LA TOMBE DE PYRÈNE
It was so cold in Paris in January 1891 that the beggars on the streets, the vagabonds and working girls in the Place Clichy said that the sun had died.
The Seine froze over. The poor and the homeless were dying, which prompted the reluctant authorities to open shelters in gymnasiums, shooting galleries, schools and public baths. The biggest dormitory was in the Palais des Arts Libéraux in the Champs-de-Mars, in the shadow of Monsieur Eiffel’s magnificent tower. Intended to symbolise all that was splendid, patriotic, modern about the Third Republic, the metal structure instead found itself presiding over dull, dark and soundless winter days. Masses of people huddled like refugees, fugitives from the cold. The scenes were reminiscent, the shopkeepers said, of the dark days of the Franco-Prussian war when German boots marched in the Champs-Elysées.
George Watson, formerly of the Royal Sussex Regiment, thought back to his own fighting days, to the heat of the Transvaal in December 1880, when they had subdued the uprising. Three months from start to finish. He had spent his twenty-first birthday with a rifle in his hand.
Throughout France the story of this winter was the same. In Carcassonne, in the foothills of the Pyrenees, the River Aude burst its banks sweeping away the most vulnerable quartiers of Trivalle and Paicherou. In the Ariège, the villages were locked in by ice and snow. Even in England, he read in an edition of The Times some seven days old, a great blizzard had swept through the south in the spring.
Nature was fighting back.
But, for George Watson, 1891 was a year of wonder. It was a year of unaccustomed experiences. He arrived in Paris in the pale and wet spring, which came late that year, and stayed during the brief, bullying heat of summer. His father had died the previous year – a hero of Khartoum, he had received a full soldier’s send off – and George would soon have to take up his new responsibilities in England. But, for a few months, he was a free man. He was in France to come to a decision about his future and was in no hurry. Having resigned his commission, George set about transforming himself from a soldier into a flaneur, an artist, a philosopher. He had nothing in common with the poets and the artists and composers about whom he read in the newspapers, and he knew it, but he was determined to dip his toe in the water and fully experience the alternative, teeming, headlong metropolis that was Paris.
His father had not approved of opera. Now the old man was dead, George intended to make up for the lost years of music by attending every opera for which he could acquire a ticket. He was there at the premiere of Massenet’s Griselde, though found the bawdy tunes of Bizet’s Carmen more to his liking. He saw Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots, Donizetti’s Don Giovanni, Rossinni’s William Tell, Ambroise Thomas’ Hamlet, Halèvy’s La Juive and Gounoud’s Faust. And, though it was not all to his taste, he found himself infected by what they were calling the fin-de-siècle spirit. As George sat with his gloves and his top hat in the Palais Garnier, admiring the feathered adornments and white skin of the ladies around him, he vowed that he would never forget what it was to be young. How he would treasure these memories as stories to tell his children in years to come. How at the Comédie-Française passions stimulated by Thermidor, Victorien Sardou’s violently anti-Robespierre play, had been so intense that the Minister of the Interior had been forced to ban performances. How, when Wagner’s Lohengrin was staged at the Palais-Garnier, it was whistled and booed off stage, just as Tannhaüser had been some thirty years earlier.
In the drawing rooms overlooking the Parc Monceau, he visited friends of his father. Their wives and daughters were reading L’Argent, the latest in Zola’s epic Les Rougon-Macquart series, and George listened with a polite expression to their literary thoughts. Later, though, he sipped absinthe in a favourite café on the rue d’Amsterdam and read less socially acceptable books purchased from Edmond Bailly’s Librairie de l’art indépendant in the Chaussée d’Antin. Baudelaire had been dead more than twenty years, yet his words lived still in the salons and taverns of Montmartre where George found himself increasingly drawn. Not only for his poetry, full of raw-boned witches and blood red moons, juxtapositions of urban beauty and decay and horror. But also for his translations of the morbid poems of the American writer, Edgar Allan Poe.
George knew he did not belong, even on the periphery, of this demi-monde. He was a tourist. But he considered it part of his essential education and knew that, when he returned to England and proposed to Anne, as he supposed he should, marriage would put a stop to such indulgences. It would change things, as his father’s death had changed things. George could see how his life would go and was happy enough to go along it with. A good life, a solid English life, the life he had been born to. A son first he hoped, also to be called George, a son who would follow in his footsteps. A strong, brave boy, destined for the Army like him and his father before him. After that, he hoped for a daughter, Sophie or perhaps Fredericka, who would play the piano and share his love of books and opera and nature.
It was at the thought of these imagined children that George spent more months in Paris than originally intended, shoring up his memories for the dusty future. But finally the sojourn reached its end. As the scent of autumn was crisp in the air, George accepted it was time to move on. Despite his strenuous efforts at literary self-improvement, in truth his preference remained for the adventure stories of Mr Rider Haggard and Jules Verne. George had read A Journey to the Centre of the Earth several times, seeing himself in the explorer-scholar role of Professor Von Hardwigg, and thought that the more violent landscape of the south of France might afford him some insight. He had seen dust in the Transvaal, he had seen heat, but he yet had to experience the claustrophobia of subterranean worlds where he felt his imagination might flourish. It was this that decided him upon the south where, he had been told, some of the largest networks of caves in Europe were to be found. Many were still closed, but the largest of them, Lombrives in Ussat-les-Bains, just south of the mountain village of Tarascon-sur-Ariège, had been excavated and was open to visitors by appointment. From there, he intended to travel into Spain, before returning to England in time for Christmas.
On a crisp October morning, where the light fell in sharp angles across the platform from the steel and glass roof, George took the Express from the Gare Montparnasse. A sharp blast from the whistle, a shriek from the engine as it belched out its first jet of steam and Paris was lost to George in a cloud of white smoke.
The voyage took seven days. Down through Laroche, Tonnerre, Dijon to Mâcon, where he broke his journey. The following morning, against an endless blue sky, on to Lyon-Perranche, Valence, Avignon and finally Marseille. George spent a couple of days in the old port, sampling the local speciality of bouillibaise, then took the coast train to Carcassonne. Everywhere there were fields of sunflowers and vines, a legacy of the Roman occupation of centuries before.