Castles and Chateaux of Old Navarre and the Basque Provinces

CHAPTER XVI

OF THE HISTORY AND TOPOGRAPHY OF BÉARN

THE old Vicomté de Béarn lay snug within the embrace of the Pyrenees between Foix, Comminges and Basse Navarre. It was further divided into various small districts whose entities were later swallowed by the parent state, and still later by the royal domain under the rule of Henry IV.

There is one of these divisions, which not every traveller through the smiling valleys of the Pyrenees knows either by name or history. It is the Pays de Bidache, formerly the principality of Bidache, a tiny kingdom whose sovereign belonged to the house of Grammont. This little principality was analogous to that of Liechtenstein, lying between Switzerland and Austria. Nothing remains but the title, and the Grammonts, who figure in the noblesse of France to-day, are still by right Princes de Bidache, the eldest of the family being also Duc de Guiche. The château of the Grammonts at Bidache, which is a town of eight or nine hundred inhabitants, sits high on the hill overlooking the town. It is in ruins, but, nevertheless, there are some very considerable vestiges remaining of the glories that it possessed in the times of Henri IV when the house of Grammont was at its greatest height.

In the little village church are the tombs of the Sires de Grammont, notably that of the Maréchal Antoine III, who died in 1678.

Bidache was made a

duché-pairie

 for the family De Grammont, who, by virtue of their letters patent, were absolute sovereigns. The Princes de Bidache, up to the Revolution, exercised all the rights of a chief of state, a curious latter day survival of feudal powers.

Tradition plays no small part even to-day in the affairs of the De Grammonts, and the old walls of the family château could tell much that outsiders would hardly suspect. One fact has leaked out and is on public record. The sons born in the family are usually named Agenor, and the daughters Corisande, names illustrious in the golden days of Béarnais history.

Throughout all this ancient principality of Bidache the spirit of feudality has been effaced in these later Republican days, a thing the kings of France and Navarre and the parlément de Pau could not accomplish. As in other parts of Béarn and the Basque provinces, it is now entirely swallowed by “

la nationalité française

.”

The Duc de Grammont still possesses the Château de Guiche, and the non-forfeitable titles of his ancestors; but, virtually, he is no more than any other citizen.

Just north from Bidache, set whimsically on a hillside above the Adour, is the feudal village of Hastingues. It was an English creation, founded by John of Hastings towards 1300, for Edward I. It is crowded to the very walls with curious old houses in which its inhabitants live with much more tranquillity than in feudal times. The fourteenth-century fortifications are still much in evidence.

Up the river from Hastingues is Peyrehorade, or in the old Béarnais tongue Pérorade, literally

roche-percée

. It is the metropolis of the region, and has a population of twenty-five hundred simple folk who live tight little lives, and not more than once in a generation get fifty miles away from their home.

The Vicomtes d’Orthe fortified the city in olden times, and the ruined château-fort of Aspremont on the hillside overlooking the river valley and the town tells the story of feudal combat far better than the restored and made-over edifices of a contemporary period. Its pentagonal donjon of the sixteenth century is as grim and imposing a tower of its class as may be conceived.

Below, along the river bank, is the sixteenth-century château of Montréal, its walls still standing flanked with grim, heavy, uncoiffed towers. It is all sadly disfigured, like its fellow on the heights; but the very sadness of it all makes it the more emphatic as a historical monument of the past.

In the villages round about the dominant industry appears to be

sabot

-making, as in the Basque country it is the making of

espadrilles

. Each is a species of shoe-making which knows not automatic machinery, nor ever will.

Lying between Basse Navarre and Béarn was the Pays de Soule, with Mauléon and Tardets as its chief centres of population. The district has a bit of feudal history which is interesting. It was a region of mediocre extent – not more than thirty leagues square – but with a political administration more complex than any Gerrymandering administration has dared to conceive since.

The district was divided into three

Messageries

, Haute Soule, Basse Soule and Arbailles. Each of these divisions had at its head a functionary called a

Messager

, and each was in turn divided again into smaller parcels of territory called

Vics

, each of which had a sort of beadle as an official head, called a

Degan

.

Popular election put all these officials in power, but the Courts of Justice were administered by the king of France, as heir to the kings of Navarre.

Mauléon takes its name from the old château which in the local tongue was known as Malo-Leone. Mainly it is of the fifteenth century. The interior court has been made over into a sort of formal garden, quite out of keeping with its former purpose, and by far the most impressive suggestions are received from the exterior. There are the usual underground prisons, or

cachots

, which the guardian takes pleasure in showing.

From the

chemin de ronde

, encircling the central tower, one has a wide-spread panorama of the Gave de Mauléon as it rushes down from its cradle near the crest of the Pyrenees. Mauléon is the centre for the manufacture of the local Pyrenean variety of footwear called

espadrilles

, a sort of a cross between a sandal and a moccasin, with a rope sole. The population who work at this trade are mostly Spaniards from Ronça, Pamplona and in fact all Aragon. This accounts largely for Mauléon’s recent increase in population, whilst most other neighbouring small towns have reduced their ranks. For this reason Mauléon is a phenomenon. Paris and the great provincial capitals, like Marseilles, Bordeaux and Rouen, constantly increase in numbers, but most of the small towns of France either stand still, or more likely fall off in numbers. Here at this little Pyrenean centre the population has doubled since the Franco-Prussian war.

The historical monuments of Mauléon are not many, but the whole ensemble is warm in its unassuming appeal to the lover of new sensations. The lower town is simply laid out, has the conventional tree-bordered promenade of a small French town, its

fronton de pelote

 (the national game of these parts), a fine old Renaissance house called the Hôtel d’Andurrian, and a cross-surmounted column which looks ancient, and is certainly picturesque.

Dumas laid the scene of one of his celebrated sword and cloak romances here at Mauléon, but as the critics say, he so often distorted facts, and built châteaux that never existed, the scene might as well have been somewhere else. This is not saying that they were not romances which have been seldom, if ever, equalled. They were indeed the peers of their class. Let travellers in France read and re-read such romances as the D’Artagnan series, or even Monte Cristo, and they will fall far more readily into the spirit of things in feudal times than they will by attempting to digest Carlylean rant and guide-book literature made in the British Museum. Dumas, at any rate, had the genuine spirit of the French, and with it well-seasoned everything he wrote. The story of Agenor de Mauléon, a real chevalier of romance and fable, is very nearly as good as his best.

Leaving Tardets by the Route d’Oloron, one makes his way by a veritable mountain road. Its rises and falls are not sharp, but they are frequent, and on each side rear small, rocky peaks and great

mamelons

 of stone, as in the Val d’Enfer of Dante.

Montory is the first considerable village en route, and if French is to-day the national language, one would not think it from anything heard here offhand, for the inhabitants speak mostly Basque. In spite of this, the inhabitants, by reason of being under the domination of Oloron, consider themselves Béarnais.

Montory, and the Barétous near-by, have intimate relations with Spain. All Aragon and Navarre, at least all those who trade horses and mules, come through here to the markets of Gascogne and Poitou. Frequently they don’t get any farther than Oloron, having sold their stock to the Béarnais traders at this point. The Béarnais horse-dealers are the worthy rivals of the Maquignons of Brittany.

The next village of the Barétous is Lanne, huddled close beneath the flanks of a thousand-metre peak, called the Basse-Blanc. Lanne possesses a diminutive château – called a

gentilhommière

 in olden times, a name which explains itself. The edifice is not a very grand or imposing structure, and one takes it to be more of a country-house than a stronghold, much the same sort of a habitation as one imagines the paternal roof of D’Artagnan, comrade of the Mousquetaires, to have been.

Aramits, near by, furnished, with but little evolution, one of the heroic names of the D’Artagnan romances, it may be remarked. If one cares to linger in a historic, romantic literary shrine, he could do worse than stay at Aramits’ Hôtel Loubeu. As for the inner man, nothing more excellent and simple can be found than the fare of this little country inn of a practically unknown corner of the Pyrenees. A diligence runs out from Oloron, fourteen kilometres, so the place is not wholly inaccessible. Lanne’s humble château, nothing more than a residence of a poor, but proud seigneur of Gascogne, is an attractive enough monument to awaken vivid memories of what may have gone on within its walls in the past, and in connection with the neighbouring venerable church and cemetery suggests a romance as well as any dumb thing can.

Aramits is bereft of historical monuments save the Mairie of to-day, which was formerly the chamber of the syndics who exercised judiciary functions here (and in the five neighbouring villages) under the orders of the États de Béarn.

Another delightful and but little known corner of Béarn is the valley of the Aspe, leading directly south from Oloron into the high valley of the Pyrenees. The Pas d’Aspe is at an elevation of seventeen hundred metres. Majestic peaks close in the valley and its half a dozen curious little towns; and, if one asks a native of anything so far away as Pau or Mauléon, perhaps fifty miles as the crow flies, he says simply: “

Je ne sais pas! Je ne peux pas savoir, moi, je passe tous mes jours dans la vallée d’Aspe.

” Even when you ask the route over the mountain, that you may make your way back again by the Val d’Ossau, it is the same thing; they have never been that way themselves and are honest enough, luckily, not to give you directions that might put you off the road.

Directly before one is the Pic d’Anie, the king mountain of the chain of the Pyrenees between the Aspe and the sea to the westward.

Urdos is the last settlement of size as one mounts the valley. Above, the carriage road continues fairly good to the frontier, but the side roads are mere mule paths and trails. One of these zigzags its way craftily up to the Fort d’Urdos or Portalet. Here the grim walls, with their machicolations and bastions and redoubts cut out from the rock itself, give one an uncanny feeling as if some danger portended; but every one assures you that nothing of the sort will ever take place between France and Spain. This fortification is a very recent work, and formidable for its mere size, if not for the thickness of its walls. It was built in 1838-1848, at the time when Lyons, Paris and other important French cities were fortified anew.

War may not be imminent or even probable, but the best safeguard against it is protection, and so the Spaniards themselves have taken pattern of the French and erected an equally imposing fortress just over the border at the Col de Lladrones, in the valley of the Aragon, and still other batteries at Canfranc.

One of the topographic and scenic wonders of the world which belongs to Béarn is the Cirque de Gavarnie, that rock-surrounded amphitheatre of waterfalls, icy pools and caverns.

Of the Cirque de Gavarnie, Victor Hugo wrote: —

“Quel cyclope savant de l’âge évanoui,

Quel être monstrueux, plus grand que les idées,

A pris un compas haut de cent mille coudées

Et, le tournant d’un doigt prodigieux et sûr,

A tracé ce grand cercle au niveau de l’azur?”

Just below the “Cirque” is the little village of Gavarnie, which before the Revolution was a property of the Maltese Order, it having previously belonged to the Templars. Vestiges of their former

presbytère

 and of their lodgings may be seen. A gruesome relic was formerly kept in the church, but it has fortunately been removed to-day. It was no less than a dozen bleached skulls of a band of unfortunate chevaliers who had been decapitated on the spot in some classic encounter the record of which has been lost to history.

Above Gavarnie, on the frontier crest of the Pyrenees, is the famous Brèche de Roland. One remembers here, if ever, his schoolboy days, and the “Song of Roland” rings ever in his ears.

“High are the hills and huge and dim with cloud;

Down in the deeps and living streams are loud.”

The Brèche de Roland, with the Col de Roncevaux, shares the fame of being the most celebrated pass of the Pyrenees. It is a vast rock fissure, at least three hundred feet in height. As a strategic point of defence against an invading army or a band of smugglers ten men could hold it against a hundred and a hundred against a thousand. At each side rises an unscalable rock wall with a height of from three to six hundred feet.

The legend of this famous Brèche is this: Roland mounted on his charger would have passed the Pyrenees, so giving a swift clean cut of his famous sword he clave the granite wall fair in halves, and for this reason the mountaineers have ever called it the Brèche de Roland. The Tours de Marboré were built in the old days to further defend the passage, a sort of a trap, or barbican, being a further defence on French soil.

The aspect roundabout is as of a desert, except that it is mountainous, and the gray sterile juts of rock and the snows of winter – here at least five months of the year – might well lead one to imagine it were a pass in the Himalayas.

Bordering upon Béarn on the north is the ancient Comté d’Armagnac, a detached corner of the Duché de Gascogne, which dates its history from the tenth century. It passed to Henri d’Albret, king of Navarre, in 1525, and by reason of belonging to the crown of Navarre came to France in due course.

The ancient family of Armagnac had many famous names on its roll: the first Comte Bernard, the founder; Bernard II, who founded the Abbey of Saint Pé; Gerard II, successor of the preceding and a warrior as well; Bernard III, canon of Sainte-Marie d’Auch; Gerard III, who united the Comté de Fezensac with Armagnac; Bernard V, who, in league with the Comtes de Toulouse, went up against Saint Louis; Gerard V, who became an ally of the English king; Bernard VI, who warred all his life with Roger-Bernard, Comte de Foix, on the subject of the succession of the Vicomté de Béarn, to which he pretended; Jean II, who terminated the quarrel with the house of Foix; Bernard VI, the most famous warrior of his race, whose name is written in letters of blood in the chronicles of the wars of the Armagnacs and Jean IV, who was called “Comte par la grace de Dieu.”

CHAPTER XVII

PAU AND ITS CHÂTEAU

PAU,

ville d’hiver mondaine et cosmopolite

, is the way the railway-guides describe the ancient capital of Béarn, and it takes no profound knowledge of the subtleties of the French language to grasp the significance of the phrase. If Pau was not all this it would be delightful, but what with big hotels, golf and tennis clubs, and a pack of fox-hounds, there is little of the sanctity of romance hanging over it to-day, in spite of the existence of the old château of Henri IV’s Bourbon ancestors.

The life of Pau, in every phase, is to-day ardent and strenuous, with the going and coming of automobile tourists and fox hunters, semi-invalids and what not. In the gallant days of old, when princes and their followers held sway in the ancient Béarnaise capital, it was different, quite different, and the paternal château of the D’Albrets was a great deal more a typical château of its time than it has since become.

If the observation is worth anything to the reader “

Pau est la petite Nice des Pyrénées

.” This is complimentary, or the reverse, as one happens to think. Pau’s attractions are many, in spite of the fact that it has become a typical tourist resort.

The château itself, even as it stands in its reconstructed form, is a pleasing enough structure, as imposingly grand as many in Touraine. This palace of kings and queens, which saw the birth of the Béarnais prince who was to reign at Paris, has been remodelled and restored, but, in spite of this, it still remains the key-note of the whole gamut of the charms of Pau, and indeed of all Béarn.

The Revolution and Louis Philippe are jointly responsible for much of the garish crudity of the present arrangement of the Château de Pau. The mere fact that the edifice was a prison and a barracks from 1793 to 1808 accounts for much of the indignity thrust upon it, and of the present furnishings – always excepting that exceedingly popular tortoise-shell cradle – only the wall tapestries may be considered truly great. In spite of this, the memories of the D’Albrets, of Henri IV, of Gaston, and of the “Marguerite des Marguerites” still hang about its apartments and corridors.

The Vicomte de Béarn who had the idea of transferring his capital from Morlaas to Pau was a man of taste. At the borders of his newly acquired territory he planted three

pieux

 or

pau

, and this gave the name to the new city, which possessed then, as now, one of the most admirable scenic situations of France, a terrace a hundred feet or more above the Gave, with a mountain background, and a low-lying valley before.

The English discovered Pau as early as 1785, fifty years before Lord Brougham discovered Cannes. It was Arthur Young, that indefatigable traveller and agriculturalist, who stood as godfather to Pau as a tourist resort, though truth to tell he was more interested in industry and turnip-growing than in the butterfly doings of “

les éléments étrangers

” in French watering places of to-day.

Throngs of strangers come to Pau to-day, and its thirty-five thousand souls make a living from the visitors, instead of the ten thousand of a century and a quarter ago.

The people of Pau, its business men at any rate, think their city is the chief in rank of the Basses-Pyrénées. Figures do not lie, however, and the local branch of the Banque de France ranks as number sixty-five in volume of business done on a list of a hundred and twenty-six, while Bayonne, the real centre of commercialism south of Bordeaux, is numbered fifteen. In population the two cities rank about the same.

The real transformation of Pau into a city of pleasure is a work, however, of our own time. It was in the mid-nineteenth century that the capital of Béarn came to be widely known as a resort for semi-invalids. Just what degree of curative excellencies Pau possesses it is not for the author of this book to attempt to state, but probably it is its freedom from cold north and east winds. Otherwise the winter climate is wintry to a certain degree, and frequently damp, but an appreciable mildness is often to be noted here when the Riviera is found in the icy grip of the Rhône valley

mistral

.

The contrast of the new and the old at Pau is greatly to be remarked. There are streets which the French describe as

neuves et coquettes

, and there are others grim, mossy and as dead as Pompeii, as far as present-day life and surroundings are concerned.

Formerly the river Hédas, or more properly a rivulet, filled the moat of the château of the kings of Navarre, but now this is lacking.

The château has long been despoiled of its furnishings of the time of Henri IV and his immediate successors. Nothing but the mere walls remain as a souvenir of those royal days.

The palatial apartments have been in part destroyed, and in part restored or remodelled, and not until Napoleon III were steps taken to keep alive such of the mediæval aspect as still remained.

Pau, with all its charm and attraction for lovers of history and romance, has become sadly over-run of late with diversions which comport little enough with the spirit of other days. Fox-hunting, golf tournaments and all the Anglo-Saxon importations of a colony of indulgent visitors from England and America are a poor substitute for the jousting tournaments, the

jeux de paume

 and the pageants of the days of the brave king of Navarre. Still Pau, its site and its situation, is wonderfully fine.

Pau is the veritable queen of the Pyrenean cities and towns, and mingles all the elements of the super-civilization of the twentieth century with the sanctity of memories of feudal times. The Palais d’Hiver shares the architectural dignity of the city with the château, but a comparison always redounds to the credit of the latter.

Below the terrace flows the Gave de Pau, and separates the verdant faubourg of Jurançon from the parent city. The sunlight is brilliant here, and the very atmosphere, whether it be winter or summer, is, as Jean Rameau puts it, like the laughter of the Béarnais, scintillating and sympathetic.

The memories of the past which come from the contemplation of the really charming historical monuments of Pau and its neighbourhood are admirable, we all admit, but it is disconcerting all the same to read in the local paper, in the café, as you are taking your appetizer before dinner, that “the day was characterized with fine weather and the Pau fox-hounds met this morning at the Poteau d’Escoubes, some twenty kilometres away to the north. A short run uncovered a fox in a spinny, and in time he was ‘earthed’ near Lascaveries!”

This is not what one comes to the south of France to find, and the writer is uncompromisingly against it, not because it is fox-hunting, but because it is so entirely out of place.

The early history of the city of Pau is enveloped in obscurity. Some sort of a fortified residence took shape here under Centulle IV in the ninth century, and this noble vicomte was the first to be freed of all vassalage to the Duc d’Aquitaine, and allowed the dignity of independent sovereignty. On the occasion when the Bishop Amatus of Oloron, the legate of the Pope Gregory VII, came to confer upon Centulle the title of comte, in place of that of vicomte which he had inherited from his fathers, a ceremony took place which was the forerunner of the brilliant gatherings of later days. Says the chronicler: “The drawbridge of the château lowered before the Papal Legate, and as quickly as possible he delivered himself of the

mandement

 of the Pope, a document which meant much to the future history of Béarn.”

Pau owes its fame and prosperity to the building of a château here by the Béarnais princes. To shelter and protect themselves from the incursions of the Saracens a fortress-château was first built high on a plateau overlooking the valley of the Ossau. Possession was taken of the ground necessary for the site by a bargain made with the inhabitants, whereby a certain area of paced-off ground was to be given, by the original dwellers here, in return for the privilege of always being present (they and their descendants) at the sittings of the court.

Just who built or planned the present Château de Pau appears to be doubtful. Of course it is not a thoroughly consistent or homogeneous work; few mediæval châteaux are. That master-builder Gaston certainly had something to do with its erection, as Froissart recounts that when this prince came to visit the Comte d’Armagnac at Tarbes he told his host that “

il y a faisait édifier un moult bel chastel en la ville de Pau, au dehors la ville sur la rivière du Gave

.” The great tower is, as usual, credited to Gaston, and it is assuredly after his manner.

Old authors nodded, and sometimes got their facts mixed, so one is not surprised to read on the authority of another chronicler of the time, the Abbé d’Expilly, that “the Château de Pau was built by Alain d’Albret during the regency of Henri II, towards 1518.” Favyn, in his “Histoire de Navarre,” says, “

Henri II fit bastir à Pau une maison assez belle et assez forte selon l’assiette du pays

.” These conflicting statements quite prepare one to learn that Michaud in his “Marguerite de Valois” says that that “friend of the arts and humanity” built the “Palais de Pau.” These quotations are given as showing the futility of any historian of to-day being able to give unassailable facts, even if he goes to that shelter under which so many take refuge – “original sources.”

One learns from observation that Pau’s château, like most others of mediæval times, is made up of non-contemporaneous parts. It is probable that the original edifice served for hardly more than a country residence, and that another, built by the Vicomtes de Béarn, replaced it. This last was grand and magnificent, and with various additions is the same foundation that one sees to-day. It was in the fifteenth century that the present structure was completed, and the gathering and grouping of houses without the walls, all closely hugging the foot of the cliff upon which stood the château, constituted the beginnings of the present city.

It was in 1464 that Gaston IV, Comte de Foix, and usurper of the throne of Navarre, established his residence at Pau, and accorded his followers, and the inhabitants of the immediate neighbourhood, such privileges and concessions as had never been granted by a feudal lord before. A parlément came in time, a university, an academy of letters and a mint, and Pau became the accredited capital of Béarn.

The development of Pau’s château is most interesting. It was the family residence of the reigning house of Béarn and Navarre, and the same in which Henri IV first saw light. In general outline it is simple and elegant, but a ruggedness and strength is added by the massive donjon of Gaston Phœbus, a veritable feudal pile, whereas the rest of the establishment is built on residential lines, although well fortified. Other towers also give strength and firmness to the château, and indeed do much to set off the luxurious grace of the details of the main building. On the northeast is the Tour de Montauset of the fourteenth century, and also two other mediæval towers, one at the westerly and the other at the easterly end. The Tour Neuve, by which one enters, does not belie its name. It is a completely modern work. Numerous alterations and repairs have been undertaken from time to time, but nothing drastic in a constructive sense has been attempted, and so the

cour d’honneur

, by which one gains access to the various apartments, remains as it always was.

Within, the effect is not so happy. There are many admirable fittings and furnishings, but they have been put into place and arranged often with little regard for contemporary appropriateness. This is a pity; it shows a lack of what may be called a sense of fitness. You do not see such blunders made at Langeais on the Loire, for instance, where the owner of the splendid feudal masterpiece which saw the marriage of Anne de Bretagne with Charles VIII has caused it to be wholly furnished with

contemporary

 pieces and decorations,

or excellent copies of the period

. Better good copies than bad originals!

The châteaux of France, as distinct from fortified castles merely, are what the French classify as “

gloires domestiques

,” and certainly when one looks them over, centuries after they were built, they unquestionably do outclass our ostentatious dwellings of to-day.

There are some excellent Gobelin and Flemish tapestries in the Château de Pau, but they are exposed as if in a museum. Still no study of the work of the tapestry weavers would be complete without an inspection and consideration of these examples at Pau.

The chief “curiosity” of the Château de Pau is the tortoise-shell cradle of Henri of Béarn. It is a curio of value if one likes to think it so, but it must have made an uncomfortable sort of a cradle, and the legend connected with the birth of this prince is surprising enough to hold one’s interest of itself without the introduction of this doubtful accessory. However, the recorded historic account of the birth of Henri IV is so fantastic and quaint that even the tortoise-shell cradle may well be authentic for all we can prove to the contrary.

There is a legend to the effect that Henri d’Albret, the grandfather of Henri IV, had told his daughter to sing immediately an heir was born: “

pour ne pas faire un enfant pleureux et rechigné

.” The devoted and faithful Jeanne chanted as she was bid, and the grandfather, taking the child in his arms and holding it aloft before the people, cried: “

Ma brebis a enfanté un lion.

” The child was then immediately given a few drops of the wine of Jurançon, grown on the hill opposite the château, to assure a temperament robust and vigorous.

As every characteristic of the infant prince’s after life comported well with these legendary prophecies, perhaps there is more truth in the anecdote than is usually found in mediæval traditions.

Another account has it that the first nourishment the infant prince took was a “goutte” (

gousse

) of garlic. This was certainly strong nourishment for an infant! The wine story is easier to believe.

The “Chanson Béarnais” sung by Queen Jeanne on the birth of the infant prince has become a classic in the land. As recalled the Béarnais

patois

 opened thus: —

“Nostre dame deou cap deou poun, ajouda me a d’aqueste hore.”

In French it will be better understood: —

“Notre Dame du bout du pont,

Venez à mon aide en cette heure!

Priez le Dieu du ciel

Qu’il me délivre vite;

Qu’il me donne un garçon.

Tout, jusqu’au haut des monts, vous implore.

Notre Dame du bout du pont,

Venez à mon aide en cette heure.”

It was in the little village of Billère, on the Lescar road, just outside the gates of Pau, that the infant Henri was put

en nourrice

. The little Prince de Viane, the name given the eldest son of the house of Navarre, was later confided to a relative, Suzanne de Bourbon, Baronne de Miossens, who lived in the mountain château of Coarraze. The education of the young prince was always an object of great solicitude to the mother, Jeanne d’Albret. For instructor he had one La Gaucherie, a man of austere manners, but of a vast erudition, profoundly religious, but doubtful in his devotion to the Pope and c