History of the War in the Peninsula and in the South of France: From the Year 1807 to the Year 1814 (D. & J. Sadlier, 1873), 617.
10. Ian Fletcher, ed., Voices from the Peninsular War: Eyewitness Accounts by Soldiers of Wellington’s Army, 1808–1814 (Frontline Books, 2016), 205.
11. Roger Parkinson, The Peninsular War (Wordsworth Editions, 2000), 185.
12. Charles Esdaile, The Peninsular War (Penguin Books, 2003), 462.
13. Esdaile, Peninsular War, 463.
14. John Lynn, The Wars of Louis XIV, 1667–1714 (Longman, 1999), 159.
15. Louis-Gabriel Suchet, Memoirs of the War in Spain, from 1808 to 1814, vol. 1 (Henry Colburn, 1829), 56–57.
16. For descriptions of the resistance operations and the Nazi/Vichy response in and around Canigou, see Rosemary Bailey, Love and War in the Pyrenees (Phoenix, 2008).
17. Blaise de Monluc, The Commentaries of Messire Blaise de Montluc Mareschal of France, trans. A.W. Evans (F.G. Browne, 1913), 446.
18. Edward Bell Stephens, The Basque Provinces: Their Political State, Scenery and Inhabitants, with Adventures Amongst the Carlists and Christinos (Whittaker, 1837), v–vi.
19. C.F. Henningsen, The Most Striking Events of a Twelvemonth’s Campaign with Zumalacarregui, in Navarre and the Basque Provinces, vol. 1 (John Murray, 1836), 136.
20. James Erskine Murray, A Summer in the Pyrenees, vol. 1 (John Macrone, 1836).
21. George Wheeler, To Make the People Smile Again (Zymurgy Publishing, 2003), 42.
22. Richard Baxell, Unlikely Warriors: The British in the Spanish Civil War and the Struggle Against Fascism (Aurum Press, 2012), loc. 1525.
23. Vincent Brome, The International Brigades: Spain 1936–37 (Mayflower-Dell, 1967), 40.
24. Brome, International Brigades, 45.
25. Baxell, Unlikely Warriors, loc. 1536.
26. Baxell, Unlikely Warriors, loc. 1536.
27. Lee memorably recounts his Pyrenean adventures and his short-lived participation in the Spanish Civil War in Laurie Lee, A Moment of War: A Memoir of the Spanish Civil War (The New Press, 1994). Nevertheless, his account has been critiqued by former International Brigadiers, including Bill Alexander, who have accused him of embellishment and even falsification.
28. For a full account of Operation Reconquest, see Ferran Sanchez Agustí, Espias, contrabando, maquis y evasion: La II Guerra Mundial en los Pireneos (Editorial Milenio, 2003). More recently, Robert Gildea’s Fighters in the Shadows: A New History of the French Resistance (Harvard University Press, 2015) contains abundant information on the participation of Spanish Republican exiles in the French Resistance in the South of France.
29. For an account of the post–World War II anti-Franco resistance in the Aragonese Pyrenees, see Mercedes Yusta, ed., Historias de maquis en el Piréneo aragones (Piraeum Editorial, 1999).
30. For a biography of Sabaté, see Antonio Téllez Solà, Sabaté: Guerrilla Extraordinary (Cienfuegos Press, 1974).
31. For a fuller account of the Kruegers’ work in the Pyrenees, see Bailey, Love and War.
6. SAFE HAVENS
1. Max Aub, Obras completas, vol. 4B, stories 2 (Valencia, 2006) (my translation).
2. Quoted in Rosemary Bailey, Love and War in the Pyrenees (Phoenix, 2008), 26.
3. Ignacio de Asso, Historia de economía política de Aragón (Zaragoza, 1798), 300 (my translation).
4. Quoted in Matthew Carr, Blood and Faith: The Purging of Muslim Spain (Hurst, 2017), 308.
5. Adolphe Thiers, The Pyrenees and the South of France During the Months of November and December 1822 (Treuttel and Würtz, Treuttel, Jun. and Richter, 1823), 82.
6. Sabine Baring-Gould, A Book of the Pyrenees (E.P. Dutton, 1907), 88.
7. Arthur Koestler, Scum of the Earth (Eland Publishing, 2006), 114.
8. Mary Lowenthal Festiner, To Paint Her Life: Charlotte Salomon and the Nazi Era (Harper Collins, 1994), 119–20.
9. Koestler, Scum of the Earth, 94.
10. Lion Feuchtwanger, The Devil in France: My Encounter with Him in the Summer of 1940, trans. Elisabeth Abbott (The Viking Press, 1941), 148.
11. Josep Calvet, Las montañas de la libertad (Alianza Editorial, 2008), 46.
12. For Fittko’s account of Benjamin’s Pyrenean crossing, see Lisa Fittko, Escape Through the Pyrenees (Northwestern University Press, 1991), 103–15.
13. Frederic V. Grunfeld, Prophets Without Honour: A Background to Freud, Kafka, Einstein and Their World (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1979), 248.
14. Fittko, 111.
15. Carmina Birman, The Narrow Foothold (Hearing Eye, 2006). It is worth noting that some of the details provided by Birman regarding both the journey and Benjamin’s death do not correspond with previous accounts. She herself is not even mentioned in Fittko’s account, which may well be due to the vagaries of memory. Another unlikely theory posits that Benjamin did not commit suicide but was killed on Stalin’s orders. See “Did Stalin’s Killers Liquidate Walter Benjamin?” The Guardian, July 8, 2001.
16. There are many books on World War II escape lines. For a more unusual perspective on the Pat O’Leary line, see Antonio Téllez Solà’s biography of Francisco Ponzán Vidal, The Anarchist Pimpernel: The Anarchists in the Spanish Civil War and the Allied Escape Routes of WWII (Christie Books, 1997).
17. See Calvet, Las Montañas.
18. See Russell Braddon, Nancy Wake: SOE’s Greatest Heroine (History Press, 2009).
19. Quoted in Edward Stourton, Cruel Crossing: Escaping Hitler Across the Pyrenees (Black Swan, 2013), 248.
PART III: THE MAGIC MOUNTAINS
1. Heinrich Heine’s Memoirs: From His Works, Letters, and Conversations, vol. 2, ed. Gustav Karpeles (William Heineman, 1910), 118.
7. PIONEERS: THE “DISCOVERY” OF THE PYRENEES
1. L. Ramond, Voyages au Mont Perdu: Et dans la partie adjacente des Hautes-Pyrénées (Chez Berlin, 1801), 347 (my translation).
2. Henry Swinburne, Supplement to Mr. Swinburne’s Travels, Being a Journey from Bayonne to Marseille (P. Elmsly, 1787), 28–29.
3. Swinburne, Supplement to Mr. Swinburne’s Travels, 18.
4. À la découverte des Pyrénées, 165.
5. À la découverte des Pyrénées, 129.
6. Henri Béraldi, preface to Cent ans aux Pyrénées, 7 vols., edited from 1898 to 1904 (repr., Les amis du livre Pyrénéen, 1977) (my translation).
7. Louis Ramond de Carbonnières, Travels in the Pyrenees: Containing a Description of the Principal Summits, Passes, and Vallies, trans. F. Gold (Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Browne, 1813), 132–33.
8. Jules Michelet, The Mountain (Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1886), 79.
9. Michelet, The Mountain, 43.
10. Quoted in À la decouverte, 118 (my translation).
11. Ramond, Travels in the Pyrenees, 58.
12. For a biography of Russell, see Rosemary Bailey, The Man Who Married a Mountain: A Journey Through the French Pyrenees (Transworld Publishers, 2005).
13. Bailey, Man Who Married a Mountain, 348.
14. Bailey, Man Who Married a Mountain, 16.
15. Bailey, Man Who Married a Mountain, 337.
16. Baron Bertrand de Lassus, “Midnight and Dawn on the Summit of the Great Vignemale,” Alpine Journal 102 (1997): 197–205.
17. Quoted in Kev Reynolds, Mountains of the Pyrenees (Cicerone Press, 1982), 27.
18. Reynolds, Mountains of the Pyrenees, 279.
19. Charles Packe, A Guide to the Pyrenees: Especially Intended for the Use of Mountaineers (Longmans, Green, 1867), 12.
20. Packe, Guide to the Pyrenees, 26.
21. Francis Galton, Memories of My Life (E.P. Dutton, 1909), 189.
22. For accounts of “heroic-age” pyreneists and their descendants, see Reynolds, Mountains of the Pyrenees.
23. Bailey, Man Who Married a Mountain, 188.
24. Douglas Busk, The Delectable Mountains (Hodder & Stoughton, 1946), 44.
25. See Jerome Lamy, “‘The Pyrenees Are Not Hollow’: The Mountain as a Boundary Object,” História, ciências, saúde—Manguinhos, no. 3 (July–September 2009).
26. Norbert Casteret, Ten Years Under the Earth (1939; repr. Zephyrus Press, 1975), 91.
27. Casteret, Ten Years Under the Earth, 11.
28. Henry Blackburn, The Pyrenees: A Description of Summer Life at French Watering Places (Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1867), 179–80.
29. Victor Hugo, Victor Hugo’s Letters to His Wife and Others (The Alps and Pyrenees), trans. Nathan Haskell Dole (Estes and Lauriat, 1895), 297.
8. VISITORS
1. George Sand, Story of My Life: The Autobiography of George Sand (State University of New York Press, 1991), 855.
2. Henry Swinburne, Travels Through Spain in the Years 1775 and 1776 (J. Davis; for P. Elmsly, 1787), 4.
3. Quoted in Jay Williams, ed., Life in the Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press, 1967), 256.
4. For a more extensive discussion of changing cultural attitudes to mountains, see Robert MacFarlane, Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination (Granta, 2008); Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (Penguin Books, 2001).
5. Titus Lucretius Carus, De rerum natura, trans. H.A.J. Munro (Deighton Bell and Co., 1864).
6. Petrarch, “The Ascent of Mount Ventoux,” in Selections from the Canzoniere and Other Works, trans. Mark Musa (Oxford University Press, 1999).
7. Quoted in Douglas W. Freshfield, The Life of Horace Benédict de Saussure (Edward Arnold, 1920), 9.
8. Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (University of Washington Press, 1997), 277.
9. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (Oxford Paperbacks, 2008).
10. Charles-François Brisseau de Mirbel, Mountain Adventures in the Various Countries of the World: Selected from the Narratives of Celebrated Travellers (Roberts, Brothers, 1869), 114.
11. Ann Radciffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho (Oxford University Press, 1998), 42.
12. Louisa Stuart Costello, Bèarn and the Pyrenees: A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre, vol. II (Richard Bentley, 1844), 12–13.
13. Victor Hugo, Victor Hugo’s Letters to His Wife and Others (The Alps and Pyrenees), trans. Nathan Haskell Dole (Estes and Lauriat, 1895), 298.
14. Joseph Wilson and Robert Andrew Riddell, A History of Mountains, Geographical and Mineralogical, vol. 2, (Nicol, 1809), 81–83.
15. William Gilpin, Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; On Picturesque Travel; and On Sketching Landscape: To Which Is Added a Poem, On Landscape Painting (R. Blamire, 1794).
16. Henry David Inglis, Switzerland, the South of France, and the Pyrenees (Whittaker and Co., 1835), 80.
17. Edith Wharton, A Motor-Flight Through France (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1908), 104.
18. Rosemary Bailey, The Man Who Married a Mountain: A Journey Through the French Pyrenees (Transworld Publishers, 2005), 323.
19. Bailey, Man Who Married a Mountain, 111.
20. Charles Baudelaire, “Incompability,” PoemHunter.com, 2004.
21. Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen, trans. Louise Varèse (1869; repr., New Directions, 1969), 28.
22. For full text, see Algernon Charles Swinburne, Selected Poems (Routledge, 2002), 246–49.
23. Algernon Charles Swinburne, “Victor Hugo: En Voyage,” North American Review 151, no. 409 (December 1890): 650–61.
24. Heinrich Heine’s Memoirs: From His Works, Letters, and Conversations, vol. 2, ed. Gustav Karpeles (William Heineman, 1910), 119.
25. For full text, see Heinrich Heine, Atta Troll, trans. Herman Scheffauer (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1913).
26. Belinda Jack, George Sand: A Woman’s Life Writ Large (Vintage, 2001), 124. Sand’s intoxication with the Pyrenean landscape was also influenced by her complex emotional relationships with her entourage. Her Pyrenean journey coincided with a crisis in her marriage that would eventually lead to separation. In the Pyrenees she became aware for the first time of her bisexuality—a discovery that produced a love triangle involving her husband and a male and female companion.
27. Quoted in Patrick Waddington, Turgenev and George Sand: An Improbable Entente (Barnes & Noble Books, 1981), 25.
28. Hilaire Belloc, The Pyrenees (Methuen & Co., 1909), 314.
29. Dominique Jarrassé, 2,000 ans de thermalisme. Economie, patrimoine, rites et pratiques (Pu Blaise Pascal, 1999), 168 (my translation).
30. For an interesting discussion of Schrader’s views on the relationship between art and cartography, see Hélène Saule-Sorbé, “En torno a algunas ‘orografías’ realizadas por Franz Schrader en los Pirineos españoles,” Ería 64–65, 2004: 207–20.
31. The establishment of the “Chemin Mackintosh” was largely due to the efforts of Robin Crichton, president of L’Association Charles Rennie Mackintosh in Roussillon and author of On the Trail of Monsieur Mackintosh: The Travels and Paintings of Charles Rennie Mackintosh in the Pyrénées Orientales 1923–1927 (Robin Chrichton, 2014). For more details on Mackintosh’s last years, see also John McKean, Charles Rennie Mackintosh: Architect, Artist, Icon (Lomond Books, 2000).
32. Anna Klumpke, Rosa Bonheur: The Artist’s (Auto) Biography (University of Michigan Press, 2001), 139.
33. Stanley Meisler, Shocking Paris: Soutine, Chagall and the Outsiders of Montparnasse (St. Martin’s Press, 2015), 39.
34. Graham Robb, The Discovery of France (Picador, 2007), 307–10.
35. Sarah Bernhardt, My Double Life: The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt (William Heinemann, 1907), 60.
36. Henry Blackburn, The Pyrenees: A Description of Summer Life at French Watering Places (Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1867), 97.
37. François René Chateaubriand, Mémoirs D’Outre-Tombe, trans. A.S. Kline, Poetry in Translation, 2005, book xxxi, chap 1: sec 1, https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Chateaubriand/ChateaubriandMemoirsBookXXXI.php.
38. Steve Cracknell, If You Only Walk Long Enough: Exploring the Pyrenees (Steve Cracknell, 2016), 86.
39. Jarrassé, 2,000 ans de thermalisme, 168.
40. Edwin Asa Dix, A Midsummer Drive Through the Pyrenees (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1890), 269.
41. Taine did not like Eaux-Bonnes at all, and spent some four pages doing as much as he could to put off potential visitors, in Hippolyte Taine, A Tour Through the Pyrenees (Henry Holt and Company, 1875), 120–24.
42. Octave Mirbeau, Twenty-One Days of a Neurasthenic, trans. Justin Vicari (Dalkey Archive Press, 2014), 3.
43. Blackburn, Pyrenees, 84.
44. Leslie Stephen, The Playground of Europe (Archivum Press, 2007).
45. Thomas Clifton Paris, Letters from the Pyrenees During Three Months’ Pedestrian Wanderings Amidst the Wildest Scenes of the French and Spanish Mountains in the Summer of 1842 (John Murray, 1843), iv.
46. Inglis, Switzerland, 99.
47. Sand, Story of My Life, 856.
48. Bernhardt, My Double Life, 60.
49. E. John B. Allen, The Culture and Sport of Skiing: From Antiquity to World War II (University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), 111.
50. See Bill McGann and Carol McGann, The Story of the Tour de France, vol. 1 (Bill and Carol McGann, 2006). Also see Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Le Tour (Simon & Schuster, 2013).
51. Edith Wharton, A Motor-Flight Through France, 106.
52. Quoted in Michael Foot, “Trotsky’s Diary—a Poignant Document,” International Socialist Review 20, no. 4 (Fall 1959): 122.
53. To be fair to Rahn, he was not the only writer to describe the Cathars in these terms. The nineteenth-century French historian Napoléon Peyrat described the caves and tunnels around Montségur as “our wild Capitoline, our aerial tabernacle, our ark sheltering the remains of Aquitaine from a sea of blood.” Quoted in Stephen O’Shea, The Perfect Heresy: The Life and Death of the Cathars (Profile Books, 2000), 251.
54. See, for example, Nigel Graddon, Otto Rahn and the Quest for the Holy Grail: The Amazing Life of the Real “Indiana Jones” (Adventures Unlimited Press, 2008).
55. For an account of Böhmers’s career and a history of the Ahnenerbe, see Heather Pringle, The Master Plan: Himmler’s Scholars and the Holocaust (Hachette Books, 2007).
56. Graham Keeley, “Revealed: Himmler’s Secret Quest to locate the ‘Aryan Holy Grail,’” The Independent, February 6, 2007.
9. LOST KINGDOMS
1. Jacint Verdaguer, Mount Canigó: A Tale of Catalonia, trans. Ronald Puppo (Barcino-Tamesis, 2015).
2. Norman Davies, Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half-Forgotten Europe (Penguin, 2012).
3. James Erskine Murray, A Summer in the Pyrenees, vol. 2 (John Macrone, 1836), 102.
4. Francis Miltoun, Castles and Chateaux of Old Navarre and the Basque Provinces, (L.C. Page & Company, 1907), v.
5. Jonathan Sumption, The Hundred Years War, vol. 2 (Faber & Faber, 2011), 317. For an English-language biography of Phoebus with detailed analysis of his political relationships with France and his neighbors, see Richard Vernier, Lord of the Pyrenees: Gaston Febus, Count of Foix (1331–1391) (Cambridge University Press, 2007).
6. John Joliffe, ed. and trans., Froissart’s Chronicles (Harvill Press, 1967), 283.
7. Quoted in Vernier, Lord of the Pyrenees, 167.
8. Louisa Stuart Costello, Beam and the Pyrenees, vol. II, 178.
9. Lady G. Chatterton, The Pyrenees: With Excursions into Spain, vol. 1 (Saunders and Otley, 1843), 267.
10. Costello, Béarn and the Pyrenees, vol. II, 55–56. Costello claimed to have encountered one of these historical ghosts herself, in the form of “a grey transparent figure in armour, the head covered in a helmet,” which she glimpsed during a walk near the castle.
11. Quoted in Graham Robb, The Discovery of France (Picador, 2007), 20–21.
12. Henry Swinburne, Travels Through Spain, 13.
13. Jules Michelet, The Mountain (Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1886), 75.
14. James Erskine Murray, A Summer in the Pyrenees, vol. 1 (John Macrone, 1836), 162.
15. Harold Spender, Through the High Pyrenees (A.D. Innes, 1898), 58.
16. Bayard Taylor, By-Ways of Europe (G.B. Putnam and Son, 1869), 267.
17. Lewis Gaston Leary, Andorra, the Hidden Republic (McBride, Nast & Company, 1912), 97.
18. V.C. Scott O’Connor, Travels in the Pyrenees: Including Andorra and the Coast from Barcelona to Carcassone (Forgotten Books, 2017), 278.
19. “An Unknown Republic,” Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal 10, No. 244 (September 2, 1848): 165–66.
20. Dix, A Midsummer Drive, 174
21. Walter Kirchner, “Mind, Mountain, and History,” Journal of the History of Ideas 2, no. 4 (October 1950): 412–47.
22. Stephen O’Shea, The Perfect Heresy: The Life and Death of the Cathars (Profile Books, 2000), 251.
23. Quoted in Charles Alfred Downer, Frédéric Mistral: Poet and Leader in Provence (The Columbia University Press, 1901), 93.
24. D. Víctor Balaguer, Los Pireneos; Trilogía en Verso Catalán con Traducción en Prosa Castellana (Talleres de Henrich y Ca, 1892), 55–56 (my translation).
25. Robert Hughes, Barcelona (Harvill, 1992), 348.
26. Hughes, Barcelona, 348.
27. Elisabet Andreu, Francisco Lagardera Otero, and Glòria Rovira Bahillo, “El excursionismo Catalán y los deportes de montaña,” Apunts: educación física y deportes 41 (1995): 80–86.
10. MOUNTAIN PEOPLE
1. Louis Ramond de Carbonnières, Travels in the Pyrenees: Containing a Description of the Principal Summits, Passes, and Vallies, trans. F. Gold (Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Browne, 1813), 63.
2. Strabo, The Geography of Strabo, vol. 2, trans. H.C. Hamilton and W. Falconer (Henry G. Bohn, 1856), 232.
3. William Melczer, trans., The Pilgrim’s Guide to Santiago de Compostela (Italica Press, 1993), 92.
4. Melczer, Pilgrim’s Guide, 94–95.
5. Henry David Inglis, Switzerland, the South of France, and the Pyrenees (Whittaker and Co., 1835), 86.
6. Comte de Saint-Saud. Contribution à la carte des Pyrénées Espagnoles (Édouard Privat, Libraire-Éditeur, 1892), 17.
7. David R. Blanks, “Transhumance in the Middle Ages: The Eastern Pyrenees,” Journal of Peasant Studies 23, no. 1 (October 1995): 64–87.
8. For details of shepherds’ lives in this period, see also Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou (Penguin Books, 1990).
9. Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis, A Short Account of the Conduct of Madame de Genlis, Since the Revolution, to Which Is Subjoined a Letter to M. de Chartres, and the Shepherds of the Pyrennees, a Fragment (R. Morison & Son, 1796).
10. Ramond, Travels, 64–65. Ramond’s observations of the inhabitants of the Pyrenees were another indication of the changing attitudes toward mountains and their inhabitants in this period. For the alpinist Horace Benédict de Saussure, “The human interest in the Alps is no less than the physical . . . if there is anywhere in Europe where one may hope to find men who have exchanged the savage for the civilised state without losing their natural simplicity, it is in the Alps that one may find them.” Quoted in Douglas W. Freshfield, The Life of Horace Benédict de Saussure, 289. Ramond’s belief that the shepherds of the Pyrenees embodied “a sentiment equivalent to the idea of liberty” was written very much in this spirit.
11. Quoted in Sabine Baring-Gould, A Book of the Pyrenees (E.P. Dutton, 1907), 30.
12. Edwin Asa Dix, A Midsummer Drive Through the Pyrenees (G.B. Putnam’s Sons, 1890), 245.
13. Dix, Midsummer Drive, 246.
14. Jean Louis Matocq, My Journey from the Pyrenees to California (Page Publishing, 2015).
15. Erskine Murray, A Summer in the Pyrenees, vol. 1, 49–50.
16. Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou, 114.
17. For a general history of the Bardaxí family and history of the Aragonese borderlands in this period, see Severino Pallaruelo, Bardaxí (Severino Pallaruelo Campo, 2002).
18. Théophile Gautier, A Romantic in Spain (Signal Books, 2001), 15.
19. Henningsen, The Most Striking Events, 135.
20. Ramond, Travels, 104.
21. Rosemary Bailey, The Man Who Married a Mountain: A Journey Through the French Pyrenees (Transworld Publishers, 2005), 339.
22. Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (University of California Press, 1989), 241.
11. WILD THINGS
1. Peter Sahlins, Forest Rites: The War of the Demoiselles in Nineteenth-Century France (Harvard University Press, 1994), 6.
2. Phoebus’s manual/homage has gone through many variants and adaptions over the centuries. The quotes and illustrations cited here are from Medieval Hunting Scenes (“The Hunting Book” by Gaston Phoebus), text by Gabriel Bise, trans. J. Peter Tallon (Miller Graphics, 1978).
3. For a full description of these gruesome procedures, see Charles Richard Weld, The Pyrenees: West and East (Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans & Roberts, 1859), 220–30.
4. Erskine Murray, A Summer in the Pyrenees, vol. 1, 243.
5. Edward North Buxton, Short Stalks or Hunting Camps North, South, East, and West (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1892), 254.
6. T.H. Hollingsworth, “A Basque Superstition,” Folklore 2, no. 1 (1891): 132–33.
7. Henry Blackburn, The Pyrenees: A Description of Summer Life at French Watering Places (Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1867), 143–44.
8. For a short account of bear reintroduction, in English, see Mick Webb, Bear Mountain: The Battle to Save the Pyrenean Brown Bear (Guardian Books, 2012). Also see M. Lyons, “The Death of Canelle and the Re-invention of the Pyrenees,” French History and Civilisation: Papers from the George Rudé Seminar 6 (2015): 279–91, www.h-france.net/rude/rudepapers.html.
9. Charles Fréger, Wilder Mann: The Image of the Savage (Dewi Lewis Publishing, 2012).
10. Rosemary Garland Thompson, ed., Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (New York University Press, 1996), 78.
11. Weld, The Pyrenees, 225.
12. Sabine Baring-Gould, A Book of the Pyrenees (E.P. Dutton, 1907), 217.
13. Sahlins, Forest Rites, 30.
14. There are a number of accounts of de Lancre’s reign of terror in Labourd. See Julio Caro Baroja, The World of the Witches (Phoenix Press, 2001); P.G. Maxwell-Stuart, Witch Hunters, Professional Prickers, Unwitchers & Witch Finders of the Renaissance (Tempus, 2005).
15. Mark Kurlansky, The Basque History of the World (Vintage Books, 2000), 95.
16. Baroja, World of the Witches, 176.
17. Henry Charles Lea, A History of the Inquisition in Spain, vol. 3 (Bibliobazaar, 2009), 234.
18. Rodney Gallop, A Book of the Basques (University of Nevada Press, 1970), 58.
19. Elizabeth Gaskell, An Accursed Race (Floating Press, 2016).
20. Louis Ramond de Carbonnières, Travels in the Pyrenees: Containing a Description of the Principal Summits, Passes, and Vallies, trans. F. Gold (Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Browne, 1813), 228. Ramond’s views on the “cretinism” of the Cagots were in keeping with the assumptions of his time, which often depicted the inhabitants of mountains in this way, regardless of whether they were Cagots. The Montagnards of the Valais region of the Alps were commonly depicted as cretins, and the philosopher Rousseau was one of the few eighteenth-century intellectuals to challenge this stereotype, when he praised the inhabitants of the Valais in the notes for his projected History of the Valais.
21. Ramond, Travels, 251.
22. Weld, The Pyrenees, 99.
12. GHOST TOWNS
1. Ismael Vaccaro and Oriol Beltran, eds., Social and Ecological History of the Pyrenees: State, Market, and Landscape (Left Coast Press, 2010), 97.
2. Ignacio de Asso, Historia de Economía Política de Aragón (repr. 1798, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Estación de Estudios Pirenaicos, 1947), 302.
3. Lorenzo Mediano, The Frost on His Shoulders, trans. Lisa Dillman (Europa Editions, 2012), 29.
4. Robert Laxalt, Sweet Promised Land (University of Nevada Press, 2007), 104.
5. This situation may be about to change. In October 2017, the regional government of Aragon announced plans to reopen the station as a hotel. That same month the regional government of Bordeaux told the BBC that it would be seeking to raise the 200 million euros required to re-open the railway line on the French side. After more than fifty years, Canfranc may yet have a future after all. See “Is Europe’s ghostliest railway station about to rise again?” BBC News Magazine, October 1, 2017, www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-41445860.
EPILOGUE: THE FUTURE IN THE PAST: THE PYRENEES IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
1. Robert Laxalt, “Enduring Pyrenees,” National Geographic 146, no. 6 (December 1974).
2. G. Hayes, Environmental Protest and the State in France (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 190.
3. Joseph Wilson and Robert Andrew Riddell, A History of Mountains, 95.
4. Antoine-François Lomet, Mémoire sur les eaux minérales et les établissements thermaux des Pyrénées (1794). Quoted in Steve Cracknell, If You Only Walk Long Enough: Exploring the Pyrenees (Steve Cracknell, 2016), 114–15.
5. Richard Ford, A Handbook for Travellers in Spain (John Murray, 1888), 515.
6. James Erskine Murray, A Summer in the Pyrenees, vol. 1 (John Macrone, 1836), 155.
7. Thomas Clifton Paris, Letters from the Pyrenees, 182.
8. European Environment Agency, Alps—the Impacts of Climate Change in Europe Today, March 17, 2010.