PAU--THE ENGLISH IN PAU--ENGLISH AND RUSSIANS--THE VIEW OF THE
PYRENEES--THE CASTLE--THE STATUE OF HENRI QUATRE--HIS BIRTH--A
VISION OF HIS LIFE--ROCHELLE--ST. BARTHOLEMEW--IVRY--HENRI AND
SULLY--HENRI AND GABRIELLE--HENRI AND HENRIETTE
D'ENTRAGUES--RAVAILLAC.
Excepting, perhaps, the famous city of Boulogne-sur-Mer, Pau is the most
Anglicised town in France. There are a good many of our countrymen
congregated under the old steeples of Tours which every British man
should love, were it only for Quentin Durward; but they do not leaven
the mass; while in Pau, particularly during the winter time, the main
street and the _Place Royale_ look, so far as the passengers go, like
slices cut out from Weymouth, Bath, or Cheltenham. You see in an
instant the insular cut of the groups, who go laughing and talking the
familiar vernacular along the rough _pavé_. There is a tall, muscular
hoble-de-hoy, with red hair, high shirt collar, and a lady on each
arm--fresh-looking damsels, with flounces, which smack unmistakeably of
England. It is a young gentleman with his sisters. Next come a couple of
wonderfully well-shaved, well buttoned-up, fat, elderly, half-pay
English officers, talking "by Jove, sir," of "Wilkins of ours;" and "by
George, sir," of what the "old Duke had said to Galpins of the 9th. at
the United Service." An old fat half-pay officer is always a major. I do
not know how it happens, but so it is; and when you meet them settled
abroad, ten to one they have been dragged there by their wives and
daughters.
"By Jove, sir!" said one of these veterans to me at Pau--he was very
confidential over a glass of brandy and water at the _café_ on the
_Place_--"By Jove, sir, for myself, I'd never like to go further from
Pall Mall than just down Whitehall, to set my watch by the Horse Guards'
clock; but the women, you know, sir, have a confounded hankering for
these confounded foreign places; and, by Jove, sir, what is an old
fellow who wants a quiet life to do, sir?"
The colony of our country folks at Pau keep, as usual, very much
together, and try to live in the most English fashion they may; ask each
other mutually to cut mutton; display joints instead of _plats_, and
import their own sherry; pass half their time studying _Galignani_, and
reading to each other long epistles of news and chat from England--the
majors and other old boys clustering together like corks in a tub of
water; the young people getting up all manner of merry pic-nics and
dances, and any body who at all wishes to be in the set, going
decorously to the weekly English service.
"_Tenez_," said a Pau shopkeeper to me; "your countrymen enjoy here all
the luxuries of England. They have even an episcopal chapel and a pack
of fox-hounds."
Of course, the prosperity of Pau mainly depends upon its English
residents, who are generally well-to-do people, spending their money
freely. Shortly before my visit, however, a Russian prince, who had
established himself in a neighbouring chateau, had quite thrown the
English reputation for wealth into the shade. His equipages, his
parties, the countess's diamonds, had overblazed the grandeur of the
English all put together; and the way in which he spent money enraptured
the good folks of the old capital of Bearne. The Russians, indeed,
wherever they go on the continent, deprive us of our _prestige_ as the
richest people in the world--an achievement for which they deserve the
thanks of all Englishmen with heads longer than their purses.
"_Ah, monsieur!_" I was once told, "_la pluie de guineés, c'est bonne;
mais le pluie de roubles, c'est une averse--un deluge!_"
Gaston Phoebus, Count de Foix, was a sad Bluebeard of a fellow, but he
showed his taste in pitching upon a site for the castle of Pau. He
reared its towers on the edge of a rocky hill. Far beneath sparkle the
happy waters of the Gave--appearing and disappearing in the broken
country--a tumbling maze of wooded hill, green meadow, straggling
coppice, corn-fields, vineyards, and gardens--verily a land flowing with
milk and honey. Further on, sluggish round-backed hills heave up their
green masses, clustered all over with box-wood; and then come--cutting
with many a pointed peak and jagged sierra--the bright blue sky--the
glorious screen of the Pyrenees. From the end of the _Place_, which runs
to the ridge of the bank on which stands the town, you may gaze at it
for hours--the hills towering in peak and pinnacle, sharp, ridgy,
saw-like--either deeply, beautifully blue, or clad in one unvarying garb
of white; and beyond that, Spain. The same view from the castle is even
still finer, as you are more elevated; and the sheer sink of the wall
and rock below you, makes, as it were, a vast gulf, across which the
mind leaps, even over the green stumbling landscape of the foreground to
the blue or white peaks beyond.
[Illustration: STATUE OF HENRI QUATRE.]
But the feature--the characteristic--the essence--the very soul of
Pau--is neither the fair landscape, nor the rushing Gave, nor the
stedfast Pyrenees. It is the memory of the good King Henri Quatre, which
envelopes castle and town--which makes haunted holy stones of these grim
grey towers--which gives all its renown and glory to the little capital
of Bearne. Look up at the "Good King" in his bronze effigy in the
_Place_. These features are more familiar to you than those of any
foreign potentate. You know them of old--you know them by heart--a
goodly, honest, well-favoured, burly face--a face with mind and matter
in it--a face not of an abstract transcendental hero, but emphatically
of a MAN. Passion and impulse are there, as in the jaw of Henry VIII.;
energy and strong thought, as in the brow of Cromwell; a calm, and
courtly, and meditative smile over all, as in the face of Charles I. The
stubbly beard grizzling round the firm and close-set lips, and worn by
the helmet, speaks the soldier--the conqueror of Ivry; the high, broad
forehead and the quick eye tell of the statesman--he who proclaimed the
edict of Nantes; the frank, gallant, and blithsome expression of the
whole face--what does it tell of--of the gallant, whose mingled sagacity
and debonnair courage won La Reine Margot from the intrigues of
Catherine; whose impulsive heart and fiery passions cast him at the feet
of Gabrielle d'Estrees; and whose weakness--manly while unmanly--made
him for a time the slave of Henriette d'Entragues. There is an
encyclopædia of meaning in the face, and even in the figure, of Henri.
He had a grand mind, with turbulent passions; he was deeply wise, yet
frantically reckless; he had many faults, but few vices. If he gave up a
religion for a throne, he never claimed to be a martyr or a saint.
Indeed, he was the last man in the world deliberately to run his head
against a wall. He thought that he could do more for the Huguenots by
turning Catholic and King, than by remaining Protestant and Pretender;
and he did it. Yet for all--for the men of Rome and the men of
Geneva--he had a broad, genial, hearty sympathy. Were they not all
French?--all the children of a king of France? Henri had not one morsel
of bigotry in his soul: his mind was too clear, and his heart too big.
And yet, with the pithiest sagacity--with the sternest will--with the
most exalted powers of calm comprehension--and the most honest wish to
make his good people happy--he could be recklessly
vehement--Quixotically generous--he could fling himself over to his
passions--do foolish things, rash things--insult the kingdom for which
he laboured, and which he loved--and thunder out his wrath at the grey
head of the venerable counsellor who stood by him in field and hall, and
whose practical wisdom it was which trimmed and shaped Henri's grand
visions of majestic politics and astounding plans for national
combinations. In the face, then, and in the figure of the Good King,
you can trace, I think, some such mixture of qualities. Neither are beau
ideals. You are not looking at an angel or an Apollo--but a bold,
passionate, burly, good-humoured man, big in the bone, and firm in
muscle, with plenty of human flesh and its frailties, yet with plenty of
mind to shine through, and elevate them all.
Let us enter the castle of his birth. Thanks to Louis Philippe, it has
been rescued from the rats and the owls, and re-fitted as exactly as
possible in its ancient style. Mounting the grand staircase, we see
everywhere around, on walls and vaulted ceiling, the gilt cyphers, "H.
M."--not, however, meaning Henri and Margot, but the grandfather of the
King of France--the stern, old Henri D'Albret, King of Navarre, and
Margaret his wife--_La Marguerite des Marguerites_, the Pearl of Pearls.
Pass through a series of noble state-apartments, vaulted, oak-pannelled,
with rich wooden carved work adorning cornice and ceiling, and we stand
in the room in which Henri saw the light. Jeanne D'Albret's bed, a huge
structure, massive and carven, and with ponderous silken curtains, still
stands as it did at the birth of the king. And what a strange coming
into the world that was. The Princess of Navarre had travelled a few
days previously nearly across France, that the hoped-for son and heir
might be a Bearnais born. Old Henri, her father, was waiting and praying
in mortal anxiety for the event. "My daughter," said the patriarch, "in
the hour of your trial you must neither cry nor moan, but sing a song
in the dear Bearnais tongue; and so shall the child be welcomed to the
world with music, and neither weep nor make wry faces." The princess
promised this, and she kept her word; so that the first mortal sound
which struck Henri Quatre's ear was his mother's voice feebly chanting
an old pastoral song of the shepherds of Bearne.
"Thanks be to God!--a man-child hath come into the world, and cried
not," said the old man. He took the infant in his arms, and, after the
ancient fashion of the land, rubbed its lips with a clove of garlic, and
poured into its mouth, from a golden cup, a few drops of Jurancon wine.
And so was born Henri Quatre. Stand for a moment in the shadow of these
tapestried curtains, and call up in the gloom a vision of the grandly
eventful life which followed. An army is drawn up near Rochelle, and a
lady leads a child between the lines. Coligni and the Condé head the
group of generals who, bonnet in hand, surround the lady and the child;
and then Jeanne D'Albret, lifting up her clear woman's voice, dedicates
the little Henri to the Protestant cause in France; and with loud
acclamations is the gift received, and the leader accepted by the stern
Huguenot array.--The next picture. An antique room in the Louvre. The
bell of St. Germain l'Auxerrois is pealing a loud alarm; arquebus shots
ring through the streets, and cries and clamour of distress come
maddening through the air. Pale, but firmly resolute, stands Henri,
beside a young man richly, but negligently, dressed, who, after speaking
wildly and passionately to him, snatches up an arquebus--stands for a
moment as though about to level it at his unshrinking companion, and
then exclaiming like a maniac, "_Il faut que je tue quelq'un_," flings
open the lattice, and fires without. Henri and Charles IX. on the night
of the St. Bartholemew.--Another vision. A battle-field: Henri
surrounded by his eager troops--the famous white plume of Ivry rising
above his helmet:
"And if my standard-bearer fall, as fall full well he may,
For never saw I promise yet of a more bloody fray;
Charge where you see this white plume shine amid the ranks of war,
And be your oriflamme to day, the helmet of Navarre."
--Solemn organ music floating through cathedral aisles must introduce
the next scene. The child who was dedicated to the cause of
Protestantism kneels before a mitred priest. "Who are you?" is the
question put. "I am the king." "And what is your request?" "To be
admitted into the pale of the Catholic Apostolic and Roman
Church."--Again a change. Henri the King of France, and Rosny, Duke de
Sully, labouring amid papers, calculations, and despatches, to elevate
and make prosperous the great kingdom of France. "I would," said the
king, "that every subject of mine might have a fat fowl in his pot every
Sunday."--Take another: a gay and courtly scene. A glittering mob of
courtiers surround a plain ferryman, who, in answer to the laughing
questions of the monarch, whom the boatman does not know, admits that
"the king is a good sort of fellow enough, but that he has a jade of a
mistress, who is continually wanting fine gowns and trumpery trinkets,
which the people have to pay for;--not, indeed, that it would signify so
much if she were but constant to her lover; but they did say that----."
Here a lady, with burning cheeks, and flashing eyes, exclaims: "Sire,
that fellow must be hanged forthwith!" "Sire!"--the boatman gazes in
astonishment on his questioner. "Tut, tut," is the reply; "the poor
fellow shall no longer pay _corvée_ or _gabelle_, and so will he sing
for the rest of his days, Vive Henri--Vive Gabrielle!"--Another scene:
in the library and working room of the great king, and his great
minister. The monarch shews a paper, signed with his name, to his
counsellor. It is a promise of marriage to Henriette d'Entragues. Sully
looks for a moment at his master, then tears up the instrument, and
flings the fragments on the earth. "Are you mad, duke?" shouts Henri.
"If I am," was the reply, "I should not be the only madman in France."
The king takes his hand, and does him justice.--Yet one last closing
sketch. In a huge gilded coach in the midst of a group of splendidly
dressed courtiers, sits the king. There is an obstruction in the street.
The _cortège_ stops; the lackeys leave it to clear the way; when a
moody-browed fanatic, with flaming eyes, and red hair all on end, bounds
into the carriage--a poniard gleaming above his head--and in a moment
the Good King, stabbed with three mortal wounds, has gone home to his
fathers. All is over: Henri Quatre is historical!