His mother, a warm and severe Calvinist, when he was fifteen years old, led him through the Catholic army to La Rochelle, and gave him to her followers as their general.  At sixteen years old, at the combat of Arnay-le-Duc, he led the first charge of cavalry.  What an education and what men!  Their descendants were just now passing in the streets, going to school to compose Latin verses and recite the pastorals of Massillon.

Those old wars are the most poetic in French history; they were made for pleasure rather than interest.  It was a chase in which adventures, dangers, emotions were found, in which men lived in the sunlight, on horseback, amidst flashes of fire, and where the body, as well as the soul, had its enjoyment and its exercise.  Henry carries it on as briskly as a dance, with a Gascon’s fire and a soldier’s ardor, with abrupt sallies, and pursuing his point against the enemy as with the ladies.

This is no spectacle of great masses of well-disciplined men, coming heavily into collision and falling by thousands on the field, according to the rules of good tactics.  The king leaves Pau or Nerac with a little troop, picks up the neighboring garrisons on his way, scales a fortress, intercepts a body of arquebusiers as they pass, extricates himself pistol in hand from the midst of a hostile troop, and returns to the feet of Mlle. de Tignonville.  They arrange their plan from day to day; nothing is done unless unexpectedly and by chance.  Enterprises are strokes of fortune....

The park is a great wood on a hill, embedded among meadows and harvests.  You walk in long solitary alleys, under colonnades of superb oaks, while to the left the lofty stems of the copses mount in close ranks upon the back of the hill.  The fog was not yet lifted; there was no motion in the air; not a corner of the blue sky, not a sound in all the country.  The song of a bird came for an instant from the midst of the ash-trees, then sadly ceased.  Is that then the sky of the south, and was it necessary to come to the happy country of the Bearnais to find such melancholy impressions?  A little by-way brought us to a bank of the Gave:  in a long pool of water was growing an army of reeds twice the height of a man; their grayish spikes and their trembling leaves bent and whispered under the wind; a wild flower near by shed a vanilla perfume.

We gazed on the broad country, the ranges of rounded hills, the silent plain under the dull dome of the sky.  Three hundred paces away the Gave rolls between marshaled banks, which it has covered with sand; in the midst of the waters may be seen the moss-grown piles of a ruined bridge.  One is at ease here, and yet at the bottom of the heart a vague unrest is felt; the soul is softened and loses itself in melancholy and tender revery.  Suddenly the clock strikes, and one is forced to go and prepare himself to eat his soup between two commercial travelers.