Let us enter the castle of his birth. Thanks to Louis Philippe, it has been rescued from the rats and the owls, and re-fitted as exactly as possible in its ancient style. Mounting the grand staircase, we see everywhere around, on walls and vaulted ceiling, the gilt cyphers, "H. M."--not, however, meaning Henri and Margot, but the grandfather of the King of France--the stern, old Henri D'Albret, King of Navarre, and Margaret his wife--_La Marguerite des Marguerites_, the Pearl of Pearls. Pass through a series of noble state-apartments, vaulted, oak-pannelled, with rich wooden carved work adorning cornice and ceiling, and we stand in the room in which Henri saw the light. Jeanne D'Albret's bed, a huge structure, massive and carven, and with ponderous silken curtains, still stands as it did at the birth of the king. And what a strange coming into the world that was. The Princess of Navarre had travelled a few days previously nearly across France, that the hoped-for son and heir might be a Bearnais born. Old Henri, her father, was waiting and praying in mortal anxiety for the event. "My daughter," said the patriarch, "in the hour of your trial you must neither cry nor moan, but sing a song in the dear Bearnais tongue; and so shall the child be welcomed to the world with music, and neither weep nor make wry faces." The princess promised this, and she kept her word; so that the first mortal sound which struck Henri Quatre's ear was his mother's voice feebly chanting an old pastoral song of the shepherds of Bearne.
"Thanks be to God!--a man-child hath come into the world, and cried not," said the old man. He took the infant in his arms, and, after the ancient fashion of the land, rubbed its lips with a clove of garlic, and poured into its mouth, from a golden cup, a few drops of Jurancon wine. And so was born Henri Quatre. Stand for a moment in the shadow of these tapestried curtains, and call up in the gloom a vision of the grandly eventful life which followed. An army is drawn up near Rochelle, and a lady leads a child between the lines. Coligni and the Condé head the group of generals who, bonnet in hand, surround the lady and the child; and then Jeanne D'Albret, lifting up her clear woman's voice, dedicates the little Henri to the Protestant cause in France; and with loud acclamations is the gift received, and the leader accepted by the stern Huguenot array.--The next picture. An antique room in the Louvre. The bell of St. Germain l'Auxerrois is pealing a loud alarm; arquebus shots ring through the streets, and cries and clamour of distress come maddening through the air. Pale, but firmly resolute, stands Henri, beside a young man richly, but negligently, dressed, who, after speaking wildly and passionately to him, snatches up an arquebus--stands for a moment as though about to level it at his unshrinking companion, and then exclaiming like a maniac, "_Il faut que je tue quelq'un_," flings open the lattice, and fires without. Henri and Charles IX. on the night of the St. Bartholemew.--Another vision. A battle-field: Henri surrounded by his eager troops--the famous white plume of Ivry rising above his helmet: