V.
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.