But I must hurry my Pyrenean sketches to an end. The true South--I mean the Mediterranean-washed provinces--still lie before me; and I must perforce leap almost at a bound over a long and interesting journey through the little-known towns of the eastern Pyrenees--quiet, sluggish, tumble-down places, as St. Gaudens, St. Girons, and St. Foix, possessed neither of pump-rooms, nor warm-springs, but vegetating on, lazily and dreamily, in their glorious climate--for, after all, it does sometimes stop raining, and that for a few blazing months at a time, too. I would like to sketch St. Gaudens, with its broad-eaved, booth-like shops, and the snug town-hall, with pictures of old prefects and wigged _fermiers generaux_, into which they introduced me, and where they set all their municipal documents before me, when I applied for some information as to the landholding of the district. I would like to sketch at length a curious walled village on the head waters of the Garonne--a dead-and-gone sort of place, of which I asked an old man the name. "A poor place, sir," he said; "a poor place. Not worth your while looking at. All poor people here, sir--poor people; not worth your while speaking to. And the name--oh, a poor name, sir--not worth your while knowing; but, if you insist--why, then, it's Valentine." I would like to sketch the merry population in the hills round that dead-and-gone village--half farmers, half weavers, like the Saddleworth peasants, in Yorkshire--a jolly set--all sporting men, too, who give up their looms, and go into the woods after bears as boldly as Sir Peter de Bearne. And I would like, too, to try to bring before my reader's eye the viney valley of the Ariege, and the deep ravines through which the stream goes foaming, spanned by narrow bridges, each with a tower in the centre, where the warder kept his guard, and opened and shut the huge, iron-bound doors, and dropped and raised the portcullis at pleasure. And these old feudal memorials bring me to the castles and ruined towers so thickly peopling the land where lived the bands of adventurers, as Froissart calls them, by whom the fat citizens of the towns were wont to be "_guerroyés et harriés_," and most of which have still their legends of desperate sieges, and, too often, of foul murders done within their dreary walls. Pass, as I perforce must, however, and gain Provence--there is yet one legendary tale I cannot help telling. It is one of the best things in Froissart, and a little twisting would give it a famous satiric significance against a class of bores of our own day and generation. It relates to the lord of a castle not far from Tarbes, and was told to Froissart by a squire, "in a corner of the chapel of Orthez," during the visit paid by the canon to Gaston Phoebus, Count of Foix--who, I am sorry to say, has been puffed, and most snobbishly exalted by the great chronicler into the ranks of the most noble chivalry, in return for splendid entertainment bestowed; whereas, in fact, Gaston Phoebus was a reckless murderer, possessed of neither faith nor honour. But, alas, the Canon of Chimay sometimes descended into the lowest depths of penny-a-lining, and "coloured" the cases just as a bribed police reporter does when a "respectable" gentleman gets into trouble. Gaston stabbed his son to death, in a dungeon; and the bold Froissart has actually the coolness to assert that the death of the heir took place, inasmuch as his father, in a rage, because he would not eat the dainties placed before him, struck him with his clenched fist, holding therein a knife with which he had been picking his nails, but the blade of which, says the lame apologist, only protruded a "groat's breadth" from his fingers,--the result being that the steel unfortunately happened to cut a vein in young Gaston's throat. The simple truth of the matter is, that the count was jealous of his son's being a favourite of the boy's mother, from whom he (the count) was separated--that he dreaded lest the wrongs of his wife might be avenged by her brother, the King of Navarre--and that he determined to starve the boy in a dungeon; but the child not dying so soon as was expected, his father went very coolly in to him, and cut his throat.