January ended with fine weather, and occasional fogs, not so dense as in London, certainly, but as thick as in the country in England. The sun, in the middle of the day, being always dangerously hot. My letters from England still announced the same weather, without the danger.
In February, we had a few days like August, then a heavy fall of snow, which for eight days covered the ground, and was succeeded by burning days; and the month ended with heavy rain and floods. March began with cold winds and rain and sharp frost; and when I left Pau the ground was encrusted with frost in all directions.
[CHAPTER III.]
the castle of henri quatre—the furniture—the shell—the statue—the birth—castel beziat—the fairy gift—a change—henri quatre.
"Qui a vist le castig de Pau
Jamey no a viat il fait."
When Napoleon, in 1808, passed through the town of Pau, the Béarnais felt wounded and humbled at the indifference he showed to the memory of their hero, Henri Quatre: he scarcely deigned to glance at the château in which their cherished countryman was born; and with so little reverence did he treat the monument dear to every heart in Béarn, that his soldiers made it a barrack; and, without a feeling of regard or respect for so sacred a relic, used it as cavalierly as if it had been a church. They stabled their steeds in the courts of Gaston Phoebus, they made their drunken revelry resound in the chambers of Marguerite de Valois; and they desecrated the retreat where La brebis a enfanté un Lio—where Jeanne d'Albret gave birth to him, who, in the language of his mountains, promised that every Frenchman should have a poule au pot[26] in his reign.
That Napoleon should not care for a royal soldier, whose fame he desired his own deeds should eclipse; and of whom, as of all illustrious men, living or dead, the little great man was jealous, is not surprising. He had nothing in common with Henri Quatre; and the Revolution, which had brought him forward, had swept away antique memories. The statue of their once-adored Henri had been cast into the Seine with ignominy, by the French, and his name was execrated, as if he had been no better than the legitimate race whom popular fury condemned to oblivion: Napoleon's policy was not to restore an abandoned worship; and he would have seen the last stone fall from the castle of Pau without notice. But that the long line of kings, who were always boasting of their descent from the immortal Béarnais, should have neglected, contemned, or pillaged his birth-place, reflects little honour on the memory of any. The son of Mary de Medici came only to Béarn after his father's death, to carry off all that was precious in art, collected by the kings and queens of Navarre, for centuries—treasures which, according to the historians of the time, had not their parallel in the sixteenth century. The palace of the Louvre became rich in the spoils of Béarn: tapestry, pictures, furniture, objects of virtu of all kinds were borne away, and nothing left in its original place. Louis the Fourteenth and his successor occupied themselves little with the country, except to levy subsidies upon it: they knew nor cared nothing for Navarre; except as it supplied them with titles or gave them funds. Louis the Sixteenth, the last of the Bourbons who took the oath to observe the Fors[27] of Béarn, promised to act differently, and to occupy himself with this forgotten nook of his dominions; but the fatal events, prepared by his profligate predecessors of the last two reigns, which hurled him from his throne, prevented the accomplishment of his intentions.
As for the sovereign people, when they became rulers, the contempt with which they overwhelmed everything aristocratic, was bestowed in full measure on the abode of him who had been their friend: and the triumph of vengeance, ignorance, and ingratitude, was complete, here as elsewhere.
The neglected castle of the sovereigns of Béarn,—for none of whom, except the immediate family of the brave and bold Henry, need one care to be a champion—remained then a mighty heap of ruin, which every revolving year threatened to bring nearer to utter destruction; when another revolution, like an earthquake, whose shock may restore to their former place, rocks, which a preceding convulsion had removed, came to "renew old Æson:" Louis Philippe, to whom every nook and corner of his extensive kingdom seems familiar, so far from forgetting the berceau of his great ancestor, hastened to extend to the castle of Pau a saving hand, and to bring forth from ruin and desolation the fabric which weeds and ivy were beginning to cover, and which would soon have been ranged with the shells of Chinon, Loches, and other wrecks of days gone by.