CHAPTER VIII.. "the Little Paris of the South."

"THE LITTLE PARIS OF THE SOUTH."

When the Count of Foix made a hunting trip to his château mignon on the present site of Pau, he found it a goodly journey. There were quagmires and waste land to pass, and the visit and return were not to be made in a sun's shining. More greatly than avenging spirits from his dungeons the spirit of steam would affright him to-day, as it goes roaring over the levels in a hundred minutes to the same destination.

From Orthez, it is less than two hours by rail, and we are at last in Pau. The Midi line is accurately on time. These French railroads are operated by the State; they are not afflicted with parallel lines and bitter competition; they have no occasion, as our roads have, to advertise a faster schedule than can possibly be carried out. Consequently their time-tables aim to state the exact truth, and the roads can and do live up to it.

It is late in the evening when we arrive, and we seek no impressions. A comfortable omnibus winds us up an infinity of turns, through an apparent infinity of streets, and we are at the Hotel Gassion.

It is impossible to be entirely impressionless, even for travelers at ten at night. It is the hotel itself which makes the dent. Our vague misgivings as to the "dismal roadside inns" awaiting our tour have already been arrested at Biarritz and San Sebastian. They are sent into exile from Pau. The Hotel Gassion, whose name honors a stout old Béarnais warrior, is fitly a palace. It cost four hundred thousand dollars. A cushioned elevator lifts us smoothly upward to our rooms, which prove high-ceiled and unusually large and have dressing-rooms attached. The dark walls accord with a deep mossy carpet. The furnishings are massive in mahogany, polished and carved: a wardrobe, dressing-cases, a writing-desk; a sofa-couch, made inaccessible, as everywhere in Europe, by the barrier of a huge round table; padded arm-chairs, upholstered in silk damask; and, acme of prevision, a praying-chair. The beds seem beds of state, covered and canopied with some satiny material; and both silk and lace curtains part before the windows, showing separate balconies in the night outside. The dining-hall and the parlors, which we do not seek until the morning, prove to be on an equally expensive scale; paintings of the Pyrenees hang in the wide halls; and there is a conservatory and winter-garden opening on the terrace. The building is of grey stone, with corner towers and turrets and an imposing elevation, and has less the look of a hotel than of a royal Residenz.

Our estimates of the standards of comfort in the Pyrenees are perceptibly heightened by the evening's impressions alone, as we discuss our surroundings and the Apollinaris. With Pau thus rivaling Lucerne, we grow more confident for Eaux-Bonnes and Cauterets, Luchon and Bigorre. And as, from the balcony, we look in vain across the murky night to see the snow-peaks which we know are facing us, we agree that here at the good Hotel Gassion we could luxuriously outstay the lengthiest storm to view them.

II.

We are glad when daylight comes, as boys are on Christmas morning. The present we are eager for is the sight of the Pyrenees snow-peaks. The sun is shining, the sky clear. Even coffee and rolls seem time-wasters, and we hasten out to the terrace.

Yes, the Pyrenees are before us. There stretches the range, its relief walling the southern horizon from west to the farthest east, the line of snow-tusks sharp and white in the sunshine. They are distant yet, but they stand as giants, parting two kingdoms. Austere and still, they face us, as they have faced this spot since that stormy Eocene morning when they sprang like the dragon's white teeth from the earth.

The view is a far-reaching one. The eye sweeps the broadside of the entire west-central chain,--a full seventy miles from right to left. The view might recall, as the greater recalls the less, the winter summits of the Adirondacks, seen from the St. Regis mountain. It has been more equally paired with the line of the distant Alps seen from the platform at Berne. I may parallel it, too, again in Switzerland, with the view of the Valais peaks which bursts on one when, winding upward past the Daubensee and its desolation, he comes out suddenly upon the brink of the great wall of the Gemmi. But here there is a warmth in the view beyond that of Switzerland. Some one has said that "snow is regarded as the type of purity not because it is cold but because it is spotless." This distant snow-line is spotless, but to the eye at least it is not cold.

Here as there, the separate peaks have their separate personality. It is not a blur of nameless tips. Two especially arrest attention, south and southeast, for they rise head and shoulders above their neighbors. Each bears the name of the Pic du Midi. That opposite us, dominating the valley of Ossau, is the Pic du Midi d'Ossau. It is ice-capped and jagged,--

"A rocky pyramid, Shooting abruptly from the dell Its thunder-splintered pinnacle,"--

the Matterhorn of the Pyrenees. That on the left is the noted Pic du Midi de Bigorre, famed for the view from its top. Other prominent peaks are also pointed out. Mont Perdu and the Vignemale, two of the princes of the chain, are partly hidden by other summits, and are too distant to rule as they ought. The monarch Maladetta, the highest summit of the Pyrenees, is farther eastward still and cannot be seen from Pau.

It is a repaying prospect; a majestic salutation, preceding the nearer acquaintance to come. One thing we know instantly. There will be no lack of noble scenery in these mountains. We shall find wild views among their rocks and ice,--views, it must be, which shall dispute with many in the Alps.

This prospect from the terrace at Pau is a celebrated one. Icy peaks are not all that is seen. In front of them the ranges rise, still high from the plain, but smoothed and softened with the green of pines and turf. Between these and the Pau valley spread hidden leagues of rolling plains, swelling as they approach us into minor ravelins of foothills known as the coteaux; and little poplar-edged streams, "creaming over the shallows," winding their way toward the valley just below us, are coming from the long slopes to join the hurrying Gave de Pau. Houses and hamlets are here and there, and the even streak of the railway; and over toward the coteaux we see the village of Jurançon, famed for its wines.

The terrace falls sheer away, a fifty-foot wall from where we stand, and at its base, as we lean over the parapet, we see houses and alleys and just beneath us a school-yard of shouting, frolicking children. We brighten their play with a few friendly sous, as one enlivens the Bernese bear-pit with carrots.

Behind us, the Hotel Gassion rises to cut off the streets beyond it; to the right, along the terrace a few hundred yards, stands a stout old building, square and firm, which we know at once for the castle of Henry of Navarre.

III.

"In most points of view," as Johnson observes, in his Sketches in the South of France, "we look down the valley and see on either side its mountain walls; or we are placed upon culminating points overtopping all the rest of the prospect; but here the view is across the depression and against the vast panorama, which opposes the eye at all quarters, and comprehends within it the whole of the picture. High up in the snow the very pebbles seem to lie so distinctly that, but for the space between, a boy might pick them up; lower down, from among the brown heather thin blue streaks stream aloft from some cottage chimney, winding along the brae-side till melted into air. We half expect to see some human figure traverse those white fields and mark the footprints he leaves behind, some shepherd with his dog crossing from valley to valley. Alas! it is twenty miles away, the pebbles are huge masses of projecting rock, precipices on which the snow cannot rest; yonder smoke is from the charcoal-burner's fire, which would take in a cottage for a mouthful of fuel, and a dozen men piled on each other's shoulders might at this moment be swallowed up in these snow-beds and we never the wiser.

"With the warm sunlight upon it, and the pure, clear blue above, into which these great shapes are wedged like a divine mosaic, the scene looks so spotless and holy in its union with the heavens that one might fancy it a link between this earthliness and the purity above, 'the heaven-kissing hill' on which angels' feet alight. The great vision of marvelous John Bunyan seemed there realized, and we had found the Immanuel's Land and these were the Delectable Mountains. 'For,' said he, 'when the morning was up they bid him look South; so he did, and behold, at a great distance he saw a most pleasant mountainous country beautified with woods, vineyards, fruits of all sorts, flowers also; with springs and fountains very delectable to behold.... It was common, too, for all the pilgrims, and from thence they might see the gates of the Celestial City.'"

IV.

At the other side of the hotel we are in Pau. There is not very much that is impressive in its general appearance. We go by a patch of park and through a mediocre street, and find ourselves in the public square,--the Carfax of the city. From this run east and south its two chief streets. All of the buildings are low and most of them dingy. We expected newer, higher, more Parisian effects. At the right of the square is the long, flat market-building, vocal, in and out, this early morning, with bustling hucksters superintending their stalls. The square itself is bright with the colors of overflowing flowers and fabrics and other idols of the market-place. Neat little heaps of fruit, apexed into "ball-piled pyramids," are guarded by characterful old women, alert and intent, whose heads, coifed with striped kerchiefs, nod a reward to the purchaser with a hearty "Merci, monsieur!"

Few of the streets in the town are well paved, and few of the villas seen in driving in the suburbs aid to raise the architectural average. Except for its palace-hotels, Pau seems to show little of artistic building enterprise.

This city, so popular with the English, is rarely spoken of in America. There, in fact, it is singularly little known. This is no truer of Pau than of the Pyrenees themselves; but even to Englishmen who may know as little as we of the latter, the former is familiar ground. Four thousand Britons winter here annually, besides French and other visitors, and Pau runs well in the hibernal race, even against Mentone and Nice. Its hotels alone would evidence this. Up to these, there are all grades of good accommodation,--the pensions, of good or better class; furnished apartments, or a flat to be rented by the season; whole villas to be leased or purchased, as the intending comer may prefer.

One can leave Paris or Marseilles by the evening express and be in Pau the next afternoon,--about the same length of time as required to reach St. Augustine from New York. This is certainly far from a formidable journey, and it is matter for surprise that the adventurous American does not oftener take it.

The favor of the spot, it owes to its climate. Something there is,--some meteorological idiosyncrasy in its location,--which guards its still, mild air, the winter through. Storms rage impotently down from the mountains or across the Landes; they cannot pass the charmed barrier of the coteaux. Winds are rare in Pau. Rain is not rare; but the atmosphere, even when damp, is not chilling, and the lines of rain fall soft and never aslant. There is a tradition of an old sea-captain who once made a brief stay here and who, as he took his daily walks, was noticed as constantly and restlessly whistling. He finally left in disgust, with the remark that there was not a capful of wind to be had in the place.

The winter colony takes full possession of the town. It passes thirty thousand inhabitants under the yoke, as Rome passed their forefathers the Aquitani. Pau in the season is a British oligarchy. Society fairly spins. There are titles, and there is money; there are drives, calls, card-parties; dances and dinners; clubs,--with front windows; theatres, a Casino, English schools, churches; tennis, polo, cricket; racing, coaching,--and, Anglicissime, a tri-weekly fox-hunt! For some years, too, the position of master of the hounds, a post of much social distinction in Pau, was held by a well-known American, so we are told,--a fact certainly hitherto unheralded to many of his countrymen.

Socially, there is a wide range of entertainment at Pau. What Johnson wrote of it thirty years ago is not materially inapplicable to-day: "One set, whom you may call the banqueteers, give solemn, stately dinners immediately before going to bed; another perform a hybrid entertainment, between the English tea-party, and the Continental soirée, where you may enjoy your Bohea and Souchong, play long small whist, and occasionally listen to ponderous harmonies solemnly performed. A third are the formal rout-givers, the white-kid-and-slipper, orchestra-and-programme, dance-and-sit-down-to-supper folks; so like home that it only requires Gunter's men to fancy oneself in Baker Street of olden times. Another is the delightful soirée pur sang, where everybody comes as a matter of course, and where everybody who does not sing, dances or plays, or is a phenomenon in charades, or writes charming impromptus, or talks like the last book, or can play at any known game from loto to chess, or knows all the gossip of the last six hours; and where everybody chats and laughs, and sends everybody else comfortably home in the best of humors just about the time that the great people are expecting the coiffeur to arrive."

Thus there is a stir in the Pyrenees the year around. In the winter, at Pau; in summer, at the twenty cures and centres among the mountains. The proprietor of a winter hotel here will own also his summer hostelry at Bigorre or Cauterets. In the summer, it is the French and Spanish to whom he caters, for they have so far been the ones most appreciative both of the springs and the scenery of these mountains. And so, with the rise and dip of the seasons, the European element waxes as the English wanes, in a kind of solstitial see-saw. And the smiling landlord stands upon the pivot.

* * * * *

The clouds are closing in, after granting us that glittering panorama, and the morning grows dull and dark. We explore the book-stores, and finally find the old Library in the upper story of the market-building. Here two of us at least pass a long and contentful forenoon.

In fierce Count Gaston's time, Béarn centred in Orthez, and Pau was but his hunting-box. Two hundred years later, Pau had become the focus, and Béarn and Foix not only, but French Navarre as well, were its united kingdom. Gaston's Castle of Moncade had aged into history,--

"Outworn, far and strange, A transitory shame of long ago,"

and the hunting-box had grown in its turn to castle's stature.

The world had brightened during the two centuries. Constantinople had fallen and the Renaissance came. Luther had posted his theses on the Wittemberg church door and the Reformation took root. Men were older than when Froissart lived and wrote. And this active province of Béarn kept pace; it opened quickly to the new influences, was alive to the changing zeitgeist. There remained the chivalric still,--and a trace of the barbaric,--as with the outer world; in short, in its faults and fervor's, in its codes and standards, the sixteenth century is aptly summed up in Béarn-Navarre,--and Navarre in its famous Henry.

VI.

And so, on the following morning, we pass into the courtyard of his castle here at Pau with the feeling that in some sense we are evoking the shade of the era, not of the man. The feeling dies hard; but the robustious, business-like guide that herds us together with other comers, and shepherds us all briskly through the official round, goes very far toward killing it. There is little that one needs to remember of the successive rooms and halls; it is a confusion of polished floors, and vases, and tapestry, and porphyry tables, and the rest,--adorned and illumined by a voluble Gallic description. Later French kings have restored the old building, and stocked it with Paris furniture, and made it modern and comfortable. One is always divided in spirit over these restorations. The castle needed help painfully; it had been badly used by the Revolution; and it had been debased to a barrack by Napoleon's troops, who "stabled their steeds in the courts and made their drunken revelry resound in the chambers of Marguerite of Angoulême." Dismantled, half-roofless, its great halls, unsheltered and unsheltering, it was wasting fast under the elements into picturesque but irreparable ruin. And I suppose the pleasure of kings and the peace of utilitarians ought fairly to outweigh the disappointments of the touring impression-seeker.

In one apartment, however, we make a stand. The herd and its shepherd can pass along. This, he has told us, is the birthplace of Henry IV. The floor is polished like the rest, and the furniture has been in part renewed, but the room is the same which that alert baby first laughed upon. In the corner at the right is an antique bed of carved walnut, with four posts and a rich canopy. Around its side are cut in the wood an elaborate series of medallions, each a foot square, representing the heads of the kings of France. Across the apartment swings still a great tortoise-shell, which served the royal infant for a cradle,--saved afterward from the furies of the Revolution by the substitution of a false shell in its place.

The genuineness of the present shell has frequently been questioned; but the testimony of LAGRÈZE has now fairly established the story of its preservation.

In this room, Jeanne d'Albret sang a Béarnais song as the hero of Ivry was born, and so won the wager with her martial old father, the King of Navarre; and the boy came into the world smiling and unafraid. And writers tell us how delighted the old king was, and how he took the infant into his arms, and rubbed its lips with a garlic clove, and tilted into its little mouth from a golden goblet some drops of the manly wine of Jurançon. When Queen Jeanne herself was born in this very castle, twenty-five years before, the Spaniards had sneered: "A miracle! the cow (of the arms of Béarn) has given birth to a ewe!" "My ewe," exclaimed the happy old father now, "has brought forth a lion! Tu seras un vray Béarnais!"

VII.

Henry's life was as martial and as merry as his grandfather sought to form it. He grew up on the coteaux in a hardy, fresh-air life, and at nineteen became King of Navarre,--the title including Béarn and Foix. Into this old room in the castle where we stand throng reminders of his career, its beginnings so closely twined with Pau. Independent still as under Gaston, the sovereigns of the stout little kingdom had lived friends but no subjects of the King of France; and the Court at Pau, always proud and autonomous as the Court at Paris, had become defiantly Protestant besides. And now if ever it had a sovereign after its own heart. Henry was kingly, but a king of the people. He had their spirit. His long, keen, grizzled face was alight with ready comradeship. "I want my poorest subject," he said, "to have a fowl for his pot on Sundays." He was a Béarnais from sole to crown,--in bravery and craft, tact and recklessness, in virtues, and--which pleased them as much--in vices. "He was plain of speech, rough in manner,--with a quaint jest alike for friend or foe; his hand upon his sword, his foot in the stirrup, his gun slung across his shoulder, the first in assault, the last in retreat. Irregular in his habits, eating at no stated times, but when hungry voraciously devouring everything that pleased him, especially fruit and oysters; negligent, not to say dirty, in his person, and smelling strong of garlic. A man who called a spade a spade, swore like a trooper, and hated the parade of courts; was constant in friendship, promised anything freely, a boon companion, a storyteller, cynical in his careless epicureanism, and so profound a believer in the 'way of fate,' that reckless of the morrow he extracted all things from the passing hour."

ELLIOTT: Old Court Life in France.

Time had not jogged on so far, in journeying from Orthez to Pau, as to forget all his mediæval ways,--his promptings to strife and feuds, his liking for adventures. Henry had abundance of them, in his running fire against his neighbor-enemies, in his hot Protestant struggles against the Medicis, in his hotter fight for the throne of France. There are both meats and sweetmeats in his career,--strong deeds and knightly diversions. "These old wars are the most poetic in French history; they were made for pleasure rather than interest. It was a chase in which adventures, dangers, emotions were found, in which men lived in the sunlight, on horseback, amidst flashes of fire, and where the body as well as the soul had its enjoyment and its exercise. Henry carries it on as briskly as a dance, with a Gascon's fire and a soldier's ardor.... This is no spectacle of great masses of well-disciplined men coming heavily into collision and falling by thousands on the field, according to the rules of good tactics. The king leaves Pau or Nérac with a little troop, picks up the neighboring garrisons on his way, scales a fortress, intercepts a body of arquebusiers as they pass, extricates himself pistol in hand from the midst of a hostile troop, and returns.... They arrange their plan from day to day; nothing is done unless unexpectedly and by chance. Enterprises are strokes of fortune.... To act, to dare, to enjoy, to expend force and trouble like a prodigal, to be given up to the present sensation, be forever urged by passions forever lively, support and search the extremes of all contrasts, that was the life of the sixteenth century."

Tour Through the Pyrenees.

Exciting incidents abound among Henry's dashing forays. He exposed himself to every risk he asked of his men, deaf even to their own entreaties that he should take more care of his life. More than once it was his personal leadership alone that carried the day. For example, there was a hostile city on the river Lot. Henry coveted it. Its garrison was strong; its governor scoffed: "a fig for the Huguenots!" Henry would brave defeat sooner than brook defiance. He marched to the town at once. "It was in the month of June," as Sully relates it in his Memoirs, "the weather extremely hot, with violent thunder but no rain. He ordered us to halt in a plantation of walnut trees, where a fountain of running water afforded us some refreshment;" and after a brief rest, he disposed his little army, and planned his attack:

"We had three gates to force; these we made haste to throw down with the petard, after which we made use of hatchets. The breaches were so low that the first who entered were obliged to creep through on their hands and feet. At the noise of the petard, forty men armed and about two hundred arquebusiers ran almost naked to dispute our entry; meantime the bells rung the alarm, to warn everybody to stand to their defence. In a moment, the houses were covered with soldiers, who threw large pieces of wood, tiles and stones upon us, with repeated cries of 'Charge, kill them!' We soon found that they were resolved to receive us boldly; it was necessary therefore at first to sustain an encounter, which lasted above a quarter of an hour and was very terrible. I was cast to the ground by a large stone that was cast out of a window; but by the assistance of the Sieur de la Bertichère and La Trape, my valet de chambre, I recovered, and resumed my post. All this time we advanced very little, for fresh platoons immediately succeeded those that fled before us; so that before we gained the great square, we had endured more than twelve battles. My cuisses being loosened, I was wounded in the left thigh. At last we got to the square, which we found barricaded, and with infinite labor we demolished those works, being all the time exposed to the continual discharge of the artillery, which the enemy had formed into a battery.

"The King of Navarre continued at the head of his troops during all these attacks; he had two pikes broke, and his armor was battered in several places by the fire and blows of the enemy. We had already performed enough to have gained a great victory; but so much remained to do that the battle seemed only to be just begun; the city being of large extent and filled with so great a number of soldiers that we in comparison of them were but a handful. At every cross-way we had a new combat to sustain, and every stone house we were obliged to storm; each inch of ground so well defended that the King of Navarre had occasion for all his men, and we had not a moment's leisure to take breath.

"It is hardly credible that we could endure this violent exercise for five whole days and nights, during which time not one of us durst quit his post for a single moment, take any nourishment but with his arms in his hand, or sleep except for a few moments leaning against the shops. Fatigue, faintness, the weight of our arms, and the excessive heat, joined to the pain of our wounds, deprived us of the little remainder of our strength; our feet, scorched with heat and bleeding in many places, gave us agonies impossible to be expressed.

"The citizens, who suffered none of these inconveniences and who became every minute more sensible of the smallness of our numbers, far from surrendering, thought of nothing but protracting the fight till the arrival of some succors, which they said were very near; they sent forth great cries, and animated each other by our obstinacy. Though their defence was weak, yet they did enough to oblige us to keep upon our guard, which completed our misfortunes. In this extremity the principal officers went to the king, and advised him to assemble as many men as he could about his person and open himself a retreat. They redoubled their instances at the report which was spread and which they found to be true, that the succors expected by the enemy were arrived at the bar and would be so soon in the city that he would have but just time to force the wall and secure himself a passage. But this brave prince, whose courage nothing was ever able to suppress, turning toward them with a smiling countenance and air so intrepid as might have inspired courage into the most pusillanimous heart: ''Tis heaven,' said he, 'which dictates what I ought to do upon this occasion; remember then that my retreat out of this city, without having secured one also to my party, shall be the retreat of my soul from my body. My honor requires this of me; speak therefore to me of nothing but fighting, conquest or death.'"

There could be but one issue to such words. Henry fought till reinforcements came to him, and the town fell.

* * * * *

Anecdotes of Henry are in a very real sense anecdotes of Béarn. The one following, lines out two of the king's best qualities. He was besieging a strong city in Poitou. "We applied ourselves without ceasing to the trenches and undermining. The King of Navarre took inconceivable pains in this siege; he conducted the miners himself, after he had taken all the necessary precautions to hinder supplies from entering without; the bridges, avenues and all the roads that lead to the city were strictly guarded, as likewise great part of the country.... The mining was so far advanced that we could hear the voices of the soldiers who guarded the parapets, within the lodgment of the miners. The King of Navarre was the first who perceived this; he spoke and made himself known to the besieged; who were so astonished at hearing him name himself from the bottom of these subterraneous places that they demanded leave to capitulate. The proposals were all made by this uncommon way; the articles were drawn up or rather dictated by the King of Navarre, whose word was known by the besieged to be so inviolable that they did not require a writing. They had no cause to repent of this confidence; the King of Navarre, charmed with a proceeding so noble, granted the garrison military honors and preserved the city from pillage."

VIII.

The great satisfaction in contemplating the career of Henry is in the fact that it succeeded. His ambitions, maturing in purpose, ended in result. The King of Navarre found himself at last the King of France.

The path had not been of roses. He had captured two hundred towns and fought in sixty battles on his way. He himself had strewed thorns for others as well. His wars spread suffering throughout France. His skirmishings, petty but many, add up to an appalling total of harm. Henry as a model of renounced ambition is a failure. Read what his Catholic enemies in Béarn said of him, in an address and appeal to the Catholics of France; as now first translated out of its Old French, it has an oddly Jeffersonian ring:

"Knowing long since, to our cost, the nature of the wolf who seeks to deceive and then devour you, we have deemed it duty to warn you of the character of the beast, (le naturel de la beste,) so that by our putting you on your guard he shall not have means to endamage you. Within twenty years he has summoned a round million of foreign mercenaries to pillage and rend your kingdom. He has sacked and demolished two thousand monasteries and twenty thousand (sic!) churches; he has wrecked no less than nine hundred hospitals; he has caused the death, by war and divers punishments, of nearly one million, six hundred thousand men. In the face of his assurances to the nobility in 1580 and of his reiterated protestations, he has put up our very priests at auction and sold them off to the highest bidder, in order that his Huguenots might have on whom to wreak at leisure their diabolic hatred. He thinks himself King of France; it is a malady common to the crack-brained to fancy themselves kings of the first realm they spy and to fashion them seigniories in the air. Beware trusting your fowls to this fox!"

Evidently the Béarnais hero had made some tolerably strong enemies in pursuing his ambitions. No less truly his ambitions had made some tolerably wide gaps in his ethics.

But the world pardons much to success. And this man had a certain high-mindedness in him which compels admiration. When the battle of Ivry was commencing, "he remembered," relates Perefix, an old historian, "that the evening before the battle he had used some harsh expressions to Colonel Theodoric Schomberg, who had asked him for money, and told him in a passion that it was not acting like a man of honor to demand money when he came to take orders for fighting. He afterward went to him, when he was ranging his troops in order, and said: 'Colonel, we are now upon the point; perhaps I shall never go from this place; it is not just that I should deprive a brave gentleman as you are of your honor; I come therefore to declare that I know you to be an honest man and incapable of committing a base action.' Saying this, he embraced him with great affection."

"The colonel," continues Perefix, "sensibly moved with this behavior, replied with tears in his eyes: 'Ah, Sire! in restoring to me my honor you take away my life; for after this I should be unworthy of your favor if I did not sacrifice it to-day for your service. If I had a thousand lives I would lay them all at your feet.' In fact he was killed upon this occasion."

He besieged Paris, but would not storm it. "I am like the true mother in the judgment of Solomon," was his famous declaration; "I would rather not have Paris at all than see it torn to pieces." "The Duke of Nemours sent all useless mouths out of Paris; the king's council opposed his granting them passage; but the king, being informed of the dreadful scarcity to which these miserable wretches were reduced, ordered that they should be allowed to pass. 'I am not surprised,' said he, 'that the Spaniards and the chiefs of the League have no compassion upon these poor people; they are only tyrants; as for me, I am their father and their king, and cannot hear the recital of their calamities without being pierced to my inmost soul and ardently desiring to bring them relief.'"

Take it good and bad, lion of ewe, the character of Jeanne's high son is crystallized in one saying of his: "I would give a whole finger to have a battle,--and two to have a general peace."

* * * * *

With delight Pau watched her merry monarch; backed his final claim to the throne of St. Louis, made on the death of the last of the Medici kings and traced back through nine generations; followed tensely his long contest for that high prize, his rivalry with the League and with Philip of Spain, his victories at Arques and Ivry, his coronation, and his wise reign as Henry the Fourth of France. His fame was hers. The hour he died,--stabbed while in his state-carriage at Paris by the dagger of a fanatic,--"a tempest broke over the place of his birth, and lightning shivered to pieces the royal arms suspended over the gateway of the castle."

"Rubente Dextera sacras jaculatas arces, Terruit urbem"

IX.

A winter station such as Pau is a hub with many spokes. Excursions and drives are in all directions. Idle fashion enjoys its outlets to the air, and invalidism demands them. Each hamlet is a picnic resort. One has choice of time and space, from an hour's ramble in the park, to a day's long visit to the monster sight of the mountains, the Cirque of Gavarnie. The park, as we pass, deserves its hour's ramble. Its wide promenade, arched with great trees, is entered not far from the castle, and leads along the torrent of the Gave, whose source we are later to see in the snows around Gavarnie itself. It is the scene of the favorite constitutional of Pau,--a neutral ground for all social factions.

Four drives in particular point us each to its own quarter of the compass. One is long, with the watering places of Eaux Chaudes and Eaux Bonnes for its double destination. The others, nearer in distance, lead farther in event,--back through the centuries, ninety, fifty, thirty decades, in turn.

The first of these is to Morlaäs, the earliest capital of Béarn. The distance is seven miles. Though the road is flat and tame, the ride affords superb prospects of the line of the Pyrenees, and these culminate at the top of the hill just before descending to the village. Here the panorama is even finer than from Pau. Easterly ranges have come into the field. The sweep of the mountain barrier in sight is a full hundred miles, and the waste of intervening plains, no longer hidden by coteaux, increases the impression of distance without lessening that of height. The greater peaks rise now into better proportion. Mont Perdu and the Vignemale loom above their neighbors, and best of all is seen far away the crown at least of the great Maladetta.

You must enjoy Morlaäs wholly for its past. You cannot enjoy it for its present. It is a poor, dejected, straggling street, noticeable only for mud and stones and dun-coated hovels. It does not, like Fuenterrabia, retain the picturesqueness of its antiquity. There, it is the old town's to-day that carries us delightfully back into its yesterday. But at Morlaäs there is neither to-day nor yesterday.

For the prime of this place antedates old Fuenterrabia by many a hundred years. The latter may come to the former's estate as many centuries hence. Orthez is but in middle life, Pau a summer stripling, in the presence of this wreck of time. Poor Morlaäs! Thou hast seen thy long successor rise and reign and fall, succeeded in its turn by the brilliant capital that now sends hither its subjects to scoff at thy driveling old age.

To share the mood of this grey spot you must travel far back, down its dim retrospect. You must retrace long, successive eras, sensitive to the spirit of each as you pass. You must cross the sixteenth century, brightening into humanity yet still un-human,--the vivid, reckless King of Navarre its type. You must penetrate beyond the twilight where Count Gaston's armor flashes across from the brutal towers of Orthez, lawless and splendid; you must grope back farther into the gloom, four hundred years still, before you see the shadowy Morlaäs in its full stature, proud, powerful, rude, rich,--the capital of old Béarn.

Nine hundred years ago. Mohammed's name and power were still new. Charles Martel had just saved Europe from the Saracens. England had not been recreated by a Norman Conqueror. The Crusades were still undreamed of. Art, science, letters, were in custody in the East. These armed children ran riot,--passionate, intense, uncontrolled, loving fight and finery as the Trojans, or the Norse heroes of the Sagas.

A single fine portal of the original sanctuary is still to be seen. But of the old castle not a trace remains; only its name survives,--la Hourquie,--with its significant etymological story: Horcæ,--furcæ,--- fourches patibulaires,--the gibbet. For these viscounts of Morlaäs had recourse to a savage expedient to control the lawlessness of their day. They kept a gallows-tree erect before the castle gateway, a speaking symbol of vengeance, and there the blackened corpse, might hang until replaced, swinging in the winter wind. There was a mint here also, which stamped the metal of the little realm, and on the coins too appeared the device of the gibbet. There is a tradition that the executions took place only on market-days, and in the Pyrenees to this day the market-gathering is known as the Hourquie.

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Eleven miles west leads us four centuries forward again from Morlaäs. This is Lescar; with its ancient cathedral, the St. Denis of Béarn, the burial-place of generations of its rulers. Morlaäs has been deposed, and Orthez reigns in its stead,--with Lescar as primate. The gleam and glory of chivalry have grown with the years. Here was the seat of the church militant in its strongest manifestation. "The bishops of Lescar," writes Johnson, satirically, "are said to have been well suited to the times in which they lived; fighting when they could, and cursing when they could not. In the early history of the province, they are found lustily taking a part in the battles of the frontier country; and when peaceful times came, getting up a comfortable trade with the intrusive infidels they had so lately belabored. The reputation for wealth acquired by this astute community seems to have brought its troubles upon the enterprising diocesans, for tradition has it that in the eleventh century Viscount Dax laid sacrilegious hands upon their property. Whether he was too strong for the carnal weapon or spiritual manifestations were deemed more appropriate to his particular case, history does not record, but certain it is that the rebellious noble, being deaf to expostulation, was excommunicated, and resenting that, was seized with a leprosy, of which he died. His successor, adopting the same line of policy as the deceased, was treated in the same way and with the same result. So that between the thunders of the church and the arms of the flesh, the Episcopality of Lescar waxed mightily, and its bishops took the position of premier barons in the province, sitting next to royalty in council and therein keeping to order all grumblers against their rights and privileges. If two of the venerable prelates themselves happened to disagree and logic failed them, then,--it being scarcely orthodox for the reverend men to fight the matter out personally,--they employed a couple of lusty varlets to settle the business for them, and upon the weakest shoulders fell all the consequent disadvantages; thus instituting a simple and expeditious method of cutting short disputes by which the ecclesiastical courts of the present day do not appear to have benefited."

Lescar was called the ville septénaire; for it had, it is said, seven churches, seven fountains, seven mills, seven woods, seven vineyards, seven gates, and seven towers on the ramparts. It is another senile hamlet now, and imagination must do all the work. Even the cathedral has been altered, and in its large, rather plain interior are few relics of its earlier state, few marks to tell of the after-despoiled tombs of Henri Quatre's ancestry. There is a satisfying legend about this sanctuary. One of the feudal rulers had a violent hatred for some neighboring seignior, and finally secured his assassination. His hatred was thereupon followed by a remorse equally violent,--these men were violent in good as in bad, which redeems much; and in atonement he rebuilt magnificently this cathedral, which was even then an old one, and added to it a monastery as well. And to complete the story of poetic expiation, the assassin he had employed became a penitent himself; was later appointed one of the monks by his penitent patron; and ended by rising to the reverend office of abbot itself.

Southeast from Pau lies our third landmark of the past,--Coarraze. It is a longer road and a dusty one, but a village will tell off each mile, the Gave de Pau brings encouraging messages along the way, and the far Pic du Midi de Bigorre keeps inspiringly in sight. Besides the commoner trees to be met in this and other directions from Pau, are occasional orange-trees, Spanish chestnuts, aloes, acacias, and here and there a magnolia; but this region is north of much tropical verdure, even now in July, and plain beech and oak play the principal parts. Coarraze can be reached by rail also, and preferably so when haste is an object, for it is thirteen miles by the highway, while the train covers the distance within the half-hour.

This spot too had its castle and its feudal barons, subject to the court at Orthez. A tower of the castle still remains. It is of Raymond, one of these barons, that Froissart tells the legend of the familiar spirit. This obliging bogey was wont to visit his host as he lay asleep, waking him to tell him what had happened during the day in distant countries. His mode of rousing his patron was unceremonious, not to say boisterous. In his first visit, he made a terrific tumult throughout the castle, pounded the doors and casements, broke the plates in the kitchen, appalled the sleeping servants, "knocking about everything he met with in the castle, as if determined to destroy all within it.... On the following night the noises and rioting were renewed, but much louder than before; and there were such blows struck against the door and windows of the chamber of the knight that it seemed they would break them down."

The baron could no longer desist from leaping out of his bed, and proceeding to investigate matters; and in the end the bogey and he became fast friends. In fact, the former "took such an affection to the Lord de Corasse that he came often to see him in the night-time; and when he found him sleeping, he pulled his pillow from under his head or made great noises at the door or windows; so that when the knight was awakened, he said, 'let me sleep.'

"'I will not,' replied he, 'until I have told thee some news.'

"The knight's lady was so much frightened, the hairs of her head stood on end and she hid herself under the bed-clothes.

"'Well,' said the knight, 'and what news hast thou brought me?'

"The spirit replied, 'I am come from England, Hungary or some other place, which I left yesterday, and such and such things have happened.'

"Thus did the Lord de Corasse know by means of this messenger all things that were passing in the different parts of the world;" and for years this invisible mediæval sprite kept his patron comfortably posted on all current events, in a ghostly adumbration of the modern newspaper press.

But Coarraze and its castle carry us on later than Froissart's days. Here young Prince Henry ran about in his hardy youth, and romped and played pranks on his future subjects. Nothing delighted him more in after life than to come back here and hunt up his old peasant playfellows, bashful and reluctant, and bewilder and charm them with his state and his bonhomie. Most of the old castle is gone now, destroyed by a storm and since replaced by a newer structure. The old baron's spirit-messenger or the "white lady" of the House of Navarre have only the single tower remaining, for their ghostly visits,--finding change over all save the far line of the Pyrenees glittering unearthly in the moonlight.