A Midsummer Drive Through the Pyrenees eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 303 pages of information about A Midsummer Drive Through the Pyrenees.

A Midsummer Drive Through the Pyrenees eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 303 pages of information about A Midsummer Drive Through the Pyrenees.

We keep on in the mid-afternoon along the road, the horses led by the guide and ambling placidly along, the rest of us briskly afoot.  The spring-houses are reached in due succession, and finally we are at the Raillere once more, where we have planned to take the omnibus which runs half-hourly to Cauterets.  And so we buy our tickets, pay the guide,—­with a double douceur for his mountaineering reminiscences,—­and are soon rattling down the hill toward the town, and studying another priest, a fat, stubby friar on the opposite seat, who is conning his breviary, murmuring his orisons, and glancing wickedly about with his beady little eyes.  There is also a gorgeously attired French dowager aboard, and a sprightly soldier; and in the interest of watching them all and the joy of repose against the padded leather cushions, we lose the idea of time until we draw up in the little plaza of Cauterets again, ‘at half-past four by the meet’n’-house clock.’

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CHAPTER XIII.

A COLOSSEUM OF THE GODS.

  "Pyrene celsa nimbosi verticis arce,
  Divisos Celtis late prospectat Hiberos
  Atque aeterna tenet magnis divortia terris."

  —­SILIUS ITALICUS.

“Parting is such sweet sorrow.”  Thus it is at Cauterets.  The hotel manager evinces it as well as we.  But the hour has come to leave him, and the tinseled supernumerary enters, left centre, with, “Milord, the carriages wait.”  The hotel bill here comes naturally to the front, and we find the charges very much on the average of all Continental resorts.  So it has been at Biarritz, so at San Sebastian, Pau and Eaux Bonnes.  Pyrenean hotel-keepers are not, as we had formerly mistrusted, an organization for plunder.  The expense question is always timely, and experience works out the conclusion that, in the main and speaking generally, one pays at about the same scale of prices for the same accommodation, throughout Europe.  In both, of course, there is customarily a wide range of choice.  It must be said that charges for travelers are out of all proportion with the cost of living to the peasants; and the morning hotel-service of coffee and rolls is fixed at a price at which a thrifty native would support his family for a day or more.  The National Review recently stated that the average expenditure of the peasant freeholder in the south of France upon his food has been accurately computed and that it amounted to the astonishingly small sum of only four sous daily,—­this sum having reference to a family, say, of four or five, and where the children are under the age of seventeen or eighteen years.  This statement presumably refers to rural freeholders only,—­where cattle and farm-land supply the staples without purchase; but even so, one finds difficulty in crediting it in full.  The housewives are minutely frugal; they will claim a rebate on a lacking pennyweight in the pound; but it is scarcely to be admitted that any economy could lower the expense of necessary outside provisioning to such a sum.  Still, quintupling it even, the hotel, at the spa a mile away, will charge you the same twenty sous for a cup of coffee, and considerably more for the lightest meal.  The disproportion is thus seen to be enormous.

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A Midsummer Drive Through the Pyrenees from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.