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CHAPTER XIII

BAGNÈRES

Visitors and residents—Pic du Midi—Ramond—Springs—Captain Lizier—Observatory—Vaussenat and Nansouty—Death of the former—Val de Campan—Château d'Asté—The Grammont family—La belle Corisande—Philibert de Grammont—His memoirs—Larrey—Marbles—The Lac bleu—Slate quarries—The Cagots—Caput Mortuum—Lepers—Recuperative power of Nature—Efforts of the Church to break down the barrier—Crestiaas.

BAGNÈRES DE BIGORRE is a town, but it is country as well; it has the amusements and dissipations provided by a place of public resort, but it has also lovely and quiet resting-places in mountain solitudes.

It swarms during the season with water-drinkers, bathers, loungers, ladies who wear elegant toilettes, and bucks turned out by the best Parisian tailors. But it also contains marble works, linen factories, and women who are skilful at the knitting of the so-called Barèges shawls. The wool is from Spain, the finest Merino, and this enables them to make the shawls delicate as lace.

To the south lie the mountains rising steeply, and commanded by the Pic du Midi. For long a rivalry existed between the Bigorriens and they of Roussillon as to whether the Pic du Midi or the Canigou was the loftiest mountain of the Pyrenean chain; indeed, some claimed for each that it was the highest peak in Europe. In both cases the mistake

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