As king, Henry said that his ambition was that every one of his subjects, every peasant in Béarn, should be able every Sunday in the year to put la poule au pot! A couple of centuries later an epigram was written thereon.
“Enfin, la poule au pot sera donc bientôt mise;
On doit du moins le présumer;
Car, depuis deux cent ans qu’on nous l’avait promise,
On n’a cessé de la plumer.”
He did not forget the good things he had eaten in his native land when far away in Paris, and he wrote to Pau to have sent to him “some good melons, muscat grapes, figs, and peaches”; and again, “a dozen geese of Béarn, the fattest that can be found, such as will do honour to my country.”
The old cathedral church of Lescar occupies a very ancient site—a Roman town, Beneharnum, on the great Roman road that ran from Narbonne to Dax. The church deserves a visit. Although not large it is fine, dating from the twelfth century. It was erected apparently on the site of some Roman building, for the mosaic that surrounds the high altar, and marks where stood the original apse of the first church, is Roman work, and represents a tiger hunt. It was formerly covered by the floor of the stalls; but these have been removed, and the mosaic, that was much injured, has been restored carefully.
The whole of the low country, and the bottoms of the mountain valleys, were occupied by Romans. Gallic nobles had their villas that studded the land. At Bielle, already mentioned, is a mosaic pavement, and an evidence of the luxury of the period is seen in this villa having had pillars of marble brought from Italy. Other mosaic pavements have been found at Biellan, near Lescar, and at Taron-Sadirac, in the garden of the presbytère and in an adjoining field. The high altar of the church there is entirely formed of slabs taken thence. In 1847, when I was a boy, I heard peasants romance about a “Palais des Fées,” that lay underground in a field by the Lyss, in the commune of Jurançon. I visited the spot and found numerous cubes of mosaic of diverse colours in a ditch. I then saw the peasant proprietor and asked him whether he had discovered anything when ploughing. “Mais oui!” he said; “five years ago I uncovered a picture that represented men sitting about a table drinking and playing cards.” I knew how to make allowance for a Gascon’s imagination, so I bargained with the man to allow me to institute a search. We cut a trench parallel to the stream and crossed walls and mosaic pavements through a length of 150 feet. I then came to terms with the owner of the field. He was to allow me to dig, and he was to charge two sous at the gate for admission.
In a fortnight we had cleared out several rooms, and then, as my pocket-money was exhausted, the English of Pau raised a subscription to pay for the prosecution of the work. In the end we uncovered eleven chambers with well-preserved mosaic floors, and two more of which the floors had broken in upon the heating apparatus underneath, but which had been very richly patterned. The villa consisted of a suite of winter rooms and another for summer residence. In the former all the floors and walls were warmed by a hypocaust. The villa was, moreover, well furnished with baths.
In the middle, between the winter and the summer quarters, was the atrium, a court with a tank, in the midst, of pure water, conducted into it by a lead pipe from a well in the hill above. The bottom of the tank was paved with mosaic, representing marine animals, fish, crabs, etc., and the two containing walls were cased in slabs of coloured marbles. Opening out of the atrium was the tablinum, the reception room of the house; the walls skirted with alabaster, above which they were painted. The most remarkable of the representations on the floors was in the hall next the entrance porch; it showed a cross in mosaic, with a monstrous bust of Neptune at the intersection of the arms, surrounded by fish and lobsters.
When the villa was almost wholly excavated, the municipality of Pau purchased the field, and built a shed over the foundations, but, penny wise and pound foolish, neglected to cut a drain around the remains. The consequence was that each room became full of water in the winter, and, frost ensuing, split up the mosaics. When I revisited Pau two years later most of the pavements were ruined. Now, shed and every trace of the villa are gone; the whole is ploughed over, and the only token that there was anything of interest in the field is a notice-board set up to forbid trespassers invading it. On the farther side of the stream is another villa, which I began to dig out, but found the pavements nearer the surface and not so well preserved. Moreover, the proprietor got it into his head that I had discovered and appropriated a pot of gold coins, and he peremptorily forbade further research.
The bridge over the river, some quarter of a mile down, is called le Pont d’Auly (pons aulæ), and on the height of Guindalos above are the earthworks of a Roman camp.
Pau has produced several eminent men. Hardly had Henri Quatre closed his eyes before the town gave birth to Gassion, born in 1609. His father purposed making of him a lawyer; but, as a lad of sixteen, rather than be chained to a desk, he started barefoot from Pau, with his shoes slung to a stick over his back, and with twenty sous in his pocket. He entered the army, and his life was spent in warfare, beyond the Alps, on the Elbe, on the shores of the Baltic. He was wounded seventeen times, and fell on the field of battle at the age of thirty-six, a marshal of France and the greatest captain of his age.