Page:A book of the Pyrenees.djvu/133

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HENRY IV
101

could cross your majesty's kingdom in a hop, skip, and jump." "Then I will trouble you, sir, to hop, skip, and jump out of my realm, and that smartly," was her prompt reply.

At the same time that Jeanne issued her order for the change of religion, she forbade the dances of the peasantry and wailing at funerals.

Of Jeanne d'Albret it might be said in the words of Quintus Curtius: "Nihil præter vultum fœmineum gerens." Marguerite de France, sister of Francis II, Charles IX, and Henry III was married in 1572 to Henry of Navarre. The union was not happy, neither cared for the other; and when Marguerite came to Pau she was affronted at her treatment.

"We came to Pau," she wrote, "where no exercise of the Catholic religion is tolerated. However, I was allowed as a favour to hear Mass in a little chapel three or four paces in length, and so narrow that seven or eight persons filled it. At the hour of Mass, the drawbridge was raised to prevent the Catholics of the place from attending; for they were most desirous to do so, having been debarred from it for several years. But, it being Whit-Sunday, some of the citizens succeeded in slipping in before the drawbridge was raised. They were not detected till the end of the service, when some Huguenots who were spying perceived them. They instantly informed the king's secretary, and in my presence were dragged out, whipped, and cast into prison, and were not released for long, and then not till they had paid a heavy fine."

When Henry IV came to the throne of France the care of his hereditary dominions in Gascony was confided to his sister Catherine. In the Castle of Pau at that time was brought up Antoine de Bourbon, Count of Moret, Henry's son by Jacqueline de Bueil. There he studied, but proved a sorry scholar. In later days he ventured on criticizing