Part 23

Your next village on this main international road is Canfranc in Spain. It is just over 14 miles off with nothing but a refuge and the pass of the Somport between. The hotel is the Hotel Sisas, from which a public coach starts for Jaca daily, still, I believe; the cooking is doubtful, the wine so-so, and the people are a little spoilt, but they are very ready with horses and used to hiring them, and you can always hire a carriage or get a relay for Jaca, which is 16 miles further down by a road with no steep hills, and for the most part nearly flat. At Jaca the hotel (which I have already spoken of) is the Hotel Mur; it is excellent in every way, clean, cheerful, and not too simple in its customs, with various wines, and a knowledge of more than the Castilian tongue. The mention of this leads me to add to what I said above that the language stops very suddenly at this central frontier, or at least south of it. There will be people who will understand Spanish almost anywhere in Béarn because the local dialects are Spanish in character, but the common French of Paris means nothing to the people of Aragon and Sobrarbe; you may be in quite a big place and find no one for a long time who will understand you, while in the small hotels and inns right up against the frontier, they do not follow a word of the language.

Of the inns of Biescas I cannot speak from experience, nor of those of Panticosa, though they say that the only useful one in Biescas is the Hotel Chauces, while Panticosa has any number of places with such names as “Continental” and “Grand,” and masses of lodgings as well, among which I imagine the only choice is to take the best; nothing is really dear there, except in the month between the middle of July and the middle of August. Of Sallent, however, I can speak. There is but one inn in the place; it has many names but is best known by the name of the man who owns it, and his name is Bergua. It is an astonishing mixture. The owner is wealthy and good natured, but you do not hear the truth about things for it is coloured by self interest. The place is clean, but slow even beyond the ordinary of a Spanish inn. The cooking is neither one thing nor another, the wine is not bad. It is a place where you may spend one night, but not two. You will leave it without enthusiasm, and without regret.

Next, following the itineraries I have given, comes Gabas, and here is as pleasant an inn as you will find in the whole world, it is called the Hotel des Pyrenees, and of the several hotels it is the dearest. The family of Baylou keep it and have inherited this soil for generations. It is an ancestor of theirs that planted the delightful Mail outside and set up the charming little fountain there. They are used in this house to every sort of gentlemanly habit, they pay no attention to the clothes in which one comes, and they understand all those who love to wander in the hills. Everything is clean and good about the place, they will give one well-cooked food in many courses at any hour. There is but one criticism to make and that is in the matter of horses and carriages; these are dear, and the good and the bad cost the same money, for there is here a monopoly of the valley, and if you do not take their vehicle, you must walk to the rail-head, 8 miles lower down. Also if for some reason you must drive or get a relay of horses, the longer notice you give the better, for there are few animals to be had.

Further down the valley is Eaux Chaudes, a dreary place, incredible from the fact that it was here that much of the Heptameron was written! If a man must stop there, let him; of the sad gloomy barracks, take the largest and the dearest, which is the Hotel de France. Laruns, at the foot of the valley, where again you are unlikely to stop, but where you may be caught, has the Hotel des Touristes, where also horses and a carriage may be hired, and whence the omnibus goes to Eaux Chaudes and to Eaux Bonnes. This last place, like Panticosa, is a place one can make no choice in, it is crowded with the rich, and where the rich have spoilt things, the only rule I know is to plunge and take the dearest—which is the Hotel des Princes—if you will not do that you must choose for yourself.

The next valley, that of the Gave de Pau, has in it four towns, Lourdes, Argelès, Cauterets, and Luz. Lourdes, like all cosmopolitan towns, is detestable in its accommodation, and to make it the more detestable there is that admixture of the supernatural which is invariably accompanied by detestable earthly adjuncts. Were it not so the world would be perfect: but it is so, and honestly one cannot say that any one hotel at Lourdes is better than another, only here again if one is compelled to stop for a night, one cannot do better than the best which is nominally the Angleterre. Avoid the hotels that have Holy names to them, they are usually frauds. If you go to Lourdes as a pilgrim, prefer the religious houses (which take in travellers). If the Angleterre is too dear for you, the Hotel de Toulouse is not to be despised; it should take you in at 25 to 35 francs a day. Argelès, up the valley, is a very different place, it is a little hurt by the neighbourhood of Lourdes, and by the stream of travellers who pour up and down its main road to Cauterets and to the sights of Gavarnie. Nevertheless it remains a French country town, and the fairly dignified capital of a district. The Hotel de France is excellent and, by the way (a thing always to be mentioned when one is speaking of hotels in the Pyrenees), it is ready at any time to furnish horses, and has, of course, a garage. At Luz stand two hotels facing each other on either side of the road, I cannot remember the names, or rather I cannot remember which is which, but anyhow take the one on the right of the road as you look up the valley, or as you come up from the station, that is, the one upon the western side. They are polite, and that makes all the difference in one’s relations with people whom one does not often meet.

Gavarnie, overrun as it is (and it is hideously overrun), has a very tolerable hotel, clean, and not too dear. The reason is that the people who come to the place usually go away on the same day, and that therefore there is some anxiety to please those who stop. Another inn, up under the mountain, is not so much to be recommended. Of Cauterets everything can be said—and much more—that was said of Eaux Bonnes, you are at the mercy of a place which the rich choose to have ruined, and apart from their vulgarity you will have that noise which accompanies them in all their doings, this sort of place in the Pyrenees is luckily not common, and when it is tolerable is tolerable in proportion as it is national. Cauterets is almost as international as Lourdes, and for anyone using the Pyrenees as I use them in this book, it would be madness to stop there. Bagnères-de-Bigorre is better, though it is something in the same line. It is better because it has something of a past and a history, and is, like Argelès, the chief town of its district. The Hotel de Paris is the best, but it is very expensive, and I believe, though I do not know, that the Hotel des Vignes in the Rue de Tarbes is good among the moderate places. But the rule holds here, as everywhere, that where rich people, especially cosmopolitans, colonials, nomads, and the rest, come into a little place, they destroy most things except the things that they themselves desire. And the things that they themselves desire are execrable to the rest of mankind.

Arreau, in the next valley, merits a more particular attention. It is thoroughly French, and here you will find side by side with the expensive places (for even Arreau has its Hotel d’Angleterre which, however, to tell the truth, is not ruinous) a most delightful little place called the Hotel du Midi, where sensible people go. I am speaking on the testimony of others, but on good testimony. It is a place smelt out by the infallible nose of the French professional class. It has a garage, and will tell you where to get carriages, though I believe it has nothing but an omnibus of its own. It is—or was—really cheap and good. But for some odd reason this excellent house charges you extra for your coffee.

Right high up this valley is Vielle where there is one hotel, the Hotel Mendielle, this is the one you must ask for if you find yourself caught here, and it is just the place at which one might be caught if one got into the wrong valley from a col in the Sobrarbe, or, if, in coming up the Gave, one had not made way enough by night; I know nothing for or against this hotel, and I believe it to be the only one. The little village of Aragnouet, which is at the very end of the road under the last precipices, has an inn of the quality of which I know nothing.

The next valley is that of Bagnères-de-Luchon. Now it might be imagined, seeing what rich places are in the way of hotels, that Bagnères-de-Luchon (being by far the richest place in the Pyrenees) would be hopelessly the worst, and that, as nothing good could be said about Cauterets, and as there was precious little choice in Eaux Bonnes, Luchon would be a place to despair of in the matter of hotels, but on the contrary it is a place to discuss.

Even if Luchon were as detestable as the Riviera, one would have to come to it because it is the knot and reservoir of all mountain travel. The valley strikes so deep into the hills, brings the railway so near their summits, and is so exactly situated at the “fault” spoken of so frequently in this book (the break in the Pyrenean line where the landscapes and peoples of the chain meet) that it is difficult not to pass through Luchon at one time or another during any length of days passed in these hills. Even if you make a vow to clear Luchon, you may find yourself caught in any one of twenty surrounding barbarisms with a bad foot or no money, and compelled to set a course for this harbour. Moreover Luchon is by no means the vulgar place its riches ought to make it. The fashion for it was first made by reasonable people, many Spaniards come and help to give the place its tone, and perhaps the very extremity of evil corrects itself, and Luchon, being so crammed with wealthy people, knows its own vices better than places just a little less rich, and it is therefore more tolerable. At any rate the problem of sleeping at Luchon is easily solved in July and August because all prices are pretty much the same, and you cannot depend upon the printed prices at all. For pension it is otherwise. There are fixed prices and they are not exorbitant for such a place. A very clean, decent, rich hotel is the Hotel d’Angleterre, where, if you stop some days, they will charge you, I believe, about 40 francs a day. There is a place for poorer people called the Hotel de l’Europe; all its prices are cheaper, but it has this drawback that you get nothing national. It is clean and there is a roof over your head, but you get neither French comfort nor French discomfort, and you are paying a little less for things a great deal worse, notably in the matter of food. The bold who fear nothing will go and stop at the village little inn called the Golden Lion, which is near the old church and existed before wealthy Luchon was born or thought of. Here the bold will consort with Muleteers and the populace in some discomfort. One of the best uses to which one can put Luchon is to eat in it, and for sleeping to go outside and camp in the woods: and the best place for the passer-by to eat is the Café Arnative on the main street; its cooking is very good indeed, and the wine really remarkable; it is such good wine that one wonders why they give it away, and every year as one returns to the place one fears it may have ceased, but it continues. Speak to the manager in English for he knows and loves that tongue, or in Spanish or in French. In the use of the hotels and restaurants of Luchon, however—always excepting the Golden Lion—remember that they are snobbish about clothes, and that even two days in the hills puts you well below the standard which they can tolerate. I confess that when I have had to use Luchon, I have depended upon clothes which were waiting for me at the station; and it is not difficult to use Luchon as a sort of half-way house in this matter, leading the right life in the western mountains, coming down to Luchon to find one’s luggage, dressing up, plunging into worldly pleasure at Luchon, sending one’s luggage off again to Ax or Perpignan, and then taking to the eastern hills for another bout of poverty.

In the Val d’Aran, next to the valley of Luchon, there is but one place where one is likely to stay, and that is in the town of Viella, which is the capital; for the Val d’Aran is a small place, and there is no advantage in stopping anywhere else. The Posada Deo is that which I know best and is good but of course Spanish; the cooking is a sort of mixture of Spanish and French, but the time you have to wait for it and in the manner in which it is given you is wholly Spanish. The wine also (oddly enough!) is Spanish. It ought, on the Garonne, to be of the Garonne, but the customs interfere.

The Catalan valley, south and east of the Val d’Aran, the valley of Esterri, has, in that town, a good little hotel, the Hotel Pepe. The people are thoroughly Catalan in their love of money and therefore you must bargain. Whatever you do, do not stop at any of the other places in the valley, it is even better to go through a storm than to risk Llavorsi, or worse still Escaló, but on the far side of the hill and of the port called St. John of the Elms there is a most delicious inn, with an old innkeeper of the very best, at Castellbo.

To return to the French side; if you go by train to St. Girons you may likely enough change at Boussens, the station has not (or had not) any buffet, but there was (and I hope is) an hotel opposite it where people travelling by train ate; the cooking here is the best in the whole of the Pyrenees, which is saying a good deal. At St. Girons itself there is not only good cooking, but the wine which Arthur Young admired, and which was well worthy of his admiration. Do not go to the best hotel (which is the hotel of the Princes and of the Alpine Club), but to the next cheapest which is called the Hotel de France; at least I have found this last to be excellent and cheaper for its quality of food and drink and repose than any other in all this chain. These things change quickly, what was true so short a time ago may not be true now; but so, at least, I found it.

In the valley of the Ariège it is always well to make Ax your sleeping-place, for Ax, though there are waters and though the baths make the prosperity of the place, is a very pleasant little town and the right beginning for the mountains, whether you are going by the main road into the Roussillon, or up the Ariège in the Carlitte group, or again over the main range into Andorra. At Ax there are two rival hotels, the Hotel de France, and the Hotel Sicre. The latter is a little cheaper though both are cheap, and while I know the second one best I should recommend the first; it will take you in as cheaply as any, and seems the more carefully kept; both have garages. The Hotel Sicre suffers somewhat from being directly attached to its Thermal Baths. If you are going to explore the wild country of the Upper Aston, you must start from Cabanes lower down on the railway. There is no need to sleep there. The valley above it has some of the best camping places in the Pyrenees. But it is worth knowing the name of the hotel, which is “Du Midi.” The whole place is, of course, quite small and cheap.

On the high road into Roussillon choose Porté, primitive as it is, and avoid _Hospitalet_ (on the hither side of the pass of Puymorens) like the plague. Hospitalet and the village just before it, Merens, are for some reason or other quite spoilt; I fancy tourists come up so far as these two without going over the pass which they find too much trouble, and that their coming and going has spoilt the two places: at any rate they are detestable. They overcharge you and treat you with contempt at the same time.

Porté, though it is but a few miles further on, is quite different. Here is one rude inn, as cheap as the grace of God, and kept by the most honest people in the world; Michet by name. It is thoroughly Spanish in character (for remember that Porté, though politically in France, is on the Spanish side of the main range, and that the pass just above is on the watershed); the animals live on the ground floor, the human beings just above them. You will never regret to have slept at Porté.

As you go on into the plain of the Cerdagne you will find a good inn at La Tour Carol: not exactly enthusiastic in their greeting of the traveller, but polite. It is quite a little place of only half a thousand inhabitants, and you cannot expect much from it, but it is better than Saillagousse where they are most unwilling.

Up the road to France from Saillagousse, at Mont Louis, is a hotel of which I can speak but little because my own experience of it was late on a holiday night when everything was very full, but it is substantial, it is cheap and I have heard it praised. It is called the Hotel de France, and it is a starting-point for the omnibus down to the rail-head at Villefranche in the valley above which rise the flanks of the Canigou.

On the Canigou itself, standing upon a platform a few hundred feet below the summit facing the Mediterranean and one of the greatest views in this world, there is now an inn which you must not despise though it does happen to be somewhat tourist. It is only open for the end of June, July, August, and September, though one can sleep there at other times of the year if one asks at Prades for the housekeeper; he comes down to that town through the winter and is known there.

In Perpignan (by the way) go to the chief hotel, for the hotels of that plain can be very vile when they try. This hotel is called “The Grand” and it stands on the quay of the smaller river just within the old fortifications. There is a delightful little restaurant in Perpignan called the Golden Lion, it is well to order what one wants some hours beforehand, and to take their own recommendation about wine. Perpignan is so twirled and knotted a town that I can give no directions for finding that Golden Lion, where it lies in its little back alley called the Rue des Cardeurs, save to tell you that it is but 200 yards from your hotel, and that the Rue des Cardeurs is the second on the _left_ as you walk away from the main front of the cathedral; or again, the _first_ on the left after you have crossed the Place Gambetta. Anyhow, Perpignan is a small place and anyone will show you where this eating-house is, and it is a good one. Down the Cerdagne in Spain, at Seo de Urgel, there are two or three hotels, and one of the second class called the Posada Universal or Universal Inn which merits its name; you will do well to stop there for it has a pleasant balcony overlooking the valley, with vines trained about it; and the people look after you.

As to the inns of Andorra your best plan is to stop in the capital, that is, in _Andorra The Old_ itself, where the Posada is called the Posada _Calounes_, and is quite a little and simple place. The entry into Andorra, however, is not always easy. If you make it from the north, mist may delay you, even on the grassy Embalire Pass, and may keep you for hours on the higher crossings of the range, even when it does not defeat you altogether. You may therefore have no choice but to stop at one of the little villages; but it is a poor fate, for they are full of bugs and fleas and appalling cooking, though the people are kindly enough. The inn at Encamps is the only one with which I am myself acquainted among these smaller places; there also it is vile.