ignorance as regarded the pursuits of her husband; and thus the little Court of Pau, where they had established their residence, rendered attractive by the frank urbanity of the sovereign, and the grace and intellect of the young Queen, became as brilliant and as dissipated as even the daughter of Catherine de Medicis herself could desire.  Poets sang her praise under the name of Urania;[12] flatterers sought her smiles by likening her to the goddesses of love and beauty, and she lived in a perpetual atmosphere of pleasure and adulation.

The marriage-portion of Marguerite had consisted of the two provinces of the Agenois and the Quercy, which had been ceded to her with all their royal prerogatives; but even after this accession of revenue the resources of Henry of Navarre did not exceed those of a private gentleman, amounting, in fact, only to a hundred and forty thousand livres, or about six thousand pounds yearly.  The ancient kingdom of Navarre, which had once extended from the frontier of France to the banks of the Ebro, and of which Pampeluna had been the capital, shorn of its dimensions by Ferdinand the Catholic at the commencement of the sixteenth century, and incorporated with the Spanish monarchy, now consisted only of a portion of Lower Navarre, and the principality of Bearn, thus leaving to Henry little of sovereignty save the title.  The duchy of Albret in Gascony, which he inherited from his great-grandfather, and that of Vendome, his appanage as a Prince of the Blood-royal of France, consequently formed no inconsiderable portion of his territory:  while the title of Governor of Guienne, which he still retained, was a merely nominal dignity whence he derived neither income nor influence; and so unpopular was he in the province that the citizens of Bordeaux refused to admit him within their gates.

Nevertheless, the young monarch who held his court alternately at Pau and at Nerac, the capital of the duchy of Albret, expended annually upon his household and establishment nearly twelve thousand pounds, and that at a period when, according to the evidence of Sully, “the whole Court could not have furnished forty thousand livres;” [13] yet so inadequately were those about him remunerated, that Sully himself, in his joint capacity of councillor of state and chamberlain, received only two thousand annual livres, or ninety pounds sterling.  This royal penury did not, however, depress the spirits of the frank and free-hearted King, who eagerly entered into every species of gaiety and amusement.  Jousts, masques, and ballets succeeded each other with a rapidity which left no time for anxiety or ennui; and Marguerite has bequeathed to us in her memoirs so graphic a picture of the royal circle in 1579-80, that we cannot resist its transcription.  “We passed the greater portion of our time at Nerac,” she says, “where the Court was so brilliant that we had no reason to envy that of France.  The sole subject of regret was that the