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.

To-day the sun shines. On my way to the Place Nationale, I remarked a
poor, half-ruined church, which had been turned into a coach-house;
they have fastened upon it a carrier's sign. The arcades, in small
gray stones, still round themselves with an elegant boldness; beneath
are stowed away carts and casks and pieces of wood; here and there
workmen were handling wheels. A broad ray of light fell upon a pile of
straw, and made the somber corners seem yet darker; the pictures that
one meets with outwe