Though data may be lacking to connect the ‘bon Roi Henri’ directly with the wine of Epernay, there can be no doubt that the sovereign whose triple talent for drinking, fighting, and love-making has been handed down to us in song[439] found a fair opportunity of exercising all three of these attributes during the siege. Of fighting, as we have seen, he had plenty, and, Anacreon-like, he seems to have blended love and wine together.[440] He who, when a new-born babe, had his lips wetted in the old castle of Pau by stout Antoine de Bourbon with a cup of the generous wine of the South, and who gloried in the title of the Sieur d’Ay, was not likely to neglect the nectar vintaged on the slopes around Epernay. And probably the recollection of the raven-haired, black-eyed, bronze-skinned Bernais peasant-girls, whom tradition vows he used to woo when in the first flush of youthful manhood beneath the trellised vines of Jurançon and Gan, served by contrast to heighten the fairer charms of the blonde Anne du Puy, in whose honour he is reported to have sung:
‘Morning bright,
Thy pure light
I rejoice when I see;
The fair dove
Whom I love
So, is rosy like thee.