A chain, but no barrier

On 26 August 1880 Henry Russell consummated his marriage in an unusual way. He was, to his own mind, married to the Vignemale, the highest French peak in the Pyrenees, and, wishing to spend the night with his beloved, he climbed to the 10,820ft summit and got his servants to dig a trench, bury him under earth and stones, wrapped in his sheepskin sleeping-bag, and leave him to the darkness. He survived and wrote of this night: ‘It seemed as though I had left the earth.’

Russell is one of the oddballs with whom Matthew Carr’s book teems. Another is Sabine Baring-Gould, the author of ‘Onward, Christian soldiers’, who in 1848 visited the Algerian emir Abd-el-Kader, imprisoned by the French in the château at Pau. He was not as impressed by this Sufi hero as most others were. The emir and his wives ‘lounged about the rooms, silent and smoking, sulky, without occupation and without interests’, Baring-Gould wrote. ‘Their habits were so dirty that the tapestries and rich furniture had all to be removed.’ The writer was only 14 when they met, though Carr does not mention this. He is such a collector of Pyrenean connections that we often want to hear more of the people he introduces.

Nothing by way of history or imagination is alien to his account of this 270-mile chain of mountains. We follow Henry Swinburne on a hot day in 1776 to the 9,439ft summit of the Pic du Midi de Bigorre, where no local person would venture. ‘Dreary’ was his verdict, but also ‘savage’.

Later we join Swinburne’s kinsman Algernon for a dip in the freezing Lake Gaube, which (recollected 37 years later, from the domesticity of The Pines, Putney) produced ‘one of the most extraordinary English-language poems of the 19th century’, in Carr’s judgment.