ors
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.

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