This artistic retreat is a happy combination of Byzantine palace and Basque chalet. Here Rostand lives part of the year, with his wife and son, in a retirement only broken to receive a friend, who is supposed never to speak of the strenuous life. To escape from the continual excitement of city life and the feverish fashionable resorts, and also to be able to devote himself entirely to work, the creator of "Cyrano" fled to this spot eight years ago. Arnaga is not constructed along the conventional lines of the French château, but looks rather like a Moorish palace as it stands on a high hill, surrounded by parks and terraces, and the wonderful Basque landscape. On one side the castle or palace, or château, or whatever you choose to call it, overlooks a verdant plain sprinkled with semi-tropical blossoms and watered by the winding stream of the Nive. On the other rise the majestic Pyrenees, which, in the glory of the southern sunset, flush to a deep crimson and then pale to a sombre purple. Surely it is an ideal spot and will be till the madding crowd comes and sets this ideal litterateurs' and artists' retreat in an uproar, as it did Étretat and St. Raphael in the days of Alphonse Karr. Rostand's earnings as a dramatist might not suffice to keep up such a pretentious establishment, but since he is married to the daughter of a Paris banker the thing seems simpler. "The fame of Cambo is only just coming to be widespread. This is due to the fact that the great poet and playwright whose fame rests upon having invented a _papier-maché_ nose for his chief creation has made it so." This was the rather unkindly criticism of a brother professional (a French playwright) jealous, presumably, of Rostand's fame, and must not be taken seriously. Rostand's house is one of the sights of Cambo, but as a Frenchman wrote: "_M. Rostand n'est pas toujours à sa fenêtre_." Still the house is there and those who would worship at the shrine from without may do so. To get in and out of Cambo one passes over a tiny bridge, so narrow that one conveyance must wait while another crosses. As the same observant Frenchman said: "No wonder M. Rostand does not quit Cambo if he has to cross a bridge like this!" Automobiles especially have an annoying time of it, and the new "automobile _corne quadruple_" as it whistles out the famous air: "_Je suis le pâtre des montagnes_," will not turn a Basque peasant and his donkey aside once the latter has set his forefoot on the curious old bridge. At Cambo the bathing establishment is in a half-hidden, tree-grown corner on the banks of the transparent Nive.