“Sleet lashed the slopes of the Pyrenees … Heavy rain shrouded the landscape. They … advanced slowly into the downpour.” (January 18, 1814)

Snoopy, Madeleine L’Engle, and Edward Gorey are my models here, although the famous “It was a dark and stormy night” owes its fame to Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Paul Clifford. And if – as some will claim – it ain’t poetry, at least it’s true. Sleet was lashing the slopes of the Pyrenees in January 1814.

 

Imagine this in winter!

Carlos de Haes, Aguas Buenas (Pyrenees), ca.1882. © Museo Nacional del Prado, www.museodelprado.es

(Click here for a small selection of Pyrenean views I've put together for you at the Museo del Prado in Madrid. To find out more about landscape painting and why many paintings in this blog date from nearly fifty years after the action of the book, check out this exhibition at the National Gallery in Washington.)

See what Francis Seymour Larpent says about it in his private journal:

“a terrible storm the day before yesterday” (January 18, 1814)

“Yesterday it was quite a fine, sunny, warm day, till one or two o’clock … when a storm gathered, and soon the rain and wind came, and has continued to this time. The night has been very boisterous.” (January 20, 1814)

“Still rain, without ceasing.” (January 21, 1814)

And what this means for travellers:

“The roads in parts [are] almost up to a horse’s belly.” (January 12,1814)

(The Private Journal of Judge-Advocate Larpent, Spellmount: Spellmount Library of Military History, 2000. With an introduction by Ian C. Robertson.)