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 Bearnais, “that lusty gallant, that very devil,” who was sharp enough to get for himself the name of “the good king.”

His chateau 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 brick towers close the line with their esplanades and battlements.  It is connected with the city by a narrow old bridge, by a broad modern one with the park, and the foot of its terrace is bathed by a dark but lovely stream.

Near at hand, this arrangement disappears; a fifth tower upon the north side deranges the symmetry.  The great egg-shaped court is a mosaic of incongruous masonry; above the porch, a wall of pebbles from the Gave, and of red bricks crossed like a tapestry design; opposite, fixt to the wall, a row of medallions in stone; upon the sides, doors of every form and age; dormer windows, windows square, pointed, embattled, with stone mullions garlanded with elaborate reliefs.  This masquerade of styles troubles the mind, yet not unpleasantly; it is unpretending and artless; each century has built according to its own fancy, without concerning itself about its neighbor.

On the first floor is shown a great tortoise-shell, which was the cradle of Henry IV.  Carved chests, dressing-tables, tapestries, clocks of that day, the bed and arm-chair of Jeanne d’Albret, a complete set of furniture in the taste of the Renaissance, striking and somber, painfully labored yet magnificent in style, carrying the mind at once back toward that age of force and effort, of boldness in invention, of unbridled pleasures and terrible toil, of sensuality and of heroism.  Jeanne d’Albret, mother of Henry IV., crossed France in order that she might, according to her promise, be confined in this castle.  “A princess,” says D’Aubigne, “having nothing of the woman about her but the sex, a soul entirely given to manly things, a mind mighty in great affairs, a heart unconquerable by adversity.”

She sang an old Bearnaise song when she brought him into the world.  They say that the aged grandfather rubbed the lips of the new-born child with a clove of garlic, poured into his mouth a few drops of Jurancon wine, and carried him away in his dressing-gown.  The child was born in the chamber which opens into the lower tower of Mazeres, on the southwest corner.