On the first floor is shown a great tortoise-shell, which was the cradle of Henry IV. Carved chests, dressing-tables, tapestries, clocks of that day, the bed and arm-chair of Jeanne d’Albret, a complete set of furniture in the taste of the Renaissance striking and sombre, painfully labored yet magnificent in style, carrying the mind at once back toward that age of force and effort, of boldness in invention, of unbridled pleasures and terrible toil, of sensuality and of heroism. Jeanne d’Albret, mother of Henry IV., crossed France in order that she might, according to her promise, be confined in this castle. “A princess,” says d’Aubigné, “having nothing of the woman about her but the sex, a soul entirely given to manly things, a mind mighty in great affairs, a heart unconquerable by adversity."
II.
She sang an old Bearnese song when she brought him into the world. They say that the aged grandfather rubbed the lips of the new-born child with a clove of garlic, poured into his mouth a few drops of Jurançon wine, and carried him away in his dressing-gown.
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The child was born in the chamber which opens into the tower of Mazères, on the south-west corner. “His grandfather took him away from his father and mother, and would have this child brought up at his door, reproaching his daughter and his son-in-law with having lost several of their children through French luxuries. And, indeed, he brought him up in the Bearnese manner, that is, bareheaded and barefoot, often with no more nicety than is shown in the bringing up of children among the peasantry. This odd resolution was successful, and formed a body in which heat and cold, unmeasured toil and all sorts of troubles were unable to produce any change, thus apportioning his nourishment to his condition, as though God wished at that time to prepare a sure remedy and a firm heart of steel against the iron knots of our dire calamities.”
His mother, a warm and severe Calvinist, when he was fifteen years old, led him through the Catholic army to la Rochelle, and gave him to her followers as their general. At sixteen years old, at the combat of Arnay-le-Duc, he led the first charge of cavalry. What an education and what men! Their descendants were just now passing in the streets, going to school to compose Latin verses and recite the pastorals of Massillon.
Those old wars are the most poetic in French history; they were made for pleasure rather than interest. It was a chase in which adventures, dangers, emotions were found, in which men lived in the sunlight, on horseback, amidst flashes of fire, and where the body, as well as the soul, had its enjoyment and its exercise. Henry carries it on as briskly as a dance, with a Gascon’s fire and a soldier’s ardor, with abrupt sallies, and pursuing his point against the enemy as with the ladies. This is no spectacle of great masses of well-disciplined men, coming heavily into collision and falling by thousands on the field, according to the rules of good tactics. The king leaves Pau or Nérac with a little troop, picks up the neighboring garrisons on his way, scales a fortress, intercepts a body of arquebusiers as they pass, extricates himself pistol in hand from the midst of a hostile troop, and returns to the feet of Mlle. de Tignonville.