This mountain was never ascended until 1834, when two guides from a neighboring valley, Cantouz and Guilhembert by name, finally mastered it.  The ascent was marked by a signal exhibition of pluck.  The men had attained, after perilous work, the large glacier of Ossoue.  They were traversing it, toilsomely and carefully, when an ice-bridge gave way beneath them and plunged them both into the depths of a crevasse.  They were made insensible by the fall.  Cantouz at last came to himself, stiffened and bruised; to his joy Guilhembert also was after some effort brought back to consciousness.  For hours these men picked their icy way along the bottom of the crevasse and its branches, through the water and melted snow, seeking some opening, some way of escape to the upper surface of the glacier.  Effort after effort failed.  The day was waning.  At length a narrow “chimney” was found, more promising than the rest; and by painful and dangerous degrees, wearied, sore and half-frozen as they were, the two slowly worked a zigzag way upward to the light.

Did they turn thankfully homeward and leave the grim Vignemale to its isolation?  They did not.  They grimly went on with the attack.  Before darkness had fallen, they stood upon the summit,—­the first human beings to accomplish the feat.  They had to spend the night upon the mountain, but it was as their subject realm.

The lake itself is perhaps a mile across, and is exceedingly deep.  The mountains crowd close to its edge, here wooded, there running off in long sweeps of rubbly waste, again starting sharply upward from the water.  Close by the path, a tongue of rock runs out into the lake, and on this still stands the little shaft, enclosed with iron palisades,

  “A broken chancel with a broken cross,
  That stood on a dark strait of barren land,”—­

a monument to a young Englishman and his wife, who were drowned here more than fifty years ago.  They were on their wedding trip, and had come to the Lac de Gaube; they took a small boat for a row, and by a never-explained accident lost their lives together.  The pathetic inscription reads: 

“This tablet is dedicated to the memory of William Henry Pattisson, of Lincoln’s Inn, London, Esq., barrister at law; and of Susan Frances, his wife; who, in the 31st and 26th years of their age, and within one month of their marriage, to the inexpressible grief of their surviving relations and friends, were accidentally drowned together in this lake, on the 20th day of September, 1832.  Their remains were conveyed to England, and interred there at Witham, in the County of Essex.”

A party of jolly, black-garbed priests have been journeying up the path behind us from the Pont d’Espagne.  They now come out from the inn upon the scene of action.  Their cordial faces attract us at once; they approach our little summer-house, and conversation opens on both sides,—­with nation, tongue and creed