"These old wasted mountains, these lacerating points, bristling by myriads, these formidable fissures whose perpendicular wall plunges with a spring down into invisible depths; this chaos of monstrous ridges heaped together, and crushing { 289}each other like an affrighted herd of leviathans; this universal and implacable domination of the naked rock, the enemy of all life, refreshes us after our pavements, our offices and our shops. You only love them from this cause, and this cause removed, they would be as unpleasant to you as to Madame de Maintenon."
So that there are fifty sorts of beauty,--one for every age.
"That is as if you were to say that a woman is nude because she has fifty dresses." { 290}
Cauterets is a town at the bottom of a valley, melancholy enough, paved, and provided with an octroi. Innkeepers, guides, the whole of a famished population besieges us; but we have considerable force of mind, and after a spirited resistance we obtain the right of looking about and choosing.
Fifty paces further on, we are fastened upon by servants, children, donkey-hirers and boys, who accidentally stroll about us. They offer us cards, they praise up to us the site, the cuisine; they accompany us, cap in hand, to the very edge of the village; at the same time they elbow away all competitors: "The stranger is mine, I'll baste you if { 291}you come near him." Each hotel has its runners on the watch; they hunt the isard in winter, the traveller in summer.
The town has several springs: that of the King cured Abarca, king of Aragon; that of Cæsar restored health, as they say, to the great Cæsar. Faith is needed in history as well as in medicine.
For example, in the time of Francis I. the Eaux Bonnes cured wounds; they were called _Eaux d'arqtiebusades _; the soldiers wounded at Pavia { 292}were sent to them. Now they cure diseases of the throat and chest. A hundred years hence they will perhaps heal something else; with every century medicine makes an advance.
"Formerly," said Signarelle, "the liver was at the right and the heart at the left; we have reformed all that."
A celebrated physician one day said to his pupils: "Employ this remedy at once, while it still cures." Medicines, like hats, have their fashions.