Co. Copyright, 1873.]

BY HIPPOLYTE ADOLPHE TAINE


Pau is a pretty city, neat, of gay appearance; but the highway is
paved with little round stones, the side-walks with small sharp
pebbles: so the horses walk on the heads of nails and foot-passengers
on the points of them. From Bordeaux to Toulouse such is the usage,
such the pavement. At the end of five minutes, your feet tell you in
the most intelligible manner that you are two hundred leagues away
from Paris....

Here are the true countrymen of Henry IV. As to the pretty ladies in
gauzy hats, whose swelling and rustling robes graze the horns of the
motionless oxen as they pass, you must not look at them; they would
carry your imagination back to the Boulevard de Gand, and you would
have gone two hundred leagues only to remain in the same place. I am
here on purpose to visit the sixteenth century; one makes a journey
for the sake of changing, not place, but ideas.... It was eight
o'clock in the morning; not a visitor at the castle, no one in the
courts nor on the terrace; I should not have been too much astonished
at meeting the Béarnais, "that lusty gallant, that very devil," who
was sharp enough to get for himself the name of "the good king."

His château is very irregular; it is only when seen from the valley
that any graces and harmony can be found in it. Above two rows of
pointed roofs and old houses, it stands out alone against the sky and
gazes upon the valley in the distance; two bell-turrets project from
the front toward the west; the oblong body follows, and two massive