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A large, well-arranged public garden begins just at the city gate and extends along the left bank of the Adour, and there are many pleasant drives in the environs. From here we take the cars for Bordeaux, France, a distance of over a hundred miles, the road running mostly through what seems to be an interminable pine forest.
So I departed to Dax, at vacation time, to try the waters. "I rented a room on the bank of the Adour, overlooking the Promenade des Baignots. A charwoman took care of it for me.
But the great strength of Bayonne arose at this juncture not so much from its original defences as from the numerous outworks which had been lately added to it. It was along the course of the Adour, as the reader will probably recollect, or rather between the Adour and the Nieve, that Soult formed his famous intrenched camp.
Along the Dordogne, Libourne and Saint-Émilion were the easternmost English towns. Up the Garonne, the French were in possession of Langon, while, in the valley of the Adour, Saint-Sever, perched on its upland rock, was the landward outpost of the diminished Gascon duchy.
The whole vast plain of Gascony and of Languedoc is an arid and profitless expanse in winter save where the swift-flowing Adour and her snow-fed tributaries, the Louts, the Oloron and the Pau, run down to the sea of Biscay.
The city of Bayonne stands, as everybody knows, upon the Adour, about six or eight miles from the point where that river falls into the sea. On the southern or Spanish bank, where the whole of the city, properly so called, is built, the country, to the distance of two or three miles from the walls, is perfectly flat and the soil sandy, and apparently not very productive.
As for the cause of the Landes, it may be easily divined, by the help of a map and of common sense. The Gironde and the Adour carry to the sea the drainage of nearly a third of France, including almost all the rain which falls on the north side of the Pyrenees. What has become of all the sand and mud which has been swept in the course of ages down their channels?
Careful preparations were made by Wellington for throwing a large force across the Lower Adour below Bayonne, in concert with a British fleet.
Their very name of De Brocas spoke of the race of nobles who had long held almost sovereign rights over a large tract of country watered by the Adour and its many tributary streams; and although at this time, the year of grace 1342, the name of De Brocas was no more heard, but that of the proud Sieur de Navailles who now reigned there instead, the old name was loved and revered amongst the people, and the boys were bred up in all the traditions of their race, till the eagle nature at last asserted itself, and they felt that life could no longer go on in its old accustomed groove.
Yet no general, not even Napoleon himself, brought about so many startling surprises as Wellington. The passage of the Douro, the storm of the frontier fortresses, the flank attack at Vittoria, the passage of the Adour, the passage of the Bidassoa were each and all of them utterly unexpected by the French marshals; and those were by no means the only, or the most conspicuous, instances.
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