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“Between the sea and the land is a stretch of pelagian country where the frontiers of the two elements become indistinct. Skylarks from the fields fly with sealarks. The plow and the fishing boat, a stone’s throw apart, furrow the land and the water alike. The sailor and the shepherd borrow from one another’s tongues: the sailor says ‘the waves are flocking’, and the shepherd speaks of ‘fleets of sheep’.”
// from Memoirs from Beyond the Grave
by François-René de Chateaubriand, 1848.
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The front cover depicts Eurasian brown bears, a species whose population in the Pyrenees is critically endangered. By old tradition in this region, elders call the bear Lou Moussu (“The Mister”). Modern conservation efforts have included the reintroduction of bears from other regions, such as Slovenia. The artwork is adapted from a vintage plate captioned “Winter Visitors at Barèges,” appearing on an unnumbered page in The Pyrenees: a Description of Summer Life at French Watering Places by Henry Blackburn (Sampson Low, 1867). In the digitized version provided by the British Library via its public Flickr archive, the plate appears on scan page 169.
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