“My daughter, listen,” said the queen mother. “This marriage is indispensable for reasons of state. The king, your brother, and I myself, like the king of Navarre as little as you do. That little kingdom in the high valleys of the Pyrenees is a veritable thorn in our sides, but by some means or other we must pluck it out.”
“I shall go to Nerac, in Gascony,” the queen mother continued, “to conclude a treaty with my sister, Reine Jeanne, the mother of Henri de Béarn. When an alliance is concluded between the queen of Navarre and myself your marriage shall take place.” This was final!
Tradition—or perhaps it is a fact, though the average traveller won’t remark it—says that the Béarnais are an irascible and jealous people. Proud they are, but there are no external evidences to show that they are more irascible or jealous than any other folk one meets in the French countryside. In the valleys the type is more delicate than that of the inhabitants of the mountain slopes, and throughout they are fervidly religious without being in the least fanatical.
The same tradition that says the Béarnais are rough, irascible spirits, says also that they seek for a summary personal vengeance rather than let the process of law take its course. There’s something of philosophy in this, if it’s true, but again it is reiterated there are no visible signs that the peasant of Béarn is of the knife-drawing class of humanity to which belong Sicilians and gypsies. The writer on more than one occasion has been stalled in the Pyrenees while blazing an automobile trail up some valley road that he ought not to have attempted, and has found the Béarnais a faithful, willing worker in helping him out of a hole (this is literal), and glad indeed to accept such an honorarium as was bestowed upon him. Nothing of brigandage in this!
The passing times change men and manners, and when it is recorded by the préfet of the Basses-Pyrénées that no department ever had so much law-business going on before in its courts, it shows at least that if the Béarnais do have their little troubles among themselves, they are now a law-loving, law-abiding people.
They are good livers and drinkers too, of much the same stamp as the gallant Gascons, of whom Dumas wrote. It was in a Béarnais inn that the Prince de Conti saw the following couplet chalked upon the wall:
“Je m’apuelle Robineau,
Et je bois mon vin sans eaux.”
Whereupon he added:
“Et moi, Prince de Conti,
Sans eaux je le bois aussi.”
The sentiment is not very high; window-pane poetry and the like never does soar; but it is significant of the good living of past and present times in France, and in these parts in particular.