The colony of our country folks at Pau keep, as usual, very much together, and try to live in the most English fashion they may; ask each other mutually to cut mutton; display joints instead of plats, and import their own sherry; pass half their time studying Galignani, and reading to each other long epistles of news and chat from England—the majors and other old boys clustering together like corks in a tub of water; the young people getting up all manner of merry pic-nics and dances, and any body who at all wishes to be in the set, going decorously to the weekly English service.
"Tenez," said a Pau shopkeeper to me; "your countrymen enjoy here all the luxuries of England. They have even an episcopal chapel and a pack of fox-hounds."
Of course, the prosperity of Pau mainly depends upon its English residents, who are generally well-to-do people, spending their money freely. Shortly before my visit, however, a Russian prince, who had established himself in a neighbouring chateau, had quite thrown the English reputation for wealth into the shade. His equipages, his parties, the countess's diamonds, had overblazed the grandeur of the English all put together; and the way in which he spent money enraptured the good folks of the old capital of Bearne. The Russians, indeed, wherever they go on the continent, deprive us of our prestige as the richest people in the world—an achievement for which they deserve the thanks of all Englishmen with heads longer than their purses.
"Ah, monsieur!" I was once told, "la pluie de guineés, c'est bonne; mais le pluie de roubles, c'est une averse—un deluge!"
Gaston Phœbus, Count de Foix, was a sad Bluebeard of a fellow, but he showed his taste in pitching upon a site for the castle of Pau. He reared its towers on the edge of a rocky hill. Far beneath sparkle the happy waters of the Gave—appearing and disappearing in the broken country—a tumbling maze of wooded hill, green meadow, straggling coppice, corn-fields, vineyards, and gardens—verily a land flowing with milk and honey. Further on, sluggish round-backed hills heave up their green masses, clustered all over with box-wood; and then come—cutting with many a pointed peak and jagged sierra—the bright blue sky—the glorious screen of the Pyrenees. From the end of the Place, which runs to the ridge of the bank on which stands the town, you may gaze at it for hours—the hills towering in peak and pinnacle, sharp, ridgy, saw-like—either deeply, beautifully blue, or clad in one unvarying garb of white; and beyond that, Spain. The same view from the castle is even still finer, as you are more elevated; and the sheer sink of the wall and rock below you, makes, as it were, a vast gulf, across which the mind leaps, even over the green stumbling landscape of the foreground to the blue or white peaks beyond.
STATUE OF HENRI QUATRE.
But the feature—the characteristic—the essence—the very soul of Pau—is neither the fair landscape, nor the rushing Gave, nor the stedfast Pyrenees. It is the memory of the good King Henri Quatre, which envelopes castle and town—which makes haunted holy stones of these grim grey towers—which gives all its renown and glory to the little capital of Bearne. Look up at the "Good King" in his bronze effigy in the Place. These features are more familiar to you than those of any foreign potentate. You know them of old—you know them by heart—a goodly, honest, well-favoured, burly face—a face with mind and matter in it—a face not of an abstract transcendental hero, but emphatically of a Man. Passion and impulse are there, as in the jaw of Henry VIII.; energy and strong thought, as in the brow of Cromwell; a calm, and courtly, and meditative smile over all, as in the face of Charles I. The stubbly beard grizzling round the firm and close-set lips, and worn by the helmet, speaks the soldier—the conqueror of Ivry; the high, broad forehead and the quick eye tell of the statesman—he who proclaimed the edict of Nantes; the frank, gallant, and blithsome expression of the whole face—what does it tell of—of the gallant, whose mingled sagacity and debonnair courage won La Reine Margot from the intrigues of Catherine; whose impulsive heart and fiery passions cast him at the feet of Gabrielle d'Estrees; and whose weakness—manly while unmanly—made him for a time the slave of Henriette d'Entragues. There is an encyclopædia of meaning in the face, and even in the figure, of Henri. He had a grand mind, with turbulent passions; he was deeply wise, yet frantically reckless; he had many faults, but few vices. If he gave up a religion for a throne, he never claimed to be a martyr or a saint. Indeed, he was the last man in the world deliberately to run his head against a wall. He thought that he could do more for the Huguenots by turning Catholic and King, than by remaining Protestant and Pretender; and he did it. Yet for all—for the men of Rome and the men of Geneva—he had a broad, genial, hearty sympathy. Were they not all French?—all the children of a king of France? Henri had not one morsel of bigotry in his soul: his mind was too clear, and his heart too big. And yet, with the pithiest sagacity—with the sternest will—with the most exalted powers of calm comprehension—and the most honest wish to make his good people happy—he could be recklessly vehement—Quixotically generous—he could fling himself over to his passions—do foolish things, rash things—insult the kingdom for which he laboured, and which he loved—and thunder out his wrath at the grey head of the venerable counsellor who stood by him in field and hall, and whose practical wisdom it was which trimmed and shaped Henri's grand visions of majestic politics and astounding plans for national combinations. In the face, then, and in the figure of the Good King, you can trace, I think, some such mixture of qualities. Neither are beau ideals. You are not looking at an angel or an Apollo—but a bold, passionate, burly, good-humoured man, big in the bone, and firm in muscle, with plenty of human flesh and its frailties, yet with plenty of mind to shine through, and elevate them all.
Let us enter the castle of his birth. Thanks to Louis Philippe, it has been rescued from the rats and the owls, and re-fitted as exactly as possible in its ancient style. Mounting the grand staircase, we see everywhere around, on walls and vaulted ceiling, the gilt cyphers, "H. M."—not, however, meaning Henri and Margot, but the grandfather of the King of France—the stern, old Henri D'Albret, King of Navarre, and Margaret his wife—La Marguerite des Marguerites, the Pearl of Pearls. Pass through a series of noble state-apartments, vaulted, oak-pannelled, with rich wooden carved work adorning cornice and ceiling, and we stand in the room in which Henri saw the light. Jeanne D'Albret's bed, a huge structure, massive and carven, and with ponderous silken curtains, still stands as it did at the birth of the king. And what a strange coming into the world that was. The Princess of Navarre had travelled a few days previously nearly across France, that the hoped-for son and heir might be a Bearnais born. Old Henri, her father, was waiting and praying in mortal anxiety for the event. "My daughter," said the patriarch, "in the hour of your trial you must neither cry nor moan, but sing a song in the dear Bearnais tongue; and so shall the child be welcomed to the world with music, and neither weep nor make wry faces." The princess promised this, and she kept her word; so that the first mortal sound which struck Henri Quatre's ear was his mother's voice feebly chanting an old pastoral song of the shepherds of Bearne.
"Thanks be to God!—a man-child hath come into the world, and cried not," said the old man. He took the infant in his arms, and, after the ancient fashion of the land, rubbed its lips with a clove of garlic, and poured into its mouth, from a golden cup, a few drops of Jurancon wine. And so was born Henri Quatre. Stand for a moment in the shadow of these tapestried curtains, and call up in the gloom a vision of the grandly eventful life which followed. An army is drawn up near Rochelle, and a lady leads a child between the lines. Coligni and the Condé head the group of generals who, bonnet in hand, surround the lady and the child; and then Jeanne D'Albret, lifting up her clear woman's voice, dedicates the little Henri to the Protestant cause in France; and with loud acclamations is the gift received, and the leader accepted by the stern Huguenot array.—The next picture. An antique room in the Louvre. The bell of St. Germain l'Auxerrois is pealing a loud alarm; arquebus shots ring through the streets, and cries and clamour of distress come maddening through the air. Pale, but firmly resolute, stands Henri, beside a young man richly, but negligently, dressed, who, after speaking wildly and passionately to him, snatches up an arquebus—stands for a moment as though about to level it at his unshrinking companion, and then exclaiming like a maniac, "Il faut que je tue quelq'un," flings open the lattice, and fires without. Henri and Charles IX. on the night of the St. Bartholemew.—Another vision. A battle-field: Henri surrounded by his eager troops—the famous white plume of Ivry rising above his helmet: