In the drawing rooms overlooking the Parc Monceau, he visited friends of his father. Their wives and daughters were reading L’Argent, the latest in Zola’s epic Les Rougon-Macquart series, and George listened with a polite expression to their literary thoughts. Later, though, he sipped absinthe in a favourite café on the rue d’Amsterdam and read less socially acceptable books purchased from Edmond Bailly’s Librairie de l’art indépendant in the Chaussée d’Antin. Baudelaire had been dead more than twenty years, yet his words lived still in the salons and taverns of Montmartre where George found himself increasingly drawn. Not only for his poetry, full of raw-boned witches and blood red moons, juxtapositions of urban beauty and decay and horror. But also for his translations of the morbid poems of the American writer, Edgar Allan Poe.
George knew he did not belong, even on the periphery, of this demi-monde. He was a tourist. But he considered it part of his essential education and knew that, when he returned to England and proposed to Anne, as he supposed he should, marriage would put a stop to such indulgences. It would change things, as his father’s death had changed things. George could see how his life would go and was happy enough to go along it with. A good life, a solid English life, the life he had been born to. A son first he hoped, also to be called George, a son who would follow in his footsteps. A strong, brave boy, destined for the Army like him and his father before him. After that, he hoped for a daughter, Sophie or perhaps Fredericka, who would play the piano and share his love of books and opera and nature.
It was at the thought of these imagined children that George spent more months in Paris than originally intended, shoring up his memories for the dusty future. But finally the sojourn reached its end. As the scent of autumn was crisp in the air, George accepted it was time to move on. Despite his strenuous efforts at literary self-improvement, in truth his preference remained for the adventure stories of Mr Rider Haggard and Jules Verne. George had read A Journey to the Centre of the Earth several times, seeing himself in the explorer-scholar role of Professor Von Hardwigg, and thought that the more violent landscape of the south of France might afford him some insight. He had seen dust in the Transvaal, he had seen heat, but he yet had to experience the claustrophobia of subterranean worlds where he felt his imagination might flourish. It was this that decided him upon the south where, he had been told, some of the largest networks of caves in Europe were to be found. Many were still closed, but the largest of them, Lombrives in Ussat-les-Bains, just south of the mountain village of Tarascon-sur-Ariège, had been excavated and was open to visitors by appointment. From there, he intended to travel into Spain, before returning to England in time for Christmas.
On a crisp October morning, where the light fell in sharp angles across the platform from the steel and glass roof, George took the Express from the Gare Montparnasse. A sharp blast from the whistle, a shriek from the engine as it belched out its first jet of steam and Paris was lost to George in a cloud of white smoke.
The voyage took seven days. Down through Laroche, Tonnerre, Dijon to Mâcon, where he broke his journey. The following morning, against an endless blue sky, on to Lyon-Perranche, Valence, Avignon and finally Marseille. George spent a couple of days in the old port, sampling the local speciality of bouillibaise, then took the coast train to Carcassonne. Everywhere there were fields of sunflowers and vines, a legacy of the Roman occupation of centuries before.
A week after leaving Paris, having transferred to the branch line that served the mountain villages of the high valley of the Ariège, George found himself in a wild and prehistoric landscape very much to his liking. Small villages crouched between sweeps of rock. The clouds hung low in the narrow valleys, like smoke from an autumn bonfire, so close that he felt he could reach out and touch them. And everywhere, black openings into caverns set high above the road, like mouths in the granite face. There was no order, no clear line, but rather a jagged and irregular ridge of mountains and hills, angry against the sky, as if the world had here been formed by some cataclysm, some violent upheaval.
George settled himself into a modest hotel in Ussat-les-Bains, a former spa town a few miles south of Tarascon. He engaged a guide and a fiacre for the morning and, after a plain meal of cured mountain ham and chicken pie, washed down with a pichet of local vin de table, he fell asleep dreaming of the adventure to come.
At ten o’clock the following morning, dressed in clothes and boots appropriate for a visit to the mountains, George and his guide, Henry Sandall, were deposited by the carriage at the head of a small overgrown path which spurred off the road. Overgrown by box and laurel bushes, it was easy going at first, but quickly the ground began to rise and George saw they were following a rough track up the mountain side.
The guide was a young English geologist, who had studied with Monsieur Noulet at the Natural History Museum in Toulouse, and stayed to marry a local girl. Sandall knew the caves well and as they climbed up to the opening through which they would descend into the first level only, Sandall explained how the temperature within the caves of Lombrives was always the same, something approximating to fifty five degrees Farenheit, regardless of the weather outside. That it was this that had meant the caves, over centuries, had been used as a refuge for those fleeing persecution in times of war. He told him that, though visitors could not go beyond the first levels, there were miles of caves on seven different levels, with evidence of calcium aragonite, limestone. Sandall explained how stalagmites and columns were formed, all in an easy and clear manner that brought to mind, even more than ever, the exploits of Professor Von Hardwigg, his nephew Axel and their guide Hans.
The path grew more precipitous and George began to feel the strain in his legs. His chest grew tight. Until now, he had not realised how quickly he had slipped from soldier to man of leisure. Too little exercise and too much reading. Seeing he was struggling, Sandall suggested they rest a while before the final ascent and the two men sat in companionable silence.
Looking out over the timeless landscape, over the leaves tipping from green to the gold and copper of autumn, George felt a surge of affection for the natural world, all the more poignant because he realised that he could put off his return to England for only a little longer. There was something about the stillness of the air and the enduring nature of the landscape which led him to reflection, so much so that he did not realise for a moment that Sandall was talking; this time, he said, telling a story that owed rather more to mythology than history or scientific study. Would he like to hear it? George said he would and sat back to listen.
Sandall’s eyes were bright with the pleasure of his narrative. Associated with a particular cavern within the caves of Lombrives was the story of how the Pyrenees had been formed and named. Going back even beyond the acknowledged history of the region – its Prehistoric, Roman, Visigoth and Huguenot pasts – was a myth of how the Greek demi-god, Heracles, had found himself in the Ariège after the tenth of his twelve labours. At that time the people of the Cerdagne, the Bébryces, lived there under the rule of their king, Bebryx.
There were various versions of the myth, but the most persistent was that Heracles had fallen in love with Bebryx’s daughter, Pyrène, and she with him. They had spent one night together but, under the terms of his quest, was bound to deliver the Cattle of Géryon to the Goddess Hera. Under cover of dawn, he had slipped away. Waking to find him gone, Pyrène, distraught and suffering, had followed and was torn to pieces by wild animals. Hearing her cries, Heracles turned back and finding her dead, in remorse and rage fashioned the Pyrenees from the earth and stone as a mausoleum to his lost lover.