For notwithstanding the luxuriance of these valleys, little of their luxury, even to-day, goes to the tillers of their soil.  The Pyrenean farmer or mountaineer has to support his family now, as in past ages, in poverty.  Little beyond the most meagre of diet can he commonly provide them, and it is the joint anxiety of ensuring even this, that wears and disfeatures him and them, as much doubtless as its meagreness.  Bread, of barley or wheat or rye, is the great staple, supplemented by what milk can be spared from the town’s demands.  Eggs and butter go oftener to the market.  Vegetables, such as lentils and beans, are also important, a few potatoes, occasional fruits and berries, and above all the powerful and omnipresent onion or garlic stew, signaling its brewing for rods around.  In the summer, if he moves with his family to the higher pasture-lands to better pasture the herds, his daily menu expands in some directions and contracts in others.  Fete-days and Sundays and trips to the town are usually the occasions of some indulgence, and a thin wine and perhaps macaroni or a pullet or a cut of beef or pork make the event memorable.  But the chief fact is that he is fairly contented under all.  His life has work and poverty and care, but it has its freedom in addition; he accepts it as it is, fully and without envy; it is not his class who are first to swell the numbers of the sans-culottes.  When Henry IV pressed his old peasant playfellows to ask some gift or favor at his hands, their modest ambition stopped at a simple permission to “pay their tithe in grain without the straw.”

Often there is even a little fund put by, or anxiously invested; France is noted for the number of abstemious husbandmen who add their mite of savings to her financial enterprises, and the distress and discouragement caused when one of these fails is easily conceivable.  On the whole, the French small proprietor or peasant is thrifty and uncomplaining to a rather surprising degree, considering the national trait of restiveness.  The revolutions of France are bred in her great cities, not in the provinces.

“But pastoral occupations form only a small part of the business of the Pyrenees,” observes a recent writer in Blackwood’s, in a summary so compact and accurate as to merit quoting.  “There are large, various and constantly increasing industries, all special to the country.  As water power is to be found everywhere, there are flour-mills and saw-mills in many of the villages.  In certain valleys,—­round Luz, for instance,—­almost every peasant has rough little grinding stones and converts his own barley, buckwheat and maize into flour.  Handlooms are numerous, and coarse woollen stuffs for the peasants’ clothes are largely made.  At Nay, near Pau, are factories where blue berrets for the Pyrenees and red fezzes for Constantinople are woven side by side.  The scarlet sashes that the men wear round their waists are produced at Oloron.