considerable discord in married life. The personal habits of Henry,
combined with his sense of gratitude to his wife for her refusal to
abandon him to the virulence of her mother's hatred, induced him to
close his eyes to her moral delinquencies, while Marguerite, in her
turn, with equal complacency, affected a like ignorance as regarded the
pursuits of her husband; and thus the little Court of Pau, where they
had established their residence, rendered attractive by the frank
urbanity of the sovereign, and the grace and intellect of the young
Queen, became as brilliant and as dissipated as even the daughter of
Catherine de Medicis herself could desire. Poets sang her praise under
the name of Urania;[12] flatterers sought her smiles by likening her to
the goddesses of love and beauty, and she lived in a perpetual
atmosphere of pleasure and adulation.

The marriage-portion of Marguerite had consisted of the two provinces of
the Agénois and the Quercy, which had been ceded to her with all their
royal prerogatives; but even after this accession of revenue the
resources of Henry of Navarre did not exceed those of a private
gentleman, amounting, in fact, only to a hundred and forty thousand
livres, or about six thousand pounds yearly. The ancient kingdom of
Navarre, which had once extended from the frontier of France to the
banks of the Ebro, and of which Pampeluna had been the capital, shorn of
its dimensions by Ferdinand the Catholic at the commencement of the
sixteenth century, and incorporated with the Spanish monarchy, now
consisted only of a portion of Lower Navarre, and the principality of
Béarn, thus leaving to Henry little of sovereignty save the title. The
duchy of Albret in Gascony, which he inherited from his
great-grandfather, and that of Vendôme, his appanage as a Prince of the
Blood-royal of France, consequently formed no inconsiderable portion of
his territory: while the title of Governor of Guienne, which he still