A Book of the Pyrenees

The population here as elsewhere in the mountains is dwindling owing to emigration, mainly to South America, especially to the Argentine Republic. This is largely due to the peasant seeing the comfort and comparative wealth of his brother peasant in the plain, the proprietor of vineyard and olive-yard, and of mulberry trees that feed silkworms. He returns to his Alpine pastures sulky and dissatisfied with his condition. He is unwilling to change his native, deeply-rooted customs of farming, that are unscientific and wasteful, incapable maybe of realizing that he might do better if he adopted newer methods.

“Nevertheless,” says M. Ardouin-Dumazet, “he might lead a better existence if he could be brought to limit the quantity of his cattle to that number which he could rear suitably; if he would consent to make a practical use of the milk of his flocks. But everywhere in Ariège one finds every little property support three times as many beasts as the soil can well sustain; the result is lean cattle, giving poor meat and milk, giving consequently but an insufficient return of revenue.

“However, nowhere has the problem of the renovation of the pastures and the animals that overrun it been more studied and theoretically resolved. The Board of Forestry has shown by example how that the extent of meadowland and the quality of the grass might be largely extended. But everywhere it encounters invincible routine.

“Every hamlet, every farm has its stables, in which during the winter the beasts are crowded in conditions of hygiene absolutely deplorable. Air, light, litter are wanting; the fodder is measured out sparingly. If the winter be long there is dearth, for the number of beasts is out of all proportion to the resources of the forage.

“So soon as the weather becomes mild, at once the animals are despatched to the pastures or the waste lands; too numerous for the space, they ruin the turf and trample up the soil. The high pastures are squandered, and, above all, are not kept up. Juniper and rhododendrons invade them without the mountaineers concerning themselves about it. The agents of the Forestry have shown them how to get rid of these shrubs by eradication and burning, and how to make the ashes fertilize the meadows; they have shown them how by irrigation to enhance the quantity and quality of the herbage. This has been seen, understood, but not followed. Channels for irrigation have been made by the foresters and abandoned. The watering places for the cattle are choked. The paths rendering access to the mountain pastures are not kept up. The carelessness of the herdsmen surpasses all that could be imagined. It makes one despair.”

And the only remedy for their poverty that they can conceive is to turn their children out into the roads to beg for sous.

A watering-place at Aulus is coming into fashion. It is reached from S. Girons by a good road, and is distant from it thirty-three kilometres; Aulus lies high up in the valley of the Garbet.

On leaving S. Girons – about which I say nothing, as concerning it nothing can be said – the factory of La Moulasse is passed, where cigarette papers are manufactured in large quantities. The man who started making them was named Jean Bardon, and he put his initials on the little books of cigarette papers, with a lozenge between, thus J.◊.B. This was read as Job, and such papers acquired the name and became famous as Job’s cigarette papers. The name has been accepted on the spot, and the sources of the Moulasse that feeds the factory are now called “les sources de Job.”

Vic, now a little village of 150 inhabitants, was once a Roman station, and remained of sufficient consequence in the Middle Ages to give to S. Girons the name of Bourg-sous-Vic. It has a little church with three Romanesque apses, and a ceiling of the sixteenth century with paintings in squares. Beside the church is a Sully elm. Such elms were planted throughout the country as token of rejoicing in 1593, when Henry IV abjured Calvinism and joined the Catholic Church.

Oust also speaks of the Roman occupation; the name is derived from Augusta. At Oust the road leaves the valley of the Salat to ascend its tributary vale of the Garbet; to the south snowy crests appear and the cascade of Arse comes in view. The Nine Springs is passed, supposed to have an underground course from the marshy lake of Lhers, at a distance of four miles. Usually it gives but little water; but after a storm the source bursts forth suddenly with violence and pours down in cascade over the rocks.

Aulus lies in an extremely agreeable situation, surrounded by well-wooded mountains, above which soar snowy peaks. The place was well known to the Romans, who worked there the mines of silver-lead. As a watering-place it is furnished with a casino, a park, and theatre in which every evening during the season comedies and farces are performed; and in the park a band plays twice a day. Old Aulus lay on the farther side of the river, but the new site is better exposed to the sun. Aulus lies in a cul-de-sac; no road goes farther – at least none that can be utilized by a carriage. Some little mountain tarns are objects of a visit by those who spend a few days at Aulus, ascending to them on the backs of mules. The largest of these lie in the valleys scooped out of the mass of the Pic de Bassiès, 8165 feet.

But it must be allowed that in this portion of the chain the Pyrenees go in for breadth rather than height. In fact, in Ariège they become somewhat dishevelled, unwind, and straggle into separate threads. The loftiest ridge is that along which runs the frontier; the second is that which starts from the Pic de Camporeile, and is called the Montagne de Tabe, attaining in the Pic de Campzas only to 7670 feet. The third chain is the limestone Planturel that reaches its supreme elevation in the Montagne de Roquefixade, 3010 feet. This is a curious ridge running parallel with the Pyrenees, very regular, but cut through in several places, and ending at Foix. Those who desire to visit a portion of the Pyrenees less in resort than the mountains of the Haute Garonne and the Hautes Pyrénées will not fail to find in this section many delightful sites.

CHAPTER XVII

FOIX

Department of Ariège – Watershed – The counts of Foix – Raymond Roger – The Albigenses – Abuses in the Church – Manicheism – Council of Albi – Innocent III – Murder of Peter of Castelnau – Raymond VI of Toulouse – Crusade proclaimed – Simon de Montfort – Subtlety of the Pope – Massacre at Béziers – And at Cascassonne – Battle of Muret – Council of the Lateran – A second Crusade – Simon de Montfort killed – Count Roger Bernard – Béarn annexed – The town of Foix – The Castle – S. Volusinian – Nailmakers – Hermitage – Grotto de l’Herme – Mas d’Azil – The River Ariège – Tarascon – Richelieu – Ste. Quiterie – Iron mines – Sabarthès – Vicdessos – Iron industry – Cavern of Lombrive – Slaughter and smothering of heretics – Les Cabannes – Lordat – Talc – Ax-les-Thermes – Self-created nobles – Hôtel Dieu – Andorra – The Republic – The capital – Urgel – The Count of Spain – His death.

The county of Foix, now constituting the major portion of the department of Ariège, is and always was in Languedoc. The Couserans was, however, ever regarded as forming a part of Gascony. The ridge between the Volp and the Salat separates two hydrographic basins and two provinces. Geographically the department of Ariège belongs nevertheless to the basin of the Garonne; all its streams, with the exception of a few at the extreme east, flow into that great artery, and finally discharge into the Atlantic. Linguistically only the Couserans is Gascon; yet Foix from an early date was united to Béarn and Bigorre.

Of the earliest history of the counts of Foix we know very little. Roger Bernard, who died in 1188, was an excellent prince. His son, Raymond Roger, lived in difficult times, and was involved in the troubles arising out of the attempt of Pope Innocent III to stamp out the heresy of the Albigenses.

To understand the spread of this heresy and the Crusade which devastated these fair lands in the South, a few words must be said.

There can be little doubt that Christianity had not struck deep roots in Languedoc. The clergy had acquired but a smattering of Latin, and a meagre knowledge of doctrine in the monastic schools. They entered on their cures not much raised above their parishioners in culture, and in morals not infrequently sank below their level. Enforced clerical celibacy was evaded, but this evasion left a scar on the conscience. Bishoprics and abbacies were the provision of cadets of noble houses, whether religiously or morally qualified was of no account.

In what is now the department of Ariège, no bigger than an ordinarily sized English county, there were three episcopal sees – S. Lizier, Pamiers, and Mirepoix – and many abbeys.

A persecution of the Manichees in the Byzantine Empire sent a stream of refugees into Lombardy, Provence, and Languedoc, and these heretics speedily acquired a strong hold on the popular imagination. The Church had done so little to awaken the spiritual life in the souls of men, that instinctively, but blindly, they turned to welcome such as promised something better.

The Cathari, i.e. Puritans, as they called themselves, offered a very simple creed and easy conditions of salvation. The fundamental principle of this religion was a Dualism of Good and Evil principles, equally matched; the Evil Principle, the author of the visible Creation; the Good Principle, the author of the invisible, the Spiritual world. The opposition of matter and spirit formed the basis of their moral system. All that pertained to the body, all its functions, its needs, its passions, were of the Evil One; all the aspirations of the soul emanated from the Good Principle. To the people of Provence and Languedoc and Gascony the Cathari seemed to be inoffensive, self-denying enthusiasts. These had their high-priests – the “Perfect” or “Very Elect” – and it was the function of these men to “console” the believers; but the sacrament of Consolation was never administered till it was supposed that a believer was on his death-bed, for this reason, that after it had been administered the recipient might not touch food under pain of committing the unpardonable sin. If there should appear signs of convalescence after the performance of the rite, the person consoled was bled to death, or given pounded glass to swallow.

This new Manichæism offered to the people of the South just what they wanted. They had set before them a class of enthusiasts, the Very Elect, who led austere lives; but they themselves were not required to adopt a life of abstinence, even of self-restraint, for at death free justification was offered them by a simple formula. Moreover, the theological system of the Cathari was simplicity itself.

The whole of the South was infected. A council, held at Albi in 1176, condemned the heresy, and thenceforth the heretics were called Albigenses.

The princes, notably the counts of Toulouse and of Foix, did not interfere. The Albigenses were inoffensive people. If they held odd opinions, that was their own affair, with which their feudal lords were not concerned to meddle.

But the Court of Rome thought otherwise. The flow of contributions into its treasury from the rich South dwindled to nothing. What to the Pope was even more serious was that his authority was openly flouted.

Pope Innocent – is there not bitter satire in the name – in 1203 sent a legate into the southern provinces, Peter of Castelnau by name. This man visited Toulouse, but his efforts there to confute the heresy failed completely. Hopeless of success and mortified in his vanity Peter appealed to Pope Innocent to adopt drastic measures, and Innocent bade him require Raymond, Count of Toulouse, to suppress Albigensianism throughout his dominions by fire and sword. He was ordered, on pain of excommunication, to become the inquisitor and executioner of his subjects. At the same time he deposed Raymond, Bishop of Toulouse, an amiable, liberal-minded man, and put in his place the firebrand Foulques, who had been a troubadour, and notorious for his licentious verses.

Raymond VI of Toulouse promptly refused to do what was required of him, whereupon Innocent, in 1207, pronounced his excommunication.

Possibly the Count may have let slip some expression of disgust at the conduct of the papal legate, and a wish to be well rid of him, as did Henry II with reference to Becket. The result was the same; a knight killed Peter of Castelnau in 1208 as he was crossing the Rhone. This filled up the measure of Innocent’s wrath. He hurled the most dreadful imprecations against the Count, and loudly summoned all Christendom to a war of extermination against the Albigenses. “Anathema to the Count of Toulouse! Remission of all sins to such as arm against these pestilential Provincials. Go forward, soldiers of Christ! May the heretics perish out of the land, and let colonies of Christians be established in their room!”

Dukes and bishops, counts and viscounts, flew to the standard of the Cross, eager to glut themselves on the spoil of the South, so rich with merchandise, and at the same time to gain eternal salvation by violation and murder. Three armies invaded the South under the supreme command of a needy northern knight, Simon de Montfort.

The Pope was as subtle as he was remorseless. In order to weaken the opposition in the South he had entered into negociation with Raymond of Toulouse, and had deluded him into expectations of pardon, till the Crusaders were on him. They began with Béziers, although the viscount was known to be a Catholic. The city was taken and the inhabitants massacred. The Abbot of Citeaux, the legate, wrote regretfully to Innocent that he could only answer for having cut the throats of twenty thousand.

Then the papal host marched to Cascassonne, where they hung fifty prisoners, and burned four hundred Albigenses alive.

Raymond was now offered pardon if he would dismiss his soldiers, level his castles and the walls of his towns, give the Inquisition a free hand in his domains, and make every householder pay a tax of four deniers to the papal treasury. The Count indignantly refused, and the legate again sounded the attack. Raymond was defeated at Castelnaudary, and compelled to fly to Aragon. The conquerors seized on his territory, which the needy knights of the north parcelled out among themselves; and they diverted themselves in hunting out the heretics and burning them.

Urged on by his kinsman, the Count of Toulouse, Peter II, King of Aragon, passed the Pyrenees with an army, and was at once joined by the Count of Foix and many other nobles. A battle was fought at Muret in 1213, in which the King was killed, the army routed, and the nobles of Languedoc dispersed. This sealed the fate of the country. The Council of the Lateran, held two years later, ratified the deposition of Raymond, who, along with the counts of Foix and Cominges, had appeared before the Council, with bitter complaints in their mouths of the way in which their subjects had been slaughtered wholesale and the country laid waste. At once up sprang Foulques, Bishop of Toulouse. “Foix,” said he, “swarms with heretics. The sister of the Count intercepted and cut to pieces six thousand Germans, Crusaders, on their way to join the legate.”

“Soldiers of the Cross!” retorted the Count of Foix fearlessly. “They were mere robbers, committing every possible outrage in the country.”

Then the Baron de Vilamour rose, and in a cold voice gave a detailed account of the horrors, the rapes, the murders, the ravages committed by the Soldiers of the Cross, those sent forth by the Holy See with assurance of gaining Heaven thereby. As he spoke Innocent’s head sank on his breast, and he heaved a sigh; some sense of shame stole into his heart. He went to meet his account in 1216, and was succeeded by Honorius III.

Toulouse, the whole South, writhed under the despotism of Simon de Montfort, and called back its exiled count. A new Crusade was preached. Remission of sins was offered to all who would glean what the first locust swarm had left, and massacre such as had been spared. Excommunication was again launched against the Count of Toulouse and the Count of Foix. In an attack on Toulouse Simon de Montfort was killed, and the command was taken by Prince Louis of France. Before this vast army the cities of Languedoc opened their gates. Count Raymond and he of Foix bowed to the storm. Louis died of exhaustion on his return, after having secured the submission of almost the whole land.

Count Roger Bernard of Foix was excommunicated in 1228, and was forced to subscribe to the most degrading terms. The truce lasted eight years. In 1237 he was summoned to appear and answer for his orthodoxy before the papal Inquisitors quartered in his own domains, and holding their court in his own castle. Because he refused he was again excommunicated. He was compelled to submit in 1240, and died in the ensuing year.

The horrors of the extirpation of heresy continued till 1244, when the last of the strongholds of the Albigenses was taken, and two hundred of them were burnt alive without a trial.

After that all trace of them gradually disappears.

Bernard Roger III (1265) married Margaret de Moncada, second daughter of Gaston de Béarn, and as she was heiress, he annexed her territories, and thenceforth the history of Foix is merged in that of Béarn.

Foix, in local patois Fouch, is situated at the junction of the Arget with the Ariège, and where, most conveniently for military purposes, a rock shoots up, abrupt and bold, inviting the mediæval noble to plant his castle on the summit. The castle never was a palace like that of Pau; it never was anything but a stronghold. When the counts became lords of Béarn they abandoned their ancient nest, which if secure was inconvenient, and betook themselves to their own creations at Mazères, Orthez, and Pau. The town occupies a triangle where the two rivers already mentioned unite. It is a dull place, its sole feature being the castle, like a very plain man with a very prominent nose. That it should be capital of the department is due to association, not to size, for Pamiers, where was a cathedral, exceeds it in population. It has a theatre, in which but rarely a performance is given; a public library, open for a few hours one day in the week, into which an occasional reader saunters; baths, better known externally than within; an abattoir, where oxen past work are slaughtered, for consumption by those of the inhabitants who have digestions that could dissolve leather; a promenade which lacks promenaders; a vast prefecture, in which the prefect is dying daily of ennui. The Hotel des Gouverneurs has become Palais de Justice – “un édifice banal, malgré ce nom grandiloquent.”

The rock of Foix is 178 feet above the river, and is surmounted by three noble towers that served successively as keeps. In the donjons the Inquisition had their court, their trials, and sentences, and the Count had to resign his castle to them in pledge of submission to the judgment of the Holy See. The loftiest of the towers is cylindrical, and is attributed to Gaston Phœbus, but apparently it dates from the fifteenth century. Between the noble towers appear the mean buildings of a prison, in which those who are confined yawn their time away. Below the rock, near the river, at the apex of the triangle, is the church of S. Volusinian, of the fourteenth century, and, like most of the great churches in this portion of the south of France, consists of a nave without aisles. The choir is surrounded by radiating chapels.

Volusinian was Bishop of Tours, a native of Auvergne. When Alaric, King of the Goths, invaded Gaul he carried Volusinian away with him south, and as he proved to be uncompromising in his adherence to the Creed of Nicæa, had him executed at Foix. His festival is on 11 February, and he suffered in 491. Foix has no manufactures, no trade – hardly an expectant commis voyageur visits it; but I am in error. It has perpetrated a joke, a miserable pun – Foix produces patés de foie gras.

Were there but coal-mines near at hand Foix would revive, for the whole county is full of iron ore. Foix bleeds iron from its veins, but the ferruginous springs run away into the river. The stars in their courses fight against Foix; the valley of the Arget was full of nailmakers at one time – in 1835 there were forty-seven forges. Now their fires are put out: machine-made nails have killed the hand-made nails. Those made in the Barguillère, the valley of the Arget, were for horseshoes, and the makers dubbed themselves chevaliers. The extinction of the little forges has led to depopulation; between 1891 and 1901 there was a loss of 27,092 inhabitants in that district.

To the north of the town rises a steep hill, on the summit of which is the hermitage of S. Sauveur, but the last hermit has departed this life; his occupation also is gone, and he has no successor. The Administration has put an end to the hermits.

In the neighbourhood of Foix is the Grotto de l’Herme, that has yielded notable finds of prehistoric man. But the main curiosity is the Mas d’Azil, where the river Arize has bored its way through the limestone barrier of the Planturel. This long chain opposed a passage northwards to the river descending from the mountains to the south. The Arize discovered a fault in the barrier and pierced it, forming a noble arch 250 feet high. Beside it is an artificial gallery bored for the passage of the road. The length of the tunnel is 1250 feet. The road follows the right bank of the Arize, separated from it by a wall of rock. The river descends into the gallery, the average width of which is ninety-five feet, breaking over masses of rock that have fallen from the roof. Above the left bank, under the huge vault, rises a natural column, called the Monk. Farther on in the gallery, a pillar thirty feet in diameter sustaining the roof. There are lateral galleries, at a higher elevation, that have yielded evidence of human occupation. The guano produced by the innumerable bats that inhabit the cave actually forms an article of commerce.

The opening to the north, through which the river effects its escape, is less striking in appearance than that where it makes its plunge underground.

The road from Foix to Ax leads up the river that gives its name to the department, and penetrates deep into the recesses of the mountains.

The first town reached is Tarascon, prettily situated at the junction of the Vicdessos with the Ariège, about a conical hill surmounted by a round tower, which is all that remains of a castle that was blown up by order of Richelieu. The great cardinal thought that the best means of maiming the independence of the nobles, petty barons, and seigneurs, was to destroy their nests. It was he, not the Revolutionists, who made the worst havoc among the stately châteaux of France. He went so far even as to insist on the pepper-castor roofed round towers at the angles of every small squire’s mansion being lowered a story to the level of the eaves of the main roof. Tarascon on Ariège is a busier place than sleepy Tarascon on Rhone, that was drawn out of its obscurity by the mythical Tastarin. It is the great centre of activity to the country, “a land whose stones are iron.” Formerly it was more prosperous than it is to-day. But the population remains stationary, which in the midst of a universal shrinkage may be reckoned as good. The town is divided into two parts. Old Tarascon clusters about the decayed castle. New Tarascon forms the faubourg Sainte Quitterie, where there is a ferruginous spring bearing the name of the saint, and supposed miraculously to cure insanity. The wonder in this part of the mountains is to find any springs that do not run red. Quiteria, who has given virtue to this spring, is a person of problematical existence. Once upon a time – the Bollandists even know not when – there lived a King Katillas and his wife Calsia, who inhabited doubtlessly a Château en Espagne. Queen Calsia gave birth to nine daughters at once, and being afraid what the King would say, gave them to the nurse with orders to drown them like puppies. But the nurse took them to her home, and reared all in the Christian faith. In time of persecution the nine damsels dispersed, but were caught and offered the alternative of marriage or death. They accepted the latter. One of them, named Wilgefortis, when pestered by a princely suitor, prayed, and lo! out sprouted a thick beard and moustache. She was crucified. Quiteria’s head was struck off with a sword. But unwilling to be less of an oddity than her sister, after death she developed into three entire bodies. One became the perquisite of the Portuguese, another of the Spaniards, and the Gascons got hold of the third, and buried it at Aire. I have little doubt that, when a man reputed insane was brought to Quiteria’s well and made to drink eight tumblers full of the red water, he remonstrated, and vowed that he was well; whereupon his relations cried out, “A miracle! He has spoken sensibly. Thanks be to Quiteria.”