A Midsummer Drive Through the Pyrenees Part 11

VI.

And so, on the following morning, we pa.s.s into the courtyard of his castle here at Pau with the feeling that in some sense we are evoking the shade of the era, not of the man. The feeling dies hard; but the robustious, business-like guide that herds us together with other comers, and shepherds us all briskly through the official round, goes very far toward killing it. There is little that one needs to remember of the successive rooms and halls; it is a confusion of polished floors, and vases, and tapestry, and porphyry tables, and the rest,--adorned and illumined by a voluble Gallic description. Later French kings have restored the old building, and stocked it with Paris furniture, and made it modern and comfortable. One is always divided in spirit over these restorations. The castle needed help painfully; it had been badly used by the Revolution; and it had been debased to a barrack by Napoleon's troops, who "stabled their steeds in the courts and made their drunken revelry resound in the chambers of Marguerite of Angouleme." Dismantled, half-roofless, its great halls, unsheltered and unsheltering, it was wasting fast under the elements into picturesque but irreparable ruin.

And I suppose the pleasure of kings and the peace of utilitarians ought fairly to outweigh the disappointments of the touring impression-seeker.

In one apartment, however, we make a stand. The herd and its shepherd can pa.s.s along. This, he has told us, is the birthplace of Henry IV. The floor is polished like the rest, and the furniture has been in part renewed, but the room is the same which that alert baby first laughed upon. In the corner at the right is an antique bed of carved walnut, with four posts and a rich canopy. Around its side are cut in the wood an elaborate series of medallions, each a foot square, representing the heads of the kings of France. Across the apartment swings still a great tortoise-sh.e.l.l, which served the royal infant for a cradle,--saved afterward from the furies of the Revolution by the subst.i.tution of a false sh.e.l.l in its place.[15]

[15] The genuineness of the present sh.e.l.l has frequently been questioned; but the testimony of LAGReZE has now fairly established the story of its preservation.

In this room, Jeanne d'Albret sang a Bearnais song as the hero of Ivry was born, and so won the wager with her martial old father, the King of Navarre; and the boy came into the world smiling and unafraid. And writers tell us how delighted the old king was, and how he took the infant into his arms, and rubbed its lips with a garlic clove, and tilted into its little mouth from a golden goblet some drops of the manly wine of Jurancon. When Queen Jeanne herself was born in this very castle, twenty-five years before, the Spaniards had sneered: "A miracle!

the cow (of the arms of Bearn) has given birth to a ewe!" "My ewe,"

exclaimed the happy old father now, "has brought forth a lion! _Tu seras un vray Bearnais!_"

VII.

Henry's life was as martial and as merry as his grandfather sought to form it. He grew up on the coteaux in a hardy, fresh-air life, and at nineteen became King of Navarre,--the t.i.tle including Bearn and Foix.

Into this old room in the castle where we stand throng reminders of his career, its beginnings so closely twined with Pau. Independent still as under Gaston, the sovereigns of the stout little kingdom had lived friends but no subjects of the King of France; and the Court at Pau, always proud and autonomous as the Court at Paris, had become defiantly Protestant besides. And now if ever it had a sovereign after its own heart. Henry was kingly, but a king of the people. He had their spirit.

His long, keen, grizzled face was alight with ready comradeship. "I want my poorest subject," he said, "to have a fowl for his pot on Sundays."

He was a Bearnais from sole to crown,--in bravery and craft, tact and recklessness, in virtues, and--which pleased them as much--in vices. "He was plain of speech, rough in manner,--with a quaint jest alike for friend or foe; his hand upon his sword, his foot in the stirrup, his gun slung across his shoulder, the first in a.s.sault, the last in retreat.

Irregular in his habits, eating at no stated times, but when hungry voraciously devouring everything that pleased him, especially fruit and oysters; negligent, not to say dirty, in his person, and smelling strong of garlic. A man who called a spade a spade, swore like a trooper, and hated the parade of courts; was constant in friendship, promised anything freely, a boon companion, a storyteller, cynical in his careless epicureanism, and so profound a believer in the 'way of fate,'

that reckless of the morrow he extracted all things from the pa.s.sing hour."[16]

[16] ELLIOTT: _Old Court Life in France_.

Time had not jogged on so far, in journeying from Orthez to Pau, as to forget all his mediaeval ways,--his promptings to strife and feuds, his liking for adventures. Henry had abundance of them, in his running fire against his neighbor-enemies, in his hot Protestant struggles against the Medicis, in his hotter fight for the throne of France. There are both meats and sweetmeats in his career,--strong deeds and knightly diversions. "These 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....

This is no spectacle of great ma.s.ses 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 Nerac with a little troop, picks up the neighboring garrisons on his way, scales a fortress, intercepts a body of arquebusiers as they pa.s.s, extricates himself pistol in hand from the midst of a hostile troop, and returns.... They arrange their plan from day to day; nothing is done unless unexpectedly and by chance. Enterprises are strokes of fortune.... To act, to dare, to enjoy, to expend force and trouble like a prodigal, to be given up to the present sensation, be forever urged by pa.s.sions forever lively, support and search the extremes of all contrasts, that was the life of the sixteenth century."[17]

[17] _Tour Through the Pyrenees_.

Exciting incidents abound among Henry's dashing forays. He exposed himself to every risk he asked of his men, deaf even to their own entreaties that he should take more care of his life. More than once it was his personal leadership alone that carried the day. For example, there was a hostile city on the river Lot. Henry coveted it. Its garrison was strong; its governor scoffed: "a fig for the Huguenots!"

Henry would brave defeat sooner than brook defiance. He marched to the town at once. "It was in the month of June," as Sully relates it in his _Memoirs,_ "the weather extremely hot, with violent thunder but no rain.

He ordered us to halt in a plantation of walnut trees, where a fountain of running water afforded us some refreshment;" and after a brief rest, he disposed his little army, and planned his attack:

"We had three gates to force; these we made haste to throw down with the petard, after which we made use of hatchets. The breaches were so low that the first who entered were obliged to creep through on their hands and feet. At the noise of the petard, forty men armed and about two hundred arquebusiers ran almost naked to dispute our entry; meantime the bells rung the alarm, to warn everybody to stand to their defence. In a moment, the houses were covered with soldiers, who threw large pieces of wood, tiles and stones upon us, with repeated cries of 'Charge, kill them!' We soon found that they were resolved to receive us boldly; it was necessary therefore at first to sustain an encounter, which lasted above a quarter of an hour and was very terrible. I was cast to the ground by a large stone that was cast out of a window; but by the a.s.sistance of the Sieur de la Bertichere and La Trape, my valet de chambre, I recovered, and resumed my post. All this time we advanced very little, for fresh platoons immediately succeeded those that fled before us; so that before we gained the great square, we had endured more than twelve battles. My cuisses being loosened, I was wounded in the left thigh. At last we got to the square, which we found barricaded, and with infinite labor we demolished those works, being all the time exposed to the continual discharge of the artillery, which the enemy had formed into a battery.

"The King of Navarre continued at the head of his troops during all these attacks; he had two pikes broke, and his armor was battered in several places by the fire and blows of the enemy. We had already performed enough to have gained a great victory; but so much remained to do that the battle seemed only to be just begun; the city being of large extent and filled with so great a number of soldiers that we in comparison of them were but a handful. At every cross-way we had a new combat to sustain, and every stone house we were obliged to storm; each inch of ground so well defended that the King of Navarre had occasion for all his men, and we had not a moment's leisure to take breath.

"It is hardly credible that we could endure this violent exercise for five whole days and nights, during which time not one of us durst quit his post for a single moment, take any nourishment but with his arms in his hand, or sleep except for a few moments leaning against the shops.

Fatigue, faintness, the weight of our arms, and the excessive heat, joined to the pain of our wounds, deprived us of the little remainder of our strength; our feet, scorched with heat and bleeding in many places, gave us agonies impossible to be expressed.

"The citizens, who suffered none of these inconveniences and who became every minute more sensible of the smallness of our numbers, far from surrendering, thought of nothing but protracting the fight till the arrival of some succors, which they said were very near; they sent forth great cries, and animated each other by our obstinacy. Though their defence was weak, yet they did enough to oblige us to keep upon our guard, which completed our misfortunes. In this extremity the princ.i.p.al officers went to the king, and advised him to a.s.semble as many men as he could about his person and open himself a retreat. They redoubled their instances at the report which was spread and which they found to be true, that the succors expected by the enemy were arrived at the bar and would be so soon in the city that he would have but just time to force the wall and secure himself a pa.s.sage. But this brave prince, whose courage nothing was ever able to suppress, turning toward them with a smiling countenance and air so intrepid as might have inspired courage into the most pusillanimous heart: ''Tis heaven,' said he, 'which dictates what I ought to do upon this occasion; remember then that my retreat out of this city, without having secured one also to my party, shall be the retreat of my soul from my body. My honor requires this of me; speak therefore to me of nothing but fighting, conquest or death.'"

There could be but one issue to such words. Henry fought till reinforcements came to him, and the town fell.

Anecdotes of Henry are in a very real sense anecdotes of Bearn. The one following, lines out two of the king's best qualities. He was besieging a strong city in Poitou. "We applied ourselves without ceasing to the trenches and undermining. The King of Navarre took inconceivable pains in this siege; he conducted the miners himself, after he had taken all the necessary precautions to hinder supplies from entering without; the bridges, avenues and all the roads that lead to the city were strictly guarded, as likewise great part of the country.... The mining was so far advanced that we could hear the voices of the soldiers who guarded the parapets, within the lodgment of the miners. The King of Navarre was the first who perceived this; he spoke and made himself known to the besieged; who were so astonished at hearing him name himself from the bottom of these subterraneous places that they demanded leave to capitulate. The proposals were all made by this uncommon way; the articles were drawn up or rather dictated by the King of Navarre, whose word was known by the besieged to be so inviolable that they did not require a writing. They had no cause to repent of this confidence; the King of Navarre, charmed with a proceeding so n.o.ble, granted the garrison military honors and preserved the city from pillage."

VIII.

The great satisfaction in contemplating the career of Henry is in the fact that it succeeded. His ambitions, maturing in purpose, ended in result. The King of Navarre found himself at last the King of France.

The path had not been of roses. He had captured two hundred towns and fought in sixty battles on his way. He himself had strewed thorns for others as well. His wars spread suffering throughout France. His skirmishings, petty but many, add up to an appalling total of harm.

Henry as a model of renounced ambition is a failure. Read what his Catholic enemies in Bearn said of him, in an address and appeal to the Catholics of France; as now first translated out of its Old French, it has an oddly Jeffersonian ring:

"Knowing long since, to our cost, the nature of the wolf who seeks to deceive and then devour you, we have deemed it duty to warn you of the character of the beast, (_le naturel de la beste,_) so that by our putting you on your guard he shall not have means to endamage you.

Within twenty years he has summoned a round million of foreign mercenaries to pillage and rend your kingdom. He has sacked and demolished two thousand monasteries and twenty thousand (_sic!_) churches; he has wrecked no less than nine hundred hospitals; he has caused the death, by war and divers punishments, of nearly one million, six hundred thousand men. In the face of his a.s.surances to the n.o.bility in 1580 and of his reiterated protestations, he has put up our very priests at auction and sold them off to the highest bidder, in order that his Huguenots might have on whom to wreak at leisure their diabolic hatred. He thinks himself King of France; it is a malady common to the crack-brained to fancy themselves kings of the first realm they spy and to fashion them seigniories in the air. Beware trusting your fowls to this fox!"

Evidently the Bearnais hero had made some tolerably strong enemies in pursuing his ambitions. No less truly his ambitions had made some tolerably wide gaps in his ethics.

But the world pardons much to success. And this man had a certain high-mindedness in him which compels admiration. When the battle of Ivry was commencing, "he remembered," relates Perefix, an old historian, "that the evening before the battle he had used some harsh expressions to Colonel Theodoric Schomberg, who had asked him for money, and told him in a pa.s.sion that it was not acting like a man of honor to demand money when he came to take orders for fighting. He afterward went to him, when he was ranging his troops in order, and said: 'Colonel, we are now upon the point; perhaps I shall never go from this place; it is not just that I should deprive a brave gentleman as you are of your honor; I come therefore to declare that I know you to be an honest man and incapable of committing a base action.' Saying this, he embraced him with great affection."[18]

[18] "The colonel," continues Perefix, "sensibly moved with this behavior, replied with tears in his eyes: 'Ah, Sire! in restoring to me my honor you take away my life; for after this I should be unworthy of your favor if I did not sacrifice it to-day for your service. If I had a thousand lives I would lay them all at your feet.' In fact he was killed upon this occasion."

He besieged Paris, but would not storm it. "I am like the true mother in the judgment of Solomon," was his famous declaration; "I would rather not have Paris at all than see it torn to pieces." "The Duke of Nemours sent all useless mouths out of Paris; the king's council opposed his granting them pa.s.sage; but the king, being informed of the dreadful scarcity to which these miserable wretches were reduced, ordered that they should be allowed to pa.s.s. 'I am not surprised,' said he, 'that the Spaniards and the chiefs of the League have no compa.s.sion upon these poor people; they are only tyrants; as for me, I am their father and their king, and cannot hear the recital of their calamities without being pierced to my inmost soul and ardently desiring to bring them relief.'"

Take it good and bad, lion of ewe, the character of Jeanne's high son is crystallized in one saying of his: "I would give a whole finger to have a battle,--and two to have a general peace."

With delight Pau watched her merry monarch; backed his final claim to the throne of St. Louis, made on the death of the last of the Medici kings and traced back through nine generations; followed tensely his long contest for that high prize, his rivalry with the League and with Philip of Spain, his victories at Arques and Ivry, his coronation, and his wise reign as Henry the Fourth of France. His fame was hers. The hour he died,--stabbed while in his state-carriage at Paris by the dagger of a fanatic,--"a tempest broke over the place of his birth, and lightning shivered to pieces the royal arms suspended over the gateway of the castle."

_"Rubente Dextera sacras jaculatas arces, Terruit urbem"_

IX.

A winter station such as Pau is a hub with many spokes. Excursions and drives are in all directions. Idle fashion enjoys its outlets to the air, and invalidism demands them. Each hamlet is a picnic resort. One has choice of time and s.p.a.ce, from an hour's ramble in the park, to a day's long visit to the monster sight of the mountains, the Cirque of Gavarnie. The park, as we pa.s.s, deserves its hour's ramble. Its wide promenade, arched with great trees, is entered not far from the castle, and leads along the torrent of the Gave, whose source we are later to see in the snows around Gavarnie itself. It is the scene of the favorite const.i.tutional of Pau,--a neutral ground for all social factions.

Four drives in particular point us each to its own quarter of the compa.s.s. One is long, with the watering places of Eaux Chaudes and Eaux Bonnes for its double destination. The others, nearer in distance, lead farther in event,--back through the centuries, ninety, fifty, thirty decades, in turn.

The first of these is to Morlaas, the earliest capital of Bearn. The distance is seven miles. Though the road is flat and tame, the ride affords superb prospects of the line of the Pyrenees, and these culminate at the top of the hill just before descending to the village.

Here the panorama is even finer than from Pau. Easterly ranges have come into the field. The sweep of the mountain barrier in sight is a full hundred miles, and the waste of intervening plains, no longer hidden by coteaux, increases the impression of distance without lessening that of height. The greater peaks rise now into better proportion. Mont Perdu and the Vignemale loom above their neighbors, and best of all is seen far away the crown at least of the great Maladetta.

You must enjoy Morlaas wholly for its past. You cannot enjoy it for its present. It is a poor, dejected, straggling street, noticeable only for mud and stones and dun-coated hovels. It does not, like Fuenterrabia, retain the picturesqueness of its antiquity. There, it is the old town's to-day that carries us delightfully back into its yesterday. But at Morlaas there is neither to-day nor yesterday.

For the prime of this place antedates old Fuenterrabia by many a hundred years. The latter may come to the former's estate as many centuries hence. Orthez is but in middle life, Pau a summer stripling, in the presence of this wreck of time. Poor Morlaas! Thou hast seen thy long successor rise and reign and fall, succeeded in its turn by the brilliant capital that now sends. .h.i.ther its subjects to scoff at thy driveling old age.

To share the mood of this grey spot you must travel far back, down its dim retrospect. You must retrace long, successive eras, sensitive to the spirit of each as you pa.s.s. You must cross the sixteenth century, brightening into humanity yet still un-human,--the vivid, reckless King of Navarre its type. You must penetrate beyond the twilight where Count Gaston's armor flashes across from the brutal towers of Orthez, lawless and splendid; you must grope back farther into the gloom, four hundred years still, before you see the shadowy Morlaas in its full stature, proud, powerful, rude, rich,--the capital of old Bearn.

Nine hundred years ago. Mohammed's name and power were still new.

Charles Martel had just saved Europe from the Saracens. England had not been recreated by a Norman Conqueror. The Crusades were still undreamed of. Art, science, letters, were in custody in the East. These armed children ran riot,--pa.s.sionate, intense, uncontrolled, loving fight and finery as the Trojans, or the Norse heroes of the Sagas.