Pau is a pretty city, neat, of gay appearance; but the highway is paved with little round stones, the side-walks with small sharp pebbles: so the horses walk on the heads of nails and foot-passengers on the points of them. From Bordeaux to Toulouse such is the usage, such the pavement. At the end of five minutes, your feet tell you in the most intelligible manner that you are two hundred leagues away from Paris.
You meet wagons loaded with wood, of rustic simplicity, the invention of which goes back to the time of Vercingetorix, but the only thing capable of climbing and descending the stony escarpments of the mountains. They are composed of the trunk of a tree placed across the axles and sustaining two oblique hurdles; they are drawn by two great whitish oxen, decked with a piece of hanging cloth, a net of thread upon the head and crowned with ferns, all to shield them from the gray flies. This suggests food for thought; for the skin of man is far more tender than that of the ox, and the gray flies have sworn no peace with our kind. Before the oxen ordinarily marches a peasant, of a distrustful and cunning air, armed with a long switch, and dressed in white woollen vest and brown breeches; behind the wagon comes a little bare-footed boy, very wide awake and very ragged, whose old velvet cap falls like the head of a wrinkled mushroom, and who stops struck with admiration at the magnificent aspect of the diligence.
Those are the true countrymen of Henry IV. As to the pretty ladies in gauzy hats, whose swelling and rustling robes graze the horns of the motionless oxen as they pass, you must not look at them; they would carry your imagination back to the Boulevard de Gand, and you would have gone two hundred leagues only to remain in the same place. I am here on purpose to visit the sixteenth century; one makes a journey for the sake of changing, not place, but ideas. Point out to a Parisian the gate by which Henry IV. entered Paris; he will have great difficulty in calling up the armor, the halberts and the whole victorious and tumultuous procession that l’Etoile describes: it is because he passed by there to-day on such and such business, that yesterday he met there a friend, while last year he looked upon this gate in the midst of a public festival.
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All these thoughts hurry along with the force of habit, repelling and stifling the historic spectacle which was going to lift itself into full light and unroll itself before the mind. Set down the same man in Pau: there he knows neither hotels, nor people, nor shops; his imagination, out of its element, may run at random; no known object will trip him up and make him fall into the cares of interest, the passion of to-day; he enters into the past as a matter of course, and walks there as if at home, at his ease. It was eight o’clock in the morning; not a visitor at the castle, no one in the courts nor on the terrace; I should not have been too much astonished at meeting the BÉarnais, “that lusty gallant, that very devil,” who was sharp enough to get for himself the name of “the good king.”
His chateau is very irregular; it is only when seen from the valley that any grace and harmony can be found in it. Above two rows of pointed roofs and old houses, it stands out alone against the sky and gazes upon the valley in the distance; two bell-turrets project from the front toward the west; the oblong body follows, and two massive brick towers close the line with their esplanades and battlements. It is connected with the city by a narrow old bridge, by a broad modern one with the park, and the foot of its terrace is bathed by a dark but lovely stream. Near at hand, this arrangement disappears; a fifth tower upon the north side deranges the symmetry.
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The great egg-shaped court is a mosaic of incongruous masonry; above the porch, a wall of pebbles from the Gave, and of red bricks crossed like a tapestry design; opposite, fixed to the wall, a row of medallions in stone; upon the sides, doors of every form and age; dormer windows, windows square, pointed, embattled, with stone mullions garlanded with elaborate reliefs. This masquerade of styles troubles the mind, yet not unpleasantly; it is unpretending and artless; each century has built according to its own fancy, without concerning itself about its neighbor.
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On the first floor is shown a great tortoise-shell, which was the cradle of Henry IV. Carved chests, dressing-tables, tapestries, clocks of that day, the bed and arm-chair of Jeanne d’Albret, a complete set of furniture in the taste of the Renaissance striking and sombre, painfully labored yet magnificent in style, carrying the mind at once back toward that age of force and effort, of boldness in invention, of unbridled pleasures and terrible toil, of sensuality and of heroism. Jeanne d’Albret, mother of Henry IV., crossed France in order that she might, according to her promise, be confined in this castle. “A princess,” says d’AubignÉ, “having nothing of the woman about her but the sex, a soul entirely given to manly things, a mind mighty in great affairs, a heart unconquerable by adversity."
II.
She sang an old Bearnese song when she brought him into the world. They say that the aged grandfather rubbed the lips of the new-born child with a clove of garlic, poured into his mouth a few drops of JuranÇon wine, and carried him away in his dressing-gown.
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The child was born in the chamber which opens into the tower of MazÈres, on the south-west corner. “His grandfather took him away from his father and mother, and would have this child brought up at his door, reproaching his daughter and his son-in-law with having lost several of their children through French luxuries. And, indeed, he brought him up in the Bearnese manner, that is, bareheaded and barefoot, often with no more nicety than is shown in the bringing up of children among the peasantry. This odd resolution was successful, and formed a body in which heat and cold, unmeasured toil and all sorts of troubles were unable to produce any change, thus apportioning his nourishment to his condition, as though God wished at that time to prepare a sure remedy and a firm heart of steel against the iron knots of our dire calamities.”
His mother, a warm and severe Calvinist, when he was fifteen years old, led him through the Catholic army to la Rochelle, and gave him to her followers as their general. At sixteen years old, at the combat of Arnay-le-Duc, he led the first charge of cavalry. What an education and what men! Their descendants were just now passing in the streets, going to school to compose Latin verses and recite the pastorals of Massillon.
Those 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, with abrupt sallies, and pursuing his point against the enemy as with the ladies. 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 to the feet of Mlle. de Tignonville.
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They arrange their plan from day to day; nothing is done unless unexpectedly and by chance. Enterprises are strokes of fortune. Here is one which Sully had recounted by his secretary; I like to listen to old words among old monuments, and to feel the mutual fitness of objects and of style: "The king of Navarre formed the design of seizing on the city of Eause, which, by good right, was his, and where he had chance of fine fortune; for deeming that the inhabitants, who had not been willing to receive a garrison, should have respect for his person, who was their lord, he determined to march all day long in order to enter in with few people, so as to create no alarm, and, indeed, having taken only fifteen or sixteen of you, gentlemen, who placed yourselves nearest to him, among whom were you, with simple cuirasses under your hunting tunics, two swords and two pistols, he surprised the gate of the city and entered in before they of the guard were able to take up arms. But one of these gave the alarm to him who was sentinel at the portal, and he cut the cord in the slide of the portcullis, so that it fell immediately almost on the croup of your horse and that of your cousin, M. de BÉthune the elder, and hindered the troop which was coming up on the gallop from entering, so that the king and you fifteen or sixteen alone remained shut up in this city, where all the people, being armed, fell upon you in divers troops and at divers times, while the tocsin rang furiously, and a cry of ‘Arm, arm!’ and 'Kill, Kill! resounded on all sides,—seeing which, the king of Navarre, from the first troop which came up, some fifty strong, in part well, in part ill armed, he, I say, marching, pistol in hand, straight at them, called out to you: ‘Come now, my friends, my comrades; it is here that you must show courage and resolution, for thereon depends our safety; let each one then follow me and do as I do, and not fire until the pistol touches.’ At the same time, hearing three or four cry out: 'Fire at that scarlet tunic, at that white plume, for it is the king of Navarre,’ he charged on them so impetuously that, without firing more than five or six times, they took fright and withdrew in several troops. Others in like manner came against you three or four times; but as soon as they saw that they were broken, they fired a few times and turned away until, having rallied nearly two hundred together, they forced you to gain a doorway, and two of you went up to give a signal to the rest of the troop that the king was there, and that the gate must be burst open, as the draw-bridge had not been raised. Whereupon each one began working, and then several among that populace who loved the king, and others who feared to offend him, began raising a tumult in his favor; finally, after a few arquebusades and pistol-shots from both sides, there arose such dissension among them, some crying, ‘We must yield;’ others, ‘We must defend ourselves;’ that the irresolution afforded means and time for opening the gates, and for all the troops to present
themselves, at the head of whom the king placed himself, and saw most of the peoples fleeing and the consuls with their chaperons crying: ‘Sire, we are your subjects and your peculiar servants. Alas! allow not the sacking of this city, which is yours, on account of the madness of a few worthless fellows, who should be driven out. He placed himself, I said, at the head to prevent pillage: thus there was committed neither violence, nor disorder, nor any other punishment, except that four, who had fired at the white plume, were hung, to the joy of all the other inhabitants, who thought not that they should be quiet on such ood terms."
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At Cahors he burst in the two gates with petard and axe, and fought five days and five nights in the city, carrying house after house. Are not these chivalric adventures and poetry in action? “So, so, cavaliers,” cried the Catholics at Marmande; “a pistol-shot for love of the mistress; for your court is too full of lovely ladies to know any lack of them.” Henry escaped like a true paladin, and lost his victory at Contras in order to carry to the beautiful Corisandre the flags that he had taken. 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. Henry at Fontenay “worked in the trenches with pick and mattock.” On his return there was nothing but feasting.
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“We came together,” says Marguerite, “to take walks in company, either in a lovely garden where are long alleys of cypress and laurel, or in the park which I had caused to be made, in alleys three thousand paces long, which border the river; and the rest of the day was spent in all sorts of suitable pleasures, a ball ordinarily filling the afternoon and the evening.” The grave Sully “took a mistress like the rest.” In visiting the restored dining-hall, you repeople it involuntarily with the sumptuous costumes described by BrantÔme: ladies “clad in orange-color and gold lace, robes of cloth of silver, of crisped cloth of gold, stuffs perfectly stiff with ornaments and embroidery. Queen Marguerite in a robe of flesh-colored Spanish velvet, heavily loaded with gold lace, so decked out with plumes and precious stones as nothing ever was before.” I said to M. de Ronsard: “Do you not seem to see this beautiful queen, in such guise, appearing as the lovely Aurora, when she is going to spring up before the day, with her beautiful pale face, bordered with its ruby and carnation color?” At the ball in the evening, she loved to dance “the pavane of Spain and the Italian pazzemano. The passages in this were so well danced, the steps so judiciously conducted, the rests so beautifully made, that you knew not which most to admire, the beautiful manner of dancing, or the majesty of the steps, representing now gayety, now a fine and grave disdain.”
You may well believe that the good king was not sparing of sport.
“Il fut de ses sujets le vainqueur et le pÈre”
The maids of honor of Marguerite could bear witness to this; hence intrigues, quarrels and conjugal comedies, one of which is very prettily and very artlessly told by the queen; Mlle. de Fosseuse was the heroine. “The pain seized her one morning, at the break of day, while in bed in the chamber of the maids, and she sent for my physician and begged him to go and inform the king my husband, which he did. We were in bed in the same chamber, but in separate beds, according to our custom. When the physician gave him this bit of news, he was in great trouble, not knowing what to do, fearful on the one hand lest she should be discovered, and on the other lest she should want help, for he loved her dearly. He determined, finally, to confess all to me, and to beg me go to her assistance, for he knew well that, whatever might have passed, he should always find me ready to serve him in anything that could please him. He opens my curtain and says to me: ‘Dearest, I have concealed from you one thing which I must confess to you: I beg you to excuse me for it, and not to remember all that I have said to you on this subject. But oblige me so much as to get up at once, and go to the assistance of Fosseuse, who is very ill; I am sure that you would not wish, when you see her in that condition, to resent what is past. You know how much I love her; I beg that you will oblige me in this matter.’ I told him that I honored him too much to be offended with anything coming from him. That I would be off and do as if it were my daughter; that in the mean time he should go to the chase and take everybody with him, so that no talk of it should be heard.
“I had her promptly removed from the chamber of the maids and put into a chamber apart, with my physician and women to wait upon her, and gave her my best assistance. God willed that it should be only a daughter, which moreover was dead. After the delivery, she was carried to the chamber of the maids, where, though all possible discretion was used, they could not prevent the report from spreading throughout the castle. When the king my husband was returned from the chase, he went to see her according to his custom; she begged him that I would come to see her, as I was accustomed to visit all my maids when they were ill, thinking to stop by this means the spread of the report. The king my husband came into the chamber and found that I had gone to bed again, for I was tired with getting up so early, and with the trouble I had had in rendering her assistance. He begged that I would get up and go to see her; I told him that I had done so when she had need of my aid, but now she no longer had occasion for it; that if I went there, I should reveal rather than cloak the truth, and that everybody would point their finger at me. He was seriously vexed with me, and this was far from pleasant to me, for it seemed that I had not deserved such a recompense for what I had done in the morning. She often put him into similar mood toward me.”
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Compassionate souls, who admire the complaisance of the queen, do not pity her too much: she punished the king, by imitating him, at Usson and elsewhere.
And yet Pan was a lesser Geneva. Amidst these violences and this voluptuousness, devotion was warm; they went to sermons or to the church, with the same air as to the battle-field or the rendezvous. This is because religion then was not a virtue, but a passion. In such case, the neighboring passions, instead of extinguishing it, only inflame; the heart overflows on that side as on the others. When the lazzarone has stabbed his enemy, he finds a second pleasure, says Beyle, in prating about his anger, alongside a wire grating in a great box of black wood. The Hindoo that gets excited and howls at the feast of Juggernaut, to the hubbub of fifty thousand tom-toms, the American Methodist who weeps and cries aloud his sins in a revival, feels something the same sort of pleasure as an Italian enthusiast at the opera. That explains and reconciles the zeal and the gallantry of Marguerite.
“They only allowed me,” said she, “to have mass said in a little chapel not more than three or four paces long, which, narrow as it was, was full when there were seven or eight of us there. So when they wanted to say mass, they raised the bridge of the castle, for fear that the Catholics of the country, who had no exercise of their religion, should hear of it; for they had an infinite desire to assist at the holy sacrifice, of which they had been deprived for several years. And, urged by this sacred desire, the inhabitants of Pau found means, at Whitsuntide, before the bridge was raised, to enter the castle, and slip into the chapel, where they were not discovered until toward the end of mass, when, half opening the door to let in one of my people, some Huguenots who were spying round the door perceived them, and went to tell it to le Pin, secretary of the king my husband, and he sent there some guards of the king my husband, who, dragging them forth and beating them in my presence, carried them off to prison, where they remained a long time, and paid a heavy fine.”
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The little chapel has disappeared, I believe, since the castle and the whole country were restored to the Catholic worship. Besides, this treatment arose from humanity: Saint-Pont, at Macon, “afforded the ladies, as they went out from the banquets that he gave, the pleasure of seeing a certain number of prisoners leap off from the bridge.” Such were these men, extreme in everything, in fanaticism, in pleasure, in violence; never did the fountain of desires flow fuller and deeper; never did more vigorous passions unfold themselves with more of sap and greenness. Walking through these silent halls, disturbed from time to time by fair invalids or pale young consumptives who walk there, I fancied that enervation of the inner nature came from the enervation of the bodies. We spend our time within doors, taken up with discussions, reflections and reading; the gentleness of manners removes dangers from us, and industrial progress fatigues. They lived in the open air, ever following the chase and in war. “Queen Catherine was very fond of riding, up to the age of sixty and more, and of making great and active journeys, even after she had often fallen, to the great injury of her body, for she was several times so far hurt as to break her leg and wound her head.” The rude exercises hardened their nerves; their warmer blood, stirred by incessant peril, urged upon the brain impetuous caprices; they made history, while we write it.
III.
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The park is a great wood on a hill, embedded among meadows and harvests. You walk in long solitary alleys, under colonnades of superb oaks, while to the left the lofty stems of the copses mount in close ranks upon the back of the hill. The fog was not yet lifted; there was no motion in the air; not a corner of blue sky, not a sound in all the country. The song of a bird came for an instant from the midst of the ash-trees, then sadly ceased. Is that then the sky of the south, and was it necessary to come to the happy country of the BÉarnais to find such melancholy impressions? A little by-way brought us to a bank of the Gave: in a long pool of water was growing an army of reeds twice the height of a man; their grayish spikes and their trembling leaves bent and whispered under the wind; a wild flower near by shed a vanilla perfume. We gazed on the broad country, the ranges of rounded hills, the silent plain under the dull dome of the sky. Three hundred paces away the Gave rolls between marshalled banks, which it has covered with sand; in the midst of the waters may be seen the moss-grown piles of a ruined bridge. One is at ease here, and yet at the bottom of the heart one feels a vague unrest; the soul is softened and loses itself in melancholy and tender revery. Suddenly the clock strikes, and one has to go and prepare to take his soup between two commercial travellers.
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IV.
To-day the sun shines. On my way to the Place Nationale, I remarked a poor, half-ruined church, which had been turned into a coachhouse; they have fastened upon it a carrier’s sign. The arcades, in small gray stones, still round themselves with an elegant boldness; beneath are stowed away carts and casks and pieces of wood; here and there workmen were handling wheels. A broad ray of light fell upon a pile of straw, and made the sombre corners seem yet darker; the pictures that one meets with outweigh those one has come to seek.
From the esplanade which is opposite, the whole valley and the mountains beyond may be seen; this first sight of a southern sun, as it breaks from the rainy mists, is admirable; a sheet of white light stretches from one horizon to another without meeting a single cloud. The heart expands in this immense space; the very air is festal; the dazzled eyes close beneath the brightness which deluges them and which runs over, radiated from the burning dome of heaven. The current of the river sparkles like a girdle of jewels; the chains of hills, yesterday veiled and damp, extend at their own sweet will beneath the warming, penetrating rays, and mount range upon range to spread out their green robe to the sun. In the distance, the blue Pyrenees look like a bank of clouds; the air that bathes them shapes them into aerial forms, vapory phantoms, the farthest of which vanish in the canescent horizon—dim contours, that might be taken for a fugitive sketch from the lightest of pencils.
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In the midst of the serrate chain the peak du Midi d’ Ossau lifts its abrupt cone; at this distance, forms are softened, colors are blended, the Pyrenees are only the graceful bordering of a smiling landscape and of the magnificent sky. There is nothing imposing about them nor severe; the beauty here is serene, and the pleasure pure.
The statue of Henry IV., with an inscription in Latin and in patois, is on the esplanade; the armor is finished so perfectly that it might make an armorer jealous. But why does the king wear so sad an air? His neck is ill at ease on his shoulders; his features are small and full of care; he has lost his gayety, his spirit, his confidence in his fortune, his proud bearing. His air is neither that of a great nor a good man, nor of a man of intellect; his face is discontented, and one would say that he was bored with Pau. I am not sure that he was wrong: and yet the city passes for agreeable; the climate is very mild, and invalids who fear the cold pass the winter in it. Balls are given in the clubs; the English abound, and it is well known that in the matter of cookery, of beds and inns, these people are the first reformers in the universe.
They would have done well in reforming the vehicles: the rickety little diligences of the country are drawn by gaunt jades which descend the hills on a walk, and make stops in the ascent. All encouragements of the whip are thrown away on their backs; you could not bear them any grudge on that account, so piteous is their appearance, with their ridgy backbones, hanging ears, and shrunken bellies. The coachman rises on his seat, pulls the reins, waves his arms, bawls and storms, clambers down and up again; his is a rude calling, but he has a soul like his calling. His passengers are of small consequence to him; he treats them as useful packages, a necessary counterpoise over which he has rights. At the foot of a mountain, the machine got its wheel into a ditch and tilted over; every one leaped out after the manner of Panurge’s sheep.
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He went running from one to another to get them back, especially exhorting the people from the impÉriale, and pointing out to them the danger to the vehicle, which was leaning back, and so needed ballast in front. They however remained cool, and went on afoot, while he followed grumbling and abusing their selfishness.
VI.
The harvests, pale in the north, here wave with a reflex of reddish gold. A warmer sun makes the vigorous verdure shine more richly; the stalks of maize spring from the earth like discharges of rockets, and their strong, wrinkled leaves fall over in plumes; such burning rays are needed to urge the sap through those gross fibres and gild the massy spike.
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Toward Gan, the hills, over which undulates the road, draw nearer together, and you travel on through little green valleys, planted with ash and alder in clusters, according to the caprices of the slopes, and with their feet bathed in living water; a pellucid stream borders the road, with waters sombre and hurried under the cover of the trees, and then, by fits and starts, brilliant and blue as the sky. Four times in the course of a league it encounters a mill, leaps and foams, then resumes its course, hurried and stealthy; during two leagues we have its company, half hid among the trees that it nourishes, and breathing the freshness it exhales. In these gorges, water is the mother of all life and the nurse of all beauty.
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At Louvie the valley of Ossau opens up between two mountains covered with brushwood, bald in places, spotted with moss and heather from which the rocks peep out like bones, while the flanks start forth in grayish embossments or bend in dark crevices. The plain of the harvests and meadows buries itself in the anfractuosities as if in creeks; its contour folds itself about each new mass; it essays to scale the lower ridges, and stops, vanquished by the barren rock. We go through three or four hamlets whitened by dust, whose roofs shine with a dull color like tarnished lead. Then the horizon is shut off; Mount Gourzy, robed in forests, bars the route; beyond and above, like a second barrier, the peak of the Ger lifts its bald head, silvered with snows. The carriage slowly scales an acclivity which winds upon the flank of the mountain; at the turn of a rock, in the shelter of a small gorge, may be seen Eaux Bonnes.
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