CHAPTER III.
THE CASTLE OF HENRI QUATRE--THE FURNITURE--THE SHELL--THE STATUE--THE BIRTH--CASTEL BEZIAT--THE FAIRY GIFT--A CHANGE--HENRI QUATRE.
"Qui a vist le castig de Pau Jamey no a viat il fait." WHEN Napoleon, in 1808, passed through the town of Pau, the Bearnais felt wounded and humbled at the indifference he showed to the memory of their hero, Henri Quatre: he scarcely deigned to glance at the chateau in which their cherished countryman was born; and with so little reverence did he treat the monument dear to every heart in Bearn, that his soldiers made it a barrack; and, without a feeling of regard or respect for so sacred a relic, used it as cavalierly _as if it had been a church_.

They stabled their steeds in the courts of Gaston Phoebus, they made their drunken revelry resound in the chambers of Marguerite de Valois; and they desecrated the retreat where _La brebis a enfante un Lio_--where Jeanne d'Albret gave birth to him, who, in the language of his mountains, promised that every Frenchman should have a _poule au pot_[27] in his reign.
[Footnote 27: The _poule au Pot_ is a general dish with the Bearnais.] That Napoleon should not care for a royal soldier, whose fame he desired his own deeds should eclipse; and of whom, as of all illustrious men, living or dead, the _little_ great man was jealous, is not surprising.
He had nothing in common with Henri Quatre; and the Revolution, which had brought him forward, had swept away antique memories.

The statue of their once-adored Henri had been cast into the Seine with ignominy, by the French, and his name was execrated, as if he had been no better than the legitimate race whom popular fury condemned to oblivion: Napoleon's policy was not to restore an abandoned worship; and he would have seen the last stone fall from the castle of Pau without notice.

But that the long line of kings, who were always boasting of their descent from the immortal Bearnais, should have neglected, contemned, or pillaged his birth-place, reflects little honour on the memory of any.

The son of Mary de Medici came only to Bearn after his father's death, to carry off all that was precious in art, collected by the kings and queens of Navarre, for centuries--treasures which, according to the historians of the time, had not their parallel in the sixteenth century.