the latter being himself _le cerf des cerfs,--servus servorum_.

If a husband were seriously rasped by his wife, or their tempers could
not agree, he was wont to retire her to a convent. "He did not send her
to the devil," remarks a sly annalist, "but he gave her to the Lord."

And read this whimsical epitaph on an organist of the cathedral at
Lescar, a bishopric near Orthez. He died in the fifteenth century:

"As you pass, pray God for his soul, that having assisted in the
music of this world, he may be received forever among the blessed
to assist in the celestial music. Amen."

Orthez is known to our century as the scene of a spiteful battle
between Wellington and Soult, engaging eighty thousand men, and ending
in the victory of the former and the rout of the French. But the town is
so deeply sunk in the past that its kinship with modern events seems
almost cause for resentment; and we will leave it as it is, with its
older glories and memories thickly crusted upon it.




CHAPTER VIII.

"THE LITTLE PARIS OF THE SOUTH."


When the Count of Foix made a hunting trip to his _château mignon_ on
the present site of Pau, he found it a goodly journey. There were