'twixt France and Spain; Or, a Spring in the Pyrenees

The Pyrenees in the 1890s, when English and American visitors still traveled with servants and stayed weeks at a time, renting furnished villas and learning the local French. Bilbrough's guide captures a vanished world of leisure, when the mountain border between France and Spain was a frontier of discovery, and Pau served as the elegant capital of this transnational playground. This isn't a modern guidebook with QR codes and hotel reviews. It's something rarer: a companion for the imagination, and for the traveler who had already booked their spring and would spend pages preparing for what awaited. Bilbrough leads you through the spa town's casino gardens and race courses, then upward into villages where muleteers still carried travelers over passes into Spain. He describes what to wear, what to eat, which views warrant a full afternoon, and which castle histories reward the curious. The Pyrenees here are neither France nor Spain but something more interesting: a landscape of transition, where the cultures blur and the mountains promise both renewal and escape. For readers today, the book works as time travel: not just to the Pyrenees, but to an era when travel itself was an art form, requiring patience, preparation, and the willingness to be transformed by distance.