The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

from Europe, was a noted duellist, a master of court etiquette and a distinguished member of the Arcadian Academy in Rome; his beautiful and distinguished wife came of the German noble family of Von Schlitz and was related to the Kaiser.
    Here in Pau he was Maestro di color che sanno, for he knew the secrets de la coulisse et du boudoir of all the ex-crowned heads and princes and their suites. The Marquis, too, was a great lover of Spain and related to the Marquis of Cavalcanti, and he used to say that Pau with its walls and castle terraces, looking out on to the glorious panorama of the Pyrenees, was the watchtower whereon the leaders of the court revolutions in Madrid stood vigilant with their telescopes in their hands, ready to catch the signals for attack from their agents in the Pyrenean valleys.
    The spirit of the intrepid golden-haired Gaston Phoebus, ruler of Béarn, whose motto was toque y si gauses (touch it if you dare), still rules in this outpost as far as the Spanish border. But to that spirit we should add the virago qualities of Jeanne d’Albret, who followed her husband Antoine de Bourbon into battle against the Emperor Charles V in Picardy, and who sang in Béarnais patois while in the pains of childbirth that her son, the future Henri IV, “ne soit ni pleureux ni rechigné”. When he was born she straightway rubbed his lips with garlic and moistened them with wine from the vineyards of Gaye, which today is called Jurançon. I drank a stirrup cup of that golden wine, at the invitation of my friend the host of the Cabaret d’Henri IV, opposite the castle, and its delicate fragrance cheered me.
    My next halting-place on the Road of St. James was Oloron Ste. Marie, where the twelfth-century Romanesque Cathedral possesses one of the most striking portals and bell tower of the Road, according to the experts. The two Pyrenean rivers, the Gave d’Aspe and the Gave d’Ossau, flow through the town of Oloron Ste. Marie and before leaving unite and form the Gave d’Oloron. The town of Oloron was originally a Roman settlement founded on the hill between the two streams. When the barbarian invasions came, it was completely destroyed and the inhabitants transferred their possessions to the further bank of the Gave d’Aspe and created the town of Ste. Marie. In the eleventh century the Viscount of Béarn rebuilt the Roman city and made it a military centre, and kept the town of Ste. Marie opposite as the episcopal and industrial capital. The two towns fused together later and formed an important centre owing to the close relations maintained by the inhabitants with Spain through the neighbouring Somport Pass.
    The church was built at the orders of Gaston IV, Viscount of Béarn, on his return from the First Crusade. He wished to commemorate the capture of Jerusalem, which had been made possible owing to a war machine which he himself had invented. He instructed the artists to show the Saracens in submission, and we can see two of them crouching at the base of the central marble column of the portal which they support on their heads. The two Saracens were an allusion to Arabs that Gaston IV found in his country on his return and whom he chased away. The centre of the tympanum represents the Descent from the Cross. Below the tympanum and above the entrance are two lions, the one on the left representing the persecuted, the other on the right the triumphant Church. The upper rim of the main arch is devoted to heaven and the twenty-four Ancients of the Apocalypse are seated playing their viols or rebecks—violin-shaped instruments of three strings, which were played by the minstrels in the Middle Ages. The Ancients adore the Divine Lamb carrying the cross. Evil is represented by the head of a dragon. These figures are a literal translation into sculpture of the vision of St. John in the Apocalypse. Immediately below, in contrast to heaven, the artist has carved in grey stone varied subjects from the daily life of the peasants; we see them hunting the wild boar, fishing and smoking salmon, cheese-making, curing hams and pruning the vines. What gives peculiar distinction to the whole portal is the tone of the Pyrenean marble which through the centuries has acquired the polish and the tones of ancient ivory.
    The whole portal deserves detailed study, for it is all allegorical. There is one fierce monster on the left end of the arch which has half engulfed a man in its voracious maw, but the waist and lower limbs