exercise of Calvinistic worship in her states, heard of the coming of De Grammont, he happened to encounter his father, aged eighty, and blind, coming out of the Huguenot meeting-house. The old man led his son home, placed in his hands a drawn sword, and bade him slay and spare not the Lord's enemies. Arros and thirty-seven followers went to Hagetmau, where Grammont and the commissioners were, and entered the castle unperceived. Then they fell upon and slaughtered officers, soldiers, and servants, indiscriminately. De Grammont alone was spared. His wife—Corisande d'Andouins, one of the loveliest women of the time—threw herself between her husband and Arros, and with tears implored the latter to spare Grammont.
When the Baron d'Arros returned to his father to receive a blessing after this exploit, the old man bitterly reproached him for having spared even one. "My son," said he, "how, as a valiant Maccabee, have you allowed this Nicanor to live? The crow you have spared will pluck out your eyes."
Calvinism, after having had complete mastery for over half a century, seems not to have taken firm root. At the present day, out of a population in Béarn of 426,350, there are but 5000 Protestants.
In one of his bear-hunting expeditions, when a lad, Henry of Navarre had visited the church of Bielle in the Val d'Ossau, and had noticed the columns of Italian marble in the church, the spoils of a Gallo-Roman villa. When he was king he sent to Bielle to have these pillars forwarded to him in Paris. The reply of the villagers was: "Sire, our hearts and our properties are yours, dispose of them as you will; but as to these columns, they belong to God. Entendez vous-en avec lui."
As king, Henry said that his ambition was that every one
