"Honourable is the riding of a horse to the rider, But the mule is a dishonour and a donkey a disgrace."
When one recalls the fact that there are comparatively few of the bovine race in the south of France, more particularly in Languedoc and Provence, he understands why it is that one finds the _cuisine à l'huile d'olive_--and sometimes _huile d'arachide_, which is made from peanuts, and not bad at that, at least not unhealthful.
In the Pyrenees proper, where the pasturage is rich, cattle are more numerous, and nowhere, not even in the Allier or Poitou in mid-France, will one find finer cows or oxen. Little, sure-footed donkeys, with white-gray muzzles and crosses down their backs, and great cream-coloured oxen seem to do all the work that elsewhere is done by horses. There are ponies, too,--short-haired, tiny beasts,--in the Pyrenees, and in the summer months one sees a Basque or a Béarnais horse-dealer driving his live stock (ponies only) on the hoof all over France, and making sales by the way.
The Mediterranean terminus of the Pyrenees has quite different characteristics from that of the west. Here the mountains end in a great promontory which plunges precipitately into the Mediterranean between the Spanish province of Figueras and the rich garden-spot of Roussillon, in France.
[Illustration: _In a Pyrenean Hermitage_]
French and Spanish manners, customs and speech are here much intermingled. On one side of the frontier they are very like those on the other; only the uniforms of the officialdom made up of _douaniers_, _carabineros_, _gendarmes_ and soldiers differ. The type of face and figure is the same; the usual speech is the same; and dress varies but little, if at all. "_Voilà! la fraternité Franco-Espagnole_".
One ever-present reminder of two alien peoples throughout all Roussillon is the presence of the _châteaux-forts_, the walled towns, the watch-towers, and defences of this mountain frontier.
The chief characteristics of Roussillon, from the seacoast plain up the mountain valleys to the passes, are the château ruins, towers and moss-grown hermitages, all relics of a day of vigorous, able workmen, who built, if not for eternity, at least for centuries. In the Pyrénées-Orientales alone there are reckoned thirty-five abandoned hermitages, any one of which will awaken memories in the mind of a romantic novelist which will supply him with more background material than he can use up in a dozen mediæval romances. And if he takes one or more of these hallowed spots of the Pyrenees for a setting he will have something quite as worthy as the overdone Italian hilltop hermitage, and a good deal fresher in a colour sense.