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Patrick Young
needed to appreciate an area such as the Pyrénées, which did not so readily open
itself up to every viewer:
In the Pyrénées, the sublime is as yet scarcely appreciated. It is invisible, perched on high,
timid. It doesn’t disrobe, doesn’t even show itself. It exists, all the more alive in that it
hasn’t been altered by human industry, vulgarised by storytellers, or by chronicles.
Giving its exact reflection is an enterprise beyond our powers, one at which many of the
better of us have failed. 51
Constructed as, in effect, a high quality good, the region demanded of the tourist
a certain disposition and preparation, if it was truly to be consumed and appreciated.
Not all tourists had these qualities, of course, and tourist writers recognized as
much, attempting actively to school them in the categories of taste essential to the
consumption of the provinces. The imperative for the tourist, overall, was now to
open him or herself up to an area, rather than simply whiling away time at a single
resort. The ideal was of a tourist who forged out, unafraid, preferably on bicycle,
one who could penetrate, owing to transport and his or her disposition, beneath
the veil of prejudice and ignorance to a discovery of the local area. Tourist
literature from the period constantly bemoaned the influence of preconception as
inhibiting response to a given local attraction. One account of a voyage in the
Eastern Pyrénées, by a TCF delegate, regretted that it was for the most part only
through regional products that most Parisians knew of the area, and that therefore
the “general opinion” of the area held it to be little more than a bunch of vines and
Castillet. 52 In his dissection of “the art of viewing,” Alfred Danzat urged that
effective viewing came only with the shedding of prejudices and habitudes: the
true tourist observed, catalogued and responded emotionally, but did not judge.
“Seeing a region, studying a people in a spirit of sympathy, is the best means of
penetrating both . . . Sympathy is reciprocal: it loosens tongues, opens hearts and
doors which remain closed to the grumpy.” 53 As tourism continued to develop,
Danzat argued, extending its reach and augmenting its facilities of reception,
traveling to remote regions would come increasingly to resemble actually living
in them. The easier travel became, “the more people will interest themselves in
the pays, the better they will taste its charm and interest, and the more will the
great number of facts and characters – which elude the first superficial viewing –
strike our more open and attentive disposition.” 54
The Past as Consolation
In their dynamic of resistance and discovery, these accounts of the provinces made
tourism into something of a search; and for many tourists, particularly those in the
Touring Club, it was now France for which one searched in tourism. Pedalling off
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