But, like all brave warriors, he became mightier in death even than he had been in life, and furnished an ideal of valor which animated the most chivalrous youth of all Europe, throughout many centuries.
With such traditions is the country round about Tarbes impregnated.
It has been suggested that the name Foch (which, by the way, is pronounced as if it rhymed with "hush") is derived from Foix—a town some sixty miles east of St. Gaudens, near which was the ancestral home of the Foch family.
Whatever the relatives of Ferdinand may have thought of this as a probability, it is certain that Ferdinand was well nurtured in the history of Foix and especially in those phases of it that Froissart relates.
Froissart, the genial gossip who first courted the favor of kings and princes and then was gently entreated by them so that his writing of them might be to their renown, was on his way to Blois when he heard of the magnificence of Gaston Phoebus, Count of Foix. Whereupon the chronicler turned him about and jogged on his way to Foix. Gaston Phoebus was not there, but at Orthez—150 miles west and north—and, nothing daunted, to Orthez went Froissart, by way of Tarbes, traveling in company with a knight named Espaing de Lyon, who was a graphic and charmful raconteur thoroughly acquainted with the country through which they were journeying. A fine, "that-reminds-me" gentleman was Espaing, and every turn of the road brought to his mind some stirring tale or doughty legend.
"Sainte Marie!" Froissart cried. "How pleasant are your tales, and how much do they profit me while you relate them. They shall all be set down in the history I am writing."
So they were! And of all Froissart's incomparable recitals, none are more fascinating than those of the countryside Ferdinand Foch grew up in.