Kipling's rock

This is rock Rudyard Kipling used to like to walk up to, rest and admire the view. It has a little ledge just right to sit on.  A little over one hundred years ago, Rudyard Kipling and his wife arrived in Vernet-les-Bains.  Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907, the world-famous  Rudyard Kipling visited Vernet-les-Bains with his wife, Carrie, in 1910, 1911 and 1914, to ‘take the waters’ for her rheumatism. Of Vernet, Kipling wrote, “Vernet is a lovely, cheerful place, surrounded by high mountains on which snow still lingers in March. The sun is Spanish and stabs through the gorges like a knife. There is a pleasant English Club, with all the papers. Our rooms are very comfortable.  Carrie takes her sulphur baths, drinks her sulphur water and had a drastic course of massage sous l’eau that made her swear yet made her better. On the whole, she found great good out of her course of baths.”  The Thermes still provide treatments but the opulent days are long gone and the posh hotels were nearly all swept away in the terrible flood of 1940. A few Brits remain but not many and now the village is more off the beaten track. I still agree with old tourist slogan that used to appear on posters and described the village as, "Le Paradis des Pyrénées."