I.
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.